Part One: John McPhee’s book, “LOOKING FOR A SHIP”

It wasn’t all fun, that 42-day round-trip voyage from Charleston, South Carolina down the South American Pacific coast to ports along the way to Valpariso, Chile. 

 

Author John McPhee sailed with aging Merchant Mariners aboard an aging freighter, the 15,949-ton S.S. Stella Lykes, built in 1964, handed off through three owners, once torn apart and stretched from 550 feet to 665, leaving her heavy and underpowered, but now able to carry up to 36,799 tons of cargo. 

In Buenaventura, Columbia, among God only knows what else, it was Columbia, after all; she picked up:

1,100,000 pounds coffee

1,500 cartons lollipops

20 tons edible gelatin

4000 cartons Quaker Oats

A 20-foot container said to contain 13,770 pounds of “carded cotton yarn put up on cones knitting twist mixed with transfer tails.” 

Speaking of tails, In Hatch 4, Bay 1, four containers held twenty-four thoroughbred horses eating away on the wooden frames of their captivity. I don’t remember which port it was where they picked up a container “Said to contain panties de senora, five and a half tons.” 

 

Did you know that 90% of all transported goods are moved by ships?

Every cargo container fetched from every port around the world—but for living things and onions which must have air—bears this label: “Said to Contain.”

 

The Stella Lykes . . .

Here’s a completely unrelated but by name bit of information:

The original US freighter, Stella Lykes, was torpedoed and destroyed by the German U-582, off the west coast of Africa on July 17, 1942. Only one of the 53 crewmen died. The captain and chief engineer were taken as POWs while the rest of the crew, in lifeboats and rafts, made it in ten days to the safety of Cacheu, Portugese Guinea.

You’ll like this: Before the U-boat departed, the German crew gave the American survivors first aid supplies, cigarettes, and a piece of paper showing a course and alternate points of land. 

 

This is what a book can do for (to) us. It can encourage us to jump off its pages to ideas it presented only in passing. By the end of this little missive I am penning, you will see that is exactly what McPhee’s book did for me.

But back to the story.

 

McPhee’s Stella Lykes picked up, transported, and dropped off sealed, “Said to Contain” containers—for which the captain is held responsible even though he can’t see what is inside. As well as anticipated cargo, the Stella Lykes unwittingly picked up, jailed, and deposited at the next port container hidden stowaways whose screaming and pounding led to their rescue. At one port, famed Captain Paul McHenry Washburn, age 65, he who is on tender speaking terms with his ship, and who senses weather before weather has finished deciding what to be, ordered a prostitute ashore before she managed to conduct any business onboard. Did I mention pirates? Captain Washburn warned that potential disaster “lurks everywhere.”

 

As he does in everything he writes, McPhee lashes the reader to his experience. Stella Lykes rolled 30° starboard then port in winter swells surging some six thousand miles from New Zealand, but the wind blew on the starboard quarter, perpendicular to long swells, resulting in a confused sea, and setting up what McPhee described as “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 creaking ship heels, things unbolted, and even some that are, shoot across the room, hit the walls, fall to the floor, “move and tumble against one another like rocks in the bed of a stream.”    

 

McPhee used more pages than one might wish required to catalogue “Ships lost at sea:” Hurricanes, thousand pound steel pipes torn loose looking for who or what to destroy; freezing sea water frosting a ship with ice, one inch an hour, before forcing her to the bottom; going aground, fires galore, engine room explosions of fuel or steam, fierce winds, an Extreme Storm Wave, a hundred-foot wall of water tearing a ship apart as if it were a sheet of printer paper; collisions with other ships, rocks, with things undetermined; tons of shifting cargo, loose cargo rolling a ship into her water grave; and, oh yeah, Pirates. 

Have I mentioned? My two sons have made careers as Merchant Mariners. 

 

McPhee doesn’t, but I am going to provide this information:

Between 2011-2020, of the 876 known vessels lost at sea:

348 cargo ships.

120 fishing vessels

76 Bulk carriers — those with loose cargo like, grain, oil, cement.

 

And of those containers “Said to Contain”? How many float even now on the ocean’s surface or have dropped to its floor? The World Shipping Council estimates 1,382 containers are lost each year. I’m convinced that my “On Sale, On Order, In Transit, and Possibly Unavailable” Air Fryer may well be part of that collection. 

 

Everyone who reads a book reads to learn something, whether that learning is beneficial. We read to learn. I’ll read anything John McPhee writes. That’s what he writes about: Anything. Name another author able to keep a reader eagerly turning 150 pages to learn about“Oranges.” How else might I have learned that in 18th century Nuremberg it was believed that a woman could cause an orange tree to die by sitting in it. See? 

 

Quite obliquely, on page 95 of my paperback copy of “Looking for a Ship,” McPhee mentioned “Aliyah Bet.” I had never heard that term. I penciled a checkmark beside the sentence, knowing that when I finished this book I wanted to learn more.

 

Aliyah Bet, a clandestine effort, using ships, to rescue thousands of European Jewish refugees, detainees,  war orphans, Holocaust survivors, and get them somewhere, anywhere, they might be safe. And why it didn’t work. Mostly, it didn’t work.

 

The Aliyah Bet wasn’t McPhee’s subject, wasn’t even a sub-plot, but after finishing his book, it became mine. You can stop reading now, if information about cargo ships, or my admiration of John McPhee’s writing is enough for you. Or, wait a few days, and I will post: #23b A Woman’s Briefs: Aliyah Bet