No bobbing heads—no sign of Davy—nothing. Time passed; he had no idea how much. All too soon there was only the starlight and the sea, tranquil and still.
He treaded water. He called out, got a mouthful of brine, and coughed. Would help be coming? Had there been time to get off a message, their location? There hadn’t been much time, that was for sure. He was strong, but he was only so strong, and he couldn’t tread water forever. He had to make a choice…do something.
Dennis McGuire took a deep breath and swam. This was what he did—he moved on. He knew how to keep going; keep swimming, keep moving.
A long time later the gray dawn began to turn the sky pale green, and the sea slate gray. His movements were dull and mechanical now. He must be growing tired.
He had never told Shorty about Faustine.
The infinite arch of the sky took on pastel shades, slowly growing brighter and more glorious. In all the vast sweep of sea there was nothing, nothing but his head inches above the water.
In the east the sun lifted its fiery brows and threw a brilliant glare into his eyes. The dull gray escaped mysteriously, and the sea was scattered with cascades of glowing, lambent light. It lifted higher and higher, and the waves licked at his naked shoulders like blazing swords. East. That way was home.
His arms moved queerly now, like those of an automaton. He seemed no longer physical, but some strange entity without soul or consciousness. He seemed to be floating above his swimming body. He swam through the molten metal of the sea into the opening rose of the sun, swimming…swimming…swimming.
* * *
—
Somewhere off to the south, the radio officer of the Matson liner had noted the time and written in a small book: “Received a fragment of a message. Possibly an SOS but did not have time to get a bearing.”
Above him, the third mate walked the bridge, yawning. He had heard a dull, distant boom before sunrise, but the flare that lighted the sky for an instant had come when his back was turned, walking the other way.
Concerned, Jerry, the radio man, clutched the phones to his ears, but there were no further sounds other than the buzz and hum of the universe and the interference of the ship’s own electrics. He began tapping away as the night turned to dawn, raising other ships, asking if anyone was in distress…but there was nothing.
As he waited for a response, he began to dream, dozing at the key, head on his desk. He would be leaving the Radio Service in a few weeks, headed home to Raiatea, where the surf made a mist above the reefs and palm trees rustled in the breeze above white sand beaches.
They would be waiting for him, as they had waited so long for his father. He had seen the world, but now the good island people would welcome him home.
Eventually, he signed off: “Dot, dot, dot. Dash, dot, dash.”
SK
End of contact.
Silent Key.
AFTERWORD
Reconstructing this book has been much like the work of an archaeologist excavating, then rebuilding the ruins of an ancient city. The truth was well preserved, but scattered and deeply buried. I had considered working on it several times since Dad passed away, but it was not until just recently that I felt I knew enough about my father’s life and had enough control over my own abilities to really do it justice.
The only existing manuscript of No Traveller Returns seemed to consist of several attempts that had been roughly patched together. This was not surprising: Louis mentioned a number of times that he had stopped and started, and on other occasions that he was trying to rewrite it. After I’d considered the manuscript over many years, the intent of the entire piece and the detailed trajectory of the different characters finally became clear to me.
As always, I have attempted to apply as light a hand as possible while still delivering a manuscript that is professionally polished and contains some important elements that were implied by, but not specifically contained in, the original text. That said, what I have done here is considerably more than an editing job. Reading between the lines, I have struggled to discover what this story was trying to become, and the goals that Dad had in mind when he first created it. Completing and enhancing those elements without straying too far afield from his original manuscript was the most significant challenge.
In a few minor cases that meant leaving certain details, which I know to be incorrect, alone—they were my father’s memories of other types of ships or earlier days in port. Those problematic elements were important pieces of Louis’s life, and so I felt they should remain. However, I have attempted to make all of the other aspects of shipboard and portside life in the 1930s as accurate as possible. Of course, one can always do better, so if you notice a mistake it is probably mine.
“Write what you know” is an oft-repeated axiom about the business of being an author. It may be interpreted by beginners as “Only write what you already know,” whereas the more mature approach might be “Educate yourself and get to know the subject you are going to write about.” Luckily, there are as many ways to tell stories as there are writers to tell them.
Educating himself was the route Dad took as he created the Westerns and many other research-inspired stories that made up the bulk of his career. But No Traveller Returns is about a world Louis L’Amour knew from firsthand experience…and it is certainly his most personal novel.
Following that bit of advice about getting to know your subject, I have gone to great lengths to learn about my father, the times he lived in, and the jobs he worked. It’s very likely that I know more about his early days than he would have been entirely comfortable with, but there is no question that I now have a pretty good sense of what his life was like before I came along.
In the few years he spent at sea, Louis did serve on a tanker, though not one as large or modern as the fictional SS Lichenfield. And he did experience a chemical fire on board a ship: at a dock in Salford, England, where part of a two-thousand-ton cargo of sulfur went ablaze. Though it seems to have been rapidly controlled, both the fire and the fumes could have been extremely dangerous. He also went to sea on at least one ship where the deck crew and the black gang were divided into rival factions, and disputes were settled with fists and improvised weapons. One such dispute, in this case between members of the engine crew, was severe enough to end with a man being slapped in irons and crew members, including Louis, being taken before the U.S. Consul in Singapore.
Dad’s ship at Balikpapan, N.E.I., about two weeks before the trouble broke out.
In San Pedro, the Port of Los Angeles, Louis did spend time living hand to mouth in a manner sailors termed “on the beach.” He applied for work at the Marine Services Bureau, or what the union men called the “Slave Market” or “Fink Hall.” He slept at the Seamen’s Church Institute when he had the money, and in gaps in the lumber piles on the E.K. Dock when he didn’t. He rented one of the squatter’s shacks for a time and went mano a mano with several of the rougher denizens of Happy Valley. He also “bucked rivets” in a shipyard.
However, it is the people, the characters of No Traveller Returns, that have the most interesting intersection with my father’s life. Throughout the rest of his career, it was very rare for Louis to use anyone he personally knew as a character in one of his stories, or to even model a character after a person he had known. But in this novel, many of the characters are either closely associated with or specifically intended to portray men that he had lived and worked with in the 1920s and early 1930s.
The inspirations for the drunkards and thieves of Happy Valley—Fitzpatrick, “Russian Fred,” Dynamite, and “Frisco” Grady—are all mentioned multiple times in Louis’s journals or notes. Louis claims to have known the real-life model for “Tex” Worden, though I am not sure when they went to sea together.
The real versions of Shorty Conrad and Pete Brouwer accompanied Dad on his first trip to sea and are rep
orted to have been much as they are portrayed in this story. Pete was truly the sailor who, as in Eugene O’Neill’s The Long Voyage Home, was forever going home, and Shorty did have a past in Australia, as well as a facility with musical instruments. Together they visited the American Bar in Liverpool and the Old Trafford Inn in Manchester. Other bars that Louis visited which are mentioned in No Traveller Returns are the Maypole Bar in Singapore and the Dutch Club in Balikpapan; however, that was with another ship and another crew.
The American Bar in Liverpool circa 2004
The most mysterious characters in this story, however, are the ones that I believe Louis modeled on himself. While Davy Jones is very much the way I imagine Dad to have been when he first set out on his own, he might not have admitted to Davy’s level of naiveté and vulnerability. And John Harlan is like Louis in many ways, but much more mature than my father was even at the time this book was written; he is almost like a fictional model for the man Louis L’Amour would eventually become. Strangest of all is Dennis McGuire, who seems to be some sort of idealized image that Louis had of himself…or a romantic version of how he would like to have been seen by others.
Adventurer, storyteller, boxer, ladies’ man—all of these were actual aspects of Louis’s character. They may be somewhat exaggerated in McGuire, yet they directly reflect the way in which Louis was attempting to sell himself to the public at the time he was writing No Traveller Returns. He had not yet become the modest and thoughtful John Harlan.
To take things in a stranger direction, the original manuscript (prior to my revisions) contained many references to how much the other characters liked, approved of, respected, or were impressed by Dennis McGuire. He was described in glowing terms by the third-person narrator, too. I’m not sure exactly what was going on with all of this adulation. Perhaps it was ego or insecurity. Perhaps Dad was trying to discover some version of himself that the public would accept. Whatever it was and however ill-advised it may have been, it was a learning experience for later in life, when he more confidently and humbly assumed the role of a celebrity.
Additionally, the inspirations for a good deal of Louis’s later fiction run all through this first novel. Most obvious is the inclusion, nearly verbatim, of the short story “Survival,” which chronicles Tex Worden’s struggle in the wake of the sinking of the Rarotonga. The story of Fritz Schumann’s voyage to Raiatea and his besting of Captain Wallace Benson is remarkably like Louis’s “The Dancing Kate,” and Raoul Carmody’s fatal adventure on the Chilean coast echoes Louis’s yet-unpublished novel Sky Ring Water…which was not even written until 1960 or so.
There is also the inclusion of what later became my favorite line from the novel Conagher. When Duck Stevens, a crewman from the Johnson City, notices Shorty Conrad’s black eye, he asks: “Who gave you the black eye?” To which Shorty replies, “Nobody gave it to me! I fought for it!” In reality that was a line my father heard while hanging around the bunkhouse at the Katherine Mine in Arizona.
However, for me, the oddest story in No Traveller Returns is the description of the death of Engineer Augie Donato’s brother:
Al had gone over that hill going at least seventy, and a truck loaded with pipe had been parked right there. What they buried was only part of Al. Hell, if they’d buried him all they’d have had to bury his car, the rear end of the truck, and about fourteen lengths of pipe.
John Otto Lamoore, known to my father as “Jack”, not long before his death in 1946
That was almost exactly the story that Louis used to tell about the death of his adopted brother, Jack. Jack was a lively little guy, similar to the character of Shorty Conrad. He lived life to the fullest, and according to my father (who didn’t drive at all) tended to drive too fast. It wasn’t until I reached out to Jack’s family, many years after my father’s death, that I learned for certain that he did indeed die from being decapitated in a collision with a pipe truck, though not in a dramatic, high-speed accident like the one described above. His death was caused by a slowly reversing semi in the parking lot of a baseball stadium, the driver of which had no idea, until it was too late, that he had backed into the car in which Jack was a passenger.
The truly weird thing is that Jack died six to eight years after this book was written…yet, for the rest of his life, whenever Louis told the story of his adopted brother’s death, he told the version from this, his unpublished novel.
That’s a pretty good example of just how confusing it can be to live with a fiction writer!
* * *
—
I’m sure that there will be some discussion of the language, morality, sense of history, politics, and philosophy contained in No Traveller Returns, since they are somewhat different from what is regularly found in many of Louis L’Amour’s Westerns. Although I have done quite a bit of revision on this novel, I have left untouched as many of the elements of Louis’s writing style from the late 1930s as I could. Specifically, I have not significantly added to or subtracted from any of the items mentioned above, nor did I alter any of Louis’s 1930s-era commentary on climate change or Japanese intentions in the Pacific…both of which might be considered mildly prophetic.
The Yondering stories (though Louis didn’t think of calling them that at the time) were written for a completely different sort of audience than his Westerns. In the 1930s, Louis was quite proud to be writing material that would have been considered “realistic,” or even risqué. Nor did he shy away from such characterizations later, near the end of his career, presenting the material in the collection Yondering without revision.
All in all, Louis was much more of a man of the world than the Western genre would often allow. He loved writing of Arizona and Colorado, the wide-open prairies and the far, blue mountains, but his real life also played itself out in remote parts of the Indies and the Middle East, the bustle of New York and Shanghai, on the waterfronts of Liverpool and San Pedro. Those were different worlds with different rules.
No Traveller Returns may have been Dad’s nostalgic farewell to those days and those people. When the war took him away from working on this manuscript in 1942, Louis was trying to pull strings to get a commission in the Navy, difficult if not impossible to wrangle because he hadn’t gone to college. Later, before he was shipped to Europe, he was briefly made an Army cargo-control officer in the port of Oakland, California, and he expected to be placed in a similar position somewhere in the Pacific. It would have been a near-perfect use of his abilities, since he knew the world of longshoremen and merchant sailors.
That situation was not in the stars, however. Orders put him on a train that gathered officers from all across the country. No one knew it at the time, but they were bound for England and the Normandy invasion. When he boarded the freighter that traveled in convoy from New York to his old stomping grounds in Liverpool, it would be the last time he would ever sail on a merchant ship…and the pages of this novel remained in a binder in Choctaw, Oklahoma, a binder that was rarely opened until after his death.
A last note: The novel takes its title from the famed “To Be or Not to Be” soliloquy in Shakespeare’s Hamlet: “The undiscovered country, from whose bourn no traveller returns.” Though the “undiscovered country” to which the Bard refers is the land of the dead (certainly the destination of the crewmen of the steamship Lichenfield), the quote had an additional meaning for my father. As John Harlan suggests in this work and as Louis wrote in the text of his 1979 novel Bendigo Shafter, “no traveller returns” refers, in Louis’s alternate interpretation, to the process of maturing as a person. As our lives are changed by travel or experience, our bodies may return to the same places we have long known, but in our hearts we are no longer the same. So it was with this book. Given all its resonances with other aspects of Louis’s life, and even though it has remained unpublished for three-quarters of a century, it is obvious that writing it was a journey that changed
Louis substantially. No Traveller Returns is a well from which much else was drawn.
I sincerely hope you have enjoyed it.
Beau L’Amour
November 2018
GLOSSARY
ABAFT THE FORM’ST—behind the foremast or first mast.
ADEN—a British possession or protectorate (now part of Yemen) and an important refueling station for merchant and naval shipping.
AFT—the rear of the ship.
AFTER HOUSE—the structure in a ship’s stern.
AIR HAMMER—an automatic hammer or chisel powered by compressed air, used to cut or shape metal.
BARK/BARQUE—a square-rigged sailing ship with three or more masts, the aftmost of which is rigged with fore and aft sails. An elegant compromise of speed and maneuverability.
BEACON STREET—a street just off the waterfront in San Pedro, California. The central four blocks of Beacon Street housed a large number of bars and bordellos, and was known for many years as one of the toughest neighborhoods in the world. While the street itself still exists, the majority of its infamous businesses were removed by bulldozer and wrecking ball in the early 1970s.
BITTS—pairs of heavy metal posts used to secure the mooring lines of a ship.
BLACK GANG—the crew of a ship’s engineering department, so called because in the old days coal dust and soot stained their clothes and skin.
BLACK MARIA—a “paddy wagon” (a police van or truck for transporting prisoners).
BLACKFELLA—Australian slang for an Indigenous Australian or Aborigine.
BLACKJACK—a short club, usually with a core of dense material to increase its weight and connected to a handle to make it easier to hold on to.
No Traveller Returns (Lost Treasures) Page 22