RE-ASSESSMENT'

The Hero Without a Name

By NEVILLE

BRA YBROOKE

,phe Death Shirr is the most famous of all 11 B. Traven's books. When it first came out in Germany exactly thirty years ago, it sold over 200,000 copies before it was banned. It is sub- titled 'The Story of an American Sailor'— although it could equally well be called The Story of a Hero Without a Name. In this context, the term 'Hero' may need definition, since `the song of the real . . . hero of the sea has not yet been sung,' writes the author in the first chapter.

For Traven, the sailor on a death ship is a gladiator; the Emperor for whom he performs is Mammon, or Gold. Perhaps, too, the term `death ship' needs definition, since it is a ship on which those who embark 'will no longer have existence. . . .' Moreover, there will always be death ships as long as there is contraband to carry, 'as long as carbines can be concealed in tins of corned beef.' This may have been written in 1935, but the trade continues: cases of marmalade Made in the USA, or crates of children's toys Made in Hamburg or Sheffield, are still smuggled into Albanian, Syrian and Moroccan ports. And the trade exists 'because a good capitalist system does not know waste.' So long as there are sailors without passports, they can be employed as cheap labour; in gratitude for being signed on, there can be a saving on the hush-hush money that would have to pass as bribes to crews whose papers are in order. The ideal man for this kind of exploitation is the AB seaman on the run. Such a man is Traven's sailor, known for most of the book simply as Pippib.

When the American freighter Tuscaloosa docks at Antwerp, Pippib goes ashore. He has a drink too many; picks up a pretty girl; spends the night with her; is told about her sick mother needing expensive medicine, and empties his pockets. In Antwerp and a hundred other ports this is a familiar story. So, he misses the sailing of his ship homeward bound for New Orleans, is without a cent, and without identity papers. When the Belgian police pick him up, they do not believe a word of it; at first they detain him, and then at night deport him to Holland, until the Dutch police in turn find him, question him and try to catapult him back across the border. At neither the American consulate in Rotterdam, nor subsequently in Paris, can they help him. He is, as far as Europe and the United Slates are concerned, a stateless person: but worse, he is a person without money.

In France, Mrs. Reuben Marcus has lost her passport, but because she is the wife of a New York banker she is issued with another. Pippib looks on and can do nothing. He jumps a train to Toulouse, but is arrested for not having a ticket; he is thrown into prison and fourteen days later thrown out. He reaches Spain, stows away aboard a freighter bound for Marseilles, and, after a night there, hops on another freighter and lands back in Barcelona. There, he sees the Yorikke with the blue flag up. This is a sign that she will be sailing within two hours. It is his one chance. No skipper can enlist a new man without taking him to his consul. The consul is obliged to ask for the passport or seaman's card, and if there is none then he is not per- mitted to let him sign on. But once the blue flag is up the ship is already considered on her way,

• The first of a series by different writers. t Cape, 18s.

and from that moment onwards the port authori- ties have no jurisdiction over her. The skipper can enlist whom he likes—and that is how Pippib is enlisted on the Yorikke.

So much for the first part of the book. The remaining two parts deal with life aboard a death ship; being shanghaied on to another; and ship- wreck. Objectively, this would suggest a worsen- ing of the situation. But Traven's sailor is a man whose motto is 'Hold on! Never give up!' He is an example of the lines from Lear: 'the worst is not/So long as we can say "This is the worst."' Here is a passage where he calls this philosophy into play:

In the opposite wall was a door leading to quarters similar to ours in shape and arrange- ment, but ten times worse as regards filth and dirt. I would have sworn away my soul that nothing on earth could be filthier than the quarter I was in, but when I saw the oppo- site quarter I said: 'This is the worst.'

The mood is calm and philosophic; at other times the philosophy is the same, but the mood becomes wild and tempestuous:

All the filth is only outside. Don't let it go to your soul and spirit and your heart. Take the plunge head-first. That way you'll feel the cold less. And now away from the railing and away from the beast that is after you. Kick him right in the pants. Sock it right in the swear- hold. Spit it out, and do it well. Spitting out the filth you feel in your throat is all you can do now. But make a good job of it. Now back into your bunk.

These are the ways that a man may rationalise a predicament and so fight for survival. They im- plant in him hope—a desire to prove himself a victorious gladiator and so see again, perhaps, Jackson Square in sunny New Orleans.

If this spirit of hope gives Traven's sailor the power to battle against tremendous odds, it does nothing to lessen his recognition of the appalling conditions that exist aboard the Yorikke. Supper consists of a watery meagre vegetable soup with an ugly-looking layer of rancid fat on the sur- face. There is a passing reference to this in another of Traven's novels, March to Coabland: `Indian mahogany workers can be fed as royally as the stokers and oilers of a death ship where, as a rule, the food is of the lowest quality pos- sible.' The reason in each case is the same: neither the profits on mahogany prices, nor freight rates, must be cut by any capital ex- penditure. One of the reasons why The Death Ship was banned in 1935 by the Nazis was because they thought it Communist.

To think this (as some still do) is to mis- understand what Traven is not only fighting in this novel, but in all his fiction. I have already called it the fight against Mammon, but another way to put it might be to call it the fight against the dictatorial power which money invests in one man over another. It is a theme that Jack London treated in The Iron Heel, and London is a writer with whom Traven might be com- pared. In their books, which are really adven- ture stories, nothing occurs which is beyond the realm of credibility; there are no imaginary gold mines as in Rider Haggard, for instance. All the scenes in The Death Ship have the smack of experience about them. (Traven has kept the secret of his nom de plume all his life, and one of the few things that have been revealed about him is that as a young boy he ran away to sea.) Pippib is taken on technically as a fireman by the captain of the Yorikke, but is made to work as a coal-drag. A coal-drag, or coal- shoveller, is the man who tortuously hauls the coal from the bunkers to the fireman. 'Only the best snake dancers survived. . . . Others who had tried and failed were no longer alive.' But failure does not matter to those who run a death ship; labour is cheap, and the companies who run them even resent the weight of coal that must be tied to a corpse to send it to the bottom. If the Yorikke and other ships like her teach a lesson, it is 'how much the individual can bear and not go overboard.' Nor is it until the final chapters are reached that the full irony of this statement is made clear.

When Traven's sailor is shanghaied on to the Empress of Madagascar, he realises that his labour as a drag is only needed to get the ship out to sea so that she may be scuttled and the insurance claimed. Yet even when she is driven on to a reef off the west coast of Africa and he is left clinging to a wooden wall from the chart-room, he still remains undefeated. Situa- tions change, they worsen—the Yorikke seemed a 'paradise' to the 'gilded' Empress—and still the worst is not yet. How foolish in comparison' with his present state seems his fight for identity papers, his fight against rats in the hold, or his fight to keep the boilers going. All that counts in the end, he realises, is the fight of the moment. 'All that we have is our breath. I shall fight for it with teeth and nails'—and, indeed, that is exactly what he does in the last pages as the waves crash more and more fiercely about him.

There is no need any longer for Traven to say that `the song of the real . . . hero of the sea has never yet been sung.' The story of his sailor is that song.