Herman Melville Boulevard

Travelling to Europe by freighter seemed like a good idea at the time

In retrospect, it’s astonishing that my father did not think the idea as mad as as it seems to me now. When I proposed it he simply said, “I’ll talk to Mickey Finkel.”

I had long wanted to visit Europe and first saw an opportunity to do so in the summer of 1975. I had saved up several hundred dollars—enough, I thought, to spend some time exploring part of Europe, but not enough to also pay for airfare to and from. The solution I concocted was to find work on a ship bound for a European port, and to sign off at the destination. It was a romantic and archaic way of thinking, but I’d entertained the idea since adolescence and it held for me the notion of a splendid maritime adventure. My father, an old navy man, seemed to agree.

MS Caribia underway in Halifax, N.S. Photo courtesy polarhav.com.

Mickey ran a company that engaged longshoremen at the North Terminal in New Bedford, Massachusetts, and acted as liaison with the ships they loaded or unloaded. My father’s company represented Frionor USA Inc., a Norwegian company that imported frozen fish from Norway and processed it at its large plant in New Bedford. My father knew Mickey from an earlier time when Mickey had his own fish packing business and the Frionor connection had brought them together again. He did, in fact, talk to Mickey about my idea and reported back to me with good news.

“You’re going to have to be here on May 5th,” my father said. The ship chartered by Frionor to transport fish to the U.S. was due on that day. Mickey had spoken to the captain by radio and he was eager to have additional crew to help prepare the ship for dry dock on its return to Bergen, Norway. He had made clear, though, that I would not be paid and that I would have to sign off when the ship docked at Cuxhaven on the North German coast.

At the time I was in Pennsylvania and had to scramble to tie up loose ends and get to New Bedford on time. It turned out that May 5th was an optimistic date. The ship, the MS Caribia, was significantly delayed by foul weather while crossing the Atlantic and did not arrive until nearly a week later. Caribia was commissioned in 1953 and was managed by Norsk Frysetransport A/L (Johan Hagenæs Shipping, Ålesund, Norway). It was a reefer vessel, meaning it was outfitted to carry frozen and refrigerated cargo, and it was quite small as freighters go: 75.9 meters, 497 deadweight tons and diesel powered; its maximum speed was 12 knots.¹

On the day specified by Mickey, we arrived at his New Bedford offices on Herman Melville Boulevard—an evocative address that stoked my excitement about the journey ahead. Mickey was a short, very animated man with an even more pronounced Massachusetts accent than I had grown up with. He told me how to get to the ship and who to ask for, taking care to say that I should avoid any interactions with the longshoremen, who he characterised as an unpredictable and potentially dangerous lot. My father and I walked together down to the ship and he gave me his clear parting advice: “Don’t do anything stupid.”

The workday was already over by this time and no longshoremen were in sight. I boarded the ship and eventually found the captain. I could see the immediate look of disappointment when he caught sight of me. It was my glasses. He had thought he was bringing on an Ordinary Seaman, but my dependence on glasses meant I would not be able to stand watch—a problem for the ship since it was short of crew. Nonetheless he completed the paperwork to bring me on board and assigned me to the steward, to work in the galley and to help manage the ship’s provisions. He brought me to my quarters, which was the sick bay, a cabin on the level of the main deck that I was to share with another itinerant crew member, an older man called “Mr Flem,” who was to arrive the next day.

I wandered around the ship but it was virtually empty. Everyone had gone into town for the evening and I didn’t meet anybody else until the next morning. After awakening I climbed down the ladder to the deck below and the crew’s mess area where several sailors were sitting around awaiting breakfast. I introduced myself as best I could (I learned quickly that only a handful of the officers and crew spoke English, beyond the deck commands that everybody needed to know), then made my way to the adjacent galley to meet my boss for the journey, the cook named Oddvar. He had things well under control and told me to join the other crew for breakfast.

The breakfast conversation, as much as I could understand it, was about the experiences of the prior evening. It seems the entire crew, including most of the officers, had made their way to a bar and spent the better part of the evening in the company of des femmes de mœurs légères. Clearly this was a regular occurrence when the ship was docked in New Bedford, as each crew member knew all the names, and each seemed to have had experience with the prostitutes their colleagues had spent time with the night before. It was not a particularly boisterous discussion, since everyone showed the grim signs of hangover, rather it was frank and matter-of-fact. I was a bit surprised to learn that all these men were married, and astonished when I learned that one of them would be visiting that very same day with his fiancée, a Norwegian girl living in Fairhaven, across the river from where the ship was docked.

I also heard two other stories at breakfast.

The first was about the second mate, who the day before had been on deck observing the longshoremen unloading the frozen cargo. He had placed his hand on the rim of the metal structure that provided an opening to one of the holds where cargo was stored. The hold’s cover consisted of several heavy metal panels hinged together that could be stacked on top of each other to open the hold, or unstacked to close it. One of the longshoremen took note of the second mate’s vulnerability, pulled the lever that operated the hydraulic hinge arms, and snapped a panel down onto the second mate’s hand. As he was taken in considerable pain off the ship and to the hospital, where he remained, the stevedores taunted him with a new nickname: “Shortfinger.” Unfortunately the crew liked the nickname, too, and it stayed with the poor fellow during the rest of the voyage.

The second story was about the ship’s electrician. It had been his first time at sea, and the ordeal of the bad weather, which prolonged the ship’s Atlantic crossing to sixteen days instead of the usual eight, caused him to have a “nervous breakdown.” He, too, was in a hospital at New Bedford.

That day was an ordinary workday for the crew. Some of the sailors worked scraping paint from the outside bulkheads as part the prep-work for dry dock, while others tended to duties on deck or elsewhere on the ship. The longshoremen continued operating the cranes and unloading the cargo. Oddvar had a number of tasks for me during the day in the galley, which was welcome, and he seemed to be happy for the company—he spoke English reasonably well so we could communicate. He had acquired new provisions for the voyage and was busy with tasks related to storing or preparing food. He had acquired an entire fresh-killed lamb and took to butchering it. Then he tended to baking bread—which was delicious and worthy of a professional baker.

At one point during the day, the ship began to list steeply to one side, which caused some alarm among crew members. Oddvar took the opportunity to lead me into the engine room to meet the ship’s engineer, who it seems had failed to manage the ballast tanks properly as the ship was being unloaded. My impression was that some insults were exchanged on this occasion, and Oddvar seemed excessively exercised over the incident. But the engine room itself was impressive. There were two diesel engines: a smaller one ran constantly and ran the ship’s generators, and the sound was deafening; the larger engine, which was idle in port, powered the ship’s propulsion systems and burned heavy fuel oil. It was particularly useful to me to see the engine room, since the inside bulkhead of the sick bay where I slept formed the wall of the engine stack, and transmitted sound from the engine room down below directly to where my pillow lay. At least I now understood the source of the incessant noise and vibration in my cabin.

We were to sail for Halifax, Nova Scotia the next morning, and the two hospitalised crew members were brought back to the ship for the voyage. The second mate appeared first, his hand looking like a sphere of white gauze with highlights of pink. I was in the galley when the electrician was brought back and Oddvar led me to his cabin to be among those to witness his return. He stood surrounded by other crew, some of whom were clearly talking about him. But the electrician seemed oblivious to it all, his eyes moving randomly as he stood in the passageway unaware of those around him. I didn’t realise it then, but not having a competent electrician on board was a very serious issue, and this man was sadly not fit for service.

The next morning everyone was up early for departure. I was in the galley when the main engine started. The whole ship began to vibrate and the ambience inside the vessel changed completely. I went up on deck as we headed out, down the Acushnet River and into Buzzards Bay, to be met by a dense wall of fog. The captain posted a sailor at the bow and we disappeared into the thick mist.

When evening fell I retired to my cabin with my new roommate, Mr Flem, but our get-to-know-each-other conversation was interrupted by Oddvar’s voice crackling through the intercom system. “John,” he said. “Come here.”

Oddvar was inebriated. A two-litre bottle of vodka was sitting on his table. Whether because of the fog or a chronic fear of being at sea, he was extremely agitated. I sat down and he offered me some vodka and lemonade. “John,” he said, “Do you know how many ships are lost each year at sea? No radio signal. No debris. Just lost.” He went on to inform me in slurred, broken English about specific examples of ships simply disappearing at sea without a trace, due to giant rogue waves or other unknown phenomena. The poor man was terrified. I asked him how he had ended up working on the ship, and the answer was that, if you grew up in Ålesund, as he had, there were very few other options. He had done military service and had become a cook in the Norwegian army, and he was able to transfer that skill to an officer’s position as steward on merchant ships. Caribia was the smallest ship he had ever served on, and he found the experience harrowing.

The next morning saw Oddvar’s anxiety grow as news circulated that the ship’s radar had failed—and the impenetrable fog persisted. At that time a vessel of its size was not required to have a redundant radar system, and with the electrician unable to function and make repairs the situation was extremely dangerous. The captain now had two men positioned on the bow of the ship, staring off into the fog, as well as two holding watch on the bridge. The first mate had some experience with electrical systems but could not fix the radar, nor could the ship’s engineer. It was a sign of the captain’s desperation that he called me to the bridge and asked if I knew anything about electronics. I did, but explained it was all about radio and electrical theory and I had no idea about how to maintain radar systems. The captain remained on the bridge, sleepless, for the entire three days it took to reach Nova Scotia, and everyone on board was on edge.

On the morning we reached Nova Scotia I left my cabin to find the fog had lifted and it was a beautiful clear day. I stood and watched the Nova Scotia coastline glide past as the ship motored onward toward Halifax. It is, I think, the most pleasant memory I have of the journey. But one more misadventure lay ahead. Entering Halifax we were boarded by the harbour pilot who would bring us to our dock. The sailors had already explained to me that the harbour pilots commanded the ship when in port and that the international language for his commands was English. I was curious to see how this worked and, as we approached the dock, went up to the bridge deck to observe.

The pilot oversaw the casting of lines to secure the ship to the dock, shouting commands to both the ship’s crew and the dock hands. But once the bow lines were attached, the bow started to drift out again, making the line taut and causing general panic on the deck, with crew shouting and running for shelter. With good reason—when the bow line snapped it lashed back against the ship with a terrible crack; I’m sure anyone in its path would have been severely injured or killed. The event was the subject of much conversation during the rest of the trip, as every sailor seemed to have a story about similar incidents where people were, in fact, seriously injured.

We were in Halifax for four days. We began by celebrating Norwegian National Day and ended with Victoria Day. The crew was happy for the long weekend and was relieved after the tense trip from New Bedford. The captain was able to have the ship fuelled and get the radar repaired.

I spent Norwegian National Day in the cabin of a sailor named Helge, a tall thin man with perhaps the worst teeth I had ever seen. They looked like a rusted and broken iron fence. But he had proposed to teach me Norwegian that day, following Mr Flem’s announcement at breakfast that I had been speaking Norwegian words in my sleep.

Helge’s pedagogy was unique and ineffective. I speculate that the theoretical basis for his approach was that alcohol relieves the mind of other cares and allows one to focus deeply on new language acquisition. Helge had what seemed to be the standard-issue two-litre bottle of vodka and poured it throughout the day.

In the late afternoon, the captain appeared and said he had to speak with me. He took me to his cabin—I have no doubt that my drunken condition was obvious—and explained that the electrician had been seen by a doctor who had advised that he, the electrician, was not fit to return to Norway on the ship. The captain asked if I would be willing to accompany the electrician on an Air Canada flight to Oslo. I would be paid for doing so, but there would be no transportation from Oslo to another destination. It sounded like a new and interesting adventure, so I readily agreed.

The Norwegian lesson having concluded, I later joined a group of crewmen to head into Halifax for an evening at a well-known music bar called “The Misty Moon.” At this point, however, anything further that I relate about the evening is as it was told to me the next day, since I honestly remember almost none of it. It appears that, at the bar, I had held the winning ticket in a raffle and went reeling off to claim my prize, not to be seen again. The only thing I can recall, from later that evening, is feeling lost wandering around the waterfront and stumbling into the Canadian navy yard. Two military police descended on me and I explained I was looking for my ship. Somehow my explanations rang a bell and they drove me to where Caribia was docked, and I staggered on board.

Whatever had happened that evening out in Halifax, it had left the crew with the impression that I was “tough” and I seemed to have gained some new level of respect. This is utterly contrary to how I view myself, and I never learned what had happened to earn such a reputation. At the time I smoked a pipe and whenever one of the sailors saw me sitting and smoking, he’d say, “Man with a pipe — very tough.”

The next couple days for me were recovery. I was concerned about what the alcohol had done to me since, when I awakened after the adventure in Halifax, I felt as intoxicated as before. I was abstemious from this point forward, and recovered slowly. The trip to Oslo was called off. Air Canada required that a psychiatric nurse accompany the electrician and I had no such qualification. After the Victoria Day holiday we left for three destinations in Newfoundland, where we would pick up three different kinds of herring in wooden barrels: pickled, salted and spiced.

It was in Newfoundland that the voyage changed from being my imagined great adventure to being painfully tedious. The places we visited in Newfoundland were poor small towns whose economy was built around the local cannery. Isle aux Morts seemed to me to be aptly named, and Harbour Breton simply felt desolate. The sailors organised an evening excursion, from Isle aux Morts to Port aux Basques, only to find that due to an ongoing strike no alcohol was available to be consumed there—not even a drop of the infamous Newfoundland “screech.”² The disappointment was profound.

Oddvar was sober and resourceful while in port and acquired a supply of fresh cod and rockfish which was welcomed by all. I had by now learned to have low culinary expectations so it was good to have something to look forward to. Breakfast usually had crèpes or some kind of porridge, both eaten with so much casting sugar that the food crunched when chewed. One morning there was a fried blood pudding made from the blood of the lamb Oddvar had acquired in New Bedford—it was sweet and enjoyable. Dinners had a certain sameness, since boiled potatoes and kohlrabi were served every evening, accompanied by a large metal pitcher of melted butter which the sailors poured like gravy over everything. Meat or fish was served also.

On one occasion we had hvalkjøtt, or whale meat, which is vivid red and even leaner than moose. It was cooked by boiling, then served with a thick greasy sauce. Oddvar explained that the lack of fat in the whale meat meant that you needed a fatty sauce to keep it warm. The most delicious food was the fried cod tongues and cheeks we consumed at Isle aux Morts (the cod heads themselves were reserved for the officers). The very worst were the frequently eaten fiskeboller, or fish balls. The latter were industrially produced and spilled out of metal tins into Oddvar’s cook pots, then served with a vile white sauce. They had the same texture as a kitchen sponge, and their pure white colour and oval shape reminded me of the bleach tablets my mother used to throw into her white washes. I don’t think they tasted much different, either.

The fiskeboller also transformed me into the officers’ entertainment one day after we had headed off into the North Atlantic. The rough weather the ship had experienced crossing to America continued, though with less severity, on the trip back to Europe. The ship would roll and pitch in every direction and it was impossible to walk down the passageways without gripping the handrails along both sides. Out on the deck it was treacherous, with nothing to hang on to. One day Oddvar sent me to the mast house, which was positioned well forward on the main deck, to fetch a supply of fiskeboller. I was equipped with two plastic buckets for carrying the cans, and when I had filled them I began the trek back to the galley.

It sounds like a simple thing, but there were a couple real challenges to getting these provisions down to Oddvar’s lair. The ship would move unpredictably, with waves washing over the deck from time to time, so it was very slippery. As I stepped carefully across the deck with my two full buckets the ship lurched, I lost my balance, fell, and cans of fiskeboller went rolling in every direction. I recovered and started the task of trying to round up the cans as they skittered in every direction across the deck. At one moment I glanced up at the bridge and witnessed convulsive laughter as the officers watched my efforts from above.

Once the cans were retrieved, the second challenge was to get them back into the ship. Not easy, I assure you. I made my way to the hatch at the side of the ship which led to the deck below. Under these conditions, when the ship rolled toward the sea, the hatch would swing wildly open and was heavy enough that you could not close it until the ship began to roll back in the other direction; when the ship rolled away from the sea, the opposite situation arose. So timing was everything. I waited for the optimal moment to set down the two buckets, grab the handles of the hatch, open it up, move the buckets inside, then close the hatch before the roll of the ship made it too heavy to handle. It all seemed to happen in an instant.

Apart from incidents like this, the week it took to cross the Atlantic was, for me, very dull. I would spend time in the galley preparing food as Oddvar, perpetually intoxicated, somehow managed to cook three meals daily for a crew of fifteen.

The ordinary seamen would spend their shifts working to prepare the ship for dry dock, and I did not envy them their tasks. The worst was cleaning out the ballast tanks in anticipation of maintenance in the dry dock. The officers chose the calmest days for this work, but it was still nightmarish. One day, three sailors were assigned the job of cleaning out the forward ballast tank—the part of the ship that experienced the greatest movement as the ship motored along. The worst part of the job—working with a shovel inside the tank—fell to Helge, who began his descent using the iron ladder welded to the interior bulkhead. But the rungs were rusted and broke, and Helge fell screaming into the mess below. There was a general panic and soon nearly everyone was on deck. Helge survived uninjured, and was retrieved by his colleagues covered in a stinking black tar of dense grease, decomposing fish, rotten seaweed and salt water.

In general, if some one was not working they were asleep. The pitching of the ship made it uncomfortable to loiter in the mess areas where the crew generally socialised and complained about having to spend six months on such a small vessel. My fantasy of adventure had blinded me to the possibility of crushing boredom and I had failed to bring any reading matter. Nearly all the books and magazines on board were in Norwegian. The only two things accessible to me were a French translation of Jack Kerouac's On the Road and The Memoirs of Cordell Hull, a thick two-volume work by Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Secretary of State, who was clearly not Roosevelt’s greatest admirer. I read both twice before we reached Cuxhaven.

Rummaging around in the sick bay I also found a volume in English that was a manual for responding to all manner of medical emergencies. It gave detailed instructions for the treatment of common illnesses, broken bones, and even surgical procedures. There were, for example, step-by-step instructions for performing an emergency appendectomy. I later told Oddvar I’d been looking at this manual and he revealed that he was also the ship’s surgeon. The image this conjured of Oddvar, three sheets to the wind on an angry sea, swaying above an injured or sick colleague with scalpel in hand, was very sobering.

There is (or was) also a period while crossing the Atlantic when radio broadcasts go silent, adding to the boredom. One of the harbingers of getting close to the destination was the first radio broadcast we picked up, which was from Cork, Ireland. It was one of those stations that plays almost nothing but trad music, and it got on my nerves then as much it does now. It was welcomed, however, by everyone as a sign of approaching civilisation once again. We also began to see other ships. Ships would appear behind us and quickly overtake us as we moved slowly across the waves at eleven or twelve knots. Then we entered the English channel—which relative to the north Atlantic feels like a highway of ships. I spent as much daylight time as I could on deck observing the passing landscapes and the many other vessels.

As we approached Cuxhaven, the brown water of the Elbe River was flowing out into the North Sea, creating miles of interesting patterns as the salt and fresh water slowly mix. The first mate saw me leaning on the railing, watching, and called for me to come up to the bridge for a better view. I took his advice of the best place to stand as we sailed into Cuxhaven—outside on the deck next to the engine stack. I should have known better. I’d been set up to be next to the ship’s whistle as they sounded it on approach to the harbour. I wear hearing aids these days, and am sure the experience bears some responsibility for that.

Once we were docked, the captain met with two officers from German immigration to discuss my signing off from the ship. I was called to his cabin and was interrogated by the two uniformed men who asked about my money (I showed them my traveller’s cheques), my travel plans in Germany, my plans for return home, and other things. The captain smiled excessively and tried to reinforce everything I said—I’m sure he was afraid I’d have to remain on the ship, whose next stop was to be in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg).

MS Caribia in later years, as "Carabic" and "Askja." Photos courtesy polarhav.com.

The immigration men were satisfied, however. I gathered my things and made the rounds to say my good-byes. Everyone gave me the the same advice—I had to visit Hamburg. Go to “Grosse Freiheit,” they said. “And the Reeperbahn.” In fact, I had already made my list of local destinations to visit—Altenbruch, very close to Cuxhaven, to see the marvellous sixteenth-century organ there (which I was able to play); Lübeck, where some of my favourite seventeenth-century music was composed (and home of the delicious Lübecker Marzipan Schwarzbrot); and then Hamburg and many places much further south and west.

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My father had spent years at sea and had crossed the Pacific in vessels even smaller than Caribia, so I’m sure he knew what I was in for. He probably also knew how naïve I was, but was still sympathetic. Think of it: I boarded a ship with an exotic name in New Bedford, Massachusetts, docked just off of Herman Melville Boulevard. How could this not have reinforced dreams of a great seafaring adventure?

But the experience was hardly of an exotic Melvillian kind. Yes, I appreciated better the daily risks of those who, of choice or of necessity, pursued this kind of working life. Indeed, I had been introduced almost immediately to the kinds of physical and psychological injury that can arise through human malevolence or natural circumstances. As the voyage progressed, I also felt something of the oppression that the crew complained about from the constant vigilance needed to preserve personal safety and the day-to-day sameness and isolation when on the open ocean.

What stays with me most tangibly from that trip across the Atlantic is how it changed my perspective of the world we live in. I was accustomed to heading down to the boat yard with my father to go out fishing and returning at the end of the day. I had never appreciated the immensity of the oceans, however—and that the land we live upon comprises the lesser part of our world. I’d also not experienced the tremendous power of the ocean in this way before. There were times on the way across the Atlantic when I’d leave my cabin, carefully timing things so I could open and close the hatch, and look up and see the crest of the waves twenty or thirty feet above my head as the ship sank into the trough.

We seemed so insignificant and small. And so we seem to me still.

1. The ship’s specifications are detailed at “1968 MS CARIBIA (ASD102196801)”, Skipshistorie https://skipshistorie.net/Aalesund/ASD102JohanHagenas/Tekster/ASD10219680100000%20CARIBIA.htm (consulted 26 November 2024). Several photos of the ship across her lifetime are available at https://www.polarhav.com/Caribia.htm and https://www.shipspotting.com/photos/743618?navList=gallery&imo=6720810&page=1&viewType=normal&sortBy=newest.

2. “Newfoundland Screech,” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newfoundland_Screech (viewed 29 October 2024). The liquor strike may be saved me from the ritual of being “screeched-in,” which involves drinking a shot of screech and kissing a codfish.