The Ordinary Seaman (53 page)

I went next to the Seamen’s Church Institute and spoke to Reverend Paul Chapman, the director of the Institute’s Center for Seafarers’ Rights. My story confirmed what he’d suspected all along, that the man we’d met was in business with the ownership, or the owner himself. I also, briefly, met the crew. They were mostly young, Costa Rican and Nicaraguan—though there were at least two older members, the cook and waiter. Our conversation—a few hours in the Institute’s basement cafeteria—took place so many years ago now that I remember very little of what we actually talked about, though some of the things they told me have been a part of my attempts to reimagine the story from the start. I owe a special debt to the waiter, Bernardo Iván Carrasco M. He wrote a twelve-page account of the travail, which he titled “Los Ultimos dias de un viejo lobo de mar,” and gave it to me, urging me to make good use of it. (This was especially helpful in its explanation of how he and some of the others had originally been hired.) The
Urus’s
Bernardo Puyano meets a far more tragic fate than Bernardo Iván Carrasco M. did. Needless to say, I’ve paid the real-life Bernardo the token tribute of lending his first name to his entirely fictional counterpart.

So I’d wanted to write this story for a long time. In a certain way, I’ve pursued it all over the world. I spent the 1980s dividing my time between Central America and New York—whenever I could, down there, I’d stop in port towns and talk to people, especially the seamen you could always encounter in the usual raunchy nightspots. When a dear, late friend of mine, Bruce Johnson, worked briefly as a ship’s chandler in Puerto Barrios, Guatemala, I went with him as his “assistant”—there, I boarded some working ships for the first time. In the 1990s, when I was living in Mexico, I made many trips to Veracruz: late one night I found myself drinking alone in a cavernous, high-ceilinged “seamen’s bar” whose madam was about to move her business to another establishment in a midnight dash. I ended up risking my neck for that madam: climbing a long, rickety ladder—a few of her girls held it from below—to snatch nautical pennants from the rafters so that she could take them to her new center of operations. That was the highest, most unstable ladder I’ve ever scaled. We became friends. She had a lover, a
captain of a ship then in port undergoing repairs. He’d given her a port pass, and she lent it to me, on the condition that, once past the port gates, I’d distribute flyers advertising her new “Seaman bar,” leaving them in stacks by the gangways of every ship I managed to board.

In the meantime, Rev. Paul Chapman had written and published an excellent account of the sometimes horrifying exploitation faced by international seafarers in the maritime industry:
Trouble on Board
(Cornell University Press). In it, he tells the story of the abandoned crew and ship that had first captured my attention in the news years before. The “phantom owners” of that ship escaped legal prosecution, but they were banned by the Liberian Registry from ever again registering under that flag of convenience. Amazingly, the ship, once seized and auctioned off as scrap to a machinery company in Brooklyn, was repurchased by those hapless owners; sometime later they were caught trying to work the same scam, with the same ship, in Staten Island; and then again in the Caribbean. (Perhaps the
Urus
is on her way to a similar destiny.)

Reverend Chapman’s book led me to Capt. W. A. Chadwick, chief investigator for the Liberian Registry. The Liberian Registry is unique among “flag of convenience” registries: it is operated as an independent business out of headquarters in Reston, Virginia, unaffected by whatever government happens to be in power in strife-ridden Liberia at the time, though a share of the registry’s profits go to that nation’s treasury. The Liberian Registry, probably more than any other flag of convenience, tries to enforce international maritime laws and standards aboard its ships—thus the investigation, and subsequent banning, of the phantom owners of the aforementioned ship. I spent two days talking to Captain Chadwick in Reston in the autumn of ’94, and I am very grateful for both his generous hospitality and the information he gave me.

In January of ’95 I moved, again, from Brooklyn, New York, to Mexico City. I was feeling a bit shipwrecked in my own life, and perhaps that provided the impulse to set aside another project I’d been working on for a few years and plunge into this novel. I still felt I lacked a true feeling for shipboard life, but I trusted that my imagination would
be able to fabricate something coherent out of the bits and pieces I’d been able to pick up during the thirteen years I’d been hunting this story down. At least, since the story was about a ship that never moves, I wouldn’t need to know very much about navigation.

Work went slowly. In the fall of ’95 a lucky break changed everything. I met Miguel Angel Merodio in a Colonia Condesa restaurant. We struck up a conversation, during which it came out that his “primo hermano,” Juan Carlos Merodio, is the head maritime lawyer at Transportación Marítima Mexicana, TMM, Mexico’s largest shipping line. It’s a long story, but in the end, thanks to Miguel Angel and Lie. Juan Carlos Merodio, as well as Lie. Fernando Ruiz of TMM, I found myself, in November of ’95, departing from Veracruz aboard the TMM ship
Mitla.
We stopped at various ports before I finally left the ship in Barcelona, after a nearly monthlong voyage. I now believe that I’d been incredibly naive to think that I could ever have written this book without having gone to sea. Many thanks to Capitán de Alta Mar Guillermo Cárdenas, Chief Engineer José Millán, and the rest of the officers and crew of the
Mitla.
I am also grateful to Chief Engineer Tom McHugh of Baltimore, Maryland, to the Nicaraguan war hero Noél Talavera, and to Reverend Jean Smith, of the Seamen’s Church Institute. Alvaro Mutis lent me precious books on tramp steamers and shipping and exhorted, and trusted, me to write this story for “both of us.” Nothing could have meant more. To Alvaro and Carmen, my deepest thanks and cariño.

Morgan Entrekin is the most supportive editor any writer could hope for, and also a great friend. Thanks for the office space, too, Morgan. The whole crew at Grove/Atlantic—Elisabeth Schmitz, Eric Price, Judy Hottensen, Miwa Messer, Carla Lalli, John Gall, Tom Ehas, Kenn Russell, and everyone else. Thanks, also, to Bex Brian and Jon Lee Anderson. Amanda Urban is my own “Queen of Luck” and a good friend of many years.

I owe so much to Veronica Macias, “Musa de Desastres y más…”