Come Sail Away

Looking for a Ship is John McPhee’s account of a voyage aboard the Stella, a cargo ship, as she makes for South America from Charleston, SC. The subject matter isn’t the ship or the cargo (though they have nice cameos) but rather the crew, an American crew of US Merchant Marines, AB’s (able bodied seamen), a dying but supremely talented brotherhood of men.

The engineers below deck push and pull the ship by voice commands, twisting knobs and throwing levers in 150 degree heat. Topside, a crusty Captain watches over the enterprise; he gets lost driving in his FL neighborhood, but under sail he can tell by the ship’s pull when a storm is coming. The first mate on the radar is a descendent of Nathaniel Bowditch, who wrote the book carried on every ship in North America. The rest of the crew contains its share of bums and swells, for every hound bound for duty-free gash at ports in Guayaquil or Valparaiso, there’s a cat like Duke who loaded up a ship full of European Jews post WWII and tried to sneak them past the British blockade into Palestine.

The stories of deaths, wrecks, and havoc are harrowing. The book is full of useful maxims (“you never drift out of trouble; you only drift into trouble”), and describes a condom giveaway program that would make a modern undergraduate blush. There are less than 500 American ships left on the waters. In 1950, US carriers represented 43 percent of the world’s shipping trade. By 1995, the American market share was 4 percent. Ah, progress.