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Authors: John McPhee

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BOOK: Looking for a Ship
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“I got a whole twenty dollars for that,” he told me. “That was the kid's last fight.”
Three nights later, the Mexican amateur no-big-deal lost a ten-round decision in a Miami main event against the fourth-ranked welterweight in the world.
Looking for a ship in Charleston in January of 1943, Washburn got the John Harvey, a Liberty ship loaded with ammunition, C rations, tanks, and guns. A convoy collected at Cape Fear. Forty-five or fifty ships set out for Casablanca, soon after the Allied invasion there. One general alarm followed another, the convoy was attacked, ships went down, escorts dropped depth charges every night. He then shipped out, as a wiper, on the Howard E. Coffin, on a run to England in the winter North Atlantic. He participated in the invasion of Sicily and in the delivery of matériel to the Italian mainland. On the Moses Rogers, of the Luckenbach Steamship Company, he crossed the ocean in a convoy of a hunded and eight ships.
“In New York, the Germans were waiting for you at the sea buoy. In San Juan, they hit you at the dock. Jap
submarines were inefficient. Our freighters crossed the Pacific alone. After a certain point, they zigzagged. They formed convoys only near the front. In New York, the front was at the sea buoy.”
From San Francisco, in 1944, he shipped out on the Cape Henry, a C-1 diesel, operated by Lykes Brothers Steamship Company. He was an able-bodied seaman now, and sometimes sailed as bosun. He went to Saipan, where the Marines were fighting, and to Tinian, in the Marianas, and to Eniwetok Anchorage, and to Ulithi. On the John G. Tod, a Liberty ship, he did not set foot ashore for six months. He went to Kwajalein, and to Okinawa just after the American invasion. The John G. Tod stood off Okinawa for sixty-nine days. There were air raids every night, and two typhoons. Ships capsized, a couple went on reefs. The Tod was at Okinawa when the war ended.
“We paid off in San Francisco.”
He had been married during the war. His wife was in Jacksonville. San Francisco was so jammed with travelling servicemen that there was no way to get out—no way to start for Florida by train or air. So he went to the union hall. Getting a ship was not difficult in 1945. Two days after arriving from the South Pacific, he was bosun of the Samuel W. Williston, and was sailing for home.
For home, but not for long. When Captain Washburn looks landward from the bridge of his ship, he will readily say, “I would rather be here for the worst that could be here than over there for the best that could be there. I've never
felt comfortable or secure anywhere else. I once thought I was going to college and be a history teacher, but I have never been able to concentrate on anything else but this—not on business, family, anything. By the end of 1945, I had passed the point of no return. I was in the soup now good. Anything adverse that came up, this was my safety blanket: ‘Hey, I can get a ship.' If I made plans and they went wrong, I was gone—looking for a ship.”
T
he fact that Captain Washburn never planned to be a sailor is something he has in common with much of the Merchant Marine. He says, “Most of them aren't making a career out of this—they're just still here. A couple of guys are here only for the money. But there are a lot of us here who are here because this is where we fit in, and we don't fit in anywhere else. We seem to be out of step. The square peg in the round hole. I was out of place as a child, and now I am not looking forward to retirement. I dread it.”
On the bulkhead behind his desk on the S.S. Stella Lykes is a vertical set of photographs of his wife and a daughter and the daughter's daughter and the daughter's daughter's daughter. Paul McHenry Washburn, licensed Master of United States Steam or Motor Vessels of any Gross Tons upon Oceans, is a great-grandfather. And if the day should ever come when he—like Nathaniel Bowditch, of
Salem—is the great-great-great-grandfather of someone on this ship, he intends to be here, too, as the skipper.
In 1946, after shipping out as an A.B. on the Bernuth & Lempke tanker Trimountain and the Mystic Steamship Company's Berkeley Seam, he sailed as a fireman-water tender on the United Fruit Company's Erastus Smith.
“There were jobs all over the board then. We were bringing troops home. We were feeding the world. Hey, when I was sailing, I sailed. I got off a ship and on another one the same day.”
His marriage was not pacific. Not even he could say if his draw to the Merchant Marine was more of a cause or a cure. Toward the end of that year, he and his wife, Jacqueline, moved to the District of Columbia, and he became the manager of a dry-cleaning store—testing the possibilities of life on the beach. He worked there through Saturday, November 2nd. On Sunday, November 3rd, the Washington Redskins played a game of football against the Philadelphia Eagles. The Redskins are more important to Captain Washburn than any other group of people on land. They mattered no less to him then. He had developed an affectionate and protective sympathy for the Redskins after the Chicago Bears beat them 73—0 in their fourth Washington season. Washburn, who was at that game, had been following the team even before they came to Washington. He remembered them as the Boston Redskins. He remembered many of them as Duluth Eskimos. And now, on this significant Sunday in 1946, the Redskins led the Eagles
24—0 at the half. The final score was Philadelphia 28, Washington 24.
“I couldn't handle defeat like that,” he says. “I can't now. I picked an argument with my wife. I remember saying, ‘Listen, woman, I don't have to listen to this. I can go back to sea.' She said, ‘Listen, jackass, if you go back to sea, if you come back to this house it will be so empty it will look like no one ever lived in it.' In those days, you didn't wave any red flags or throw gauntlets in front of the kid. November 7th, I was fireman and water tender on a ship out of Baltimore leaving for Poland.”
“So what happened in the football game?”
“Washington sat on its lead. The Eagles' Tommy Thompson—one eye and all—hit Blackjack Ferrante in the end zone, and that was that. I still feel a little pain.”
The separation led to divorce. The ship was the William S. Halstead, of Moore-McCormack Lines. She carried six thousand tons of coal and two hundred and twenty-eight cows, most of them on deck. In the Chesapeake Bay, she hit the Esso Camden, and there was a fire. Hay burned. There was a hole in the bow. She went back to Baltimore and spent seventeen days in drydock.
“Now, all of these cows had been served. Eight Quakers were along to feed and care for the cows. Three weeks to Gdansk. In the North Atlantic, half the cows had calves—a hundred and seven calves. We lost seven calves, one cow. In Gdansk, we discharged three hundred and twenty-seven head.”
The Halstead went also to the east coast of South America: twenty-eight days in Rio de Janeiro, fifty-six days in Buenos Aires—the slow discharge of break-bulk cargo, the old Merchant Marine. Washburn used his free time to prepare for the Coast Guard examinations that could take him out of the fo'c'sle and make him a licensed officer. He took them and passed them in New Orleans in the summer of 1949.
“Afterward, I started looking for a ship. Jobs were tough. There weren't any ships. I couldn't get into the International Organization of Masters, Mates, and Pilots.”
He may have come up the anchor chain, but the hawsepipe was solidly blocked, so he went on sailing as an able-bodied seaman. He worked on an ore carrier on the Great Lakes. He went to the west coast of South America on the Gulf Merchant.
“Then I went to New Orleans, looking for a ship. I caught the Fred Morse, a C-i, owned by Lykes Brothers Steamship Company.”
A sailor always remains something of a freelance, but this was the beginning of a relationship that only age would end. The company derived from the Spanish-American Sealift, and Washburn would be with it so long that people would someday imagine that he did, too. The seven founding Lykes brothers were from Hillsborough County, Florida. Since early in this century, the company has made its headquarters in New Orleans. Among major American shipping companies, it seems to be competing with Sea-Land and
American President Lines for that special form of venerability that is reserved for the last of anything. The last Mohican. The last passenger pigeon. Third mate, second mate, chief mate—Washburn kept taking his Coast Guard exams between voyages all over the earth on various Lykes Brothers ships. He first sailed as master on Lykes Brothers' Anadarko Victory. He has been the skipper of—among many other ships—the Sylvia Lykes, the Sue Lykes, the Charlotte Lykes (“She was a South and East African ship”), the Sheldon Lykes, the Jean Lykes, the Mallory Lykes, the Genevieve Lykes. In 1979, he took the Genevieve with a load of cotton to Tsingtao, in the Yellow Sea. A month earlier, the Letitia Lykes, under another master, had called at Shanghai. In thirty years, these were the first two American merchant ships to load for China. After Washburn secured the Genevieve, forty officials climbed the gangway to clear the ship, including naval architects. To the dockside came a very long line of children, walking two by two and holding hands. Thousands of people came to see the ship.
Across all the years, Washburn kept in touch with his former wife. He followed news of her as she remarried, as she gave birth to children, and, ultimately, as she suffered the dissolution of her second marriage as well. If she needed support in any form, he was always there to help. In 1976, between runs to South and East Africa as master of the Sheldon Lykes, he asked her to marry him. She decided that she could deal with him even if the Redskins lost. They live in a multilevel condominium behind the third green
at the Baymeadows Golf & Country Club, in Jacksonville, where he has an American flag flying from their bedroom balcony, as if it were the fantail of a ship.
Andy thinks that I should visit him there, visit him and others in their homes, so that I can see merchant mariners in their contrasting lives: see the undisputed master of any gross tons upon oceans in contexts where in all likelihood he is the undisputed master of nothing. Washburn tees up at Baymeadows, a quiet place under pines and palms. Wearing an electric-blue shirt, red pants, and white shoes, he is himself an American flag. According to his closest friend, a New Orleans businessman named Edward Lee, Washburn has spent twenty thousand dollars on golf lessons and golf equipment. His irons are Hogan Radials. He addresses his ball with a custom-made, frequency-balanced, titanium-boron-graphite driver. He waves it over the ball as if he were rubbing a lamp.
I remember asking him, on the ship, what he does with his long vacations, which he has to take in order to share his job.
“If the whole truth is known, most of the eighty-five days I am sitting around waiting to go back to work,” he said. “I'm impatient if it's eighty-five days. If I have to take four or five months off, I go berserk. I play golf incessantly. I'm out there thrashing away, screaming, cursing, throwing clubs, making a spectacle of myself. They don't call me Captain Angry for nothing. Which is my nickname in the club I belong to. I hate golf. I hate it with a passion. I hate it because I can't do it better. It's a major defeat.”
And now, at Baymeadows, seconds before his first tee shot, he mutters, “There is nothing I love as much as I hate this game.”
According to Edward Lee, Washburn has long since composed the inscription he wants on his tombstone:
I'D RATHER BE HERE
THAN PLAYING GOLF
He swings. He hits the ball two hundred yards up the middle. His second shot goes another two hundred yards up the middle. He is on the green in three, very nearly sinks a thirty-foot putt, and is down in par five.
With three companions, he is playing skins no carryover, which means, among other things, that only a clear winner wins a hole. He is the clear winner of seventy-five cents. The foursome includes Craig Van Horn, who is in charge of sales for Weyerhaeuser in Florida and, as we go along, converses by telephone from his golf cart with salesmen all over the state.
Washburn describes the second at Baymeadows as “the most honest but difficult No. 2 hole in the city.” When the hole, in its probity, puts him into a sand trap, he says, “They don't call me the Desert Fox for nothing. The kid could always get out of the sand.” The Desert Fox raises a cloud of sediment, but the kid remains in the sand.
On the fifth hole, his ball comes to rest between two trees that stand closer than bollards. “Greed, avarice,” he mumbles, referring to the risk inherent in the shot that put
him in the trees. Trying to get out, he lands in sand. He pars the seventh. On the tenth, as his titanium tee shot turns left like a model airplane on a tether, he says, “The kid can always hook 'em.” On the fifteenth, his golf cart is rear-ended. (“You sail defensively … . Hey, the
only
way I'm going to get hit is in the stern.”)
Peewee, in Savannah, takes me down Victory Drive, calling it “the longest palm drive in the world,” showing off his home town. “They been here hundreds of years,” he says of the columnar trees. “Way before I was born.” In and out among horses and buggies he weaves through Johnson Square. Peewee's own buggy, his Lincoln Town Car in dark cabernet clear-coat, is a rubber-borne cabin cruiser with cruise control and a burglar alarm. He paid twenty-six thousand for it new. His wife, Ethel Kennedy, has it much of the year, after taking him to Charleston to put him on his ship. When I ask her how long a trip that is, she says, “If I'm nice, two hours.”
“What if you're not nice?”
“An hour and a half.”
Ethel describes Peewee's absence as “a lonesome missing piece.” Years ago, he used to ship out of Savannah, on United States Lines vessels to North Europe. A cadre of their seven children would go with her when she took him to the waterfront, and one time a grandnephew went along and kept saying, “Put me in his seabag, put me in his seabag.” Ethel, recalling this, says, “He looked like his heart would drop out of his body.” The kids waved at the ship as
it went down the Savannah River. Peewee, on deck, waved back. He would be gone fifty days.
They live in a one-story house painted dusty gold on a street that is shaded with sycamores. There are two heavily bearing pecans in their yard, near a brick barbecue so large that it could be the standing remains of a house that burned down. Ethel has landscaped their corner lot, with no help from Peewee. She will not let him mow the lawn, regarding him as incompetent. He sits in the house, relaxing for three months, with a cigar in his shirt pocket—the provider. His daughters Diane and Louvenia come in and hit him for fifty cents so they can go up the street for sodas. Diane is thirty-four and Louvenia is thirty-three. On the piano, in the dining room, is a ship in a bottle. Over the tropical plants on the glassed-in porch turns a slow paddle fan. The rest of the house is air-conditioned. In, among other things, ceramic objects that Ethel makes, there is ample evidence in every room of the presence of religion. A masked gunman not long ago came close to destroying this domestic scene. He came off the street, demanded money, and shot Ethel in the neck and the collarbone. In the hospital, she watched the doctor for a while and said, “Am I fixin' to die?” He said no, and she believed him. She had been wearing a thick gold chain. The bullet severed it, but the chain saved her.
Married to Peewee nearly forty years, Ethel has a concise and summary view of the Merchant Marine. She says, “It was the chance to give us a good living.”
BOOK: Looking for a Ship
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