Transiting the Canal

The Mercury arrived at the Pacific entrance to the Panama Canal at 5:00am on Wednesday, June 25, 1980.  En route from San Diego, California, to Wilmington, North Carolina, she was fully loaded with a high-priority cargo for the U.S. Marine Corps, part of the American military response to the Iranian hostage crisis.  This cargo gave the Mercury precedence over several other cargo ships that lay at anchor waiting their turns to transit the canal.  Gliding easily through the placid water off the south coast of Panama, she slowed to take on pilots and linehandlers, and then proceeded into the canal entrance, past the port of Balboa, and under the large center span of the Bridge of the Americas.  Just ahead stood the Miraflores Locks.

This was the first of my two experiences with the Panama Canal.  I was very young and had a third mate’s license that was just over a year old.  Everything in Panama was brand new to me, and I found it all fascinating.  As the Mercury entered the Miraflores Locks, she was guided forward and into position by railroad locomotives called “mules” on the dock.  These were connected to both sides of the ship by heavy steel hawsers.  Then the lock gates were closed, valves were opened, and water gravitated into the chamber from the next and higher chamber just ahead of it.  Then the lock gates between the two chambers were opened, and the ship was eased forward into the second chamber.  This one was filled from Miraflores Lake, which lay between the Miraflores and Pedro Miguel Locks.  All this was orchestrated in a small Spanish mission style building adjacent to the locks.  After exiting the Miraflores Locks, the Mercury sailed the short distance across this intermediate lake to the Pedro Miguel Locks, and the process was repeated.  Here, though, there was only one step, that is, the ship passed through only one lock chamber, in order to reach the uppermost water level.

From the Pedro Miguel Locks, the Mercury transited the famous Culebra Cut through the backbone of the Latin American mountain chain.  Later renamed Gaillard Cut for the engineer who headed this feat of construction, it was a most impressive but also incongruous sight with jagged walls of rock towering along both sides of the ship.  After eight miles of this, the ship entered Gatun Lake, which stretched 23 miles across the center of the isthmus to the north.  Following a series of twisting and turning channels around islands and through the jungle, the Mercury at last arrived at the Gatun Locks.  Here the ship passed through three lock chambers in fairly quick succession and was lowered back down to sea level.  Seven miles later, she exited the canal at Limon Bay, next to the port of Cristobal.  After discharging the pilots, the vessel proceeded into the open Caribbean.  It was by now mid-afternoon; the transit had taken close to ten hours.  With Panama fading from sight, the Mercury increased speed and headed northeast into a strong wind and building waves.

Possibly unique among the world’s waterways, the Panama Canal was certainly distinctive in a manner that commanded my attention and has held my interest ever since.  On a shipmate’s recommendation, I later read David McCullough’s great book[1] about the canal’s construction, a tale replete with engineering, history, political intrigue, medical advances, and tragedy.  While the Panama Canal has been long and rightly recognized as one of the great man-made wonders of the world, it is sobering to consider the horrific price in human life that its construction cost.  We who benefit from the canal today owe an immense debt of gratitude to those who lost their lives building it.  Such thoughts came to me later in life, though.  When I was young, it just felt exciting to have even a very small part in something so famous.

My second experience with the Panama Canal took place a few years later aboard the Comet.  En route from New Orleans, Louisiana, to San Lorenzo, Honduras, she arrived off Cristobal and anchored there at 6:00pm on Monday, January 30, 1984.  The ship rested easily at anchor in very calm water, no wind, and stifling heat overnight.  Soon after breakfast on Tuesday the 31^st, a pilot came aboard, and the Comet weighed anchor and proceeded into the canal.  This transit was in the opposite direction of the Mercury’s, but was otherwise quite similar.

The pilot on this transit was an exceptionally friendly fellow.  I remember when the Comet passed from Gatun Lake into Culebra Cut he remarked to us, “Well, this is the part that God did not intend to be a canal.”  And he chatted with us about the difficulties of dynamiting a waterway out of a mountain range.  He also gave us tourist brochures complete with photographs and text that described the canal and its history and operations.  I still have this bit of memorabilia, which I found very informative.

At 5:00pm that day, after completing her transit of the canal, the Comet moored in Balboa for cargo operations.  I went ashore briefly and walked around the waterfront.  At the entrance to the docks, a taxi driver spoke to me in badly broken and heavily accented English.  He offered to bring me into downtown Balboa for “only $30.00.”  When I politely declined, he exploded angrily and cursed me out in very loud, completely fluent, unbroken, and unaccented English.  I found this performance rather amusing.

That evening, actually at 12:30am on Wednesday, February 1, the Comet sailed from Balboa.  Another pilot took her under the Bridge of the Americas and out to sea.  After he departed, the ship set a course for the coastwise run to Honduras, and I left the Panama Canal behind for the last time.

In the forty years since, many changes have come to the Panama Canal.  Foremost among these is the transfer to Panamanian ownership.  The erstwhile American colony called the Canal Zone has passed into history.  Equally important are the new and bigger locks, built to accommodate today’s gargantuan container ships and oil tankers.  The original locks, 1,000 feet long and 110 feet wide, were by the standards of their time enormous.  They are still used, of course, but supplemented by the newer and larger ones.  Additionally, two more bridges now cross the canal; the cargo ports of Cristobal, Colon, and Balboa have expanded; and webcams now monitor all traffic passing through the locks.  So I can watch all the action on a computer screen at home!

For many years I was the only member of my family that had gone to Panama.  This changed on Friday, January 8, 2010, when my son James entered the canal from the north aboard the cruise ship Zuiderdam of the Holland America Line.  This vessel transited the Gatun Locks and entered Gatun Lake, where James disembarked and then completed his transit from Gamboa aboard the ferry Tuira II.  From Balboa, he recrossed the isthmus by bus and rejoined the Zuiderdam at the Colon Cruise Terminal.

Next, my son Michael, while on a hitchhiking odyssey through Latin America, visited the Miraflores Locks, witnessed the passage of a ship through them, and then toured the adjacent Miraflores Visitor’s Center on Wednesday, December 7, 2016.

Then, Miss Patty saw the Panama Canal from an airplane on Tuesday, May 21, 2019.  She was traveling on Avianca Airlines to Brazil to assist with our newborn grandson David, and she changed aircraft in Panama City.  When she returned on Saturday, July 6, the view of the canal was unfortunately obscured by clouds and rain.

Little did I think in the 1980s that the Panama Canal would later become such a family affair!  I never imagined then that one son would sail on cruise ships, that another son would hitchhike from Pennsylvania to Panama, or that I would have family in Brazil.  Life is indeed full of surprises.  Through these surprises, though, the Panama Canal has served four of us well as a common interest and as a waypoint in our travels.  Time will tell if the rest of the family will also go to Panama.

In the preface to his great book, David McCullough pays tribute to the Panama Canal, describing its construction as

a profoundly important historic event and a sweeping human drama not unlike that of war.  Apart from wars, it represented the largest, most costly single effort ever mounted anywhere on earth…. It affected the lives of tens of thousands of people at every level of society and of virtually every race and nationality.[2]

Since its construction, the Panama Canal has affected the lives of hundreds of millions of people, including my own, as one of the world’s most vital transportation links.  More freight passes through Panama than most folks can imagine, and there is no end of it in sight.  Without Panama, the global supply chains and the world’s economies would be largely crippled. 

Finally, there remains in the annals of Panama Canal literature an additional, if tenuous, family connection.  My grandparents never travelled to Panama, but they owned an edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica which contains an article[3] on the Panama Canal co-authored by Colonel George W. Goethals, one of the chief engineers of its construction.  This prose, now in my possession, symbolically links the family, the sea, and the Panama Canal, and prompts me to recall many golden opportunities and happy memories!

Now, we have some photographs to consider: 

 

 

 

Two views of the anchorage taken from the Comet in Limon Bay off Cristobal near the north end of the Panama Canal on Monday, January 30, 1984.  I took more pictures than these, but my camera was malfunctioning, which I did not realize until later, and so only these two survived. 

The following photographs come from the tourist brochure which the friendly pilot aboard the Comet gave me.  I don't remember his name, but I remain very grateful to him for this gift.

 

In this first picture, we have an aerial view, looking north, of the Miraflores Locks and Lake Miraflores.  In the upper left corner, we can see part of the Pedro Miguel Locks.  

 

Next, we look the other way and see the canal's southern terminus, and beyond that, the Pacific Ocean.  In the center stands the Bridge of the Americas, a structure that dates from 1962.  On the left lies part of the port of Balboa.

 

Here, near the northern terminus of the canal, we see Limon Bay with its extensive anchorage and the finger piers of Cristobal.  The city proper of Colon lies to the right, just out of the picture.

 

This rudimentary map shows the basic layout of the canal, most notably its northwest to southeast layout, something that surprises many people.

 

Finally, this schematic profile, while not drawn to scale, illustrates the canal's elevated course through the mountainous terrain of the Panamanian isthmus.  A short but unlikely route for a ship!

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[1] David McCullough, The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal 1870-1914, New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc., 1977.  A truly outstanding book by one of my favorite authors.

[2] Op. cit., p. 11.

[3] George W. Goethals and Clarence S. Ridley, “Panama Canal,” in Encyclopaedia Britannica, London: The Encyclopaedia   Britannica Company, Ltd., 1941, v. 17, p. 171-177.   In 1941 Mr. Ridley was the governor of the Panama Canal Zone.

Going Back to Work

Leaving home to join a ship was seldom a simple matter.  Some complication usually arose, which meant that going back to work was often an adventure and sometimes a misadventure.  Factors such as flexible schedules, weather delays, changing dock assignments, and personal emergencies contributed to the confusion, but they were all part and parcel of the transportation business and so were understandable.  Sending a crewman to join a ship which by its very nature was moving most of the time could be a hit-or-miss affair.  But sending someone to join a vessel that was parked in a drydock seemed like a comparatively simple job, since the ship was now a stationary target.

On Saturday, May 24, 1980, I left New York aboard a United Air Lines DC-10 bound for San Francisco.  In my third assignment as third mate, I was on my way to join the Mercury, then in drydock in Alameda, California.  I had spent the previous day at company headquarters in Bayonne, New Jersey, where the powers-that-be had prepared me for my flight west and my subsequent new position aboard ship.  For my part, I had complete confidence that they had fully prepared me for everything and that it would all proceed smoothly and with no problems.  How naïve I was!  Sitting comfortably on the airplane as I crossed the North American continent for the first time, I remained blissfully ignorant of the disarray that awaited me on the West Coast.

On landing in San Francisco, I was to take a taxi to the Islander Motel in Alameda, across the bay from the city.  The crew was being billeted there until the shipyard work was complete, and then everyone would move on board.  I was to be one of the last crewmen to join the ship; most had already arrived.  There would be a lot of work to do on a tight schedule, but by the end of the coming week, the Mercury would sail.  Being young and ambitious, and after two months at home, I was ready to go!

After the aircraft landed I collected my luggage, went out front, and found a taxi.  As I put my suitcase in the trunk, I told the driver that I was going to the Islander Motel in Alameda.  He gave me a confused look, shrugged his shoulders, and said, “Where dat, man?”

Startled by this inquiry, and thinking that of the two of us he should know, I replied with, “You’re asking me?”

Leaving me to wonder what I had just gotten into, the driver stepped into the dispatcher’s office.  Through the window I could see the two men studying a map.  After several minutes he returned to the taxi and said, “Ees okay.  I find eet.“ Away we went, then, over the Bay Bridge, across Oakland, and then through a tunnel.  Emerging into the daylight again, the driver turned to me and announced, “Deesa Alameda.”  The Islander Motel stood a moderate distance farther along.

In an attempt to situate myself, I asked the driver about the locations of the motel, the shipyard, and the subway.  I specifically asked him, “Can I get the BART1 subway here in Alameda?”  I preferred to use that instead of paying for expensive taxi rides.  The driver assured me, “Yay, ees right by dee hotel.”  And a moment later we arrived there.

As I checked into the Islander Motel, I explained to the desk clerk that I was to be a crewman on the Mercury and was joining a group of shipmates who were already registered there.  The clerk stared at me uncomprehendingly and replied that there were no crewmen from any ship staying at the Islander.  Seeing my bewilderment, he then inquired about the Mercury and my business with her.  In the course of this very confused conversation, it became clear that my employer had sent me to the wrong place.

Feeling bad for me, the clerk placed a call to the shipyard so I could try to get some information about the Mercury and her crew.  The yard bird who answered the phone resented my inquiries and threw a minor tantrum:  “There ain’t no Mercury here!  She’s still the Illinois!  You guys don’t even own the thing yet and yer askin’ me all these questions!!  How am I supposta know this stuff?  I ain’t no infermation booth!!  Why don’t you come over here and see fer yerself?  There’s a couple a yer guys on the thing.  Maybe they kin tell ya what’s goin’ on!”

I had already decided to do just that.  After all, I had gone out there to work, not to just sit around and wait for something to happen.  So I asked the desk clerk to point me the way to the subway station that the taxi driver had said was near the motel.  He looked at me in astonishment.  “There is no BART station in Alameda,” he exclaimed.  “You need to go into Oakland for that, and it’s much too far to walk.  I can’t imagine why he said there’s a BART stop here.  That’s just crazy!”  He called another taxi for me instead, and off to the shipyard I went.

The Todd Shipyard was a modest affair situated on the north side of Alameda Island and across the Oakland Inner Harbor from Oakland itself.  Aboard the Mercury I introduced myself to Captain Edward Lanni.  Completely surprised by my unexpected arrival, he asked me many questions.  “How did you get here?  What are you doing here?  And why are you here on Memorial Day weekend?  Did you just come out from the base in Bayonne?  You got any luggage?”  And so on.  Another very confused conversation followed, and it left my new boss feeling exasperated.

“You gotta be kidding me!” the Captain finally exploded.  “Those folks in Bayonne!  They need to look out the window once in a while!”  Counting on his fingers as he spoke, he continued, “First, they send you out here on a holiday weekend.  They don’t want to pay overtime, so the crew isn’t working until Tuesday.  You could have stayed home with your family longer!  Second, they send you to the wrong hotel.  We’re all put up at the Jack London Inn.”  Pointing across the water, he went on, “It’s right over there in Jack London Square.  Nice place, good neighborhood, great restaurant, and a short walk to downtown Oakland.  You can get the train there and go into San Francisco.  Third, they don’t tell you anything about the ship.  We don’t even own it yet, but we’re here anyway to get her into shape.  She still belongs to States Lines, and she’s still officially the Illinois, and they’ve got their own skipper and chief mate here to help us out.  Fourth, there is no way this ship is going to sail a week from now.  It takes more time than that to bring a ship this size out of layup and put her back in service.  And finally, I suppose they didn’t give you any cash for your taxi rides or your dinner tonight.  Am I right?  Yeah, I knew it!”  He threw up his hands and shook his head in disgust.

It was by now getting late in the afternoon.  With nothing for me to do just yet aboard the Illinois-Mercury, and with my belongings in a room at the Islander, we agreed that I would spend the night there and join everyone else at the Jack London tomorrow.  Captain Lanni would dispatch another young mate with the company car on Sunday morning to help me change hotels.  Come Tuesday, he would have the purser reimburse me for my taxi rides and dinner tonight.  Finally, he ordered me to have some fun: “This is a great port.  Go out!  See the sights!  Have a good time while you’re here!  Just be ready to work on Tuesday morning.”

As promised, the second mate arrived at the Islander Motel with the company car the next morning.  He was Manny Subda, a graduate of Fort Schuyler and a few years older than I was.  Delivering me to the Jack London Inn, he described the crew’s work schedule and duties while the Illinois-Mercury was undergoing her renovation.  Everyone lodged at the hotel because the ship was as yet uninhabitable.  We would all move on board when the domestic mechanical systems became fully functional and the company officially took possession of the vessel.  Then the Mercury would sail, probably in mid-June.  This was good to know, and I started to feel better about everything.  Then, after settling in at the correct hotel, I followed Captain Lanni’s orders to “go out” and “see the sights,” and San Francisco soon became one of my favorite cities!

On Tuesday, May 27, I went to work.  The company vehicle shuttled the crew between the hotel and the ship, which over the holiday weekend had been refloated and towed to the Military Ocean Terminal on the west side of Oakland.  One of my first duties was meeting with Charlie Malone, the purser.  While grumbling about the time and money that Bayonne had wasted in sending me to the wrong place, he did all the paperwork necessary for me to recoup my expenses.  “One of us could have gotten you at the airport with the rental car and brought you to the Jack London,” he lamented. “No need to send you chasing all over California!”

As things turned out, I joined a good ship and a good crew.  I spent many hours working with Manny Subda, the second mate, stockpiling and organizing nautical charts, navigational publications, and related materials, and we became quite friendly.  I also assisted Paul Dino, the chief mate, with several projects relating to cargo stowage and emergency equipment.  He, too, was a very good shipmate, and also a mentor for many of the younger fellows.  In my free time in the late afternoons and on weekends, I explored San Francisco and its environs, using the BART system as inexpensive and reliable transportation.  No more taxi rides for me! 

In due time, through the good work of all thirty-five crewmen, the Illinois-Mercury became fully ready to go to sea again.   Some bureaucratic snags delayed the transfer of ownership, and we officially took charge of the Mercury on Friday, the 13^th of June.  That same day we all checked out of the Jack London Inn and took up residence aboard ship.  At 9:00am on Fathers’ Day, June 15, 1980, the Mercury departed from Oakland and went to sea.  It was my first time sailing on the bright, blue, and beautiful Pacific.

While this assignment got off to a bad start, it had a happy ending.  More importantly, this experience taught me valuable lessons.  Never again would I blindly believe everything the Bayonne folks told me about a shipboard assignment.  Never again would I assume that a taxi driver knew where he was going and what he was talking about.  Never again would I fly off to a place I had never been before without first studying it on maps and memorizing its salient features.  Never again would I leave company headquarters without company cash in my pocket for the inevitable unexpected expenses.  Never again would I enable such a fiasco to take place.  Skepticism and improved self-preparation would replace naive gullibility and misplaced trust.

Church leaders in recent years have spoken extensively about life experience, self-reliance, and preparation, applying these points to both spiritual and temporal matters.   President Thomas S. Monson once asserted that “Life is a school of experience,”2 and that “Preparation for life’s opportunities and responsibilities has never been more vital.”3

Wise people prepare as much as possible for everything, learn from both good and bad experiences, and avoid repeating mistakes.  By following these simple principles, we find assurance that “The day will come when we will look upon our period of preparation and be grateful that we properly applied ourselves.”4  My trek to join the Mercury taught me both the educational value of experience and the practical value of preparation.

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1 Bay Area Rapid Transit.

2 Thomas S. Monson, in Teachings of Thomas S. Monson, comp. Lynne F. Cannegieter, Salt Lake City: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 2014, p. 10.

3 Op. cit., p, 231.

4 Op. cit., p. 231.

Culture Shock

The freighter Mercury was sailing southeast in beautiful tropical weather several miles off the coast of Mexico in June of 1980.  She was  bound from San Diego to the Panama Canal with a load of military vehicles which were on their way to the Marine Corps base near Wilmington, North Carolina.  Because of the military nature of this cargo, the Mercury carried a military officer to superintend it on this voyage.  He was a Navy lieutenant in his mid-twenties, which made him a few years older than myself.  He had previously sailed aboard Navy ships and had become a fully qualified surface warfare officer of the unrestricted line.  His voyage aboard the Mercury, however, was his first experience of a civilian cargo vessel, and it astonished him.

Lieutenant Mike was an affable shipmate.  He seemed to blend in reasonably well with the Merchant Marine crew, and he displayed a healthy interest in the workings of the ship.  Some of our ways puzzled him, but he never criticized us or our methods.  This trait alone would have endeared him to the crew.  Above and beyond that, though, he was a genuinely friendly fellow and a good dining room companion.  He loved to eat, and he remarked over almost every meal, “This is even better than the Navy chow!”

One morning when I was on watch, the lieutenant came up to the bridge.  Opening the door slightly, he poked his head through the opening and politely requested “permission to come on the bridge.”   I of course bid him enter, and he came in and stood by me and chatted for a bit.  As we talked he looked around at everything with a somewhat confused expression on his face.

The Mercury had a very spacious bridge.  From where we stood, we could see everything, including out the large plate glass windows to the sea beyond and out the side doors to the also very spacious bridge wings.  The lieutenant took all of this in and realized that until he arrived, I had been all alone up there.  I was a very young third mate, all of 22 years old, and I was in charge of the ship’s movements with no one to assist or supervise me.  His astonishment at this situation soon became obvious,

In a stammering voice, the lieutenant asked me, “There’s no one else here?  There’s no helmsman?”

“It’s on automatic,” I started to reply.

But he continued as if this hadn’t registered.  “You do everything here?  You do your own radar plotting?  You do your own navigation?  You’re your own lookout?  What if something happens?  And the weather observations?  Do you do that, too?”  And so on and so forth.  He was clearly flabbergasted—and possibly terrified, too—at finding one solitary third mate on the bridge of a large cargo ship underway at sea.  This did not fit in with his Navy experience, where an army of crewmen swarmed a much smaller bridge.

I explained that this situation was perfectly normal.  We were in open water with good weather and no traffic.  Since they were not needed on the bridge, the three unlicensed seamen on my watch were working with the bosun on deck.  With my license, I was fully qualified as the mate of the watch and could do everything he asked about and more.  There really was no cause for concern.  I’m not sure that he believed me, though.

After a short interval, the lieutenant turned to go below.  He wished me well, but as he left he muttered uncomprehendingly to himself, “I don’t get this.  Only one man on the bridge?  I can’t understand these guys.  How do they do it?”  And so on and so forth as he disappeared down the stairs.

A few years later, when I was the second mate aboard the Waccamaw, something similar took place.  The ship was docked in Norfolk, Virginia, one weekend in October of 1982, and a large group of naval reservists came aboard for a tour.  These men held full-time civilian jobs and did part-time military work.  They were middle-aged in dress blue uniforms with numerous gold stripes on their sleeves.  To facilitate the sightseeing, the group split in half.  The chief mate led one tour, and I led the other.  We took them through the entire ship, from bow to stern and from bridge to engine room.  They followed closely, listened attentively, and asked intelligent questions.  A few times, though, they seemed confused by the answers they received.

Down in the pump room, one reserve commander asked several questions, and then exclaimed, “I don’t understand how you fellows can run a ship this size with such a small crew!”  He went on to explain that compared to a Navy ship, we had “so few officers” and “so few crewmen” that he just couldn’t see how we got the job done.  This led to some lively discussion, and it came out that several of the other reservists felt the same way.

Through no fault of their own, these men had been taught the Navy way of doing things and not the Merchant Marine way.  And there is a difference.  A commercial ship must operate efficiently and turn a profit in order to survive, while a military ship relies on the bottomless pit of government funding.  Also, the Navy sees a ship primarily as a floating gun platform, whereas in the Merchant Marine a ship is transportation.  These financial and operational dichotomies lead to two completely different ways of thinking and working. One might say that “never the twain shall meet,”[1] but they did in our fleet and usually with the result that the Navy men and the Merchant Marine fellows simply could not understand each other.  Each group looked at the world from its own point of view and found the other’s viewpoint incomprehensible.

One of our Church officials, Elder Dallin H. Oaks, recently made a similar observation:

Each of us has a personal lens through which we view the world.  Our lens gives its special tint to all we see.  It can suppress some features and emphasize others.  It can also reveal things otherwise invisible.[2]

My experiences as a merchant seaman crafted my personal lens many years ago.  My subsequent academic career as a college librarian and student of the humanities reinforced and enhanced this

personal lens  So, after all these years, I still view the world as if I were standing on the bridge wing of a cargo ship.  I like this view.  I see everything quite clearly from this vantage point.

Quite naturally, people do think in terms of what they know and understand, and of course this colors their view of everything outside their own corner of the world.  And when people are confronted with something radically different and completely alien to everything within their range of understanding, they typically respond with astonishment and often say the most outlandish things.

This is reflected in some of the remarks that people ashore have made to me about seafaring.  They’ve ranged from the bizarre—“Do you sleep in hammocks?” and “Do you have flush toilets?”—to the uncomprehending—“Oh, how exciting! You work on a cruise ship!”—to the demeaning—”How can you stand to live like that?!”—to the sadly inevitable and inappropriate jokes about shipwrecks.  While these remarks grow very tiresome very quickly, they do serve to illustrate the gulf that separates the merchant seamen from the laymen.

Captain Paul McHenry Washburn, the Master of the container ship Stella Lykes and a literary figure, asserted the opposite point of view:

But there are a lot of us who are here because this is where we fit in, and we don’t fit in anywhere else.  We seem to be out of step.  The square peg in the round hole.  I was out of place as a child, and now I am not looking forward to retirement.  I dread it.[3]

Furthermore, he added as he looked toward land from the Stella Lykes:

I would rather be here for the worst that could be here than over there for the best that could be there.  I’ve never felt comfortable or secure anywhere else.[4]

 

Admittedly, this is an extreme opinion that seems to border on solipsism.  After all, Captain Washburn did have a family ashore, and he cared for them all very much.  Nonetheless, his remarks do summarize the situation well.  The merchant fleet is a culture unto itself, separate and apart from life in any other profession, including the Navy.  A landsman, or for that matter a naval officer,  stepping aboard a cargo ship would experience culture shock just as much as a seaman going ashore and taking up a new occupation would.  Some things, like the proverbial oil and water, just don’t mix.

It is precisely for this reason that the seaman-turned-playwright Eugene O’Neill penned his famous lines:

It was a great mistake, my being born a man.  I would have been much more successful as a sea gull or a fish.  As it is, I will always be a stranger who never feels at home, who does not really want and is not really wanted, who can never belong, who must always be a little in love with death![5]

Another extreme position, this one not only borders on solipsism but also leans toward misanthropy.  Still, the author makes his point well, and I have thought similarly many times in social and business situations over the years.  In the end, I’ve just had to resign myself to the simple fact that going to sea has made me immutably different.  Thus, both Mr. O’Neill’s and Captain Washburn’s assessments are correct.

Yet there remains one further point which these gentlemen did not address.  In his trial before the Athenian court, Socrates asserted that “the unexamined life is not worth living.”[6]

Sea gulls and fish, with their inherently limited capabilities, cannot know how fortunate they are. Unable to think and reason, they cannot ponder the higher matters of life.  They cannot read and study the classics of literature and history and philosophy and theology or master the natural and applied sciences.  At first glance, their lives may look more attractive than that of the social outcast who can’t fit in anywhere except at sea, but the intellectual limitations of the sea gull and the fish would inevitably become intolerably crippling.  Humans, including merchant seamen, are created in the image of their Creator, and as such, they share in his characteristics, including intelligence, which enables them to learn, enrich themselves, and achieve so much more than animals.  What an honor this is, since the scriptures inform us that “The glory of God is intelligence, or, in other words, light and truth” (D&C 93:36).  Even the most socially misfit, solipsistic, and misanthropic merchant seaman shares intelligence, light, and truth with God.

Furthermore, with these divine qualities, there is no need to dread retirement.  I’m actually looking forward to it.  I anticipate a robust retirement filled with grandchildren, academic studies, church activities, and occasional cruise ship voyages!

Before I leave for work in the predawn hours, I often step out onto the porch and gaze upon the stars.  The constellation Orion stands out in the south.  Betelgeuse  shines on the east flank, Rigel on the west, and Sirius below.  I smile as I remember standing with my sextant on the bridge wing of the Rigel, taking sights of her heavenly namesake.  Thoughts of ships, voyages, and even sea gulls and fish crowd upon my mind, too.  But the great celestial majesty above me transcends these idle reminiscences.  Thus enlightened, my mind recalls in the great celestial language, Gloria Dei est intellegentia.

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[1] Rudyard Kipling, ‘The Ballad of East and West,” in A Victorian Anthology, 1837-1895, ed. Edmond Clarence Steckman, at www.bartleby.com.

[2] Quoted in “Spiritual awareness” (sic), Church News, June 25, 2017, p. 16.

[3] Quoted in John McPhee, Looking for a Ship, New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1990, p. 157.

[4] Op. cit., p. 155-156.

[5] Eugene O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey into Night, New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989, pp. 153-154.

[6] Plato, The Apology of Socrates, tr. Benjamin Jowett, in The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces, vol. 1, 6^th ed., New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1992, p. 824.