Students Who Ship Out During Summer Vacations See The World, A Declining Industry And Themselves

After you've shipped, once or twice or many times, you're expected to have a supply of ready-reserve sea stories on hand for the attentive. The sad fact is, you do. But the temptation to satisfy fantasies, the case with which life at sea can be embroidered, make it hard not to lie, and over the winter in House dining halls you finally grow flip about the whole business.

Employment Seasonal

For two summers I've shipped NMU--National Maritime Union--out of the union hall at 17th Street, New York. Last summer there were four or five Harvard men doing the same. The hall serves a large number of college boys in the summer, when jobs are plentiful; in the winter when the steady hands return and things tighten up, it may be months before someone in Group II (the best a college man ever achieves) could get a job. Most ship in the Steward's Department, where the money is; the more adventuresome may ship deck; no one ever goes through the engine room, which is hell in summer and on southern runs.

Eventually, almost everyone gets out. Once at sea, life expands at an enormous rate, but still not fast enough to contain expanding experience. The only way I know to express it is the way a friend described a day he had spent in Greece last summer, which ended with a round white Mediterranean full moon over the ruins at Delphos. He said that day was "More" than Cambridge days--it wasn't just more of his winter experiences, as though you added a hundred days here to make it, but it was on a different level altogether. Some knew what he was talking about, some didn't; and those who had recently known, like him, may have found life at school a little thin.

Yet, I see, I'm romanticizing the life from the first, and it's necessary to counteract the impression immediately. If one word could characterize the vast majority of the hours, it would be boredom. In the Steward's Department, life is usually like that of any large hotel. Deck is more interesting, but you still sleep eleven hours a day, and would sleep more if you could. I've never met an officer who felt he had chosen the right career; for the crew, it's just wage-slavery. Hours on end I've looked into the wake, occasionally thinking but mostly glad for the hypnosis: what some joker once called "the romance of the deep." Inevitably, a college "kid" or a "young blood" becomes a mascot, especially on a freighter with a small crew, about 60 all told. (The United States would carry over 1200 in crew though it never sails with all hands.) And then, immediately, you begin to hear the troubles of all the older men, and their bull as well. It's easy to become insensate, but finally the brutalities of the life just storm your mind.

Le Havre

An example: The America touches Cobh, Le Havre, Southhampton, and then overnight in Bremerhaven. The first time I shipped, I drove an elevator on the America, and when we hit Le Havre I was off with the first. It was three A.M. We had five hours before sailing. Everyone stormed into town, heading for Suzanne's, the combination bar and whore-house en face de la gare. Down the block is its rival, the Algiers Bar, open to Algerians only. The French government rules all such places closed until five in the morning, but the metal slats were kept down, while 'unimaginable scenes of riot' took place. God, it was like the movies, with the whores pouring in from all over town, down the dark streets in tiny cars; I'Amerique was in. And men you knew and in some strange way liked, threw fifties and hundreds of dollars away on 7-Up bottles they called champagne, for $13. I hardly want to become maudlin: they had the money, after all, to throw away. And there is such a vast emptiness in lives of transit that, once ashore, you ache for excess.

Education Respected

After that trip, I've sailed on deck, with what is usually considered a better class of people. It might be profitable to explain ship (union) politics, or the sickness of the shipping industry, or what one actually does on a watch. (For the last item, as an ordinary seaman: 4 hours lookout, 2 hours standby and general labor, and perhaps 2 hours wheel-watch). But I'm seeking what is specific to the summertime sailor's experience; of which an infuriating helpless sympathy is a large part. They condemn you and your innocence, and still worship your education; Beretta, an Able-Bodied who called me "Harbard," took me on exhibition to each and every woman in Antwerp whom he had (carnally) known. Then he sent me to Brussels, away from evil companions.

Surprisingly enough, the college sailor encounters almost no personal resentments. We are no economic threat, and most professionals admire the industry that sends us out to earn money in the summer--if indeed that is why we go. There is a lot of money to be made; I know student waiters who brought home $3000, and one boy, studying navigation at the NY State Marine Academy, was paid $5000 for one trip to Vladivostok.

Intelligence Present

I, for one, sailed for the experience more than for the money, and more than anything else, because I like the sea. The atmosphere has its own diseases, but you don't stay long enough to get them. You can feel grateful for what you do get, which is a relief from some of the sicker aspects of college life. The boats are, after all, a pretty total opposite to gay Harvard days. Obviously, the intellectual stimulants are gone, at least in the form we usually take them. But there are men with intelligence on ships, and you are asked to read bad novels and poems, and hear good conversation. The most biting comment I've ever heard from a Negro about his situation in America came from a fireman I met aboard the Archer. We had passed Bishop's Rock and were entering the Channel, when another US Line ship came by, and I was told to dip our flag in the customary salute. When I came forward again I passed him, and he pointed over the stern to that silk flapping thing, saying, "anywhere this flag flies is no place for the black man." He wasn't personally bitter, only very disappointed and very analytic.

Monomaniacs Common

The confinement of sea life makes people fix upon subjects with intensity, if only to keep sane. You meet men with the most immense knowledge of the Bible, say, or of internal combustion engines. You remember them for the sharpness of their mental edges; always, you remember them.

There isn't any experience, I suppose, to be gained aboard ship that can't be gained doing some land job. But whatever else you go, the ties holding you home and the connections that build themselves in insidious steppingstones, remain. This is entirely irrational, of course; but once at sea those ties disappear: the fact that home is as near as the wireless makes no difference. Even the largest ship is lost at sea; you, lost with it, are thrown on your resources. Your life becomes more elemental; not necessarily more primitive, as though you had gone camping, but more emotionally elemental. I noticed this first with my reactions toward others: they became plus-or-minus affairs, "I like" or "I don't like." You know no one completely or for very long, and yet nobody just brushes by, as in normal life. All you can learn is one facet quickly and deeply: it is all you have time for.

Introspection

The same thing happens with your self, and it is even more interesting. While "Introspection!" is one of the battle cries of Harvard, college is no place for it. Whether we try too hard, or not enough in the right places, or whether there are too many distractions, I can't say; but from observing myself and my fellows, it would appear that any personal statement tends to be immediately fuzzed with qualifications until it dies altogether. At sea, given loneliness, introspection, unfulfilled desire, and a few other basic components, you learn your defenses. Even college men emerge from a time shipping with a knowledge that they can handle themselves and the world. At school we are (anxiously) hoping that the World, when it intrudes, will press lightly. Then, paradoxically, you find it difficult to give up the pressure of that World when summer is done.

There are two ways in which the results of this isolation-in-the-self come out; at least two that I saw. One was a self-possession that I began to see in my friends and in myself; wherever we were, we began to know who we were. Which is not to say we overrated ourselves, as the seaman doesn't stand too high. But having been flung about we knew how to roll; and lost in the cold woods outside Antwerp or thrown into polite high living at the AMVJ in Rotterdam, we could stand with these formidable foreigners and make conversation, and get the hell back. That skill is the traveller's; but we weren't travellers, really, and for us the skill was a measure of maturity.

The other change I noticed was in something mildly fundamental, sex. I'm not sure how to express it, but there seems to be an uncertainty regarding sex at Harvard that may also be found at other schools but isn't true of all people our age. It's as if the men and women haven't quite sorted themselves out; and it's shown in the endless sniggering double entendres that should have ended years ago. That being the negative aspect, perhaps a result of our half-done celibacy, there are positive ones: you can know a woman as another human, rather than as a tool.

To the seaman--and quickly to the college man at sea--women are tools again. But the distinction man/woman is clearly drawn, and all others as well: you are male, a "buck" or "stud"; or you are homosexual, a "queen"; or, commonly, bisexual, "AC/DC", "Greek", "double-cheeked". (Incidently, the homosexuals in the union hall keep clear and apart, and tend to ship together; anywhere in the fleet you can hear of Tillie, the Queen Bee of the Independence and the sous-chef there.) In the general camaraderie there's a great deal of rough humor about this, but no fundamental questionings: everyone has a place and is in it. After one of the spring love affairs for which Cambridge must by now be famous, it can be a great relief.

Industry Sick

Finally, though hardly uniquely, you learn something of an industry and its problems working at sea. American shipping is chronically ill; despite government subsidies (every large seafaring nation subsidizes its ships), there are a host of problems involving costs, replacements, schedules, etc. For the seaman the result is that American wages, though still the highest, are being approached by the Scandinavian and West-European. American living conditions, eventually more important than wages, are the worst, bar none, of any of the industrial nations. There is a phrase you often hear, that Americans don't live on their ships, they just "camp out for the run."

College students, thrown into this bitterly declining situation, are often called on to help. The feeling of power your expected degree confers can be enormous, especially on freighters. Twice, for instance, I was illegally made union secretary (each ship is a local); and among the complaints, the "beefs," it was easy to see the source of difficulties, which is that technology is eliminating ships, men, and badly needed overtime. Trying to help, you involve yourself in long, utterly pointless arguments. Standing aside, there is only an empty desire to help.

And yet it is hardly that grim. Remembrance, what I have excluded, tends to flood back; the Mass River at night, with lights from cranes cutting the sky as though Rotterdam expected the bombers again; Curacao in the early morning, dry caked and smelling of oil; the union hall and the member who motions to "Kick all the winos, finks, and faggots out of the NMU!" (Curran replied "What d'ye want, a non-paying union?" General laughter.)

Once we sailed north of England, past Iceland, to Boston. There were constant storms, and one night aurora borealis was out. Lookout was on the bridge--you would have been washed from the bow the way a seatainer trailor was washed from its lashings. Standing there and sighting along the ship, you felt yourself rise with a rumble over a wave, plunging down into the black night water. Then the foam broke over the bow and your eyes without moving your head were turned to those green and white fireworks in the sky. Up and down, black and light, for about a half hour; clinging to the rail. Life and art are supposed to imitate one another; I remember reading a story that ended in a graveyard with the phrase, "This is really living!