He’d bunked with as many as twenty men on the early non-union ships, before they were barred from the West Coast in the wake of the Great Strike. Criminals, dope addicts with hypos in their seabags, amateur boxers with holes in their memories—all stacked together so snugly in their sacks that when another man coughed or farted or moaned, Eddie thought he’d done it himself. Once he’d happened upon two men locked together in a stokehold in a slick, grunting embrace. The sight revolted and enraged him. He resolved to act—protest, find a sea lawyer and file a complaint—but by the time his watch ended, he’d ceased to care. The incident had fallen into the past, left behind with the nautical position at which it had taken place. They all had their secrets in 1937. No one talked more than men on ships, but the point of the stories they told was to hide the ones they could never divulge to anyone.
Pearl Harbor interrupted Eddie’s drifting. Experienced sailors were desperately needed to transport war supplies, and he was promoted—through no effort of his own—from an ordinary seaman to an able-bodied seaman. ABs were strongly encouraged to study for the third mate’s exam. For months Eddie resisted, longing to preserve the floating peace whose essential feature was his own passivity. It was no good; idleness in wartime—even a war he couldn’t see—had felt like loafing. He grew bored, restless. Finally, having not spent two consecutive weeks ashore in over five years, he’d paid off in San Francisco and taken the train to Alameda for the two-month officers’ training course.
Mindful of the hour, Eddie began descending Telegraph Hill. Warships crowded the bay. The hills around it were speckled with pale houses, like birds’ eggs. He was disappointed to find that the view had not assuaged his anxious new vigilance. But it wasn’t new. It was a relic from his old life. Eddie had forgotten what it felt like.
Thirty minutes later, he was climbing the slanted gangway from Pier 21 to the Elizabeth Seaman. Before he’d reached the deck, a familiar voice gusted against his ears: florid and bawling inside crisp British corners. Eddie froze on the gangway. He tried to imagine the voice issuing from another man—any other man—than the bosun who despised him. He could not. There was only one man in the world who talked like that.
On the main deck, he glanced through the tumult of booms and cargo and scrambling army stevedores for a glimpse of the bosun’s dark skin. But the Nigerian was nowhere in sight, nor could Eddie hear him anymore. This wouldn’t be the first time he’d conjured him up.
Outside the midship house, Eddie introduced himself to Mr. Farmingdale, the second mate. Farmingdale’s courtly manners and snowy beard gave him the noble air of a profile on a coin, but Eddie pegged him for a juicehead. It wasn’t just Farmingdale’s overcareful walk that gave him away—this was New Year’s Day, after all, and plenty of men were tiptoeing about. It was the smell that eked from his pores, like soil mixed with rotten orange peels. Eddie felt a twinge of distaste.
In the wardroom, he presented his brand-new third mate’s license to the master, the ink still wet, as it were. Young Captain Kittredge was fair-haired and striking—more like a picture star playing a skipper than a real one. Eddie felt old beside him; was old for a third mate. “You’ve come out of retirement?” the master asked, clearly thinking along the same lines.
“No, sir. I was already at sea.”
The captain nodded, doubtless placing Eddie in the category of misfits one found aboard merchant ships before the war. Kittredge had that American air of bullying optimism: expecting the best and presuming he’d get it—or else. This would be his third voyage on the Elizabeth Seaman, he told Eddie, the first two having been uneventful island-hopping runs to the Pacific.
“She’s a special girl, Mrs. Seaman,” he said with a wink. “We’ve been making twelve knots.”
“Twelve!” Eddie exclaimed. Liberties were notoriously slow; twelve knots would be flank speed. Perhaps some of the captain’s buoyant American power had seeped into the ship.
A breeze sallied through three open portholes on the forward wall. Beyond them, Eddie had an impression of San Francisco’s colors, blue, yellow, pink. It was a light city. In the union halls and seamen’s churches, men imparted ghastly tales from the East Coast: torpedoed tankers vaporizing like Roman candles, men frozen to death at their lifeboat oars on the dreaded North Sea runs to Murmansk. It was hard to envision any of that here. Eddie’s voyages in the year since Pearl Harbor had been much like the ones Captain Kittredge described: offshore unloading, no liberty, but no apparent danger, either, now that typhoon season was over.
His third mate’s stateroom was on the boat deck, starboard aft, beside the sick bay. Small and straightforward: a bed with built-in drawers, a small closet, desk, sink. But to Eddie—accustomed to living out of a single locker in a cabin with at least one other man, more often several—so much solitary space was an intimidating luxury.
Unpacking his seabag, he found a sealed envelope with Save for later written on the front in a neat schoolteacher’s hand. It must have been placed there by Ingrid, a young widow he’d met three weeks before, in San Francisco. Feeling a twinge of baffled irritation, he set the envelope inside the desk drawer and went to the wheelhouse to begin his third mate’s duties. He checked over the bell books and signal flags. Having already sailed twice on Liberty ships meant that he knew the Elizabeth Seaman—being mass-produced, Liberties were interchangeable down to the last oilskin locker. From the wheelhouse window, he watched the number two hold receive more of the boxed cargo he’d spotted from Telegraph Hill. They were aircraft, as he’d guessed: Douglas A-20s. The crates were stamped with Cyrillic letters.
He left the midship house and returned to the main deck. In the after part of the ship, number three hold was receiving general cargo: bags of cement, canned beef, powdered eggs, boxes of boots. Eddie climbed onto the rear gun deck and greeted the gunner on watch, painfully young and big-eared like they all were, with their crude generic haircuts. No sailor wanted the job of guarding a merchant ship, yet every cargo required a complement of navy gunners to operate the cannons and machine guns in case of attack.
As he climbed down from the gun deck, Eddie noticed that the hatch to the steering engine room, belowdecks, had been left ajar. Only officers were supposed to go down there, but the deck crew had ways of getting hold of the keys, as Eddie well knew, having done it himself. The steering engine room was an excellent place to dry laundry.
Curious to know who was behind the infraction, he began descending the ladder into the familiar greasy warmth of the ship’s innards. He nearly collided with the Nigerian bosun, who was on his way up the very same ladder.
“What? . . . You . . .” the bosun sputtered, surprise and displeasure rendering him uncharacteristically mute. “Is this a deranged attempt to report for work on my deck crew?”
Eddie had the advantage of forewarning. “Not at all, Bosun. I’ve my third mate’s ticket now,” he said, taking his first genuine pleasure in the promotion.
Like most bosuns, this one disdained officers. More, he disdained former able-bodied seamen who became officers—“hawsepipers,” as they were known. Eddie glimpsed these strains of contempt at work in the bosun’s dark, expressive face. “A hawsepiper!” he remarked at last with honeyed mockery. “Congratulations, sir! Would this be your maiden voyage at that rank?”
“As a matter of fact, it is,” Eddie said, his heart accelerating as it always did when he tried to match wits with the bosun. The man discharged words in a way that left Eddie punch-drunk. He’d an imperious accent, something Eddie couldn’t get used to in a Negro. “And you don’t have to ‘sir’ me, Bosun. As I think you know.”
“Oh, I am keenly aware of that fact, Third,” the bosun bellowed merrily. “My ‘sir’ was merely a courtesy intended to acknowledge and salute your breathtaking rise in the maritime hierarchy.”
“Have you a reason to be in the steering engine room?” Eddie asked.
“Naturally, I have, or I would not be spending even a second of my precious time in that p
lace.”
“I’d like to come down and take a look, if you’ll kindly step aside,” Eddie said. “Make sure that reason doesn’t have anything to do with drying laundry.”
The bosun’s nostrils flared. His husky build and violet-dark skin made him seem larger than Eddie, even looking up from below. He did not step aside. “Perhaps this would be an opportune point at which to remind you,” he said, snapping the words like a whip, “that as third mate, and a brand-new one at that, you haven’t the slightest jurisdiction over me. Which is to say, putting it plainly, you may not give me orders.”
He was right, of course. A third mate commanded no one, whereas a bosun commanded a deck crew of some thirteen sailors—six ABs, three ordinaries, three deckhands, and Chips, as the carpenter was always known—and answered directly to the first mate. Eddie knew, having worked under this bosun, that he was an old-school tyrant—the sort shipping companies loved because they wrung the maximum from their deck crews while paying them a minimum of overtime. Like most autocrats, the bosun was solitary, a fanatical reader who read with a riveted attention that suggested physical engagement. While most sailors talked of their reading at chow and exchanged books to stretch their meager libraries, the bosun covered his in oilcloth and turned them facedown when anyone came near. Some theorized that they were dirty; others speculated that he read only one book: the Bible, the Koran, the Torah, or perhaps all three. His secrecy had nettled Eddie. He thought of himself as being kind to Negroes, but was accustomed to Negroes who had less than he. The jumbling of races on merchant ships had been a shock at first: it was common for white men to work under Negroes, South Americans, even Chinamen. But this bosun was not just better spoken than Eddie, with palpably more education. He’d also had a contemptuous way of looking at Eddie that brought to mind the phrase “dumb mick.”
On a dare from the other ABs, Eddie had made bold once to approach the bosun and ask—with a smirk he couldn’t fully repress—what he was reading. The bosun had closed his book and walked away without a word. They were crossways of each other after that. The bosun buried Eddie in make-work until his head swam from the fumes of the rust-retardant fish oil, followed by red lead paint, and then battleship gray, that he’d had to apply to every inch of the ship including the masts—normally a deckhand’s job. In high winds, Eddie had swung to and fro, pointlessly plotting his revenge.
“I’ve a feeling, Bosun,” he said now, with mounting frustration at finding his path down the ladder still blocked, “that you think I should be taking orders from you.”
“I wouldn’t dream of suggesting such a thing,” the bosun protested, “despite knowing that a mere voyage ago, that would have been precisely the case.”
“Well, it isn’t the case anymore. And it won’t be again, unless one of those books you’ve always got your nose in is preparation for the third mate’s exam.”
The bosun gave himself to laughter, a sound somewhere between bells and drums. “With all due respect, Third,” he chortled, “had hawsepiping been my object, I’d have been master of my own bucket long ago.”
Eddie smelled an advantage. The bosun could swagger and verbiate all he wanted, but Eddie had never encountered a Negro captain on any American merchant ship, and he doubted the bosun had, either. An awareness of this seemed to infect both of them at once. “Fine, then,” Eddie said with meaning. “I think we understand each other.”
“We will never understand each other,” the bosun spat with loathing. He continued up the ladder, forcing Eddie backward. Eddie felt as if he’d won by playing dirty—worse than losing. He retreated onto the deck, and the bosun shouldered past him.
When at last Eddie reached the steering engine room, he found no laundry anywhere.
* * *
Later, through a door behind the galley, he climbed down to the engine room. The temperature rose as he descended through a skein of pipes and catwalks and grates and vents into the gut of the ship, although the three giant pistons that turned the screw were still.
The third engineer, Eddie’s counterpart belowdecks, had an accent at odds with his name. “O’Hillsky?” Eddie asked skeptically. “Irish?”
The engineer laughed. “Polish. O-C-H-Y-L-S-K-I.” He was smoking a pipe, a rarity in the engine room, it being already so hot. “You heard the rumor?” Ochylski said. “Russia.”
Eddie recalled the Cyrillic lettering on the airplane crates. “That doesn’t make geographic sense.”
The third engineer chuckled around his pipe, and Eddie recognized a dour European humor he’d come to appreciate. “A machine can’t think,” Ochylski said, “and the War Shipping Administration is a machine.”
“Murmansk?” Eddie asked, the name feeling strange on his lips.
“Only if they give us the arctic gear. Do you know?”
“I’ll find out,” Eddie said.
* * *
During the next eight days, the Elizabeth Seaman moved from pier to pier along the San Francisco waterfront and continued to load. Number four hold was filled with bauxite; number one hold with C rations and boxes of small arms. At her last stop, Pier 45, tanks and jeeps were placed around her battened hatches and secured as deck cargo, then lashed down with lengths of chain shackled to a padeye. The first mate, a knowledgeable Dane of about sixty, oversaw all of this, along with the bosun and his deck crew. Eddie’s port responsibilities were nebulous, and he tried to steer clear of the bosun. Luckily, officers and crew ate in separate mess halls, although the food was identical. The saloon, where officers ate, had white tablecloths. Alone in his stateroom at night, Eddie eluded the echoey range of his thoughts by reading. His favorite books were about the sea, and he’d finally got his hands on a copy of The Death Ship, which had made the rounds on one of his jungle runs before Pearl Harbor.
On the Elizabeth Seaman’s last evening in port, Eddie stood on the flying bridge with Roger, the eager, nervous deck cadet. Along with Stanley, the engine room cadet, Roger had completed three months of officer training at the Merchant Marine Academy in San Mateo and now was beginning his required six months at sea. The cadets quartered together on the bridge deck, near “Sparks,” as the radioman was always known.
“What sort of fellow is our Sparks?” Eddie asked. Radiomen were rarely seen; they were either in the radio shack or asleep in a cabin beside it with an alarm to wake them should an emergency transmission come in.
“He curses quite a bit,” Roger said.
“Soon you’ll be doing that, too.”
The cadet laughed. He was scrawny and beak-nosed, a few steps short of manhood. “Mother won’t like it.”
“No mothers here.”
“I saw something strange today,” Roger said after a pause.
He’d opened the door to a storeroom and found Farmingdale, the second mate, busy at something inside it. When Roger approached, he saw that Farmingdale was tipping a can of gray paint over the mouth of a mason jar, pouring a thin stream of paint into a loaf of bread he’d wedged into the mouth of the jar. The bread absorbed the paint’s viscous pigment, so that what reached the bottom of the jar was a trickle of cloudy liquid. In full view of Roger, Farmingdale lifted the jar to his lips and calmly drank this down.
“He looked angry,” Roger said, “but he didn’t stop.”
“Imagine the state of his stomach.”
“Will he be fit to sail?”
“If he can drink like that, then he’s used to it,” Eddie said.
“Who’ll handle the navigation if the second mate is drunk?”
“I will,” Eddie said, though his own navigation skills were still rudimentary. He was disgusted with the second mate for having let the cadet witness his degeneracy. “And you, kiddo. Get to work with that azimuth.”
Dusk fell moodily on the city, pricks of diamond light pulsing from Telegraph Hill. The fog hadn’t yet come in.
“I’ll sure miss Frisco,” Roger said.
“So shall I,” Eddie said. “Although it turns out only sailors
call it Frisco.”
“San Francisco,” Roger said, laying down the words in a voice that hadn’t fully broken yet. “She’s a hell of a town.”
* * *
They cast off lines at six the next morning, January 10, and were directed by a local pilot to the degaussing range, where the Elizabeth Seaman’s hull was demagnetized so she wouldn’t set off mines. Eddie led a fire and boat drill, safety procedures being a third mate’s one clear responsibility. But the drill was perfunctory; they didn’t even swing out the davits, much less lower the lifeboats. Captain Kittredge was in a hurry to sail, and the bosun seemed indifferent—perhaps inclined to minimize Eddie’s domain.
When they were past the Golden Gate, the captain disclosed their destination: the Panama Canal. That meant the Persian Gulf almost certainly, from whence the cargo would be transported overland to Russia, whose infinite Red Army continued to beat back the Krauts. The Elizabeth Seaman hadn’t been given the arctic gear required for crossing the North Sea in January, to the extreme relief of everyone aboard. The refrain “better than Murmansk” echoed through the gangways and over chow tables for the rest of that night. But Eddie felt no such relief. The Caribbean was hazardous enough, and he seethed over the halfhearted boat drill.
When he relieved the first mate of his watch at eight the next morning, Eddie persuaded him of the need for a second drill. That afternoon, the engines were reduced to standby and the order given for the abandon-ship drill: six short blasts followed by one long blast of the general alarm bell. As men began moving toward the boat deck, the bosun sprinted up the ladders and accosted Eddie there.
“Third Mate,” he began, smacking his lips at the utterance of the title, “are you cognizant of the fact that it has been over a year since a Jap submarine sank a merchant ship on the California coast?”
“I am, Bosun.”
“Can you explain, then, why we are now undertaking our second boat drill in two short days at sea?”
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