Looking for a Ship (8 page)
Read Looking for a Ship Online
Authors: John McPhee
Calvin grew a foot at the wheel.
I said, “Suppose you had a neophyte where Calvin is.”
Washburn said, “He panics. You go aground, you run into a buoy, or you hit another vessel.”
Calvinâwith authority burgeoning in his low, slow voiceâremarked that he never had cared for electrical steering. He said, “You don't feel your ship.”
We went up the river in darkness through a braid of
mangrove islands. At the maritime port of Guayaquil, in the glare of quayside light, pirates hit the ship while it was docking. The event was swift, incredible, prophetic, and surreal. It was also rehearsed. It could not have come off as smoothly had it not been rehearsed.
mangrove islands. At the maritime port of Guayaquil, in the glare of quayside light, pirates hit the ship while it was docking. The event was swift, incredible, prophetic, and surreal. It was also rehearsed. It could not have come off as smoothly had it not been rehearsed.
In the general profusion of sea stories, there had been so much talk about pirates that I was certain we would never see them. All through a voyage while nothing happens, sailors tell stories about things that happen. There is usually some connection with an ocean voyage, but sometimes the tales drift to the beach and into the streets and back rooms and beds. Apocryphal stories are much told: many a sailor has enough first-person sea stories to fill up several lifetimes. Andy has said, “If you added up a lot of people's sea stories, these people would be two hundred years old.” After enduring such a monologue, one sailor will interrupt another to ask, “Did you sail bosun with Columbus?” As Stella went up the Guayas, a sailor said that we were arriving early “to give the pirates more time to take stuff off the ship.” There were tales full of grappling hooks, bolt cutters, and crowbars. That nothing was going to happen seemed fairly clear until a fast boat with a quiet engine came up on the offshore sideâslipped between the two tugs that were working the shipâand seven or eight pirates threw grappling hooks and swarmed across the rail. They climbed to a container, broke the seal with bolt cutters, removed half a dozen cartons said to contain the worldly possessions of an American diplomat, and were gone in five minutes. The captain appeared with a pistol stuck in his belt that was four times as large as
a 45. It was a hand cannon. Its bore could have accommodated a golf ball. It glistened with Rhodesian chrome. It was a Kilgore P52 flare gun loaded with a twenty-thousand-candlepower parachute flare. I had seen the box of flares: “DangerâExtremely Flammable, Keep Out of Reach of Children. Directions: Fire Upward.” The captain said something about “getting one of them bastards,” but surely he meant to follow the directions. Besides, it was too late. The boarders were gone. “See?” he said. “You come on a modern ship and you are attacked by piratesâby a little outboard flying the Jolly Roger.”
a 45. It was a hand cannon. Its bore could have accommodated a golf ball. It glistened with Rhodesian chrome. It was a Kilgore P52 flare gun loaded with a twenty-thousand-candlepower parachute flare. I had seen the box of flares: “DangerâExtremely Flammable, Keep Out of Reach of Children. Directions: Fire Upward.” The captain said something about “getting one of them bastards,” but surely he meant to follow the directions. Besides, it was too late. The boarders were gone. “See?” he said. “You come on a modern ship and you are attacked by piratesâby a little outboard flying the Jolly Roger.”
O
n the fifth of August and again far out to sea, Calvin had the first turn at the wheel. I asked him what day of the week it was. He had no idea. Like everybody else, he knew that it was the fifteenth day of the present voyage, but the day's heathen name meant next to nothing. On Sundays, by some metaphysical process that is not well understood, most of the crew appear in fresh clothes. Calvin's khaki shirt has an iron shine. On Saturdays, the second mate goes up and down the house winding the ship's clocks. Essentially, though, the days are homogeneous. Calvin and I, adding on our fingers in the dark, needed several minutes to figure out that it was Friday. What truly mattered to most of the crew was how many days there were to go: twenty-nine if you were paying off in Charleston after the end of this voyage, seventy-one if you were making the next trip, too. Here by free will, and (in most cases) with histories behind them of decades on the sea, these people act like prisoners
making Xs on a wall. I was to hear Jim Gossett say to William Kennedy one morning, “Peewee, we're under fifty days now. Forty-nine to go.” This brought to mind graffiti I had seen on the State of Maine, the training ship of the Maine Maritime Academy. As part of the curriculum, students spend two summers on the State of Maine. The graffiti said, “ONLY 13 MORE MFD's, ONLY 12 MORE MFD's, ONLY 11 MORE MFD's,” and so on down a toilet stall. The “D” stood for “day.” To me it seemed a strange thing for someone to write who was going to college to go to sea. But no professional mariner would fail to understand it.
n the fifth of August and again far out to sea, Calvin had the first turn at the wheel. I asked him what day of the week it was. He had no idea. Like everybody else, he knew that it was the fifteenth day of the present voyage, but the day's heathen name meant next to nothing. On Sundays, by some metaphysical process that is not well understood, most of the crew appear in fresh clothes. Calvin's khaki shirt has an iron shine. On Saturdays, the second mate goes up and down the house winding the ship's clocks. Essentially, though, the days are homogeneous. Calvin and I, adding on our fingers in the dark, needed several minutes to figure out that it was Friday. What truly mattered to most of the crew was how many days there were to go: twenty-nine if you were paying off in Charleston after the end of this voyage, seventy-one if you were making the next trip, too. Here by free will, and (in most cases) with histories behind them of decades on the sea, these people act like prisoners
making Xs on a wall. I was to hear Jim Gossett say to William Kennedy one morning, “Peewee, we're under fifty days now. Forty-nine to go.” This brought to mind graffiti I had seen on the State of Maine, the training ship of the Maine Maritime Academy. As part of the curriculum, students spend two summers on the State of Maine. The graffiti said, “ONLY 13 MORE MFD's, ONLY 12 MORE MFD's, ONLY 11 MORE MFD's,” and so on down a toilet stall. The “D” stood for “day.” To me it seemed a strange thing for someone to write who was going to college to go to sea. But no professional mariner would fail to understand it.
This was one of the clear nights when Mars, Jupiter, and Venus were lined up like ships, steaming past Aldebaran on the way to Sirius. To port was a quarter-moon, and somewhere off the curve of the earth was Punta Pariñas, the westernmost cape of South America. We had entered the waters of Peru.
When you do that, you let them know. Peru wants to be notified at once that you have entered its waters, and to be told your position at eight in the morning and eight in the evening as long as you remain. For each failure to comply, the fine is five thousand dollars. William Raymond Charteris Beachâi.e., Sparksâwould let them know.
Dawn came. The air, Fahrenheit, was sixty-two. There was a head wind at Force 7. The sea was heaping up, and there were whitecaps everywhere, and high spray, and the foam off breaking waves made streaks in the direction of the wind. At five-fifty-five, Vernon McLaughlin arrived on
the bridge to relieve Calvin. Mac had spent the first hour of the watch standing in the bow in the fifty-mile compound wind, and the second hour swilling coffee. Now, taking over as quartermaster, he said, in his Cayman baritone, “Good morning. Happy birthday to me, too.”
the bridge to relieve Calvin. Mac had spent the first hour of the watch standing in the bow in the fifty-mile compound wind, and the second hour swilling coffee. Now, taking over as quartermaster, he said, in his Cayman baritone, “Good morning. Happy birthday to me, too.”
With no prodding, McLaughlin continued, “Fifty-eight years old today. I'm getting as old as Ronald Reegin.”
I reached for a crew list and said to him, “You and everybody else, Mac. Calvin is sixty-one. Peewee is sixty-two. Sparks is fifty-nine. Jim Gossett is fifty-seven. Steve Kruthaupt is sixty-four. Bernie Tibbotts is sixty. Paul Agic is sixty. Frank Patton is sixty-one. Zeke is fifty-eight. Murray the ordinary is fifty-nine. Kiwi is fifty-three. Victor Belmosa is fifty-two. Louis Smothers is sixty. Duke Labaczewski is sixty.” I had been pondering the crew list for days. There were thirty-four names on it. They included Robert Bryant, a thirty-year-old demac; Ron Peterson, the twenty-eight-year-old third mate; Karl Knudsen, the twenty-nine-year-old second engineer; and Donald Colon, the twenty-four-year-old engine cadet (a student from the United States Merchant Marine Academy at Kings Point, New York), not to mention Mr. Chase, the second mate, aged thirty-two. Yet the average age of the crew was fifty-one. “This is now an old man's business,” the captain had remarked one day. “Sailing A.B.âit's an elderly gentleman's job.” He didn't say anything about sailing captain.
As it happens, our six A.B.s average fifty-five years of ageâten years younger than Washburn. The captain is
accustomed to sailing with crews averaging five to seven years older than our crew. He said he looked upon this as “a young ship.”
accustomed to sailing with crews averaging five to seven years older than our crew. He said he looked upon this as “a young ship.”
McLaughlin continued to bestow upon himself his birthday honors. “Thirty-nine years at sea,” he said. “All I need is feathers and I'll get up and fly. I'll be a seagull.” Like everyone else in the crewâlike Victor Belmosa, who was born in Trinidad; like Bill Beach, who was born in Scotland; like Trevor Procter and Bernie Tibbotts, who were born in New ZealandâMac is an American citizen. He was born on Cayman Brac. The Cayman Islands were British colonial then, and Mac is a self-impelled transfer from the U.K. merchant fleet. The first vessel he worked on was a sailing ship. His father was her third mate. They picked up lumber in Alabama and took it to the Bahamas. When Mac hears the expression “iron men in wooden ships,” he does not develop nostalgia. Moving up to steel, he worked on banana boats, making runs to London from the West Indies, Central America, Ecuador, and Colombia.
“I knew everything about bananas except how they talk. If they get below fifty-four degrees, they're dead. You might as well have taken a shotgun and killed them.”
Some days, he comes into the wheelhouse in the dark of the early morning with bananas he has bought ashore. He buys forty-eight pounds, green as limes, for a dollar. Other people buy bananas, too. While theirs remain green, Mac's assume the color sunbeam. There may be, say, five hundred bananas on the ship all bought at the same time
from the same dockside vender, and Mac's by a long interval will always be the first to turn yellow.
from the same dockside vender, and Mac's by a long interval will always be the first to turn yellow.
“I put the gezoong on them and they just turn ripe.”
The gezoong is an amazing molecule in which two atoms of hydrogen are combined with one of oxygen. In his cabin each day, Mac wets his hands and flicks water from his fingers onto the bananas. He closes the box. When they are ready, he will come up to the bridge with a bunch in hand and say, for example, “These are Gros Michels. They are virtually square in cross-section. They have more squares than Locatans or Robustas. You will like them best. They don't appear to choke you.”
McLaughlin is not only the four-to-eight-watch bananologist. He is the four-to-eight-watch ornithologist. When a man-of-war bird perched in the rigging, Mac said, “He knows better than to get his ass in the waterâhe won't get back out. He can't swim. He's not web-footed.” While albatrosses were soaring beside the bridge, Mac said, “They can only take off into the wind and land into the wind. The only time they land is when they mate. The albatross is the soul of a lost seaman.” When the man-of-war bird came back, Mac said, “He could pluck a pin out of the water. He chases other birds, beats the shit out of them, and takes their food.”
Mac may be fifty-eight, but his eyesight seems to be 29-29. He will say, for example, “Pilot whales to port,” and minutes go by before other people see them. He is the first to see oncoming ships. From the bridge of a tanker off the
coast of Algeria he once spotted a floating mine, a lethal relic of the Second World War. The tanker's captain said, “He saved the ship,” and served him Kool-Aid at the wheel. Mac will see islands fifteen miles away while others see nothing but blank horizon. Possibly he owes this ability not so much to his exceptional vision as to his birthright in the sea.
coast of Algeria he once spotted a floating mine, a lethal relic of the Second World War. The tanker's captain said, “He saved the ship,” and served him Kool-Aid at the wheel. Mac will see islands fifteen miles away while others see nothing but blank horizon. Possibly he owes this ability not so much to his exceptional vision as to his birthright in the sea.
I asked, “How many degrees north of the equator are the Cayman Islands?”
He said, right back, “Eighteen degrees forty-five minutes. See how quick I answered that?”
He described the Grand Cayman of his youth as “a sleepy little island with dirt roads,” and went on to say, “Now it has high-rise condos, superhighways, and five thousand banks.” Cayman Brac, his home island, was eighty miles from Grand Cayman and was perched on the edge of Bartlett's Deep, the deepest part of the Caribbeanâsomething close to twenty-five thousand feet. Bartlett's Deep is known in geology as the Cayman Trench, where the Caribbean crust dived under the North American Plate, melting far below to rise as magma and form volcanic islands. It has since become a different kind of fault, in history similar to the San Andreas. I said as much to Mac. As he looked at me, the always varying gleam in his eyes seemed for the moment to be ten per cent tolerance and ninety per cent pity. He said, in so many words, that if I thought I was talking about the Cayman Islands I was talking bullshit. He said he would henceforth call me Elisha. The biggest liar in the known history of Cayman Brac was Elisha. He
was a fisherman who trolled for kingfish, wahoo, and sailfish, using a small herring as bait. One time, he got a fish on his line that pulled him around the eastern part of the island for four hours. When Elisha finally managed to boat this mighty fish, it was smaller than the herring. According to Elisha.
was a fisherman who trolled for kingfish, wahoo, and sailfish, using a small herring as bait. One time, he got a fish on his line that pulled him around the eastern part of the island for four hours. When Elisha finally managed to boat this mighty fish, it was smaller than the herring. According to Elisha.
When McLaughlin was a teenager, he went out in a catboat fishing with a cousin “in the Grouper Hole, off the eastern end of Cayman Brac, eighteen fathom deep.” Groupers spawn there in January. Mac and the cousin used hand lines, with small herring on the lines, and big sinkers. They caught so many huge groupersâeach thirty to forty poundsâthat they filled the catboat too full to sail. They paddled for Cayman Brae. A wind arose, and waves came over the cockpit coaming. The catboat sank. The boys swam ashore. The air sacs in the groupers expanded, and three thousand pounds of fish floated to the beach, where a grateful population gathered them up. According to McLaughlin.
He said, finishing the story, “In those days, I was the number-one fisherman.”
McLaughlin's father went on shipping out until he was seventy-four. Mac will, too, if there's a Merchant Marine that will have him. “When I go ashore after this trip, I'll be fluttering like a fish out of water,” he said. “I'll want to get back. It's an evil you want to come back to.”
Mac lives as a bachelor in an apartment in Brooklyn. He has one son, who is in the Royal Marines, and they are out of touch.
I asked Mac if he had another job ashore.
“I'm a seabird,” he answered. “When I'm at home on the beach, I don't work for nobody. All I do is lift a fork. I may have as much as six months when I get off here. It'll take six months before I'll have an old enough card to get a job. Years ago, you could get on a ship, put your clothes in a drawer, and throw your suitcase over the side. The ship was your home.” Years ago, he sailed with a man who had been on one ship, with no vacation, for sixteen years. (“Brazil-New York, the romance run. He probably had two households.”) Mac shipped out with Moore-McCormack until the line folded. Then he shipped out with United States Linesâon the American Michigan, the American Draco, the American Lynx, the American Legacy. The legacy was that the Lines folded.
This summer, he had gone to Savannah looking for a ship. “There's hardly any jobs going into New York anymore,” he explained. “They don't pay off there. There's no ships being called there. When I left New York, I had close to a killer card. I had to get a ship in Savannah or forget it. If I didn't get a ship in ten days, my card would have died.” In Savannah, his card got him onto the Stella Lykes over fifteen other able-bodied seamen.
“I remember when the union was strong,” he said. “The union has gone from a big blow to a breath of wind.” He told a sea story to illustrate the power of the National Maritime Union. The American Legacy was in Los Angeles when her television failed. The crew refused to leave port. Their contract called for a working nineteen-inch color TV.
While the ship remained at its berth and the wharfage fee mounted and another ship waited for the berth, the port agent went off shopping for a nineteen-inch TV. For some reason, he couldn't find one. Finally, he returned with a twenty-four-inch TV. When it was working, the American Legacy sailed.
While the ship remained at its berth and the wharfage fee mounted and another ship waited for the berth, the port agent went off shopping for a nineteen-inch TV. For some reason, he couldn't find one. Finally, he returned with a twenty-four-inch TV. When it was working, the American Legacy sailed.
“To the Far East,” Mac said. “That was a long ocean voyage.”
Now there were fewer ships and a scarcity of jobs; the union was weak, and its members were unemployed.
“Their stomachs are breaking like seas on a reef. And how many merchant ships are under construction?”
Andy answered, “None, in American yards.”
Mac said, “That's a God-damned sin.”
Andy said that the several ships being built in Germany for American President Lines were “post-Panamax”âtoo large for the Panama Canalâand were intended for runs in the Pacific. The latest Panamax ships were the so-called econs, or Econships, built in Korea for United States Lines and now owned by Sea-Land. “They are not ships but shit,” Mac said. “They were made with a hammer and nail.” Captain Ron Crook's Sea-Land Performance, which Andy had night-mated in Charleston, was an econ. Taking his work seriously, Andy had done his best to heed a sign on the bridge that said “CAUTION, DON'T WITHSTAND VOLTAGE & INSULATION RESISTANCE INSPECTION.”
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