The Signing of the Paperwork

The freighter Rigel swung on the hook in the anchorage of La Maddalena on a warm and sunny Tuesday, June 12, 1979. Situated just off the north shore of Sardegna and adjacent to the Strait of Bonifacio which separates Sardegna from Corsica, the small archipelago of La Maddalena served as an American military station for many years. The Rigel used the secluded anchorage there on several occasions to transfer cargo to other ships. On this particular day, she was sending pallets of food and supplies by both helicopter and boat to the Navy freighter San Diego.

This operation filled several hours from late morning to mid-afternoon. No one could go ashore, but no one really minded. The weather was beautiful, the scenery was gorgeous, and sailboats laden with pretty Italian girls came along to see what was going on. Besides, the Rigel was due in Napoli for an extended visit the next morning, and the crew would have a good time then. When the lengthy cargo transfer at La Maddalena was completed, the Rigel closed her hatches, weighed her anchor, and set a course eastward. Just as the watch was settling into what was expected to be a routine overnight crossing of the Tyrrhenian Sea toward Napoli, the supply officer burst onto the bridge in a panic.

“We have to go back!! We forgot something very important!!” He exclaimed in a rush to Captain Viera. He held a jumbled sheaf of paperwork in his hands, and he held it out supplicatingly to the Captain. More explanation followed. The bottom line was that a signature was missing. The head honcho in La Maddalena had neglected to sign a critically important item of paperwork, and the Rigel absolutely must return to the anchorage so he could do this. The way the supply officer described things, it sounded like the entire American military establishment would cease to function without this one signature! His explanations were confirmed by the shoreside military authorities over the radio. Like it or not, the ship had to go back.

And so Captain Viera gave the order and the Rigel reversed her course to return to the anchorage. The engineers were instructed to stand by for maneuvering, and the anchor detail was sent back up to the bow. Word of what was happening spread around the ship quickly. There was no end to the incredulity at the notion of going to all this trouble for a mere signature. Captain Viera expressed no such opinion; the look on his face said it well enough. A very disciplined man, he rarely showed emotion in front of his subordinates. He simply did what had to be done.

After a short while, the Rigel slowed as she approached the entrance to the anchorage. A small Navy launch emerged from behind one of the islands and headed for the ship. The Rigel stopped without anchoring as the launch came alongside. A visibly shaken figure stepped forth from the launch and awkwardly climbed the pilot ladder to the Rigel’s main deck. The supply officer met him as he clambered on board, and a hurried signing of paper took place. Then the man retreated back down the pilot ladder, and finally the launch whisked him off again to La Maddalena. The crisis was now resolved! With all this accomplished, Captain Viera for the second time turned the Rigel around, and the bridge watch for the second time set a course across the Tyrrhenian Sea for Napoli.

When the excitement had settled down, several men in the crew gave themselves over to philosophical discussions of what was important in life and what wasn’t. Inspired by the time, effort, and expense invested by the Rigel to acquire one signature, these fellows asked the obvious question. Just how important could this one signature really be? Was it really worth all the time, effort, and expense invested in getting it? Aren’t there much more important things in life than a scrawl on a sheet of paper? Of course there are, but some signatures really are important. The signatures of the Coast Guard officials on the Merchant Marine licenses are critically important; without them the licenses are worthless and not valid for employment. The signatures of the shipmasters in the seamen’s sea service books are also critically important; without them the records are invalid for qualifying to take the next level of license exams. But licenses and jobs were not at stake in La Maddalena. It was really nothing more than a bureaucratic obsession run amok.

For those of us who were young and impressionable at the time, the signing of the paperwork was an opportunity to “learn wisdom in [our] youth” (Alma 37:35) by observing the actions and decisions of others. Everything in life has an importance greater than or lesser than everything else in life. Simply put, everything is relative. On this informal scale, we all concurred that one signature on paperwork that would soon be relegated to the dustbin of bureaucracy was not worth the ink expended on it, let alone the time, effort, and expense of recalling the Rigel for it.

Three years later the view from another ship in the Mediterranean made this little affair seem all the more ridiculous.

On July 6 and 7, 1982, the Waccamaw and numerous other American ships stood off the coast of Lebanon. This time the weather was overcast, the scenery was drab, and there were no sailboats with pretty girls. The war between the Lebanese and the Israelis was reaching its climax with Israeli troops and ammunition wreaking havoc on Beirut. Many buildings in the city were being destroyed. Many innocent civilians, including defenseless women and children, were being killed. The United States Navy and Marine Corps were standing by a few miles offshore of Beirut, waiting to land and intervene in the combat, should the government find such action necessary.

A small armada supported this contingency. There were naval combatants, troop carriers, and several supply ships and tankers. Of these last, the Waccamaw, the Neosho, the Caloosahatchee, and the Seattle were uncomfortably fully loaded with oil and within sight and therefore weapons range of Beirut. Several amphibious attack vessels, fully loaded with Marines, took turns coming alongside the Waccamaw and the other tankers to refuel. These were sober moments. Looking across the water at the Marines, we wondered what would happen to them. We also wondered what would happen to ourselves. Hopefully nothing. Still, one well aimed missile from someone seeking to escalate the conflict by causing trouble with the Americans, or even one errant missile homing in on the wrong target, could have easily resulted in a cataclysmic destruction of shipping and horrific loss of life. Even Captain Aspiotis’ perennially cheerful and optimistic outlook was dampened by this thought.

On Thursday, the 8^th of July, the Waccamaw was detached from this assignment. Her work with the Beirut fleet concluded after only two days, she headed west toward Napoli, her crew heaving a collective sigh of relief. The other tankers remained in the area, as the war continued unabated, and the Navy and Marines continued to stand by. News accounts from European radio stations kept us informed on the progress of the war. While none of this news was good—it was mostly a litany of death and destruction—at least no American intervention took place. It could have been worse, then.

In quiet moments later on, I began to view these two occasions in relation to each other. This juxtaposition of the Rigel at La Maddalena and the Waccamaw off Beirut yielded an opposition, that of the frivolous and the momentous. One was a triumph of trivia over reason, the other a time of momentous stillness; one a comic farce, the other a potential disaster; one a signature, the other a war. Father Lehi advised his son that “it must needs be, that there is an opposition in all things” (2 Nephi 2:11) and these two occasions contrast sufficiently to prove his point. Saint Augustine also recognized the principle of opposition and saw it as natural to the human condition:

The soul. . .takes greater delight if things that it loves are found or restored to it than if it had always possessed them. The storm tosses seafarers about, and threatens them with shipwreck: they all grow pale at their coming death. Then the sky and the sea become calm, and they exult exceedingly, just as they had feared exceedingly.

Perhaps Saint Augustine used this example because he himself had sailed on the Mediterranean between Europe and Africa. Whatever his motivation, I appreciate his articulation of the principle of opposition in terms congruent with my chosen profession. In the case of the Waccamaw off Beirut, the threat was not from any force of nature, but from a strictly human storm. And it was not really an explicit threat, but more an implicit understanding of what could happen—based on knowledge of what sometimes has happened—to neutrals in a war zone. Hence the feeling of apprehension among the crew while there, and the feeling of relief when sailing away afterwards.

One comparison invites another. As important as a signature may be on a Merchant Marine license or a record of sea service for the purpose of career advancement, this pales alongside the killing of innocent civilians by an invading army. To those of us aboard ship who were young and ambitious and anxious about upgrading our licenses, the war in Lebanon became a clarion call to look at the world view. We were fortunate to be able to sweat blood over license exams instead of shedding blood in an armed conflict. There were worse fates than not making it to Master or Chief Engineer!

The battle in Beirut took place thirty years ago, and the paper chase at La Maddalena three years before that. With twenty-twenty hindsight, I see these two occasions as painless ways to gain life experience, to learn from the mistakes of others, and to acquire wisdom at someone else’s expense. It’s not always that easy; life experience, wisdom, and understanding often come at a terrible price. Later in life I would pay a higher price, but in the Mediterranean those two summers it was easy for me to watch and learn and heed the scriptural admonition to “Get wisdom, get understanding: forget it not. Wisdom is the principal thing; therefore get wisdom: and with all thy getting get understanding” (Proverbs 4:5, 7).

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¹ St. Augustine of Hippo, The Confessions, 8:3:7, in The Confessions of St. Augustine, tr. Msgr. John K. Ryan, Garden City, NY: Image Books, 1960, p. 185. ²

Friends and Enemies

The freighter Victoria lay quietly alongside Pier Q in North Charleston, South Carolina. It was late in an October evening in 1981, and most of the crew had gone ashore. No work, except for routine watch keeping, was being done. All was peaceful and quiet. A few of us were watching the TV news in the lounge. After a while, the chief mate came along and sat down, too. With no cargo to carry, the Victoria was spending the latter half of October in port, and the extended inactivity was starting to get tiresome.

Suddenly, one of the deck seamen burst through the door. Clearly agitated and panting heavily, he gasped out, “Mate! Mate! You gotta come right away! There’s a big fight down below and someone’s gonna get killed!!” In an instant the chief mate jumped up and ran after him into the unlicensed crew’s quarters.

By the time the mate reached the scene, the intensity of the altercation had lessened. A few other men had already intervened and disarmed the principal assailant, but the arrival of an authority figure brought the entire incident to an immediate conclusion. The combatants, both reeking of alcohol, were packed off to bed, and peace was restored. In the quiet aftermath, the mate wanted to know what exactly had happened.

It was really quite simple. The two men involved in the brawl had gone ashore to have a good time, and they returned to the ship after several hours and too many drinks. They had always been good friends, but some small disagreement had escalated to the point of violence. One of them grabbed a fire axe from an emergency station, and swinging it wildly, chased the other all around the ship. His aim being poor, the fire axe never met its intended target and clanged against doorways, bulkheads, and handrails instead. This racket woke up the few men on board who were sleeping. Rushing out into the passageway, three or four of them subdued the axe-wielder while one went for the chief mate.

After a sound night’s sleep and nothing more to drink, the two fellows who had gone to war against each other were friends again. Neither one of them remembered very much of the previous evening’s combat; in fact, neither remembered the initial point of disagreement that had started the battle. A fresh new day had dawned upon them. They ate their breakfast, did their work, and got along just fine. All was forgiven and forgotten.

A popular song by the rock group War bears the title and asks the rhetorical question, “Why can’t we be friends?” A lot of food for thought resides in this simple inquiry. If two men can still be friends after a potentially fatal axe fight, why can’t the rest of us be friends? Or if we can’t actually be friends, can we at least not be mortal enemies? In a world whose history has too often been saturated with bloody violence, these questions suggest far preferable alternatives. I think most people would readily agree to a program for peace. Unfortunately, there are always some who refuse to control their mouths or their actions, and then the trouble starts. Heads of governments through the millennia have had this problem, and brutal wars causing millions of innocents to suffer have resulted. There must be a better way!

In the first of the two brutal wars between Germany and the Western Allies, one Captain and his crew proved that there is a better way. This was Kapitan Felix Graf von Luckner,¹ who held both a Master’s license in the German Merchant Marine and a commission in the Imperial German Navy. During the war he commanded the sailing ship Seeadler,² a naval vessel disguised as a neutral merchant ship. Her mission was to seek out and destroy Allied merchant shipping without inflicting casualties.³

To this end the Seeadler was fitted out with extensive dormitory and dining accommodations. The German Navy provided these facilities for the housing and feeding of Allied merchant seamen captured by Captain von Luckner and his crew. The strategy called for the Seeadler to break through the British blockade of the North Sea by presenting herself as a Norwegian cargo ship. Once out on the open Atlantic, she would carry out her attacks on enemy ships through a combination of disguise, deception, and the threat of force.

This plan worked well. From January to July of 1917, the Seeadler prevailed against fifteen Allied ships, twelve in the Atlantic and three in the Pacific. Fourteen of these vessels were sunk; one was used to transport prisoners to a Brazilian port when the Seeadler’s dormitory had reached capacity.⁴ In each attack, the Germans took the enemy crew aboard and then sunk their ship when they were certain that no one was left on board. Once on the Seeadler, the Allied prisoners were treated as and called guests. They enjoyed fine dining and recreational activities with their German hosts, and they were not restricted to their quarters but could roam the ship at will. In this atmosphere wartime enemies became friends.

Eventually, one thing did go wrong, however. During an attack on the British freighter Horngarth in the South Atlantic on March 11, 1917, the Seeadler fired a shot at the Harngath’s radio shack. The objective was to prevent the transmission of a message calling for help by destroying the apparatus. At the time the shot was fired, the radio shack was empty, and therefore no casualties were expected. The shell which was fired did the intended damage to the radio equipment, but also ruptured a steam line. The resulting discharge of high pressure steam and hot water injured four British seamen. All of them were subsequently taken aboard the Seeadler and given medical treatment. One, unfortunately, died from his injuries.⁵

This sole fatality in the Seeadler’s entire campaign was Douglas Page, age 16. The Germans held a funeral service for him at sea with full military honors, his body reposing under the Union Jack prior to burial. Afterwards, Captain von Luckner wrote to the boy’s family in Great Britain, telling them in English that:

It is an old German custom to honour the dead of our enemies, & we are now standing on the pall of this young knight.  He is not our enemy any more, he is now our friend & is at present where our forefathers are gathered, where all are brothers.  God has his future destined.  God has called him to his side, he is now happy because he is looking into the face of Jesus Christ.⁶

To this day, Douglas’ family believes that he was “treated very well by the Germans.”⁷

Several months later, in August of 1917, the Germans reached the end of their mission when the Seeadler was shipwrecked in the South Pacific.⁸ Subsequently, they were obliged to surrender to the British. The Captain and most of his crew spent the remainder of the war as prisoners in New Zealand; the rest were interned in Chile. Repatriated to Germany after the armistice, Captain von Luckner became an international hero because of the peaceful manner in which he conducted his wartime campaign at sea. Among other laudations, he was called to the Vatican where he received a decoration from the Pope, who described him as “a great humanitarian.”⁹

Captain von Luckner’s military campaign aboard the Seeadler demonstrated that the citizens of belligerent nations can become friends instead of remaining enemies even in the midst of a major world conflict. In a postwar memoir directed primarily to an American audience, he wrote from practical experience of a lofty vision:

As a sailor who has sailed under many flags and whose friends and pals are the citizens of many countries and many climes, it is my dream that one day we shall all speak the same language and have so many common interests that terrible wars will no longer occur.¹⁰

These wars, and for that matter all forms of human conflict, will become obsolete when all the governments and all the peoples of the world consistently heed the scriptural instruction, “Cease to contend one with another; cease to speak evil one of another” (D&C 136:23). When instead of speaking evil, all nations and individuals greet each other with the Lord’s gentle valediction, “Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you” (John 14:27), the time will have arrived when “terrible wars will no longer occur.”

The two men aboard the Victoria who became friends again the morning after a midnight fire axe fight and the wartime captors and prisoners who became friends aboard the Seeadler demonstrate that it is possible to overcome both personal and political enmity. Once enmity is removed and replaced with a less hostile and more positive outlook on others, there should be no reason why we can’t all be friends.

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¹ The hereditary title Graf, meaning “Count” in English, identifies Captain von Luckner as a member of the old German aristocracy. Since he was also a career merchant seaman who held a Master’s license and commanded a ship, and for the sake of simplicity, I will refer to him here by the respectful English language Merchant Marine title “Captain.”
² In English, Sea Eagle.
³ The information in the narrative is drawn from two sources: Lowell Thomas, Count Luckner, the Sea Devil, Garden City, NY: Garden City Publishing Company, Inc., 1927; and Oliver E. Allen, The Windjammers, Alexandria, VA: Time-Life Books, Inc., 1978. Specific points are cited below.
⁴ Allen, op. cit., p. 133-134.
⁵ Allen, op. cit. p. 133.
⁶ Images of Captain von Luckner’s correspondence and other memorabilia located at http://luckner-society.com. This is the website of the Felix Graf von Luckner Gesellschaft (Felix Count von Luckner Society) of Halle, Germany, established to preserve his history and legacy.
⁷ Ibid.
⁸ Allen, op. cit., p. 134.
⁹ Thomas, op. cit., p. 4.
¹⁰ Thomas, op. cit., p. 308.

The Memory of a Man

While my voyage aboard the cruise liner Nieuw Amsterdam brought back many happy memories for me, it also rekindled the very sad memory of one former shipmate in particular. He was a very bright and ambitious young man who seemed to have a good future and a good career ahead of him. Seeming to have a good future and actually having it are two different things, however. As the future is unknown to all but God, we humans cannot take it for granted. With little or even no advance notice, anything can take everything away from us. Such was the case with my former colleague.

Captain Derric F. Linardich joined the Waccamaw as relief Master in Norfolk, Virginia, during the first week of January, 1983. He came aboard to relieve Captain Rigobello, who was going on vacation until about mid-March. Captain Linardich was in his early thirties and recently married. He stood almost six feet tall with medium brown hair and inquisitive brown eyes. He came from Riverhead, Long Island, and was a graduate of the State University of New York Maritime College at Fort Schuyler in the Bronx. After receiving his original license as third mate, he remained aboard ship for long periods with minimal vacations in order to accumulate the sea time required for each upgrade. In this way he worked his way up through the licensed ranks quickly. He passed the exams for Master before he turned thirty. After a few more stints as chief mate, he was selected for relief jobs as Master. I believe his assignment to the Waccamaw was the second of these.

With Captain Linardich in command, the Waccamaw sailed from Norfolk for points south at noon on Sunday, January 9, 1983. It was a fairly routine voyage; the ship carried out her customary duties of refueling Navy vessels at sea. Enroute to one such rendezvous, she sailed westward past San Juan, Puerto Rico, on Friday, January 14, but did not stop there. She visited Roosevelt Roads, Puerto Rico, on Tuesday, January 18, and again a week later on January 25 and 26. Aside from these brief port visits, the Waccamaw spent most of her time sailing from one rendezvous point to another and delivering fuel and supplies to military vessels at each rendezvous. Among others, she serviced the aircraft carrier Carl Vinson and the guided missile frigate Oliver Hazard Perry.¹ At the time, these were both new and well-known vessels. The meetings with all these ships took place in various locations quite distant from land, but in the general areas north and south of Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. On several occasions the Waccamaw transited the Virgin Passage, the waterway separating Puerto Rico and the Virgins. Captain Linardich always called this “Hole in the Wall.” He would typically say to me, “I need you to lay out a course to Hole in the Wall,” and away we would go.

Captain Linardich used some memorable turns of speech. Often when someone told him something business-related that he needed to know, he would incline his head slightly and respond, “Interesting.” This was his way of acknowledging even the most unexpected or bizarre information; everything was “interesting.” Another stock phrase of his was “It’s easy money.” Every task, even the most involved and unusual, was “easy money.” One night when the Waccamaw was proceeding along on station waiting for a Navy ship to come alongside for replenishment, Captain Linardich stood on the port bridge wing tossing glow sticks overboard at about one minute intervals. These would serve as a floating guideline for the approaching ship. Turning to me with a shrug he said, “People think I’m nuts, but it really is easy money. Sometimes I can’t believe they’re paying me to do this!”

Some people did in fact think Captain Linardich was nuts. He had a reputation among some for being unreasonable and difficult to work with. Admittedly, he expected a high level of competence and professionalism from the mates and engineers. From the unlicensed crew he exacted less, but then, they carried less responsibility. I had no real difficulty with him. On a few occasions I did not completely agree with some things that he said and did, but he was the boss, and I figured that it was up to me to get along with him. I made it my business to do so, and we got along all right. More important in a shipmaster, though, his professional capabilities were excellent.

On Thursday, January 20, while underway in the Caribbean the Waccamaw experienced a mechanical malfunction with her steering motors. These were corrected by the engine room personnel, and the ship was able to continue on her voyage and meet all of her commitments for refueling the military vessels in the area. On the completion of all these assignments, then, she returned to Norfolk on Saturday, February 5.

On Monday morning, February 7, the Waccamaw again sailed from Norfolk. She did not go far, though. The problem in the steering motors reasserted itself, and the ship returned to port that afternoon. The next two days were spent making repairs to the steering gear. Finally on Friday, February 11, the Waccamaw once again left Norfolk and was scheduled to conduct several at sea refuelings of military vessels in the following week. After that, she would prepare for her annual shipyard overhaul.

As she left Norfolk that morning, the Waccamaw headed eastward into the teeth of the winter storm which that night would cause the loss of the coal carrier Marine Electric and most of her crew. Because of the weather, Captain Linardich had been authorized by his superiors to proceed or not at his discretion. Accordingly, when the Waccamaw reached the pilot station at the Chesapeake Bay entrance and he saw the maelstrom in front of us, he decided that the ship would immediately return to port. On hearing the terrible news about the Marine Electric the next day, the entire crew came to fully appreciate the wisdom of Captain Linardich’s decision and respect the soundness of his judgment.

That was the last time I went to sea with Captain Linardich. In the month that followed, the Waccamaw remained in Norfolk. In preparation for the shipyard overhaul, she pumped all her oil ashore, unloaded her dry cargo, underwent two weeks of tank cleaning followed by tank inspections, and took on water ballast for stability purposes. Also, several of her crew, including both Captain Linardich and myself, participated in two days of basic small arms training at the Norfolk Naval Base. This was done periodically for the purpose of training merchant crews to protect themselves and their military cargos in the event of a terrorist attack. Finally, the powers that be decided that the Waccamaw would be sent to the Old Dominion Metro Machine yard across the Elizabeth River from downtown Norfolk for her overhaul.

On Monday morning, March 14, Captain Rigobello returned from vacation. He rejoined the Waccamaw at the supply piers, and that afternoon rode the ship up the river to the yard. On Tuesday, March 15, he officially took over as Master. Captain Linardich then departed the Waccamaw and returned to the company headquarters in Bayonne, New Jersey. On Wednesday he was scheduled to relieve Captain Viera aboard the freighter Sirius there so that he could take his vacation.

While I never sailed with Captain Linardich again, I did see him briefly once in the Bayonne headquarters in the spring of 1986. He was working in an administrative capacity there for a few months. Knowing that I had been seriously sick, he inquired about my health. We had little time to talk, though, as he was heading off to a meeting. That was the last time that I ever saw him. Later on aboard the Hayes, I learned that he had holed up in a low-rent apartment in Bayonne while he worked in the office, and that he had subsequently resigned from the company and gone on to greener pastures. At that point, I did not expect to see him or hear about him any further.

A year later, I also left for greener pastures. The employment situation for American merchant seamen had been deteriorating for some time, and by the spring of 1987 there was little to nothing left. I eventually took up a second career as a college librarian. In this capacity my contact with the Merchant Marine became nearly nil. I heard from a couple of former shipmates for a while; otherwise, most of my information came from the newspapers. It was from these two sources that I finally heard about Captain Linardich again, and the news was not good.

Captain Linardich accepted a seagoing position with the Kuwait Oil Tanker Company. An opportunity for American seamen had opened up there because of a political turn of events. During the war between Iran and Iraq, Kuwaiti merchant ships became endangered. Iran intended to target the Kuwaiti fleet because it supported Iraq in the war. In order to prevent attacks on these ships, the United States “reflagged” them in 1987, so that they would sail as American vessels with American crews. The thinking was that no one would attack a neutral American ship, and no one did. The war ended in August of 1988, but the eleven Kuwaiti merchant ships continued to sail under the American flag.²

In 1990, Captain Linardich was sailing as Master of the tanker Surf City. She was a petroleum transporter of 80,000 tons, 760 feet long and 144 feet wide, and she had been built in 1981 by Mitsubishi in Nagasaki, Japan. She carried a crew of 25 and a cargo of diesel fuel and naptha.³ On Thursday, February 22, 1990, the Surf City was passing between the United Arab Emirates and the Iranian Island of Abu Musa while on a voyage from Kuwait to Italy. Some repair work was in progress on one of the starboard cargo tanks. The Captain and his chief mate, Steven McHugh of East Bridgewater, Massachusetts, were on deck in the vicinity of this tank. Suddenly an internal explosion took place, and the ship was engulfed in flames and smoke. Captain Linardich and the chief mate were both killed by the explosion. The other 23 crewmen were rescued by the USS Simpson, a guided missile frigate which had been patrolling the shipping lanes.⁴

The Surf City did not sink. She remained afloat and was repaired and returned to service. In 1991 she was sold to a new owner and operator and renamed.⁵ There would be no such second chance at life for Derric Linardich and Steven McHugh. They had finished all their worldly voyages before reaching the age of 40.

My voyage aboard the Nieuw Amsterdam took place long after I had passed age 40. As this magnificent vessel approached San Juan, I recalled a dinner conversation I’d had with Captain Linardich aboard the more earthy Waccamaw 29 years earlier. Sailing westward past San Juan in the late afternoon of Friday, January 14, 1983, the Waccamaw offered a beautiful view of the north coast of Puerto Rico, including both the old and new cities of San Juan. As I had spent a long night meandering through the fabled streets of this grand colonial city the preceding November, I facetiously suggested that the Waccamaw make an unscheduled stop there so that we could all go sightseeing.

To my surprise, this innocuous remark elicited an a scornful response. “What do you want to go there for?” Captain Linardich asked. “It’s nothing but a ghetto! There’s nothing to see there. The whole place is all ghettos and slums. There are no sights to see there.” And that was the end of the conversation.

The Nieuw Amsterdam afforded nearly the same view when she arrived and afterwards departed from San Juan on Wednesday, February 8, 2012. The sight of the famous fortress of El Morro, the brightly painted pastel buildings basking in the Caribbean sun, the storied blue cobblestone streets of the old city, the magnificent cathedral named in honor of Saint John the Baptist—all of these and the breathtaking beauty they held made me think again of my former shipmate. Admittedly, there is poverty in San Juan and elsewhere in Puerto Rico. To casually dismiss the whole place as “ghettos and slums,” though, was drastically erroneous. But perhaps it was just another of his memorable turns of speech.

These turns of speech hold in them the memory of a man, as do the ships he sailed on and the places he visited. Captain Linardich was a career merchant seaman who, like many of us, was more comfortable aboard a ship at sea than in some pedestrian employment ashore. His sudden demise should stand as a warning to all of us: “Take ye heed, watch and pray: for ye know not when the time is” (Mark 13:33). Whether we are at sea or ashore on leave, our time will inevitably come, and we will not want to be found unprepared for the final grand voyage.

As I gazed upon the great waters of the Atlantic and Caribbean from the Nieuw Amsterdam, I thought of the late Captain Derric F. Linardich and silently prayed, in pace requiescat.

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¹ When I was in my late teens, I had the privilege of watching the launching of the USS Oliver Hazard Perry at the Bath Iron Works in Bath, Maine, on Saturday, September 25, 1976.
² Associated Press, “Tanker Explodes and Burns,” The Los Angeles Times, February 23, 1990, available at http://articles.latimes.com.
³ Particulars from www.shipspotting.com.
⁴ Associated Press, op. cit., and Boston Globe, Feb 23, 1990, p. 1-2.
⁵ Information from www.shipspotting.com.

The Three Honored Guests

Few points of etiquette exist aboard ship, but those that do are taken seriously. A breach of them by a well intentioned but unknowing visitor from shoreside would lead to a polite and friendly word to the wise. The same breach from someone associated with ships and the sea who should know better would be met with less friendly and possibly more vicious corrective action. On these matters merchant seamen are generally quite plainspoken and straightforward.

Three basic items of shipboard etiquette come to mind. First, no one is addressed as “Captain” except the man embarked in that capacity. Even if one or more of the mates holds a Master’s license, he is not addressed as “Captain,” even if he has sailed as such before. The same holds true among the engineers. Only the Chief Engineer is addressed as “Chief.” None of the other engineers, even if they hold the big license, is called “Chief.”

Second, the bridge and chartroom area of a ship is generally held as sacrosanct. No one who does not normally belong there enters without permission. Anyone else who may have business there requests permission to enter; he does not simply walk in unannounced. If, say, the steward or the purser came up to the bridge about some matter, he would poke his head through the door and ask the mate or the helmsman for “permission to come on the bridge.” This would be readily granted, of course, unless some critical situation necessitated that he wait. The asking is mostly a gesture of respect, and it is always appreciated.

Finally, there is a chair on the bridge for the Captain’s use, and he is the only one permitted to sit in it. Everyone else stands up. Some ships have a Captain’s chair on each bridge wing as well as on the bridge itself, but this is unusual. This chair is not a desk chair or a dining room chair, but a high-level cushioned seat, a throne of sorts, large enough to serve as a status symbol and high enough so that the Captain is at the same eye level that he would be at if he were standing. This way he can see clearly out the windows and be at the same height as the mate, pilot, and helmsman. It would not do if he had to look up at his subordinates.

The only exception to the rule that no one else occupies the Captain’s chair is the Captain’s wife when she visits the ship. I have seen this twice. Captain Aspiotis’ wife sat in her husband’s chair when she visited the Waccamaw in Napoli, Italy, and Captain Giaccardo’s wife did likewise on the Bartlett in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Otherwise, no one, not even the president of the company that owns the ship, may ever sit in the Captain’s chair.

The tanker Waccamaw sailed in and out of Norfolk, Virginia, for several months in 1982 and 1983. She carried oil for the Navy; therefore, the Navy dictated the ship’s movements. In Norfolk, she often docked at the Naval Supply Center piers. Frequently, personnel from the Navy came aboard to conduct business involving supply, engineering, and petroleum issues. A few times, though, high-level administrative officers visited the Waccamaw. Two of them even went to sea with the ship. These were not pleasant occasions.

Captain B proudly strode up the gangway one morning in a pristine dress blue uniform that glittered with gold braid, brass buttons, and multicolored ribbons. Once on board, he was met by a disheveled gangway watchman who welcomed him in the customary manner: “Who are you, man?”

Taken aback by this greeting from a unlicensed seaman in his torn and dirty dungarees, his untucked and unbuttoned oil-stained shirt, his filthy blackened hands, his long, dirty, and tangled hair, and his several-days unshaven face with a tobacco-stained grin, Captain B stood speechless. Evidently, this was not what he had expected. The disdainful expression on his face with the nose up in the air clearly indicated that Captain B was disgusted. At this happy moment, I emerged from an adjacent passageway and met Captain B.

On seeing the mate of the watch, Captain B recovered his composure. Greeting me with undisguised wrath, he voiced his extreme displeasure at the situation and demanded to be escorted up to Captain Rigobello’s quarters. His complaints included the appearance of the gangway watch, the absence of an officer there to meet him, the insulting manner in which he was asked to show identification, and the complete lack of spit-and-polish that would be found aboard a military ship. As he spewed this venom, I noticed that his linguistic style was not as immaculate as his dress uniform. I had work to do, but I had interrupted it and come to the gangway for the sole purpose of bringing this gentleman up to Captain Rigobello’s office. I knew that once there, his attitude would change.

And up to a point, it did. In his firm but polite way, Captain Rigobello explained what life in the Merchant Marine was like to Captain B. In other words, once Captain B stepped aboard the Waccamaw, he wasn’t in the Navy anymore. This calmed him down considerably, but enough vestiges of his military haughtiness remained, and these did not go unnoticed by the crew.

Following the completion of some repairs in the engine room, the Waccamaw put to sea for a day to conduct tests of the equipment, and also to hold emergency drills for crew training. Captain B came along for the ride. Exactly what work he had to do was never made clear. Most of the time he seemed to be doing nothing. At least he changed out of his dress uniform and into a less conspicuous but still amply decorated set of khakis. Still, while his interactions with the Captain and the Chief Engineer became cordial, they remained considerably less so with everyone else.

Merchant crews do not take kindly toward military arrogance, pomposity, and rank consciousness. Many of the Waccamaw’s crewmen resented Captain B’s attitude and behavior toward them, and a lot of ill-tempered grumbling ensued. “Who does this guy think he is? What right does he have to come on here and give orders? He’s not the boss!! Why’s he telling us to call him ‘Captain?’ He ain’t the Captain!! He ain’t got no Master’s license!! Man, we oughtta kick him over the side!! Let him swim back to Norfolk!!”

Well, Captain B did not swim back to Norfolk. After the sea trials of the engineering equipment were finished, I went up to the bridge to take the watch at 4:00pm. The Waccamaw was by this time in the traffic lanes and heading back to the pilot station at the Chesapeake Bay entrance. As I came on the bridge, I found Captain Rigobello, the third mate, and the helmsman all inside doing their work—and Captain B ensconced in the Captain’s chair on the starboard bridge wing! He was alone, and the very picture of relaxation with his feet up on the wooden bridge rail.

“Excuse me,” I said quietly to Captain Rigobello, “but what is he doing in that chair?”

“He is doing us a big favor,” came the reply. “He is staying out of our way!”

I found this response surprising. Captain Rigobello went on to explain: “I know, he is a nuisance. And he does not belong in that chair. But it is a small point. It makes him feel important to sit there, and it keeps him out of the way. So he is happy because he feels like a big shot, and we are happy because we are left alone to do our work. And when we gat back to Norfolk, he will leave us, and we will never have to see him again. Until then, let us leave him where he is, and it will keep the peace.”

Words of wisdom from a man who had spent 25 years at sea. Compared to commanding a large tanker in busy traffic lanes, someone sitting in a chair was indeed a “small point,” and conceding the chair did in fact “keep the peace.” Captain B stayed very quietly out of everyone’s way as the Waccamaw returned to Norfolk. On arrival, he departed the ship without any hostilities. We never saw him again, but the memory of this ill mannered man has remained.

Captain B stands as an unwitting example of one “puffed up in the vain things of the world” (Alma 5:37), one of those who “lift themselves up in the pride of their hearts, unto the wearing of very fine apparel” (Morm. 8:35). His resplendent military uniform was as ridiculously out of place aboard a grimy civilian oil tanker as the gangway watchman’s dirty rags would have been at a Joint Chiefs of Staff meeting. His high handed arrogance—“the proud man’s contumely,”¹ as Shakespeare artfully expressed it—endeared him to no one. Even his host, the Master of the vessel, wanted ultimately to get him out of the way. This he did graciously, returning good for evil by giving Captain B a front row seat as the Waccamaw returned to port.

On another occasion, Captain K joined the Waccamaw for an overnight jaunt from Norfolk. This time the ship would participate in the at sea refueling of several military vessels, and Captain K would observe. Not participate, though. Once again, it was very unclear what, if any, work he was there to do. Fortunately, I had little to do with him, although I heard several others of the crew complain viciously about him. My turn came early in the morning when the Waccamaw was at sea and preparing to rendezvous with the other vessels for the refueling.

As second mate, I stood the four to eight watch underway. Three unlicensed seamen were on duty with me. One steered the ship while the other two did chores on deck. About 6:00am, I was in the chartroom plotting the ship’s position on the navigational chart and calculating the distance and time to go to the rendezvous point. Additionally, as the mate of the watch, I had to monitor the traffic and make course and speed changes as needed. As I was thus engaged at the chart table, the door from the passageway opened and Captain K entered the chartroom. I turned and looked, and was startled speechless by what appeared before me.

Uninvited and without requesting permission, Captain K walked into the chartroom as if he owned the place and strode silently across to the coffee table. He was dressed in spit-shined black shoes, black socks, and a knee-length dark blue bathrobe. As he reached for the coffee pot, I could only stare and think, this guy must be joking! He picked up the coffee pot and a cup. On discovering that the pot was empty and that there was no coffee anywhere, he finally he turned to me and spoke. He acknowledged my presence not with a cheerful greeting but by emitting a crude stream of invective concerning the “failure of the watch to make the coffee.” Slamming the empty pot back down with a bang, Captain K stormed out of the chartroom and stomped down the passageway.

This episode lasted less than a minute, but it left a lasting impression. Focused as I was on my work, Captain K’s unwarranted intrusion and subsequent temper tantrum caught me completely by surprise. With more important matters on my mind, though, I went about my business not quite believing what I had just seen and heard.

On the bridge, the helmsman had heard it all, even if he had not actually seen it, and he felt no reluctance in speaking his mind on the incident. “What’s up wit dat guy, mate? He tink we be here to wait on him? Don’t he know we all got work to do? Dis ain’t no luxury liner! He be on da wrong ship if he wanna be waited on!”

I agreed with him, and so did the boss. In a quiet moment a little while later, Captain Rigobello mentioned to me that Captain K had complained to him about the “failure of the watch to make the coffee.” In response, he explained to our guest that of the four men on the deck watch, one was the second mate, who was in charge, only two were on the bridge, and all four had work to do and were busy doing it. They simply had no time to make coffee for someone else, and it wasn’t their job anyway. Furthermore, he continued, as a point of protocol, the man at the helm did not drink coffee while he was steering the ship, and the second mate was simply not a coffee drinker at all. So there was absolutely no reason for there to be any coffee in the chartroom at that hour. If Captain K wanted a cup of coffee, he could get one aft in the chow hall. Looking out at the sea, Captain Rigobello shook his head, heaved a sigh, and asked quietly, “What next?”

The Waccamaw successfully carried out her part in the underway refueling exercise and returned to Norfolk with no additional trouble. At the pier, Captain K, like Captain B before him, left the ship peacefully. Also like Captain B, we never saw Captain K again, but the memory of his trespass and temper tantrum has remained.

The Apostle Paul wrote, “he is proud, knowing nothing” (1 Tim. 6:4). Captain K certainly knew nothing about the duties of the deck watch aboard a merchant ship and it showed. Proudly expecting busy crewmen to cater to his whims and then complaining when they could not, he proved that “whosoever shall exalt himself shall be abased” (Matt. 23:12), although Captain Rigobello would handle the abasing in a tactful way. Less politely, someone might have told him that “small things make base men proud.”² A pot of coffee seemed pretty small compared to the safe navigation of the ship.

Then there was Captain Dietz. He was also a Navy man, but that’s where the resemblance ended. Captain Dietz held an important administrative post at the Norfolk Naval Base, and he had extensive experience with the ships of our fleet. He understood the differences between the Navy and the Merchant Marine, and he maintained a high level of respect for the merchant crews and the work they did. He visited the ships periodically for meetings with the Captains and Chief Engineers, and one morning in Norfolk he came aboard the Waccamaw.

Captain Dietz’ official business lay almost entirely in meetings with Captain Rigobello, and to a lesser extent with the Chief Engineer. But as a seaman, he was interested in the whole ship and the crew who manned her, not just in the paperwork part of the job. An upbeat and cheerful man by nature, he roamed about the ship looking things over and stopping to chat with everyone on board. He had a bright smile, a warm handshake, and a friendly greeting for everyone in the crew, regardless of their rank or the condition of their clothing. In this way, Captain Dietz made friends wherever he went on the Waccamaw. Everyone liked him.

At lunchtime, Captain Rigobello and Captain Dietz came into the chow hall together. Several other officers including myself were already present and eating. A group of us regularly sat at a long table with assigned seats. The Captain and Chief Engineer always occupied the seats at the head and foot of the table; the chief mate, second mate, cargo mate, and first assistant engineer occupied the remaining seats. Today there were one or two vacancies, though.

Captain Rigobello led the way with Captain Dietz behind him. When they reached the table, Captain Rigobello motioned for Captain Dietz to sit in the chair at the head of the table, and then he started to take the empty chief mate’s chair for himself. Captain Dietz immediately realized what his host was doing and protested, “Oh, no. I can’t take your place here. You’re the Captain, not me. I can sit in another seat.”

Captain Rigobello insisted, “But you are our guest today, so you take the best seat. I’ll sit here next to you”

Captain Dietz replied, “But it’s still your ship, so you should sit here. I can take the other seat.”

Captain Rigobello responded, “This is a special occasion. You are not with us every day, so you sit there. I’ll be all right here.”

And then he sat down, leaving Captain Dietz with no option but to take the seat at the head of the table. He did this under protest, though: “You are too kind to me, but thank you all the same.”

An exceptionally enjoyable luncheon followed. Captain Dietz engaged all the mates and engineers in conversation and shared jokes and sea stories. While these pleasantries were going on, I thought of the chair debate between the two Captains and was reminded of the scriptural injunction to take the lowest place: “But when thou art bidden, go and sit down in the lowest room; that when he that bade thee cometh, he may say unto thee, Friend, go up higher” (Luke 13:10). A gracious and humble guest, Captain Dietz did indeed seek the lower place, and Captain Rigobello, a gracious and humble host, called him up higher. In this way both men showed respect for the other’s professional standing.

For that matter, Captain Dietz showed respect for everyone aboard the Waccamaw. Throughout his visit to the ship he spoke politely and courteously with all on board, both licensed and unlicensed. He treated them as his equals. When the messman in the dining room brought his lunch, Captain Dietz looked up at him, smiled broadly, and thanked him warmly. A simple courtesy, but one that revealed a true officer and gentleman.

An old proverb holds that comparisons can be odious; still, we cannot help but make them. Unlike his predecessors, Captain Dietz did not show up flamboyantly overdressed, did not spew a stream of invective about the condition of the gangway watch, did not barge uninvited and in his bathrobe into the chartroom, did not throw a hissy fit over something as trivial as an empty coffee pot, and did not so alienate the crew that he had to put into a corner to keep him out of the way. Arrogance was simply not his style; civility was. He had no delusions of superior importance; he viewed everyone, regardless of rank, as important. All three visitors’ behavior and attitude and the resultant feelings which the crew held toward them proved the point that “whosoever shall exalt himself shall be abased; and he that shall humble himself shall be exalted” (Matt. 23: 12).

The Waccamaw’s crew appreciated the professional respect, courtesy, and friendliness which Captain Dietz displayed toward them. No one complained about calling him “Captain,” even though he did not hold a Master’s license and was not the Captain of a merchant ship. It was simply recognized as his military title, and that was all. By extending the hospitality of the ship and the honor of the best seat in the dining room to him, Captain Rigobello led the mates and engineers in exalting Captain Dietz to the level of a Master in the Merchant Marine, a very high honor indeed from a group of merchant seamen.

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¹ William Shakespeare, Hamlet, III:i:71.
² William Shakespeare, King Henry VI, Part 2, IV:i:106

Riding With the Pilots

The tanker New Jersey Sun weighed anchor after the pilot had come aboard early in the morning of Monday, May 16, 1977. A small motor launch had delivered him to the ship. From this vessel he climbed a rope ladder with wooden rungs which hung down the tanker’s starboard side. When he reached the main deck, he was welcomed aboard by the third mate and two able seamen. The third mate escorted the pilot to the bridge, and then joined the bosun on the bow. The two ABs stayed behind and hauled in the pilot ladder and stowed it away pending future use. On the bridge the pilot was greeted by Captain Jack Taylor and chief mate Joe Reilly. When the introductions were complete the mate recorded the pilot’s name in the bell book, the written record of the ship’s transit through the harbor. The pilot’s name¹ was Pizzatolla, and he had come aboard to bring the New Jersey Sun into the harbor of Galveston, Texas.

For Captain Pizzatolla, this morning’s arrival was a fairly routine operation. Standing on the port bridge wing next to Captain Taylor, he issued the engine and rudder instructions necessary to maneuver the ship out of the anchorage, into the channel, through the narrow inlet between the barrier beaches, and then through the port itself toward the Todd Shipyard on Pelican Island. This destination, a sprawling industrial complex across the stream from Galveston proper, would be the New Jersey Sun’s home for the next several weeks while she underwent an extensive overhaul. But getting the large vessel into this facility required some effort. Captain Pizzatolla called ahead on his walkie-talkie and arranged for a rendezvous with two tugboats as the ship approached the shipyard.

From his perch on the port wing, Captain Pizzatolla surveyed the scene before him and decided on his course of action. He explained his plan to Captain Taylor, who nodded and gave his consent, and then began issuing instructions to the tugboats via the walkie-talkie and engine and rudder commands to the chief mate and helmsman. With one tug pushing on the starboard bow and the other on the port quarter, with the rudder hard left and the engine going slow astern, the pilot turned the New Jersey Sun ninety degrees in the channel. She was now positioned so that she could back down into her berth with her port side to her assigned pier. But this was a tight spot. The pilot dismissed the tug on the port quarter. The second tug remained and held the New Jersey’s bow steady. Then, with the engine going slowly astern and the rudder amidships, the pilot eased the great ship into the narrow space between her pier and the adjacent floating drydock. There was no room for error here, and the operation had to be taken slowly.

The New Jersey Sun carried one rudder and one propeller. Rudders are simple enough tools, but propellers come in different varieties. They can be right hand or left hand, meaning they turn clockwise or counterclockwise when the ship is going ahead, and the propeller blades are shaped and pitched accordingly in order to get a good bite on the water and push it astern. A single engine ship like the New Jersey carried a right hand propeller. This was fine for going ahead, but when going astern, a right hand propeller caused the stern of the ship to “walk” to port. Likewise, a left hand propeller would produce a walk to starboard. By contrast, a ship such as the Waccamaw with two propellers would have one right hand and one left hand; they would be mirror images of each other, and when going astern, the opposite walking effects would cancel each other out.

As the New Jersey Sun backed alongside the pier, the walking effect produced by her right hand propeller became an important factor. Both Captain Taylor and Captain Pizzatolla eyed the stern carefully from the bridge wing as the ship eased slowly alongside the pier. Neither one of them wanted the propeller to walk the stern of the ship into the pier. When this motion of the stern toward the pier became evident as the ship moved farther into her berth, the pilot called for a quick burst ahead on the engine with the rudder hard left. The resulting propeller wash to port countered the walking effect and prevented the ship from colliding with the pier. In a backing move of over a thousand feet at slow speed, the pilot did this three times. Had there been no floating drydock moored to the next pier, a tugboat could have steadied the New Jersey’s stern and made the job much easier. The pilot really earned his fee on this arrival.

With the New Jersey Sun finally backed all the way into her berth, the crew tossed the mooring lines ashore, winched them in, and made her fast. Next they rigged the gangway. On the bridge, Captain Taylor ordered the engine rung off and the helm secured. He thanked Captain Pizzatolla for his services, signed his paperwork, and bade him farewell. The chief mate then escorted him down to the main deck and the gangway. The pilot stepped off the ship and into a waiting automobile. The driver would deliver him to his next assignment, most likely an outbound cargo ship. A routine day at the office.

For her part, the New Jersey Sun remained in the Todd Shipyard in Galveston for six weeks. When the time came for her to leave, another pilot was driven to the pier to meet her. He then performed the same duties as Captain Pizzatolla had, except in reverse. When the ship was safely outside the port, he climbed down the rope ladder with the wooden rungs to a waiting launch, and was whisked away to his next assignment, most likely an inbound merchant ship. And so the cycle continued.

This cycle of piloting merchant ships in and out of port goes on continuously in every harbor. Each port has its association of pilots, licensed Merchant Marine officers who are specialists in the waterways on which they serve. Possessed of an intimate knowledge of the port and everything in it, pilots know everything there is to know about the local tides, currents, weather patterns, navigable channels, shoal areas, anchorages, bottom topography, bridges, tunnels, and all aids to navigation including buoys, lights, and daybeacons. They know every pier and wharf and how best to approach and depart from them in all conceivable conditions. Pilots are expert shiphandlers. They simultaneously give instructions for engine and helm settings and tugboat positioning and maneuvering, often orchestrating solutions to the most complex situations so that it all looks like an art form. Their level of proficiency and the value of their services cannot be overstated. Outside of the seafaring profession, though, pilots rarely receive any recognition for their work.²

The Coast Guard examinations for pilots’ licenses are famously difficult. Many pilots already hold unlimited Master’s licenses from years of deep sea experience. While an unlimited license is valid over the limitless oceans, a pilot’s license is specific to a certain place. A man with pilotage for Galveston, for example, cannot bring a ship to Houston. There are also pilots who cover wider areas than single seaports. This would include pilots who bring ships through major inland waterways such as Long Island Sound or Chesapeake Bay. The transit times in such areas are many hours long, and typically at the end of the run a docking pilot comes aboard and relieves the original pilot. Sometimes called coastal pilots or bay pilots, they, like the harbor pilots, must also pass rigorous and demanding examinations, as well as complete a comprehensive apprenticeship. For a while I considered pursuing a pilotage endorsement for the port of Norfolk, Virginia. I thought this might be a nice addition to my license once I had reached the level of unlimited Master, and I had sailed in and out of Norfolk so many times on several ships that I came to know the port and the lower Chesapeake quite well. This idea never came to fruition, though.

Norfolk was a short pilotage run, about two hour’s transit time from the Virginia Capes. By comparison, Baltimore was a twelve hour transit from the capes. On my next-to-last day aboard, the New Jersey Sun travelled this long route. She picked up a pilot from the Maryland Pilots’ Association at the Chesapeake Bay entrance at 12:00 noon on the Fourth of July, 1977, a bright sunny day with excellent visibility. Both the Eastern and Western Shores of the bay were clearly visible as the ship headed north. The bay itself was punctuated at intervals by lighthouses that were built on steel skeleton foundations, webs of metal that rose up out of the water. After darkness fell, brightly colored fireworks shot up at many locations along both shores. Through this festivity the pilot brought the ship almost the length of the Chesapeake to the Francis Scott Key Bridge on the outskirts of Baltimore. There a docking pilot came aboard. He and two tugboats conveyed the New Jersey Sun the remaining distance to the Hess pier. She was made fast at midnight. A long day’s work for the Chesapeake Bay pilot. He had taken his lunch and dinner on the bridge and ate as he worked. After the docking pilot relieved him, he slept on a settee just aft of the bridge until he was able to go ashore.

Another pilotage run of twelve hours that the New Jersey Sun made took her between the Gulf of Mexico and the oil docks of Garyville, Louisiana. She went upstream on June 28 and 29, spent seventeen hours alongside the pier, and returned downstream on June 30 with the oil that she subsequently brought to Baltimore. Two long runs on a winding and curving river channeled between high levees. Except for New Orleans and the delta, most of it looked the same. The pilots knew all the subtle differences in the riverscape, though, and hence always knew exactly where we were.

Several years later the Comet rode the Mississippi to New Orleans from the Gulf. This was a pleasant transit on a warm Saturday, January 7, 1984. Arriving at the entrance to Southwest Pass at midday, the Comet proceeded up the narrow channel to Head of Passes, the meeting point of all the tributaries of the Mississippi River Delta. She changed pilots at nearby Pilottown. The first pilot left the ship there and would subsequently take another vessel down to the Gulf. The pilot who relieved him then took the Comet the rest of the way upstream to New Orleans. A peaceful and picturesque place, the marshes of the Mississippi Delta stretched for miles in all directions, bisected only by the dredged channel and its low bordering levees. These pristine wetlands contained vast acres of low-lying lush green foliage interspersed with brownish river and gulf water topped by a leaden gray sky that stretched to all horizons. It was very pretty, but in an unusual way. And it was very peaceful. 

This serenity was breached only on arrival that evening in New Orleans. One very brash young officer looking for adventure demanded, “Hey, Pilot, where’s the action in this town?”

The pilot, far older and wiser than his interlocutor, advised him to be extremely careful about looking for action in New Orleans. “Y’all kin git yahself killed raht outside the gate heah,” he cautioned. Explaining that he knew the city as well as he knew the river, this gentleman counseled the young mate to be careful and avoid the vice dens of the city. Following the scriptural injunction that “every man should take righteousness in his hands. . .and lift a warning voice unto the inhabitants of the earth’ (D&C 63:37), he provided moral as well as navigational direction.

The Comet herself had to be careful on her way back down the river three weeks later. Caught in a blinding winter rainstorm with dense fog six hours below New Orleans, she anchored off Duvic, Louisiana, at 2:30pm on Thursday, January 26. Unable to see more than two hundred feet, she remained at anchor sounding fog signals until 10:30 the next morning. After listening to the Comet’s fog signal for twenty hours, the residents of quiet little Duvic must have been very happy to see her leave!

As the Comet transited the Southwest Pass enroute to the open Gulf, her pilot did something unusual. In a very narrow stretch of waterway, he stepped over to the helmsman and said jovially, “Why don’t you take a break for a few minutes, young man?” Then the pilot himself took the helm and personally steered the ship down the center of the channel for the next ten minutes or so. With a look of intense concentration on his face, he deftly handled the wheel, making short, sharp corrections to keep the ship on course. When the pass widened out again, he relinquished the wheel to the helmsman, who seemed very grateful to have his job back. By way of explanation, the pilot mentioned to both the mate and the helmsman that no one had done anything wrong; it was just a very tight spot in the pass and he always found it easier to steer the ship himself than to be constantly calling for minute corrections in the ship’s heading.

During my time on board, the Comet made several long pilotage runs. On each of her two transatlantic voyages she picked up an English coastal pilot off Brixham, England. These pilots assisted with navigation through the English Channel and the North Sea and rode the ship to Trondhein and Bremerhaven in November and December of 1983. Local harbor pilots then maneuvered the ship in and out of both these ports. Returning westward, the coastal pilots again assisted in the traffic lanes until they disembarked off Brixham.

In Panama, an American canal pilot brought the Comet through the locks, across Gatun Lake, and through the narrow confines of the Culebra Cut. This transit took eight hours on a very hot Tuesday, January 31, 1984. In the cut, with the ragged edges of mountains rising out of the water on both sides of the ship, the pilot turned to the bridge watch and remarked, “This is the part that God did not intend to be a canal!” In between helm instructions, he then described the difficulties encountered in digging through this mountain range during the canal’s construction. Partly inspired by this man’s casual conversation, I later read the great book about the Panama Canal in my leisure time on the Bartlett.³

On the other side of the world, the Comet made a very long pilotage run first through the narrow strait that separates Honshu and Kyushu, and then through the Inland Sea of Japan enroute to Iwakuni. Three separate pilots came aboard for this long route: the first for transiting the strait, the second for the nearly nine-hours-long voyage through the heavily trafficked Inland Sea, and finally a docking pilot. This operation, along with a six-hour period of loading cargo in Iwakuni, filled the entire 24 hour cycle of Tuesday, March 13, 1984.

Such long runs are exceptional, though. Most pilotage routes take up only a fraction of these transit times and cover much shorter distances. The shortest in my experience is Port Everglades in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Typically, the passage from arrival at the sea buoy to mooring at the pier took only 45 minutes. Furthermore, the weather was always good. This was not always the case elsewhere. Holy Loch, Scotland, stood at the opposite extreme. The pilotage run there took perhaps an hour, but the weather made it feel much longer. The anchor detail and the linehandlers on the Victoria always dressed for drenching rain, thick fog, and cold winds, and they often got all three. The Scottish pilots were always completely unfazed by these conditions.

Closer to home, New York has long been one of my favorite seaports. In the 1970s and 80s, I sailed in and out of there on the State of Maine, the Charger, the Vandenberg, and the Comet, and served as night mate aboard the Vanguard and the Hayes. Additionally, I always enjoyed riding the ferries between Manhattan and Staten Island. After the children arrived, they joined me on these short voyages across the harbor. One of the greatest shows on Earth, New York almost always had something going on. Merchant ships of all descriptions dotted the water and the shoreline, filled the anchorages, shifted between berths, passed beneath the bridges, and arrived and departed through the Narrows between Staten Island and Brooklyn. This great movement of commerce called for pilots to bring the ships into, through, and out of the port. Aboard the ferries, more pilots wended their vessels’ ways through the traffic. The children always found this activity fascinating. They watched carefully and asked many questions. One day, something very special took place.

On a warm and hazy Friday, August 23, 2002, James, Steven, and Michael sailed with me from Manhattan aboard the ferry Governor Herbert H. Lehman. As the ferry got underway from the city, we gathered at the bow and spotted a large container ship inbound in the Narrows. A few minutes later, we saw a large tanker emerging from the Kills, the small channel that separates Staten Island and New Jersey. Estimating that they would meet off St. George, our ferry’s destination on the northeast corner of Staten Island, we watched and waited. Then the northbound ferry Andrew J. Barberi got underway from the St. George terminal and quickly crossed ahead of both ships. Through the binoculars we identified the inbound container as the Zim Mediterranean of Valletta and the outbound tanker as the Falcon of Piraeus. The Governor Lehman approached closer to both of them as their course changes carried them to the now-obvious meeting point in front of the St. George ferry docks. The binoculars were no longer necessary. Even using the camera proved awkward as both ships became too big to fit in the viewfinder.

James, Steven, and Michael watched closely as the shipping drama played out in front of them. The Governor Lehman maintained a steady course but cut her engines to reduce speed as both the Zim Mediterranean and the Falcon adjusted their courses to pass safely port-to-port in front of the ferry. The Lehman coasted to a stop with the Zim’s starboard side perhaps 400 feet in front of her and the Falcon less distance than that from the Zim’s port side. The Falcon became momentarily obscured from our view by the larger Zim. From where we stood on the Lehman, the Falcon and the Zim were first bow to bow, then side by side, and finally stern to stern as they passed each other on their reciprocal courses. No sooner did water open up where their sterns had been than the Governor Lehman rang up full ahead and resumed her voyage to St. George. The Zim turned more to port to enter the Kills, evidently enroute to the big container docks in Newark and Elizabeth, New Jersey. We gained a clear view of her broad transom stern piled six-high and thirteen-across with containers which would soon be off loaded onto trailer trucks and freight trains. We had a similar view of the somewhat smaller but still impressive Falcon as she turned to starboard to pass beneath the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge and into the Ambrose Channel. With these two vessels now safely past and well on their way, the Governor Lehman eased anticlimactically into her berth in St. George.

All these vessels’ movements in this congested situation were carefully controlled by pilots. No doubt they had all spoken to each other on channel 16 on the bridge-to-bridge VHF radio and had agreed upon a safe and convenient place to meet. With their intimate knowledge of the harbor, their expertise in shiphandling, and their years of experience, these pilots were eminently qualified to direct these large merchant ships worth hundreds of millions of dollars in circumstances where there was almost no margin for error. A routine day at the office.

James, Steven, and Michael were suitably impressed. They seemed to intuitively recognize that bringing such massive vessels around sharp corners and into narrow channels and through congested harbors required an expertise above and beyond the ordinary. Unfortunately, this goes largely unnoticed and unremarked by those with no connection to the sea. Once in a while, though, word does get out.

The new Queen Mary 2 of the Cunard Line arrived in New York on her maiden voyage on a misty Thursday morning, April 22, 2004. Because of the historical significance of the Cunard Line and the Queen ships, the city took notice. The following day, The New York Times reported on this event with special attention to Captain Robert D. Jones, the harbor pilot who brought the new Queen Mary into port:

Standing on the ship’s bridge with a walkie-talkie in one hand and a pair of binoculars within reach of the other was Captain Jones. He is not the captain of the Queen Mary 2, but the harbor pilot who guided it on the last few miles of its maiden voyage to New York.

Through it all, Captain Jones never touched the throttles, never turned the wheel. But his was the last word on where to steer the ship, how fast it could go, and where the trouble spots lay in the harbor’s complicated underwater geography. He long ago memorized where the navigational buoys are—knowledge that helps when, as was the case yesterday, he cannot see them for the early-morning fog.

So he knew when and where, off Brooklyn, the ship had to make two crucial turns on its way to Manhattan.⁴

The Times noted that Captain Jones had previously piloted the Queen Elizabeth 2 in and out of New York, one of over 8,000 ships he had boarded in his long career. Additionally, the paper recorded his assessment of both Queens’ maneuvering capabilities and acknowledged the tremendous efforts required for safely docking the new Queen Mary. Alluding to the risks inherent in such an operation and the ever-present possibility of something going wrong, the Times graciously left the last word to the pilot:

After 45 years as a harbor pilot, Captain Jones, 69, will retire today. “You’re only as good as your last job,” he said, “and this was pretty good.”⁵

In the early evening of Sunday, April 25, 2004, the Queen Mary 2 and the Queen Elizabeth 2 sailed from New York in tandem, bound for England. Darkness had just fallen as the two ships were piloted down the Hudson River from their midtown piers. As they approached the Statue of Liberty, fireworks erupted into the sky and cascaded downward onto the surface of the water. The sky and the sea sparkled in celebration of these grand vessels. My sons and I watched from Battery Park in Lower Manhattan, and we all agreed that it was “pretty good.”

But the Queen Elizabeth 2 was embarking on her last transatlantic voyage. Soon afterwards, she would be withdrawn from service and retired. On the night we saw her, she was crossing the bar for nearly the last time. Likewise, all the ships of my youth had also crossed the bar and put to sea for the last time, most of them bound for dismantling in a scrap yard. All of us, too, will metaphorically cross the bar and put to sea for the last time, bound for the grave yard, no doubt hoping as we depart that it was all “pretty good.”

Then we will meet our Pilot, the One whose navigational instructions during the voyage of life we will have hopefully followed. Like the pilots who board our ships, the Supreme Pilot holds all the necessary and detailed knowledge that we need for a safe transit. All we need do is consult him, for we are assured, “Ask, and it shall be given you” (Matt. 7:7). Our Pilot will give us moral guidance, just as the Mississippi River pilot on the Comet gave to the young mate looking for “the action” in New Orleans. He will be completely unfazed by adverse conditions, like the Scottish pilots aboard the Victoria, and his calmness will soothe our souls. Like the Panama Canal pilot who knew the intent of God concerning the isthmian mountains, he will not leave us to wander aimlessly through an artificial world. But we must first take him aboard:

Draw near unto me and I will draw near unto you; seek me diligently and ye shall find me. Whatsoever ye ask the Father in my name it shall be given unto you, that is expedient for you (D&C 88:63-64).

Our Pilot will convey his directions to us via the Spirit, through the still small voice, through inspiration, and through the leadership of the Church, not only when we are transiting pilotage waters, but throughout our long voyage. In the end, we may anticipate a happy conclusion to our travels when we meet our Pilot in propria persona:

For though from out our bourne of Time and Place

The flood may bear me far,

I hope to see my Pilot face to face

When I have crossed the bar.⁶

And when we meet our Pilot we will find that it is not just “pretty good,” but very, very good.

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¹ I regret that I cannot remember the names of many of the pilots who boarded the ships I sailed on, but for some odd reason I recall Captain Pizzatolla’s name and perhaps a half-dozen others with particular clarity.

² See Matt Jenkins, “Running the Bar,” Smithsonian, February, 2009, pg. 62-69. This is a very informative description of the work done by the harbor pilots serving Portland, Oregon.

³ David McCullough, The Path between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870-1914, New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc., 1977.

⁴ James Barron, “A Queen Arrives in New York, and Even in the Jaded Big City, Jaws Drop,” The New York Times, April 23, 2004, available at www.nytimes.com.

⁵ Ibid.

⁶ Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “Crossing the Bar,” in The Norton Anthology of Poetry, New York: W.W. Norton and Company, Inc., 1970, p. 756.

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.