People who travel on freighters may do so accidentally for the first time, as I did in 1932 from Marseille to Los Angeles on the Feltre, later bombed and sunk. Thereafter they do it deliberately, or never again.
They either loathe it and know that they cannot stand it again, or they return like opium smokers to the pipe, never halfheartedly, and almost always with a deliberate plan, a kind of rhythmic pattern, for the long, slow, sleepy voyage. Either they must have plenty of time and no other pressing use for it than to spend some of it in a little ship, or they must have almost no time at all and an imperative hunger to spend it in this chosen way, moving to the tides’ movings and the stars’.
Freighter travel is never forgotten. I was greatly reassured to prove this, lately, when I rode some five weeks on two oceans, two seas, a canal, a couple of bays, and a river, after having been land-bound for more than a decade.
It is true that I pampered myself somewhat, suspecting that my old skill might be too rusty for comfortable practice. I took a clean, efficient little ship toward Europe instead of a grubby if more romantic one headed for the South Pacific, and I chose the easy month of August instead of the obviously more exciting season of an equinox. I was cautious, and slid out under the Golden Gate Bridge in a mood that was definitely timorous.
The minute I knew, though, that it would be days and weeks before I touched land again; that I was there on that little Dutch freighter for good or bad or even hell-and-high-water; that if I died on it I would still be a long time from the dust I should return to; that if I lived decently on it the Captain would like me and that if I lived indecently on it he would not; but that in any and all such cases it was basically my own choice—the minute I knew all this again, I was at home.
I slipped unprotestingly into the first trance-like sleepiness which always engulfs me when I put to sea, and which tapers off almost imperceptibly until I land again. It is true that I walk and even talk at the proper times, but inwardly there is little difference between having eyes shut or eyes open; and my first encounters with passengers and officers and general shipside protocol are even less real than my endless untroubled dreams.
Dutch crewmen seem unusually understanding of such mildly neurasthenic procedures, perhaps because they are said to be sons of a phlegmatic nation, and there is no better place to try one’s first steps again, one’s first deep breaths, than on the scrubbed decks and in the hospitable neat air of a little steamer named anything ending with -dyk or -dam. From the Captain, coldly and implacably invisible when duty called and very jolly indeed when it did not, to the most impish deckhand or oiler, the men seemed to accept my private reasons for my public behavior just as philosophically as they did the other passengers’, and made us all feel, very comfortably, that we were really not much more bother than the tons of canned fruits and precision tools that weighted down the holds and held us to such an even as well as profitable keel. My own actions were steadily somnambulistic, but they caused no more astonishment than if I had stood on my head before every meal, just outside the dining-saloon door, as did a gym teacher from British Columbia, or had dropped my monocle into my full soup plate every night, as did a permanently and politely dead-drunk lecturer from Amsterdam.
Of course, there are always a few mavericks, who get on in a daze and will get off in a state of frustrated ennui. Most of them will never, as God is their witness, let themselves get roped into another tedious crawl over any ocean on this world.
For instance, there was on our little freighter—as there always is—a passenger who either could not or would not accept the fact that for several weeks it would be impossible for him to read the morning and afternoon papers for exactly forty minutes after breakfast and twenty minutes before dinner. He would stand fuming and scowling, plainly miserable, before the two typed sheets of radio news Sparks pinned up each noon on the bulletin board. One was in Dutch, of course, and one in very British American, and the passenger was sure that there were several vitally important bits of news in the Netherlands report which were being deliberately withheld from him as a one-language Yankee. He would waylay a steward or a Dutch passenger and stand suspiciously comparing what he could read with what was being translated.
I felt genuinely pained for him, partly for his present misery and partly because he would never achieve real supercargodom. He had come aboard knowing, but never actually accepting, such irrevocabilities as that the Spokane dailies cannot be delivered, limp from their presses, a thousand miles northeast of Cuba. He would go ashore convinced that it could have been managed somehow.
In the same way there was, this time and always, the passenger who fought a gallant fight for the last twenty-five days of the thirty-three-day voyage to have fresh eggs for breakfast. She was well-read enough to know that very few modern ships travel with chickens aboard, as in the days of Drake and Magellan. But every morning she hoped anew, and assured her table steward that she must have fresh eggs, and almost every morning after the first week at sea she sent back what she had ordered with the unbelieving statement that it was not fresh at all.
Gently, the head steward, a very clever man indeed and one of infinite experience, ordered little omelets and unnamed scrambles for her instead of the undisguisable soft-boiled eggs she struggled for, until by the time we were heading for the North Sea she was eating highly seasoned dishes that would have seemed impossibly exotic to her in San Diego or Vancouver. The last morning, though, when we all ate an early breakfast and wore our hats and clutched our new passport holders and watched the docks of Antwerp slide by the portholes, I heard her say with a note of dauntless disbelief, “I do insist on having my eggs fresh-fresh-fresh.” And she was right: she did insist.
Another common phenomenon of supercargodom, something which even ten years of land exile had not changed for me, was that I soon sniffed out, through the fog of my private snooze, the familiar hunger for new words. It is something shared by all real travelers and can give as much pleasure to a twelve-days-and-all-expenses adventurer as to a raddled old countess who has spent nine tenths of her life on A Deck, from Hong Kong to Montevideo with stop-offs at will in Plymouth, Skagerrak, Vladivostok.
It takes only a couple of days in Honolulu to enable a Stateside housewife to spend the next ten years rattling off directions to her decorators about lanais and hookalumais—which she learned in what she knowingly refers to in four, not three, syllables, carefully accented, as Hah-wah-ee-ee. In the same enjoyable way, a few days in Paris, especially if helped along by a French Line crossing, can bring out almost voluptuous garglings and rollings of good flat Illinois r’s, so that saying “Trente-trois rue de Rivoli” to a taxi driver can sound much like the after-treatment of a tonsillectomy.
Even more so, four or five weeks on a Dutch freighter can do fine things to this linguistic amour-propre we all wear hidden somewhere until the magic new phonetics brings it to light, and I felt reassured to discover that it was as true in 1954 as it had been decades before, on the Feltre, and the Santa Cerrita and the Maréchal Duffroy, and … and … and …
Very shortly after I went aboard, I learned that, in good Dutch, the barman is called the Buffetchef, pronounced Puffishay (naturally), and that the chief steward, always an equally good man to know, is called the Hof-Meister (Huff-Maystuh). Shuttling from one to the other with no pain, it was inestimably satisfying to be able to murmur to the first in supercargo Dutch—which sounds even Dutcher after the second or third small glass of Genever gin—“Ein Bols” (Ayn Buhlsh, of course), and then to request knowingly from the second a large bowl of Hodgepodge for lunch.
Hodgepodge is perhaps peculiar to ships out of Rotterdam. Certainly I have never seen it in the same form on land, in Holland or even in France, where it might possibly be called Hochepot. It is a thick, greenish-grey, lumpy, delicious stew of vegetables and bits of unidentifiable meat and sometimes slices of sausage, to be served in soup plates and eaten with large spoons and, if possible, pieces of fresh brown bread for pushing and sopping. Needless to say, it is pronounced, by any old-timer—which means any passenger who has been more than forty-eight hours aboard—Uhdgee-Puhdgee. There is something very satisfying about rolling out this word when it has been preceded by a wise modicum of Genever and a few twinkles from the poker-faced, warm-eyed Puffishay.
Cakes (Keks), which apparently are as necessary to the end of a Dutch sea meal as Bols is to the beginning, are based on a batter which is yellow, spongily heavy when baked, and increasingly nutmeggish as the voyage progresses and the fresh fresh eggs grow less so. Keks can be anywhere from half an inch to three inches thick, sliced in fingers or rounds, cut in squares, diced or crumbled when stale, and quite possibly used as ballast in a nautical emergency, and they are interesting chiefly as an indication of how the baker feels.
For instance, before our baker’s last land-whirl in Cristobal and the long haul toward Antwerp, we were titillated at dinner by his version of a dainty slab named Gâteau d’Amour. The next night, and the only time he let us down in some five weeks, we had to be content with tinned fruit cup and vanilla wafers, but twenty-four hours later he had pulled himself together enough to produce his basic batter again, stripped of the love-cakes’ whipped-cream doodads, starkly burned on the starboard side, and entitled Celebration Crumbcake.
And of course the Esperanto of pastry cooks, easy enough to decipher after one or two sorties as supercargo, makes it completely unsurprising to find a cherry on top of anything called Jubilee, or tooth-shattering morsels of nut brittle scattered here and there with the menu cue Noisette, on any ship from a transatlantic liner to a freighter. This lingo is international to the point of banality, and cannot possibly give quite the semantic thrill to a traveler as the ability to recognize, as well as mouth, the word Goudasprits.
Ah, those lovely, dry, flat, whirly Goudaspritses, our baker’s one deviation from his occasionally faltering but always narrow path of Kek-Kek-Kek!
They meant, on his emotional chart, a period of high-barometer insouciance, with low humidity so that they would stay moderately crisp and unflabby, and a subtropical zing to the air. On the days he served them, the bread too seemed more delicious, and passengers who ordered American Utt-Keks for breakfast reported them to be comparatively airy, which is to say that they were not more than three quarters of an inch thick, each weighing somewhat less than a pound per Kek. Goudaspritses meant, in other words, a general lightness aboard, even in their pronunciation, which according to the Captain was imposssible for anyone not born in Holland. (We compromised to our own satisfaction, if not his, by gurgling as genteelly as possible when we said “Whghooooo-da-shpritsh,” but there lurked always in our linguistic consciences his firm comment that we simply did not have enough juice to speak good Dutch.)
Something that happens at least once on every respectable freighter out of Rotterdam or into it is a Nassi Goreng for luncheon.
Britishers aboard feel about it much as they do about anything even vaguely curried, which a Nassi Goreng is not, and they bandy reminiscences larded with pukka and boy. Reticent withered Dutch ladies, relicts of traders in Surabaya in the old days, grow almost gay again and chat of Rijstta-fels, which a Nassi Goreng is not quite. And everybody eats too much and sleeps all afternoon, for the feast is not only tantalizing to several of the senses, but it must be floated down on a heady flood of beer.
A Nassi Goreng is served in an almost hysterical way by every available hand on board, including a few ordinarily invisible oilers squeezed into leftover white jackets. This may be one reason why it is definitely a ceremony performed only when the sea is flat and empty and the ship is on its automatic compass or whatever it is that takes over when the bridge can be left to its own devices.
The Hof-Meister, somewhat glassy-eyed from the general emotional temperature and several amicable Genevers, stands straighter than usual at the pantry door, focusing behind his thick lenses on every one of the loaded platters that whip past him. The stewards, generally a relaxed and merry squad, are frowning, with beaded lips and unaccustomed clattering and crashing. The tables look overcrowded with tall bottles of mango chutney and short bottles of red and black sambal, and soup plates at each place, and the largest size of dinner plates beside the forks, and big stemmed glasses, and the clear green of the Heineken beer bottles.
There seems to be no set pattern for serving, once the rice is there to act as a kind of foundation in the soup plates. The rice is always browned with minced onion, steamed, and then baked slowly, so that it is a little crisp. And then over and around it, and piled on the dinner plate too, is what really amounts to a gastronomical mishmash of grilled and roasted and fried fishes and meats, in chunks and slices and on skewers: chicken, lamb, kidneys, herring, this-and-that. There are even very flabby fried eggs. And on top of all these things, and around them and alongside, go the more or less familiar “condiments” like chopped roasted peanuts and shaved coconut, steamed raisins, pickled fish, shaved spiced cucumbers, little hot peppers, one or more kinds of chutney of course, grated raw onion … on and on. And then, to pull things into focus and to bring real happiness to the world-wanderers who want to go home laden with nonchalant little anecdotes in any language at all besides their own, there is the final fillip, about as subtle as a flash fire in a munitions dump, of sambal.
Sambal, once tasted or even sniffed, can never be compared with Tabasco, or Louisiana hot-sauce, or the salsa picante of Mexico, or even the watery, oily, treacherous sauce forte splashed cautiously over an Algerian couscous, for it is so much more so that it makes them seem like sweet lemonade or milk.
It is black or it is red, and connoisseurs choose one or the other and shake it with knowing discretion here and there over the general confusion on their plates, at a Nassi Goreng, and then wait happily to fall by accident upon one drop of it, when tears will brim their eyes and they can reach blindly for the beer.
Sambal is, I think I can say without being contradicted, the most thoroughly and incredibly hot flavor in the world. How and why it can somehow, over and above the enjoyable torture it causes, make the basically unattractive clutter of a Nassi Goreng even more entertaining and appetizing than it manages by contradiction to be, I do not try to explain. All I can say is that it is pronounced, surprisingly enough, almost as it is spelled, that it can be found wherever a few old Java hands are gathered together, and that it can add inestimably to the culinary reputation as well as the vocabulary of anyone who has ever added to either, generally, by a trip on a little or big Dutch ship.
So can a Nassi Goreng, of course, even without the red and black sambals!
After five weeks spent contemplating the horizon, the navel, and the Dutch face, things taste better, and memories are good, not sour: the night the Puffishay cried a little because at Panama City he had learned that three weeks earlier his wife in Hille Doornkamp near The Hague had felt a cold coming on; the afternoon a glittering flying fish landed by the engine-room door and Cor of the crew dipped on it like a bird and threw it back into the blue water before it could even open its beak-bill mouth; the morning the Canadian judge came on deck without his orthopedic boot and played a game of deck quoits which everybody pretended not to watch too anxiously, nor cheer with tears too plainly sounding.
There is a kind of sharpening of what wits are left us, on a little ship’s slow slide over many waters; and although it demands a certain amount of bravado to attain supercargodom, once done and admitted it is done forever, and like me you can go aboard in San Francisco or Baltimore or Corpus Christi any time at all in your life and get off a few weeks later anywhere at all, and find yourself wide awake again, and stronger and fresher if you want to be, and with a richer, indeed broader, tongue.
—Si. Helena, 1955