Published by iUniverse, Inc., 2021 Pine Lake Road, Suite 100, Lincoln, NE 68512
ISBN: 0-595-30117-7 (pbk) / ISBN: 0-595-66132-7 (cloth)
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Reviewed by Donald Gunn Ross III
A word to all those who contemplate running away to sea. At last there is a really good book to be released in March '04 that will let you know just what you are getting into: The Last American Sailors: A Wild Ride in the Merchant Marine. Michael R. Rawlins captures the essence of his past decade in the merchant marine, and sheds much light on the lives of the merchant seamen cast of characters that sail aboard the merchant fleets and all that that entails. We are talking about some really strange adventures here, on land and at sea. For Rawlins is an intelligent keen-eyed observer who learned early on to keep his wits about him at all times, especially as those around him were losing theirs, sometimes wondering about just what he had gotten himself into after signing on aboard different ships. Rawlins, however, stays on course with his second career choice, after having left the world of broadcasting for a life on the water, all the while milling it around for an eventual book. It is an amazing tale to tell as Rawlins tries to set the record straight about the merchant marine and the mysterious world of merchant shipping.
According to Rawlins:
"Merchant marine" is a broad term defining a nation's publicly or privately owned vessels. It also refers to the personnel operating such ships. These ships include cargo vessels, oil tankers, and passenger ships. If you work on a cruise ship, ocean-going tug, or car carrier, you are in the merchant marine.
Rawlins' adventures at sea were on cargo vessels and tankers primarily, but he takes a broad overview with his matter of fact history of the merchant marine choked full of his personal observations into the human element and what the merchant marine was in the old days as well as the changing life of the mariner and what it has become in modern times.
In the opening paragraphs of Chapter six Rawlins writes:
Ah, the romance of the sea! Nothing but beautiful sunsets, the fresh breeze in your face, exotic drinks in exotic locales, warm, dark beauties to fall in love with.
You are exposed to the sea in glowing, romantic terms in books, poetry, music and movies. Hemingway wrote majestically of an old man's heroic fight with a giant marlin off the coast of Cuba. Jimmy Buffet sings about "Mother, Mother Ocean" and the Beach Boys about the "Sloop John B." Errol Flynn heroically wielded cutlasses on the big screen. There are C. S. Forester's epic swashbuckling adventures in the Horatio Hornblower series Raw, briny fare like Moby Dick is presented as a larger than life, heroic tale, even the tragic story of over 1.500 lives lost in the north Atlantic is given a romantic, Romeo and Juliet twist in the film Titanic.
Having not sailed in the days when "ships were wooden and men were iron," my impressions of a sailors life are hardly viewed through a swashbuckler's lens. However when I read lines such as "The sailor, he has a tremendous respect for the ocean blue and a personal attachment to the vessel he lives on. He feels the power of the waters coursing through the rail under his palms," forgive me, but that is Hollywood. My response to "The sailor, he knows the difference between a strong breeze and a gale," is to say, Yeah, I know the difference. I look it up on the Beaufort wind scale." Perhaps I look at nautical affairs with a jaundiced eye, envious of those who lived on the high seas.
For many, going to sea is viewed as a job in a floating office or warehouse. This is not my view (most of the time). It has afforded me a great deal of travel to places where I otherwise would never have dreamed of setting foot. It has given me contact with all sorts of different cultures. Merchant mariners are perhaps the most open-minded group of people with respect to their attitudes toward people of different skin colors and belief systems. To that end I have worked alongside men and women, old and young, elitists and hillbillies, lawyers and homeless, ex-cons, blacks and whites, Filipinos, Vietnamese, West Africans, Arabs, Chinese, Mexicans, Germans, Samoans, Jamaicans, Greeks, Poles, Russians, Hondurans, the list goes on. Yes, it is a lifestyle unlike any other, but primarily it is a job like anything else. For the most part you are counting down the days as soon as you set foot on the vessel. Many sailors cross off days on their calendars and will write, "only 25 MFD's to go," D standing for days.
There are many reasons why people join the merchant marine and Rawlins delves into this in chapter six. He answers the personal questions most often asked in the "Questions of the Game" Chapter 4, and there really are lots of questions out there, some of them dumb, that get asked all the time for the profession is a mysterious way of life to most people. Rawlins handles this chapter with a self-depreciating sense of humor and lots of personal anecdotes and observations about the profession and answers such questions as: Are their pirates out there? The answer is "yes" and Rawlins has the facts and stories here. Sometimes people do ask the right questions, like, What is it like looking up at the stars.
It is like spending a moment of time all by yourself. To see Orion's Belt with rare, crystal clarity on a cold winter's night off the British Columbia coast is breathtaking. Shooting four obscure stars with a sextant and successfully taking a fix brings the satisfaction of knowing that all of your celestial navigation training has paid off. It is easy to understand why Crosby, Stills and Nash sang about seeing the constellation the Southern Cross "for the first time."
Clearly the merchant marine has its moments. Every sailor has his personal tale to tell. And Rawlins' "wild ride" is just that, a fast-paced tale of a decade at sea aboard different ships that jumps around on land and sea and in the air in the telling. Starting off with chapter one, A Typical Strange Day in the Business, that sets the pace and the hook.
Rawlins' narrative puts the reader right there on deck with him, or wherever else the adventure goes, summing up the action as it moves along, particularly sizing up the crew that he sails with, and this is where the storytelling shines. Such chapter titles as: Suez Madness, Ship of Fools, Blood Money, You are a Seaman When. . ., Surviving the Sealift Tankers, The Return of Jake the Third, Sea Stories, Tropical Snow, A Good Night for Sabotage, and Back To New Jersey offer a glimpse of what the reader is in for.
For anything that can go wrong eventually will go wrong out there on the high seas, or wherever else the action goes, and Rawlins has a way with words that catches the irony of it all and does so with good style.
Michael R. Rawlins
