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In summer 1962 I departed New York on a small Moore-McCormack Line freighter bound for the east coast of Africa. It wasn’t a romantic gesture but a practical one: I needed to earn tuition money to continue my education at Union College.
The S.S. Robin Gray was one of eight ships whose names started with “Robin” (Robin Locksley, Robin Goodfellow), all of which sailed regularly on this route carrying cargo. A red locomotive — manufactured by American Locomotive in Schenectady, the same city where Union is located — was strapped to the deck of our ship for South African Railways.
The voyage was my first time truly away from home, a Jewish kid from Brooklyn at sea in several ways, not the least of which was joining the crew of merchant seamen whose lives, work and countries of origin were completely foreign to me. There was Sammy S., the slight Filipino deckhand who chipped paint on the highest parts of the ship; Rios, the Puerto Rican first chef, who guarded his carving knives with his life and who tried to teach me how to wash pots at Olympic speed; and Paul W., the Polish third chef, who broke up the only fist fight I was ever threatened with before it could begin.
I’ve forgotten the names of my two bunk mates, the gaunt and taciturn Bible-reading old-timer and the chap from Jamaica who spoke with explosive speed. I never talked to the officers, though I was reprimanded by the captain for making an early morning commotion while retrieving a cooking pan taken by a messman from the upper deck.
Ships are their own worlds. Their crews have their own rituals, rivalries and languages. The men on the Robin Gray presented a small, floating world that I could experience and learn from. Rule number one was: Do Your Job!...and be grateful for having it. As the galley boy, I washed pots, peeled potatoes, swabbed decks and fitted myself into the steward’s department team. Add to those duties special chores like cooking, peeling and deveining a mountain of shrimp for a surprise party for the ship’s agents in Durban, after which my rose-colored hands, it seemed, had swollen to twice their normal size.
The worst assignment arrived every night when I had to carry two large steel buckets full of the day’s galley garbage to the fantail and dump the contents overboard. A half-century later, I can still feel the terror of knowing that with some nautical hiccup I could have been lost at sea under the astonishing, unlimited night sky and not be missed until the next day when the others were looking for their morning coffee.
That summer, at several South African ports, I witnessed for the first time and up close the vile system of apartheid when shoeless Black workers wearing rags came on board to load and unload cargo. I witnessed the slavery of the haggard laborers on an unscheduled stop in a Tanzanian lagoon called Kilwa Kisiwani. The men carried sacks of coffee from pontoons up the gangway under the severe watch of the south Indian master who wore a giant silver “CUSTOMS” badge pinned to his white turban. (When a worker appeared wearing a threadbare Seafarers’ International Union T-shirt, he received a round of applause from the crew.) Ten days later, we were sailing south from Mombasa on the return leg of our 92-day voyage.
In the years between my seafaring job and the end of my career as a theater professor, I’ve thought often about what I now call my “Eugene O’Neill experience” at sea. (As a young man, before trying his hand at playwriting, O’Neill shipped out on a tramp steamer to central America where he caught malaria and nearly died.) While teaching, I would recommend to my students that they travel internationally if they could while they were young; it would “enlarge” their lives, I advised.
The world is much different from when I took my summer journey, including how life and work take place aboard a ship (see Rose George’s book, Ninety Percent of Everything). The $1,100 I earned for my next Union year would hardly pay for a week of education now, and the Robin Gray was sold and cut up for scrap in 1971. Some things, however, have not changed, including the subjugation of people by evil systems that blight their lives with violence and despair. Responding to injustice has informed my Jewish life ever since.
No, it wasn’t Jonah’s biblical voyage to be sure, but when processed through the years, the fear and grit of such journeys turn into important lessons that determine and expand one’s life. It’s the real meaning of “bon voyage.”
Bob Skloot is professor emeritus of theater and drama and Jewish studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
