Race and Class at Sea

"A flotilla of steamships sailing under the flags of several nations" (1901). Via the Library of Congress.

There were no days off. If you took a day off you were logged for four. One trip in Havana only two of my 18 galley helpers showed up for the evening meal and three of us had to prepare dinner for the passengers. There was only one problem we didn’t have—insufficient stores. Five large freezers were jammed to the bursting point with fresh meats and vegetables and the steward, fully aware that the crew would steal whatever was not delivered to the table, allowed us to feed well. But nine hours a day in a crowded, steaming galley, seven days a week, month in, month out, is work indeed. I never fried an egg or flipped a pancake without wondering “What in hell am I doing here?” One can’t work this way in a militant atmosphere without wondering about the meaning of work, exploitation, and the future—especially when one is 52! 

There were two other conditions on the Polk that aroused my political and social consciousness—the route we traveled and the character of the passengers. The Polk was on a round-the-world schedule, putting into 20 or more ports in more than a dozen countries, territories, and possessions. Usually the tourists, ashore only for the day, headed for the fanciest hotel or shopping district. At our first stop, Havana, they set course straight for the Nacional or Sloppy Joe’s, and spent most of the day in an air-conditioned bar, with, maybe, a daring sortie or two to buy a piece of lace, straw hat, or a bauble. The following day at sea they could be heard “analyzing” the problems of Cuba—the workers were lazy and filthy, the weather was too hot, prices too high, and Cuba was lucky America had taken such an interest in it—otherwise it would be worse off! They learned nothing of this island’s dictatorship which had been completely taken over by American sugar interests; its once rich, multicrop land converted into a one-crop estate which could employ the workers only a few months of the year. An Englishman could have formed equally valid views of America from a day in the Waldorf-Astoria bar!

… Few of the Polk passengers gave any thought to the problems of war or peace. That Korea had been enslaved by the Japanese since 1905, that Japanese armies had already occupied large parts of China, that its military machine had moved into the islands of the South Pacific, almost none knew or cared—they were interested only in the “quaint charm” of Japan, a ricksha tour of the parks and gardens, a visit to the Ginza for bargains, and finally, for no trip would have been complete without it, a visit to Tokyo’s Yoshiwara or Yokohama’s Homoku sections, where numbered 15-year-old prostitutes were exhibited in store windows and could be “ordered” by number for four yen the whole night! This was “doing” Japan. 

By contrast it is well to point out that by 1939 the seamen and West Coast longshoremen had already declared their own strict embargo against the shipment of scrap iron and oil to Japan, while the rest of the world was blithely trading with the aggressor. The bombs that rained over Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, were, in a very real way, our own steel chickens coming home to roost. 

— Hugh Mulzac, A Star to Steer by: As Told to Louis Burnham and Norval Welch (New York: International Publishers, 1963), 121-123. 

The boat wound through the Red Sea showing us the coast of Arabia one side and East Africa on the other. Then I remembered the visit of the Queen of Sheba to the court of the Hebrew king Soloman and also of the commercial and cultural relations of India with Mespotmaia and Egypt through the ages. A young Marathi student was proceeding to Enlgland hoping to compete for the I.C.S. and he began to squeeze something every day from me about Indian history and culture. On September 4, while we were studying together, some Indian Khalasis came with pathetic faces to tell us that a middle-aged Muslim stoker had suddenly died of heat-stroke, and far away from his relatives and friends he was given a sea-burial before our eyes. While such brave but poor Indians were dying by thousands unknown and unwept by their countrymen while serving as galley-slaves, some of the Indian students proceeding to England with us were behaving like real spoiled brats. Their parents must have provided them with fat bank balances and they appeared to be bent on specialising in the art of dressing and spending lavishly. Some of them showed an atrocious temper born of pride, for I was shocked to find two well-dressed Indian students suddenly begin fighting with each other after a short altercation on deck. It was a perfect scandal, making the Indian youths the laughing stock of other passengers. We rushed, however, to stop the fight but it took two full days for their vile tempers to cool down. On September 6, our boat would enter the Suez Canal after dinner and so the first class passengers were entertained to a fancy-dress ball with dances to the accompaniment of war tunes till the boat reached the mouth of the Suez Canal at midnight. 

— Kalidas Nag, Memoirs: Volume One, 1891-1921 (Calcutta: Writers Workshop, 1991), 88.

"United States Warship 'Intrepid': Passing through the Canal—not so long ago." Via New Middle East (January 1969).  

The previous year King Farouk, loyal to the west, had been overthrown and a new revolutionary government of Egypt led by President Naguib had taken over. Within the temporary government, Gamal Abdel Nasser was already a strong force. There were disputes simmering about the control and use of the Suez Canal. The bitterness in Anglo-Egyptian relations was already quite strong, though it would not burst into open warfare until three years later. 

So there was some tension as we waited on board, hoping that the Egyptian officers would soon come, as they eventually did, all neatly dressed in well-starched white uniforms. We passengers had formed a long queue from the deck that gave access to the shore, right to the top of the ship. I was sandwiched between two groups of rather loud men talking about the lethargy and other failings of Egyptians, and the gullibility of Egypt-loving Englishmen such as T.E. Lawrence and the archaeologist Leonard Woolley. 

An Egyptian officer came up the steps, stopped and looked at me, and asked where I was from. When I told him that I was from India, he took me straight down off the ship to the line of waiting buses, to join a cluster of people of colour (to use a modern term not then in use) who were getting into them. This was the only occasion in my whole life when my Indian citizenship resulted in favourable treatment at a border control. Since I still have only Indian citizenship, I am very used to standing in long queues at passport checkpoints, answering questions about whether I might be tempted to stay in whatever country it is I am passing through. I did not know how unusual this episode of favoured treatment would be. 

— Amartya Sen, Home in the World: A Memoir (New York: Liveright, 2022), 248-249. 

We had no idea, in any case, that for the next four or five years our little group would constitute with a few rare exceptions the entire complement of first-class passengers on the Compagnie des Transports Maritimes passenger-and-cargo steamers which plied between France and South America. We had a choice of either second-class on the only luxury-liner which worked this route, or first-class on the humbler sort of vessel. The intriguers went by luxury-liner, paid the difference out of their own pockets, and hoped by so doing to rub shoulders with an Ambassador or two and in some way profit thereby. We others chose the bateau mixte; it took six days longer, but we were its masters and, what is more, it made many stops en route. 

How I wish today that I had realized twenty years ago the full value of what we were given! The unbelievable luxury, that is to say: the royal privilege of sharing with eight or ten others exclusive rights over the first-class deck, cabins, smoking-room, and dining-room on a ship built to carry a hundred or a hundred and fifty passengers. We were nineteen days at sea; our province was rendered almost illimitable by the lack of other passengers; our appanage went everywhere with us. After our second or third crossing we came back to our ships, our own way of life; and we knew by name, even before we got aboard, those sterling stewards from Marseilles, with their moustaches and their heavy-soled shoes, who overpowered us with their garlicky smell as they bent over us with suprêmes de poularde or filet de turbot. The meals, planned in any case on a Rabelaisian scale, became even more so from the fact that there were so few of us to sit down to them. 

That one civilization is ending and another beginning; that our world has suddenly found itself to be too small for the people who live in it: these are facts which became real to me, not because of figures or statistics or revolutions but because I happened, a few weeks ago, to make a certain telephone call. I had been playing with the idea of retrieving my youth by a return visit, after fifteen years, to Brazil. The answer was that I should need to book my cabin four months in advance.

And I had imagined that, since the establishment of regular air-services between France and South America, the sea route was the preserve of a few eccentrics! It is, alas, a mistake to suppose that because one element has been invaded the other has been set free.

But in between the marvellous voyages of 1935 or thereabouts and the one to which I returned an immediate “No” there was one, in 1941, which was charged with symbolic meaning for the years to come. Shortly after the armistice I was invited to the New School for Social Research in New York. (This I owed in part to the friendly interest which had been taken in my work by Robert H. Lowie and Alfred Metraux, in part to the vigilance of relations of mine long settled in the U.S.A., and, finally, to the Rockefeller Foundation s scheme for the rescue of European scholars who might find themselves menaced by the German occupation.) The problem was: how to get there? My first idea was that I should pretend to be returning to Brazil in order to continue my pre-war research there. I went to the ground-floor rooms in Vichy, where the Brazilian Embassy had set up its temporary home, and asked to have my visa renewed. The interview was cruelly brief. I was well known to the Ambassador, Luis de Souza-Dantas, and he would, in any case, have behaved in the same way had I not known him. He was just raising his hand to stamp my passport when one of his staff reminded him, in tones of chilling respect, that under the new regulations he could no longer renew visas. For several seconds his arm remained poised, and there was a look almost of entreaty in his eyes as he tried to make his junior turn aside for a moment. My passport once stamped, I could at least have left France, even if I could not get into Brazil. But he wouldn’t; and at length the Ambassador had to let fall his hand wide of my passport. No visa for me; he handed me back my passport with a gesture of distress.

… but I saw myself as marked down for a concentration camp. Moreover, I had spent the previous two years, first in the virgin forests of Brazil, and later in one improvised billet after another in the course of a disorderly retreat that had taken me from the Maginot Line to Beziers by way of the Sarthe, the Correze, and the Aveyron: cattle-trains on the one hand and sheepfolds on the other: so that my interlocutor s scruples seemed to me out of place. I saw myself going back to my wandering life but on the oceans this time, sharing the labours and die frugal repasts of a handful of seamen, sailing hither and yon on a clandestine vessel, sleeping on deck, and gaining in health and strength from the day-long nearness of the sea. 

I did at last get a ticket for the Capitaine Paul Lemerle. When the time came to embark the quayside was cordoned off. Helmeted gardes-mobiles, with automatic pistols at the ready, severed all contact between passengers and the relatives or friends who had come to see them off. Good-byes were cut short by a blow or a curse. This was not the solitary adventure I had had in mind; it was more like the departure of a convict-ship.

— Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, Translated by John Russel, (New York: Criterion Books, 1961 [1955]), 23-25.