Ticky and I found the three weeks in the Shipper one long, gay picnic, its only drawback being that we ran very short on sleep. Both of us had expected to work and study on this leg of the trip; neither of us got anything of the sort done. But I am forced to admit that, aside from a couple of good parties in port, nothing noteworthy happened. We played cribbage, we yarned endlessly, and we had cheerful drinks with cheerful companions. Someone else might have found the trip excruciatingly dull.
Freighter travel is not necessarily cheap. For the North Atlantic crossing freighter fare runs about the same as cabin class in the Ile de France, with first-class fare running considerably more and tourist class running considerably less. No direct comparison can be made between passenger ships and freighters on the run from New Orleans and Valparaiso as there are no passenger ships on this run. But it can be compared with air travel. First class one-way by air from New Orleans is now $529, air tourist class is $402, whereas the ocean freighter fare is $410, to which you can add $30 or $40 in tips.
Another way is to compare round-the-world fares:
President Lines tour ships... about $2600
Air First Class................................ $1720
Air Tourist..................................... $1580
Ocean freighter travel-from $500 to about $2000: the catch being that the $500 bargain is almost impossible to get and you probably would not want it if you could get it. A more likely figure is something between $1400 and $2000, or a median cost almost exactly equal to air tourist fare and a top cost in excess of first-class air travel.
Of course air transport simply gets you there, room-and-board on the ground being your problem. A typical trip around the world by freighter or cargo liner might show thirty days in port, during which time you may sleep and eat in the ship. Equal accommodations might cost you $15 per day if you went by air-a very rough guess since cost-of-living and rates-of-exchange vary so widely. Nevertheless, from my own recent personal experience in hotel costs around the world, I estimate the value of freighter accommodations as American-plan hotel accommodations to be certainly not more than $450 for 30 days, i.e., you can buy as many days sightseeing around the world for about the same price whether you go by air or by freighter. If you do not insist on the foreign equivalent of a Hilton hotel, you may be able to do it by air for a few dollars less than by freighter-and much cheaper than you could do it by luxury ship.
This may be surprising-I know that it surprised me. Until I made a direct comparison, on paper and through experience, I had always assumed that air travel was comparatively expensive, that in general travel by water was fairly reasonable, and that ocean freighter travel was very inexpensive. While it may have been true once, it is not true now.
The rates for particular trips vary widely. As a rule of thumb you can now expect that first-class travel by air will cost about the same as first-class travel by ship or train and that ocean freighter travel will cost about as much as air tourist travel. But it still depends on where you want to go; New York to London is about $75 cheaper, class for class, on the water, whereas New York to Los Angeles is at least $100 more expensive by water.
It adds up to a matter of taste and convenience. If you like long, lazy days at sea and have time for an extended vacation, ocean travel and freighter travel in particular is a real bargain; if your time is limited and you want a maximum of sightseeing for your dollar, go by air. If you can spare a month, you can go all the way around the world, see as much in as many days of sightseeing as are offered in luxury cruises of three or four months, all for the price of a Chevrolet. (A luxury ocean cruise, counting in tips and extras, will cost as much as a Cadillac.)
But freighter life unquestionably offers the maximum opportunity to rest. When we left Colorado Springs I was in a state of jumpy nerves from overwork. I twitched in the daytime and had insomnia at night. After a few days in the Gulf Shipper I was as relaxed as an oyster. It took me five days to work up enough ambition to load my camera.
After some days of sleeping all night, all afternoon, and napping in the morning I did bestir myself enough to poke around the ship a little. The Shipper is a typical freighter of the type known as "C-2." Her gross registered tonnage is 10,700 but, loaded, she actually displaces 15,000 long tons of sea water, i.e., that is what she would weigh, loaded with cargo and ready for sea, if you weighed her on your bathroom scales-I am speaking of largish bathroom scales, of course.
The term "tonnage" is used glibly with respect to ships by travel agents, seafaring men, and landlubbers, but the word is as slippery as "democracy" or "love" unless defined each time it is used. The ton referred to is a "metric ton" which the dictionary says is 2204.62 pounds-which is right as far as it goes. But it can also mean space of 100 cubic feet, or a carrying capacity of 40 cubic feet, or 35 cubic feet of sea water which is 2240 pounds in weight. It never means 2000 pounds as in a ton of coal delivered to your house.
To add to the confusion any ship has at least four usual "tonnages"-gross registered, net registered, dead weight, and displacement. The first two are measured in cubic feet, the second two are measured in pounds. In speaking of the Queen Mary, the Nieuw Amsterdam, or any merchant ship, the term "tonnage" that you are likely to hear means "registered gross tonnage" which is a cubic measure of the space enclosed inside her skin. On the other hand "tonnage" of a warship almost always means how much she weighs, ready for action. The two scales have the barest nodding acquaintance.
In the case of the Shipper her "net" tonnage is less than one third of her "displaced" tonnage, but both are correctly her "tonnage."
(John "loves" Mary; John "loves" bowling-see what I mean?)
Let us call the Shipper an 11,000-ton ship-on the same scale under which the Queen Mary is called an 80,000-ton ship, by the cubic footage inside their skins. This does not mean that the Shipper is small; it means that the Queen Mary is fantastically large. A "little" ship like the Gulf Shipper can carry as much as two to three ordinary freight trains. She is 460 feet long, 63 feet wide, and draws 32 feet. To push this bulk through the water at 15.5 knots (18 land miles per hour) she uses 6000 horsepower derived from oil-fired boilers and steam-driven turbines-the locomotives used by the Santa Fe's famous SuperChief are rated at 900 horsepower; on the other hand the lovely lady Lexington, lost in the battle of the Coral Sea, had a rated horsepower of 180,000 and could, by tucking up her skirts a bit, turn up over 200,000 horsepower.
The Gulf Shipper carries a crew of forty-seven, seventeen in deck and navigation, seventeen in engineering, thirteen others including the purser, radio operator, chief steward, cooks, waiters, and helpers. Twenty-four of the crew are deck and engineering watchstanders, eight to each of the three watches. The others are either those whose duties never end, such as the Captain, the chief engineer, the purser, or those who work at specified hours, such as cooks and deck maintenance men. The ship's payroll will run around $20,000 a month and the total cost of operating her is about $85,000 a month-which means that she has to run fully loaded most of the time, make fast turn arounds, and avoid excessive overtime in order to show a profit.
American merchant ships are in a poor position to compete with foreign shipping. The ship itself costs more, our safety laws are more stringent than those of many of our competitors, and we pay enormously higher wages. I am not criticizing the wage scale; it is simply what must be paid to persuade Americans to go to sea instead of taking jobs ashore-but it is true that we pay as much to an able seaman as many countries pay the captain of a large vessel.
Because of our high costs many American vessels are being transferred to foreign flags under whose laws they can operate at much lower costs. This flight from the American flag would perhaps be of only sentimental importance were it not usually agreed that a large and healthy merchant marine is an essential part of our national defense. A quick answer is to hit the taxpayers for a shipping subsidy. Another quick answer is "American ingenuity and enterprise." A third quick answer is
that merchant shipping is no longer a major factor in war because the next war will be settled from the air in a matter of hours or days.
I am sorry to say that I seem to have mislaid the right answer.
The Gulf Shipper arrived off the Atlantic end of the Panama Canal early Saturday morning the 21st, stopped just long enough to pick up the pilot and his handling crew and to drop the purser, then started through the Canal. Passengers could, if they wished, get off with the purser, spend the day shopping and sightseeing, travel across the Isthmus by bus, and join the ship that evening on the Pacific side.
None of us did so. Ticky had never seen the Canal before, but neither had she ever seen Colon and Panama City and the U.S. settlements, Cristóbal and Balboa, adjacent to them. She was torn between the desire to see the first foreign port in our trip and a desire to see the Canal; I persuaded her to see the Canal.
I swear on a stack of wheat cakes that I was not motivated by a desire to keep her away from the bazaars. It is true that the shops of Colon and of Panama City have an effect on all women and some men much like that of a bed of fresh catnip on a cat-and the bargains often are real bargains, for Panama City is a free port. No, like a total eclipse of the sun, the experience of transiting the Panama Canal is one that should not be missed if available. There is nothing else like it in the world . . . and I am not forgetting the Suez Canal.
I still have scars on my arms from sunburn acquired more than a quarter of a century ago when I first went through the big ditch. I knew at the time that I was getting sunburned but I could not bring myself to stop looking and go below. Since then I have seen it many times-and I still can't stop looking.
Any atlas, world almanac, or encyclopedia will provide a winter's supply of sound, chewy facts about the Panama Canal, tonnages, tolls collected, yards of earth moved, and so forth. They are well worth reading but we will not repeat them here. The Canal was started by the French in 1882; you can still see the old French Canal slicing slaunchwise into the channel we cut. Yellow fever and more bad luck than any man ought to have put a stop to the French attempt. We bought the franchise and, with almost indecent haste, recognized a Panamanian revolutionary government which seceded from Colombia in 1903, signed a treaty with the new government and started work again in 1904. Ten years later the first ship went through.
The Canal is fifty miles long and runs northwest to southeast across the twisted isthmus in such a fashion that the trip from the Atlantic to the Pacific (i.e., to the west) winds up twenty-seven miles farther to the east. This has to be seen on a map to be understood; it is as silly as the fact that Los Angeles is east of Reno. Sea level is a couple of feet higher on the Pacific side than on the Atlantic side but this odd fact is swallowed up by the fact that the major portion of the Canal is eighty-five feet higher than either ocean. Three sets of locks at each end perform the improbable task of lifting and lowering ships of fifty thousand tons or more the height of an eight-story building.
There has been a lot of agitation for a sea-level canal, through Nicaragua or elsewhere. One glance at any one of the locks of the Panama Canal is enough to show why; one pony-sized A-bomb anywhere near one of the locks would put the entire Canal out of use for months or years and leave our navy and merchant marine with a nice, long, chilly trip around the Horn in order to get from one coast to the other. You will correctly assume that the Canal Zone contains anti-aircraft and radar installations-but the bomb need not be delivered by air; it can be in the hold of a ship flying the flag of Ruritania, or even the U.S. flag. There are more than seven thousand ships going through the Canal each year and the only known way to inspect a ship for A-bombs is to unload everything, take a screwdriver and open every crate . . . a process equivalent in itself to closing the Canal to traffic.
I am disclosing no secrets. You may be sure that Mr. Malenkov's assistants have given thoughtful consideration to these matters and that our government has been equally thoughtful. If I knew of an answer I would be in Washington right now.
In the meantime the locks of the Panama Canal remain the most satisfying gadgets I have experienced since the time Santa Claus brought me a toy steam shovel that actually worked. The ship slides slowly and quietly into the first of the Atlantic side or Gatun Locks, towed into place by miniature cog railway engines known as electric mules. The gates close ponderously and magically behind her, untouched by human hands; a guard chain rises to protect the gates. The ship is enclosed in a box; all one can see is the concrete walls.
Water boils up from the bottom of the lock and high, high up she rises! The ship lifts gradually up and up until the sightseers on her decks can again see over the sides of the lock the tailored, tropical surroundings. The gates ahead open, again by magic, and the ship is gently urged into the channel ahead. Three times the ship goes through a water elevator, lifted each time about thirty feet, then she is let free into Gatun Lake.
The lake was made by damming the Chagres River, which supplies the water to work the locks. Here and there, outside the dredged channel, dead trunks of trees still thrust up through the water, melancholy monuments to progress. The extremely broken shore line and the numerous islets, both characteristic of newly-flooded river valleys, form and re-form deep three-dimensional vistas, all in glorious Technicolor. The place seems unreal, as if one had fallen into a Disney musical.
I have heard it said that Gatun Lake is the "dull" part of the Panama Canal. I don't know what to say to such people. They are unquestionably right, since it is all a matter of taste, as the old lady said when she kissed the pig. I once ran across a woman from France who had just finished a tour of the western part of the United States. In her opinion she had seen nothing west of the Mississippi worth looking at-including the Grand Canyon, the Rocky Mountains, Yellowstone, and so forth. As the booking agent said to the man who was flying by flapping his arms: "So you can imitate birds. But what can you do that's novel?"
You may not share my enthusiasm for Gatun Lake and, after all, it is just another lake. The whole world is loaded with beautiful scenery; Gatun Lake is one of thousands. But I have been in it at every time of day and in every season and I myself have never grown bored with it. The lights and colors are always changing; the motion of the ship combines with the twisted shore lines to form backdrop after backdrop into mysterious depths. Perhaps it is "dull"-but I am a Missouri country boy with black mud between my toes; I still stare at the Empire State Building whenever I get a chance.
The entire experience of the Panama Canal has always seemed pleasantly unreal to me, as if it all had been constructed by a Hollywood miniature set designer-the blazing sunlight, the quick rain storms, the little electric engines crawling slowly up beautifully curving concrete walls, the locks themselves and the lavish engineering structures around them, the endlessly changing depth on depth of lake and cut and jungle. It was designed more than half a century ago, back when ladies had "limbs" and the shout of "Get a horse!" at an "automobilist" was real wit. Yet it looks like a set for a major production scene in a Hollywood fantasy of the future.
After the lake the ship enters the Cut-"Gaillard Cut" on the maps, "Culebra Cut" in the mouths of most people. This is the part that almost broke the hearts of the builders. This is where hairy engineers in field boots stared through surveying instruments at mountains and decreed that they must be moved. Moved they were-by coal-burning steam shovel and scraper and mule and muscle and sweat. The Model-T Ford was brand new then and the bulldozer was yet to be born. Earthmoving machinery such as any county road department now owns would have seemed miraculous; they made do without.
The banks are very close here and the jungle is almost in your lap. You sit in a deck chair or lean on the rail and let it flow past you, birds and snakes and waterfalls and giant blue butterflies. Once, some years ago, I found myself staring back at an eight-foot alligator, so close that I could see the stains on his teeth. I alert Ticky to watch for them, but we have no luck. One of the pilot crew aboard tells me that there
are plenty of them still on the shores of the lake and that it has been necessary to fine people who hunt them for sport, then leave the carcasses to rot in the clean water of the lake.
Back in the jungle here, only shouting distance away in places, is the old Gold Trail, peopled with the ghosts of the Indian slaves who died on the way. Once, twenty years earlier, I rode along a portion of it on a borrowed army horse. It was paved with stone and the jungle had not quite destroyed it, but had arched over it instead, forming a dusky tunnel, a place of enormous butterflies and midget deer and silence. The Isthmus was one of the world's major roadways long before the water bridge was cut through it.
But nowadays the once-heartbreaking journey is soft and easy and no one dies on the way. Traffic lights control the shipping through the Cut, real traffic lights with red for stop and green for go. There are places where the pilot must hold back and give the traffic ahead a chance to clear; the lights tell him, just like those on Wilshire Boulevard. In addition to lights he has been briefed by the control officials ashore as to what ships to expect and where, since the enormous mass of a ship is not stopped by jamming a foot on a brake. The handling of a ship through the Canal is a piece of precision choreography. There are ranges, each a pair of giant targets, at dozens of places along the route; the pilot can sight along one range and know that he is lined up properly for the channel and sight along another at the same time and know to the yard just how far he has progressed along that reach of the channel and how soon he must turn.
The reason for such precision is evident: in some places ships pass so closely that you expect their plates to scrape. Canal pilot is among the most highly skilled jobs in the Zone and is highly paid by civil service standards. But the job is done without swank. Almost all other countries dress their pilots in uniforms like those of naval officers, but the Gulf Shipper's pilot was a young man in a slouch hat and casual sports clothes who carried his responsibilities with the relaxed ease of a truck driver.
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