The Death Ship
The Death Ship
by B. Traven
(Originally written in English in 1923 or 1924, translated into German by B. Traven himself and first published as Das Totenschiff. Die Geschichte eines amerikanischen Seemanns in Berlin, 1926. The first edition in English appeared in 1934)
Table of Contents
Song of an American Sailor 4
THE FIRST BOOK
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
THE SECOND BOOK
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
THE THIRD BOOK
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Appendix A – “B. Traven – An Anti-Biography”
Appendix B - Further sources of information about B. Traven
Song of an American Sailor
Now stop that crying, honey dear,
The Jackson Square remains still here
In sunny New Orleans
In lovely Louisiana.
She thinks me buried in the sea,
No longer does she wait for me
In sunny New Orleans
In lovely Louisiana.
The death ship is it I am in,
All I have lost, nothing to win
So far off sunny New Orleans
So far off lovely Louisiana.
THE FIRST BOOK
1
We had brought, in the holds of the S.S. Tuscaloosa, a full cargo of cotton from New Orleans to Antwerp.
The Tuscaloosa was a fine ship, an excellent ship, true and honest down to the bilge. First-rate freighter. Not a tramp. Made in the United States of America. Home port New Orleans. Oh, good old New Orleans, with your golden sun above you and your merry laughter within you! So unlike the frosty towns of the Puritans with their sour faces of string-savers.
What a ship the Tuscaloosa was! The swellest quarters for the crew you could think of. There was a great shipbuilder indeed. A man, an engineer, an architect who for the first time in the history of shipbuilding had the communistic idea that the crew of a freighter might consist of human beings, not merely of hands. The company who had ordered the ship to be built had, somehow, made the great discovery that a well-treated, well-fed, well-housed crew is worth more to the welfare of a ship and its ability to pay high dividends than a crew treated like bums. Everything was as clean as a Dutch girl.
Showers whenever you wanted them. Clean bed-sheets and clean pillow-covers twice a week. Yes, sir. Everything was solid like rock. The food was good, rich, and you could have as much as you could pack. The mess-gear always polished like in a swell hotel dining-room. There were two colored boys to attend to our quarters and mess to keep them spick and span like a peasant home in Sweden at Whitsunday. All for no other reason than to keep the crew in fine health and in high spirits. Yes, sir.
I second mate? No, sir. I was not mate on this can, not even bos’n. I was just a plain sailor. Deck-hand you may say. You see, sir, to tell you the truth, full-fledged sailors aren’t needed now. They have gone for ever, I think, with the last horse-drawn cab in New York. A freighter of today isn’t a ship at all. A modern freighter meant to make money for the company is only a floating machine. You may not know very much about ships, sir, but, believe me, real sailors wouldn’t know what to do with a modern ship. What such a ship needs is not sailors who know all about rigging; what she really cries for is men who are good engineers, mechanics, and working-men who know machinery when they see it. Even the skipper has to be more of an engineer than a sailor. Take the A.B., the able-bodied sailor, who used to be more than anybody else a real sailor; today he is just a plain worker tending a certain machine. He is not supposed to know anything about sails. Nobody would ask him to make a proper splice. He couldn’t do it for a hundred dollars. Nevertheless he is as good a sailor on a modern freighter as his grandfather was on a three-mast schooner. Yes, sir.
All the romance of the sea that you still find in magazine stories died long, long ago. You would look in vain for it even in the China Sea and south of it. I don’t believe it ever existed save in sea-stories — never on the high seas or in seagoing ships. There are many fine youngsters who fell for those stories and believed them true, and off they went to a life that destroyed their bodies and their souls. Because everything was so very different from what they had read in those alluring stories. Life on the sea is not like they make it out to be and it never was. There is a chance, one in a hundred, maybe, that at some time romance and adventure did exist for skippers, for mates, for engineers. You still may see them singing in operas and making beebaboo in the movies. You may find them also in best-sellers and in old ballads. Anyway, the fact is that the song of the real and genuine hero of the sea has never yet been sung. Why? Because the true song would be too cruel and too strange for the people who like ballads. Opera-audiences, movie-goers, and magazine-readers are like that. They want to have everything pleasant, with a happy ending. The true story of the sea is anything but pleasant or romantic in the accepted sense. The life of the real heroes has always been cruel, made up of hard work, of treatment worse than the animals of the cargo get, and often of the most noble sacrifices, but without medals and plaques, and without mention in stories, operas, and movies. Even the hairy apes are opera-singers looking for a piece of lingerie.
I was just a plain deck-hand. What you might call a handy man aboard. I had to do every kind of work that came my way or that was pushed my way. In short, I was just a painter and brass-polisher. The deck-hands have to be kept busy all day long. Otherwise they might fall for some dangerous ideas about Russia. On a modern ship, once under weigh, there is little to do outside of the engine-holds. Sometimes repairs have to be made on deck or in the holds. Holds have to be cleaned or aired. The cargo has shifted, perhaps, and has to be put back into place to keep the ship from hanging down a fin. Lamps have to be cleaned. Signal flags set in order. The life-boats watered and inspected. And when nothing else can be done on deck, the hands paint. Always there is something to be painted. From morning to night.
There comes a day in the deck-hand’s life when he feels convinced that there are only two kinds of people on earth, those who sail the high seas and those who make paint. You feel a sort of gratitude towards those good people who make all that paint, because should they ever stop, the second mate would surely go mad wondering what to do with the deck-hands. The deck-hands can’t get paid for just looking around the horizon or watching the smoke of another ship coming up. No, sir.
The pay was not high. I have to admit that. The company could not have competed with the German and the Italian freight rates had they paid us t
he wages of the vice-president of a railroad. They say the whole trouble is that sailors don’t know what to do with their pay; otherwise they might easily own, after a couple of years, five or six seagoing freighters.
For my part, not being under the influence of the success stories of the builders of our nation, I reckoned like this: if I would not spend a cent of my pay for twenty-five years and I would tuck it away in a trust or bank and if I would never have, during these twenty-five years, one week without pay, but work hard all the time, even then I could not retire and live on my dividends. Still, after another twenty-five years of equal pay and of equal good luck in always having a ship, I might by then call myself a useful and honest citizen and a member of the lower middle-class, ready to buy a gas-station somewhere on a highway. A fine and noble prospect it convinced me to stay a plain sailor for a good long while and so prepare myself for the bread in heaven and leave for others the cake here on earth...
The other guys had gone ashore. I didn’t care to see the city. I don’t like Antwerp. There are too many beachcombers, bums, worthless sailors, and drunken ships’-carpenters around anyway. One should not mix with such people, being a sailor on a smart American freighter, and a freighter from New Orleans at that. Besides, I told Honey I wouldn’t play around with any dames. At least not on this trip. No, sir. I mean, yes, sir.
I have learned that it is not the mountains that makes destiny, but the grains of sand and the little pebbles. Sounds philosophic, but it is the truth.
I was alone in the foc’sle. Everybody else had gone ashore to get a bellyful of port life before going home to be dry again. I was sick of reading true confession stories and ranch romances. I couldn’t even sleep any more, which was strange, because I can sleep anywhere and any time. I didn’t know what to do with myself. We had laid off work at noon, when the watches were assigned for the trip home.
I wandered from the quarters to midship and back again. Five hundred times or more. I spit into the water and speculated on how far the rings might go before they died. I threw crumbs of bread into the water to feed the fishes.
It made me so very miserable to look at the offices and buildings along the docks, by now all empty and closed. Office windows after closing hours make the same impression upon me as bleached human bones found in a desolate place in the open sun. From the height of the ship I could see right into the offices, where on dull desks were piled up all kinds of papers, blanks, bills. Blanks too can make me sick; they remind me of questions I have to answer to some official to whom I would like to say whose son I think he is.
All and everything about the docks and the buildings and the offices looked so utterly hopeless, like a world going to pieces without knowing it.
In the end I got a craving to feel a solid street under my feet. I wanted to see people hustling about. I wanted to make sure that the world was still going on in the usual way, doing business, making money, getting drunk, laughing, cursing, stealing, killing, dancing, falling in love, and falling out again. I really got frightened being alone there.
“Why didn’t you come earlier in the afternoon like the other guys did?” the mate said. “I won’t give you any money now.”
“Sorry, sir, to bother you, but I sure must have twenty bucks advance. I have to send it home to my mother.”
“Five and not a cent more.”
“I can do nothing with a five, sir. Prices are high here in Belgium since the war. I need twenty, not a cent less. Maybe, sir, I mean I .might be very sick tomorrow. Who do you expect would paint the galley then? Tell me that, sir. The galley has to be ready when we reach home.”
“All right. Ten. My last word. Ten or nothing. I’m not obliged to give you even a nickel.”
“Well then, sir, I’ll take the ten. But I think it’s lousy the way they treat us here in a foreign country.”
“Shut up. Sign here for the ten. We’ll write it in the book tomorrow.”
The truth is I didn’t want more than ten in the first place. But if I had asked for ten I wouldn’t have got more than five. The fact is I couldn’t even use more than ten. Once in your pocket and out in town, the money is gone, whether you have ten bucks or two hundred.
“Now, don’t get drunk. Understand. There’ll be plenty of work tomorrow and you’ve got to be ready to go on hand when we’re putting out,” the mate said.
Get drunk? Me get drunk? An insult. The skipper, the other mates, the engineers, the bos’n, the carpenter haven’t been sober for six consecutive hours since we made this port. And I am told not to get drunk. I didn’t even think of Scotch at all. Not for a minute.
“Me get drunk, sir? Never. I don’t even touch the cork of a whisky bottle, I hate that stuff so much. I know what I owe my country in a foreign port. I am dry, sir. I may be a Democrat, but I am dry. Ever seen me drunk, sir?”
“All right, all right, I haven’t said a word. Forget it.”
“Thank you, sir.”
Ashore.
2
It was a summer twilight, beautiful and dreamlike. I was in full harmony with the world as it was. I could not under stand how anybody on earth could be displeased with life. Communists, reformers, and hell-drummers ought to be kicked out of this beautiful world of ours. I strolled along the streets, looking at the windows where the riches of the world were on display, calling to be bought and carried away. All the people I met seemed so satisfied with themselves and with everyone else. The girls smiled at me, and the prettiest were the ones who greeted me best.
I came to a house that had a fine gilded front. It looked friendly, inviting, and very gay. The doors were wide open, and they said: “Come in, good friend. Come in and be happy with the happy. Just drop in here, and forget all your worries!”
I had no worries. Yet I felt fine that somebody should call me and remind me that I might have worries. In I went. There was a jolly crowd there. Singing. Music. Laughter. Gay talk. Everything friendly.
I sat down on a chair, at a table. Immediately a young man came, looked me over, and said in English: “How do you do, mister?” He put down a bottle and a glass. He filled the glass and said: “Drink to the greatness of your country!” So I did.
For weeks I had seen only the guys of the bucket, and water and more water, and stinking paint. So I thought again of the greatness of my country. And again. There is really too much water on earth. And most of it is salty, at that. And paint is no perfume. Well, to the greatness of my country!
There was foggy weather around me. The longer I sat at the table, and the more I thought of my country, the thicker became the fog. I forgot all the worries I could remember ever having had during my life.
Late at night I found myself in the room of a pretty girl. She was laughing and friendly. She was sweet.
Finally I said to her: “Now look here, Mademoiselle whatever your name may be, you’re a piece of sugar. That’s what you are. Tell me, what time is it now?”
With her sweet laughing mouth she said: “Oh, you handsome boy —” Yes, sir, that’s exactly what she said to me. “Oh, you handsome sailor boy from the great and beautiful Amerique land, you want to be a cavalier, don’t you? A real cavalier. You wouldn’t leave a little defenseless lady alone in her room at midnight, would you? Burglars might come and rob me or take me away to dark Africa. They might even murder me or sell me as a slave to the wild Arabians. And I am afraid of mice, I am.”
“I am not afraid of a mouse,” I said.
“Oh, you bad sailor man! That’s what you are,” the pretty lady said. “Please don’t leave me alone here at midnight. I am so afraid of terrible burglars.”
I know what a real red-blooded American must do when he’s called to rescue a defenseless lady. It was almost a daily sermon from the time I was a kid: “When a lady asks you to do something, you jump up and do what she says, even if it should cost you your life. Just remember that every woman is a mother or may be a mother some day. That’s a good boy.”
What else could I do? It?
??s in the blood. You have to do what a lady asks you to do. Even if it should cost you your life.
Early in the morning, before the sun came up, I hurried to the docks. There was no Tuscaloosa to be seen. Her berth at the pier was abandoned. She had gone back home to sunny New Orleans. She had gone back home without me.
I have seen children who, at a fair or in a crowd, had lost their mothers. I have seen people whose homes had burned down, others whose whole property had been carried away by floods. I have seen deer whose companions had been shot or captured. All this is so painful to see and so very sorrowful to think of. Yet of all the woeful things there is nothing so sad as a sailor in a foreign land whose ship has just sailed off leaving him behind.
It is not the foreign country that makes him so sick at heart, that makes him feel inside like a child crying for its mother. He is used to foreign countries. Often he has stayed behind of his own free will, looking for adventure, or for something better to turn up, or out of dislike for the skipper or the mates or some fellow-sailors. In all such cases he does not feel depressed at all. He knows what he is doing and why he did it, even when it turns out different from what he expected.
But when the ship of which he considers himself still a useful part sails off without taking him with her, without waiting for him, then he feels as though he had been torn asunder. He feels like a little bird may feel when it has fallen out of its nest. He is homeless. He has lost all connection with the rest of the world, he thinks; he has lost his right to be of any use to mankind. His ship did not bother to wait for him. The ship could afford to sail without him and still be a good and seaworthy ship. A copper nail that gets loose, or a rivet that breaks off, might cause the ship to sink and never reach home again. The sailor left behind, forgotten by his ship, is of less importance to the life and the safety of the ship than a rusty nail or a steam-pipe with a weak spot. The ship gets along well without him. He might as well jump right from the pier into the water. It wouldn’t do any harm to the ship that was his home, his very existence, his evidence that he had a place in this world to fill. If he should now jump into the sea and be found, nobody would care. All that would be said would be: “A stranger, by appearance a sailor.” Worth less to a ship than a nail.