Education Of a Wandering Man (1990) (10 page)

Although known as the "Arabian Nights," the stories largely originated in India or farther east, as did those in The Ocean of Story. Many of the places can readily be identified by anyone with a sailing knowledge of Asiatic waters. No matter what the content of the stories, the locales were invariably actual places, just as in my own stories.

We in the Western world have been so involved with seafaring in the Mediterranean and Atlantic that we have almost ignored what was happening on the other side of the world, when much longer voyages were being made and another part of the world explored.

When Vasco da Gama arrived in the harbors of India after his long voyage around the Cape of Good Hope, he found those harbors crowded with shipping.

Almost two thousand years earliler, when Nearchus, Alexander the Great's admiral, was looking for a pilot for the Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf, he had no trouble at all in finding one. Ships from China had come to Babylon in the time of Nabonidus, and before Columbus discovered America, Cheng Ho had sailed back from Africa with a giraffe for the Emperor's zoo.

Ships were sailing from the south of India for Madagascar and Africa over an open ocean of more than two thousand miles. The area now known as Indonesia had been explored and colonies established, at least one in Borneo, by the ninth century.

It was about this time that I read Quentin Durward by Sir Walter Scott and Ivory Apes and Peacocks by James Huneker, and followed it with Iconoclasts by the same author.

I was in the habit of listing books read, even then, but often lost the lists, so the only ones intact are from periods after 1930.

At the end of a week in Los Angeles, I gathered my gear and headed for San Pedro and the sea again.

Arriving at San Pedro, I registered at the Marine Service Bureau for a ship, discovering it might be as much as three months before my number came up. At that time the West Coast ships were unionized but East Coast ships were not, and conditions aboard ship were drastically different. On the West Coast the food was better, the fo'c'sles cleaner, and conditions generally much better. As a result, many seamen wanted to ship off the West Coast, and at the time I arrived it was said there were seven hundred seamen "on the beach" in San Pedro.

At the time the most important place to many seamen on the beach was the Seamen's Church Institute, a place where one could pick up mail, where there was a game room, a small reading room and library, and a place where one could shower, shave, and clean up. They also had a dormitory where clean beds were available.

I've forgotten the price, which I rarely had, but it was fifty cents or a dollar.

On Wednesday nights there was entertainment in the game room, offered by some amateur or semiprofessional group, followed by volunteer acts from among the seamen, which was invariably the best part.

A surprising number of seafaring men have at one time or another worked in some phase of the theater. Some were not good enough for the big time and for one reason or another dropped out and went to sea.

Others had become alcoholics or gotten themselves in trouble otherwise.

Several men I knew had played the vaudeville circuits, but movies were replacing them in many theaters and the sea no doubt seemed an escape. In any event, during my short time in San Pedro, I saw some very entertaining acts.

Of course, it was to the reading room that I went. They had three or four hundred books, if I recall correctly, varied in quality but all interesting. Perhaps a third of them were nonfiction.

Finding work was almost out of the question with so many skilled seamen standing by and ready to work, yet occasionally there was something. My first dollar was earned helping a man unload a truck. A week later I picked up two days of roughpainting in the shipyards, and that job got me into a couple of days bucking rivets.

What money I earned was necessary for eating. I slept in empty boxcars, on piles of lumber, anywhere out of the rain and wind.

By day, when not working, or during the evenings, I read.

The first book, a real delight, was The Expedition of Humphry Clinker by Tobias Smollett. I had heard of Smollett but this was the first book of his that I'd read, and I enjoyed every line. I also read The Bar Sinister by Richard Harding Davids, a story about a dog, and a good yarn. Another great dog story was The Call of the Wild by Jack London.

There was a copy of Knight on Seamanship in the library and I studied it when I could get my hands on it, as several others were reading it too.

It was a rough time on the waterfront. The Pacific fleet was located at San Pedro then and the town swarmed with sailors ashore, most of whom went on to Los Angeles on the big red cars of the Pacific Electric. Under a trestle of the P. E., the longshoremen had a crap game going almost continually.

With the mixture of nationalities that made up the American Merchant Marine, there was sure to be friction. Rough-and-tumble fights were common. As long as the watching crowd did not block traffic and no local citizen was involved, the police rarely interfered, enjoying the fight as much as any other spectators.

When Fitzgerald, a Liverpool-Irish oiler, whipped Frisco Brady on the corner of Front and Fourth, there were at least four policemen among the spectators. The fight, a brutal, battering match, lasted upwards of forty minutes.

Waterfront fighting has nothing to do with rules or sportsmanship, only with winning.

Dead Man's Island, which at the time still marked the entrance to the ship channel, caught the drifting body of more than one loser. However, that was not the reason for its name. Various stories are told but the one sure to be true was told by Hugo Reid, who probably knew as much about what was happening in Southern California as anyone.

Captain William Mervine, with a party of sailors, attacked Captain Flores and a party of "insurgents" on the Dominguez rancho. Six men were killed, six wounded. Mervine buried the American sailors on the lonely little island in San Pedro Bay. The battle had taken place on October 8, 1846, as the United States was in the process of acquiring California.

Dead Man's Island was finally removed as a menace to navigation.

Today, a collection of shops and restaurants in San Pedro is known as Ports o' Call, and it occupies the site of the old E. K. Wood Lumber Dock, where lumber schooners from Aberdeen, Coos Bay, and other points on the Northwest Coast used to discharge their cargoes of raw lumber for the building of Los Angeles. There were several slips and each one was usually occupied by such a vessel. They were old and battered, built only for the carrying of lumber.

Their crews were usually Swedes or Norwegians, big, husky men who worked cargo as well as working as seamen.

The discharged lumber was usually piled on the dock awaiting shipment by train, and the rails ran right up to the dock. Perhaps they ran out on the docks--I do not clearly remember.

However, what was important to me was that often, in piling great stacks of planks, there would be spaces left like caves where a man could crawl in out of the rain. If he was thoughtful enough to provide himself with a newspaper he could wrap around his body under his coat, he might sleep there out of the rain and in reasonable comfort. I use the last term in a relative sense. What is comfort to some is cruel hardship to others.

This might be a good place to add that I had a family, including two brothers and a sister, but they were living their own lives, with problems of their own. I was going the way I had chosen, with no intention of leaning upon anyone for sustenance.

My parents knew where I was but not how I was surviving.

It was at this time that I read Boswell's The Life of Samuel Johnson, Ll. D., without doubt one of the greatest biographies in the English language. It was a book I read slowly, often returning to reread parts of it. I could not accept the generally believed idea that Boswell was merely someone who followed the great man about, duly noting his comments and ideas. The writing was too good, the appreciation of his subject too great. History was, of course, to bear me out, but many of the Boswell papers had not yet come to light or been published. I now have the complete set in my own library and have drawn upon them from time to time when picturing the London taverns and inns of the period. Samuel Pepys has proved another good source on the life of English public houses. Their periods of history are separated by just enough time to give one a fairly adequate picture of where men were going and what was happening in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England.

Such books offer a valuable insight into social life as well as traveling conditions, the food being eaten, and what was inbibed in the taverns.

In re-creating the life of a time, it has always been my way to find the best possible sources--first person, if possible. There are many books of memoirs written by travelers, soldiers, sailors, merchants, and others which, if sought out, offer excellent pictures of their times.

One that I have found valuable as well as interesting is The Memoirs of Vincent Nolte, which was also one of the source books for Hervey Allen's Anthony Adverse, the first book I ever reviewed. The review was written for the Sunday Oklahoman of Oklahoma City when Professor Kenneth C. Kaufman was the book editor.

The Seamen's Institute was an education in itself, and some of the most remarkable characters I have ever known I first met there. One, whom we called Old Doc Yak after a comic-strip character of the time, inspired a short story I was to write and publish many years later. Another story of mine grew out of the checkers games that were a regular feature of the place.

There was an old longshoreman who came nearly every night to play. He was a thorough student of the game and had memorized all the plays in the books. He played using bottle tops for his "men" and disdained any but a few who had proved themselves able to give him a contest. One of these was Oriental Slim, a particular friend of mine. Another was a marine engineer. Either of these might beat him on occasion, but the occasions were rare.

Then came Sleeth, a slim, dark man with a fantastic head for figures. I've seen him stand beside the tracks and memorize the numbers on the boxcars as they rolled by, and be able to repeat them in order. They always checked out.

Sleeth was ignored at first when he suggested a game with the old man, but after he beat Oriental Slim, he was considered a likely candidate. What followed was cruel, although not intentionally so.

Checkers was more than a game to the old longshoreman. It was his life, his very reason for being, and he was proud of his skill. Each move was studied with care and made only after much thought.

Sleeth would carry on a conversation with bystanders, and as soon as the old man had made his move, he would, with scarcely a glance at the board, make his move.

And he would win every time.

Perhaps the sudden moves shook the old man's confidence. Perhaps the conversation did. After a few such games, the old man did not come back to the Seamen's Institute. Sleeth, like most of us, was a bird of passage, and soon he was gone too.

Often I would sit by the window in the game room and watch them, these men who came and went to and from all the seaports of the world. Every one was a character, and every one had a story. Some day I would write some of those stories, but at the time I was just another seaman on the beach, waiting for a ship.

And then one morning about four o'clock, I shipped off the dock on a freighter bound for the Far East. I took what used to be called, in sailing-ship days, a "pier-head jump," signing on in the First Mate's quarters by a dim light over his desk.

Back in the reading room of the Seamen's Institute, I left a couple of good books unfinished.

Unfortunately, in most of our schools the history of Europe and North America is taught as if it were the history of the world. The rest of the world is referred to only when Europeans or Americans were invading or trading. There has recently been a small change for the better but not nearly enough.

Not long ago, a distinguished historian was speculating on why all the great voyages of discovery began in Europe--which, of course, is not at all true. However, aside from the Viking voyages, which explored northern waters, most European exploratory ventures were toward the Far East.

The reasons were obvious. The riches of the Indies were known and had been known for centuries, and everybody was striving for easier access or a route they could control. Europe wanted the silks and spices of Asia, while Europe had nothing at all Asia wanted.

Europe's only exportable item at the time was religion, and Asia certainly did not lack for religions of her own.

The fact of the matter is that Asiatic waters had been explored very thoroughly by her own people, and a lively trade was conducted from northern China to Africa and all points between, often with larger ships than any sailing European waters. The Buddhist Jatakas speak of many voyages, and although the stories of Sinbad are fabulous, in many cases the islands and ports in his stories can be identified.

During the Vietnam War era, people were led into all sorts of foolishness by simple ignorance of a part of the world strange to them. Many believed that North and South Vietnam were one country divided, but such was never the case except briefly under French administration.

North Vietnam had originally been two countries, Annam and Tonkin, and their civilization derived largely from China. South Vietnam had formerly been known as Champa, and, like Cambodia's, its civilization came from India. Before France moved into the situation, the two countries had been fighting for nearly two thousand years.