Across the Pacific to Panama Canal and USA

This post is excerpted from memoirs written in the early 1990s, illustrated with some photos.

Three youthful sailors on the Port Alfred

On January 3, 1964, we left Sydney on a refrigerator ship, the Port Alfred, called in Brisbane to top off the cargo. We carried 12 passengers and about 30,000 tons of frozen meat across the Pacific, through the Panama Canal to Kingston, Jamaica, Vera Cruz, Mexico, and on up the eastern seaboard of the United States. I had free passage as ship’s surgeon, Wendy was charged half the regular fare and our three kids were carried at about a quarter of the adult fare. It was luxury travel in a spacious stateroom on a ship in which our quarters were air conditioned. I had a separate cabin, the ship’s surgeon’s quarters, but seldom slept there, preferring to cuddle with Wendy. There was a huge amount of deck space for the kids to play, and a swimming pool. This way to travel is far superior to travel on a cruise ship with thousands of passengers. Without doubt, this 5-6 week voyage was one of the highlights of our lives. We’ve always felt sorry the children were too young to appreciate or even to remember much about it.   

 Rebecca chatting to the First Mate of the Port Alfred

The voyage across the Pacific was one of the high points of my life because I love the sea so much. Wendy, Rebecca and David thoroughly enjoyed it too. Jonathan slept most of the time, days as well as nights. We had a pleasant ship’s company, the captain, deck officers, engineer officers, and refrigerator engineers were splendid people with whom we could socialize comfortably. As I got to know the officers, I recognized personality characteristics that made them select themselves for life at sea, away from family with whom constant contact would be emotionally intolerable, whereas occasional home leave was a time for rejoicing and revelry. The radio officer was type-cast, a reclusive, solitary individual, like most who work for the Marconi Corporation. One of my statistical tasks at the Social Medicine Research Unit had been analyses of sickness and death rates in occupational groups insured by the Prudential Life Assurance Company.  Maritime radio operators employed by the Marconi Corporation (which had a monopoly covering most European merchant fleets) were well outside the continuum for “normal” mental and emotional states. Psychiatric disturbances including obsessive disorders and depression were very common, associated with preference for solitude. Marconi Corporation radio operators had by far the highest suicide rates of any occupational group.   I have only vague memories of the other passengers. There was an American oil man with his wife and small child, and an Australian girl who was clearly his mistress as well as the nanny to the little boy; there were only two or three others (twelve passengers in all). None made any impact on my memory comparable to that of Captain Barlow, Bob MacDonald, the big, red-bearded second engineer, and several other officers who were all very pleasant company. My duties as ship’s surgeon were undemanding: I hardly ever had to do anything other than the daily inspection with the captain, first officer and chief steward. I had to suture a laceration, render a little psychotherapy when two gay stewards had a lover’s quarrel, provide ointment for skin rashes, etc. Fortunately there were no surgical or medical emergencies.

 Wendy in Port Alfred's swimming pool with Rebecca and David, midway across the Pacific

A few days out from Brisbane we ran head-on into a powerful storm, almost a hurricane, and for 3 days battered our way into the teeth of fierce winds and huge seas. This was a much stronger storm than the one I had experienced in the Southern Ocean in 1954, enough to clear the dining saloon of all but three or four of us when it was at its height. The dining saloon faced aft on the Port Alfred. The best vantage point to view the stormy sea was the bridge, to which I had access as a member of the crew, the ship's doctor. I spent many hours on the bridge discretely out of the way aft of the wheel and the instruments that told us how this storm was slowing our way through the ocean. It was fascinating to see huge waves breaking over the bows and surging back, with the wind helping them gather force before they crashed into the superstructure, making the ship, sometimes those watching too, tremble. The open decks were dangerous, and if I ventured out the spray hit my face with the force of shots from a gun. I felt then the full power of the sea. The dining saloon for officers and passengers thinned out during those days, the table cloths were dampened to stop plates sliding about, the fiddles were raised and our heavy chairs firmly fixed to the deck. 

 When the storm passed and the sea was calm again, we could see the ocean all around us ablaze with ghostly light on moonless nights from myriads of tiny phosphorescent plants and animals. If you flush a ship's toilet in the dark at such a time, it’s a dramatic sight - ship's toilets use sea water so the luminescent little creatures can be seen there too as well as in the wake and all around the ship. There were many tropical nights when the phosphorescence in the wake was bright enough almost to read by, many nights when the stars seemed close enough to touch. One night when Wendy and I were strolling on the deck after bedding down the children, the first officer called out to us from the bridge, drawing our attention to a satellite crossing the sky; in those days, satellites were still uncommon enough to be noteworthy. We saw little other shipping apart from a few Japanese fishing trawlers and only a few islands, low atolls where palm trees seemed suspended in the sea, and one high volcanic peak on the horizon in the Society Islands group.

Gatun Lock, the highest point on Panama Canal

The Panama Canal was fascinating with its locks that lifted and then lowered the great ship. 

Then we were in the Caribbean. We were berthed in Kingston for a week unloading some of our cargo of frozen meat – frozen goat carcases; goat meat is popular in Jamaica. We went most days to the swimming pool at the Myrtle Bank Hotel (made famous just before this in a James Bond novel and movie). We saw the city of Kingston and the Botanical Gardens and had a brief excursion to the Blue Mountains. We often left Jonathan who slept almost all the time, in air-conditioned comfort in our cabin.

I went sailing across the harbour to the old buccaneer haven of Port Royal, now a few feet under water because of an earthquake 300 years ago, with Jim McKenzie, the refrigerator engineer, who had a tiny yacht on board. Sailing to Port Royal was great, with a light breeze that carried us along, the sail gently filling with wind. At Port Royal a party of fat tourists off a cruise ship included the brother of the medical school dean at the University of Vermont (I forget how we learnt   this but it led to some worth-while conversation). Getting back safely from Port Royal was a different matter. The trade wind had freshened into a gale and it was all we could do to prevent capsizing when we were caught in the wake of a large tanker, and we were well aware that the harbour contained man-eating sharks.

Jonathan with Bob MacDonald and Captain Barlow

Wendy and I had a wedding anniversary in Kingston and spent the evening at the Bamboo Club, a raucous night spot where we watched highly sexed scantily clad Jamaican girls writhing and gyrating on a small dance-floor. We didn’t know it when a party of ship’s officers invited us to join them but the Bamboo Club was a well known brothel. It was an excellent place to celebrate a wedding anniversary, one of several memorable wedding anniversaries we have had in exotic places. I remember that evening with much pleasure.

Wendy with Second Engineer Bob MacDonald

Our first US landfall was at Charleston, South Carolina, a picturesque old city where the Civil War started when the confederate army bombarded Fort Sumter located in the harbour. As the Port Alfred moved up the river, I was struck by shanty-town settlements of poor blacks that we passed before we saw the affluent mansions of the well-to-do whites. I had never before seen such blatant contrasts of wealth and poverty nor the contrasting lives of blacks and whites; it was a foretaste of much that would follow about the American way of life. Another foretaste was a gun-shop window with rows of ugly, heavy automatic pistols and revolvers on display. We were in the land where people had the right to bear arms, a right as important to many as freedom of religion.  Like the lovingly preserved slave auction market with the auction block and signs displaying prices, this was an eloquent reminder that we had come to a violent nation with a brutal and violent past. In other ways Charleston was a good place to be introduced to the USA. It is a graceful old city with many very beautiful ante-bellum mansions, boasting lovely wrought iron balconies, pillared porches and porticoes, white clapboard or red brick sides. There was a feeling that these people cared about the past and about their history. The fact that some of the past was brutal and the history was violent didn’t seem to trouble them.

We went on around Cape Hattaras to Norfolk, Virginia, then Philadelphia, another historically interesting city that it was good to see at the beginning of life in America. I left the ship in Philadelphia and flew to Burlington, Vermont, via New York. It was a heavily overcast day as the plane from Philadelphia touched down at Newark, and the connecting flight to Burlington had been cancelled. I was taken by bus from Newark through the Holland Tunnel, across Manhattan Island, past the Empire State Building, out the Midtown tunnel, and across Brooklyn to Kennedy Airport where I waited a few hours for the flight to Burlington. Those airport arrivals and departures at two of New York’s airports were harbingers of many similar experiences stretching over all the years since that day in February 1964. Our life in the New World had begun.