In the coming days we wandered in the small dock area, still obsessed with getting a job on a ship. One day we noticed a German freighter with a chalkboard hanging over the gangway indicating that she was bound for Port of Spain, Trinidad early the next day. Trinidad – that's where we wanted to go! To meet the Cuthbert! Maybe there was still time after all.

The German ship was named Johann Alterman and came from Hamburg. After a counsel the three of us decided to stow away. Odysseus was kept seven years by Calypso on the isle of Ogygia. Our stay on the Calypso Isle (St. Thomas) was to be much shorter. But its magic would soon draw us back unwillingly, like Circe – the enchantress on the isle of Aeaea, sister of the wizard Aeetes – was known to do. But Calypso was more of a secretive, hidden goddess, as in the Greek word kalypto, ”to hide”. And hidden indeed must three stowaways be if they wanted to avoid capture.

We had to think fast. Henry would pose a problem stowing away, but we would risk it. We had spare gauze and bandages for Henry, the mummy, but other things were needed for the clandestine voyage. Food, of course. Fortunately we had sold the scuba tank and had some ready cash, since no one would take travelers cheques at that late hour. And it was Sunday, to boot! All the stores were closed! The only thing we could buy at that late notice was salted peanuts. We would have to travel light, and Henry would have to leave all the junk he had bought behind. I too had to make a sacrifice, leaving my jazz phonograph records (Charles Lloyd, Bill Evans, John Coltrane, Miles Davis) to our neighbors at the hotel – the ones with the yacht. Once we were in readiness, we began waiting impatiently throughout the night for zero hour.

A good bit past midnight we snuck down to the dock with our bags. All was dark and silent, except for the full moon who was screaming bloody murder. Shh! We might get nabbed! We crawled along the dock on our hands and knees parallel to the hull of the Johann Alterman. The big ship was still,

’tis sleeping fast,
Like a beast, unconscious of its tether.
– Shelley, ”The Boat on the Serchio"

We crouched in her shadow, our hearts beating fiercely in the moonlight. Henry brought up the rear, dragging his mummy trappings over the cement dock. The freighter sat low at her moorings, loaded down with cargo for her early morning departure. We were worried about the night watch spotting us, since the gunwale was only about three feet over the dock where we crouched. As we approached the gang-plank Henry bumped his injured arm and moaned.
... – Shh!
We crawled up the gang-plank on our bellies like rats and quickly flopped down on to the painted metal deck. Henry was last and made a clunk when he landed, moaning again.
... – Shh!
All was dark on the bridge. The crew slept. We crawled to the bow of the ship, where we found a small hold for storing ropes, pulleys, life-jackets and other equipment. The crew's quarters were about fifty meters away in midship. All was desperately quiet. First we found a hiding place in the hold for Henry, behind a huge coil of rope. He groaned, still smarting from his motorcycle accident. He kept knocking his sore limbs on hard things hidden in the dark. We wedged him firmly in the cubbyhole, and in the darkness, his bandaged form looked even more like a mummy in a carefuly prepared sarcophagus.

Antaole
pencil sketch by Theo Radic

Then Anatole and I found ourselves hiding places in the hold, waiting patiently for dawn and the long-awaited moment of casting off for Trinidad. My legs became numb from crouching in my damp hiding place, and we were so uncertain of our fates that we didn't even dare whisper to one another. Waiting. Waiting. Such torment! I heard Henry moan again in the darkness. My thoughts wandered. What day was it? Moansday? Thumpsday? Shatterday? That's right – it was Someday. Thus, in uncertain fear we waited countless swollen hours. The edge of an anchor irritated my side. I couldn't feel my legs. I was having second thoughts about stowing away. Here's anutha fine mess Anatole's gotten me into! The dawn brought finely powdered light into the hold, still submerged in darkness. We heard the sounds of crewmen moving about on deck. One even came into the hold where we hid, scaring the piss out of me, but he didn't notice us.

A rosy light glowed in the geometric portions of sky visible through the open hold door, beyond the loading booms on deck. The ship lurched. Voices out on the deck. Uncertainty. This is it! There's no turning back now! I felt a slow rhythmic swaying in the heavy metal beneath me. I noticed a wooden piling recede into the distance. The Johann Alterman was struck full by the south wind, the salty swells rolled under her and a dark wave hissed at the bow. The vessel gathered way and steamed out onto the obsidian ocean, choppy like the surface of an arrowhead chipped by master Ishi's blessed hands.

We were on the high seas! I was jubilant. Now I was finally leaving American soil, on my way to discover if "freedom" was truly the wretched lie that I had found it to be in the "land of the free". But even then, I had not yet put the territorial United States out of sight until we passed the Virgin island named St. Croix, once called Ayay by the Caribs who cultivated it.

Here, on his second voyage, Columbus had his first fight with the man-eating Caribs (origin of the word ”cannibal”) in which one Spaniard was killed. In huts on Guadalupe abandoned by the natives, the Spaniards had found human limbs and cuts of human flesh partly consumed, as well as castrated boys who were being fattened to be the main meal for a coming feast, and ”twelve very lovely plump girls from fifteen to sixteen years” who were to produce babies for other cannibal feasts. And thus, history reveals that despite angry protests of Native Americans today against Columbus, Native Americans themselves displayed such perverse and sadistic cruelty that even the perversely cruel Spaniards were horrified.

Many aboriginal cultures of the New World established themselves in their territories only after violent conquest, as did the Caribs. At times, they joined forces with the European invaders to annihilate neighboring tribes, as did the Tupinamba in Brazil, and the Hurons and Iroquois in North America – to be then treacherously betrayed by their allies.

When St. Croix (called Santa Cruz by Columbus) dropped out of sight behind the Johann Alterman I could heave a sigh of good riddance (for now) to the Yoo Ess of Aye. My joy was that of a certain spermatozoon, the one among millions who knows it to be his destiny to fructify the ovum. That joy eludes me now as my pencil digs into the page, excavating the Valley of the Pharoahs of my past. Such awe as I felt then comes seldom in a lifetime. One must be a twenty-year-old stowaway to feel it.

The Johann Alterman rolled out to sea and the deck-hands went about their daily tasks out on the sun-warmed decks. We didn't want to risk being caught, so we remained hidden the whole day. Henry wasn't the only one to be in pain. My muscles were leaden and aching from being immobile all those long hours. But hearing the rushing sea outside, just on the other side of the metal hull on which my ear rested, I couldn't but silently rejoice. Within the iron hull I could also hear the diesel heart pump rhythmically deep down in the engine-room.

Out in the noontide, the sea arched her back on the sky's blue bed as the sun spread his seed in dazzling flashes of light. The Johann Alterman slid... Voices! Crewmen came into the hold again! Two of them rummaged around, looking for something! Our asses are grass if they catch us! They could throw us overboard with no sweat if they had a mind to! They're Germans! Achtung! I just hope Henry keeps quiet! They coiled some rope used to moor the ship in Charlotte Amalie and stored it in the hold just in front of the coiled rope behind which Henry crouched. I held my breath. They said a few things in German which I didn't understand and then went back out on deck. After a while Anatole unwedged himself from his hiding place and came over to where I was hiding.
... – I think the coast is clear, Ted.

After stretching our legs in the cramped hold, we decided that it was best to stay in the hold for the rest of the day. The sun set by hearsay, its oblique rays gilding the edges of wooden crates, frayed coils of rope and other odd and ends like sacred objects in an Egyptian burial chamber. Entering the dark hold, the setting sunlight ”broke the Egyptian darkness with a brightness that seemed almost malignant.”(Richard Henry Dana, Two Years before the Mast)

As happens in southern latitudes, it grew dark very quickly. We had been in hiding Mukat only knows how many hours and had eaten nothing during this time. Anatole and I pried Henry loose from his hiding place like archaeologists removing a mummy from a coffin. His bandages were dirty and the gauze arm-sling hung in tatters. Maybe we shouldn't have brought him along... oh, what's done is done. We crawled out of the hold onto the deck, finally breathing in a lungful of sea air, which swept over us like a caress. My head reeled with dizziness. Night arched over us from horizon to horizon like Mother Isis wearing a sequined robe. Silence. There were more stars than I had ever seen in my life. I was thunder-struck with fear and joy.

The crewmen had retired to their quarters and the bow where we stood was not visible to the night watch. We seemed to be adrift in the starry heavens on the Johann Alterman, sailing among constellations. The Great Bear rose and, as it has done for eons, looked across the heavens with a wary eye at Orion the Hunter. We propped Henry against a mast like a rag doll, retied his bandages, and then lay flat on our backs on the newly painted deck.

The main mast soared into the stars, its radar antenna turning in dizzy circles at the top. Lines slapped metalically on the cargo booms. I stared at the main mast, slowly rocking to and fro over the universe like a pendulum. First a slow roll over to Cassiopeia, and then ever so gently back over Cygnus. There was no moon, and the sky and sea seemed as one inseparable black, heavy mass. To and fro... to and fro. The swaying main mast, the spinning radar antenna, the rotating earth the strolling solar system – all were in some strange synchronization with the myriad dancing atoms which made up my material body, my thoughts, my spirit.

My trance-state which I had been perfecting since early childood was attaining new realms. My silent awe was pure poesy, deriving its eloquence from the stars. The night hung over me like a drop of ink from the pen of Thoth, scribe of the gods. All was eloquence, all was non-verbal, beyond language, beyond the grasp of human understanding. The stars hung on the main mast like clusters of grapes, the Milky Way its foliage. Vine-like ropes hung from the cross-boom, clanking against the sapless mast. We lay on our backs like three drunken satyrs overpowered by night's bacchanale, stowaways on the barque of millions of years.

The spirits of drowned sailors rushed against the metal hull as Anatole put his head through a large mooring hole in the gunwale to see what all the racket was about. He motioned for me to come look. I stuck my head through the work-worn hole and looked down. The dark water was lit green! Just as it was that night on my surfboard in the swells off Balboa Peninsula. The luminous green phosphorescence splashed off the bow like spilled jewels. The light given off from below was equally as hypnotic and threatening as the light from above. The ocean's maw opened beneath us, the sky's maw gaped above. We were stupefied. I kept my eyes on Ursa Major throughout the night, acknowledging its greeting from the frightening depths of the eons. It almost spelled out a word with its starry calligraphy, a word which has never been uttered, but which is on the tip of all tongues. The Word existing outside the parentheses of human sensation, the Name of that being who was never born and who never dies.

The Big Dipper slowly tipped on its side, wastefully spilling its amrit, nectar of immortality, over mankind, who hold out no cups to receive it. Be that as it may, I looked off the port bow and saw a red-orange glow on the coal-black horizon to the east. What type of dawn was this, in the middle of the night? I was flabbergasted, thinking that I was on another planet, forgetting an obvious fact of astronomy. I forgot about the moon! Queenly and red, she ascended from night's depths and entered the dark arena over our heads. She was huge, Madame La Lune! How could I have forgotten her! How stealthily she sneaked up on me, dragging her crimes and craters into the heights. But down, down, in the kilometric depths, invisible fishes swarmed in a frenzy like the neurons in my oceanic cerebrum. We rolled gently with the ship, taking in as much of the spectacle as we could in utter silence. Henry broke the silence.
... – Hey Anatole! I'm hungry!
... – Shh! Will you shut the fuck up! Do you want to get us all thrown in jail?
Come to think of it, I was hungry too. We broke out our peanuts and began our modest feast. We gobbled peanuts ravenously, having suddenly realized how hungry we were. But inexperienced stow-aways cannot foresee everything. For example, that peanuts make one thirsty. And we had forgotten to bring water. Henry again voiced our collective longing.
... – (sotto voce) Psst! Anatole... I'm thirsty.
No heroin addict ever needed a "fix" like we needed a glass of water! All of a sudden the mysteries of the night sky, the phosphorescent sea and the soul of man all became things of secondary importance – no, of no importance at all. Numero uno was water. Water! What were we to do? There was no other choice but to make a commando raid on the crew's quarters. Aside from drinking sea water, there was no other alternative.

Somehow, I was chosen for the perilous raid. I snuck up to midship where the lonely figure of the watch on the bridge was the only sign of life. I flattened myself against the side wall near the opened hatch leading to the living quarters and the galley. A faint light shone in the passage-way crossing the ship from port to starboard. I peeked in and, lo and behold, a drinking fountain stood at the corner of the adjacent passage-way.

I went in cautiously, took a long delirious drink of ice cold water, and then filled up a bottle I had found in the hold. Out of curiosity I peeked around the corner into the other passageway. Maybe there was some bread or cake lying about. Oops! I quickly pulled my head back and rejoined Anatole and Henry at the bow. As they were taking turns gulping from the bottle, I whispered:
... – I think I was spotted.
... – Real fucking nice, Radich!
It was not long until we saw a group of men with flashlights coming over the deck toward us. Excited voices.
... – Was machen sie da?
A swinging beam of light from one of their powerful flashlights stopped on the bandaged form of Henry. He sat on the deck, leaning against a wench like a star-struck Petrushka. What now? Leg-irons? Keel-hauling? Burial at sea? They'll show us no mercy! I had heard that these Germans skinned their victims and made lamp-shades of their hides! I had also heard that they didn't take too kindly to "schizophrenics"! Uh oh! Better tell them that Henry's suffering from dysentery, you know, from eating too many coconuts in St. Thomas. That's why he's acting so ...uh, funny, mein Herr! Uh oh again! We belonged to an "inferior race"! Slavs! They'll tan our hides for sure! We're up Shit Creek without a paddle!

We were taken up to the galley and given hot coffee. The cook changed Henry's bandages and arranged a place for us to sleep in the mess-room. We soon discovered that a society existed at sea which was less barbarous than that on land. The captain was more amused than anything else, and broke out laughing when we told him of our plans to meet the Cuthbert in Trinidad and be hired as deck-hands.
... – You've been reading too much Joseph Conrad, my friends.
He spoke perfect English, as did all the officers. He informed us of the regulations specified by international law (whatever that is) which stated that stowaways must be given room and board until the ship reached the port at which they had come on board, and that under no circumstances were stowaways permitted to work. In the space of a few minutes we had gone from the possibility of keel-haulings (I always think of the worst that can happen) to a Caribbean cruise with three meals a day, free of charge! We hit the jack-pot! Three meals a day! Three comfortable bunks to sleep in! And an endless supply of cold beer (which is second only to the rudder on German ships). So the Germans weren't all grim blond beasts after all! Nicht schlect!

In the coming days we became the three mascots of the Johann Alterman from Hamburg. They weren't angry at us as we thought they would be. They were amused! After our breakfast of freshly baked rolls, porridge, coffee, orange juice and toast with marmalade, we would sit in lounge chairs under the Caribbean sun, watching the busy crew at work. We were willing to help out, mind you, but international law forbid it. Thirst was no longer a problem. If we got thirsty lounging in the hot sun, why, it was only a matter of trotting to the fridge and getting ourselves some ice-cold beer! Feel right at home! Zu hause! At lunch and dinner we stuffed ourselves with saurbraten, kartoffelsalat, schnitzel, bratwurst mitt saurkraut und plenty of mustard. Ja voll! It was a regular Bavarian beer-garden aboard the Johann Alterman! Quite a luxury cruise! All we needed was a shuffleboard court! Just like the rich people! The cook was even so considerate as to ask us how we liked our steaks! Medium rare! Danke schön!

Anatole began sketching the crewmen at work scraping old paint from the decks, booms and railings, swabbing gangways, or taking sightings with the sextant. Some hung dangerously over the foaming blue water giving the rusted spots of the hull a going-over with a wire brush. Here was typical Teutonic efficiency which contrasted with the British slovenliness aboard the Cuthbert. Anatole did a drawing of me as we were passing the isle of Montserrat. Here on the Street of the Sour Well I sit presently looking at it. Graphite sunbeams burst through the clouds and shower down over the mountainous tropical island. In the foreground I sit in a lounge chair beside the rope guard-rail encircling the deck. We were having a jolly time on our Caribbean cruise.

Me on the Johann Alterman
pencil sketch by Anatole Kitchenko

It turned out that the Germans understood our boyish wanderlust, since most of them were dreamers desiring a little more out of life than did the people cooped up in the big cities, stressed out, frantic for profits, running over pedestrians with their cars. We were shown human kindness that I had given up hope of ever finding among men. The cook looked after us like a mother hen. He gave Henry extra portions because he thought he needed extra vitamins. Henry's wit surfaced now and then. The sores from his motorcycle accident were healing.

We often went up on the bridge where the first mate, impeccably buttoned and bearded, showed us the radar equipment, the gyroscope, the automatic pilot, and the sextant, which he demonstrated for us. A large part of his adult life had been spent at sea, and he was also extremely learned in the arts. He felt a spiritual kinship to the Greeks and Phonecians who dared to sail out through the Pillars of Hercules and enter the Atlantic. (Perhaps ancient mariners crossed the Atlantic a millennia before Leif Ericsson without ever having left a trace in history.) But on countless modern ships like the Johann Alterman, the ocean crossings have become boring and routine, even for poetic first mates. He showed us the principle of navigation and how man had stretched a Eucalidian net over the stars, which is the ceiling to the fantasy of the mathematically inclined. During the day he leaned over his chart verifying the minutely plotted course to Port of Spain, on the island where Columbus saw three peaks on his third voyage and wittily named it Trinidad (Trinity).

From our gentlemanly conversation with the first mate on the bridge, we descended into the ribald simple-minded chatter of the crew down in the mess-room. They were all from Hamburg.
... – Know you St. Pauli? Reeperban? Fucky-fucky?
That was often the extent of their English. We were entertained by a machinist who sang an extremely obscene song in English to the melody of "Valencia". Anatole laughed up a storm. He slapped his thighs and then, like a boastful cossack, danced the hopak for them in his jim-dandy Ukrainian dancing boots. He was good at mimicking celebrities, and made everyone laugh when he imitated Charlie Chaplin, Field Marshall Rommel, and that movie-star (what's his name again?) who played the werewolf in the thirties.

We descended even further into the ship, into the inferno of the engine-room where the machinists slaved away in unbearable heat and the unending roar of pistons and cog-wheels. To work down here was a coveted, well-paid job, and I thought it strange how men were actually willing to work under such hellish conditions, preciously coveting their damnation. As long as the pay and prestige are good, there are men today who would willingly take over all the "jobs" of the damned in all the nine rings of the Dante’s Inferno and boast to one another of their cleverness, as the chief machinist of the Johann Alterman boasted when we shouted to him over the roar that we knew absolutely nothing about machines.

But strangely enough, the hellish din in the engine-room, when muffled by layers of steel floors and wood-work, became oddly pleasant. Each night the vibrations it caused in the metal hull lulled us to sleep as we neared Trinidad. We would not be allowed to disembark on arrival. International law forbid it. And so, our last hopes of meeting the Cuthbert and becoming able-bodied seamen were smothered. The Johann Alterman sailed in the opposite direction of Columbus' route along the Antilles on his second voyage, when he would wreak havoc among the natives of Haiti and begin the West Indian slave-trade. We kept different hours than the crew, who had to get out of bed at 5:00 A.M.and be at work by 6:00. Like luxurious idle rich, we awoke whenever our brains were jingled awake, which was more like nine-ish. The cook always saved us a pot of porridge and coffee. He was quite an enterprisng fellow, and one day as I sat in my lounge chair reading I saw him out on the newly- painted red deck, edging toward the side of the ship with a basket.

As the larger waves washed over the deck of the heavily loaded freighter, the cook held the basket in the onrushing water in which floundered schools of flying fish. A cosmic lottery decided which of the flying fish would remain in the sea and which would be served for dinner. I leaned over the railing and watched one of the buzzing little devils pop out from the side of a wave and soar like a dragonfly over deep blue valleys speckled with bright yellow algae. I watched the fish fly quite a long distance (at least for a fish) and then plunge again into the mountainous slope of a wave. This one would escape the cook's oven – at least this time around. The cook walked back to the galley with a big catch of flying fish. He had prepared steamed dolphin fish the day before, served with lots of lemons, a meal that I will never forget. How delicious it was! And the flying fish proved to be quite delicious as well.

We steamed past St. Eustatius with its one bulky mountain, St. Kitts and Nevis. Then came the isle of Antigua which we could barely make out through a pair of borrowed binoculars. Like St. Croix (Santa Cruz), Antigua was named by Columbus, although he too sailed past it without landing. He also named the next island we passed, Montserrat – after a monastery near Barcelona. (The inhabitants today speak with an Irish accent, descendants of captives of Oliver Cromwell who were deported to the island by the puritans.)

Then came Guadalupe. In 1528 the epic Florentine navigator Giovanni Verrazano waded ashore onto a beach on Guadalupe, expecting to be greeted as usual by cheerful and friendly natives who would hail him as a god. That was in any case how he had been greeted on his earlier epic voyage from the Carolinas to Maine (when he had entered what would become New York harbor). Was it in one of those coves, over there to port, where Verrazano’s brother Girolamo waited in a row boat, watching in horror as ferocious man-eating Carib warriors over-powered and slaughtered his brother and captain? Girolamo was close enough to see them cut Giovanni Verrazano into pieces and eat his still-quivering body raw, horrified at the ”sand ruddy with fraternal blood.” Perhaps the Caribs remembered Columbus from thirty years before. Perhaps they were sons of slaves abducted from Guadalupe by Columbus, ”evening the score.”

After Guadalupe came Dominica, Columbus’ first landfall on his second voyage, a target aimed at and hit on the bull’s eye by dead-reckoning navigation over the Atlantic.

The gray-bearded captain of the Johann Alterman, a good-natured man, paced the bridge beneath the immaculate blue sky overseeing the busy crew. We nodded up to him like three court-jesters before the king, still not knowing what our fates were to be. After all, we had broken the law. International, even! What would happen to us when our holiday cruise came to an end? What kind of reception would we get from the American officials in Trinidad, who had been notified by radio of our misdeed? What cutthroats would we have to deal with then? That was all we needed: to be thrown in jail again! How many months (or years!) would we be rotting away in some grimy jailhouse?

It was just as well to enjoy ourselves while we could, even though we were not allowed to go off ship to visit Fort-de-France in Martinique when we docked briefly there. We were a little over half-way to Trinidad. I had to content myself with leaning on the railing of the moored ship, watching from afar the hustle and bustle of the fortress city. Alas, yet one more colony plagued with disease-ridden bureaucracy which is so dear to the French, this nation of fonctionnaires. What? Is the dread disease "colonialism" still alive and well in the twentieth century? When will these wine-sodden barbarians begin dropping atomic bombs on this tropic isle as well, like they are doing on the Mururoa atoll in my Pacific Ocean? O disease! Morbus gallicus! Syphilization!

It was an extremely bright mango-and-papaya day in the harbor of Fort-de-France. I looked at the surface of the water beneath me and saw my shadow emerging from the large bulk of the ship's shadow. Ecstatic rays crowned the form of my head. No matter where I moved along the railing, it was the same phenomenon which met my eyes: the shadow of my head was the epicenter of kingly rays of reflected sunlight glittering on the surface of the water. Fuel for my egotism, just as, out on the open ocean, I saw the entire horizon form a vast circle of which I was the exact center.

Illusions? Maybe science would call them such. But for me they were real phenomena. Why did that kingly crown of sun rays not surround the shadow of Anatole’s head, who was leaning on the rail next to me? Why is this phenomenon only reserved for the observer? Anatole told me that he saw the crown of sunlight around his head. My vantage point, as was his, was that of the mysterious phenomenon of ego. Yes, my shadow wore a kingly crown in the harbor of Fort-de-France, on the isle of Martinique, and I was very inclined to believe (call it youthful impetuosity, if you will) that it was my rightful possession. If not king of an empire, I could at least become king of myself. Is this not normal, reader? Is it not the same kettle of fish chez vous?

We left Martinique and set out again on the limitless expanses of the sea. We were often at the extreme tip of the bow, watching the flying fish flit among patches of yellow algae. We passed St. Lucia and its volcanic domes, the Pitons, heaving heavenward at the northern end of the island like the stone breasts of a fertility goddess. The Caribs called the island Iounalao, ”place of the iguana”.

Now, over the pastures
of bananas, the island lifted its horns.
– Derek Walcott, Omeros

The metal ladders and masts of the Johann Alterman cast geometric shadows on the swirling white lace of foam. Soon we sighted the jutting Punta Peñas of Venezuela off the starboard bow, which Columbus had first seen coming from the other direction, through the Gulf of Paria separating Trinidad from the continent of South America. We were half a day from Port of Spain. The three of us lay on our stomachs at the very tip of the bow, our heads hanging over the edge, as we peered down at the ship's hull plowing through the swells like an opening zipper. Three porpoises body-surfed on the wave made by the bow, inches from the ever-approaching mass of iron and steel behind them. They slid in the water in rhythmic sychronization charging forward with their sleek, powerful bodies.

They seemed to be pulling the ship like a chariot, dancing a magnificent jig. A dance filled with the boundless joy of nature, a dance of perhaps the happiest creatures on earth. I watched the three porpoises enraptured, thinking with my new mammalian body, and felt the stream of water slide smoothly over my nose and stream-line back, and the massive surge behind me pushed by fifteen thousand tons of metal. I was free of those clumsy things called "arms" and "legs", just as were Anatole and Henry swimming at my side in their sleek limb-less bodies. But then the smell of the cook's curried chicken reached our nostrils, and our fantasy ended. By the time we had eaten dinner a long stone jetty appeared jutting from the thin strip of land to our left.

This was Port of Spain, Trinidad. We got the crazy notion of jumping ship once we docked, but the Johann Alterman anchored out in the middle of the harbor. We were forbidden to go ashore and began to feel trapped. To get ashore unseen was next to impossible, unless we were willing for a long swim to unknown, hostile shores in the oily water of the harbor, which we were not. The HMS Cuthbert would just have to get along without us.

We were interrogated by a local customs official and agreed to be good boys and stay on the ship. After the cargo had been unloaded we set sail again for the long trip back to Charlotte Amalie. My first attempt at leaving the territorial United States had been thwarted. I didn't like the idea of going back to St. Thomas, especially considering that we would have to deal with the American authorities, who had been informed by radio of the three stowaways. We were nervous about the reception we would be given and had a gnawing fear of being thrown in jail again. We tried to enjoy the last leg of our Caribbean cruise as best as possible under the circumstances.

We docked at Charlotte Amalie. I began to feel desperate. An American official immediately came aboard snarling in his kakis. He wanted our heads! We had broken the law and now we must pay the consequences. Kind sir! We are so young and foolish. Please don't throw us in dee briar patch! But he was insistent. He wanted us locked up. The sooner the better. We were parasites. A menace to society. He assured us that we would not get off easy. The captain took our defense and told the American that his steamship company would most likely not press charges, and therefore there was no need of our being punished. Well put!

The official was one of those gung-ho-halls-of-montezuma-break-your-balls-god-bless-amerika types. He was furious. Such audacious youth and freedom is un-American! Oh, how he wanted to see us locked up! He walked down the gang-plank in a huff. Whew! We had one last meal aboard the Johann Alterman before going back to an uncertain fate on St. Thomas. The cook prepared us a box of food to take along and said good-bye along with the rest of the crew. We thanked the captain for his generosity. Before saying good-bye he told us that if we ever made it to Hamburg in the next few months he could take us on as deck-hands. The ship would be going into dry-dock for repairs and would be easy to find. Maybe we would be seamen after all?

Although we had been treated with exemplary courtesy in spite of our crime, stowaways do not always have such a happy ending to their adventures. Recently I read of a Ukrainian cargo ship that took on freight in some African country, along with several African stowaways. When they were discovered at sea, they were rounded up, beaten to death, and thrown overboard. The lone survivor hid in the hold and later told his horrifying story when he successfully sneaked ashore.

Another incident even more recent happened on a Taiwanese freighter that docked in Halifax, Canada. It was discovered that Rumanian stowaways had been dumped in the Atlantic on a flimsy raft of oil drums, most likely to perish by drowning or thirst. However, in the 1920s another luckier stowaway from Rotterdam successfully made it to New York to flourish as an artist and become America’s greatest living painter: Willem de Kooning.

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