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Authors: John McPhee

BOOK: Looking for a Ship
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Mac picked up a piece of chalk and began writing cryptic numbers on the top of the steering selector. He could ignore the wheel, because the ship was on automatic pilot.
After adding, subtracting, erasing, multiplying, he said, “These hours have cashed in on my durability.” He was computing his overtime.
Two-thirds of his work was overtime. There was required overtime, for dockings and undockings (handling the stern mooring lines), and most days he opted to work on deck for the bosun—chipping and painting—from nine to twelve in the morning and one to four in the afternoon. Weekends were pure overtime—on watch as on deck. His base pay was fifty-three dollars a day for a five-day, forty-hour week. But he wasn't working a five-day, forty-hour week; he was working fourteen to eighteen hours a day seven days a week. His hourly overtime rate was only thirteen dollars and seventy-eight cents, but there would be enough of it, he figured, to triple his base. In twelve weeks, he would earn about fourteen thousand dollars.
That is when I said, “This is a good watch.”
And Mac said, “This is the only watch. The overtime watch. Sailors with the oldest shipping cards can name their watch. Nine out of ten prefer the four-to-eight. The early worm gets the bird.”
It occurred to me that in being carried out to sea the word “overtime” had acquired enough special meaning to make it remarkably subtle. With its resonating nuances of opportunity and fairness, it created an entrepreneurial illusion among people who were actually working like ponies in a Scottish coal mine. Base pay or extra pay, it was all pay. Basic time or overtime, it was all time. With aggressive self-interest, with rewarded dedication, with nothing better
to do, you willingly worked an eighty-hour week, worked eighteen hours on some days, for—as your chalk or your calculator would quickly tell you—about ten bucks an hour.
This, of course, had occurred to Mac, too. He said, “The only one who makes a decent salary is the bosun. It's chalk and cheese between my salary and his.”
In the payoff port—Charteston, Newark, or wherever —an armored car drives up to the gangway, and the crew is paid in cash.
For the unlicensed deckhands, overtime is almost a synonym for chipping rust. It begins after breakfast. Mac, Calvin, Peewee, and others report to the shelter deck, where the bosun disperses jobs. Chipping rust is a job for people made of neurological nylon. They use hand-held jack-hammers—needle guns, chisel guns, Bumble Bees, triple scalers. They dislodge rust and they create sound. Wherever they are, wherever you are, you can hear them. You can climb the flying bridge, wrap a pillow around your ears, stuff yourself in a hawsepipe, hide under a table—you cannot escape the sound. As a result, there are union rules limiting the sound to six hours a day. Depending on where you are, the chippers can seem to be hovering aircraft, they can seem to be splashing water, they can suggest a dentist drilling in a cavity hour after hour. There is a rust buster so large, so heavy, so lurchingly difficult to control that Vernon McLaughlin is often the only sailor willing to accept the task. This is the Arnessen Horizontal Deck Scaler, colloquially known as the lawnmower. It looks something like a lawnmower, but if it were ever used on a lawn it would
bury itself in seven seconds. After standing watch from four to eight, Mac will run the lawnmower from nine to twelve and again from one to four, while Peewee follows him, sweeping chips. They wear masks. One day years ago, when Mac was on a C-2 called the Flower Hill, he was hanging over the side with a hand-held Arnessen hammer. The machine went right through the hull. Mac filled the hole with Red Hand epoxy putty.
The chipping opportunities offered by the Stella Lykes are reminiscent of the Flower Hill. Owned first by Moore-McCormack and later by United States Lines, Stella was in mothballs in Jacksonville for a year and a half before Lykes Brothers took her over. She was not well maintained. Duke the Bosun Labaczewski will guide you around the main deck from valley to valley of ulcerated rust. “It is made by water laying steady,” he says. “The lawnmower doesn't get all of it. After that, you have to use the triple scaler and the needle gun. The needle gun gets right into the pits.” All this, and the painting that follows, Duke directs from the shelter deck—a name borrowed from tankers and applied here to a room on the main deck that reaches from one side of the ship to the other and has large doors at either end that open to views of the ocean. It is a tunnel through the ship with breezes at the extremes. If you go into the shelter deck when the ship is rolling, you see sky at one end, water at the other. The shelter deck is full of ladders, hoses, cables, cargo lights, rigs of block and tackle, turnbuckles, rope, and, above all, paint—the whiff of paint.
After fo'c'sle deck and fantail, it's the most nautical space aboard, and seems to smell of creosote and tar.
I like to hang about the shelter deck talking to Duke. He is from New Jersey, and he makes me feel at home. Like his A.B.s and his ordinaries, he is at home not only with hand-held jackhammers but also with clove hitches, running hitches, sheet bends, and bowlines. Of marlinspike seamanship there may not be a great deal left on the oceans, but you will find it in the shelter deck.
Duke is short and muscular and wears a puffy white hat. He grew up in Camden and Philadelphia, where one of his close friends was a boy named Mike Perlstein. In 1947, when Duke was eighteen—and a veteran of the North Atlantic in the wartime Merchant Marine—Perlstein told him about Aliyah Bet, the secret Jewish effort to lease or buy ships, clandestinely load them with displaced European Jews, and take them to Palestine. The ships were very old, and the crews were not paid. Duke volunteered. He sailed on a ship called Hatikvah, a former Coast Guard cutter, which crossed the ocean in ballast and then replaced the ballast with fourteen hundred Jews. Duke was one of two Gentiles on the ship. The other was Hugh McDonald, a Harvard law student. McDonald painted a shamrock on the Hatikvah's stack.
“A
shamrock!”
I exclaimed as the narrative reached this point.
Duke said, “He might have been Scottish, but he was a very well-educated man.”
Like the Exodus and the nine other Aliyah Bet vessels that sailed from America in 1946 and 1947, the Hatikvah failed to penetrate the British blockade. Fifty miles off the coast, the Hatikvah was boarded. Its passengers and crew were interned on Cyprus. Eventually, Duke and everybody else made it to the Holy Land. In Haifa, the volunteers were provided with new clothing, which included a short-sleeved shirt. That embarrassed Duke, because his arms were covered with tattoos and he knew that Judaic tradition barred tattoos. Jewish officials went out and bought him a long-sleeved shirt. David Ben-Gurion heard this story. After Duke moved into the Kibbutz Genosar, David Ben-Gurion looked up the volunteers, and expressed astonishment that a Gentile would put himself out to such an extent for a Jewish cause. “I was young and idealistic,” Duke explains. “I was trying to help these people have a homeland.” Forty years later, Duke was invited to a reunion in Israel, which he attended with Yehuda Sela, Hillel Haramati, Menahem Peretz, Aryeh Malkin, Mike Perlstein, Paul Kaye, Murray Aronoff, Harry Weinsaft, Nat Nadler, Ben Ocopnick, Irving Meltzer, Yakov Ben-Yisrael, and other American sailors from the Aliyah Bet. Israel, in its gratitude, gave each sailor a medal, bearing the face of David Ben-Gurion.
Duke is highly skilled as a fly-fisherman and spinfisherman and as a bow hunter. A widower for ten years, he lives with his daughter on the southern fringes of the Pine Barrens. He has two granddaughters. Their mother works. Every day that Duke is ashore, he combs the hair of the younger one before sending her off to school. Wherever
he goes on the ocean, he buys jewelry boxes. He puts gold in them in the form of rings, earrings, and chains. At this time, each granddaughter has ten thousand dollars' worth of gold.
After we left Panama, Andy went around the house like the Ship Crier, knocking on doors and calling, “Sea watches are set. Get up if you want to work. Rise and shine for overtime.” With all our dockings and undockings and ulcerated rust, an ordinary seaman on the Stella Lykes can make more than an A.B., or even the bosun on a tanker: witness Peewee's thirty thousand dollars last year. In addition to overtime, an A.B. gets five dollars and forty-seven cents an hour for not eating lunch, if mandatory work on deck keeps him away from the food. It's called penalty time. J. Peter Fritz, the chief mate, says, “They eat, work, and sleep, and stand their watch. They get off and laugh all the way to the bank.” Peewee averages more than seven hours of overtime a day, Calvin and Mac about six and two-thirds. The chief cook made fifty thousand dollars last year. There is a daily bonus if explosives are aboard. It's sometimes called ammo pay. In the engine room, there is a dividend known as daily dirty work, paid at the discretion of the chief engineer to some demac, like David Carter, who will work inside a boiler at a hundred and fifty degrees. Carter earned forty-five thousand last year.
The mates are paid copious overtime. The chief mate seems to work around the clock, and—forty-two days on, forty-two days off—goes home with roughly seventy-five thousand a year. Andy's base pay is a hundred and one
dollars and twenty-eight cents a day, his overtime rate twenty-six dollars and thirty cents an hour. He gets overtime pay for, among other things, climbing twelve feet up turnbuckles and lashings to look at thermometers and record the temperatures of refrigerated containers. Every morning after breakfast, he reads the reefers for an hour. Luke Midgett, his predecessor as second mate, grossed twelve thousand dollars in forty-two days.
On Mac's birthday, the ship itself was making money running slow, because we were ahead of schedule. Seventy-one revolutions per minute. Fifteen knots. Undertime. Even so, she was consuming a gallon of bunker fuel every five seconds, a barrel every three and a half minutes. Three hundred thousand dollars had bought enough fuel to get us from Charleston to Chile and back. Mac said, “When we get up to maximum speed is when she just drinking like water.” The captain never goes higher than eighty-eight r.p.m., which makes about nineteen knots. Andy looked up from his weather reports, and his fingers began to tap a calculator. That would be fifty-nine gallons a mile, he told us—seventeen thousandths of a mile per gallon.
Calvin was hosing the flying bridge, and Peewee was mopping the wheelhouse floor—the ritual end of the watch. Calvin had a long-handled brush that reached down to the bridge windows. While the iron mike steered the ship, Mac, with a cloth and Windex, sprayed the glass from the inside. The ship makes its own fresh water, and in such abundance that the whole house can be washed, helping the paint to last.
Andy said that we had found the Humboldt Current. The sea temperature had dropped ten degrees, and the ship had been set (shoved) to starboard four miles in less than two hours. Captain Washburn said that the Spaniards had not had the seamanship to sail against “the old Humboldt.” He said it took them three months to go from Panama to Lima. “They even tried rowing. They never mastered the use of sail, the way the English did. The English had to. Up there, you mastered the use of sail or you died.”
The chief mate appeared for the eight-to-twelve. Victor Belmosa relieved McLaughlin at the wheel. “Don't hit a porpoise,” someone said to him.
Belmosa said, “Straight between the anchors.”
Mac, to greet his fifty-ninth year, gave himself a birthday present. He did not turn out for overtime. He went to his cabin and slept all day.
W
e left fifteen thousand seven hundred and twenty-eight GAZ lighters on the dock in Valparaiso. We left four tons of mattress ticking, twelve tons of scouring pads, and two tons of books. We left fatty acid, silicic acid, nalidixic acid, polyvinyl-chloride resin, hexane, methane. We left eighteen thousand pounds of cellophane. We left eight pails of “flammable flavoring extracts,” which, according to the cargo manifest, had a “flash point of 32 degrees Fahrenheit” and were “licensed by the United States for ultimate destination Chile and for distribution or resale in any destination except Soviet bloc, Laos, Libya, North Korea, Kampuchea, or Cuba.” We left one container said to contain “sausage.casings, water filters, auto parts, paper-making-machinery parts, and safety equipment—mixed,” and another container said to contain “spare parts for front-end loader, paper-making machinery, aircraft parts, fluorescent tubes, valves, plastic film, air-conditioning parts,
and epoxy catalysts.” We left thirteen thousand pounds of sunflower seeds and twenty-five thousand pounds of alfalfa seeds. We left three hundred and sixty-four cases of hypodermic syringes that we had picked up in Colombia. We left a hundred and sixteen tons of steel strapping and (in Chile!) nine tons of copper wire. We left a ton and a half of money-changing machinery, forty-three tons of used clothing, a Model 1080 crane crawler, and a fire engine. Among other things.
We picked up three thousand cases of wine, two tons of button-down short-sleeved shirts, seven hundred bags of pentaerythritol, three hundred and fifty pounds of Chilean bone glue, and a hundred and thirteen thousand pounds of candy. We picked up eight hundred and seventeen desks and eight hundred and seventeen chairs. We picked up eighty-five cartons of umbrellas (on their way to Los Angeles), seven thousand spare tires (New Orleans), six thousand four hundred and eighty toilet pedestals (Chicago), and a hundred thousand pieces of kiln-dried radiata pine (destinations everywhere). We picked up nine tons of fruit cocktail, sixty-three tons of peach chips, sixty-seven tons of raisins, two hundred and thirty thousand gallons of concentrated apple juice, four hundred thousand fresh lemons, four hundred thousand fresh onions, five hundred thousand fresh apples. And then we departed.
And now it is 4 A.M., cool, in the fifties, northbound, and the lights of Valparaiso go into the ocean behind us. The onions are in six abovedeck containers. The onions need air, and the doors of the containers have been left
open. The aroma emerges like smoke. It thins in the wind, but some of it streams past the bridge. This is a night so dark and clear that Venus is lighting a path on the water. A broad, bright path on the water. If you look directly at Venus, you dent your retinas—you look away and see a purple planet. Andy has seen rainbows made by the moon.
The shaft is making sixty revolutions a minute as the captain continues his slow economical trudge across the weekend to Peru. The ship, scarcely making fourteen knots, is all the more vulnerable to the big Pacific swells. The rolls are long and deep. She creaks like a bark in the doldrums. When Vernon McLaughlin takes over the wheel, he says, “I'd rather be in port than out here rolling around. If you were going to North Europe, you wouldn't be drifting around like this. You'd get up and be going, and hope to God the weather didn't catch you.”
Dawn begins. It backlights the Andes. In day after day of overcast, we have not seen them before.
“Holy Toledo, look at those mountains, Mac. What do you say to that?”
“You can never please a seaman.”
If the Fathometer were capable of registering awe, awe is what it would register now. While we are watching the mountain ridgeline, the machine is looking under the ship. On its electrolytic paper, the steep jagged sketch of the continental slope looks like cartoon lightning. The mountains rise beyond twenty-two thousand feet to the greatest elevation in the Western Hemisphere. The ocean close to the continent is as deep as the mountains are high. This
trench—the Peru-Chile Trench—runs the length of South America. A few hundred miles north of us, near Antofagasta, it is twenty-six thousand feet deep. The abyssal plains. of the world ocean floors are not nearly as deep as that. Like the Cayman Trench, the Peru-Chile Trench is a phenomenon of plate tectonics. It is the site of a plate-to-plate collision. South America, moving west, is encountering the ocean-crustal rock of the Nazca Plate, which plunges eastward under the continent. Each increment of this motion is an earthquake. Each volcano is in part the product of melted ocean crust.
A geologist might say:
It is hardly possible to doubt that this great elevation has been effected by successive small uprisings … . by an insensibly slow rise.
The pried-up edge of South America is like a partly submerged cliff. As we move north with our toilet pedestals, our spare tires, and our two tons of button-down shirts, we are halfway up a ten-mile rise, ruffling the boundary of two fluids.
Daily it is forced home on the mind of the geologist, that nothing, not even the wind that blows, is so unstable as the level of the crust of this earth.
The dawn is pink behind Mercedario, orange and pink behind Aconcagua. The range is black. There is a thin line of bright silver where the ridges intersect the sky.
Every one must have remarked how mud-banks, left by the retiring tide, imitate in miniature a country with hill and dale; and here we have the original model in rock, formed as the continent rose during the secular retirement of the ocean.
The geologist is Charles Darwin, and those are descriptions of Chile, where he experienced an earthquake that was the most severe in local memory.
I happened to be on shore, and was lying down in the wood to rest myself. It came on suddenly, and lasted two minutes, but the time appeared much longer. The rocking of the ground was very sensible.
 
He felt a little giddy when he stood up.
 
It was something like the movement … felt by a person skating over thin ice, which bends under the weight of his body. A bad earthquake at once destroys our oldest associations: the earth, the very emblem of solidity, has moved beneath our feet like a thin crust over a fluid.
Darwin described a tsunami as well, and, by intuition, understood its behavior:
I suspect (but the subject is a very obscure one) that a wave, however produced, first draws the water from the shore, on which it is advancing.
He described the mountains. By a leap of the intellect that seems to me to have gone far beyond intuition, he understood what made them:
In all probability, a subterranean lake of lava is here stretched out … . We may confidently come to the conclusion that the forces which slowly and by little starts uplift continents, and those which at successive periods pour forth volcanic matter from open orifices, are identical. From many reasons, I believe that the frequent quakings of the earth on this line of coast are caused by the rending of the strata, necessarily consequent on the tension of the land when upraised, and their injection by fluidified rock.
Having Darwin for a guide—to people and places as well as rock—is a bright fringe of this voyage. Especially when he was young, he was such a clear, good-humored writer.
Whoever called “Valparaiso” the “Valley of Paradise” must have been thinking of Quillota.
 
The Chilian miners are a peculiar race of men in their habits. Living for weeks together in the most desolate spots, when they descend to the villages on feast-days, there is no excess or extravagance into which they do not run. They sometimes gain a considerable sum, and then, like sailors with prize-money, they try how soon
they can contrive to squander it. They drink excessively, buy quantities of clothes, and in a few days return penniless to their miserable abodes, there to work harder than beasts of burden. This thoughtlessness, as with sailors, is evidently the result of a similar manner of life.
 
These lizards, when cooked, yield a white meat, which is liked by those whose stomachs soar above all prejudices.
He wrote the sort of thing that can give other writers ideas. The seminal aspects of his work may have extended beyond science.
By the middle of the day we arrived at one of the suspension bridges made of hide, which crosses the Maypu, a large turbulent river a few leagues southward of Santiago. These bridges are very poor affairs. The road, following the curvature of the suspending ropes, is made of bundles of sticks placed close together. It was full of holes, and oscillated rather fearfully, even with the weight of a man leading his horse.
He was twenty-five when he reached Chile. He had a geological hammer, and he knew what he was hitting. He did not so much bring his geology with him, though, as figure it out in mid-terrain. The science in its modern form was less than forty years old. Plate tectonics, as a term coined
to describe a theory, was a hundred and thirty-three years away. Yet he went through the country in 1834 decoding the message written in the stratified shingle. The presence of seashells at thirteen hundred feet did not suggest to him the flood of Noah. Darwin saw the stratigraphy, comprehended the structure, and understood most of the tectonics. And as far as he went he was right.
No one fact in the geology of South America interested me more than these terraces of rudely-stratified shingle.
… I am convinced that the shingle terraces were accumulated, during the gradual elevation of the Cordillera, by the torrents delivering, at successive levels, their detritus on the beachheads of long narrow arms of the sea, first high up in the valleys, then lower and lower down as the land slowly rose. If this be so, and
I cannot doubt it, the grand and broken chain of the Cordillera, instead of having been suddenly thrown up, as was till lately the universal, and still is the common opinion of geologists, has been slowly upheaved in mass.
In the heavy roll, Stella's bridge wings alternately reach for the water, like the hands of a swimmer. Captain Washburn enters the wheelhouse. His belt buckle is stationed at his left hip today. There are days when the buckle is on his right hip. It is rarely in the middle. When we are not in port, he wears thinly striped semitransparent sports shirts, long dark trousers, running shoes. Always, he wears the
baseball cap with the scrambled eggs. He says, “A quartering wind makes a ship roll.”
McLaughlin, without expression, looks straight ahead. One does not need a Fathometer to sense what Mac is thinking. Let's get on with it, he is thinking. If you were in the North Atlantic, you wouldn't be drifting around like this.
The captain mentions Columbus. Captain Washburn would be unlikely to include Columbus on any list that also included Clean Shirt George Price, Dirty Shirt George Price, and Terrible Terry Harmon. “Columbus was a great big con man,” he says. “Columbus knew where he was going and what was there. He thought it was closer—that was his mistake. He became nervous when he didn't find it. The men said they were turning back. Columbus said, ‘Not all of you are turning back. The ones I kill are staying here.'” With a pugilistic frown, Washburn looks around the bridge.
Columbus sailed with fifty-two men on a square-rigger that was a hundred and seventeen feet long. Washburn is sailing with thirty-three on a merchant ship that is six hundred and sixty-five feet long. Washburn calls this undermanning. Steaming between the Scylla of automation and the Charybdis of bankruptcy, contemporary American shipping companies find ways to get along without crewmen: they beach the purser, the second cook, the sous-chef, the extra third mate, a wiper or two, and various engineers. Many ships larger than the Stella Lykes have scarcely twenty men aboard. If you are looking for large crews, you would
look to a navy. Darwin's little warship had a crew of sixty-five. A modern United States Navy frigate, barely half the size of the Stella Lykes, will have two hundred and fifty men aboard, seven of them rubbing shoulders at any one time on the bridge.
When Darwin got off H.M.S. Beagle in Valparaiso, he was ashore nearly four months. When we got off the Stella Lykes in Valparaiso, we were ashore scarcely six hours before the longshoremen had loaded the button-down shirts, and the ship was preparing to go. The crew members do not see much of the countries they come to. Andy, who was so pleased to be making a run for the first time to the west coast of South America, could not get off in Cartagena or in Guayaquil and had time in Balboa only for a short walk with me. In Guayaquil, the ship was moved from one berth to another at noon, and he had to be aboard for that, and then at four he went on watch, and then we sailed. In the old days of the stick ships, turnaround time was long. A ship would sit in port a week or two. With the innovation of container ships and heavy-lift sheer-leg dockside cranes, the handling of cargo became intensely efficient. Our port visits are so brief that we often stay on sea watches. If port watches were set, a mate, for example, would be eight hours on and eight off, then eight more on and eight off, and then have thirty-two hours to himself. By that time, the Stella Lykes would be at least halfway to the next country. In the forty-two days of a voyage, J. Peter Fritz, the chief mate, who is in charge of cargo, usually goes ashore twice,
and only briefly. The captain goes ashore even more rarely. When he comes up the gangway in Charleston to begin his routine of two voyages, he figures that the next time he sets foot on land will be eighty-four days later, in the same place. Andy was once on a dry-cargo ship that was in port a week at a time, but since then he has seldom been in any port more than twenty-four hours. Join the merchant navy and glimpse the world. Glimpse, in fact, only the seaports of the world. I heard a crewman say, “You get to Haifa, you can't get to Jerusalem. You get to Alexandria, you can't get to Cairo.”

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