The Death Ship (17 page)

The pitfall led down into two small holds. One was the chain-hold, or the chain-chamber, in which there were all kinds of chains, emergency anchors, and such objects as might be useful for repairs at sea.

The other room, to starboard, was called the hold of horrors, or, more often, the chamber of horrors. There was nobody on the
Yorikke
who could claim that he had ever been inside it. We tried several times to find a peep-hole or a crack through which we might see what was inside. But there was no peep-hole and no crack to be found, and when, once during the night, Spainy drilled a hole through the door, we discovered that the door was protected with armor-plate.

Once when for some reason or other somebody asked for the key to this hold of horrors, it came to light that no one on the whole bucket knew where the key was. The mates claimed the skipper must have it. The skipper, on the other hand, swore by his soul and by the safety of his unborn children that he knew nothing about the whereabouts of the key to that forehold. And immediately he gave strict orders against opening the door, adding that should anyone dare force this hold open, he would shoot him like a sick dog and sink his carcass in the sea without a prayer. We got scared stiff and avoided going even near it save when we were ordered to get something out of the hold toward port.

I have never met a skipper who had no whims. This one had them wholesale. One of his many whims was never to inspect the quarters of the crew, which, according to regulations, he has to do at least once a week. He always had some excuse for not doing it, saying he would do it the next day, because at the moment he didn’t want to spoil his appetite, and, besides, he had to hurry to take the position of the ship.

25

There is a rumor along the coasts of the Mediterranean and the western African coast that two men were actually in this hold of horrors and saw with their own eyes everything inside. These men, of course, were no longer on the
Yorikke
. They had been fired the moment the skipper discovered that they had broken in. He was not the same skipper who was now in command and who had sworn to shoot any man who dared look into this hold.

Nevertheless, fired or not fired, their stories remained on the
Yorikke
. The crew may leave a ship, their stories never leave. A story penetrates the whole ship and every part of it, the iron, the steel, the wood, all the holds, the coal-bunkers, the engine-hall, the stoke-hold, even the bilge. Out of these parts, full of hundreds and thousands of stories, tales, and yarns, the ship tells the stories over again, with all the details and minor twists. She tells the stories to her best comrades — that is, to the members of the crew. She tells the stories better and more exactly than they could ever be told in print. One has only to listen with an understanding heart and with love for the ship. Of course, those people who sign on for a trip the same way as they would take a job in an automobile plant never hear any of the stories told by the ship, and they sign off as dumb as they were when they came aboard. There’s no use telling those guys that ships tell stories; they simply think themselves too smart to believe it; yes, sir.

This story about the two men having been in the hold of horrors remained on the
Yorikke
like all the others. The two men driven by an unquenchable curiosity had seen a number of skeletons in that hold. Frightened as they were, they could not count how many there actually were. To count them would have been, anyway, rather difficult since the skeletons had fallen apart and had mingled with each other. There was no doubt, though, that there were a lot of them. But these invaders of the hold were able to make out to whose bodies the skeletons had originally belonged.

They were the last remains of former members of the crew who had been eaten up by rats. These rats, huge as big cats, were often seen by us when they ran out of this hold through some hole which we could never find. The rats ran about the quarters trying to pick up food and old shoes; and they disappeared as quickly and strangely as they had shown up. We were all afraid of the big, savage animals, but we could never catch or kill one. They were too quick and too smart for us.

Why and for what reasons the unfortunate sailors had been thrown into the hold of horrors and given over to these terrible rats we, for a long time, could not see. But from the stories told about the
Yorikke
in the ports where we put in, we picked up here a word and there a word, and eventually we put the whole story together.

These sailors, of whom only the scattered skeletons told that they had ever been alive, had been sacrificed to cut down the running-expenses of the
Yorikke
and to keep high the dividends of the stockholders of the company.

Regulations require that a sailor must be paid overtime if he makes any by order of the skipper, because unions have had some bad influence even on the shipping business. Now, when a sailor signed off from the
Yorikke
, he naturally asked to be paid for his hundreds of hours of overtime. He relied on this pay, for his regular wages were always paid out long before in advance money.

So whenever he dropped the word: “Sir, how about my hundred and sixty hours’ overtime?” he was led right away to the hold of horrors and thrown in it before he had a chance to realize what was happening. The skipper had no other means to dispose of the sailor, because the skipper was under strict orders to keep the expenses for the
Yorikke
far below the possible minimum, or he would lose his job. Skippers have a tougher time to land a job than a plain sailor has, for everybody wants to be a skipper, and very few like to be deck-hands. On account of the difference in wages.

It always happened, of course, in port. No sailor has yet been found who asked to sign off in mid-ocean, without another ship standing by. Being in port, the skipper could not throw the man overboard. The port authorities would not permit such a thing to be done, because it would pollute the harbor, for which crime the skipper would have to pay a heavy fine. The port authorities were not interested a bit in what a skip per might do to his men so long as the port was kept clean. Suppose the skipper had let his man go without paying for overtime; the sailor (sailors are that mean) would have gone straight to the seamen’s union, or, worse, to the Wobbly firemen’s syndicate, or, in a mild case, to the consul. In any case the skipper would have been forced to pay the overtime, or the whole
Yorikke
would have been put under an embargo. The Wobblies in particular and the communists would have held the ship for half a dollar if the skipper had refused to pay it to a sailor when due.

So what else could the skipper, no matter how human he was, do? He simply had no other way out than to throw the sailor into the chamber of horrors.

He did not mean to do the sailor harm; he just wanted not to be troubled by the union or by the authorities, for he might miss his proper sailing-time and have to pay twenty-four hours more in anchorage taxes. When the ship was on the high seas again, the skipper went to the hold of horrors to release his man, whom he needed badly, because two or three men had, as usually happened on the
Yorikke
, skipped the bucket, or else they were somewhere in jail for being drunk or for a row or on account of some trouble about a dame with a baby.

But in the meantime something had happened in the hold of horrors that the skipper could not have foreseen. Certain rats in the hold had taken out marriage licenses upon seeing a sailor come in to provide them with an excellent wedding feast. So the rats had every reason not to let that sailor go, once he came within their reach. No matter how elegantly and nobly the skipper gave battle to the rats, he always lost out, and if he had fought to exhaustion, there was every possibility that he might have had to share the lot of his sacrificed sailor. The skipper dared not shoot or call for help, for then his secret would have been revealed and he would have lost for all time his chance to get away with not paying his men for overtime. There was nothing else for him to do but leave the sailor to the wedding guests.

You could never make a man who had sailed the
Yorikke
believe those dreadful stories about slaves and slave-ships; no sir. Never had slaves been packed as closely as we were. Slaves could never have worked as hard as we had to. Never could slaves have been as hungry and as tired and as down and out as we always were. Slaves had their festivals, their singing, their dances, their weddings, their beloved women, their children, their joy, their religious merriment, and hope. We had nothing. Senseless drunks and a ten-minute girl for half a peseta were all the recreation we ever had. We were as cheerless as a busted five-cent balloon in an ash-can.

Slaves were valuable goods, paid for in real money, goods that were expected to bring even higher prices if kept in good shape. They were goods handled like rare vases. Nobody would have paid even the cost of transportation of slaves that were starved to death, that were bruised from too many whippings, that were so overworked that they could hardly move a toe. Slaves were treated better than good horses, because they had a greater commercial value.

Sailors, on the other hand, are slaves that are not bought and that cannot be sold. Nobody is interested in their wellbeing, because if one of them falls overboard, or dies in the dung, no one loses any money on him. Besides, there are thousands eagerly waiting to take the place of him who is thrown into the ditch along the road to the progress and prosperity of the shipping business.

Sailors are certainly not slaves. They are free citizens, and if they have established residences, they are even entitled to vote for the election of a new sheriff; yes, sir. Sailors are free laborers, they are free, starved, jobless, tired, all their limbs broken, their ribs smashed, their feet and arms and backs burned. Since they are not slaves, they are forced to take any job on any ship, even if they know beforehand that the bucket has been ordered down to the bottom to get the insurance money for the owners. There are still ships sailing the seven seas under the flags of civilized nations on which sailors may be whipped and lashed mercilessly if they refuse to ship double watches and half of the third watch thrown in.

Slaves had to be fed well, like good horses. The free sailor has to eat whatever is placed before him, regardless of whether the cook was yesterday still a tailor. The company cannot pay wages for a real cook, because the stockholders of the company want their dividends. Suppose a good cook comes aboard and wants to do something for the hard-working crew; he cannot do it, because the skipper has to economize on the expenses for the crew’s fare.

There are wonderful regulations all over the world as to the treatment of sailors aboard ship. They look fine on paper, these regulations. There are also the most wonderful regulations as to the purity of food, especially in packing-plants. And just open a can in which you are supposed to find the pork and beans that the elegant label tells you about. Instead of pork and beans you find only the effective results of the pure-food regulations. Precisely the same is true of the five thousand regulations concerning the welfare of sailors aboard seagoing buckets. Whenever new regulations are made, I think of the
Yorikke
, and right then, without the help of a communist meeting or a peace conference, I know exactly what the regulations will be good for and in whose favor they are enacted.

There are sea-stories and sea-stories, millions of them. Every week an output of at least seven hundred and fifty. If you look closely, however, at those interesting sea-stories, you notice that they tell of sailors who are opera-singers in disguise, who manicure their finger-nails, and who have no other worries than their goddamned silly love-affairs. Even that heavenly, that highly praised, that greatest sea-story writer of all time knew how to write well only about brave skippers, dishonored lords, unearthly gentlemen of the sea, and of the ports, the islands, and the sea-coasts; but the crew is always cowardly, always near mutiny, lazy, rotten, stinking, without any higher ideals or fine ambitions. Of course the crew is that way. Why? What ambition shall the crew have? For whom? The skipper has ambition, because higher wages and promotion and orders await him. His names flares over the front pages of the papers and is set perhaps in golden letters on tablets on the walls of the Board of Trade. The crew have nothing in the world but their wages, their food, their health, their lives. They have no promotion in sight and no share in the dividends of the company. So what earthly reason have they to be ambitious about anything? To save the lives of passengers in a shipwreck no crew have ever failed in their duty as human beings; but skippers have, to save the company’s money. Sailors know that, and therefore they are the only people who know how to read a sea-story the right way, and how to read about the bravery of skippers in newspaper reports. Not the skipper, but the sailor is the one who is the first to risk his life, because he is always nearest the real danger, while the skipper on his bridge, like the general at headquarters, is farthest away from where he could lose something; yes, sir.

26

I hardly exchanged more than ten words with those sleepy men groaning in their bunks. When I had been told that there were no blankets, pillows, or mattresses for the crew on this bucket, there seemed to be nothing left to talk about.

Above me, on the fore-deck, I heard the rattling and banging of the chains, the clanging and scratching of the anchor

against the hull, the screeching of the winches, the hustling and trampling of heavy feet, the commanding and swearing and cursing of the mates and the bos’n and of whoever thought he had somebody to chase around.

Noise like that always makes me sick at my soul. I feel best when the ship is out on the high sea. A ship in port is no longer a ship. It is merely a box to be loaded or to be unloaded. Nor is a sailor aboard a ship in port a sailor; he is just a hired man. Nothing better. The dirtiest work a sailor ever has to do is done while the ship is in port; the sailor works there exactly like a worker in a factory. No watches, only a full day’s work. Cleaning, scrubbing, wiping, painting the hull, polishing, sweeping, washing, repairing. You get sick only thinking of it.