During the next eight days, the Elizabeth Seaman moved from pier to pier along the San Francisco waterfront and continued to load. Number four hold was filled with bauxite; number one hold with C rations and boxes of small arms. At her last stop, Pier 45, tanks and jeeps were placed around her battened hatches and secured as deck cargo, then lashed down with lengths of chain shackled to a padeye. The first mate, a knowledgeable Dane of about sixty, oversaw all of this, along with the bosun and his deck crew. Eddie’s port responsibilities were nebulous, and he tried to steer clear of the bosun. Luckily, officers and crew ate in separate mess halls, although the food was identical. The saloon, where officers ate, had white tablecloths. Alone in his stateroom at night, Eddie eluded the echoey range of his thoughts by reading. His favorite books were about the sea, and he’d finally got his hands on a copy of The Death Ship, which had made the rounds on one of his jungle runs before Pearl Harbor.
On the Elizabeth Seaman’s last evening in port, Eddie stood on the flying bridge with Roger, the eager, nervous deck cadet. Along with Stanley, the engine room cadet, Roger had completed three months of officer training at the Merchant Marine Academy in San Mateo and now was beginning his required six months at sea. The cadets quartered together on the bridge deck, near “Sparks,” as the radioman was always known.
“What sort of fellow is our Sparks?” Eddie asked. Radiomen were rarely seen; they were either in the radio shack or asleep in a cabin beside it with an alarm to wake them should an emergency transmission come in.
“He curses quite a bit,” Roger said.
“Soon you’ll be doing that, too.”
The cadet laughed. He was scrawny and beak-nosed, a few steps short of manhood. “Mother won’t like it.”
“No mothers here.”
“I saw something strange today,” Roger said after a pause.
He’d opened the door to a storeroom and found Farmingdale, the second mate, busy at something inside it. When Roger approached, he saw that Farmingdale was tipping a can of gray paint over the mouth of a mason jar, pouring a thin stream of paint into a loaf of bread he’d wedged into the mouth of the jar. The bread absorbed the paint’s viscous pigment, so that what reached the bottom of the jar was a trickle of cloudy liquid. In full view of Roger, Farmingdale lifted the jar to his lips and calmly drank this down.
“He looked angry,” Roger said, “but he didn’t stop.”
“Imagine the state of his stomach.”
“Will he be fit to sail?”
“If he can drink like that, then he’s used to it,” Eddie said.
“Who’ll handle the navigation if the second mate is drunk?”
“I will,” Eddie said, though his own navigation skills were still rudimentary. He was disgusted with the second mate for having let the cadet witness his degeneracy. “And you, kiddo. Get to work with that azimuth.”
Dusk fell moodily on the city, pricks of diamond light pulsing from Telegraph Hill. The fog hadn’t yet come in.
“I’ll sure miss Frisco,” Roger said.
“So shall I,” Eddie said. “Although it turns out only sailors call it Frisco.”
“San Francisco,” Roger said, laying down the words in a voice that hadn’t fully broken yet. “She’s a hell of a town.”
*
They cast off lines at six the next morning, January 10, and were directed by a local pilot to the degaussing range, where the Elizabeth Seaman’s hull was demagnetized so she wouldn’t set off mines. Eddie led a fire and boat drill, safety procedures being a third mate’s one clear responsibility. But the drill was perfunctory; they didn’t even swing out the davits, much less lower the lifeboats. Captain Kittredge was in a hurry to sail, and the bosun seemed indifferent—perhaps inclined to minimize Eddie’s domain.
When they were past the Golden Gate, the captain disclosed their destination: the Panama Canal. That meant the Persian Gulf almost certainly, from whence the cargo would be transported overland to Russia, whose infinite Red Army continued to beat back the Krauts. The Elizabeth Seaman hadn’t been given the arctic gear required for crossing the North Sea in January, to the extreme relief of everyone aboard. The refrain “better than Murmansk” echoed through the gangways and over chow tables for the rest of that night. But Eddie felt no such relief. The Caribbean was hazardous enough, and he seethed over the halfhearted boat drill.
When he relieved the first mate of his watch at eight the next morning, Eddie persuaded him of the need for a second drill. That afternoon, the engines were reduced to standby and the order given for the abandon-ship drill: six short blasts followed by one long blast of the general alarm bell. As men began moving toward the boat deck, the bosun sprinted up the ladders and accosted Eddie there.
“Third Mate,” he began, smacking his lips at the utterance of the title, “are you cognizant of the fact that it has been over a year since a Jap submarine sank a merchant ship on the California coast?”
“I am, Bosun.”
“Can you explain, then, why we are now undertaking our second boat drill in two short days at sea?”
“The first was sloppy. If this one is sloppy, I’ll hold another tomorrow.”
“You would enjoy that, I can well imagine,” the bosun said with a wily smile at his growing audience—the blasts had brought all hands onto the boat deck. “After all, safety drills afford you a rare opportunity to frolic in your newfound authority!”
“Is that what this looks like to you? Frolicking?”
“Every man frolics differently,” the bosun said.
Eddie caught smirks on faces around him, felt a rise of incipient laughter. The mate and master stood by. If they stepped in now, Eddie would never regain his authority.
“Do you refuse to participate in this drill, Bosun?” he asked sharply, recognizing that he’d arrived late where he should have begun.
“I would not dream of refusing!” the bosun expostulated. “On the contrary, I am putty in your hands, Third—we all are. Please, lead us through the necessary steps!”
It took all of Eddie’s self-restraint to ignore the sarcasm and proceed. The man raised in him a welt of provocation whose itch he could barely withstand. This time, at least, all four lifeboats were lowered and boarded successfully. Eddie resolved to hold a boat drill every week, exactly as the rules stipulated, even if it brought him to blows with the bosun. He rather hoped it would.
*
A day out of Panama, ten days into their voyage, the Elizabeth Seaman’s call numbers appeared in a radio message—a highly unusual event. Sparks deciphered the message with codebooks and brought the typed result to the captain’s office. They were not to go through the canal after all, but to continue south, around Cape Horn and across the Southern Atlantic to Cape Town, South Africa: a journey of some forty days. Captain Kittredge was convinced they could make better time.
There was widespread chagrin over not being able to buy Panamanian rum from the bumboats that swarmed both ends of the canal, but it soon dissolved into the monotony peculiar to long voyages. Everyone resisted this at first; they were bored, stymied, restless. But within a few days, peace overcame the ship like a sigh—the relief of knowing this was all there was, or would be, for some weeks. Men took up their sea projects of whittling whistles or making square knot belts. Eighteen days out of San Francisco, Farmingdale mastered the tremor in his hands enough to fashion two dolls out of hemp. That night, when he relieved Eddie of the eight-to-twelve watch, Eddie complimented him on the dolls and asked how he’d learned to make them.
“An old salt,” Farmingdale said. “He’s made five hundred sixty, if you can feature it. Keeps ’em in a storage locker at Rincon Annex.”