Authors: B. TRAVEN
Every sailor of any nationality knows some thirty English words, which he pronounces in such a way that after half an hour you may get a rough idea of what he wishes to say. Each sailor, though, does not have the same vocabulary as the others, and hardly two have the same pronunciation of the same word. Living together and working together, each sailor picks up the words of his companions, until, after two months or so, all men aboard have acquired a working knowledge of about three hundred words common to all the crew and understood by all. To this vocabulary are added all the commands, which are given without exception in English, but in a degenerated cockney flavored with Irish and Scotch, the is and ch’s mostly out of place. This lingo, of course, is enlarged by words which are brought in by sailors who, owing to their lack of the right words, have to use occasionally words of their own homemade language. These words, used over and over again, are, after a while, picked up by others and used at the proper place. Since usually one fireman at least was a Spaniard, it had become proper to use for water and for fuel never any other words but agua and carbon. Even the engineers used these words.
We found ourselves able to tell each other any story we wanted to. Our stories did not need more than three hundred and fifty different words, more or less. And when a good story, born in the heart and raised in the soul and fattened on one’s own bitter or sweet experiences, had been told, there was nothing left unexplained or misunderstood. They all could have been printed, but, of course, it must be added that no bookstore would have sold two copies and bookstore-keeper, printer, and publisher would have been in the pen for thirty years.
Regardless of how far from the academic the Yorikkian English strayed, the fundamentals remained English; and whenever a newcomer hopped on who spoke English as his mother tongue, the Yorikkian lingo once more was purified and enriched with new words or with a better pronunciation of words which by long misuse had lost their adherence to their family.
A sailor is never lost where language is concerned. He always can make himself fairly well understood, no matter which coast he is thrown upon. He surely will find his way to an answer to the old question: when do we eat? Yet whoever survived the
Yorikke
could never be frightened any more during his lifetime by anything. For him nothing had become impossible as long as it was within reach of a courageous man.
36
Stanislav was called Stanislav, or, usually, Lavski, only by me and by the firemen. Everyone else aboard, including the engineers and the mates, called him Pole or Polack.
The majority of the crew were called after their nationalities. Hey, Spaniard, or Spainy. Fortes or Portuguese. Russ. Dutch. Germy. Dansky. Taley the Italian. Finsky the Finn, who, by the way, when he joined the
Yorikke
, understood only a few commands, but otherwise knew no word of English; and since there was nobody aboard who understood Finnish, he was for months unable to say to anybody even so much as: “May I have your spoon?”
That everybody was called according to his nationality was one of the great ironies of which there existed so many aboard the
Yorikke
. Their native lands and the authorities of their native countries had denied all of them citizenship, and therefore passports, for some reason or other. But on the
Yorikke
their nationality was the only thing they possessed to distinguish them from anybody else. Whether, however, the nationality they agreed to have was their true nationality was never proved. When a newcomer joined the crew and was asked what nationality he had, he gave one in answer; and hence he was called as he had answered and was believed by everybody.
Rarely if ever did anybody on the
Yorikke
reveal his real name. No one, not even the skipper himself, knew for sure if the name and the nationality given by a man when signing on were correct. The skipper was very discreet about what he wrote in the crew’s record-book concerning a man. He was the kind of master who stuck to his men; and most likely he would never have given away a man of his to the authorities as long as he could avoid it. The true facts about a man came out only from the man himself, who told frankly all about his person and his past. Few ever did such a thoughtless thing. When a newcomer, after having signed on, left the skipper’s cabin and stepped on deck and was met by the mate or the bos’n or the chief and asked his name, he usually answered: “I am a Dane.” With this he had answered already two questions, his name and his nationality. Henceforth he was called: Dane! Nobody, officer or man, ever asked him again. The officers were sure that Dane was already a lie. Anyway, they never went deeper into the matter, because they did not want to be told more lies. It is an old rule, only not sufficiently obeyed, but a good rule: If you do not wish to be lied to, do not ask questions! The only real defense civilized man has against anybody who bothers him is to lie. There would be no lies if there were no questions.
One evening, while the
Yorikke
was at anchor off an African port, waiting for cargo and orders, Stanislav told me his story, and I told him mine. The story I told him was not my true story; it was just a good story, which he accepted. Of course, I do not know if the story he told me was true. How can anybody know if any story told or heard is true? Does even a girl tell her own mother always a true story about what she did last night between nine and twelve? She would be a fool and would have endless trouble if she did. And as to true stories in general: I do not even know if the grass is green; it may just happen that the grass causes within my brain an illusion which reminds me instantly that I was told, when I had no judgment of my own yet, that whatever looks like grass must be green. Besides, green is not something by itself, but green is everything which I can compare with the color of fresh grass. So how do I know whether the story Stanislav told me was the story of what he had experienced in fact, or whether it was the reflection in his mind of what he believed he had experienced? Another man than Moses, who was trained in an Egyptian priests’ college, would have told the story of the creation of the world and the history of the Israelites in a way entirely different from what we now believe to be the only true story of the misleading of the human race.
But there were many reasons that made me feel that the story Stanislav told me was true, for the story did not differ much from all the other stories of men who sail death ships.
His true name, which, together with his story, I never betrayed to anybody on the
Yorikke
, was Stanislav Koslovski. He was born in Poznan, which then was the capital of the Prussian province of Poznan, or, as it was called by the Prussians, Posen.
In Poznan he went to school until he was fourteen. All instruction was given in German, but he knew a little Polish from his parents, who spoke it occasionally, mainly at church service. The German Poles, it seemed, had the idea that the Lord would not understand them if they addressed him in German.
When he was about to leave grammar school, his parents wanted to give Stanislav as an apprentice for four years to a master tailor. A couple of hundred stories in imitation of Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans, sold at a dime apiece, and another couple of hundred sea-stories and pirate-yarns, had ambushed his spirit, and he ran away from home, landing in Stettin, one of the greatest German ports in the Baltic Sea. Here he stowed away in a Danish fishing schooner and came to the Danish island of Fünen. The fishermen found him here half frozen and nearly starved to death.
He told them that he came from Danzig. He assumed the name of the bookshop-keeper where he had bought all the dime novels that he had consumed during his schooldays. He said (rather intelligent) that he was an orphan and that he was so mistreated and so cruelly beaten every day by his foster-parents that he had jumped into the sea to end his life. Since he was a good swimmer he could not die in the sea, however, and he swam for his life and reached the fishing schooner, where, not seeing anybody aboard, he stowed away to escape from his martyrdom. He finished his story, his eyes filled with tears, and said: “If I am brought back to Germany I will tie my hands and feet and jump again into the sea and this time make a good job of it. I prefer rather to go to hell than to return to my foster-parents.”
He told his story so excellently that all the fisherwomen were bathed in tears over the terrible fate of a fine good German boy. So they kept him there.
Not only the German, but also the Danish and Swedish newspapers were full of stories about the tailor-apprentice who had mysteriously disappeared from Poznan, probably kidnapped by Jews who needed, for a religious ceremony, the blood of a Christian boy. A similar affair had happened not so many years before in Konitz, another town of the same province, where, according to police records, Jews had kidnapped and butchered a Christian college boy. All Germany, then already in the grip of anti-Semitism, believed this horrible story true.
The boy was sought all over Germany, and the most gruesome stories as to his possible fate were published in the papers. The Danish fishermen, having other troubles to worry about, did not read newspapers. And if they did, as the story was in all the Danish papers also, they never for a moment thought their boy from Danzig to be the tailor-apprentice from Poznan. Stanislav had to work hard with the fisher-folk on Fünen.
He ate nothing which he had not earned honestly. He liked it, nevertheless, a hundred times better than sitting on a tailor’s table. If he seriously meant to become a good sailor, he could have had no better schooling than he had with those fishermen. The Baltic Sea, looking often so calm and so smooth, is in reality one of the most capricious of waters. Four miles off the coast you think you can make it whistling and singing, and before you have got time to think what has happened, a squall has got your craft so hard that, with the coast at arm’s reach, you have to struggle for your life. If you can sail a plain fishing schooner from Svendborg on Fünen to Nykjobing on Falster in any weather, and you bring the ship home again and no sail lost, you have got every right to call yourself a great sailor. Compared with this it means absolutely nothing to bring a transatlantic liner from Cherbourg to Hoboken. Any fool can do that and be thought a great captain.
No matter how hard the work was, when Stanislav thought of being a tailor-apprentice he lost all and every desire to send word home that he was still alive and not sacrificed in Jewish rites. His fear of being made a tailor was greater than the love for his parents, whom in fact he hated profoundly for their attempt to make an honest tailor of one who wanted to detect new straits and unmapped islands in the South Sea.
At seventeen he had become an A.B., a real able-bodied seaman. With the good wishes of the fisher-folk he left for Hamburg to look for long trips and so satisfy his craving for the great seafaring world.
He could not find the right ship going out on a big voyage. For a few months he took up work with a sail-maker. Having in mind to sail on real big ships under his true name, he went to obtain a legitimate sailor’s identification book, or what they called a seaman’s book, with which he could ship in the finest of German ships. German shipping was then at the peak of its glory. By working at this sail-maker’s he had established his residence in Hamburg, and so it was easy to obtain true papers. He shipped for a few trips on honest great German merchants.
For a change he shipped on good Dutch vessels, with which he made several trips to the East Indies.
While on a Dutch the bloody dance about the golden calf started. His ship happened to be in the Black Sea. When it passed the Bosporus on its return to Holland it was searched by German officers in the service of the Turks. He and another German were taken off the ship and put into the Turkish navy under assumed names, because when arrested he did not, for some reason, give his true name. A Belgian sailor on the Dutch ship had betrayed these two Germans to the officers, but the Dutch master of the ship said he had nothing to do with this and added that he did not know their names and was not sure if they were Germans at all.
Two German war-ships, which had been in an Italian port and had evaded the English, reached Constantinople, and by order of the German government they joined the Turkish navy. So Stanislav served under the Turkish flag for a while.
Smart as he was, he quit the Turks as soon as he had an opportunity. He shipped on a Danish merchant. The ship was brought up in the North Sea by a German submarine. Stanislav, whom everybody on the Danish ship believed a Dane, had made the gross mistake of telling a Swede, also on the ship, that he was a German. So when the Germans examined the Dane, the Swede gave Stanislav away. Stanislav came to Kiel, the most important port of the German navy. He was put into the navy, again under an assumed name. Artillery service.
In Kiel he met, by chance, another coolie, as a gob was called in the German navy, with whom he had once shipped on a German merchant. By sheer carelessness, and not through betrayal by this fellow-sailor, Stanislav’s real name became known. Now he was in the German navy under his right name. Had he given his right name before, when in the Turkish navy, he could have been court-martialed for desertion.
Stanislav was at the sea-battle of Skagen, where two nations who were at war against each other came out victors at the same time and where the English lost more ships than the Germans, and the Germans more than the English. It depended on the papers you read.
The ship on which Stanislav was a gunner was blown up by a torpedo. Since the battle was off the Danish coast it happened that Stanislav was picked up by Danish fishermen after having been in the water for about thirty hours. They took him to their village. He knew how to get along with Danish fisher-folk, and so they did not hand him over to the Danish authorities, but helped him to hide. By his good luck Stanislav met a fisherman who happened to be the brother of that fisher-woman of Fünen who had picked him up first. With the help of this brother he was roaded to Esbjerg, where he was put as a Dane on a Danish ship, with which he again sailed for the great voyage. He had learned his lesson, and so he never told anybody his true nationality any more. He could laugh at all English, German, and French submarines whenever they searched the Dane. He never was caught again, and he kept himself out of the struggle for supremacy of the big banking firms.