There's more than one way to cross the Atlantic
“Today our course is more directly towards the setting sun than yesterday. We stood on the forward section of the upper deck for a long time and contemplated our progress westward through the ocean’s vastness.” RMS Rotterdam, May 1934, Diaries of Thomas MannOn August 31 last year I left Washington, DC, where I had been visiting relatives and drove up to the port of Chester in Philadelphia. There, together with my nine-year-old son, Zooey, I went aboard the M/V Independent Trader , a cargo vessel carrying 19,000 tons of freight, for a ten-day voyage across the Atlantic. It was a trip I had wanted to take for years, firstly because I had always been terrified of flying and secondly because I was filled with romantic notions of life at sea. My rose-tinted view of maritime travel had reached new heights after reading the diaries of another—former—resident of Munich, the writer Thomas Mann, who had crossed the Atlantic twice by ship in the mid-1930s and later, in 1938, on his way to America, where he lived in exile.
Chester’s industrial port is certainly a far cry from New York’s quayside. No crowds waving, no sleek ocean liners and scurrying porters. Just a concrete wasteland, an unsightly orange and white craft and the over-powering smell of oil and grease.
Oh well, I thought. Luxury isn’t everything. What about poor Father Joseph Benedikt Peruschitz, a cleric and native of Wolfratshausen, who must have thought he was in for a comfortable ride when he boarded a new luxury liner in Southampton on April 10, 1912, to start a new life in America. Instead he is commemorated on a plaque in the cloisters of Scheyern Monastery 40 miles north of Munich—“May Joseph Peruschitz rest in peace, who on the Titanic ship piously sacrificed himself.”
Our cabin was cozy and equipped with all mod cons: an en suite bathroom, a fridge, plus TV and video. After a quick wash we went down to the dining room for dinner with the captain and the chief officers.
“To dinner in the serenely romantic dining salon. Caviar, soup, tournedos, and ice-cream. Chablis and coffee.” Queen Mary, February 1938
Prosaic by comparison: lamb curry, green beans and rice were served as our first dinner aboard the ship but we were sitting at the captain’s table and, as there were no other passengers, we would continue to do so every meal until we docked in Antwerp. Tall and gray-haired, Captain Otte spoke in the dialect of Hamburg, which many Germans immediately associate with seafaring folk. Life at sea does not seem to encourage loquacity and if it had not been for the captain’s wife, mealtimes would have been very quiet. However, Frau Otte explained everything we wanted to know about the ship and answered all our ignorant questions with great charm.
We quickly settled into a lazy routine, helped by wonderful weather and smooth sailing. In the mornings we lay in chairs on our own little deck. There was even a small swimming pool but it was deep and filled with seawater, which rather unnerved Zooey. The sensation of being surrounded by the deep blue sea was what I had craved but in fact I found the feeling enervating and unsettling and it took more getting used to than I had anticipated. In the afternoon we would go up to the bridge and look out for dolphins or follow the progress of the ship, which the first officer marked out with a pencil and a pair of compasses on a navigational chart.
Zooey was by far the youngest passenger ever to travel on the Independent Trader . To help keep him occupied, the captain taught him how to announce the time change over the ship’s loudspeakers every evening.
“The sea was very rough, the ship rolled, creaked, groaned and pitched most unpleasantly.” Berengaria, July 1935
In the English Channel, one of the busiest waterways in the world, we needed to take a pilot on board to steer us into the docks in Antwerp. But now the weather had turned nasty and the sea was rough so the pilot had to be brought aboard by helicopter rather than the usual launch. Zooey and I watched in amazement as the helicopter, juddering in the wind, came to within a few feet of the ship. We could make out a pair of legs hanging from the open door and then slowly the pilot was lowered down to the bridge.
We disembarked the following day and, even on the cold, foggy Antwerp docks, with a ten-hour train journey ahead, it felt good to be on terra firma. Waking up the next morning (September 11) in my own bed in Munich I wondered whether I would recommend freight travel to other nervous air travelers. It was certainly not cheap (about € 1,800 for the two of us) and bad weather could have made it into a nasty experience, but it was a great adventure and preferable to the stomach-churning angst of plane travel any day.
