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Authors: John McPhee

BOOK: Looking for a Ship
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“When these things decide to develop into something bigger, it's almost instantaneous,” Washburn said. “You can be five hundred miles away from it, and think you're safe, and suddenly it reaches out. If we go to Yucatan, we and the storm will arrive at Cape San Ann Tone at exactly the same time. In this game, it's the ties that hurt. The dead heats. We're going under that sucker and east.”
He headed straight for the storm in order to be where it had been. And he avoided rushing to confined waters. After forty-eight hours or so, he reached the track of the storm, and stood on the bridge looking out on the lazy waves of a sunlit Caribbean. “On a day like this,” he said, “even the In God We Trust could have made it.”
F
ragments of the future and fragments of the past—all that was a thousand leagues away as we sailed north to Lima and returned to Guayaquil.
On the dock in Callao, the seaport of Lima, we left a container said to contain thirty thousand pounds of chewing-gum base. The manifest advised the mate, “Please stow away from the boilers.” We left a container said to contain fifteen thousand pounds of “hot leftovers,” which were otherwise unexplained. We left twelve thousand pounds of “synthetic organic pigments.” We left sixteen containers said to contain five hundred thousand pounds of yarn. We left forty-seven hundred bags of cellulose-acetate flakes. We left raw tobacco, processed fats, malic acid, industrial hoists. We left three tons of fluorescent tubes, twenty tons of float glass, and thirty-three tons of steel angles. We left two graders, a bulldozer, and a hundred and ten bags of common clay. We left twenty tons of chicken vitamins. We left
twenty-five hundred tons of sardines to be collected by Japanese ships.
Approaching Callao, Andy saw, for the first time northbound, the handle of the Big Dipper. From the northern rim of the earth it protruded like the handle of a plow. Closer to shore was an apparently permanent mist, too thin to be fog, too thick to be haze, and hanging so heavy it was almost rain. On the three-centimetre radar, the numerous ships at anchor looked like dotted clouds. Most were Russian; some were former Dutch, Italian, and British warships, long ago sold to Peru. Captain Washburn said, “If they move, they are towed.” Captain Washburn, in dress blues, had appeared on the bridge in the morning not long after four.
The Callao pilot, a compact man of middle age named Jorge Bustamante, guided the ship through the narrow aperture of the Callao breakwater speaking English to the quartermaster and Spanish to the tugs, and quoting Peruvian proverbs. “Have a son, plant a tree, write a book,” he said. And all in the space of ten seconds he said, “Stop her. A little push ahead.
Muy despacio
. Stop her. Another push, Captain. Dead slow ahead.
Poco más fuerte
. Stop her.”
“Roger,” said Washburn.
“All to the right,” said Bustamante.
“Hard right,” said Washburn.
Bustamante told us that he would have risen to high places in the Peruvian Navy but had been prevented from doing so because he was honest. He also said, “Whenever I board an American ship, I can smell America.”
I asked what the smell was like.
He said, “Clean.”
It could be said, though, that almost anything entering that milieu would seem clean. A person could confide to a notebook:
Callao is a filthy, ill-built, small seaport … . The city of Lima is now in a wretched state of decay: the streets are nearly unpaved; and heaps of filth are piled up in all directions.
As Darwin did in 1835. The picture he painted has not faded or changed. The midden reeks in the medians of roads.
The black gallinazos, tame as poultry, pick up bits of carrion. The houses have generally an upper story, built, on account of the earthquakes, of plastered woodwork; but some of the old ones, which are now used by several families, are immensely large, and would rival in suites of apartments the most magnificent in any place. Lima, the City of the Kings, must formerly have been a splendid town
Darwin could publish that now. He could be working as a stringer. His dispatches could be filed to
The New York Times.
No State in South America, since the declaration of independence, has suffered more from anarchy than
Peru. At the time of our visit, there were four chiefs in arms contending for supremacy in the government: if one succeeded in becoming for a time very powerful, the others coalesced against him.
 
A dull heavy bank of clouds constantly hung over the land … . It is almost become a proverb, that rain never falls in the lower part of Peru. Yet this can hardly be considered correct; for during almost every day of our visit there was a thick drizzling mist, which was sufficient to make the streets muddy and one's clothes damp: this the people are pleased to call Peruvian dew.
Off the dock there we picked up four hundred and twenty-two thousand pounds of coffee and a hundred thousand pounds of shrimp. We picked up four containers said to contain five thousand bags of “chilled” lead shot. We picked up zinc oxide and alpaca blankets. We picked up cotton, tuna, tungsten, and a ton of terry-cloth towels. We picked up a 1942 Chevrolet convertible destined to fetch a large price in the rich marketplace of antique cars. Under a New York gavel you could sell a Latin American traffic jam for ten million dollars.
And now it is 5:49 A.M., August 18th, and Vernon McLaughlin turns the helm over to Calvin King, saying, “Zero-three-nine. Automatic. All is well, and the pirates are waiting for us.” Three degrees south of the equator, we are crossing the Gulf of Guayaquil. For the second time, we approach the Guayas. The sea is flat. The temperature
is cool (in the sixties). In the weeks since we were here before, the pirate talk has never really stopped, but now, as we prepare once more to go upstream, the talk intensifies. “This place is becoming a God-damned war zone,” Mac says. “When you board a ship that is docking, how much more brazen can you get? That is real defiance.”
“We didn't sign anything saying that we would defend this ship with our lives,” Andy remarks.
In the past couple of months in Guayaquil, pirates have attacked the Allison Lykes once, the Mallory Lykes once, and the Stella Lykes three times. Late one evening, some of Stella's crew saw pirates boarding a vessel berthed a cable length away. The port authorities were notified. Meanwhile, the spectators watched goods from containers being lowered into small boats from the stern of the other ship. They witnessed the arrival of police, who had a look around and left. The pirates resumed work. Thirteen boatloads went to the mangrove swamps.
One attack occurred at noon. Obviously, the pirates have no fear of confrontation. “They know our routines,” the captain remarks. “They know if we're eating supper. They know if we're heaving up the anchor. They know where every man on the ship is. They have free run of the harbor. They've come aboard with manifests. They go around looking for the containers with the TVs, the containers with the computers. Piracy is a way of life here. It has been for four hundred years. We've had 'em steal the flag halyards, the mooring lines. Any kind of metal. The sounding caps out of the deck. The deck telephones. Mooring
lines are chained down and locked. They can cut those chains like they're paper. What can we do? We'll have roving patrols, crew members on the stern with walkie-talkies, searchlights.”
J. Peter Fritz, the chief mate, says, “They carry firearms. They have bolt cutters. They know their way around the ship in darkness. They know our lashing gear. They know our docking procedures. They must have walkie-talkies. They must have people with spyglasses.”
A couple of trips ago, in Guayaquil, an A.B. named Bill Haisten went aft at dawn to run up the flag and cut some lights. When he didn't return, Luke Midgett sent Calvin and Peewee to investigate. They found Haisten tied to a king post. Seven pirates had come over the stern and surprised him. In their needle boat, they had come up the river under the stern of the ship before the day's first light. They were armed mainly with knives. One of them held a hacksaw blade at Haisten's throat while others tied him up. A sailor named Ron Just, who was taking “a morning stroll,” happened to pick the wrong moment to stroll across the stern. They tied him to the lashing rods of a container. A pirate pointed at the men's watches and said, “Give me.” When Just showed signs of not cooperating, the pirate threatened to cut off Just's arm with a hacksaw. Haisten and Just surrendered the watches. The pirate looked at Haisten's watch and gave it back.
Breaking into four containers, the pirates stole a load of yard goods. Then they went over the side and away in their boat. “But, hey,” the captain says. “Hey! They take
whole containers in New York, in Boston. They don't board from private boats. You're safe until the longshoremen and the labor gangs come aboard. They think it's part of their pay. No one outsteals the Boston longshoremen. They wouldn't have that. Ever since man put two logs together and made a raft, people stole from it. During the war, when I was an able seaman somewhere in North Africa I watched two Arabs work two hours to take a mattress through a porthole. They got a corner of it up there—they twisted and pulled and they twisted and pulled, and they finally got that whole mattress through the porthole. Then the chief mate took it away from them. But, hey! Piracy is a different ballgame. Sooner or later, they start killing people.”
Off Singapore, when merchant ships make the slow tight move between Raffles Lighthouse and Buffalo Rock they might as well be passing through a pirate tollhouse. It is most especially that part of the Strait of Malacca which is in a category with the approaches to Lagos, with various ports in the Bight of Benin, with Guayaquil. After pirate attacks in the Malacca Strait, it has been reported that the pirates were wearing uniforms. They use gunboats. They have sprayed merchant ships with automatic weapons.
To throw a grappling hook over a stern rail and climb a line to board a ship requires conditioned strength. The pirates have that kind of strength. Our quinquagenarian and sexagenarian crewmen—so many of whom appear to be in their third trimester—are no match for such invaders. The day may come when merchant ships are beribboned with concertina wire, railed with chain-link fencing.
In Charleston, Captain Ron Crook told me that he had once lain at anchor off the delta of the Ganges for two weeks as he waited to transfer cargo to a German ship. Every night, in heavy rain, pirates came down the river in black mahogany boats. These were oar-powered boats, each holding ten or fifteen pirates. Crook blew his whistle and shouted commands—including “Repel boarders!”—white the crew shot water into the boats from high-pressure hoses. The pirates had bamboo poles with hooks on the end. They climbed them to the deck. The crew fought the boarders with axe handles, broom handles, and three-cell flashlights. At last, the Germans arrived. They brought two hundred Indians of both sexes and all ages to unload the ship by hand, to lighten it enough to go up the shallow Ganges to Calcutta. The Indians camped on Crook's deck, where they built fires and made curries. Crook is a great-great-great-nephew of Brigadier General George Crook, commander of the Department of the Platte, who was one of the most celebrated soldiers of the Old West, and who stood out in his time for the integrity with which he dealt with Indians.
In 1974, when Ron Crook was third mate on the Mormacscan, armed pirates boarded her in Brazilian waters, went directly to a container said to contain two hundred thousand dollars' worth of Kodak film, offloaded all the film, and sped away in a small, fast boat.
Captain Washburn says, “Hey, Cartagena it happens. Buenaventura. In Buenaventura, a while back, they boarded ships while they were under way. It took the United Nations to stop it. In Buenaventura, while the Mason Lykes was
steaming around the sea buoy—waiting for daylight because of piracy—a pirate grappled the rail, came aboard with a gun, held up the third mate, took his wallet and watch, and disappeared. But, hey, a couple of guys disguised as longshoremen went on a Waterman ship in Barbour's Cut, Houston, Texas, and walked right into the captain's office, made him open the safe, took the money, and shot him dead. Pretty soon—down here on the west coast of South America—it's going to get violent. Right now you'll see armed guards. That's fairly new. Pretty soon these pirates will start shooting back if they get shot at.”
In Callao, after a new pilot ladder worth five thousand dollars went over the side and into a waiting boat, Louis Smothers said, “What goes around comes back.” In case anyone misunderstood him, he explained that we, as a nation, “stole people's lands and destroyed their minds,” and are now getting what we deserve. Smothers, an A.B. on the twelve-to-four, was the assistant pastor of a church in York, Pennsylvania, before he moved to Jacksonville. There he has become an intraurban itinerant preacher, preaching every Sunday in a different church when he is home from the sea. He has been shipping out with the Merchant Marine for twenty-seven years. Before that, he was in theological seminary, and before that he spent many years in the army. He once owned what he describes as “the largest black detective agency in the state of Maryland.” He often wears shorts. They reveal the legs of a football player. On his dark-blue baseball cap are the words “QUEEN MARY,” across the brow in gold. “The Peruvians steal a line
or a ladder or something from a container,” he went on. “In New York, they steal your Mercedes and put it in a container, and six days later it's in Panama.”

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