The Death Ship

by B. TRAVEN

  “Only it is so very difficult to make a Mohammedan who is not a Turk grasp the idea that somebody can be a German and then fight on the side of the French in their legion. An Arabian believes a German looks different from an Englishman or a Frenchman. Seeing that a German looks almost exactly like a French, the Moroccan gets sort of suspicious against his captured legionnaire, and thinks he is being fooled.

  “What happened to pass in the minds of those Moroccans who had captured Paul no one will ever know. They believed his word, however, that he had never fought against any Moroccans, and that he had joined the legion only because he had been facing years of prison in France, for some conduct of which he really was not responsible.

  “So they clothed him, fed him, doctored his sores, and then handed him over from tribe to tribe and clan to clan until he reached the coast of Spanish Morocco. Here he was brought to the Yorikke, then right off the coast with special cargo for the Moroccans.

  “Now, the old man was overjoyed to have him. Because we were badly in need of a coal-drag. Paul was happy to be with us. He did not know and had no idea that his situation had not changed at all since he had enlisted for the legion.

  “It took him anyway only about two days to learn where he was, and that it was more difficult to escape from the Yorikke than from the legion. After he had passed a watch with three bars out in one furnace and five out in another, despite the fact that during this time all the fuel was rather close at hand, he said to me: `I wish I had not skipped the legion. This here, I tell you the truth, is ten times worse than our sweat company and the penal company combined. Compared to this, believe it, comrade, we lived like princes in fairy-tales. We had at least decent food, clean quarters, and soap and washed shirts and some leisure. I feel I’ll go to the rats here in no time.’

  “ ‘Now, don’t talk like an old woman, Paul,’ I consoled him. `You get used to it. And there is still some fun, sometimes, when in port with some cash. Don’t hang your head. Up the chin.’

  “It was likely that Paul had already caught something on account of his wanderings and hardships during his flight. Because it all happened rather rapidly,” Stanislav went on with his tale. “He began to spit thick blood. Every day more and more. Then he vomited blood, pails of it. One night, when I came to relieve him, I found him in the upper bunker, lying upon a pile of coal, his face bathed in thick blood.

  “He was not dead. I carried him to the quarters and put him into his bunk. I took his watch on, so that he could rest. “In the morning, when I went to see him, he was dead. At eight he went overboard on a greasy plank. The skipper did not even take off his cap and say a prayer for him. He only touched his cap and said: `Lower away.’ The boy was not clothed. He only had his rags on him, stuck on his body by his blood. A big lump of coal was tied on one of his legs to hold him down in the sea. I had the feeling that the skipper would have liked to save even that piece of coal. He looked that way.

  “Paul had never been registered in the pay-book of the ship. He left the world like so much useless dust. Nobody ever knew his name. He was just Frenchy. A member of a civilized nation which had denied him legal existence.”

  40

  While Stanislav was on the Yorikke, more than one coal-drag had been taken, eaten, and digested by that can.

  There was Kurt. He was from Memel territory, which was a part of Germany that had been taken away from the Germans after the war, without any other justification than to bite away from Germany as much as possible. Nobody had any idea what to do with or to whom to give this territory. So it stayed independent.

  When the residents and the natives of Memel had to make up their minds what nationality they wished to adopt, Kurt was in Australia. During the war he had not been molested very much by the Australians. The war over, he got homesick and wanted to return to Germany.

  He had been mixed up with a strike. In a battle with strikebreakers one of those rats had been beaten up until he was left dead in the street. Kurt was supposed to have had a hand in this, and he was sought by the police. He could not go to the German consul. If he had done some damage to the Australian army, the consul would have done all in his power to help him out of the country. But being mixed up with a strike is a different thing. Laborers attacking the profits of capitalists are out. When a strike is to be quelled, all consuls work in unison, regardless if only a few months ago they would rather have liked to cut one another’s throats. The consul, doubtless, would have handed Kurt over to the Australian police, or at least tipped them off. A consul is always on the side of order and state authority. A strike is always against the state, if led by the workers. When led by the leaders, one is never sure in whose interest the strike has been declared.

  Kurt could make England without any papers, being helped by members of the seamen’s union of Australia.

  England is a tough spot, since it’s an island. An island is always tough. You can hop on it easily. But it is not at all easy to hop off again if you have to do so within a given time. Kurt found himself like in a cage. He could not get off again. He had to go to see the consul. The consul wanted to know why he had left Sydney, or Brisbane, whatever town it was, without going to the German consul to get his papers in shape, and why, in particular, he had come to England illegally. Kurt could not tell his true story. He did not want to. England was in no way safer than Australia. The English would have sent him back to Australia without delay to go on trial there.

  Stanislav could not remember exactly what town in England it was where Kurt had gone to see the German consul. When in the office of the consul, where everything, pictures on the wall, labels on drawers and file cabinets, the homely voice of the consul, reminded him of his country, which he had not seen for so many years, Kurt began to cry. The consul took his tears as an expression of the hypocrisy of a bum who wished to gain something by unfair means. So the consul bellowed that he had better cut that comedy because it wouldn’t do him any good. Kurt gave him the only answer fit for such a situation. The German language is well provided for such needs. To make his meaning even clearer, Kurt took up an inkstand and hurled it against the consul’s head. The consul began to bleed at once and he phoned right to the nearest police-station. Kurt did not wait for the police. He struck down the porter at the gate who wanted to hold him, and off he went out in the street, making a clean get-away.

  Kurt had made a mistake anyway in going to the consul. He should have known beforehand that the consul could do nothing for him. He was from Memel, and since he had not adopted according to the regulations of the Treaty of Versailles, that masterpiece of the overwhelming stupidity of brilliant statesmen, no consul on earth could help him. He was neither German, nor a citizen of this tiny little worm of a new nation that does not know, and never will know, what to do with herself. The consul was only a paid servant of the state. He had no power to help a lost sheep get on the road again.

  So Kurt was dead now for ever. Nevermore could he see his native country, his parents, his relatives. “All seems so strange and ghastly. But so it is. Let all the political wiseacres try to find out if such things do exist in modern civilization. Of course they won’t try, and dismiss even the thought of it by crying out loud that it’s an exaggeration if not a brazen lie,” Stanislav interrupted his tale.

  To Kurt a high official of state had said that his homesickness was only a bum’s comedy. A bum cannot be homesick. Refined feelings are reserved only for men and women far up in class, who can take from their drawers every day two fresh handkerchiefs, silk, if you please, or at least genuine Irish linen.

  I was homesick. I am homesick. All my struggling and roaming is but a dope to put to sleep my homesickness. It took me some time, and it cost me thousands of achings of my heart, before I learned in full that this thing which is supposed to be your native land, which God gave to you, and which no one, no emperor and no president, can take away from you, this homeland is today canned and put in files of passport departments and consuls’ offices.
It is now truly represented only by officials with credentials, by men who have the capacity to destroy your true feeling for your country so thoroughly and so completely that no trace of love for your homeland is left in you. Where is the true country of men? There where nobody molests me, where nobody wants to know who I am, where I come from, where I wish to go, what my opinion is about war, about the Episcopalians, and about the communists, where I am free to do and to believe what I damn please as long as I do not harm the life, the health, and the honestly earned property of anybody else. There and there alone is the country of men that is worth while living for, and sweet to die for.

  Kurt, the dead boy from Memel, hopped on a Spanish ship which was leaving England exactly the minute Kurt needed a ship most. He could not stay long on the Spaniard. The crew was complete. He had to get off when she reached home. After switching from one port to another in search of a berth he finally, one day when very hungry and desperate, met the Yorikke going under weigh. He climbed up and landed a job as coal-drag. The berth as a coal-drag was always to be had on the Yorikke.

  The Yorikke knew nothing about safety devices such as provide for the safety of the working-men in all civilized nations. The Yorikke could not have such modern nonsense. Because it costs money, in the first place; in the second place, safety devices are only hindrances to the work that has to be done. A death ship, everybody ought to know, is no kindergarten. Keep your eyes open and look around. If your skin is scorched off, your knuckles smashed, your chin bruised, your arm broken, it’s only the lazy parts of your carcass that go off. Work, and work well, and you won’t need any means to safeguard your limbs.

  The crystal tube at the boiler which served as the water, gauge didn’t have the wire screen that is demanded by the law, even in the interior of Afghanistan. One day, while Kurt had the watch in the stoke-hold, this tube burst.

  There is on all boilers a valve which, with the help of a long rod, serves to shut off immediately the water-pipe leading to the gauge. As soon as this valve is closed, no steam can go through the broken gauge, and a new gauge-crystal can be set in without the slightest danger to the man who has to do it. There is nothing to it.

  But the trouble on the Yorikke was that she had no such rod-valve, because the Phoenicians did not have it and so there was no earthly reason why the Yorikke should have it. There was only the regular cock directly under the crystal tube to shut off the steam and the boiling water that rushed out through the broken pipe. In less than half a minute the stoke-hold was so thickly filled with hot steam that one could not see the end of his arm, and it seemed impossible for any human being to stay there half a minute longer without being cooked all over.

  But that was not to be used as an excuse for the man who had to shut off the pipe. It had to be done, for the steam went down so rapidly that the engine was liable to stall any moment. To bring the steam up again would take two hours. Suppose the bucket was then close to reefs or shoals, the whole ship would be a total loss if owing to the stalled engine the ship went out of control.

  Who had to do the job and shut off the pipe? The coal-drag, of course. Who else? The dirtiest and lowest of her men had to sacrifice his life that the Yorikke might survive. In the sea-stories and in the pictures these jobs are done, of course, by the skipper himself, or at least by the chief, because somewhere in the background a girl is waiting with a kiss for the great hero. In real life it is always the other way round. It is the soldier, the private, who does it; on the ship it is the dirtiest and the most despised hand that has to do what is called in the log the most heroic deed of the chief.

  Kurt shut off the pipe. The steam came up quickly again. The engine had not stopped for a second, and the mate on the bridge had not lost for a minute control of the ship.

  Down below, however, Kurt had dropped upon a pile of coal. He had to be carried to his bunk by the second engineer and the donkey.

  “I do not wish anybody on earth,” Stanislav said, “no matter how much I hate him, to hear once in his lifetime the shrieking and screaming that we had to listen to from the bunk Kurt was in. It went on hours and hours without ceasing for a minute. Never before, not even when I went down with my battleship at Skagerrack, had I believed that any human being can cry so long a time without losing his voice. He could not lie on his back, nor on his belly, nor on either side. The skin hung down on his body in long strips and rags as if it had been a torn shirt. All over blisters, some as thick as a man’s head. I don’t think that he ever could have been saved, even if a hospital had been at hand. Maybe it could have been done by putting on his body new flesh some way or other. But sure the doctors would have needed the whole skin of a calf to cover all he had lost. And how he yelled and shrilled! I only wish that the consul who had refused him a passport could have heard his shrieking in his sleep. He sure would never have felt at ease again for the rest of his life, knowing that such a damned worthless little stamped paper as a passport was to blame for such a terrible fate of a young man supposed to have also a soul. But these guys sit at their desk, scratching and filing and polishing their finger-nails and smiling crooked at you if you want something from them maybe a paper to help you along. They feel so very superior to us workingmen. Easy to feel great a hundred miles away from the real life as it is out here.

  “Bravery on the battle-field? Don’t make me laugh. Bravery on the field of work. Here, of course, you don’t get any medals; no mention in the report, either. You are no hero here. Just a bum. Or a communist always making trouble and never satisfied with the conditions as ordered by the Lord himself to help the profits.

  “He screamed himself to death. The mate had nothing in his medicine chest to make it easier for the poor devil. We tried to pour into him a cup of gin, but he could not hold it.

  Late in the afternoon he was sent overboard, the boy from Memel land. Can’t help it, Pippip, I have to take off my cap, speaking and thinking of this boy. Damn it, don’t look at me that way, I am not an old sissy. But here you have to sound taps. No getting away from that. Sent overboard like an escaped convict. The second engineer looked down over the rail when he disappeared in the water. Then he said: `Damn it all. Hell. Rotten business, short again a drag. Wonder when I will ever be complete.’ That was his prayer for the boy’s last trip. And he was the man whose obligation it was to shut the cock. It’s not the fireman’s or the drag’s business to look after repairs while the ship is out.

  “Yes, this was Kurt from Memel. His name is not in the log either. The second had his own name written in as the man who had done it. The grandfather saw the book when he went lifting toilet soap from the skipper’s chest. Yes, sir.”

  41

  With the rest of the crew I spoke very little. Most of the time they were cranky, cross, mad at something, sleepy whenever you saw them. In every port they got drunk, drunk as only sailors can get.

  To tell the truth, however, I have to admit it was not I that did not speak to them, but they who did not speak to me or Stanislav. We, Stanislav and I, were but coal-drags. A coal-drag is not as high in society as a deck-hand, or, more, the great A.B. These are gentlemen compared with the coal-shovelers, who live in filth, in soot, in dirt, in ashes. You must not touch a drag; you will get so dirty that you won’t be clean again inside of a week. Take the bos’n, the donkey, the carpenter. These were the peers, before whom a coal-drag had to stand in awe when they passed by. Capitalists are too dumb, otherwise they’d find some new ideas on how to get along better with the workers. They would make use of the fine social distinctions of the workers for their own benefit. There are even nobles among them that is, the union men. He who is not fit to join the union is looked upon as a Hunk even if born on the Emerald or right north of Aberrrrdeen.

  The bos’n, the carpenter, the donkeyman, and that hang-around of whom I never knew what he really did on board, all these mugs were the so-called petty officers. They were, nevertheless, just as filthy and dirty as we were. None of them had any better experience in
seafaring than we had. For the regular life of the Yorikke our work was by far more important than theirs. Yet we, the always overtired and overworked coal-drags, had to serve the donkey his meals on his tiny table in his little hole of a separate quarter. We had to clean up his cave, and we had to wash his dishes. What a great man he was, that we had to serve him! What was his work, anyway? When the ship is under sail, all he does is tinker around without any special aim or anything definite. He smears here a bit of grease on the engine, and there a drop of oil on a winch-shaft; he takes away here a little bit of dirt and puts it there. As the Yorikke had only two engineers, he occasionally went on watch in the engine-hold, particularly when the chief felt too tired or not yet perfectly sober, and when the weather was so calm that all the donkey had to do in the engine-hold was to sit on a bench, smoke his pipe, and read true confessions. When the bucket was in port, he was fireman and coal-drag at the same time; and he was in full charge of the winches used to hoist in and hoist out the cargo. For all these reasons he was so great a personage that he had to have his own quarter. He got the same meals we got. But, so as to let us feel that he was a person far higher in social standing than we, he received on Sundays rice pudding with marmalade, well watered by the grandfather to make it last longer and to make it look like more. The donkey also had twice a week our famous prunes in the bluish starch sauce. We received our pudding only once a week, and no rice pudding at all. Such elegant differences are made even in food to show that one person is worth more than another, not for his work or talent, but for his social standing among workers. There sure would be no Caesar and no Napoleon without these petty officers, foremen and sweat-shop whips, who have one foot on the first rung of the ladder that leads up to the rank of general. Petty. officers who come from above are no good; they are failures. The best petty officers are those who come from the ranks, where they were whipped hard only as far back as yesterday. They make the best whippers today. Cæsar can rely on them. They do the job best, and without them he is lost.