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Good books, or for that matter any books, about American merchant
seamen are in short order, particularly these days when the bookshelves
are filled with volumes about other endangered species. With the virtual
disappearance of the oceangoing United States merchant marine, it would
take a writer like John McPhee, who worries about things being lost to a
bewilderingly voracious technology, to tackle the subject...
His vehicle is the Stella Lykes, a 650-foot elongated Lykes Brothers
Steamship Company freighter, which he joined at the suggestion of his
friend...as a "person in addition to crew," in effect, a certificated kibitzer.
He and the ship are off on a 42-day voyage to the west coast of South
America from Charleston, S.C....
By the time he and we have debarked, we have come to know the
crewmen and the routine aboard a modern cargo ship... But there are
reminders that all these are mere frills of a calling that routinely is at the
mercy of weather and wave, with collision and shipboard accident always
waiting, just off the starboard beam, with sinkings and vanishings still a
possibility in seas that are more untracked than they might appear on a
land-based computer screen. And on some runs, there are still pirates.
But worst of all, for those who make their living at it,there are virtually no
ships, or that was the case when Mr. McPhee wrote his book, before the
Persian Gulf crisis created a demand for mariners. In the book, seafarers
tensely wait for their number to come up in the hiring hall for a ship or a
run they want; some unions won't allow their members to ship out for
more than six months a year to insure that all hands get a chance at a job.
The average age of the Stella Lykes's 32 crewmen is 51, and the captain
sums up the situation: "This is now an old man's business....
He's a romantic, even in the most casual, laconic way, and you can tell he
dotes on talk of pirates, on the mention of strange ports and especially on
those yarns that seamen spin. "Looking for a Ship" is not a treatise on the
decline of the American merchant marine...there is not even an index.
Style is what Mr. McPhee is loaded down to the Plimsoll marks in:
felicitous phrases, keen observation, the knack of unloading a cargo of
information without hitting the reader on the head with a jumbo boom.
Those who sail the Stella Lykes are a competent, highly individual cast of
characters, starting with the captain, a great-grandfather who might have
been created by the people who coined the word "feisty." He runs a happy
ship, has strong opinions on any subject, can't find his way around his
home town when he's ashore and driving his car, but is a virtuoso ship
handler, who delicately docks his ship, the length of Rockefeller Center,
between two others in what the author calls a "problem in very tight
large-scale parallel parking."
Mr. McPhee's own cruise through the pages is not a simple here-to-there
affair. The chapters do not sail as does the ship from one point to another;
each picks up at a different position and tackles a different aspect of
maritime living. Even within chapters, one topic leads to another,
sometimes without any notice. It is a charming sort of garrulity and puts
one in mind of a most articulate old sea dog who has swallowed the
anchor and sits on a waterfront bollard telling his lubberly acquaintances
about what happens out there, just on the other side of the horizon.