Work at Sea: How to Get a Freighter Job
(Page 3 of 4)
May/June 1971
The Mother Earth News editors
The work on deck is sometimes dirty (cleaning up oil or greasing cables), sometimes heavy (putting away hardware that secures the deck cargo) and most of the time menial (scraping rust and painting). But there are consolations. For one thing, you're out in the sun and clean sea air working more or less on your own and, for another, you're doing something different every day.
RELATED CONTENT
A job on a vessel beats most work situations in this country (where workers hate their grind, do the minimum and can't wait for the day to end). On a ship the crew knows what has to be done, they do it right and they take pride in their labor. The situation is very relaxed, everyone works at his own pace, no one is pushed and there's no time clock to punch. It's what gets done —and not time put in—that counts.
"Good, working people" is the best way to describe sailors. The crew I joined was really great . . . not at all like the hard, rough cutthroats I'd imagined. Working on a ship is sometimes dangerous (you can easily get hit by the huge hooks that swing from the cranes or have your fingers squashed in machinery) so crew members always watch out for one another. I was really surprised at the way we all stuck together, especially in port.
Although none of the able seamen had long hair, they accepted mine from the beginning. Apparently, most people making just one trip on a vessel do as little as possible and the other hands liked me because I did my work and did it well. I found it much easier to keep busy than to stand around-bored-doing nothing.
Gradually the crew accepted me as one of their own and we did a lot of rapping (they all spoke good English and one could talk fluently in five languages). Most hands were Danish (one was dodging the draft in Denmark) but the ship's complement also included a Chilean, an Australian, a Swede, an Irishman, a French Canadian and a Greenland Eskimo. They all had interesting stories of the places they'd been.
Life aboard the freighter was good but the routine did get a little boring. We spent our evenings playing cards, reading, writing letters (all postage was paid by the ship) or just sitting in the messroom talking. A movie was shown twice a week while we were at sea. Some of the films were good, most were bad and a few weren't even in English. The chief steward opened the ship's stores twice a week also and we bought things like soap and candy against our pay. Everything was duty free and some of these items were really inexpensive (a carton of cigarettes cost $1.75).
The food was excellent and plentiful and the variety served at each meal was amazing . . . within limits. The Scandinavians are meat, cheese and bread eaters and they don't have much of a sweet tooth. Dessert during the week was fresh fruit with Danish pastry served only on Sundays. Still, even though I ate no meat on the trip, I never once left the table hungry.
