Tramp Royale (8 page)

The
Gulf Shipper
carries a crew of forty-seven, seventeen in deck and navigation, seventeen in engineering, thirteen others including the purser, radio operator, chief steward, cooks, waiters, and helpers. Twenty-four of the crew are deck and engineering watchstanders, eight to each of the three watches. The others are either those whose duties never end, such as the Captain, the chief engineer, the purser, or those who work at specified hours, such as cooks and deck maintenance men. The ship's payroll will run around $20,000 a month and the total cost of operating her is about $85,000 a month-which means that she has to run fully loaded most of the time, make fast turn arounds, and avoid excessive overtime in order to show a profit.

American merchant ships are in a poor position to compete with foreign shipping. The ship itself costs more, our safety laws are more stringent than those of many of our competitors, and we pay enormously higher wages. I am not criticizing the wage scale; it is simply what must be paid to persuade Americans to go to sea instead of taking jobs ashore-but it is true that we pay as much to an able seaman as many countries pay the captain of a large vessel.

Because of our high costs many American vessels are being transferred to foreign flags under whose laws they can operate at much lower costs. This flight from the American flag would perhaps be of only sentimental importance were it not usually agreed that a large and healthy merchant marine is an essential part of our national defense. A quick answer is to hit the taxpayers for a shipping subsidy. Another quick answer is "American ingenuity and enterprise." A third quick answer is that merchant shipping is no longer a major factor in war because the next war will be settled from the air in a matter of hours or days.

I am sorry to say that I seem to have mislaid the right answer.

The
Gulf Shipper
arrived off the Atlantic end of the Panama Canal early Saturday morning the 21st, stopped just long enough to pick up the pilot and his handling crew and to drop the purser, then started through the Canal. Passengers could, if they wished, get off with the purser, spend the day shopping and sightseeing, travel across the Isthmus by bus, and join the ship that evening on the Pacific side.

None of us did so. Ticky had never seen the Canal before, but neither had she ever seen Colon and Panama City and the U.S. settlements, Cristóbal and Balboa, adjacent to them. She was torn between the desire to see the first foreign port in our trip and a desire to see the Canal; I persuaded her to see the Canal.

I swear on a stack of wheat cakes that I was not motivated by a desire to keep her away from the bazaars. It is true that the shops of Colon and of Panama City have an effect on all women and some men much like that of a bed of fresh catnip on a cat-and the bargains often are real bargains, for Panama City is a free port. No, like a total eclipse of the sun, the experience of transiting the Panama Canal is one that should not be missed if available. There is nothing else like it in the world . . . and I am not forgetting the Suez Canal.

I still have scars on my arms from sunburn acquired more than a quarter of a century ago when I first went through the big ditch. I knew at the time that I was getting sunburned but I could not bring myself to stop looking and go below. Since then I have seen it many times-and I still can't stop looking.

Any atlas, world almanac, or encyclopedia will provide a winter's supply of sound, chewy facts about the Panama Canal, tonnages, tolls collected, yards of earth moved, and so forth. They are well worth reading but we will not repeat them here. The Canal was started by the French in 1882; you can still see the old French Canal slicing slaunchwise into the channel we cut. Yellow fever and more bad luck than any man ought to have put a stop to the French attempt. We bought the franchise and, with almost indecent haste, recognized a Panamanian revolutionary government which seceded from Colombia in 1903, signed a treaty with the new government and started work again in 1904. Ten years later the first ship went through.

The Canal is fifty miles long and runs northwest to southeast across the twisted isthmus in such a fashion that the trip from the Atlantic to the Pacific (i.e., to the
west
) winds up twenty-seven miles farther to the
east.
This has to be seen on a map to be understood; it is as silly as the fact that Los Angeles is east of Reno. Sea level is a couple of feet higher on the Pacific side than on the Atlantic side but this odd fact is swallowed up by the fact that the major portion of the Canal is eighty-five feet higher than either ocean. Three sets of locks at each end perform the improbable task of lifting and lowering ships of fifty thousand tons or more the height of an eight-story building.

There has been a lot of agitation for a sea-level canal, through Nicaragua or elsewhere. One glance at any one of the locks of the Panama Canal is enough to show why; one pony-sized A-bomb anywhere near one of the locks would put the entire Canal out of use for months or years and leave our navy and merchant marine with a nice, long, chilly trip around the Horn in order to get from one coast to the other. You will correctly assume that the Canal Zone contains anti-aircraft and radar installations-but the bomb need not be delivered by air; it can be in the hold of a ship flying the flag of Ruritania, or even the U.S. flag. There are more than seven thousand ships going through the Canal each year and the only known way to inspect a ship for A-bombs is to unload everything, take a screwdriver and open every crate . . . a process equivalent in itself to closing the Canal to traffic.

I am disclosing no secrets. You may be sure that Mr. Malenkov's assistants have given thoughtful consideration to these matters and that our government has been equally thoughtful. If I knew of an answer I would be in Washington right now.

In the meantime the locks of the Panama Canal remain the most satisfying gadgets I have experienced since the time Santa Claus brought me a toy steam shovel that actually worked. The ship slides slowly and quietly into the first of the Atlantic side or Gatun Locks, towed into place by miniature cog railway engines known as electric mules. The gates close ponderously and magically behind her, untouched by human hands; a guard chain rises to protect the gates. The ship is enclosed in a box; all one can see is the concrete walls.

Water boils up from the bottom of the lock and high, high up she rises! The ship lifts gradually up and up until the sightseers on her decks can again see over the sides of the lock the tailored, tropical surroundings. The gates ahead open, again by magic, and the ship is gently urged into the channel ahead. Three times the ship goes through a water elevator, lifted each time about thirty feet, then she is let free into Gatun Lake.

The lake was made by damming the Chagres River, which supplies the water to work the locks. Here and there, outside the dredged channel, dead trunks of trees still thrust up through the water, melancholy monuments to progress. The extremely broken shore line and the numerous islets, both characteristic of newly-flooded river valleys, form and re-form deep three-dimensional vistas, all in glorious Technicolor. The place seems unreal, as if one had fallen into a Disney musical.

I have heard it said that Gatun Lake is the "dull" part of the Panama Canal. I don't know what to say to such people. They are unquestionably right, since it is all a matter of taste, as the old lady said when she kissed the pig. I once ran across a woman from France who had just finished a tour of the western part of the United States. In her opinion she had seen nothing west of the Mississippi worth looking at-including the Grand Canyon, the Rocky Mountains, Yellowstone, and so forth. As the booking agent said to the man who was flying by flapping his arms: "So you can imitate birds. But what can you do that's
novel?
"

You may not share my enthusiasm for Gatun Lake and, after all, it is just another lake. The whole world is loaded with beautiful scenery; Gatun Lake is one of thousands. But I have been in it at every time of day and in every season and I myself have never grown bored with it. The lights and colors are always changing; the motion of the ship combines with the twisted shore lines to form backdrop after backdrop into mysterious depths. Perhaps it is "dull"-but I am a Missouri country boy with black mud between my toes; I still stare at the Empire State Building whenever I get a chance.

The entire experience of the Panama Canal has always seemed pleasantly unreal to me, as if it all had been constructed by a Hollywood miniature set designer-the blazing sunlight, the quick rain storms, the little electric engines crawling slowly up beautifully curving concrete walls, the locks themselves and the lavish engineering structures around them, the endlessly changing depth on depth of lake and cut and jungle. It was designed more than half a century ago, back when ladies had "limbs" and the shout of "Get a horse!" at an "automobilist" was real wit. Yet it looks like a set for a major production scene in a Hollywood fantasy of the future.

After the lake the ship enters the Cut-"Gaillard Cut" on the maps, "Culebra Cut" in the mouths of most people. This is the part that almost broke the hearts of the builders. This is where hairy engineers in field boots stared through surveying instruments at mountains and decreed that they must be moved. Moved they were-by coal-burning steam shovel and scraper and mule and muscle and sweat. The Model-T Ford was brand new then and the bulldozer was yet to be born. Earthmoving machinery such as any county road department now owns would have seemed miraculous; they made do without.

The banks are very close here and the jungle is almost in your lap. You sit in a deck chair or lean on the rail and let it flow past you, birds and snakes and waterfalls and giant blue butterflies. Once, some years ago, I found myself staring back at an eight-foot alligator, so close that I could see the stains on his teeth. I alert Ticky to watch for them, but we have no luck. One of the pilot crew aboard tells me that there are plenty of them still on the shores of the lake and that it has been necessary to fine people who hunt them for sport, then leave the carcasses to rot in the clean water of the lake.

Back in the jungle here, only shouting distance away in places, is the old Gold Trail, peopled with the ghosts of the Indian slaves who died on the way. Once, twenty years earlier, I rode along a portion of it on a borrowed army horse. It was paved with stone and the jungle had not quite destroyed it, but had arched over it instead, forming a dusky tunnel, a place of enormous butterflies and midget deer and silence. The Isthmus was one of the world's major roadways long before the water bridge was cut through it.

But nowadays the once-heartbreaking journey is soft and easy and no one dies on the way. Traffic lights control the shipping through the Cut, real traffic lights with red for stop and green for go. There are places where the pilot must hold back and give the traffic ahead a chance to clear; the lights tell him, just like those on Wilshire Boulevard. In addition to lights he has been briefed by the control officials ashore as to what ships to expect and where, since the enormous mass of a ship is not stopped by jamming a foot on a brake. The handling of a ship through the Canal is a piece of precision choreography. There are ranges, each a pair of giant targets, at dozens of places along the route; the pilot can sight along one range and know that he is lined up properly for the channel and sight along another at the same time and know to the yard just how far he has progressed along that reach of the channel and how soon he must turn.

The reason for such precision is evident: in some places ships pass so closely that you expect their plates to scrape. Canal pilot is among the most highly skilled jobs in the Zone and is highly paid by civil service standards. But the job is done without swank. Almost all other countries dress their pilots in uniforms like those of naval officers, but the
Gulf Shipper
's pilot was a young man in a slouch hat and casual sports clothes who carried his responsibilities with the relaxed ease of a truck driver.

We passed through Pedro Miguel and Miraflores Locks in the late afternoon, with the same processes as in Gatun Locks save that we started each time high above the scenery, then sank into claustrophobic depths before being let out into a lower level. At dusk we dropped the pilot and steamed out into the waters of the Pacific, into the Gulf of Panama, with the lights of Panama City on our port hand. We picked our way through islands and submerged rocks and presently Captain Lee set course for Point Charambira above Buenaventura, Colombia.

A drastic change comes over a ship as soon as it touches dock. The physical change can be easily described but the emotional change is far greater and harder to convey. For some days you have been in a little world, an enclave away from atom bombs and strikes and bills and auto accidents and traffic noises and strange people. Nothing is real but the ship and it is a place of no worries. You leave your stateroom door wide open, leave binoculars or cameras on deck chairs, dress as you please. No one hurries and no one worries. You are home, with only your "family" around you.

Then the gangway touches the dock and all is changed completely, with the suddenness of being dumped out of warm sleep into cold water. Strangers swarm aboard, they are everywhere and they all look like criminals. A percentage of them are indeed petty thieves who will steal the socks off your feet without untying your shoe laces; this is true in any port including those of the United States. You always lock your stateroom door and carry the key with you everywhere. You dog down the ports of your room if you step out even for a moment, no matter how hot it is, as even a moment is enough for the waterfront pilferer; fly screens won't stop him, it takes steel. Nor are you safe simply because your porthole does not face onto a gallery; harbor thieves have been known to operate from the masts of small boats, using a gadget combining the features of lazy tongs and fishing rods.

You return to your stateroom-locked, thank heaven!-and find a villainous-looking stranger trying the door. Unabashed, he claims to have been looking for the purser. Perhaps he was and perhaps he has legitimate business with the purser. Perhaps stealing is only a hobby with him. You don't find out, as the purser is much too busy to talk with you. The Captain, a genial host only an hour before, brushes past you without seeing you, two strangers in tow. You return to your room, bolting the door behind you, and start to change clothes. Then you notice faces at each porthole. They weren't there ten seconds before and the gallery was empty as you came in.