Columbia Baron, part 2

Repairs were needed to the bricks in the fire room after the explosion during lighting off in Texas, but all we really did was bunker in Trinidad. this involved being anchored for a couple of nights there and gave me a chance to explore.. I never had been anywhere tropical, so most of the day was spent walking around town looking at all the weird trees and just soaking it in. The night before I'd gone ashore on the launch with a few of the other guys who seemed to know where to go. As soon as we stepped on the dock we were met by "shore pilots" a common occurrence in any third world port in those days. Someone who hopes to benefit from steering you in the direction of one place of business or another. This tropical gentleman steered us to the Admiral Benbow Inn, a few blocks from the dock. This was a place where you could order drinks and dance with the girls. There was also "rooms" in the back which had chicken wire walls above 6'. No air conditioning. It was the first time I had ever seen a juke box with a video screen. In fact, the only time. One of the girls that sat at our table was very interested in the leather wrist band I had worn. It had a place in it for folding money and she wanted me to take it off. That didn't happen.. and I made it clear that I didn't want to dance either.
Surviving the first port, some kids my age threw rocks at me when I ventured away from the center of town, so I went back down the flower covered streets and found the launch boat again. When we finally heaved anchor and steamed out around the island all the old guys were passed out, drunk in their rooms. When the Captain called down for us to secure the gangway, as it was still rigged outboard and the ship was starting to roll in the Ocean swell, no one showed up to help the Bos'n except us ordinary seaman. This became quite a chore as this steel stairway was hinged at the turntable at the upper end and was moving around a lot. We got a few lines around it and took the stanchions out, then folded it back inboard to its stowed position. When the ABs sobered up and tried to tell us we were too young to work with them on the hatch tops, maintaining the cargo gear, we called them on it and the Bos'n backed us up. So our lot in life improved, as long as we stayed sober.
We had lost the third mate to a stroke while we were anchored there, taking fuel. He was an old Norwegian sailor, who had started on square riggers when he was 12 years old, fifty years before, in 1920. He had really cool tattoos, the old kind, that spoke about a seafaring life that no longer in existed. Just think, when he was 18 guys he worked with that had been sailing for fifty years had started to sea in the 1870s. As he was carried down the gangway in a stretcher I spoke up to the Bos'n that I wanted to go home too, since I had been sea sick the whole way (9 days) from Texas. He turned to someone on the upper deck who I hadn't ever met and said "Captain, this kid says he's sick and wants to go home" The answer: "Tell him he signed on for a year" I didn't ask again. Felt better soon after that as well..
the trip to Durban (the Suez canal was closed due to fighting between Israel and Egypt) took over two weeks at 12 kts. Once we crossed the equator the air got cooler and drier, and the swells longer and higher. The constellations of the N hemisphere sank below the northern horizon a little more each night and strange ones rose higher in the southern sky. As I stood my lookout, on the dark and silent steamship I could see Scorpio really take shape, claws first and finally the whole tail, covering that whole quadrant of the zodiac. Finally the Southern Cross, around which the southern celestial hemisphere turns, spoke of another section of the galaxy that had been hidden from me my whole life. Ships are "space ships" in a really low, slow orbit. More so in those days when the only way to know where you were was to triangulate the stars. The fact that we traveled along on a curved surface just made it seem all the more as if we were thrust out into space, the atmosphere acting as our windshield. Navigators are completely caught up in these facts: the earth is turning on its axis 900 mph (at the equator) The sun takes 365 days to circumnavigate and due to earth's tilted axis, precession the seasons take place. Add our speed and direction and there is plenty to account for before you know where you might be under heaven. There's local apparent time, zone time, Greenwich mean time.
None of this mattered too much to me at that time. We approached Durban in close to the coast of South Africa. A little more repair work to the fire brick, more bunker fuel and I managed to go ashore for a day. The city sits on a low bluff looking east into the Indian Ocean. The surf is good enough to attract even Australians. Because of Apartheid, the black part of town was as off limits to us as the city was to them. This struck me as an unsustainable situation. I had to pass by a black night club on the way back to the ship, and since I had sat in a white night club without talking to anyone earlier I was reminded of Trinidad where everyone (all black) had talked to us! Just as I passed the front door a fight burst through the front door, or rather a stabbing victim of a fight. He lay there on the side walk, bleeding so that I had to pass around him and still no one would even look at me or acknowledge my existence. Amazing. Hope he made it. I made it back to the ship and we sailed for Colombo.
The seas were rough most of the way, the first day out of port we all had to go on deck to secure everything, the ship changed course and slowed down so we wouldn't be swept overboard, but we still got plenty wet and hung on to a line rigged fore and aft to go anywhere. I said "25 foot seas" in my journal (which didn't have much information in it about such conditions) You can smell India as you cross the Indian Ocean. They burn cow dung for cooking. As you get closer the overall sense is that the other side of the world is "a world apart" where everything is different. "Caution" doesn't describe the feeling that you get.. Of course once you're there and find out that people, animals, plants all live and thrive there you are drawn into that dreamy, eastern realm trying to understand, knowing you will never figure it out or fit in.