Authors: Robert A. Heinlein
The
Gulf Shipper
was warped away from dock and headed out into the stream by towboats about 1000 Tuesday morning. We spent all day watching the lower or delta reaches of the Mississippi, counting pelicans and one (1) porpoise. (No score is credited for seagulls.) The delta Mississippi is an improbable place. From the deck of a ship one can see right over the tallest trees to the horizon, stretching around through 360 degrees as in the flattest parts of western Kansas. The highest land seems to be roughly 21 inches above water and the black gumbo mud runs down to China. Vegetation is lush, thick and low, something between canebrake and jungle. But there are farms and cattle ranches back in here, paved roads and many oil wells. One wonders what they do at high water.
Almost down to the Gulf the Delta pilot leaves the ship, at Pilot Town, a town built on stilts, and the Bar pilot takes over. The Bar is a neighborhood rather than a channel-the lower portion of the multiple mouth of the Mississippi changes so rapidly that it must be piloted by a man who has taken a look at it just a few hours before. You can almost see him moving his lips as he comes aboard, concentrating on remembering the latest twist of Old Man River. He takes the ship out into the open Gulf as the sun goes down, then with a sigh of relief turns it over to the skipper.
We went to bed.
Next morning we were out of sight of land, on the open blue Gulf, lying in deck chairs and counting flying fish instead of pelicans. The sea was almost glassy with the ship moving gently, rolling almost imperceptibly and lifting a trifle to long, slow, low swells. Nevertheless it was enough to bother one passenger, who started missing meals at once. The rest of us started getting acquainted-Ticky and myself, Vi and Robert from Hawaii and off on a busman's holiday to the tropics, two couples from the same middle west town who kept much to themselves, and Mr. Tupper. Mr. Tupper was known either as "The Cruise Director" or as "The Owner"-it was his third trip in this ship, he had his own sextant and navigated with the mates each day, he had a stateroom right on the bridge, one which had apparently been intended as an emergency cabin for the skipper in wartime. He was not a seafaring man by profession, but a retired insurance executive from Atlanta, Georgia, who had made a hobby of the merchant marine in his old age and had studied navigation in order to enjoy it the more. He was the life of the party, the benign spirit of the ship, with an endless string of anecdotes and "animal stories," always funny, and with a case of Old Parr under his desk in case something-such as sighting a whale, or a boat drill, or such, should make him and his companions "nervous."
He assuaged my nervousness on numerous occasions. GSA should give him his passage free and charge the other passengers extra, should they be lucky enough to sail with him.
We passed the west end of Cuba the next night and were in the Caribbean, which looked just like the Gulf. I looked for the furrows I had worn into the Caribbean as a kid thirty years ago, but they were gone. All is change, there is nothing you can really depend on. The Captain gave a cocktail party which made up for it. He put on a uniform for the first time, too (freighters are
very
informal)-dress whites. Captain Lee is a tall, handsome man in his early forties and looks the way a skipper should look. He has a very heavy hand with a cocktail shaker.
The skipper went to sea as a boy, shipping before the mast, and worked his way up through the hawsepipe through all ratings from ordinary seaman to master mariner. This personal saga of the sea is probably passing today, as a consequence of the founding of the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy. No doubt this transition represents progress, but one thing is sure: the old-style skipper has a knowledge of his ship and the job of every man in it which cannot be learned in a school room.
Captain Lee kept a very taut ship. There was overt evidence in clean paintwork and well-shined brightwork but the most compelling evidence was negative; the ship had no odor. Almost every ship that sails the sea holds a pervasive, inescapable stink compounded of bilgewater and a dozen other ancient, organic whiffs. In a dirty ship it is almost unbearable; in a clean ship it is so slight as to be inoffensive when the weather is calm, the ports open, and the stomach is easy. But one does not expect it to be missing entirely. The
Gulf Shipper
had none that I could detect.
Later on we were conducted through all parts of the ship, engineroom, holds, lower passages, crew's quarters, galley, lockers, iceboxes-and I could see why. The ship was clean. Not just reasonably clean, but clean. The Captain inspected the ship each morning from stem to sternpost. When he inspected during our first day at sea I was asleep, with our door closed. He did not knock but noted down that he had not been able to enter stateroom number three and returned that afternoon to complete his inspection.
He did not simply stick his head in, glance around, and ask us if everything was all right. He came in and tried everything himself-plumbing valves, porthole dogs, medicine cabinet door, wardrobe doors, drawers. There was a steel chest of drawers welded to the bulkhead; Captain Lee found that one drawer stuck, so he squatted down, took hold with both hands and attempted to make it work.
He is a large man and powerful. With a sound of ripping metal the entire steel chest parted from the bulkhead and came away in his hands. He looked at it soberly and remarked, "I'll send one of the engineers up to fix that."
Freighter travel can be very pleasant. If you insist on the combination of swank hotel and organized children's party which characterizes a smart North Atlantic liner you will be bored and miserable in a freighter, for a freighter offers only meals, room, and transportation; the rest is up to you. I am not sneering at luxury liners; real luxury can be a lot of fun. Freighter life is a different sort of fun.
The staterooms are usually larger than any but the most expensive in a liner and they are always outside rooms. Ours in the
Gulf Shipper
had a private toilet and shower, contained two single bunks and a large couch, had three ports, and was roomy enough to set up a card table. Outside the passengers' rooms were wide verandas with deck chairs. There were no deck stewards hovering around; if you wanted your chair moved, you moved it; if you wanted a cup of coffee or tea, you went down to the pantry and got it.
The passengers ate with the officers in the officers' saloon. The service was adequate-one waiter for nine passengers-and the food was the sort known as "good, plain cooking." This can as easily be "bad, plain cooking" but in the
Shipper
it was good. The chef was no
Cordon Bleu
but he had a decent respect for good raw materials and prepared them accordingly. There was usually a choice of three entrées and two desserts; I believe that anyone but a gourmet would have been happy with it. Dutch, German, and Scandinavian freighters have a reputation for setting a better table than do our ships. In some cases this reputation may be justified-but I enjoyed the food in the
Gulf Shipper.
What you do between meals is up to you. You can sunbathe in a deck chair and count the flying fish, sleep, chat with the other passengers and the officers, read, play cards, study, or even get drunk. Or you can hole up in your room and wish to heaven that you had never left Paducah.
Ticky and I found the three weeks in the
Shipper
one long, gay picnic, its only drawback being that we ran very short on sleep. Both of us had expected to work and study on this leg of the trip; neither of us got anything of the sort done. But I am forced to admit that, aside from a couple of good parties in port, nothing noteworthy happened. We played cribbage, we yarned endlessly, and we had cheerful drinks with cheerful companions. Someone else might have found the trip excruciatingly dull.
Freighter travel is not necessarily cheap. For the North Atlantic crossing freighter fare runs about the same as cabin class in the
Ile de France,
with first-class fare running considerably more and tourist class running considerably less. No direct comparison can be made between passenger ships and freighters on the run from New Orleans and Valparaiso as there are no passenger ships on this run. But it can be compared with air travel. First class one-way by air from New Orleans is now $529, air tourist class is $402, whereas the ocean freighter fare is $410, to which you can add $30 or $40 in tips.
Another way is to compare round-the-world fares:
President Lines tour ships... about $2600
Air First Class................................ $1720
Air Tourist..................................... $1580
Ocean freighter travel-from $500 to about $2000: the catch being that the $500 bargain is almost impossible to get and you probably would not want it if you could get it. A more likely figure is something between $1400 and $2000, or a median cost almost exactly equal to air tourist fare and a top cost in excess of first-class air travel.
Of course air transport simply gets you there, room-and-board on the ground being your problem. A typical trip around the world by freighter or cargo liner might show thirty days in port, during which time you may sleep and eat in the ship. Equal accommodations might cost you $15 per day if you went by air-a very rough guess since cost-of-living and rates-of-exchange vary so widely. Nevertheless, from my own recent personal experience in hotel costs around the world, I estimate the value of freighter accommodations as American-plan hotel accommodations to be certainly not more than $450 for 30 days, i.e., you can buy as many days sightseeing around the world for about the same price whether you go by air or by freighter. If you do not insist on the foreign equivalent of a Hilton hotel, you may be able to do it by air for a few dollars less than by freighter-and
much
cheaper than you could do it by luxury ship.
This may be surprising-I know that it surprised me. Until I made a direct comparison, on paper and through experience, I had always assumed that air travel was comparatively expensive, that in general travel by water was fairly reasonable, and that ocean freighter travel was very inexpensive. While it may have been true once, it is not true now.
The rates for particular trips vary widely. As a rule of thumb you can now expect that first-class travel by air will cost about the same as first-class travel by ship or train and that ocean freighter travel will cost about as much as air tourist travel. But it still depends on where you want to go; New York to London is about $75 cheaper, class for class, on the water, whereas New York to Los Angeles is at least $100 more expensive by water.
It adds up to a matter of taste and convenience. If you like long, lazy days at sea and have time for an extended vacation, ocean travel and freighter travel in particular is a real bargain; if your time is limited and you want a maximum of sightseeing for your dollar, go by air. If you can spare a month, you can go all the way around the world, see as much in as many days of sightseeing as are offered in luxury cruises of three or four months, all for the price of a Chevrolet. (A luxury ocean cruise, counting in tips and extras, will cost as much as a Cadillac.)
But freighter life unquestionably offers the maximum opportunity to rest. When we left Colorado Springs I was in a state of jumpy nerves from overwork. I twitched in the daytime and had insomnia at night. After a few days in the
Gulf Shipper
I was as relaxed as an oyster. It took me five days to work up enough ambition to load my camera.
After some days of sleeping all night, all afternoon, and napping in the morning I did bestir myself enough to poke around the ship a little. The
Shipper
is a typical freighter of the type known as "C-2." Her gross registered tonnage is 10,700 but, loaded, she actually displaces 15,000 long tons of sea water, i.e., that is what she would weigh, loaded with cargo and ready for sea, if you weighed her on your bathroom scales-I am speaking of largish bathroom scales, of course.
The term "tonnage" is used glibly with respect to ships by travel agents, seafaring men, and landlubbers, but the word is as slippery as "democracy" or "love" unless defined each time it is used. The ton referred to is a "metric ton" which the dictionary says is 2204.62 pounds-which is right as far as it goes. But it can also mean space of 100 cubic feet, or a carrying capacity of 40 cubic feet, or 35 cubic feet of sea water which is 2240 pounds in weight. It
never
means 2000 pounds as in a ton of coal delivered to your house.
To add to the confusion any ship has at least four usual "tonnages"-gross registered, net registered, dead weight, and displacement. The first two are measured in cubic feet, the second two are measured in pounds. In speaking of the
Queen Mary,
the
Nieuw Amsterdam,
or any merchant ship, the term "tonnage" that you are likely to hear means "registered gross tonnage" which is a cubic measure of the space enclosed inside her skin. On the other hand "tonnage" of a warship almost always means how much she
weighs,
ready for action. The two scales have the barest nodding acquaintance.
In the case of the
Shipper
her "net" tonnage is less than one third of her "displaced" tonnage, but both are correctly her "tonnage."
(John "loves" Mary; John "loves" bowling-see what I mean?)
Let us call the
Shipper
an 11,000-ton ship-on the same scale under which the
Queen Mary
is called an 80,000-ton ship, by the cubic footage inside their skins. This does not mean that the
Shipper
is small; it means that the
Queen Mary
is fantastically large. A "little" ship like the
Gulf Shipper
can carry as much as two to three ordinary freight trains. She is 460 feet long, 63 feet wide, and draws 32 feet. To push this bulk through the water at 15.5 knots (18 land miles per hour) she uses 6000 horsepower derived from oil-fired boilers and steam-driven turbines-the locomotives used by the Santa Fe's famous
SuperChief
are rated at 900 horsepower; on the other hand the lovely lady
Lexington,
lost in the battle of the Coral Sea, had a rated horsepower of 180,000 and could, by tucking up her skirts a bit, turn up over 200,000 horsepower.