The Seas of Tranquility

This past summer our home city of Nashua undertook two noteworthy construction projects.  One involved the tearing up and repaving of Pennichuck Street, which provided an excitement and entertainment extravaganza for the grandchildren.  The other was the rebuilding of the boat ramp near Greeley Park.  This primitive facility, located in the woods at the end of a badly beaten up dirt road, has long enabled recreational boaters to launch trailered boats into the Merrimack River.  This  year the launching ramp was rebuilt with better materials, the access road and parking area, though still dirt, were enlarged and improved, and a small trash dumpster and porta-potty were added  Otherwise, it remained a bare bones set-up, with no electricity, no illumination, and no running water. 

 

Situated within the city limits yet far from the madding crowds of busy streets and noisy neighborhoods, the boat ramp had an atmosphere of peace and quiet in the early mornings and thus offered a respite from the commotion and confusion of life.  Located about a mile from our house, it lay within easy walking distance along the largely untrafficked Boston and Maine Railroad and dirt access road.  I went there once or twice each week, and I always arrived in the pre-dawn darkness, well in advance of the boaters.

Perched in quiet solitude on a large rock or fallen tree trunk, I gazed eastward and watched the dawn break over the farmland of neighboring Litchfield.  The only artificial lights came from a farm house directly across the river and from a residential neighborhood a mile downstream.  Otherwise, Nature lit the scene with several stars, the occasional Moon, and the soon-to-emerge Sun.  The scattered clouds reflected the Sun’s light in pink, orange, and purple, and these colors were in turn reflected on the unrippled surface of the river.  With its water as flat and undisturbed as a mill pond, the Merrimack, like a mirror, reflected all the colors of the sky above and the rows of trees along its banks.  As the light grew brighter and culminated in sunrise, the effect was sublime and spiritual.  The still small voice carried clearly through the cool dawn air over the tranquil Merrimack, and this pristine natural setting became supernatural.  A perfect way to start the day! 

I usually had at least half an hour before the first boaters arrived and broke the silence.  In this interval my mind wandered to other locales of peace and quiet and solitude.  I have known several such places over the years, but here at the boat ramp one in particular stood out in memory, and my wandering mind eventually settled on it. 

The South Atlantic between South America and Africa is a calm, quiet, and lonely ocean.  There has long been commerce on it, of course, mostly between the European nations and their former colonies, but this has never rivaled the volumes of traffic that have plied the North Atlantic.  Ships would go for many, many days without seeing another vessel on the South Atlantic. Vast stretches of this great sea have always been and still remain isolated from the outside world.  For the seaman  who likes solitude and wants to make a quiet voyage on a calm sea with mild weather, the South Atlantic is the ocean of choice. 

My first encounter with the South Atlantic occurred not aboard ship, but on an airplane.  In the mid-afternoon of Wednesday, September 12, 1979, and accompanied by five other crewmen, I left Patrick Air Force Base near Melbourne, Florida, aboard a military cargo aircraft bound for Ascension Island, The airplane made a stop for dinner and refueling at Antigua, and then travelled overnight across the equator to Ascension, arriving early in the morning on Thursday the 13^th.

A British colonial outpost located at 7° 56’ south latitude and 14° 25’ west longitude, Ascension Island was a dormant volcanic mountain used mostly for military purposes by both the United Kingdom and the United States.  It was also a port of call for the range instrumentation vessel General Hoyt S. Vandenberg, which my five new colleagues and I joined when she arrived from Recife, Brazil, on Saturday, the 15th.  The ship anchored off Georgetown, the main settlement, in the late morning.  We and several pallets of freight and provisions were delivered alongside in a cargo launch at 1:00pm.  Four hours later, the Vandenberg weighed anchor and got underway again. 

The two and a half days of enforced leisure while waiting for the ship on Ascension Island had not been popular with all of the new crewmen.  I rather liked it, though.  Ascension had a nice library, great food, unique scenery, and enticing beaches.  We were free to roam pretty much as we wished, and I naturally gravitated toward the beach.  I was all set to jump into the beautifully inviting, clear, warm water of the South Atlantic, when a hammerhead shark appeared right in front of me.  I quickly changed my mind about going swimming! 

After two and a half days, though, it felt good to see the Vandenberg arrive.  I needed to be going somewhere, getting on with my career, upgrading my license, and so on.  These things were very important to me then.  And so that Saturday evening, with the ship on a southeasterly heading and making about eleven knots, I stood my first 8 to 12 watch as the new third mate. 

The Vandenberg headed for a special operations area a few hundred miles off the coast of South Africa and arrived there on Sunday, September 23.  She remained on station there until Thursday the 27^th, and then proceeded to another special operations area in mid-ocean, about a thousand miles south of Ascension Island.  On station at this new site from Monday, October 1, through Friday the 5^th,  she then returned briefly to Ascension on Tuesday the 9th.  I reached the ripe old age of 22 at sea on Sunday the 7^th. 

To call this voyage peaceful and quiet would be a masterpiece of understatement.  In this entire time, the Vandenberg came upon one other ship and sighted one island, Saint Helena, on radar.  Otherwise, this large tract of the South Atlantic remained devoid of human intrusion.  In addition, the weather was consistently mild with warm air, excellent visibility, a  mostly clear sky, and a calm sea.  After spending the summer aboard the Rigel in the hustle and bustle of the Mediterranean, this voyage on the placid and remote South Atlantic seemed like a vacation!

Since the Vandenberg provided such an easy life, and since I was young and ambitious, I used this leisure time for professional development.  On the 8 to 12 morning watches, I took hourly sun lines, worked up running fixes, calculated local apparent noon, and worked out a latitude by meridian altitude.  On the 8 to 12 evening watches, I studied the constellations of the Southern Hemisphere and selected the Southern Cross as my favorite.  Frequently around dinner time, I returned to the bridge to observe the green flash at sunset.  In my off-duty hours, I studied oceanography and meteorology, particularly ocean current circulation, surface wind patterns, and tropical cyclone formation.  Even though my third mate’s license was only five months old, it was never too early to prepare for the next round of exams for the second mate’s license.  For more recreational reading, I had brought along a history of Christianity. 

During this voyage in the South Atlantic, the Vandenberg carried a contingent of technicians who worked with sophisticated electronic equipment in carrying out the ship’s national defense mission for the federal government.  We Merchant Marine crewmen sailed the ship for them and took them where they needed to go.  When the ship arrived back at Ascension Island at 6:00am on Tuesday, October 9, the technicians’ work in the South Atlantic was finished.  On sailing again that afternoon, the Vandenberg went north to Monrovia, Liberia, and arrived for a weekend visit early on Friday the 12^th.   Along the way, she crossed the equator and left the South Atlantic behind. 

I, too, left the South Atlantic behind and returned only twice, in February and May of 2016.  I did not join a ship on these occasions, but traveled to Brazil to visit my daughter and newborn granddaughter.  I encountered the South Atlantic fleetingly from airplanes, from the coast road on the east side of Salvador, and from the lighthouse and promenade at the southern tip of Salvador. About 400 miles up the coast stood Recife, the city where my daughter was married in July of 2014 and the port from which the Vandenberg had sailed for Ascension Island 35 years previously.  After such a long time, it felt wonderful to gaze upon this magnificent sea of tranquility again.  I could have remained at the South Atlantic oceanfront indefinitely, but the baby needed attention. 

I thought I could have remained at the Nashua boat ramp indefinitely, too.  But after the Sun rose over the Merrimack River, this inland sea of tranquility always lost some of its idyllic peacefulness when the first boaters arrived and noisily launched their boats and revved their engines.  At this point, it was time to walk home again.  A busy day awaited me there, a day filled with household chores, tumultuous street repairs, and very excited grandchildren.

No matter how busy and tumultuous the day, however, my dawn retreats at the waterfront  enabled me to “Go placidly amid the noise and the haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence,”[1] and thereby to “be at peace with God.”[2]

 

Next, I am happy to present two photographs of the South Atlantic from our family archives.  In the first, we see Ascension Island, including the principal settlement of Georgetown.  I took this picture on Saturday, September 15, 1979, from the starboard bridge wing of the General Hoyt S, Vandenberg.  I thought that I might never return to this uniquely beautiful island, so I seized the opportunity and took several photographs of it.

In the second picture, taken four decades later on Monday, March 30, 2020,, the majestic South Atlantic Ocean stretches out to the horizon from the beach and lighthouse of Itapuã on the east side of Salvador, Bahia, Brazil.  My daughter took this photograph, which features my granddaughter Miss Lydia Elizabeth gazing seaward from the beach.  Such attraction to the ocean seems to run in the family!

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[1] Max Ehrmann, “Desiderata,” 1927, found at www.desiderata.com. 

[2] Ibid.

All the Girls

The oceanographic survey ship Bartlett rested quietly alongside the wharf in Port Everglades, Fort Lauderdale, Florida, on Friday, January 4, 1985.  She was preparing for a two-weeks-long voyage in the Gulf of Mexico and would sail on Monday, the 7^th.   Late this Friday afternoon, the day’s work was winding down, but it would resume promptly the following morning.  Nearly at the end of my own duties for the day, I went up to the bridge and glanced out the windows in the direction of the inlet that connects Port Everglades with the open Atlantic, and there I beheld a great sight.

Entering port through this narrow inlet was the Cunard Line’s famous passenger ship Queen Elizabeth 2.  I watched as this magnificent vessel slowly and gracefully glided in from the sea, turned around in the basin, and eased alongside her berth.  Her mooring lines then snaked ashore, and she was made fast directly across the wharf from the comparatively diminutive Bartlett.  Next, I wrote up the log, went off duty, and had my dinner.  Afterwards, I went ashore for a closer look at the great Queen.

Almost a thousand feet in length, the Queen took up nearly the entire dock space on the east side of the Port Everglades basin.  To look this ship over carefully involved a lot of walking.  This great sight was worth every step, though, for the Queen Elizabeth 2 was clearly the most interesting  thing in Fort Lauderdale that day.  Several of my shipmates felt the same way, and a group of us roamed the pier admiring the Queen.

In the early evening twilight, the passengers aboard the Queen began to stream ashore to enjoy a night on the town in Fort Lauderdale.  They came out by the dozens, and they made for a somewhat odd sight.  The vast majority came ashore as couples.  Without exception, the men were much more advanced in age than the ladies.  This was clearly evident in their balding heads, gray fringes, sagging jowls, and pot bellies.  The ladies, by contrast, were tall and slender with long flowing hair and radiantly beautiful faces.  They were dressed in evening gowns, and the men wore tuxedos.

After stepping off the gangway, each couple walked a few steps to a waiting lineup of limousines.  The drivers, also attired in tuxedos, hurried with lavish gesticulation to open the doors for the young ladies.   Several of the older men gruffly interrogated the drivers about their vehicles:  “Do you have a wet bar?  Do you have a TV?  Do you have a phone?”  If a particular limousine failed to meet these expectations, the older man turned his nose up in the air and led his young lady away to a more worthy conveyance.  Once embarked in their limousines, the couples were chauffeured away into town. 

This spectacle continued for quite a long while.  There were just so many of these superbly dressed but oddly matched couples coming ashore from the Queen and then being whisked away by this enormous fleet of luxurious limousines.  This ostentatious display of wealth astonished me almost as much as each couple’s blatant disparity in age.  Yet there it all was, and doing a very brisk business.

Later in the evening, their shore excursions completed, these same couples returned to the Queen in their limousines.  The tuxedoed chauffeurs again held the doors for the young ladies, received their tips from the older gentlemen, and then drove their now empty vehicles away.  At dawn the next morning, Saturday the 5^th, the Queen Elizabeth 2 took in her lines and went to sea again.  The Bartlett remained behind and continued preparations for her own upcoming voyage.

My initial reaction on seeing this parade of old men and young girls was bewilderment.  Somehow it just didn’t seem kosher.  In thinking about it, I figured that they were probably not fathers and daughters, nor uncles and nieces, nor grandfathers and granddaughters.  I did not hear any of the girls call any of the men “Daddy,” or “Uncle,” or “Grandpa.”  The thought of such innocent pairings-up seemed too idealistic and unlikely, not to mention naïve.  By process of elimination, I concluded that I was most likely seeing what was euphemistically called an escort service.  These old men obviously had money, and they were willing to spend it on young, pretty girls.  And they no doubt expected returns on their investments. 

Fearing that I was becoming too cynical while still in my twenties, I was relieved to hear an older colleague remark, “These girls are making hay while the sun shines.”  It was expensive hay, too, much more than anyone on the Bartlett could afford.  Yet the Bartlett was crewed mostly by young men, about the same ages as these girls.  That seemed like a more natural source of attraction than old men so far past their prime.  But some such men still salivate over young, pretty girls, and some girls love what money can buy.  Otherwise, I could not imagine what they would have in common socially.  I wondered, though, when the sun stopped shining and the thrill of sailing on the Queen wore off, how would these girls then feel about their careers as “escorts?”

With their many warnings against moral decadence and degeneracy, the ancient scriptures attest that the lechery of old men is not a new phenomenon.  These senior citizens embarked on the Queen would have done well to heed the proverb’s counsel, “Lust not after her beauty in thine heart; neither let her take thee with her eyelids” (Prov. 6:25).  They were not the only ones, though.

Many years later while working ashore, my employer feared that I had suffered a hernia and sent me to be examined by a physician.  Miss Patty accompanied me.  As we and numerous other people sat quietly in the waiting room, an odd spectacle developed.  The administrative area behind the receptionist was open by both sight and hearing to the waiting room.  Everything that happened there was easily visible and audible to the waiting patients.  When we first arrived, all was quiet.  But then an obviously older man (receding hairline, grayish-white fringe, sagging jowls, and pot belly) approached a much younger lady (slender, long blond hair, and pretty face) working at a desk.   At first we thought nothing of it, but after a moment, the one-sided conversation caught our attention.

As a room full of patients waited for the physician, this sixty-plus-year-old man flirted publicly, loudly, and shamelessly with this approximately twenty-year-old girl.  He laughed at his own inappropriate jokes while she sat silently and looked extremely uncomfortable with it all.  This performance continued unchecked for several minutes.  As we watched in amazement, I remarked to Miss Patty, “I wonder who that guy is?”

“I don’t know,” she replied  “Maybe he’s the office manager.”

After a few more minutes, the show ended and then we were called into an exam room by a nurse.  She took care of the preliminaries with us and then left saying, “The Doctor will be right in.”

A minute later, the old man who had just been carrying on with the young lady entered the room.  He caught us both by surprise, and Miss Patty blurted out, “You’re the Doctor?!

He then introduced himself.  Miss Patty and I exchanged inquisitive glances with raised eyebrows, and the Doctor saw this.  The medical checkup that followed was carried out in what we thought was an unprofessional and condescending manner.  This man had been caught, and he clearly did not like it.  My employer was paying him, so I did not protest.  If it had been my dime and my time, however, I would have left and gone elsewhere.  But the good news was that I did not have a hernia, only a mild muscle strain.

Afterwards, I read the Doctor’s posted credentials in the waiting room.  He was a board certified surgeon, had medical licenses in two states, and held academic degrees from two of this country’s most prestigious universities.  With all these lofty qualifications, I would have expected more professional behavior.  Instead, I thought of Shakespeare’s famous lament, “How ill white hairs become a fool and jester!”[1]

On a happier note, a portrait of the Queen arrived in the mail some time after my encounter with her in Port Everglades.  This was part of an advertisement for a travel agency.  It was a beautiful photograph of a beautiful ship, and it proved that not all junk mail is junk!  I’m happy to share it here: 

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[1] King Henry IV, Part II, V:v:51.

The Lady Commodore

In between voyages, the Bartlett usually moored in the basin of Port Everglades in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.  During these layovers, oceanographic survey equipment was  installed and changed out, technicians reported aboard and were discharged, fuel and provisions were loaded, and repairs to machinery were made.  All routine operations.  Occasionally visitors came aboard, mostly in connection with the survey equipment and mechanical repairs.  On Thursday, October 18, 1984, however, the Commodore of the Fleet came to visit the ship.

Nowadays a Commodore is an unusual personage.  In the Navy, there were Commodores ranking above Captains and below Rear Admirals until the late 1890s, when the position was abolished.  In the Merchant Marine, a Commodore was the senior Captain in the company.  Mostly an honorific, the rank and title of Commodore recognized the long years of experience and extensive knowledge of ships and the sea held by the line’s longest-serving Master.  In some cases, merchant Commodores had some administrative duties ashore; more typically, however, this administrative work came under the jurisdiction of the Port Captain.  Most Commodores continued to go to sea.  When they retired and came ashore, they often wrote their memoirs.

The Commodores who reigned over our line in the 1980s were different.  They were commissioned naval officers holding the rank of Captain, not Commodore.  Also, they were not the senior shipmasters in the fleet; in fact, none of them even held Merchant Marine licenses of any level, let alone as Masters.  Simply put, they were administrators.  They were not real seamen but office personnel who sailed desks in the company offices in Bayonne, New Jersey.  And these offices, contained in a windowless building situated on the waterfront of New York Harbor, did not permit the Commodores to even peek outside and see the shipping.

In my eight years with the company, I think we had four or five Commodores in succession.  They never stayed long, but arrived and departed with express train regularity.  Until this one day aboard the Bartlett in Port Everglades, I never saw any of these Commodores, although aboard all the ships we routinely received communications from them.  They remained distant and ethereal figures who sent commendatory memos for work well done and felicitous greetings at Christmastime.

Most of the seamen preferred it this way, and for good reason.  The Commodores and many other high-ranking personnel were regarded not with reverence and respect but with suspicion and disdain.  Too many times aboard too many ships big shots of various descriptions  came on board in various ports for very dubious purposes.  They demanded lavish attention from busy crews, and their presence on board interfered with the ships’ routines and wasted much of the company’s time and money.  In short, they got in everyone’s way.  They had no useful work to do and they made nuisances of themselves.  Consequently, the seamen came to regard visiting big shots as nothing but trouble.  The more inquisitive-minded of the seamen wondered about the psychology that drove these big shots to behave the way they did.

Impromptu discussions in the chow hall or at the gangway sometimes focused on the abnormal psychosis of the big shot.  There were many questions but few answers.  Why does this guy act like this?  What’s he trying to prove?  Is he compensating for an overwhelming inferiority complex?  Is he an unwanted second son trying to outshine his older brother?  Is he an  ignorant person trying to sound more sophisticated than he really is?  Is his demonstrated contempt for the crew an act to conceal his own lack of self-esteem?  Whatever his problem is, we don’t need it here.  He should go home and get counseling!

One big shot and retiring Commodore especially rankled the crews of every ship in the fleet with a farewell message which he sent on his departure.  In this missive he discussed his upcoming retirement, and went so far as to brag that he had taken the exams for and had been given an original Master’s license by the Coast Guard!!  This meant that on the basis of going to sea in the Navy, the Coast Guard had permitted him to take the exams not for third mate or second mate or even chief mate, but to jump right to the top.  Whatever his military credentials may or may not have been, he had not built a career of sailing aboard civilian cargo ships.  This lack of experience in seaborne commerce, of which the Master’s license stood as the crowning achievement, struck the Masters and mates in the fleet as outrageous beyond belief, a slap in the face to all merchant seamen everywhere!  If this fellow could get a Master’s license without ever having been a merchant seaman, let alone working his way up through the licensing levels, then the Master’s license itself would become nothing but a meaningless piece of paper, a mere decoration.  But then, big shots always seemed to somehow get everything they wanted.

It was with the cynicism generated by negative experiences involving big shots that the crew of the Bartlett anticipated the arrival of the company’s first lady Commodore one bright and sunny October morning.

About 9:00am Commodore Elizabeth Wylie drove onto the pier in a nondescript rental car.  She parked the vehicle in a legal parking space, got out, and walked over to the ship and up the gangway.  She arrived alone, without an entourage.  She wore plain Navy khakis with only her rank insignia on the collar.  She did not wear battle stars, campaign ribbons, or gold braid.  The gangway watchman and I met her when she stepped aboard.  She greeted both of us cordially and introduced herself simply as Elizabeth Wylie without adding any titles.  She cheerfully showed me her company identification when I asked for it.  In fact, she remarked that of the five ships that she had visited thus far, the Bartlett was the only one to require identification, and she was happy to see this done.  I next notified Captain Giaccardo that the Commodore had arrived,   He came along a minute or so later, and the introductions continued.  The discussion that followed took place in normal conversational tones.  There was no shouting nor barking of orders nor unreasonable demands for lavish hospitality.  Neither were there any displays of self-importance, military pomposity, or personal aggrandizement.  On the contrary, the occasion was noteworthy for its simple civility.  After previous experiences aboard other ships, it seemed astonishingly benign.

After a few minutes of light conversation at the head of the gangway,  Captain Giaccardo  and Commodore Wylie set out on a tour of the Bartlett.  I returned to my own duties thinking that the day would not be so bad after all.

And it wasn’t.  The Commodore spent the next few hours touring the ship, meeting and talking with the crew, having lunch, and discussing business with the Captain and Chief Engineer.  I saw her again a few times, too.  She impressed me as being very interested in the ship and the oceanographic survey work that it did, and also as an exceptionally pleasant person.  After spending most of the day on board, she wished us all well and returned ashore as quietly as she had come aboard.  After her departure, a broadly smiling and very happy Captain Giaccardo told me more about her visit.

He, too, had not been looking forward to this state occasion.  A young man in his early thirties, Captain Giaccardo was serving his first stint as Master on the Bartlett, and quite naturally he did not want any trouble with big shots visiting from the Bayonne headquarters.  Well, he didn’t get any.  Captain Giaccardo described Commodore Wylie in glowing terms.  She was friendly and courteous and very gracious.  Obviously intelligent and well educated, she asked many good questions about the ship and its survey voyages, and then she listened attentively to the answers without interrupting or otherwise demonstrating impatience.  Somewhat surprisingly, she admitted to never having gone to sea—this was before the Navy became fully co-ed—and also to being new on the job as Commodore, having started only two and a half weeks ago, at the beginning of the month.  For these reasons, she stated her intention of visiting as much of the fleet as she could and learning as much as possible about all the ships and their operations.  She expressed a sincere admiration for the crews she had met thus far and for the work they did.  In this way, she made an outstanding first impression as a gracious guest and industrious administrator. 

Everyone on the ship who had met Commodore Wylie liked her and appreciated her polite and professional demeanor, her interest in the ship and its crew, and her demonstrated willingness to listen and learn.  While this behavior sounds like simple common courtesy, previous experiences had unfortunately shown it to be more the exception than the rule with visiting big shots.  But this one was different.  In Shakespearean terms, Commodore Wylie displayed neither “the insolence of office”[1] nor “the proud man’s contumely.”[2]  In shipboard terms, she did not act at all like a big shot!

The Bartlett remained in Port Everglades for another week and then sailed on Thursday, October 25.  She went on a three-weeks-long survey voyage in the southwest Atlantic, just outside the Caribbean basin.  I never saw Commodore Wylie again, but I did hope that she would do well in her new position as Commodore of the Fleet.  In retrospect, I see Commodore Wylie as following the scriptural admonition, “Humble yourselves in the sight of the Lord, and he will lift you up” (James 4:10).  She boarded the Bartlett humbly and without fanfare as a new employee striving to learn the ropes, and she returned ashore commanding the respect and admiration of the entire crew.

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[1] Hamlet, III:i:73.

[2] Op. Cit., III:i:71.

Going Home to the Sea

The view took my breath away.  From the Crow’s Nest Lounge on the uppermost enclosed deck of the cruise ship Nieuw Amsterdam, I beheld Port Everglades for the first time in 27 years.  Moored to the same wharf that my diminutive Bartlett had occupied in the mid-1980s, this flagship of the Holland America Line was the largest vessel on which I had ever set foot.  With a week-long voyage to the Caribbean islands ahead, I would have ample opportunity to explore this great ship.  For the moment, though, I studied Port Everglades.

Much had changed over the years.  There were new cruise ship terminals, new parking garages, new airport-style security checkpoints, and of course, new ships.  Much had also not changed.  The artificial basin that comprises the port looked the same.  So did the industrial landscape to the west, the high rises of downtown Fort Lauderdale, and the waterfront condominiums that flanked the harbor entrance.  But one landmark in all of this was missing.  Burt and Jack’s, a fancy restaurant owned by the actor Burt Reynolds that had occupied the point of land separating the basin from the intracoastal waterway, had been deemed a threat to national security and removed by the federal government.  Gone were the broad lawns and stands of palm trees and the parking lot full of Mercedes, Rolls-Royces, and Jaguars.  Their places were taken by bland concrete and a blander warehouse.

To the east, however, the great Atlantic Ocean—my ocean—remained the same.  A gentle onshore breeze came out of the east, as it almost always did.  In plain view just beyond the narrow barrier beach, the deep blue water capped by the lighter blue sky speckled with tufts of white altocumulus clouds beckoned the exiled son of the sea to come home.  I would, in a few hours’ time, when the Nieuw Amsterdam sailed.  But first, I needed to reacclimate myself.

Port Everglades was alive with activity.  In addition to the Nieuw Amsterdam, four other cruise vessels were loading passengers—the Westerdam, the Carnival Freedom, the Celebrity Solstice, and the Allure of the Seas.  Across the basin the tanker High Energy discharged petroleum ashore while the tanker Pula took in her lines, left her berth, and headed seaward escorted by police boats.  From the cargo docks along the intracoastal waterway the container ship Melbourne Strait emerged and passed through the inlet to the open sea.  The sight of all these vessels going about their business brought me back in time.

On October 12, 1984, I had reported aboard the oceanographic survey ship Bartlett at this very dock.  With a brand new chief mate’s license in a deteriorating employment situation, I was very fortunate to join ship as second mate.  I made several voyages from Port Everglades aboard the Bartlett.  She did survey work in the Caribbean and the Gulf, passed along the Keys and through the Bahamas to her operating areas, called at Key West, Florida, and Gulfport, Mississippi, and late one night rescued a shipwreck victim, a mysterious figure whose story did not quite add up.  Toward the end of February, 1985, the Bartlett was once again in Port Everglades, preparing to go into the nearby Tracor Shipyard for her annual overhaul.  When she was safely in the yard, I took a few days off and travelled north by air to visit family.  Not included in the itinerary were the medical checkup that diagnosed my cancer and the subsequent surgery and radiation treatment.  I never did return to the Bartlett.  And until James signed the family up for this voyage aboard the Nieuw Amsterdam, I thought that I would never return to Port Everglades, either.

Like a child with a new toy, then, I merrily reminisced and enthusiastically pointed out all the sights of Port Everglades to my children from the upper deck of the Nieuw Amsterdam.  It was Sunday afternoon, February 5, 2012, but I had completely lost track of the time.  At length, Miss Patty came along and reminded me that we were not there to sightsee, but to attend our oldest son’s wedding.  Leaving the Crow’s Nest, then, the entire family went outdoors and up to the highest deck on the ship.  There, in a lovely ceremony under the canopy of the open sky and surrounded by merchant shipping at the edge of the great Atlantic, our son James married Miss Sarah Ruth Marchand.  Steven and Michael served as ushers, and Miss Karen as a bridesmaid.

If ships could speak, I mused, what tales they could tell!  As our son and his fiancé prepared to exchange vows aboard this Nieuw Amsterdam of the Holland America Line, I thought of my grandparents.  In June of 1957, shortly before my time, they had sailed from New York to Le Havre aboard an older Nieuw Amsterdam of the Holland America Line.  On other occasions they had also sailed aboard the Noordam, the Westerdam, and the Statendam.  Little could they have known that their great-grandson would work for Holland America, meet his fiancé there, sail aboard the Zuiderdam, and marry aboard the new Nieuw Amsterdam—a unique family history connection!  I trust that they were watching the day’s events from their celestial vantage point with smiles on their faces.

Following the wedding ceremony Holland America hosted a reception one deck below in the Crow’s Nest lounge.  Elsewhere on the ship, passengers were boarding and the crew was preparing to go to sea.  At 4:30pm emergency drills were held, and promptly at 5:00pm the Nieuw Amsterdam quietly took in her lines and eased away from the dock.  Gathered on the promenade deck, the entire family watched in fascination as the great ship left the port behind and sailed through the inlet and out to sea.  As she did so, I called my parents on Long Island on the cell phone.  For the first time in the family’s history, three generations were able to converse by telephone while two of them were at sea.

The Nieuw Amsterdam sailed eastward from Port Everglades into the Atlantic and then through the northwestern Bahamas overnight.  The next day she steered southeast past Eleuthera, Cat Island, and San Salvador.  Her first port of call would be Grand Turk in the Turks and Caicos Islands on Tuesday.  Then on Wednesday and Thursday she would visit San Juan, Puerto Rico, and Philipsburg, St. Maarten.  Friday and Saturday would be spent entirely at sea, and early next Sunday she would return to Fort Lauderdale.  A tourist itinerary, to be supplemented by fancy dining and entertainment aboard ship.  My principal interests aboard the Nieuw Amsterdam, however, were threefold: my son’s wedding, the ocean, and the ship itself.  Tourism took a lower priority, although I have always found the history and geography of the Caribbean fascinating.  With James and Sarah married and the ship now at sea, I turned my attention to the ship and the sea.

It felt so good—so ineffably good—to go to sea again aboard a merchant ship.  The sights and sounds and sensations of a ship at sea were marvelous beyond description.  The east wind driving the low swells, the rippled surface of the water, the endless circle of the horizon, the sun and clouds by day, the moon and stars by night, the swishing of the water alongside the steel hull, the churning of the propeller wash, the gentle rolling of the ship, the soft vibration of the decks—all of these and more combined to produce the supernal experience of once again being at sea.  The exiled son of the sea had come home and was partaking of “the magic monotony of existence between sky and water”¹ that only the most eloquent of writers with experience at sea can begin to articulate.

I spent many hours of every day and night simply looking at the sea and sky.  It had been many years, and I felt that I needed to make up for lost time.  As I had done on watch long ago, I analyzed the weather conditions and the sea state and concluded that the semi-permanent Azores high pressure system was producing the east-southeasterly wind which in turn was the driving force behind the waves and the swell pattern into which the Nieuw Amsterdam was heading.  A very gentle combined pitching and rolling motion resulted, just enough to let everyone know that we really were at sea.  I watched as the sun gradually dropped from the sky to the distant western horizon and colored in pastels the towering cumuliform clouds that are so typical of the lower latitudes.  In the predawn hours I gazed at the stars and tried to pick out my old navigational favorites through the intermittent cloud cover.  The nearly full moon illuminated the horizon sufficiently to facilitate an accurate star plot, although in this technological age a loran-c fix would be just as good and require a lot less effort.  That’s very practical, of course.  Still, few things in life can offer the sense of satisfaction that comes from working out a round of stars and plotting perfectly intersecting lines of position on a chart.

I made frequent visits to the Nieuw Amsterdam’s library.  This was an ideal spot to sit down and write letters describing the voyage to the folks at family headquarters.  I also consulted the National Geographic book of atlases.  Not having traversed these waters in a while, I felt the need to refamiliarize myself with the neighborhood.  Memories of vessels and voyages long past came to mind as I studied the shipping lanes through the Bahama and Virgin Islands.  James and Steven looked on several times as I pointed out where I had gone before and where we were going now.  In addition, a flat screen monitor mounted on a nearby bulkhead provided continuous updates of navigational and meteorological information.  I consulted it often.

The Nieuw Amsterdam had many such state-of-the-art features.  Built in Italy, she entered service in 2010.  She was 936 feet long and 106 feet wide; carried 2,106 passengers and 929 crew; measured 86,700 gross tons; was powered by six diesel generators, four producing 16,000 horsepower and two producing 11,000 horsepower; was driven by two azipod electric-drive propeller units, each with an output of 17.6 megawatts; had a maximum speed of 23 knots; and carried three bow thrusters for maneuverability when docking and undocking.  Her port of registry was Rotterdam, the Netherlands.  Her Master was Captain Edward van Zaane, and her Chief Engineer was Pieter Kesteloo, both of the Netherlands.²

Additionally, the Nieuw Amsterdam was a floating art museum.  Gracing the landings in the midships stairway were magnificent original paintings of historically significant Holland America Line vessels.  My favorite depicted the earlier Nieuw Amsterdam, on which my grandparents had sailed, at sea eastbound from New York and passing on her starboard side the lightship Ambrose.  I practically fell in love with this painting and wished that I could take it home with me!  One deck down hung an equally impressive port quarter view of the old Nieuw Amsterdam entering port.  In the Crow’s Nest, the brass bell from this ship was prominently displayed behind a plate glass window.  Nearby stood a ten-foot-long scale model of this earlier Nieuw Amsterdam.  In her era, 1938 to 1973, she had been the flagship of the Dutch Merchant Marine.

The landings in the forward and aft stairways were decorated with varied artwork of a colonial theme.  This included pen-and-ink drawings of the Dutch settlements in Lower Manhattan, a painting of Captain Henry Hudson’s famous ship Halve Maen,³ and a portrait of Governor Pieter Stuyvesant.  As history has always been one of my favorite subjects, I appreciated these displays of historical material.  Much of it focused on New York.  It was all very attractively and graciously presented, yet I wondered if the Dutch were subtly reminding the English, “We were there first!” 

Lining the bulkheads in all the passageways leading to the passengers’ staterooms were vintage black and white photographs of all the Holland America Line ships over the years.  Some were portrayed at sea and others in various ports.  Most notable was New York, where the Manhattan skyline in its various stages of development loomed large behind vessels underway on the Hudson River.  A few of the most recent of these photographs showed ships passing the twin towers of the World Trade Center.  Whether we like it or not, this is history now, too.  The Dutch, with a long and not always easy history of their own, demonstrated a profound respect for both countries’ heritage in this extensive gallery.

The history continued in the ports that we visited.  Miss Patty and I learned a lot about both Grand Turk and St. Maarten on the cultural and historical tours.  My favorite port of call, however, was San Juan. 

Steeped in both natural beauty and colonial history, San Juan, like Port Everglades, brought back memories for me.  I had been there before in November of 1982, when I was embarked on the tanker Waccamaw as second mate.  This ship docked briefly in Roosevelt Roads, Puerto Rico, on a few occasions.  During one of these intervals a few of us drove to San Juan in a borrowed automobile and spent the midnight hours wandering through the streets of the old colonial city.  I saw San Juan in the dark, never in daylight.  Even so, it was clearly a beautiful city, and I have long wanted to return to it in the daytime.

The Nieuw Amsterdam docked in downtown San Juan at 1:00pm after passing the famous El Morro fortress that has for five centuries guarded the harbor entrance.  With Miss Patty I again wandered the narrow blue cobblestone streets of the colonial city.  Reaching El Morro, we gazed upon the beautiful north coast of the island where the sun-lightened blue sea turns white as the surf crashes ashore on the narrow strip of sand and rock that borders both the old and new cities of San Juan.  Multicolored Spanish architecture melds into white stucco high rise as one looks eastward along the shore.  It was truly a magnificent sight to behold, and one that I had only previously beheld from the bridge of the Waccamaw several miles offshore.  From El Morro we walked through the old city back to the piers.  Along the way we passed through neighborhoods filled with beautiful Spanish Mediterranean style buildings painted in vivid Caribbean hues.  My favorite stood opposite a small park on the aptly named Calle Cristo: the Catedral San Juan Bautista, a colonial outpost of Roman Christianity and the spiritual center of the old city.  With its white arched façade and its front steps intersecting the slope of the street, the cathedral stood out as the architectural magnum opus of the city.  I remembered it fondly from the nocturnal meanderings of my youth.  I had sat on those front steps in the middle of the night.  I had been awake and busy for far too many hours.  Nonetheless, I stayed awake to see this beautiful city and then returned to the Waccamaw and went to work again.

This time, though, Miss Patty and I returned to the Nieuw Amsterdam.  Enroute back to Port Everglades, she had one further stop to make, at Little San Salvador Island in the Bahamas.  Situated between Eleuthera and Cat Island, Little San Salvador is the site of Holland America’s  resort called Half Moon Cay, so named in honor of Henry Hudson’s ship.  The cruise ships anchor a short distance offshore there, and the passengers go ashore by tender.  By the time the Nieuw Amsterdam arrived, early on Saturday morning, the weather had changed.  A thirty knot wind blew from the southwest onto the island, and this generated large waves that made the tendering operation much too dangerous.  Speaking over the public address system, Captain van Zaane explained the situation and announced his decision to cancel the visit to Half Moon Cay.  Instead, the ship would continue through the Bahamas toward Port Everglades at reduced speed and arrive as scheduled early Sunday morning.

I had to laugh at this.  Of course, I fully understood and respected the Captain’s decision.  The amusing part was that during my years at sea I had sailed through and between and past the Bahamas many times on several ships, but I had never stopped and gone ashore there!  The Vandenberg, the Mercury, the Waccamaw, the Comet, the Bartlett—all these ships had carried me within sight of the Bahama Islands, but none of them had stopped there; they had all been going elsewhere.  After that, I had been eagerly looking forward to finally going ashore and actually setting foot on one of the Bahamas, only to have it cancelled at the last minute!  And so I gazed longingly at Little San Salvador Island as the Nieuw Amsterdam sailed away on a northwesterly course and left it far astern.  Miss Patty made it the family joke.  She claimed that with my history I had jinxed our visit to Half Moon Cay!

In the predawn hours of Sunday morning I watched from the Crow’s Nest Lounge as the Nieuw Amsterdam approached the Florida coast.  The lights of Fort Lauderdale and Hollywood shone clearly in the darkness, and I searched diligently for the entrance to the inlet that leads into Port Everglades.  At 5:15am the pilot boat came alongside to port.  A minute later, with the pilot safely delivered on board, the launch scurried away, soon to deliver another pilot to another inbound ship.  The sky lightened as the Nieuw Amsterdam eased through the inlet and then slowly backed into position alongside the wharf.  By 6:00am, it was all finished. 

It had been a voyage of accomplishment.  Our little family—Miss Patty, myself, James, Karen, Steven, and Michael—had enjoyed a wonderful week-long reunion.  We had seen James and Sarah marry, both of them radiantly happy, and we had met her family.  In this way our family had grown.  And I had gone back to sea with my family.  This enabled them to see me in my element, and they came to understand, up to a point, why I liked it so much.  Miss Patty maintained that I was “obsessed with the ship and the ocean.”  That gives me two obsessions now: seafaring and family history.  The Nieuw Amsterdam combined them very nicely on this voyage.  But now it was time to reluctantly go ashore.

Numerous poets have written about the seaman’s return from the sea.  Two of them even shared the famous line, “Home is the sailor, home from the sea,”⁴ which one of Great Britain’s most revered merchant seaman later used as the title of his memoirs.⁵  Well, I have been “home from the sea” for a long time.  Aboard the Nieuw Amsterdam, however, I felt as if I had truly come home after a long absence.  As soon as I stepped aboard, I felt a sense of having returned.  In fact, it all made me feel at home—the collection of merchant ships in Port Everglades; the transit outbound through the inlet with the leaving of a continent behind; the voyage through the Bahamas and on the open Atlantic; the arrivals and departures at the ports of call, especially the visit to San Juan.  Most of all, though, I felt at home on the open decks of the Nieuw Amsterdam in the very early morning hours when the stars peeked through the scattered clouds and the moonlight reflected on the rippled surface of the water.  Simply put, a seaman is at home at sea.

But he is not alone there.  I had my family with me this time, but beyond that, the night sky over the open ocean always exudes a spirituality that is unmistakable.  The Master and Chief Engineer of the universe stands watch over the sea and makes his presence known through the sight, sound, and feel of the sea and sky.  How can anyone look at this, I mused, and not believe in God?  “The world is charged with the grandeur of God,”⁶ as one devout poet exclaimed.  The supernal creative genius of a Supreme Being stands as self-evident when viewed from the deck of a ship at sea, a view that is always uplifting, edifying, and inspirational.

In one of my favorite verses of scripture, Nephi asserted after a long voyage, “he hath preserved me upon the waters of the great deep” (2 Nephi 4:20).  I would make the same assertion after a short voyage.  I came ashore from the Nieuw Amsterdam preserved and also improved by the voyage, and very thankful for the privilege of having returned, however briefly, to the sea where I belong.

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¹ Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim, Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1920, p. 6.
² Information from Holland America Line.
³ In English, Half Moon.
⁴ Robert Louis Stevenson, “Requiem,” in The Harvard Classics, v. 42, New York: P.F. Collier & Son, 1910, p. 1261-1262; and A. E. Housman, “R.L.S.,” in The Norton Anthology of Poetry, New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1970, p. 901.
⁵ Captain Sir Arthur Rostron, Home from the Sea, New York: The MacMillan Company, 1931.
⁶ Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J., “God’s Grandeur,” in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 5^th ed., v.2, New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1986, p.1581.