Under the Red Sea Sun

by Edward Ellsberg

  “Captain,” I volunteered in this dilemma, “I’m sure my morning longitude sight was good and my figures O.K. That placed us much further west than the position you used. I advised then a more easterly course. Go east now and you’ll find San Juan about an hour’s run from here.”

  He did, and we did. About fifteen miles eastward down the coast, approximately the distance I had figured we were off the true course, we picked up the entrance to San Juan.

  From that point on, the skipper was in his element. If there was anything he knew, it was piloting. Once there were buoys and lights in sight to take bearings on, no one could beat him. Very skillfully, relying hardly at all on the local pilot we picked up outside, he conned his vessel through the torpedo nets and the narrow channel, fringed with surf breaking on reefs close aboard, into the harbor and neatly laid her alongside the wharf.

  But far from any thanks for my assistance in our safe arrival, it seemed to me from the skipper’s distant behavior from the moment he headed the ship east, that I had now only his strong ill will. I had been a witness on the bridge to that exhibition of gross incompetence in the deep sea navigation of the S.5. Pig’s Knuckle.

  Our overnight stay in San Juan, while the ship was being refueled alongside the wharf, was memorable, but not pleasantly so. The weather ashore was hot and humid, more noticeably uncomfortable as we had just come from winter.

  I went into town only to buy a book of modern navigation tables. In addition I picked up a few charts of the South Atlantic and a Nautical Almanac for 1942. With these as my own property and the occasional use of one of the mates’ sextants, for it was perfectly evident I was no longer welcome to use the captain’s, I figured that I could keep on navigating on my own, the while I taught the mates, of whom three at least were eager for help, how to navigate accurately themselves.

  Most of the larger shops were soon closed, as we had landed late in the afternoon. But still open, especially near the water front, was a plethora of dives proclaiming themselves in Spanish and in English to be “Night Clubs,” with gaudily painted but still ugly and unattractive native “hostesses” swarming about them as lures. From inside each of these places came the most infernal racket of jazz bands, struggling to outdo adjacent competitors in noise.

  Finally, Porto Rican rum seemed to be on sale everywhere, cheap as compared to New York prices. So far as I could guess, as I sauntered back to the ship with my new navigational equipment, it was already being guzzled in enormous quantities by my fellow passengers, civilians as well as soldiers, judging by their uncertain gait from “night club” to “night club.”

  Back on the nearly deserted ship, I turned to at once in my stateroom on boning up on the thin volume of Ageton’s tables I had managed to buy ashore. Ageton’s tables and his method gave a much quicker and simpler means of solving the trigonometric problems involved in celestial navigation than I had learned in my youth.

  But even Ageton required some practice to develop the familiarity with the tables necessary for speed. Consequently I was still involved in working out by this newer method the sights of the sun I had taken much earlier north of Porto Rico, when 11:00 P.M., which was the zero hour for the expiration of shore leave for the passengers, struck. From then on, singly and in small groups, the sightseers began to return and very shortly, perforce, I had to give up further study.

  A more hideous and disgraceful night was never experienced on any ship as those drunks, overflowing with Porto Rican rum, staggered aboard—some fighting drunk, some roaring drunk, some singing drunk, and some just drunk. Hour after hour the deafening hullabaloo kept up, started afresh by a continuous stream of late comers each time Major Curtin and his overworked sergeants managed to subdue momentarily some of the most obstreperous of the already on board cases.

  The drunken soldiers, Curtin and his M.P.s managed to quell. Even when drunk, the soldiers still had instinct enough left to recognize the danger of bucking their sergeants. But the drunken civilians were hopeless. They were free and equal citizens of the United States, drunk as lords, and recognized no authority at all. Short of strangling them, there was no way of quieting them.

  All through the night, the ship echoed from bow to stern with an ear-rasping uproar from shouting, screaming, singing, fighting drunks that would have shamed a pack of hyenas. No one slept on the S.S. Pig’s Knuckle that night.

  Morning came at last and with it relative quiet. Worn-out drunks were strewn prostrate everywhere, in deck chairs, in the passages, on the deck. The M.P.s cleaned up by heaving the now dead-to-the-world celebrants indiscriminately into the nearest staterooms to sleep off their stupors.

  The ship, topped off with fuel, made ready to sail at noon. A check on the passenger list, however, showed one man still missing. So instead of sailing, the ship’s whistle began to shriek, in the thin hope the noise might waken our missing passenger ashore. It did. Half an hour later he sauntered slowly down the dock, his leisurely gait an added insult to the chafing officers aboard. Explaining casually only that he had been asleep ashore till the whistle roused him, he ambled over the gangway and we immediately cast loose, an hour late.

  That delay promptly caused trouble then and more later. Hardly had the ship cleared the wharf, and started to swing her bow towards the harbor mouth, than two huge Pan-American flying boats came in from seaward and straightened out, flying low over the water, for a landing inside the harbor. To avoid a possible chance of fouling them, either in the air or in the long lane of clear water they needed to come down on, our skipper had no option but to drop anchor suddenly to hold us clear.

  As soon as both flying boats had landed in clouds of flying spray, come about, and taxied away to their berths, clearing the harbor, the clatter of chain links banging over the wildcat forward announced our anchor was being weighed. But before it came aweigh, the clanging of chain coming in suddenly ceased, and we remained anchored for almost another hour before the anchor was at last heaved up into the hawsepipe. It was 2:00 P.M., nearly two hours late, when the vessel finally sailed from San Juan.

  On February 27, ten days out of New York, we stood out of the harbor. We headed due north for some time, then east-northeast, to get well off the coast before turning eastward for our normal course. The naval authorities in the port had warned us before departure that a U-boat had been reported that morning working in the Anegada Passage east of the island of St. Thomas.

  Several Navy patrol planes and a destroyer were being sent to search the area, and at least keep the U-boat submerged and immobilized during the day. Still, as we would now pass that way at night, it was advisable to give the coast as wide a berth as possible off Anegada Passage.

  When we were about two hours out of San Juan and straightened away on our eastward course, I learned in strange fashion what had caused the delay in weighing anchor. Up on the bridge where I was chatting with the third mate over my newly acquired navigation tables, came a swarthy, heavy-set seaman, demanding to see the captain. While a messenger went for the captain, the mate whispered to me that this man, chosen apparently for his obstreperousness, was the union delegate, representing all the strange assortment of “seamen” that made up our motley crew.

  As soon as the captain appeared on the bridge, with no preliminaries, the delegate faced him with an air of obvious insolence and announced,

  “The crew’s all decided I’ve gotter tell you the ship’s gotter turn back right away to San Juan.”

  At this outrageous demand, the captain was struck dumb. For once I was sorry for him. It had certainly come to a sad pass in the American merchant marine when a seaman, a crew’s delegate or not, dared brazenly to order a ship off a voyage and back to port.

  When finally the skipper came to sufficiently to speak, he asked,

  “What for?”

  “We talked it over and decided that the feller what got his mitt jammed in the wildcat when we was weighin’ the anchor oughter be taken right back to San Juan and put ashore in the hospital
there.”

  At this point, the third mate whispered to me that another able seaman had carelessly jammed a finger between chain and wildcat while the chain was coming in. The delay to the ship in San Juan had occurred from an instant stop of the heaving process till the chain was carefully wedged free of the wildcat to clear him. Now he was in the sick bay for treatment of his torn finger.

  Here at least I had to admire the skipper for his restraint, though I felt his actions were governed considerably by his knowledge that as matters had been going lately at sea, ship’s officers got little backing from authorities ashore in disputes with their organized crews. In case any member of the crew, from cabin boy up, cared to make an official complaint, a ship master was more likely to find himself permanently without a ship, as had lately happened to the unfortunate skipper of the City of Flint, than to find his authority or his judgment backed up. I held no brief for our captain, who had been unable to get his crew, either on deck or below, to do the ordinary ship’s work, so that the problems had been sloughed off on the passengers who had solved them in various ways, but nevertheless no one could help sympathizing with him now.

  It was my turn to look with astonishment at that brash seaman, unabashedly telling the captain what he and the crew, none of them with the slightest knowledge of surgery, had decided must be done. Turn a troop transport at sea in wartime, with the ship’s own surgeon and an oversupply of military surgeons aboard, all capable of treating any wound, back to port to treat an injured finger. What gall!

  The captain, with difficulty restraining his wrath, though it was plain from the swelling arteries in his temples that he was near apoplexy, turned from the seaman before him to the quartermaster.

  “Tell the ship’s surgeon to come up on the bridge. Then ask General Scott if he’ll send the senior Army surgeon up here, too.”

  The quartermaster slid down the ladder. The captain abruptly turned his back on the insolent delegate before him, lest he burst a blood vessel, strode to the far wing of the bridge, grabbed his binoculars and started to scan the empty sea ahead. The third mate and I walked to the other wing of the bridge, leaving the delegate grinning alone near the helmsman. Self-satisfaction was written all over his smiling countenance.

  “This finger business is all a smoke screen,” muttered the third officer. “That bozo doesn’t care any more about that other sailor’s smashed finger than the king of Dahomey does. I see through his game. If the ship goes back now, it’s so late she can’t sail again till tomorrow morning, and it’ll give him and his mates another go tonight in San Juan at the cheap rum and the cheap whores there! Did you notice he waited to complain till we were well out, not when we might have landed anybody and then kept right on going?”

  Very possible, I thought. At any rate it sounded more rational than the reason given.

  In a few minutes, the ship’s doctor, a retired Navy surgeon of long experience gone back to sea in the merchant service for the war emergency, clambered up the bridge. He was followed by a major in the Army Medical Corps.

  The skipper came back amidships, faced his seaman.

  “Tell the doctors what you want.”

  “We want the ship put back to San Juan to land that man with the busted finger for treatment in the hospital there.”

  It was now the turn of the two surgeons to look in puzzled astonishment from the Seaman before them to each other.

  “What for?” asked the ship’s doctor. “I’ve already operated on that finger, got the bones set, splinted, and bandaged, and there’s nothing more anybody or any hospital could do right now. Don’t you agree, Major?” he asked the Army man. “You watched the operation.”

  “I don’t understand you, my man,” said the major, wrinkling his brows questioningly at the sailor before him. “Your shipmate can’t get better medical attention in the world anywhere than he’s getting right here. There are four surgeons aboard and only one minor accident case for them to work on. Landing him’s ridiculous.”

  At that “my man,” the seaman stiffened up as if insulted. Apparently a crew’s delegate expected to be addressed in a more respectful manner, though I noted that he had ostentatiously omitted any title at all when addressing his captain. But he said nothing till the doctor had finished, then he growled sullenly,

  “That’s what you say. Now I’m telling you for the crew, turn the ship around and land that man.”

  The skipper grew still redder, but his only answer was to turn to the Army surgeon.

  “Will you recommend to General Scott, Major, that I put the ship back to port so’s this patient can be transferred to a hospital for treatment?”

  “I will not! No doctor could. This is the damnedest ‘Alice in Wonderland’ performance I ever heard of! You can leave me out of it!” and with that the major swung angrily and left the bridge.

  The skipper turned back to the delegate.

  “You heard what both the doctors said. That man will be treated aboard, I’m not turning back.”

  “What them doctors say ain’t nothin’ to me. You put this ship around or the crew—”

  “Get off the bridge now,” exploded the skipper, “or I’ll have you thrown off!”

  The startled sailor, cut off in the middle of his “or else,” gazed a moment at the irate captain. There was no question the skipper was through palavering. For once, he was in a fine position in case the crew’s union back home made an issue of it. It was wartime, the War Department was bound to back him up ashore. And right now before the crew tried to start trouble on board if they didn’t like his decision, they would doubtless recall that episode in the galley a few days before when some of them had looked down the muzzles of the M.P.s’ Colts.

  To save his face, the interrupted seaman started to mumble again his demand.

  “Get!” shouted the exasperated skipper, moving toward him.

  The delegate “got.”

  Leaning over the port wing of the bridge, gazing down at the waves as the ship steamed on eastward, I reflected on what I had just witnessed and what had gone before. It began to look as if that Army surgeon had hit the nail squarely on the head. This cruise of the S.S. Pig’s Knuckle was right out of “Alice in Wonderland.”

  CHAPTER

  10

  THE REST OF OUR VOYAGE WAS MORE of the same, with variations—some ridiculous, some serious.

  Our first night out of San Juan, while north of the Anegada Paspage, the bow lookouts reported two torpedo tracks crossing our stem. Nothing hit us, but there was consternation enough aboard. About midnight the second evening, the general alarm sounded from the bridge turning out all hands in their lifebelts to stand by the lifeboats, while the ship, with guns ready for action, suddenly reversed course, and ran full speed away from some undetermined object spotted in the darkness ahead in our path.

  The food stayed bad, the crew sullen, the captain more so. This latter was not helped any when four days later, approaching the Equator, we were chased by a warship which might have been an enemy raider but turned out to be one of our own cruisers on South Atlantic patrol looking for enemy raiders camouflaged as merchantmen.

  What thoroughly upset our skipper was the bawling out he got from the warship captain for answering a signal to identify himself by hoisting the Pig’s Knuckle’s confidential war code call letters instead of her ordinary merchant code flag identification. Had our pursuer been an enemy, sang out the warship captain angrily through his bull-horn when close aboard us, this would have put him in possession of a secret code call which he could have used later to decoy other Allied ships.

  On we steamed over the Line towards our next refueling stop, Recife, in the state of Pernambuco, Brazil. I ran a navigation school for the three junior mates, which the skipper looked on with obvious but silent disapproval, though the mates took the instruction enthusiastically.

  Meanwhile, I also navigated myself, using my own equipment and the third mate’s sextant. The skipper’s sextant, at his request, had gone
back to his custody, where it went out of service again. Evidently he regretted the generous gesture by which he had started all this in offering me the instrument and inviting me to navigate when I pleased, though he never openly said so to me. In this delicate situation, all my positions went down on the chart as the third mate’s, which I believe the skipper suspected, and it went decidedly amiss with him. He still said nothing to me, but went at it obliquely. Calling the third mate into his cabin, he told the mate to tell me to stop navigating. This the third mate refused to do on the grounds that first it was the captain, not he, who had asked me to navigate, and second, the instruction was doing the mates (as well as the ship) a good turn. The skipper became quite violent over this refusal, and the mate came out of the cabin, determined to quit the ship at the first opportunity, sure now that the captain had a knife out for him.

  On March 8, nine days out of San Juan, we made the Brazilian coast, coming in from seaward some sixty miles north of Recife. The landfall, based on a fine set of star sights I had got just before sunrise and worked out together with the third mate, was beautiful. We picked up Cape Blanco exactly on the bearing and at the time predicted—an occasion notable by its complete difference from our lubberly landfall at Porto Rico, but it was marked on the bridge mainly by a complete silence on the part of all hands there.

  In sight of land and with known lighthouses again to guide him, the skipper became less sour as with his usual skill he piloted down the coast. Pernambuco harbor, an unusually difficult one to approach because of off-lying reefs and an involved outside system of buoys, he took his ship into in a manner to arouse any seaman’s admiration—a performance which made the skipper himself positively genial as we came in and anchored inside the breakwater, preparatory to docking for refueling.

  But the geniality swiftly went sky-high. Someone, either the captain, the purser, or the ship’s operators back in New York, or all of them together) had blundered. Our arrival in Recife was a complete surprise to Recife—no berth had been assigned, no fuel oil had been ordered there to await our coming. And with oil in foreign ports in wartime scarce and strictly rationed, this last was serious. The local oil representatives merely shrugged their shoulders—all their fuel oil was allocated, they could let go of none of it to any ship without proper papers. And the poor S.S. Pig’s Knuckle, in keeping with all else in connection with her, had none at all, proper or otherwise.