ss Mariekerk December 1959

Above is the ss Gaasterkerk, the same type as the ss Mariekerk which were Victory Class ships built in the USA in WWII. I sailed on several, including this one.

My first trip.

I was the  ship pantry boy, but the first time I served food nobody came. I thought ‘to hell with this’ and threw the food away and put the plates back. Then suddenly all these guys came rushing in, drunk and shouting for food. I reckon they must have been shanghaied from the bars. They were always fighting. And they had the hatches on the ship ringed off as a boxing ring. A boatswain would be the referee. It was bare fist stuff, settling disputes and that kind of thing.

So I was frankly scared when they came swarming in. I was just one metre forty-five and a teenager! I locked myself in the pantry and these big guys were banging to get in. But when I eventually came out and explained, they weren’t so hard on me.

In fact I was quite well protected by the elders. Oh and educated into a sea-dog’s way as well. When we docked they took me on shore to bars and whores. I liked the idea of breaking out. In fact I sometimes felt as though I had a hoard of fathers keeping an eye on me. They were paternal in a hard way, but fair and if they thought I had a problem they were there for me.

I served the whole crew making beds, cleaning the toilets and so on. In the afternoon I was splicing, doing the derrricks, painting and steering and at the end of a trip the crew always tipped me.

You need a hobby….

1959 Pollux – Amsterdam

1959 Pollux – Amsterdam

1959 Pollux – Amsterdam

1959 Pollux – Amsterdam

mv “Banggai” Calcutta

N-Atlantic

New Orleans 1964

mv “Banggai” Chile

India 1960

1967

N- Atlantic

Kobe , Japan 1963

Kobe

KNSM

Houston Texas 1962

” Willem Barentsz” Karel Goos

Hamburg “Top Ten Club ” 1961

Amsterdam Merwedekanaal

Old mates

Old mates

Me in Amsterdam 1971

Me 1953-4

Portugal 1986

Savannah , USA

Antofagasta , Chile

Freek Hoeben , NY 1987

2014

My Cabin in Amsterdam

Stellingplank 1963

Stellingplank  2012

Pollux

“Pollux” moored at the formerly Ships Wharf NDSM-Amsterdam

PA0UNT ,PA0OI EN ANDEREN

PA0UNT ,PA0OI EN ANDEREN.

The Potty Bar

The ceiling was full of chamberpots hanging lop-sided looking to dry
It reminded me of a story that happened in Amsterdam mid-sixties where I was invited to a home of crew member I sailed with
The room was like a Jan Steen painting full of laughter music and drinks
In middle was a baby sitting on a chamber-pot his mum standing next to him
This was obviously his first potty training she had to stop standing there as asked one of us to keep an eye while attending the some cooking in the kitchen
Then one of our mates said “shall we do a bit of contribution” we nodded and sniggered
like naughty children and took the the baby of the potty and one with “sturm und drang “
took the potty to the toilet and emptied his bowels into it. Then returned a short while later to the room and put it back under the baby
Mum came back from the kitchen and said to the baby “ and how’s my little darling been doing ?” She lifted him up and her fell wide open at the sight of the contents of the pottyI told this story to the potty bar owner he looked up to the ceiling and told me he didn’t find it funny

Port Said

“ Special Price “ !  These shoes are only made for you , my friend , yelled one of the vendors whom came on board with the canal crew .

These were people who’s job was to  attend to the Suez Light which they fixed at the front of the ship.

By shining on reflectors on  the shore they aided those steering the ship in the night .

But also these guys did a bit of trading on the side , selling poufs , souvenirs , slippers , shoes and
badly reproduced pornographic sepia coloured photographs
I fell for the shoes he showed me . They were beautiful creamy leather and I bought them for a very special price . Such a bargain I thought.
After the crew and traders had left the ship in Suez we  sailed on and headed for Bombay ( Mumbai ).

When we had moored I dressed  myself and went ashore  with my lovely looking creamy leather shoes .
I headed towards the exit of the custom area and outside I was wondering if people were looking at and admiring my special shoes
It was monsoon time.
Clouds opened their bladders.

As I was running for  cover my shoes started to be sucked more and more into the mud until the soles came right off.

I picked them up and realised that they had the look and feel of papier- mache .

WHICH IS PRECISELY WHAT THEY WERE!

Broadway 1963 , shaking the hands of Jack Dempsey

I heard Jack had a restaurant on Broadway I was an admirer so I took a taxi after work to Broadway

unfortunately I had only ten bucks which the taxi driver accepted for to and fro 

We arrived at his joint in Broadway and there was Jack outside his restaurant I stepped out of the taxi ran up to him shook his hand

and instead going in I ran back to the cab and went back to the ship !  I was happy …

Hamburg 1962

Willie has du den Hund noch oder hast du ihn an Weihnachten aufgefressen ?
I shouted as a joke to a German crew member of a tugboat in Hamburg
He obviously did not like that and said something in his walkie talkie to his
Captain on the bridge , suddenly the tugboat changed direction to port side and then to starboard side what put an immense pressure on the towing rope

It snapped
and our ship was helplessly cut loose and aided by a breeze drifted towards a dry dock
I saw a crane driver from the dry dock sliding down his ladder a sign that this was not going the be alright and sure it did we bashed bow first against the side of the dry dock we managed to bring out ropes and moored along sided the dry-dock
The ship ended up in the same dock for repairs for 3 days and I had an extended stay in my favourite joint the Top-Ten Club on the Reeperbahn

GOING TO SEA

I went to sea at age 15 , I had always wanted  to go. My father was a docker, my brother a sailor and my uncles were sailors too and it was what everyone in the neighbourhood was doing. Besides , this was the best work available for working class boys in Holland at the end of the fifties

wanted to be able to  buy Levi jeans and a Lucky Strike t-shirt. I’d seen what a hit these kitted out sailors were when they came back home.

I spent a year on a training ship, the Pollux.

FULL ABLE SEAMAN

I did just two journeys as a pantry boy, then I graduated to a full able seaman. I did steering, lookout, making everything sea ready – for instance securing cargo against the storms.

On one journey we were travelling with barrels full of radioactive stuff stowed on deck made ready to dump in the mid-Atlantic. It was quite stormy and we  had to heave the barrels  in nets  and dump it over the side.

It was scary and nobody wanted to do this while a storm was raging  (These days  I would have notified Greenpeace )

One ship going across the North Atlantic had US sports cars stowed on barrels of oil. But the barrels broke loose underneath and there were cars all over the place, wrapped around the mast and oil barrels rolling here and there, bursting all over the deck. It turned out the cars had been badly stowed in New York and we copped the result. We had to unload the cars on to the quayside in Jeddah and most were battered. There was only one Chevy in good nick, but when one of the dockers got to drive it away, he drove straight into a boulder.

CHINA HO

CHINA-HO

As we sailed into harbour the Bund came into frame and it had the feel of 1920s America but then I saw as we got closer that there were no adverts for Coca Cola or Ford on the billboards. Instead Mao, Lenin and Marx looked down, dressed in Stalin-style clothes. Blue ants crawled underneath the images.

In the background were trams, carts, bicycles, propaganda and rapper voices coming out of speakers. These were attached on poles all over the quayside.

After mooring the ship, the gangway was lowered and what appeared to be a solid mass of blue streamed on deck , taking over the decks, opening the hatches and positioning the derricks.

We , newly arrived sailors wanted to go ashore and explore Chairman Mao’s world it’s beer and maybe a Suzy Wong, but this couldn’t be done until the shop was methodically stripped by Customs of anything that looked to them like Western decadence or that mentioned Taiwan – in the 1950s there had been armed conflict between the People’s Republic of China and strategic islands in the Taiwan Strait, the Republic of China.

So it was that after the raid the crew were stripped of their companionable Playboy centrefolds – I can’t help wondering if they were traded on the black market. Fortunately the captain had hidden the sea chart of Taiwan as we needed it for our next port of call – if it had been discovered the Captain would have got to experience a genuine Chinese jail.

SEAMAN’S CLUB SHANGHAI 1961

The Seaman’s Club was a former British merchant Building supporting the longest bar in the world according to the English speaking barman it had lanes carved out of the mahogany bar and your order was shouted to the end, a bottle was given a karate chop by an ex-Chinese State Circus performer stopping exactly in front of you. Orders flew in…just to see if he might miss.

The place was full with Eastern-bloc sailors asking us for goodies from the West in exchange for fur hats and black KGB type leather jackets .

There was an 8pm curfew and travel was restricted to harbour quarters, except when the club was showing movies in which most of the storylines centred on the Red Army wiping out a Catholic Priest who tried to infiltrate the People’s Republic with their evil values.

He was chopped up like a Peking Duck. We were then escorted up the ship’s gangway.

ALIMONY 1964 mv “Banggai “

We had a guy on board who was tall, ugly like hell, red hair , from Friesland. His legs had been broken several times and he walked lopsided. He was always talking on about the illegitimate child he had in Peru .

He didn’t want to pay alimony, but kept saying he had to. We, the rest of the crew, got very bored with him and we thought we’d try something. We asked a Spanish member of the crew to make an official looking paper and we managed to create an official looking stamp on it. When we arrived in Valparaiso in Chile we managed to get hold of a photo of an extremely ugly looking baby . When we arrived in Callao in  Peru  we got hold of a customs officer dressed up like a general in white and with a hat.

For a carton of cigarettes he was happy to agree to pretend to arrest the guy always on about his baby. We pointed the  guy out , the customs officer produced a gun, told him to put his hands upand he showed the official paper we had made and said he was going to arrest him for not paying alimony.

The guy went white and started shaking. He begged the customs officer to go with him to his cabin and ten minutes later the officer emerged with all the  guys cigarettes and contraband goods he had hoped to sell. The customs officer passed us on the gangway and gave a big wink , a smile and nodded muchos grazias. .

It was the big story in the mess room. A member of the crew was  telling what had happened to everyone . We kept our mouths shut .

HEART AND LIBIDO

President Kennedy got killed when we were two days away from Valparaiso coming from Yokohama .

On the boat everyone was panicking at the idea of a  nuclear war. We  were due to travel via the Panama Canal stopping at ports in the US

I had heard of Indians living in grottos in Tierra del Fuego so I packed my case thinking I could escape the danger by joining them!  Once I was off the ship I decided to have a drink before catching the bus , but chance would have it , two beautiful girls came on to me, and seduced me so much that I decided I didn’t want to go and bury myself in Tierra del Fuego. So I got back on board.

My heart and libido got me into trouble a few times. Another time I deserted in  Kobe to be with a girl I fell in love with. The ship was planning to get in a replacement and I knew I would be in trouble , but when I chose to go back, rather apologetically I was surprised to find the captain was quite nice to me and just deducted one week’s pay.  He was an old guy who had been at sea for ages; he’d been through the war. We had a kind of relationship and I joked with him. One time we were laying in Calcutta and the Captain was looking through his binoculars as though at the course the ship was charting, but I  realised he was looking at girls on the Hooghley River and I put my hand over the glass of his binoculars and he just laughed.

KICKING ASS

In Calcutta I was on night security so sleeping during the day time. Then one time I woke and there was a black hand coming through the porthole which I had hooked open. I realised the arm was reaching for my radio just inside, so quick as I could, I undid the  hook and the porthole fell on to the arm. I screwed it down , went outside and kicked his ass. How he howled. Then I went back into my cabin and released him.

BEER

We ran out of beer in the Bay of Bengal so the crew member in charge of the telegraph  talked to another boat from the same company. They had beer so we went to meet them in the middle of the sea, lowered the life-boat and brought beer for us to heave on board. That’s the kind of camaraderie you get among the big freight ships.

JUKE BOX

There was the time we bought our entertainment during  a stay in dock with a juke box . The whole crew pooled money to buy the juke box in America. Then when we reached Cebu in the Phillipines a Chinese brothel keeper we had got to know wanted the juke box, so we sold it to him in exchange for free liquor and women and we really had the Gods on our side. The dockers went on strike while we were there so we got extra time .

Then when we had to leave the brothel keeper and his girls pushed the juke box outside the bar and they were all singing and waving us goodbye as we left dock.

SEAMAN’S CLUB

We were always a long time in port in India and the only place to go was the Flying Angel Seaman’s Club. In Calcutta the hookers were not allowed in after 7pm because the owner wanted “respectable” punters to feel comfortable . He would come in and shout “naughty girls out”. Then all the office girls would come in, and we sailors would have to foxtrot with them.