Chapter Five

Voyage To A World That Is No More
© 2005 Jack Ragsdale

Fertile Uganda fell under British influence due to its great agricultural potential. In 1895 Lord Rosebery’s[1] Liberal Government decided to colonize both Kenya and Uganda. However, opening up the promised bounty of land-locked Uganda six hundred miles distant from the sea required a railroad. To insure the venture’s success, construction of "The Lunatic Line" was begun in 1896. That apt, epithetical nickname revealed the high construction cost expected. The project presented humongous engineering difficulties due to the terrain, outbreaks of untreatable diseases, and the destruction of native settlements. Rivers had to be bridged and the Great Rift Valley had to be negotiated. In places, that cyclopean crevice falls away into a gully three thousand feet deep. Financial success of the railroad required a substantial population of white settlers contributing freight and otherwise utilizing the line.

To accommodate that requirement, through a process euphemistically called pacification, natives were quieted and moved about so the most desirable areas could be reserved for white settlement and railway construction. The narrow strait separating Mombasa Island from the mainland was bridged with a causeway and a new town created for a railroad-marshaling yard and management center for the new line. The result was Nairobi, three hundred miles inland, built on the dusty red plains off the Aberdare Mountain Range.

Anticipating difficulties with a labor force of native Africans, the British imported 35,000 Indian coolies and skilled workers. They were housed in tents and moved on weekly or oftener as the juggernaut of railway construction advanced toward Lake Victoria.

Wild animals preying upon humans and ungulates without discrimination abounded in the land to be crossed. Bold lions soon developed a taste for human flesh and learned that sleeping coolies in their tents, and white supervisors in their railway cars were equally toothsome morsels. Neatly cleaned human bones would be found the next day a short distance from the camps or parked railway cars. Once, when several men were being carried off each day, all work had to be stopped until some of the predaceous beasts could be killed. More than one hundred men died as victims of lions.

The little river town of Tsavo was the center of this human predation. Before a professional hunter arrived to kill the guilty lions they committed the boldest of their audacious acts. One of them entered a railway car and took away a screaming official. Two of those lions were eventually stuffed and put on exhibition in a museum in Chicago.

The £10,000[2] per mile cost soon threatened to halt the project but a new Conservative government replaced the Liberals, and completed construction in five years.
Attempts to recruit settlers advanced slowly and ceased while Britain fought World War I. More serious efforts after the war resulted in some thousands of new settlers. Many of those were military personnel who responded to offers of free or very cheap land–land in essence, stolen from the natives.

Settlers fell into three classes: a self-financed, hard-partying, vocally assertive elite, most having arrived previous to the war; Boers; and ex-military people. A period of high prices accompanied by a severe shortage of shipping followed. While the settlers did not become wealthy in that period of hard work and optimism, they “got by” and looked on their prospects as bright. After 1929 the disastrous drop in prices brought most of the debt-ridden settlers to the brink of ruin. Newly introduced cattle and sheep fell to disease, and coffee, sisal and other crops sold at cost or below. It was in similar circumstances that the Chincha arrived in Kenya in late 1935.

For a moment, entranced by the exotic atmosphere of the place and my boyish desire for adventure, I visualized myself far inland trekking from one ranch to another. On the other hand the daunting circumstances presented by lions on the loose and the extreme heat of that equatorial land which caused my head to ache, brought about a return of my sanity. Thus it was that I never crossed the causeway to mainland Kenya, and never again heard from Biko. I wrote once but his active life dedicated to independence, no doubt caused him to move on. Perhaps the imperialists[3] who envisioned great wealth to be extracted from this stolen land had jailed him. Months later, my letter was returned undelivered.

The last of the Chincha’s cargo was discharged and loading for the trip home started. To cover the ore in holds one, two, four and five, and separate it from the other valuable cargo, it was covered with two layers of waterproof canvas tarpaulins. Tons of bagged coffee beans were then placed on top of the ore and they were covered with bales of sisal. The remaining space was reserved for the general freight awaiting us in Durban and Capetown. So it was that we sailed away from that historic, British-ruled Swahili town just two degrees south of the equator.

Adios Africa

We had six missionary passengers on the trip home. The others who boarded the Chincha at Capetown in late November, 1935, were Miss Stuart, a young lady coming to America to get married, a paunchy Armenian businessman, twenty-eight year-old David Windly, rubber-stamp wielding clerk in the American consulate in Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia, his mother Thelma, and lastly, a Mrs. Jones, about thirty from Queens in New York City, accompanied by her five year-old son. The boy gained some fame on board for he approached one of the crew sitting in a card game and peed on the man’s leg.

Thelma Windly, whose vinegary face unmasked the creepy hypocrite behind the pious façade, quickly installed herself as the Chincha’s moral arbiter-in-chief for the thirty-day trip back to the States.

Occasionally, a passenger might stop a crewmember to ask a question or make a comment, but only seldom would they engage in extended conversation. Usage opposed it. My fellow cadet and roommate, Bill Fellows and Mrs. Jones broke that rule. Fairly early out of Capetown, he and the lady talked and exchanged smiles when they met.

The “master” of a ship does not hold that title without good reason. Captain Lee immediately took on the onerous duty of entertaining the young bride to be. They often sat in intimate tête á tête in beach chairs on the captain’s private deck[4]. Actually, they made a handsome couple, he, aged sixty but unwrinkled, silky haired and youthful, and she, giggly, svelte and blonde, no more than twenty-five.

The watch plan at sea is four hours on duty and eight hours off. Fellows had the eight to twelve watch. Mornings he worked on deck crisscrossing the small passenger area, seeing and being seen by Mrs. Jones. At night he and his watch mates alternated in their several tasks. At midnight when Bill came off duty as the watch changed, he found Mrs. Jones taking the air or having a last smoke before bed. While it was not scandalous for Bill and Mrs. Jones to meet “accidentally” at such a late hour, the constancy of their rendezvous, lent credence to the accusation that their meetings were in fact trysts. It was a delightful story and excellent grist for the ship’s gossip mill, due to the otherwise stultifying dullness of shipboard life.

The forecastle riff-raff was dying to know more of the captivating details of the friendship between Bill and Mrs. Jones and during meals there was no shortage of unwelcome suggestions as to how our young swain might effectively advance his sexual success with the lady. Bill declined those offers of advice, remaining silent to all references to their friendship. It was the best defense possible under the circumstances.

The direct avenue to first hand information having been effectively closed off, the unrequited mob descended on me as roommate, for information they felt certain I had.

I have neglected to emphasize the friendly relations that existed from the beginning between Bill and me. From our first meeting we exchanged confidences and told each other some details about our lives. In an early interview he showed me some condoms he carried in his wallet. He had three as I remember, calling them fishskins. He praised their high quality and extreme thinness. In my understanding, it was a rather juvenile exercise. He was telling me: “I am a man of the world” and “Women, go for me!” Youth that he was, Bill was indulging in nostalgia—reliving agreeable experiences. All told, I found Bill Fellows a pretty cool guy. He stood out in his indifference to and his absolute independence from the mob.

At meals, Bill bore the burden of intrusive comments with relative ease. He laughed with the rest of us when possible and made no attempt to choke off the ribald repartee that involved him. While no one had any evidence to state a definite fact, everyone was sure to a certainty that a serious affair was going on.

Keeping the details so close to his breast was a heavy burden on Bill and he soon found himself in need of someone on whom to shift some of that heavy weight. That person happened to be me, and that confidence—sweet as it was, became an anchor around my neck. I lied that I was not Bill’s confidant but everyone assumed that I knew. It was simply not believed that someone so young could be so burdened with so rich a fortune in gossip and contain it within his own soul when there were many empty vessels at hand anxious to share the burden.

Actually my entry into that sacred realm of knowledge had come about by accident. Bill had only three condoms. As we know, love may advance slowly in its first stages, but once the flame is lit, it flares into a roaring inferno. In no time, Bill would have exhausted his supply of condoms even as the flame of love burned ever more brightly.

One day, I entered our room when the door was closed. There was Bill sitting on his bunk over his bucket, washing a used condom in soap and water. His sputtering explanation revealed the dilemma: his fountain of pleasure was in danger of being cut off for the lack of an accessory.

When the washing was completed, the instrument of Bill’s pleasure was rolled down over a broomstick and placed in the remotest corner out of sight to dry.

The saloon became divided into two warring camps. Mounted on her high horse Thelma Windly imperially snubbed Mrs. Jones, the young bride to be, and even our majestic captain. She made clear to all her disapproval of the disgraceful goings on.

It was not until we got into cold weather that I learned we were going first to Halifax and not directly to New York. In the Nova Scotia city, New York City passengers were put up in a hotel and were to be sent south at company expense.

We arrived in Halifax on a Sunday morning and Mrs. Jones invited both Bill and me to visit her in the hotel. It was the dead of winter and I was happy to have such an opportunity to get away from the ship into a warm hotel room in such pleasant company. The city’s landscape was bleak and encrusted in frost. Furthermore, when we arrived at the noon hour, Mrs. Jones ordered food for all and we had a feast. Warmly welcomed by her and the child who knew us well, having played amongst us for a month, our meal became a gala farewell party.

In the middle of our little fiesta there was a knock at the door and when Mrs. Jones answered, in walked the Marine Superintendent of the American South African Line, the man who had hired me in New York. He seemed embarrassed and immediately sought refuge in chitchat, asking Mrs. Jones how she had enjoyed the trip. She replied that it had been just fine. I heard later through Sparks, the radio operator that Mrs. Windly had radioed her complaints to the company. Why he came snooping was a mystery. Was he surprised when he found us with our clothes on? Did he come to rescue innocent Bill Fellows from this conquering siren?

Bill left the ship in Boston. I continued with the Chincha up and down the coast and made the next trip back to Africa with the same captain, Arthur Lee. That next trip was dull as hell!

The Chincha’s stay in Halifax was short; we moved on to Boston after a day or two. Fellows was very busy there. He had bought some poisoned-pointed assegais on the African coast and had a plan to sell them to curio dealers. When he attempted to take them ashore, the customs confiscated them as dangerous and illegal contraband.

Since most of our cargo was for New York we were soon back at pier seven, Bush Terminal in Brooklyn. When I signed off the ship, the money I had acquired was a pittance, but I opened an account at the Seaman’s Bank for Savings in lower Manhattan—probably with five or ten dollars.

I saw my sister, who was living in a Village apartment on Jones Street with several other women. Times had been rough for her, but she had landed a job as an usher in Wallack’s Theater, a Forty-Second Street movie house near Eighth Avenue. At that time, Wallack’s was one of four or five sleazy theaters in that block where people paid ten or twenty cents admission to enter and sleep during the day or night. I once met her on her coffee break in a café next-door to the theater. Apparently, she was friends with the café people, for when she hurried back to her job, she warned me to be sure to leave a dime tip. Ah, the innocence of life in 1935. Don’t laugh. That 1935-dime tip was the equivalent of $2.00 now.

Discharging our cargo in Brooklyn came off just fine until they arrived at the bottom tier of coffee bags immediately on top of the tarpaulins over the ore. Both the tarpaulins and the bottom side of the coffee bags next to the canvas atop the ore had been eaten away by the combined moisture and acid in the ore. Only a few strings and fibers were left of the heavy waterproof canvas and the coir or sisal of the coffee bags. All of the coffee beans in the bottom bags had spilled out and mixed with the ore. It was one grand mess! I was too low on the totem pole ever to know who was blamed, or who had to pay. My guess is that it was the stevedore company in Mombasa that had failed to lay dunnage[5] atop the ore before putting the tarpaulins in place.

Once all cargo except the ore was out, we made a quick trip down to Baltimore to disgorge that heavy ore for the nearby the steel mills.

There is no place in modern economics for such ships as the Chincha. Giant specialized carriers now fill every need, and full loads of one type of cargo for one single destination are now the rule.
Somewhere, there is a bent and abused photo of frozen Sailor Jack standing on a snowy dock in Baltimore, shivering in the cold without a heavy coat. A few days later, the Chincha was back in Bush Terminal, loading the next trip’s cargo—good friend Bill Fellows gone, replaced by young Fred Vespe of Astoria, Queens.

With a new crew of less interesting people aboard, life at sea was much duller. While at sea, I continued as helmsman, working on deck while in port. In Africa, we made all the same ports.

The new crew was told the story of Port Elizabeth Annie and one man swore to bring a woman on board when we arrived in South Africa. In Durban, he picked up a light-colored black woman, squired her around town, first to a restaurant, then to a movie. They were thrown out of both places with threats to call the police[6]. He then surreptitiously brought her aboard the ship.

She was more mature than Annie, a polite, dignified woman. Her visit aboard ship was a pleasant meeting with a native of the country—conversation with her both interesting and uneventful. In no way was it a repeat of the outrageous “Annie” incident.

My fellow cadet, Fred Vespe made just one trip to sea then returned to his family. He invited me to a hearty Italian meal at their modest, super neat Spartan apartment where I met his family. Fred’s father was a cab driver.

I was never around brighter people than Fellows and Vespe, and had to admire them for their big city smarts which far outstripped mine. In my view, the love and stability present in Fred Vespe’s home was near to perfection. Fellows’ past life, I believe, had been much more like mine—disrupted by sickness and economic misfortune.

Having continued my friendship with the Perez couple in Washington Heights, I asked for my old room and got it at the same price of three dollars per week. That settled, Arturo took me into the hall, and putting a chair to stand on under the electric meter, showed me how a simple piece of cardboard two by six inches, inserted into the meter stopped it from turning and registering consumption. Under no circumstances was I ever to open the door without first removing the cardboard. It was a trick imported from Mexico City, where he said, half the population had such a device.

Julia, Arturo’s wife had been in New York for some years but was fearful of traveling about the city alone and often wanted to be accompanied—even to church that was just a few blocks away. Arturo’s experience with the Catholic Church in Mexico had not been good and he refused to enter the doors of that institution but waited for his wife on the corner opposite. He loved and pampered Julia.

Knowing almost no one in New York, I embarked on a job hunt. Through agencies I had several temporary jobs but fees ate into the meager pay. One day, I met with my sister, her roommate Nancy, and Nancy’s Jewish boyfriend Mark, for a restaurant meal. Mark was a college grad and an insurance salesman. At that time a guy who sold insurance walked a beat collecting ten and twenty cent monthly premiums. Nancy and Mark were very pleasant company. In our talk we were frank and found we had similar views on many subjects . Mark told me he continued to attend religious services for “business purposes.” He knew I was looking for a job and offered to speak to a college friend about me. There was one problem—his friend did not like southerners—thought them lazy and well…dull witted.

His good friend managed the Audubon Theater on Broadway at 165th Street, an aging beauty then in serious decline. My interview, while not pleasant, was short but ended in my being hired.

It was clear that it had been Mark and not own good looks that got me the job. I became one of six ushers at this huge neighborhood theater, no longer fresh and glamorous, showing double features and re-runs, at very low admission prices.

On the Chincha, amid a baker’s dozen of foreign accents, I was never teased about my southern accent, but from day one, all the ushers made fun of my accent and my southernisms. They mocked me when I said “Ain’t it the truth” or even a cleaned up “Isn’t it the truth.” They taught me a lesson with that hoary catch phrase and I abandoned it in a hurry.

The Audubon Theater was the pride of the Brandt chain whose other theaters were seedy rundown houses. Our real competition was the rococo Loew’s theaters like the Alhambra and the 175th Street Loews. The Audubon had opened twenty-five years earlier, one of the first ornately decorated Fox theaters, with first run films and vaudeville’s biggest names on stage. Fannie Brice, Eddie Cantor, “Jazz Singer” Al Jolson and Sophie Tucker were the names bandied about by the historical know-it-all patrons who used to lay their ancient memories on us young-uns who worked there.

In spite of President Roosevelt’s efforts to improve the economy, the depression dragged on. Gasoline stations gave away crockery and neighborhood movies had games and giveaways to lure reluctant customers determined to extract even more value from their measly dimes and quarters. The Audubon had two alternating games, “Lucky” and “Big Money.” The first was a punch card numbers game like Bingo. Big Money was a cash giveaway each night it ran—three or four nights a week. Both games were effective at pulling people in, and elderly customers flocked to the movie or stood in a specially opened side door during the drawing to hear and compare their numbered cards—each one being valid for a week. When there was no winner the money accumulated, eventually mounting to $500. It was then separated into a separate drawing—two drawings, three drawings of $500 each. It created plenty of excitement—and never a winner. Meanwhile the amount built up. Occasionally, the person selected to reach into the barrel to pick a number, complained that there seemed to be so few stubs in the barrel.

Once a girl selected from the audience to pick the winner was caught hiding her own stub in her sleeve about to reach…oops, that was a no no. She was held up to ridicule and dismissed from the stage.

All of the ushers were aware that the management was running a con game. Each night it was the janitor’s responsibility to collect all the numbered stubs thrown on the floor or in the trash. The next day the assistant manager matched those with their mates and deposited one half in the barrel—so the management had possession of both parts of those tickets, making it impossible for anyone to win. With no winner possible, the dramatic charade of “hand-in-the barrel” proceeded. Some ushers told regular customers what was going on but were never believed. Eventually the management decided to terminate the game and the final giveaway was widely advertised. In spite of a higher admission charge, on the promise that the drawings would be continued until each $500 prizes had been given out, there was a stampede of attendees with people fighting to get in.

After I left the Audubon, I met one of the ushers—a smart youngster who lived near the theater. It was his job in the late afternoon to take down the stack of “Lucky” cards and insert the wooden punch into each card. It was a boring but necessary job so the ticket-taker could give each arriving customer a card as he entered. That job also gave the boy the opportunity to study the cards and he quickly learned how to identify the winning cards. On two separate occasions, he told me, all of the winners were his friends and relatives. Whether someone blabbed or whether a two-time winner was recognized as my friend’s relative or friend, I cannot say, but he told me that story in a spirit of great personal satisfaction and victory. Once discovered, he was unceremoniously fired.

In chapters two and three I told about my cousin in Birmingham. When it came time for him to go to college, because of the depression, his father no longer had the income that had sent all the other children to college. Instead, my uncle asked his youngest to become his driver and eventually take over the sales business. My cousin was furious at his father’s suggestion and managed his own matriculation into Carnegie Tech in Pittsburgh. A self-starter, he worked two or three jobs to prepare for a career in theater production. He wrote me asking if he could stay overnight with me. I was pleased and happy to share my modest digs with this agreeable and very clever cousin in spite of the fact that my bed was not even full-sized.

I had heard that he had some sort of medical problem, but we were not in close touch and I had no intimate knowledge of his life. We had lots to talk about and stayed up late drinking beer. The next morning he apologized for an accident and left early. He had wet the bed and the red of the mattress had dyed the white sheet a great circle of red which could not be removed—neither by my efforts nor those of the laundry downstairs. Arturo and Julia were kind in never mentioning this embarrassment.

Later, my cousin married and came to live first in Greenwich Village and later in a cold water flat on Sixth Avenue near 43rd Street. I once visited them there and was shocked to find cans of heating oil (kerosene) on each floor outside the tenant’s door.

He was a bomber pilot in WWII and participated in the attack on Italy from North Africa. Later he worked in production for the ABC network and died of kidney trouble in the early days of television. That disease had dogged his life from childhood and in the end had taken his life as he finally started earning good money.

Coming home late at night hungry as a horse, I often stopped at the deli around the corner to buy enough boloney or cheese for a sandwich. Rarely, I splurged with a fifty-cent small T-bone steak from a restaurant on 181st Street. The moment I received my pay, I gave Julia my three dollars for rent, and retired at once to the tiny A & P store on Audubon Avenue where I bought a few cans of beans to insure my survival for the ensuing week.

During that time Julia had minor surgery. I came home that night to find a note on the door with information that her body was resting at a funeral home on 135th Street. She had died on the operating table.

By this time my sister had gotten a job as Teletype operator at the Barclay Hotel on Lexington Avenue. That had been her job at Sears in Atlanta. She had also found a tiny room in a large apartment on the corner of 161st Street and Broadway for which she paid five dollars per week. What made it especially desirable was that it had its own bath. (It had been meant to be the maid's room.) The friendly Maine-born landlady rented five rooms of her sixth floor apartment, retaining only the kitchen, living room and a small bedroom for her use. The building had a 24 hour concierge/elevator operator with switchboard connection to all apartments.

From its founding, New York has always been “in a state of flux.” Washington Heights certainly was astir in ’35 and ’36. It had been Jewish. Many who fled Germany lived there, but it was rapidly becoming Hispanic. Black Harlem was pushing up from the south. Six years of depression had taken its toll on the fine old residential buildings lining Broadway. They, like the Audubon Theater, were languishing for a lack of care. One by one their concierges or lobby attendants were dismissed and automatic elevators installed. In deference to the Hispanization of the neighborhood, the Audubon became the San Juan. Much later, in 1965, the Audubon Ballroom, the meeting hall over the theater, became the site of the assassination of Malcolm X.

I hated looking for a job. I was not then nor am I now a “self-starter. I realized that I needed to save, but saving with such miserable pay was out of the question. School had little attraction. How would I live? I didn’t like my life. Like Paul Robeson in Ol Man River, I was tired o’ livin' an' skeered o’ dy in'.

The modern workingman evolved out of the slave whose remuneration for his service was the food he ate and the rags that covered his nakedness. Through the ages, the ‘owning”[7] class set the workman’s wages. Before 1935, employers set the living standard for members of the disrespected labor force so low that money from the children’s labor was required to maintain the family. College education was difficult for of a workingman’s children—indeed, college was not intended for them. To make sure their will would prevail over that of the motley unsophisticated herd, employers bought outright and came to own the people’s representatives.

With a liberal government in Washington after 1933, there was a revival of the spirit of unionism. The moribund American Federation of Labor was roused in its slumber but insufficiently to be moved to action. John L. Lewis, iron-jawed, out-spoken leader of the United

Mine Workers was of a different ilk. Out of that union’s spirit and money grew the militant unions that became the basis for the Congress of Industrial Organizations—the CIO. In a few short years they built up a membership of millions, forcing a living wage on reluctant American industry that cried ANTI-AMERICAN and COMMUNISM at every turn. The Wagner Act of 1935 afforded a voice in law to this formerly voiceless segment of American society.

In the previous century, Reverend Henry Ward Beecher stated in clear terms the business community’s view of its workers: People who work with their hands should have limited expectations, and not have access to money beyond bare essentials—coarse food and education only enough to read and write. Nothing more. That ideal remained their mind-set into the twentieth century.

For centuries, it had been a given that excess money in the pocket of a workingman only led to irresponsible radicalism, drunkenness and wife beating. Many in the clergy were happy to affirm capitalism’s opinion in that widely accepted view. Reverend Beecher of Brooklyn Heights’ Plymouth Church said: “God has intended the great to be great and the little to be little ... The trade unions, under the European system, destroy liberty ... I do not mean to say that a dollar a day is enough to support a workingman... not enough to support a man and five children if he insists on smoking and drinking beer. But the man who cannot live on bread and water is not fit to live! A family may live on good bread and water in the morning, water and bread at midday, and good bread and water at night!”

The seemingly non-violent transition I present here has little relation to the actual battle waged for a decent wage. It was a war with many people shot down in cold blood. To understand that side of American life, one may taste it in the history of the Pennsylvania Coal and Iron Police force whose men were accused of assault, kidnapping, rape and murder; or in the massacre of miners’ in 1914 in Ludlow, Colorado.

At last, thanks to the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, American labor had a share in political power with American Business. Nevertheless, the playing field was not leveled by an action so needed and so just. Business has access to money in amounts unions and working people can never expect to equal. Relentlessly, business puts its money to work in the wholesale purchase of politicians, and in the control public opinion. There is no better example of this process than the insidious television advertising removing control of children’s diets from their parents, certainly a giant factor in the present epidemic of obesity in children.

Every politician enters office deeply obligated to men of great wealth, many of whom have the morality of Ken Lay—the Kenny Boy friend of President Bush.

When John L. Lewis and Sidney Hillman launched a drive to organize workers on a broad scale, they were kicked out of the AFofL. The seaman’s union affiliated with the American Federation of Labor was a slumbering paper entity that only awakened to counter the new militant CIO-aligned National Maritime Union.

When I saw a return to the sea as momentary relief from my direst poverty, I joined that union. Some of the indignities of job seeking were immediately swept away. When I was still far away from the top of the list to ship out, I spent most of my time across the street in the Seaman’s House YMCA reading New York’s dozen newspapers.

For those of us who have an inadequate education, newspapers are the most convenient substitute, which statement must immediately be dampened by this caveat: “Newspapers are the natural ally of business, and the spokesperson for private interests as opposed to democracy. They are one of the many shills voicing industry’s point of view, urging us to shun unions and go it alone.” Only a fool sees fairness in such a stacked contest.

In that era I sailed in the Grace Line, first in the Cacique and later in the Santa Lucia.
The Cacique was a small ship of the NOSA Line (New Orleans South America), one of many Grace Line companies. The captain, Enesco or Cenesco, was an easy-going friendly man of Romanian origin who had once been the Grace Line’s port captain for Callao. My first trip was to Barranquilla and Cartagena on the Caribbean coast. We were warned that Barranquilla was world famous as the university for pickpockets who, once taught, were sent out to ply their trade around the world--nor was I long in becoming a mark for a learner in that art. A shipmate and I were walking down a city street when we found ourselves about fifteen feet behind two young men deep into conversation and utterly oblivious of our existence…or so it seemed. All of a sudden without the slightest break in their animated conversation, they dropped a wallet and continued their impassioned debate. Forewarned, we took the long route around the trap—as though it were a dangerous land mine. Their trick exposed, they had to rush back to retrieve the dropped billfold.

Their ruse was to accuse the finder of the billfold of having removed a valuable treasure of bills the wallet contained when dropped. In the ensuing argument a demand to “see YOUR bills” is issued followed by the certain identification of YOUR bills as those stolen from their wallet.

In later years after I had read Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s stories, I again appreciated the Magdalena River and Barranquilla, the town at its mouth. They are close to Aracataca, Garcia’s birthplace. The Magdalena, one of the great rivers of the world, has served since colonial times as a highway from the coast to Bogotá.

Cartagena, an ancient walled town, is much more pleasing to the eye and interesting to the mind for its role in Spanish and Colombian history. It was in Cartagena that Peruvian and Bolivian gold and silver were accumulated to be shipped to Spain. That temporary El Dorado was often under attack by pirates and the freebooters of England, France and Holland, who lingered offshore to capture the Spanish galleons that spirited the tons of precious metals to Spain.

Before you dismiss this bit of history as unrelated to our lives, I would say to you: learn its lesson first.

Why, for example, do politicians so love war? Instead of investing our money in our people they undertake imperial wars of conquest. Again and again, they have taken our wealth and wasted it in killing human beings, leaving us with thousands of broken bodies and a huge debt instead of a full treasury.

Early in the sixteenth century, as the conquest of South America advanced, Spain acquired a new king, Charles I. At the same time huge quantities of precious metals extracted at immense human cost, began to flow into the young king’s treasury. He used that vast wealth for armies to hold on to his possessions in the Low Countries and Italy and to fight a succession of religious wars.

War then meant power for him and importance, just as it has meant for Theodore Roosevelt in Cuba and the Philippines, Eisenhower in Iran and Guatemala, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon in Vietnam, Ronald Reagan in Grenada and George Bush II in Iraq.

Those would-be Caesars required a war to puff up their egos. As John F. Kennedy said to Gore Vidal: "What would Lincoln have been without his war?" We do not have Gore Vidal’s answer, but it should have been: “Lover Boy Johnny, you ain’t no Lincoln!”

In 1898 when the United States had reached possession and settlement of its land from coast to coast, it then set its sights on foreign territories and the elusive ‘China trade.’ We went to war with Spain to steal away that collapsing empire’s colonies. At the time, both Cuba and the Philippines had successful revolutions in progress against Spain. For our conquest to succeed those revolutions had to be stopped and in both countries full-fledged wars developed against the American conquerors. In the Philippines the three-year war cost the lives of five thousand Americans and two hundred thousand Filipinos. Theodore Roosevelt converted the United States into an empire.

[1]The Marquess of Queensberry, nemesis of Oscar Wilde, once threatened to waylay and horsewhip Lord Rosebery, Prime Minister, 1894-1895.
[2] Approximately $4,500,000 per mile in today’s money.
[3] Winston Churchill was one such.
[4] The companionway leading to the captain’s deck carried the blunt notice: Private Keep Out. As helmsman, I had to cross those sacred precincts several times every day going to and from the bridge.
[5] Wooden planks used as padding to protect cargo.
[6] Twelve years later, during the presidential election of 1948, I was in a group including several black people who went to Washington in support of Progressive Party’s candidate Henry Wallace. In a restaurant, we were refused service and threatened with police action if we failed to leave.
[7] cf “ownership” society of Carl Rove and President Bush.