Looking for a Ship Page 2

  The door opened, and Pete Pizzarelli came in—trim as a nail, beardless, dark-olive skin. He was, as Andy soon found out, a second mate. “I just got off the Allison,” he said. “I’m sitting back and relaxing now. I’m night-mating. That’s it.” It was Andy’s turn, for the moment, to sit back and relax as well. Which he chose not to do. Before the moment when your shipping card is exercised and actually takes precedence over all others, you never know what may come through the door and keep you off a ship. In Charleston, there was one daily job call—at one-thirty. At one-twenty-nine on the crucial day, someone could walk in with a truly killer card. And Andy could kiss the Cygnus goodbye.

  With Pizzarelli, he talked ships—what else? Ships are all that people talk about in union halls, with the exception of politics as it relates to ships. This ship was built in Korea. That ship was built in Germany. This one paid off in Houston. That one paid off in New Orleans. Where a ship pays off is where it most often changes crew members. Pizzarelli told a story from his last ocean voyage. Thousands of dollars’ worth of ships’ stores had been seized by pirates in Guayaquil.

  That evening, while Andy and I were talking about something completely unrelated to the sea, he suddenly looked up and said, “It happens more often than you like to think. A nice fat job appears on the board. A guy strolls in off the street with a card that beats yours.”

  Peninsular Charleston is a small antiquarian Manhattan, lying between confluent rivers and pointing south into a substantial harbor. As in Manhattan, there is a battery at the southern tip, in the oldest part of the city. When you drive about the region, you are frequently looking over water. On the way to the hall the second day, I noticed a ship that had come in and anchored in Charleston Harbor—a freighter, indistinct in haze, at least three miles from the road.

  I said, “Why don’t we get on that one?”

  Andy, who was driving, glanced to his left, and said, “It’s a foreign ship.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “It has writing on the side. Lykes and American President have writing on the side and it doesn’t look like either of them. It’s a stick ship and the house is aft. We have plenty of ships with the house aft, but not stick ships. We don’t have many stick ships left, period.”

  Through the intervening water a long black shape was sliding, graceful as an alligator, and analogously fast. Andy noticed it first, out of the corner of his eye. He said it was a Trident-class submarine, five hundred and sixty feet long, and it could go at least fifty miles an hour; the exact figure was classified; the Navy would admit to twenty-three. Submarines can move rapidly because they are in a single fluid, he went on. There are no waves. Waves detain ordinary ships, which operate at the interface of two fluids. An idea that has been around for a long time is to make a very fast cargo ship consisting of two submarines with stems rising to a literal bridge connecting them, where the crew would be housed and the helmsman would stand. We weren’t going to be shipping out on anything like that, either.

  For the second consecutive day in the Masters, Mates, and Pilots hall, there was, as Andy expected, nothing on the board—no surprises, no new developments, no unexpected ships, not so much as one night-mating job, nothing to learn that he didn’t know already. He was present for the job call, though—and in plenty of time. Andy never misses a job call. If he is in a city to look for a ship, he goes to the hall every day, regardless of what he may know. “You’re counting on luck,” he said. “A ship might come in a day early. A ship not on a schedule might come in.” A ship not on a schedule is a tramp steamer.

  The hall opens at nine. We learned that a mate named Tony Tedmore had been waiting there at nine to register for a new shipping card, and when the office opened a little late and he was handed a card that said “9:04” he had become furious and announced his intention to make a formal complaint to the union. Andy said, “When I paid off my ship last year, I hotfooted it to the union hall as fast as I could. Your former job ends. Your bargaining power begins. Every minute counts. At job calls, I’ve seen one person beat out another by as little as a minute on his shipping card.”

  After the obligatory vacation period, which has lately settled back to fifteen days for every thirty at sea, there comes the moment when you are permitted to look for work again, but there’s scarcely any point in trying until your shore time grows longer. As people sit in union halls, the grapevine will tell them how old a card has to be to get a job. One long job begets another—the more sea time, the more vacation time, the older your card when you look again. You can get into a bind of short jobs. On the actual day when a ship you are hoping for is called, your card goes into a box on a table at the union hall. Anyone can look at it. This prevents “backdoor shipping.” There was once a day when a couple of hundred dollars tucked under a dispatcher’s fingers could get you a ship.

  Andy has never refused a job because of something he has heard about a ship from gossip in a union hall:

  “The captain’s a tyrant.”

  “The captain’s a creep.”

  “The captain’s a drunk.”

  “It’s a terrible run.”

  “The ship is unsafe.”

  “You never get any port time.”

  “They carry dangerous cargo.”

  Andy said, “You may find that the creepy old captain is a neat guy. Or he may be a recluse, but when all hell breaks loose he turns out to be a great seaman. That’s why the company goes along with the guy.”

  Many dry-cargo mates fear tankers. When a dry-cargo ship ties up at a dock, longshoremen come aboard and unload her. When a tanker is in port, her own mates load and discharge the ship. The work is hazardous, and most dry-cargo mates don’t know how to do it. “I still get trepidation when I go on a tanker,” Andy said. “You’re lining up a hundred valves. You’re operating under the assumption that all valves leak. They usually do. We had oil in the pump room on the Spray. We calculated that to get there the oil had to go through six closed valves. It was an old ship. The fumes on a tanker are sometimes so thick you can see them rise like fountains. They spread in the air. They flow over the deck. You can see them go down the sides.”

  The door opened. In came a man with a sharp face, a sportive mustache, bowl-cut bangs the color of light straw. Andy had never seen him before. In this situation, two people who are unfamiliar will sniff each other out in seconds. This was Gene Whalen, second mate, out of Cape Canaveral, looking for a ship. He said, “I just go from port to port: Jacksonville, Port Everglades—small places.” In the continuing conversation, he mentioned that he was a graduate of the New York Maritime College, at Throgs Neck, in the Bronx, that he enjoyed shipping with Lykes when he could, because “they’re in a time warp, they’re an easygoing company with break-bulk ships that stop in lots of ports.” Dreamily, he spoke of Penang, of Borneo, of the mountain springs of Mindanao. He said that pirates had shot at his ship “in the Gulf of Thigh Land.” He said, “Ping. Ping. You’d hear bullets hit the mast. You just duck.” Piracy, one gathered, is heavy in the Strait of Malacca, in Guayaquil, on the whole West African coast. Pirates usually board ships in port. They come in boats to the seaward side of the ship. They throw a hook over the rail and shinny. They tie people up. They go for safes. In the Strait of Malacca, they attack moving ships. Crewmen line the rails with pressure-charged fire hoses to drive the pirates off the sides. Low-freeboard ships are especially vulnerable to pirates.

  None of this interested Andy a ten-thousandth as much as the age of Whalen’s card. Whalen eventually mentioned what it was. Andy had him beat to death.

  The door opened, a new face came in—blond, heavyset, linebacker man. Even a little cherubic. Curl across the forehead. Beard that could have been panned in a stream. Without a glance around, he walked right over to the desk to sign in for a job. He had just arrived in Charleston from his home, in Montana, and he didn’t need to look for anything. This was, after all, the union of masters as well as mates. The paperwork he quickly
completed is known as “clearing for a ship.” Captain of the Sea-Land Performance, he would take over the ship when it arrived in Charleston. Captains and most chief mates are “permanent.” They take enforced vacations like everybody else, but—at the owners’ behest—they return to their specific ships. With rare exceptions, no second mates or third mates are permanent. Many unlicensed personnel have permanent jobs; most do not.

  In the afternoon, we went to a couple of ship chandlers’. We talked with a fisherman about the fish he was not catching from the battery. We sat on a park bench under the deep shade of live oaks and squinted into the glare of the harbor. Andy said that he had begun to develop second thoughts about the Cygnus. He was unaccustomed to having any kind of choice. His experience instructed him to take the first open ship and risk nothing. Unfortunately, though, the desirability of the jobs before him seemed to rise from one to the next. He needed sea time. Second mates become chief mates not only by passing examinations but also by accumulating sea time. The Cygnus job was significantly short on sea time. For that matter, the Sea-Land trip out of Jacksonville was not what you would call an odyssey. Also, his daily wage and overtime pay would be lower with Sea-Land, because he’d be sailing as third mate. Jacksonville was something of a long shot in any case. And if he went down there he risked losing out on anything that might come up in Charleston in his absence.

  The Stella Lykes was the most appealing ship. Second mate. Interesting run. All the sea time he wanted and needed. But to wait for the Stella Lykes meant weeks, not days, multiplying the possibility that something could go wrong. “It’s a bit of a gamble,” he said. “You never know if someone’s going to come walking into the hall that day and take it away from you.”

  In less than a day, though, he made up his mind. He would break his own rules. He would pass up the Cygnus and Sea-Land. He would narrow the field and raise the risk. He would wait for the Stella Lykes. In the Merchant Marine, there is an expression that describes what he was doing. He was laying for a ship.

  A couple of “PORT RELIEF OFFICER JOBS” were posted on the board. Andy chose to night-mate the Sea-Land Performance from 1600 to 2400. On the same watch, Pizzarelli would night-mate the Cygnus. The two ships were ten miles apart. At midnight, Andy would drive the ten miles in nothing flat, and, further exercising the seniority of his shipping card, relieve Pizzarelli and work the Cygnus until eight in the morning. He would be paid twenty-three dollars an hour. He bought a pack of cigarettes. “If I have cigarettes and a cup of coffee, I’ll feel so rancid I can’t fall asleep,” he said. At home in Maine, he almost never smokes. Night-mating, he has worked sixteen-hour nights back to back and gone to the union hall during the day. There, with his head on a table, he sleeps. Just before the job call, he lifts his head. Night-mating in Charleston, he would make a thousand dollars in less than a week.

  A police officer with coconut palms on the lenses of her eyeglasses admitted us to the Columbus Street Terminal, Old Charleston. We walked across acres of paved open storage under heavy-lift sheer-leg cranes. The dock was three-quarters of a mile long. The dimensions of the Sea-Land Performance were Panamax (fitting by inches in the locks of the Panama Canal). As we approached the gangway, Andy remarked that his “basic ambition” was “someday to be the skipper of a ship like this.”

  While he put in his eight hours making rounds—chronicling the opening and closing of hatches, noting degrees of inshore list, checking the ullage and innage of ballast—I did what I could to stow the vocabulary (if your gas tank is all ullage you are going nowhere), and I talked to the captain, Kenneth Ronald Crook. He was behind a desk in a spacious office, reachable by elevator, near the top of the house. Across the room, I sat on a couch by a coffee table. Like everyone else in the Merchant Marine, he told sea stories. One or two were a touch macabre. He said he had been on a Calmar ship that made regular runs to Los Angeles from Baltimore with steel. One of the ordinaries could not keep his hands out of the food. That is, time after time he walked the cafeteria line, reached across the cutting board, and sank a hand into a tub of food. Finally, the chief cook could not contain his rage. One day, as the hand moved over the cutting board, a cleaver came down and cut off the hand. The chief mate used a blowtorch to cauterize the stump.

  On the same ship on a beautiful day with long low swells in the Pacific, a seaman was standing in the rigging on a ladder that was not tied down. As the roll of the ship reached its maximum angle, both the ladder and the sailor went over the side. A life ring was thrown to him. He got himself into it. A lifeboat was lowered. When the man was taken from the sea, only half of his body was there.

  At least he was employed. Without a modulation of tone, Captain Crook went into the horrors of the search for work. “In those days—as third mate, second mate—I was shipping off the board. There were too many mates and not enough ships. I drove from York, Pennsylvania, where I lived then, to Baltimore every day, looking for a ship. There were job calls every two hours, so I was in the hall all day. Weeks would go by with no job called. Then a job would come along and I’d get beat out by someone else’s card.” After he got a ship or two with Moore-McCormack Lines and became a permanent chief mate, he discovered that working for shipping companies was not unlike working for magazines. Established structures (Moore-McCormack, the Saturday Evening Post, United States Lines, Life, Seatrain, Look) tended to collapse beneath you. After the Moore-McCormack ocean fleet was absorbed by United States Lines, in 1982, Crook “sat on the beach for seven months basically without a job.” The union forced United States Lines to hire him. In 1986, United States Lines went bankrupt. “Thirty-some ships came to a screeching halt. That put an awful lot of people on the beach. A lot of the older skippers retired. Sea-Land purchased about twenty ships, including this one. I sat on the beach from the middle of February until November 17th. I was in the dentist chair in Montana. The union called from New York. I was to be captain of an old stick ship called S.S. Galveston Bay, taking food to the natives in Africa. Right down my alley. That job led to this one. From zero income to a six-figure income makes a difference.” The difference was the ranch he had his eye on in Montana, with its hundreds of acres and its trout streams.

  By midnight, Andy and I were on the bridge of the Cygnus, at Wando Terminal, on the Wando River. The air-conditioning on the ship had failed. The temperature was above a hundred. Through thick dust weighted with fumes, Army tanks rolled onto the ship. One end was open like the mouth of a sucker. The Cygnus inside resembled a tunnel. Taped to the satellite-navigation receiver on the bridge were recent advisories from the Maritime Administration on the subject of pirates. On the west coast of South America, the S.S. Mallory Lykes had been “boarded by one or more pirates with machetes.” In the Strait of Malacca, the master of a South Korean vessel had been “beaten and forced to open the ship’s safe by pirates who boarded the ship in the vicinity of Batam Island.” Lying near the SatNav was a Maritime Administration brochure called “Piracy Countermeasures.” It said, “Countermeasures should be designed to keep boarders off the ship. Repelling armed pirates already on deck can be dangerous … . Have water hoses under pressure with nozzles ready … . Use rat guards on all mooring lines and illuminate the lines … . Under way, keep good radar and visual lookout.”

  A ship in port can be filthy, hot, and dismal, in contrast to the same ship at sea. Andy, staring forward from the bridge, seemed to be out there somewhere on the deep ocean, a very great distance from the Wando River. “You develop affection for your ship,” he said quietly. “A rusty grimy disagreeable bucket soon becomes an object of affection.” There on the Cygnus bridge—sweating marrow, reading about rat guards—I found it hard to imagine being affectionate toward the Cygnus, but not entirely impossible.

  As time passed in Charleston, Andy got more night-mating work—Farrell Lines’ American Resolute—but essentially he waited. At some point during the second week, his shipping card became eleven months old. “I’m up in the big leagues now,” h
e said. “Basically, I think I’m all right, but it’s healthy to be a little nervous.” One day, he felt his health running over when a second mate arrived from New York specifically looking for the Stella Lykes. New York! Oh, Jesus! Andy thought. But he had the older card.

  I was up at five-thirty on the day we expected the ship to be called. I read a long political article that included a catalogue of every national deficiency except the Merchant Marine. Andy slept until nine-thirty but got up nervous about the drawbridge. We left at ten-thirty to make the one-thirty call. Andy said, “This way, if we run out of gas or get a flat tire we can still make it.”

  I said, “We got gas last night.”

  We arrived in Charleston, of course, early enough to ship out on a Yankee clipper. We drove around. We exchanged worries. We killed ten minutes in a Burger King, and carried the food away, because we felt pressed. When we went into the union hall and sat down to eat and wait, Andy’s hands were shaking. Lettuce fell out of his sandwich. He was unable to line up the straw that was meant to penetrate the lid of his takeout Pepsi. One o’clock. Thirty minutes to go. The door opened. Chester Dauksevich came in, the mate from New York with the inferior card. Beardless, tall, and going bald, with a white mustache, he wore brown leather wing-tip shoes, white-faded jeans, a guayabera. To destroy a few more minutes, I asked him why he had come to Charleston.

  “Because I’m hungry and broke,” he said. “There’s forty guys ahead of me in New York. That’s why I’m here. I might run out of money. It’s costing me too much here.”

  Having been informed long since that this was to be the day of the all-important call, we had not been much concerned about the shipping board. One port-relief-officer job was up there, nothing more. At the job call, there was no mention of the S.S. Stella Lykes. The telephone rang at one-thirty-four. Andy’s wife, MaLinda, standing in rain at a pay phone in Bucksport, Maine, wanted to know if he had a ship. No ship. He would have to wait it out for another twenty-four hours.