PERSONAL COLUMN
Slow boat to Grenada
GEOFFREY WAGNER
Neither my wife nor I had particularly felt the lure of the freighter way. We had read the few books and brochures — now mostly dated and inaccurate — on freighter travel, and it sounded austere. However, if you have personally to accompany a sizeable amount of your own effects, viz, freight, to remote parts, as we were forced to when building a home for retirement in the Grenadines, such is the only way to do it from New York, at least.
So one icy January evening I found myself discussing ships and routes with a soft-spoken, pipe-smoking Scot in a small office off the Battery. The eventual result was an extremely informal, indeed ticketless embarkation during a correspondingly sweltering June afternoon, on a small freight ship anchored (hardly) to a vitriolic Brooklyn pier (and unless they are looking forward to a mile walk with, say, fourteen pices of small luggage, prospective passengers should be apprised that cabs are disallowed in such areas). In fact, almost no one is allowed on these desperate and chaotic waterfronts, it seems, except ex-Italian longshoremen and a few natty gents in implacable suits, forever presiding, from the eyes of blackjack dealers, at the side.
The SS ' Amigo ' sailed slowly but surely. Its maximum speed was ten and a half knots, a considerable advantage to uncarpentered freight: the banana boats have to keep to stern schedules and ply a steady twenty-five knots through the roughest seas. The ' Amigo ' sailed under a Panamese flag with a Liverpudlian skipper, Scottish officers, a Russian-Estonian Chief Engineer (whose beer consumption was unbelievable) and a crew of West Indian islanders whose accents were so disparate they could scarcely understand each other.
The general informality extended, of course, to the ship's schedule. It is seldom that the New York office will be able accurately to estimate ports of call and duration of stays. The captain himself may be uncertain as to length of time in any one port since this depends on freight business often arranged in the interim by his shore agent, or whether a shed manager in Barbados has lost a key and gone off to bathe on a distant beach all day (as happened in our case), and so forth. More than one crew member hauled himself over the side at a running jump as we were pulling out, under a pilot, from this port or that en route.
Our cabin turned out to be tiny but cosy, conveniently opposite the captain's cuddy, into which there was a standing invitation, from eleven thirty a.m. on, to cool drinks and endless yarns, a lot about Liverpool in the last war (from which I myself had once embarked for North Africa during a titanic air-raid on the docks), but still more about almost absurdly romantic adventures in foreign places. These chats were long, pensive affairs, picked up and redeveloped at various times throughout the trip, to the clink of ice, the tamping of Player's Navy Cut, and much head-wagging over the ways of town life, as reported by itinerant landlubbers like ourselves. One soon got the impression that these young, confident officers were really drop-outs from modern life, their own masters in their own small world for month after month of every sunny year. One incidental result of their solicitude was that I was never allowed to buy a drink during the entire voyage: not that it would have cost much to have done so, a bottle of best Beefeater's selling for $1.90 US aboard (a price off which the chief steward had already made a modest profit!).
This last, an enormous Gaelic-speaking Scot with calves as thick as my thighs, ministered to our few needs with cheerful alacrity.
He too turned out to be another lucky replacement, the previous incumbent having gone mad halfway up the Amazon, it seemed, and having had to be forcibly put ashore at Iquitos, from which he was flown off in a straitjacket, never to be heard of since. For some reason — possibly its very remoteness — the Amazon run was a favourite with all concerned. Men would long to go ashore there who wouldn't even bother to step off the ship in Miami. Our steward of the time kept two piranhas in a vacuum flask in his cabin — to the horror of visiting customs inspectors. They were to find their way to a tank in his small house on the oustkirts of Plymouth. Placed in a wash-basin with any other fish they could be watched chopping off tails and bodies until only inedible heads remained, floating to the top. Meanwhile, we observed that the chief steward ordered raw liver for breakfast.
The informality of a small freighter is extreme. At times we felt we were on a private yacht. The bridge was an open house. You could do or wear anything or nothing. The Captain or First Officer -a bearded Cypriot called Mac — gave us warm welcomes everywhere. Mac's predecessor had committed suicide. At any rate, he was on board one day and not the next, so that it was assumed he had jumped (or fallen?) overboard. There was a small recreation room through the tepid air of which darts regularly whizzed and plunked into a cork board, Latin Mac proving far more expert than any British aboard. It was another cosy place, if a mite blackened — the last captain had picked up a barbecue set in the South and since the poop had proved windy he had transported his efforts indoors and nearly set fire to the ship. The Russian-Estonian Chief Engineer together with a Trinidadian deck-hand had apparently hosed down the whole place, and ex-skipper, with some satisfaction.
Apart from the ship's officers, the freighter traveller is going to find considerable proximity to what passengers board. In fact, I would say this is a determining element in the journey — plus the weather. Our only fellow-voyagers turned out to be a Baptist missionary and wife from South Carolina. I confess that my own heart sank at this news from my own wife. But I couldn't have been wronger. No attempt at conversion was made by either of this delightful, relaxed and thoroughly sophisticated couple and what's more, they had brought along with them their lovely eight-year-old Indian daughter, whom they had adopted during their last, unbelievably arduous and uncomplaining stint in Venezuela, where their mission had been seventy-five miles from the nearest village. It seems that these days most freighter passengers are missionaries or hippies (or maybe both combined) when they aren't impoverished artists, like ourselves. People, perhaps, with some inner resources with which to pass the long, lazy days that lie ahead. With her great glyphic eyes, and mane of black silk hair, little Juanita kept me pegged to endless games of draughts (checkers), which she invariably won; by the end she was beating Mac at darts!
Food was frequent and, in general, appalling — barring breakfast where the kippers tasted as if they had just swum out of the sea (they had) and you could stand a spoon in the porridge, as in the rice, pudding invariably to follow. The trouble here is that the " chef " in, our galley was a Grenadian like me and to any ex-British islander the acme of cuisine is to get everything tasting as soggily English as possible. Just like they do it at Buckingham Palace, man. Thus suet pudding was served on the equator and any meat came over-cooked to the texture of best British shoe-leather. Our cabin boy called Sunshine rarely smiled. He doubled as ship's barber, his technique being the traditional saucer cut, via a Gillette razor.
These freighter days are drawling, dozy affairs in deck-chairs, perfect for those trying to catch up on some reading, as for the personnel aboard who seem to have cordially opted out of modern life. I suspect that why our Lancashire skipper ('the old man' to all) so liked the Amazon was that it meant a full three-months round trip on his own from the New York office. Previously this quiet, contained, and fulfilled-looking individual had been running freight up from Singapore to mainland China where not the least of his exploits seems to have been the successful suturing of a pet monkey's torn testicles without benefit of the usual ship's surgical radio instructions; he was a fully Conradian 'character,' constantly suborned during this particular duty to spy for various major powers (and always refusing), and regaling us nightly with fantastic yarns of ocean life, plus attendant eccentricities of human behaviour. He really pined in port! Yet luckily he kept a strong speedboat aboard, officially for dashing up and down Amazonian inlets, it seemed, and delightful for water-skiing behind elsewhere. All in all, for those who expect little freightering can offer a lot.
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