Listening to Moby Dick

Moby Dick was read to me by my mother when I was maybe five or six. She made a deal with me that she would continue to read the story as long as I could remember on the following night where the story had gotten to. Reading usually took place around six in the evening, and she would quiz me as to where we were and how far on its voyage the Pequod had gotten and what was doing with Queequeg and Captain Ahab. If I failed the quiz, she did not read it to me. I would have to wait another day. 

She omitted the long abstract passages in which Melville reflects on the meaning of the whale and the immensity of the sea. Sometimes my father would also contribute to the conversation and unravel the knots in Melville’s metaphors and allegories. By the time I got to be six or seven, when I could read by myself, I’d continue the story further into the evening.

My family was in the shipping business. There were a number of ships belonging to the family fleet on the Embarcadero in San Francisco, so I had a romantic attachment to sea stories. I assumed that somehow sailors and seafaring were in the DNA of the family.

Shipping Out

After graduating from Yale, I persuaded my father to arrange for me to serve as an ordinary seaman, a member of the crew of one of the last of the American-Hawaiian ships, which had been converted into a bulk carrier. It had been a freighter, but in Japan they’d put in another 150 feet amidships so the ship could carry either grain or oil or some sort of bulk cargo. The voyage that summer was to bring back iron ore from a mine 150 miles up the Orinoco River in Venezuela. That was half of the summer. The other half was to bring iron ore from a mine in Labrador, which was well up toward the Arctic Circle. 

I was appointed purser. There were no such things as pursers on merchant ships in those days, but the captain decided I would be useful as a member of a crew who could keep records, keep notes, write reports, and present papers to customs officials in Venezuela, Quebec, and most importantly, in the ports of Mobile, Philadelphia, and New York. The captain had no patience with paperwork, and none of the mates could bear it either.

The interesting part of it was in Venezuela. We got to the mine well up the river. In the shipping businesses the thing is to keep the ship moving as steadily and continuously as possible. This was a very rich iron mine, so there were ships from several nations already anchored off the loading dock waiting to take on iron ore before the descent back down the river. The trick was to get early access to the conveyor belt. In order to enjoy favored-nation status and move as soon as possible to the loading dock, it was necessary to bribe as many of the port officials as could be reached. It was my task to bribe the officials. There were quite a few of them, because there were apparently only two customs uniforms to be found anywhere in what was known as Puerto Ordaz. But they had cut the uniforms into many pieces, so one person would be wearing a sleeve, another the hat, another, a part of a shirt, and so forth. The customs boat would bring twenty or thirty people onboard. It was my task to distribute cartons of cigarettes and bottles of Scotch to each and every one and make sure they were well and hospitably received. When this was done, we tended to move to the dock well ahead of the German, Norwegian, and Greek ships waiting to load. 

I was given a watch. A ship’s routine is divided into, as you know, four-hour watches, and I was assigned one at night, the dog watch, between four in the morning and eight. The third mate, who was the chief officer on that particular watch, took the trouble to teach me the rudiments of celestial navigation, so I had a lesson in the stars. And the stars are very brilliant at night. They’re not quite the same stars to which one was accustomed in Connecticut, and the third mate would also teach me about fish. We saw a lot of flying fish. The water was a beautiful color. So was the journey upriver in the Orinoco, a big, broad river along the lines of the Congo. Monkeys in the trees, brilliant birds, natives in dugout canoes.

The Orinoco, as you probably know, is inhabited by piranha fish, deadly, small, murderous, with many teeth. They can tear flesh off a man or animal within minutes. A member of the crew, who happened to be the steward, had bought a dog in Mobile to see if the rumor about the piranha was correct. So we got a few miles well into the river, and the steward, whose name was Lacey, had a rope around the dog’s neck. I can’t still see the dog, so I can’t remember whether it was a big spaniel or a small retriever, but it got thrown overboard, and sure enough, within a matter of minute and a half, there was nothing left except a few bones.

I remember writing letters for the crew. As a sailor, you escape from land, leave the girl behind, or the wrecked car or the foreclosed house, and hope to get to sea before the authorities arrive. There was one member of the crew named Rudy Rosales. He was having a particular problem with his wife in, I believe, San Diego. It was a California crew, and he’d get notes explaining that she’d left the house and taken the car. It was a series of bad news after another, and I was having to write letters of response for Rudy, trying to argue with the wife and sue for some sort of truce. Rudy had a spectacular tattoo on his entire back: the figure of Christ on the cross so that Christ’s head was at the base of his neck. Christ’s feet were at the tip of the lower point of his spine. Christ’s arms stretched out on the back of Rudy’s arms. It was a spectacular display. 

I was eighteen, and everybody else was in their thirties, if not older, because the American merchant marine at that point in time was beginning to shrink. During the war, the United States had built enormous numbers of ships, Liberty Ships, launched at the rate of one a day during the war to supply both the Pacific and Europe. Then, as the ships disappeared after the war—either scrapped or given away or sold to foreigners—the number of crew required to operate and maintain the remaining American merchant fleet declined. There were fewer jobs, so young men weren’t encouraged by the union to apply for work. I got a special dispensation, because of my family’s connection, to be on the ship. That’s also why they rated me as an ordinary seaman but assigned me to the duties of a clerk. 

Chasing Secrets of the Deep

In those days, The Saturday Evening Post carried on its masthead as adventure editor a man named Robert Marx. He ended up with that job because he had come to the attention of the publisher. Before becoming the publisher of The Saturday Evening Post in the 1960s, the publisher had served in the Navy during World War II, and during his time in the Navy, he had acquired a love of the sea. He’d come up on the editorial side of journalism, and he’d been a writer for a magazine. It could have been Holiday. It could have been Newsweek, or it could have been Time. There had been a rumor that this young ex-Marine named Robert Marx had discovered the wreck of the USS Monitor offshore of Virginia, a wonder to behold. This soon-to-become publisher of The Saturday Evening Post had been sent to help Marx write the story. They would lead the diving expedition to the Monitor. It turned out not to be true. There was no Monitor. I mean, at least not there and then. But the soon-to-become publisher got to know and became extremely attached to Marx. They had the same kind of mindset. 

Marx would be assigned to do adventures for the Post. One of the first ones was to sail a replica of Columbus’ ships—La Nina—from Portugal to the Bahamas on the same course and with the same rigging and construction as Columbus’ ship. No new technology, no improvement of compass. The sails were made out of the same cloth that had been used in the late fifteenth century. And the crew was Portuguese, and few of them spoke English, and the food was the kind of slop that would have been served to a fifteenth century Portuguese crew.

The Marx voyage proved to be a catastrophe. It had taken Columbus two months to reach the first site of the New World. After two months, Marx was still adrift a thousand miles south and east of the Bahamas, and the Post had to send the Coast Guard out looking for him. They had a flying boat, an old PBY, and they spotted the ship, and then came low to the water, and Marx was waving them off. Marx was a purist. I mean, everything had to be true and authentic. Yes, it was maybe taking a little longer than it had taken Columbus, but he wanted to show it could be done, and wanted no help from the Coast Guard.

But this was not the view of the Portuguese crew. By that time, they had had enough of Marx’s rules. They also were short on water as well as whatever biscuit they’d been eating. Two or three of them seized Marx and put a large knife to his throat and indicated to the pilot of the Coast Guard plane that unless the goddamn plane landed, they were going to leave Marx for dead and throw him overboard. It was under these conditions that Marx gave up the voyage.

But the Post had invested a lot of money into the adventure, promising its readers revelations never heard before, and so on. Somebody had to write the rest of the story as if it had occurred the way it was supposed to have occurred. This often happened with Marx’s adventures at the Post. I was not yet a senior enough staff writer to finish the voyage of the Nina, but the publisher and Marx were never discouraged. And the next adventure was a treasure ship.

Marx was sure that one or more Spanish galleons had gone aground on a reef—the Serranilla Bank, which was on the route between Cartagena and Havana. A Spanish treasure fleet was bringing Peruvian silver to Havana. In Havana, the ships coming from Colombia and from Mexico would gather into a convoy. Once a year they would make the voyage across the Atlantic to Spain. But this treasure ship never made it to Havana. 

Marx knew all about it. He persuaded the publisher to send him to Seville to spend three months in the library, going through manuscripts, tracking down manifests and sailing instructions kept in the Spanish archives from the sixteenth century. So he knew exactly where this wreck was. It was just right there, in twenty feet of calm water. It was easy: just sail over there and go down and pick it up and bring it aboard. In potato sacks. It couldn’t be easier. 

The Post had equipped Marx with a shrimp boat that they chartered in Key West. Marx had drummed up a crew of seasoned treasure hunters, three guys from Bermuda and two from Barbados and one from Orlando. I went along to write the story for the Post, because this was another one of their big-time adventures.

I was again the ship’s clerk. You can never have a hero, as you know, without having somebody to write the story of the hero. That was my assignment. We also were carrying onboard the shrimp boat a small submarine known as the Cubmarine, and the Cubmarine’s operator, George Bucha. It was a two-man submarine, and the idea was that it turned out that the wreck was a little further below the surface than Marx had anticipated. 

Marx had taken the Cubmarine for a trial run, a voyage in the waterway between Palm Beach and West Palm Beach. The Cubmarine had been manufactured by Perry Submarine Builders in Lantana, Florida, just down the coast from Palm Beach. Marx wanted to test out the Cubmarine. The Post, of course, is paying for all this. He decided to do it at night when the water traffic in the waterway was quiet. He sank beneath the surface of the waterway, and managed to get the Cubmarine caught up against the water intake into the electric power plant in West Palm Beach, the source of energy for the power plants that generated electricity and light in the region. That meant that all the lights went out across the entire town of Palm Beach and West Palm Beach, and it took them several hours to get the submarine off the grate and get the lights back on. But nevertheless, the Cubmarine had been rescued, and we had it on the roof of the deck house of the shrimp boat, leaving Key West for the Serranilla Bank.

The shrimp boat had a shallow draft with a rounded bottom. If you had that much weight—the Cubmarine probably weighed at least a ton—in any kind of a sea, the shrimp boat would roll through angles of close to forty-five degrees. It was never far from being overturned. The difficulty was so apparent that the two gentlemen from Barbados spent the whole time in a large launch being towed behind the trim boat. The two Barbadians slept in the launch, one of them always awake with a machete ready to cut the tow rope if the shrimp boat overturned. 

It was just a comedy of errors. Nothing went the way it was supposed to go. None of the treasure hunters truly knew what they were doing. Of course, there was no wreck, no treasure anywhere to be found. But that wasn’t the only problem with the voyage. During the journey to the Serranilla Banks, there had been a fairly severe storm in the Caribbean. It had persisted for three days with winds gusting up to forty miles an hour. With the Cubmarine on top of the shrimp boat, I more than once gave myself up for lost.

Marx got all kinds of assignments from the Post, as long as this publisher stayed with the magazine. One was to find the Northwest Passage, across the top of Canada. Another one was to find the Loch Ness monster. Another one was to sail a replica of a Viking sailing ship. Marx was never at a loss for projects,. 

The first time I met him, actually, was before the treasure hunt. I was in the office at 666 Fifth Avenue. The Kennedy Cuban Missile Crisis was in 1962, and a New York senator named Keating was said to have evidence of missiles being placed in Havana. The Russians were busy putting up missiles with which to destroy Miami, New York, Washington. Marx, meanwhile, didn’t live in New York. He had a place in Cozumel, off the east coast of Mexico. He also spent a lot of time in Jamaica and Florida. In Florida, he had come across Cubans who had just made the journey across the Straits of Florida and had in their possession microfilm of the missiles. Proof. It would be page One news.

Marx phoned the publisher of the Post from a cantina in Miami, saying he was sitting there with Cubans. He assured the publisher that he knew good Cubans from bad Cubans, and that these particular Cubans had microfilm, and it was extremely valuable. They were willing to sell it to The Saturday Evening Post for a bargain price of only $50,000—$25,000 on delivery to Marx of the film, and then the other $25,000 to be forwarded to them once the photographs were published in The Saturday Evening Post. To the appalled disbelief on the part of the editorial staff of the Post, the publisher sent by Western Union a cashier’s check for $25,000 to the Cubans sitting in the cantina.

Marx was paranoid. He always thought he was being followed by enemy agents or other treasure hunters meaning to steal the secrets of the deep. So he put the microfilm in his boot. He wore boots, which gave him a manly look. He was a strapping young man. He had a mustache, deep tan, physically fit, but paranoid. Now he has the microfilm, but he knows he’s being followed, and so in order to throw off his pursuers, he takes a circuitous route back to New York. First he flies to New Orleans and then rents a car and drives to Shreveport. From Shreveport, he takes a plane to St. Louis. I’m not sure if he came directly from St. Louis to LaGuardia or if he made an intermittent stop, somewhere like Buffalo. Anyway, he finally gets to New York, it takes him three days. By chance, I was in the office on the day he arrived with the microfilm in his boot. I was there among the other editors and writers when they put the microfilm up on the lightbox that magazines used to review images before sending them to the printer.

 On closer inspection, the gantries were tinker toys that had been built—very well built—in a sandbox, and the Cubans, of course, were never to be seen again.