Looking for a Ship

The United States Merchant Marine, a collective enterprise of private shipping companies employing American crews to transport cargo worldwide, was in severe decline by the late 1980s. The number of American dry-cargo ships had fallen below 200, no commercial vessels were under construction in American shipyards, and qualified sailors vastly outnumbered the jobs available. Against this backdrop, author John McPhee follows Andy Chase, a licensed Merchant Marine officer, as Chase traveled to a union hall in Charleston, South Carolina, to find work aboard a ship.

Chase carried a National Shipping Card, the union seniority card mariners used to compete for jobs, nearly 11 months old. Whoever held the oldest card won the available position; if a card reached 12 months without use, it rolled over, losing all accumulated seniority. Chase graduated from the Maine Maritime Academy with a third mate's license, a junior deck-officer credential, in 1979 but endured long stretches of fruitless waiting in union halls across the country as the fleet shrank. His card once rolled over without a job, forcing him into unlicensed work on a tanker as bosun, the senior unlicensed deck crew leader. For a licensed officer, this was a humiliating reversal.

McPhee provides context for the industry's collapse. During World War II, the Merchant Marine suffered a higher percentage of deaths than the Navy or Army, with roughly 800 ships lost and 6,500 sailors killed. By the 1980s, American companies had entered bankruptcy, the Soviet merchant fleet carried at least 10 times as much American cargo as the U.S. fleet, and open-flag registries, known as flags of convenience, allowed American-owned ships to sail under foreign flags with cheap international labor, avoiding taxes and regulations. The U.S. had dropped from first to 13th in total merchant ships worldwide.

In Charleston, the union hall occupied three windowless rooms on a commercial boulevard. The dispatcher informed Chase of three upcoming openings. The most appealing was a second mate position, the deck-officer rank responsible for navigation, on the S.S. Stella Lykes, bound for the west coast of South America. Breaking his own rule of always taking the earliest available ship, Chase gambled by waiting. He took overnight port-relief jobs for income. At one-thirty-one on the critical day, no one with a superior card had appeared, and Chase secured the ship. Simultaneously, a television report announced that the Ben Sawyer Bridge, the drawbridge Chase had worried about, was stuck open, its brakes having failed just after he crossed it.

The narrative shifts to the voyage, a 42-day round trip from New York down the Pacific coast of South America. McPhee attaches himself to Chase's four-to-eight watch. The crew included Chase as second mate and two able-bodied seamen, or experienced deckhands: Vernon McLaughlin and Calvin King. William "Peewee" Kennedy served as ordinary seaman, an entry-level deckhand. The average age of the 34-member crew was 51. McLaughlin, born on Cayman Brac, had been at sea 39 years. King, 61, was a steady-handed grandfather from North Carolina. Kennedy, 62, had shipped out for 35 years from Savannah.

The ship's captain, Paul McHenry Washburn, emerges as the book's central figure. A restless bridge pacer who talked to himself and to his ship, Washburn ran what the crew called a happy ship, and several crew members arranged their schedules to sail with him. His family traced back to early New England coastal shipping, with connections to the Minneapolis Mill Company and Gold Medal Flour. Washburn took an unconventional path. As a boy near Washington, D.C., he was asked to leave multiple schools and from age 13 rode freight trains as a hobo, reading history in city libraries. He performed in a circus sideshow, boxed semipro, and sparred with the champion Henry Armstrong. In 1941, he went to sea. During World War II, he sailed on an ammunition-laden Liberty ship to Casablanca and spent 69 days off Okinawa under air raids and typhoons. After the war, a failed attempt at managing a dry-cleaning store ended when the Washington Redskins blew a 24-0 halftime lead; Washburn picked a fight with his wife and shipped out to Poland, never looking back. He rose through the ranks at Lykes Brothers Steamship Company to become a master, or ship's captain.

Washburn's seamanship is tested throughout the voyage. In Cartagena, Colombia, a harbor pilot misjudged the wind and called for full ahead dangerously close to the dock. Washburn stood the pilot in a corner and took command, warping the ship, hauling it by mooring lines, to avoid collision with the Colombian freighter Ciudad de Manizales. In Buenaventura, he overrode another inexperienced pilot, docking in a berth with only a 35-foot margin. He spoke of ships as living things, telling McPhee he talked things over with the vessel and asked what she could do.

McPhee weaves in the broader dangers of seafaring. He profiles the chief mate, or first officer, J. Peter Fritz. Fritz had desperately wanted to sail on the Marine Electric, a collier, or coal-carrying ship, because she passed his Rhode Island home every 10 days. On February 11, 1983, the Marine Electric sailed from Chesapeake Bay in a winter storm with deteriorated hatch covers. Water poured through, the ship capsized, and 31 of 34 crew members died of hypothermia, including Fritz's close friend Clay Babineau. Fritz carried the ship's arrival announcement in his wallet. McPhee compiles a catalogue of maritime casualties: ships crushed by waves, broken in two, vanishing without a trace.

Piracy was a constant threat on the South American run. On the ship's first visit to Guayaquil, Ecuador, pirates boarded during docking, broke a container seal with bolt cutters, stole a diplomat's belongings, and vanished in five minutes. On the return visit, at the Explosive Anchorage on the Guayas River, pirates climbed the anchor chain through the hawsepipe, the opening in the hull through which the chain passes. Rifle shots cracked out from hired Ecuadorian guards, bullets slammed into the mangroves, and a pirogue fled. Washburn greeted arriving port officials in dress whites with a .38 revolver in his belt.

The drug trade compounded the dangers. Containers were sealed and labeled only "Said to Contain," leaving crews ignorant of actual cargo. The Allison Lykes arrived in Port Newark carrying a container labeled as chocolate that proved to hold cocaine; the seizure led to the arrest of Medellín Cartel members, seizing $480 million in cocaine. Stowaways posed another persistent problem. In Buenaventura, a man apparently working as a stowaway travel agent smuggled three young Colombians into the hold. They went undetected until crewmen heard banging days later at Balboa, Panama, and found them dehydrated in extreme heat. The bosun, Duke Labaczewski, quietly observed that his own grandfathers came to America the same way, and able-bodied seaman Victor Belmosa revealed that he, too, entered the United States hidden in a ship at age 17.

Along the coast of Chile, McPhee weaves in Charles Darwin's 1830s observations of the same landscape, connecting Darwin's geological insights about the Andes to modern plate tectonics. Chase reveals that he owns the sextant of Nathaniel Bowditch, the Salem mariner who in 1802 published the American Practical Navigator, the definitive reference carried on every Navy and merchant ship. Bowditch is Chase's great-great-great-grandfather, a lineage McPhee presents as the key to understanding Chase's attachment to the sea.

The voyage ends with a crisis. The chief engineer drew fuel from a long-unused deep tank, a shipboard fuel reservoir, and within hours the burners went out, killed by water in the fuel. Lights failed, the emergency generator died, the radar went dark, and the steering locked at hard left. The ship arced in the water and lost momentum. Two black balls flew from the uppermost mast, the international signal for "Not Under Command." Engineers worked for hours in extreme heat to clear the contaminated lines and bring one boiler back to pressure. The underlying cause, discovered later in Port Newark, was a crack in the ship's hull that had admitted seawater into the tank. McPhee closes with the Stella Lykes dead in the water, laden with wine, passion-fruit juice, glass Nativity scenes, and balsa wood, as an albatross circled the bow and the bosun fished off the stern, a final emblem of the aged, fractured, yet still enduring American Merchant Marine.