The Navy doesn’t issue you a suitcase when you go to sea; rather, you get a large canvas bag, traditionally referred to as your “seabag.” When I was a kid leaving my ship in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, I dreaded passing through the main gate because the Marines on duty would often dump the contents of my seabag on the pavement, just because they could.
I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and say they were “just following orders;” but, frankly, there wasn’t one thing in that shipyard that I wanted to steal, and I resented the implication that there was. Maybe I just looked suspicious in my tight jumper, tailor-made bell bottoms, and my dixie cup perched on the back of my head.
About the only items I carried for local excursions would have been my shaving kit, a change of clothes, a few books, a map of the city, and my notebook to write in when I saw things that interested me. That meager list well defines and sums up my uneventful life ashore as a sailor for the first ten years of my career. As I travelled around the world, visiting various ports of call, I’d generally come back to the ship with an idea for a story which I would eventually write and publish in the ship’s newspaper and, occasionally, in a “little” magazine. The smallest ship would have a newspaper, even if it was just a few mimeographed sheets stapled together, and the editors were always looking for “filler.” I called them my “seabag stories,” and I want to share four such vignettes from disparate locations you might not be that familiar with: Long Beach, California, Gibraltar, the island of Yap in the Micronesian archipelago, and Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.
It was always nice to come home to Long Beach from a deployment overseas, although by the mid-1960s the city was in decline and would soon become known as “Watts by the Sea.” The famous oceanside amusement park, the “Pike,” second only to Brooklyn’s “Coney Island” in my experience, was getting dangerous, and most of us stayed away from it. Before we tied up at the Naval Station, we would stop first at Naval Weapons Station, Seal Beach, a suburb of Los Angeles, to unload our ammunition and missiles.
Although security was tight, everyone knew when the “nukes” were being offloaded, and I often watched the civilian stevedores casually swing them by crane from the ship to awaiting railroad flatcars. I wondered what would happen if one of them fell out of the sling and hit the concrete deck. I couldn’t help but remember how Robert Oppenheimer, the “father” of the atom bomb thought of the following Hindu scripture while watching the first-ever atom bomb explode over the New Mexico desert: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
If one of the missiles fell, I had a feeling that the San Andreas fault line would be the least of Los Angeles’ worries, and that about 100 miles of the West Coast would slide off into the sea. There’s certainly precedence for ships loaded with ammunition blowing up with disastrous consequences.
The worst was probably the tremendous explosion in the harbor of Halifax, Nova Scotia. On the morning of 6 December, 1917, the SS (Steam Ship) Mont-Blanc, a French cargo ship fully loaded with 2,925 tons of gun powder, picric acid, gun cotton and benzyl, collided with the Norwegian vessel, SS Imo, in the Narrows separating the twin cities of Halifax and Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. Approximately 2,000 people in the surrounding area were killed immediately, and the blast was the largest man-made explosion in history prior to the development of nuclear weapons. In the mid-1960s, I was stationed on a small destroyer escort that pulled into Halifax regularly to refuel and resupply, and the corporate memory of the explosion was still very evident among dock workers.
I didn’t always file stories about accidents and tragedies. The first time I went ashore in Gibraltar, I came back aboard with my notebook filled with interesting facts. Gibraltar was first settled by the Phoenicians, and it was known to ancient sailors as one of the “Pillars of Hercules.” Before the chronometer was invented and nobody knew for sure what their longitude was, which was one of the reasons the Pilgrims ended up on Cape Cod instead of Virginia, their original destination, sailors headed west through the Strait of Gibraltar were afraid that they would fall off the edge of the world.
It has been an important base for the British Royal Navy since 1713, much to the consternation of the Spanish, who also claim it. In the harbor, which was Lord Horatio Nelson’s base before the Battle of Trafalgar (1805), which he won, but actually lost, being mortally wounded by a French sniper and consequently having his body sent home to England in a barrel of brandy, I saw, as far as I know, the world’s only side-paddle tug boat, busily marshalling ships of various nationalities back and forth. After Nelson was shot, he died in the arms of his Flag Captain, Thomas Hardy, and as he lay dying, his famous last words were: “Kiss me, Hardy.”
Gibraltar is riddled with tunnels, most dating from World War II, and they are still controlled by the military. If you climb to the top of the “Rock,” you need to watch out for the Barbary apes, which are bad about throwing things at you. Don’t ask what. There is a legend that they have a secret tunnel underneath the Strait of Gibraltar over to the Morocco side, about eight miles, as certain apes have been seen on both sides on the same day. Another legend or superstition is that if the apes ever leave Gibraltar, so will the British. Winston Churchill was so concerned about this that he took steps to protect them when he was Prime Minister of England.
Since Gibraltar is so small and compact, and space is at such a premium, the airport runway crosses the main street which must be blocked off whenever large airplanes land. Back in the days when “Britannia ruled the waves,” and the “Sun never set on the British Empire,” Gibraltar was the often the last stop before ships entered the Suez Canal enroute to the Red Sea and India. The main British shipping company, the P&O (Peninsular and Orient) Steamship Company, ran a regular schedule and supposedly stamped the tickets of wealthy passengers with the word, “POSH,” which stood for “Port Out, Starboard Home,” thus guaranteeing those select passengers’ cabins on the sides of the ship with more shade and sea breezes for each leg of the journey. That’s also how the word, “posh,” got into our language to indicate something special.
I also ended that seabag story by repeating a quote I’d read ashore by the dissolute French poet, Baudelaire (1821-1867), who famously said: “The only real traveler is the one who leaves just for the sake of saying ‘goodbye.”
You must be a real traveler to end up in a place like Yap, which is almost so far away that when you finally get there, since the earth is round, you are already headed back home. In the past, if you couldn’t get to out of the way islands like Yap by ship, you could always fly. Continental Airlines had a weekly “milk run” from Honolulu that went all over Micronesia, including Yap, Kosrae, Chuuk, Palau, Kwajalein, etc. It was funny, though. You could look around the airplane and all you would see were missionaries, government contractors, and obvious CIA agents. Once Continental merged with United in 2012, however, I’m not sure what happened to those flights. Of course, I got there the first time by ship.
Micronesia, which means “little islands,” consists of 2,141 separate islands, many no more than tiny dots in a seemingly endless sea. Many of the islands in this west central part of the Pacific Ocean, where a large part of World War II was fought against the Japanese, have some rather strange customs, at least to us, and the island of Yap is no exception.
For example, Yap is renowned as the land of the stone money. Colonia, the capitol, is the site of the famous stone money bank, with the money outdoors in full view. Some of the stones are the size of small houses. It’s not like Easter Island, where you walk around among the stone heads – it’s like you are in the vestibule of a bank. The stone money is used chiefly for the purchase of land and houses. When title to a particular wheel of stone money changes hands, it usually remains in its original position because everyone knows the ownership of each wheel. It’s so heavy that no one could move it, anyway.
Before we dismiss the Yapese as natives who have been out in the sun too long, perhaps we should think about some of our own money customs. Although we are told that there is gold in Fort Knox and other mysterious government-controlled places, our monetary system, since Franklin D. Roosevelt took the nation off the gold standard in 1933 (Richard Nixon took the final steps in ending convertibility of U. S. dollars to gold in 1971 to curb inflation.), has been based on paper – paper currency, paper stocks, paper bonds, etc. My daddy understood this and buried what little money he had. Unfortunately, he neglected to tell anyone where it was before he died.
My final seabag story concerns not me, but a friend of mine, Seaman Jesus Lopez, of Alice, Texas, who told me all about his opportunity to visit the Chilean Navy training ship, “Esmeralda,” while it was tied up alongside us in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Esmeralda, which means “emerald” in Spanish, was made famous by the tragic Gypsy girl character in Victor Hugo’s novel, “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” (1831).
Of all the ships in the harbor, the Esmeralda attracted the most attention. A wooden sailing ship, with sleek lines, tall masts, and graceful white sails, she conjured up romantic notions in many of us. Jesus, however, was one only one who managed to wrangle an invitation onboard for a visit. Here are some of the things he learned: Esmeralda’s homeport was in Talcahuano, Chile, their major naval port and the home of the cadet training school. The ship was almost always deployed. It returned to Chile about once every six months for an entirely new crew, and cruises alternated between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Sails were used 80% of the time, with the engine only being used when there was no wind or a schedule had to be kept. Although the ship had electric winches, etc., they were seldom used – everything was done manually to train the midshipmen. Each morning, the cadets and some of the enlisted men climbed the sail rigging for exercise. Occasionally, they fell off.
I borrowed our Navigator’s copy of “Jane’s Fighting Ships” to learn more about the history of the ship. It’s not that old. It was built in Cadiz, Spain, in 1952, for the Spanish Navy. Its original name was “Don John De Austria,” and it was bought by Chile in 1953. A four-masted schooner, Esmeralda carried 26,910 square feet of sail area and displaced 3,040 tons. The main engine was a 1,400 bhp Fiat auxiliary diesel with a range of 8,000 miles at a speed of 8 knots. The ship normally carried a crew of 271 plus 81 cadets. If you have ever driven up Interstate 95 through New London, Connecticut, you might have seen the U. S. Coast Guard’s midshipman training vessel, the USS Eagle, which looks very similar to the Esmeralda and which we received from Germany after World War II as reparations.
It was lunchtime when Jesus visited the ship, and he said the baked chicken tasted very good. Wine was served with the meal; however, his guide told him that only sergeants and above were normally permitted to drink it. Compare that to a U. S. Navy ship where the only alcohol you will find is in the chaplain’s communion wine and the doctor’s sickbay.
In case you are wondering, I never was tempted to slip some of that Yap rock money into my seabag. I knew I couldn’t spend it and besides – it wouldn’t fit.
Light a candle for me.
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Benny Hornsby of Oak Grove is a retired U.S. Navy captain. Visit his website, bennyhornsby.com, or email him: villefranche60@yahoo.com.
