LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

continues to make shipping news a major feature of daily coverage, rivaling the more specialized press, such as the New York-based Journal of Commerce, in the depth of its reporting.

      One can argue correctly that this disappearance is coincident with New York City’s decline as a seaport. But this argument misses the point that the combined Port of New York and New Jersey remains second only to Los Angeles and Long Beach on the west coast as the preeminent port in the Americas. But the working port is invisible from Manhattan and increasingly so from Brooklyn, with the main cargo terminals relocated with the advent of containerization to Port Elizabeth and Port Newark.

      The metropolitan gaze no longer falls upon the waterfront, and a cognitive blankness follows. Thus despite increasing international mercantile dependence on ocean transport, and despite advances in oceanography and marine biology, the sea is in many respects less comprehensible to today’s elites than it was before 1945, in the nineteenth-century, or even during the Enlightenment.

      This incomprehension is the product of forgetting and disavowal. In this sense elites become incapable of recognizing their own, outside of narrow specialist circles. Consider, by contrast, the obscurity of Malcom McLean, the trucking executive who initiated containerized cargo movement in 1956, alongside the historical and cultural importance accorded to Donald McKay, the nineteenth-century Boston clipper-ship builder. In his American Renaissance of 1941, F.O. Matthiessen reproduced as a frontispiece a striking daguerreotype portrait of McKay by Southworth and Hawes:

      McKay’s portrait makes the most fitting frontispiece, since it reveals the type of character with which the writers of the age were most concerned, the common man in his heroic stature, or as Whitman called the new type, “Man in the Open Air.”³¹

      Matthiessen’s choice reflects both the legacy of American romanticism and the pragmatism of a nation entering a convoy war in the North Atlantic. But the line leading from American romanticism to American pragmatism has since been broken. The new model hero, in an age that celebrates cunning survivors of corporate bankruptcies and victorious commanding generals in wars against abysmally inferior opponents, is less Walt Whitman’s “common man” than Herman Melville’s archetypal American swindler, the Confidence-Man.

      MIDDLE PASSAGE

      27

      28

      29

      30

      31

      GHOST SHIP

       Le Corps d’un Américain découvert à bord d’un voilier à la dérive

      FALMOUTH. – Le corps d’un Américain de 63 ans mort dans des circonstances mystérieuses a été retrouvé samedi à bord d’un voilier dérivant à plus de 1.000 kilomètres au sud-ouest des côtes britanniques, tandis que sa femme ne se trouvait plus à bord. Les gardes-côtes ont précisé que le “Happy End” était enregistré dans l’Alabama et qu’il avait quitté les côtes américaines le 1^er novembre à destination de l’Irlande avec à son bord le propriétaire du bateau, Gerald Hardesty et son épouse Carol, âgée de 60 ans. Un membre d’équipage d’un porte-tontainer américain, le “Sealand Quality”, a pu monter sur le voilier repéré à la dérive vendredi par un cargo norvégien et voir le corps du propriétaire du bateau, Gerald Hardesty, mort selon lui depuis deux ou trois jours.

      Enlarged photocopy of clipping from unidentified Cherbourg newspaper brought aboard by the North Sea pilot and posted by the captain without translation in the officers’ and crew’s mess rooms, Sea-Land Quality.

      As the crew filed back into the house from the main deck after the memorial service for the two Americans, the usually taciturn captain announced to no one in particular and everyone in general: “Well, that should put an end to all the ghost stories that have been going around.”

      FIRE AND EMERGENCY

      Muster at boat station

      ABANDON SHIP

      Muster at station

      NUCLEAR, BIOLOGICAL, CHEMICAL WARFARE

      Remain in stateroom

      Notice engraved on steel plate bolted to stateroom bulkhead, Sea-Land Quality.

      THE BO’SUN’S STORY

      “Black-and-white photos tell the truth. That’s why insurance companies use them.”

      32

      33

      34

      35

      36

      37

      38

      39

      40

      41

      42

      43

      WORKERS' MUSEUM

      Question?

      De-flagging.

      Is it true

      Sea-Land will

      use Russian officers

      with Vietnamese crew?

      They are digging

      up Jack Kennedy

      to see if he’s rolled

      in his grave.

      They couldn’t beat us

      so they’ll unemploy us!

      God bless corporate America.

      Handwritten message on yellow legal pad, engine-room bulletin board, Sea-Land Quality.

      Launched in 1984, the Sea-Land Quality was one of the first ships built at the Daewoo shipyard on the island of Keoje off the southeast coast of South Korea, and one of a series of “econships” commissioned by the now-defunct United States Lines of Malcom McLean, the

Скачать книгу