Voyage to Somewhere (3 page)

“Oh, the ammunition goes in the magazines, the toilet paper goes in the lazarette …” I paused and wiped my brow. As I did that a seaman wearing a pistol came up to me with a message. I signed his receipt book and opened the envelope he handed me. It was an order from the district office.

“Make ready for sea and sail before 1500 of May twenty-four for Milne Bay, New Guinea. Routing Instructions will be supplied.”

I didn't read any farther. That gave us just three days, seventy-two hours, to get ready. I glanced up and saw Mr. Rudd standing near me. Without a word I handed him the dispatch. He read it and handed it back. I glanced around the cluttered deck and at the seamen who were increasing rather than diminishing its disorder.

“Well, Mr. Rudd,” I said, “what do you think?”

He gave me a sardonic grin, and walked away.

CHAPTER FOUR

I
MADE AN
appointment to speak to the Commander and ask him for a delay on our sailing time. After waiting three-quarters of an hour in an anteroom I was led into the Commander's office. The Commander was a thin, very small man whose three heavy gold stripes seemed to weigh down his arms.

“I've come to speak to you, sir, about the SV-126. We're supposed to sail in forty-eight hours. The engineering officer and I and four of the crew are the only ones who have ever been to sea at all. We have been aboard only twenty-four hours, the ship has had no shakedown cruise, and half the equipment isn't aboard. I feel I need at least a week to make her ready for sea.”

“If we all waited until we were really ready,” the Commander said, “not a battle would be fought.”

“This is not a fighting ship, sir,” I replied. “The main thing we have to fight for the time being is just lack of knowledge and lack of preparedness.”

The Commander cleared his throat. “Those little supply ships are needed right away,” he said. “I've got orders to get them out as soon as possible. I know your crew is inexperienced, but they're not going to get experience lying at the wharf.”

“No,” I said, “but at least I can get the equipment I need. Not only is much of the authorized equipment undelivered, but I want to try to get authorization for lots of other equipment. We have no gyro compass, no azimuth circles, no radar, and only two fifty-calibre machine guns. The guns fire only over the stern. If anything attacked us over the bow we couldn't fire a shot.”

The Commander held up his hand. “You've got to realize that these small supply ships are being mass produced,” he said, “and we don't have enough fancy stuff to go around. These ships are made to carry small amounts of cargo, and, if necessary, to be sacrificed. Don't try to get more equipment authorized. And meet your sailing date if you possibly can. That's important. There's nothing you can gain waiting around here, and I get dispatches every day asking for more supply ships.”

Somehow the Commander made me feel guilty about asking for either time or equipment. At the same time I felt angry. It was so obviously absurd to sail such an ill-equipped, ill-manned ship anywhere, yet I was begging and feeling badly about it.

I got up. “We'll sail her if we can,” I said, and went out. I hurried back to the ship.

That night all hands worked until midnight. The more we worked the more work was uncovered. Every inventory we made disclosed more gear lacking. In the navigational department there was no nautical almanac, and the chronometer was discovered to have no steady rate. The cooks found that there were not enough plates and cups to go around, and in the engine room Mr. Rudd found that the testing blanks in the pipelines had not been extracted. When everyone was so tired that further work was impossible and when the men had finally turned the floodlights off on deck and retired to their quarters, I knocked on the door of Mr. Rudd's stateroom to have a talk with him. I found him at his desk poring over the ship's blueprints. I sat down on his bunk.

“I asked for another week,” I said, “and the Commander talked me out of it. I asked for equipment and he talked me out of that.”

“Well,” said Mr. Rudd, “let's bundle the whole damn mess together and take it to sea.”

“You don't seem very disturbed,” I said.

“I'm not. It amuses me.”

“Your amusement doesn't help much,” I said.

He grinned. “You make sure you have everything you need to navigate,” he said. “Tell Warren to make sure we have food and water. Tell Crane to fix up some kind of a paper organization that will at least look good, and I'll guarantee the engines will run. It won't be so bad.”

“Stop being funny,” I said. “It'll be like taking a tenement house to sea. Everybody running around, everybody sceaming, complete disorder …”

He grinned again. “All the closer to nature,” he said.

“And we don't have a damn thing to work with,” I groaned. “We've got to sail this bucket with just about the same equipment Columbus had. No fathometer, no gyro, no radar—just a magnetic compass, one sextant, and one crazy chronometer. What'll we do if anything breaks?”

“Trust in God,” said Mr. Rudd piously.

“Just what Columbus had,” I said again, “and I bet we don't get half the credit.”

I got up to go. Mr. Rudd sat at his desk grinning at me. “It's a hell of a mess,” he said. “It couldn't be worse. You're a citizen of the richest nation in the world and you're sailing a ship the Swiss Navy would be ashamed of. We're a great seafaring nation, and you've got just six men, including yourself, that have been to sea. You've got eight thousand miles to sail and forty-eight hours to start. Before you're through you'll get shot at and go through typhoons. You've got to be ready for all that, you know. You've got thirty men aboard this split watermelon, and if she sinks thirty Western Union boys will deliver thirty telegrams telling how the Navy Department regrets. All the telegrams will be addressed with a, name that begins with W, except Mr. Crane's, yours, and mine, and those will probably be misspelled. Yours will go to ‘Warton' and mine will go to ‘Wudd.' But don't worry about it—it all is just at is should be. Everybody has everything all figured out. It's all written down somewhere. Don't worry about it. When the time comes to sail just take the lines off the dock and sail. It will be fun to see what happens!”

“Thanks.” I said. “Thanks for cheering me up.”

I was about to go out the door when he stopped me.

“Seriously,” he said, “I wouldn't worry. This ship is no different from any other. At bottom they're all that way. After a few weeks she'll be clean and all the boxes will be in all the right places and everyone will talk as though they knew exactly where they were going. She'll be a good ship, a taut ship but a happy one, as they say. Small ships and big men. We don't have to worry in the engine room—all American youths have innate mechanical ability. You can read that anywhere. You don't have to worry. We're all brave, courageous, loyal and true. The boys in blue will pull us through—shall I make a poem of it?”

“No, damn it, things aren't as bad as that. We will be all right,” I said defiantly.

“Sure we will,” he said. “Sure we will. That's the funny part about it. That's the part I've never been able to understand.”

CHAPTER FIVE

T
HE DAY BEFORE
we were to sail a string of trucks came down and loaded our holds with a cargo of canned pineapple. As our first stop was Hawaii and because the labels on the cans clearly read “Grown and canned in the Hawaiian Islands,” it was a little discouraging. I took it upon myself to telephone the cargo officer and ask him about it. He explained that the pineapples were grown in Hawaii and shipped to the United States for distribution to the armed services all over the world. Our shipment was consigned for New Guinea; the fact that we were to pass through Hawaii on the way was insignificant. Yes, the pineapples would make a useless voyage from Hawaii to the States and back to Hawaii, but that couldn't be helped.

I said all right, and went back to the ship.

“If we sink,” Mr. Crane said, “just write on my tombstone, ‘He died in a vain attempt to bring pineapples to Hawaii.'”

“It's not that I mind so much,” Mr. Warren contributed. “It's just that I've always loathed pineapples. They've always made me ill.”

By the night of May 23 the ship was loaded, the hatches were battened down, and I saw it was possible to sail the next day as planned. An order came down from the district that no liberty could be granted the men on the last night in the States. This was a common practice I knew. Last nights in the States had too often resulted in frantic telephone messages home, breaks in security, wild parties, and AWOL. Nevertheless it was difficult to tell all hands that their last night must be spent aboard ship. Some of them had their wives in town and nearly all of them had girls. To tell them they had to spend their last hours sitting on a ship alongside a wharf was a lot to ask. When the word was passed, however, there were no audible complaints. The men went about their work, and, if anything, the ship was quieter than usual. For the first time I saw a very serious look on the faces of the younger seamen.

At supper that night there was little conversation in the wardroom. After the soup had been eaten in silence and the main course had been brought in and carried away almost untouched, Mr. Crane and Mr. Warren excused themselves and went into their staterooms. I stirred uneasily in my chair. It seemed to me that we were already at sea; the tie with the shore had already been broken. The streets of the city of Wilmington were not far distant from the wharf alongside which we were moored, and the sounds of traffic were clear, but the honking horns and occasional sounds of voices seemed removed from us.

On the bulkhead outside the wardroom we had hung a mailbox, and from time to time I could see through the open door a seaman or a petty officer come and drop a letter in it. As the evening wore on this occurred more and more frequently, and the performance carried with it always the same little pattern of sound. First I heard footsteps coming down the passageway; then the seaman appeared, reached up to the mailbox, and I heard the gentle sound of the letter dropping inside. Next, more than usually, the seaman knocked with his knuckles a little against the side of the box to make sure the letter had fallen all the way in. After that there was a pause, and I heard footsteps walking up the corridor again toward the forecastle. These repeated sounds and the distant clatter of traffic were the only noises to be heard.

I became restless myself and went into my cabin and wrote a letter to my wife. When I had finished it I dropped it in the mailbox, caught myself knocking against the side of it just the way the others had, and went back into the wardroom. Mr. Rudd had gone to his stateroom, and I was alone there. The clock on the bulkhead read eight o'clock. Nineteen hours before we sail, I found myself thinking.

Another seaman came and dropped his letter in the mailbox, and I found myself waiting for his retreating footsteps. Instead I heard a knock at the wardroom door and saw White, a seaman of about eighteen, standing there with his cap off.

“Will the mail go off in the morning, sir?”

“Yes, White.”

“I put in my letter that they might not hear from me for quite a while. Will that be censored?”

“No, White. I think we can let that go through.”

“Thank you, sir.”

He turned and I heard his footsteps going away. I waited undeterminedly in the wardroom a faw more minutes, then got up and knocked at the door of Mr. Warren's stateroom. I found him seated at his desk writing a letter. Tacked to the bulkhead above his desk was an enlarged photograph of a very beautiful girl of about eighteen. The shape of the girl's face, with high cheekbones and large, intense-looking eyes, made the picture arresting, and I found difficulty in keeping my eyes away from it; my glance kept straying toward the photograph. Mr. Warren bade me sit down on his bunk, and paused in his writing.

“It's kind of a tough way to spend the last night,” I said.

“Yes, sir, it is.”

“When you censor the mail in the morning I think it'll be all right to let the men say that they won't be able to write for quite a while.”

“Yes, sir.”

I caught myself glancing at the photograph again and looked away. I wondered what it was about it that made it so different from the usual pictures of pretty girls. I decided it was because the girl in the picture looked as though she were just about to say something. Mr. Warren saw me looking at the photograph.

“That's Rachel. She's my wife,” he said.

“She's very lovely.”

There was a moment's pause and then Mr. Warren started talking very fast.

“She's in a hotel uptown,” he said. “We've just been married a week. I guess she'll be surprised when I don't come tonight, but I told her it might happen any time. She won't worry, I don't think. She's pretty independent.”

“She won't worry,” I said.

I glanced at his desk and saw that the letter he was writing was already many pages long. It struck me that I knew by heart every word that he had written.

“Well,” I said, “she'll probably get your letter tomorrow afternoon.”

“Yes,” he said, “that's what I figure.”

I got up and went out. As I walked back to the wardroom I could hear his pen resume its scratching.

I sat in the wardroom and tried to read. Somewhere up in the city a siren threaded its way through the distant streets. A fire, I thought, or maybe an ambulance. Somebody ashore had
his
problems too.

It was nine o' clock. The men were still shuffling in to the mailbox. On an impulse I got up and walked forward to the forecastle. When I opened the heavy iron door the quiet babble of voices stopped. The forecastle was a large compartment that followed the shape of the bow. Along both sides were triple tiers of bunks. In the dim light I could see the half-naked bodies of the men in their bunks. Most of them were propped up on one elbow writing on tablets. In the middle of the forecastle squatting on deck were four seamen, and it had been these whom I had heard murmuring. One of them had a cheap map of the Pacific unfolded. It looked like a Standard Oil road map, and the seaman who had been holding it, a dark-haired boy of about twenty, still had his finger pointing somewhere in the middle of it. All the seamen, those on the deck and those in their bunks, were looking at me.