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Fifth Expedition
SEPTEMBER 1972âJUNE 1973
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Chapter 10
Travel by SeaâThe African Lightning
âSHE HAS INSULTED THE
GOVERNMENT OF GUINEA!
SHE GOES ASHORE!â
ONCE AGAIN, we were headed off to Africa. Dr. Antonio Machado of DIAMANG, the Diamond Company of Angola, had invited us to spend several months at the companyâs huge holdings in northeastern Angola. There was a virtual war going on in Angola, but he assured us we would be safe under the companyâs care. Then Rud Boulton wrote excitedly that he had secured permission to visit a seldom-seen section of the Okavango Swamps in Botswana; did we want to go on another tented safari with his crew? How could we refuse? Dave secured another sabbatical from California State University, Chico; the National Science Foundation supplied a grant; and we were on our way.
This time, we set off on the Farrell Lines C3 freighter the African Lightning, traveling nonstop from New York to Walvis Bay, South-West Africa/Namibia. Our 1970 Buick station wagon was going, too, to save on car rental fees.
The New York skyline shone with a million lights and bridges looked like lighted spiderwebs as the Lightning slowly moved away from the dock. The Statue of Liberty seemed to wave her golden torch.
We awoke in Philadelphia. Philadelphia? I didnât know one sailed to Philadelphia. Overnight, we had traversed the coast of New Jersey and then sailed 100 miles up the Delaware River.
Two massive blue-and-yellow General Motors locomotives waited on the pier. They, too, were going to Africa. The locomotives had been purchased by a large bauxite consortium to move ore in Guinea to an aluminum smelter. Getting them aboard was a mammoth job; extra reinforcements were needed to support the deck. Since our station wagon was in a hold directly beneath the engines, I trusted the engines were to be off-loaded before we landed in Walvis Bay. Our route was supposed to be nonstop, but somehow I didnât think it would work out that way. Unlike the captains of luxury liners, freighter captains may change the itinerary to fit their freight commitments.
The first locomotive came within a hair of hitting the warehouse when it swung free from the dock, creating a horror for the crane operator. The engine, so big it extended from railing to railing across the ship, was inched over the number four hatch just behind the bridge. Workmen spent hours chaining and securing it only to discover that it had to be moved a few feet to make room for the second engine.
A week after we had left New York with much tooting and shouting, we pulled away from the dock in Philadelphia and headed to sea. We were really on our way. Good-bye, U.S.A.
We became fond of the African Lightning. Granted, she was a rusty twenty-five-year-old headed out on her last voyage. She would have been mothballed by now but was sailing one more time because she was the fleetâs only ship with an onboard crane big enough to unload the locomotives. In the eyes of the children, she was the Queen Mary.
Daveâs and my nine-foot-square stateroom was made of blue steel, with a rubber tile floor and an overhead fan. In this cubicle were two bunks, two closets, two portholes, one dresser, and a desk. The interior bathroom smelled as if something had died belowdecks. Hooks fastened the doors to the wall. Alzada and Kymry had the adjoining cabin; a screen door at the head of a tiny hallway made our two cabins into a suite. With no air conditioning, we latched open the inside doors in an attempt to gain even a hint of cross ventilation.
We were joined by six other passengers who had chosen this mode of travel because they either had heavy household items to transport or simply relished the opportunity to spend a month at sea. The two French Canadian nuns were by far the liveliest. They set up their tape recorder on deck and merrily danced the cha-cha. Their laughter reverberated throughout the ship. The two elderly South African widows were polar opposites. Mrs. DePrie was a good scout with a fondness for telling wicked stories. The other, Mrs. Factor, was small and shy but a whiner nonetheless. Professor Seit and his wife were pompous and demanding, insisting on a new cabin even though the change forced the elderly ladies to move.
Breakfast was served from 7:30 to 8:30 A.M., dinner from 11:30 A.M. to 12:30 P.M., and supper from 5:00 to 6:00 P.M. Tea was served at 3:30, and an evening snack was provided at 9:00. We ate with the officers. Captain Shuttleworth riveted us with tales of being torpedoed during World War II and then spending twenty-three days in a lifeboat in the North Atlantic. His adventures made our outings seem totally uneventful.
Bells and whistles blasted on our first morning at sea; it was time for lifeboat drill. Grabbing our orange life jackets, we headed up to our boat station. Half of the crew, the nuns, and our family had the starboard lifeboat. The crew members looked as if they just stepped out of a whale boat in Moby Dickâthey were grizzled, grimy, rugged men. Donning blue woolen caps, greasy dungarees, and orange life jackets, they manhandled the lifeboat down the side of the ship and then hauled it back up, pulling together on a hand winch. This was no cruise ship staffed by sailors in spiffy white uniforms. I fervently hoped the old Lightning would not sink. Passengers would be low on the list of priorities.
Several days out, Captain Shuttleworth hosted a cocktail party. The chief steward organized some hors dâoeuvres on crackers and the chief engineer brought out his recorder and some tapes. It was my first cocktail party to the tune of âOnward, Christian Soldiers.â The nuns polished off gin and tonics with cheery goodwill. At the five oâclock dinner gong, the professor and his wife rose abruptly and left, unaware of the protocol that one does not leave before the captain. The party continued until a quarter of six, when we marched off to a fancy dinner. We were offered something called âCrumbâs Puddingâ for dessert and concluded that the cookâs name must be Crumb. (It wasnât, but we called him Crumb anyway.)
As the old Lightning pitched and rolled across the Atlantic Ocean, we settled into a routine dominated by schoolwork. Kymry was laboring over fifth-grade lessons from our beloved Calvert School while Alzada was grinding away at ninth-grade work from the University of Nebraska, which offered high school courses by correspondence. I taught the morning lesson and Dave taught in the afternoon, although for the most part, the girls followed their own manuals and just came to us when they were stuck. They aimed at two lessons a day. We had to get as much as possible done at sea because once we were ashore, our interest would be focused elsewhere and our lives would be much less predictable.
The African Lightning carried $15,000 worth of provisions, enough to sustain its company for 120 daysâaround Africa, through the Mediterranean Sea, and back to New York. One large galley served the whole ship; officers, passengers, and crew had the same menu. Granted a brief tour of the galley and storage facilities two decks below, we poked into pantries, freezers, storage bins, and a cooler for vegetables. The chief steward mentioned that if anyone took a shower while Crumb was drawing water, it might vary in temperature, shedding light on why we had found ourselves alternately scalded and frozen.
John Riggsby, the chief engineer and the only four-striper besides the captain, gave us a detailed tour of the shipâs bowels. We climbed ever deeper down steel ladders and across catwalks until we were down at the very bottom. There, the huge shaft that turns the propeller was rotating. Fitting my picture of Hell, steaming, hissing, and pounding machinesâblowers, pumps, and boilersâreverberated in hot steel, trapping us in the engine room.
If the throbbing engine room was the heart of the ship, the bridge was surely the brains. Bristling with electronic equipment and blessed with an all-encompassing view during the day, the bridge had the quiet of the heavens at night, staffed by one or two senior officers and the helmsman. We learned about the gyrocompass, the automatic pilot, the charts, and the communication devices. Alzada spotted another ship on the Lightningâs radar screen.
Life settled into a cozy routine of schoolwork and jigsaw puzzles. In the evenings, most of the passengers gathered in the shipâs one small lounge. That was where we taught the nuns a board game called Lie, Cheat, and Stealâsimilar to Monopoly. The good sisters pealed with laughter when they were caught lying or cheating.
The widows knitted endless afghan squares while the Seits, the nuns, and Alzada played Lie, Cheat, and Steal. When Dave and I found out that the mate and chief engineer were bridge players, we played bridge with them. Kymry and the captain often played on the carpet with paper boats folded from napkins. We had extended our family.
After twenty lessons, Kymry took her first exam. The arithmetic test required her to make a scale diagram of her cabin. She had great difficulty visualizing the placement of bunks and other pieces of furniture and spent hours doing and redoing the diagram. All during the evening bridge game, this little person with a smudgy diagram would reappear to have her drawing checked, only to learn that something was awry. First, the dresser was directly in front of the bathroom door. The chief engineer loaned her his long ruler. When she came back again, the toilet was bigger than the shower. âYouâre a hard man, Magee,â said the mate to Dave as he sent the child away to redo the drawing. Back again.There was silence from the bridge players as we each hoped she finally had it right. âOkay! Now trace it to send in to Baltimore.â We continued the game with lifted spirits. Because Kymry finished her exam, we gave both children the next day off. It was the first day since we had gone to sea that they did not study at least six hours.
Lifeboat drill again. Every time I looked at those scruffy roughnecks who were supposed to be our saviors, I wished I had done more serious swimming. But looks aside, our âPirates of Penzanceâ were good sailors.
As we approached Africa, it was apparent that we had been sailing almost straight east to the big western bulge of the continent. Doubts began to surface among the officers. To get to the mines beyond Kamsar, Guinea, we had to sail up the Rio Nunez and into a lagoon. Would we off-load the locomotives successfully? And, once there, how soon would we leave? The logistics were daunting. Because the Lightning was too big to pull up to the dock, she had to anchor in the lagoon, where a barge would retrieve the locomotives. I visualized a platform strapped across six canoes. The locomotive would have to be dead center on the barge or the barge would flip over. To make matters worse, the weather was usually windy and rainy, so the barge would be bobbing up and down. Then, when the 100 tons of engine touched the barge and transferred its weight from the ship, the ship could roll back and pull the locomotive off centerâover goes the barge, and down goes the locomotive.
We passengers had been listening to these horror stories with fascination and foreboding. We felt sure that the officers would wait for a dead calm day before they tried the first maneuver, but the right conditions might be days in coming. Still, if everything moved along with maximum efficiency, we would unload the two locomotives and be out in four days. I thought we would be lucky to be out in six.
Over dinner, the officers indicated that the entire operation was an exercise in futility. The Guineans had neither the expertise nor the spare parts that would be needed to maintain the engines in a wet, tropical climate. Equipment worth $1 million would soon rust in the jungle.
On top of everything else, the politics of the operation were decidedly dicey. The African Lightning had to enter the harbor between 6:00 A.M. and noon or the Guineans would blow us out of the water. No one would be allowed off the ship, and no radio contact would be allowed once we were in the harbor. The Guineans were still furious at France and considered the United States another colonial power and a friend of France to boot. They were especially bitter about the abrupt way in which independence had been achieved. After Guinea declared independence, France invited the country to join the French Community. When Guinea declined to join, the French nationals left, taking every bit of equipment with them, including typewriters, telephones, adding machines, electrical connections, and cash registers. Business came to a halt, the countryâs infrastructure was in shambles, and anger was rampant. The freighter African Star had taken a shell in the passenger quarters. Fortunately, no passengers were aboard.
During our upcoming layover in the lagoon, Dave hoped to have termite nests brought to the ship. If he could get nests, he wouldnât care how long we were delayed in Kamsar. If not, and he had to stare from the shipâs decks at an untouchable forest filled with unobtainable termitophiles, he would be an unfit companion.
The ship was slowing down. We had been at sea for fourteen days and could finally glimpse faint outlines of the western coast of Africa. The second mate had been radioing officials in Kamsar for two days to announce our arrival time but had received no reply. The local pilot, a Guinean captain, was to meet us at 6:00 A.M. outside the mouth of the Rio Nunez. The pilot knew the waters of the narrow, shallow river; he would navigate. We were late, pulling up at 9:00 A.M. No pilot. When he finally arrived at 11:30, the tide was out and we had to creep past protruding sandbars. All the way up the river cannons were trained on the ship. For three hours, we would catch glimpses of gun emplacements almost covered up by tall grass or see a flash of gunmetal in the jungle. In light of what had happened to the African Star, the passengers didnât go below.
Once we were anchored in Kamsarâs lagoon, the immigration and customs officials came on board. They carefully checked our passports, even though no one would be allowed ashore. Then they sat in the lounge for the rest of the day, drinking beer. The officials who preempted the lounge did little to improve relations.
Soon, a barge arrived filled with workmen, who climbed up ropes and ladders, covering the ship like ants. Alzada and I watched, amazed, as they stole everything that was not nailed down. We saw ropes, books, cups and saucers, potatoes, towels, magazines, work gloves, a University of Illinois sweatshirt, bottles, coffee cans, and dinner rolls disappear onto the barge. The men unloaded a small amount of freight, too. The captain and crew rigidly looked on in silence; a confrontation might turn unpleasant. With its government in shambles, Guineaâs reaction to any trouble would be problematic at best and perhaps violent.
If all went well, we could get away from Guinea in four days. It would be none too soonâthe shipâs boiler leaked, the radar was inconsistent, and our drinking water was brackish.
When Professor Seit pulled out his camera and ...
