3 for the Sea: John McPhee's "Looking for a Ship"

This is the first in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread my three favorite marine travel books – John McPhee’s Looking for a Ship (1990), Jonathan Raban’s Passage to Juneau (1999), Redmond O’Hanlon’s Trawler (2003) – and compare them. Today, I’ll begin with a review of Looking for a Ship. 

If you want to know what life was like aboard an American merchant ship in 1988, this book tells you in detail after fascinating detail. It’s an account of McPhee’s experience travelling on the six-hundred-and-sixty-five-foot Stella Lykes (“as large as most old-time ocean liners”) as it makes a forty-two-day run through the Panama Canal and down the Pacific coast of South America, with stops at such ports as Cartagena, Valparaiso, Balboa, Lima, and Guayaquil. 

It puts you there on the ship’s bridge:

Across the front of the wheelhouse are ten large windows, rounded at the corners, providing an interrupted view of the sea and the enlarging city. The lashed containers are visible now, stacked so high that they block the line of sight from bridge to bow. On top of some of the stacks, riding far up in the sky, are bulldozers and earthmovers and big backhoes that look like thunder lizards. There is a small fire engine, white with red trim.

It takes you down into the hundred-and-ten-degree heat of the engine room:

I have a thermometer with me. When I put it in my pocket, my leg cools it off. A step down from the maneuvering platform is the engineers’ flat, where a logbook lies open on a standing desk and the engine watch can loiter under four large blowers. In the course of a sea watch, the blowers and the water fountain provide the only relief available in four hours. The blowers are a foot in diameter and, somewhere above, are sucking in outside air. It picks up heat on its way down but feels good as it pours out. People stand under the blowers in much the same way that people stand under showers.

It takes you amidships, where there are containers full of thoroughbreds:

As many as seven horses were in one twenty-foot box – in narrow wooden stalls framed within the steel. The two-year-olds were cribbing as if their lives depended on it. They were chewing up the wood of the stalls. Five hundred miles from Guayaquil, they had already made crescent-shaped indentations larger than slices of watermelon. They were chewing the posts as well as the rails.

It tells you what it’s like, lying in your bunk at night, as Stella rolls in the long Pacific swells:

Lying in your bunk, you can feel your brain sloshing back and forth. With your chin on your pillow and your arms spread, you are flying. Bank left. Bank right. Six banks a minute. As the ship heels, creaking, it sounds like a ratchet. Loose objects – “The Voyage of the Beagle,” the “American Practical Navigator,” the Casio HL-802 electric calculator, the Seiko Quartz Snooze-Light alarm – have long since shot across the room, hit the walls, and fallen to the floor, where they move and tumble against one another, like rocks in the bed of a stream.

Stella has thirty-four crewmen – captain, chief mate, second mate, third mate, chief engineer, deck and engineer mechanics, able-bodied seamen, ordinary seamen, among others. McPhee identifies and describes many of them. For example, here’s Captain Washburn:

Back and forth through the wheelhouse he moves, from one bridge-wing door to the other – now indoors, now outdoors and a spin around the binnacle, now indoors, now outdoors and a look over the side. Occasionally, he stops to talk to someone. Sometimes he just stops and talks. Out of the blue, I have heard him say, “A little here, a little there.” Out of the blue, I have heard him say, “If you don’t like to do that, seek gainful employment elsewhere. The army of the unemployed has an opening.” Out of nowhere, I have heard him say, “O.K., ye of little faith, there has been a change in the program; the regular cast has left and the stand-ins are taking over.” With no related dialogue coming before or after, I have heard him say,” Any jackass can do that.” Quite evidently speaking to the ship, he will sometimes say, “I don’t like to lose and I never quit.” Often he asks questions and then provides answers. One day, offering advice to all within earshot, he said, “In Rome, do as the Romanians do.”

Here’s Vernon (Mac) McLaughlin, able-bodied seaman:

“Thirty-nine years at sea,” he said. “All I need is feathers and I’ll get up and fly. I’ll be a seagull.” Like everyone else in the crew – like Victor Belmosa, who was born in Trinidad; like Bill Beach, who was born in Scotland; like Trevor Procter and Bernie Tibbotts, who were born in New Zealand – Mac is an American citizen. He was born on Cayman Brac. The Cayman Islands were British colonial then, and Mac is a self-impelled transfer from the U.K. merchant fleet. The first vessel he worked on was a sailing ship. His father was her third mate. They picked up lumber in Alabama and took it to the Bahamas. When Mac hears the expression “iron men in wooden ships,” he does not develop nostalgia. Moving up to steel, he worked on banana boats, making runs to London from the West Indies, Central America, Ecuador, and Colombia.

Here’s deck-and-engineer mechanic David Carter:

In the winter North Atlantic, the demac David Carter has oftentimes tied himself in his bunk after propping his mattress up and wedging himself against the bulkhead – to avoid getting thrown out and injured by a forty-five or fifty-degree roll. He got his first ship after nearly everyone aboard had been injured. On one voyage, Carter had a big chair in his cabin that was “bouncing off the bulkhead like a tennis ball.” In his unusually emphatic, italic way of speaking, he goes on, “Pots won’t stay on a stove. After a night of no sleep, a full day of work, you get nothing but a baloney sandwich if you’re lucky. They soak the tablecloth so nothing will slide. I hope you won’t get to see that. If you wonder why we party and get drunk when we’re in port, that’s why.

Another subject that McPhee pays close attention to is Stella’s cargo. Here’s what she picks up in Valparaiso:

We picked up three thousand cases of wine, two tons of button-down short-sleeved shirsts, seven hundred bags of pentaerythritol, three hundred and fifty pounds of Chilean bone glue, and a hundred and thirteen thousand pounds of candy. We picked up eight hundred and seventeen desks and eight hundred and seventeen chairs. We picked up eighty-five cartons of umbrellas (on their way to Los Angeles), seven thousand spare tires (New Orleans), six thousand four hundred and eighty toilet pedestals (Chicago), and a hundred thousand pieces of kiln-dried radiate pine (destinations everywhere). We picked up nine tons of fruit cocktail, sixty-three tons of peach chips, sixty-seven tons of raisins, two hundred and thirty thousand gallons of concentrated apple juice, four hundred thousand fresh lemons, four hundred thousand fresh onions, five hundred thousand fresh apples. And then we departed.

I relish lists like that; Looking for a Ship brims with them. But if it’s drama you want, there’s plenty of that in this book, too: pirates, stowaways, and, on the way back to Panama, Stella’s burners go out and she becomes dead in the water. McPhee writes,

An impatient albatross circles the bow. Sirens and alarms continue. From under the stern comes an occasional thump, presumably from the rudder. Maybe it’s a fish. Duke the bosun has tied a white rag to a 5/0 fishhook and put it over the stern on an orange nylon line of quarter-ton test, hoping for a giant fish. The clouds are very dark off the starboard quarter. With our lemons and lollipops and terrycloth towels, our three thousand cases of wine, with our ninety drums of passion-fruit juice, our onions, our umbrellas, bone glue, and balsa wood, our kiln-dried radiate pine, with our glass Nativity scenes and our peach chips, we are dead in the water.

Looking for a Ship is an unusual travelogue. The people and places it’s interested in aren’t in the ports of call; they’re on board Stella. That’s the world it evokes. It does so brilliantly.

Postscript: In future posts, I’ll discuss a number of aspects of Looking for a Ship, including its action, structure, imagery, detail, point of view, and humour. But first I want to introduce the other two books in my trio. Next month, I’ll review Jonathan Raban’s great Passage to Juneau.