| Title | : | The Voyage of the Rose City: An Adventure at Sea |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0812982436 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780812982435 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Hardcover |
| Number of Pages | : | 256 |
| Publication | : | First published October 4, 2011 |
When John Moynihan decided to ship out in the Merchant Marine during the summer of his junior year at Wesleyan University, his father, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, was not enthusiastic: As a young man, before joining the U.S. Navy, Pat Moynihan had worked the New York City docks and knew what his son would encounter. However, John’s mother, Elizabeth, an avid sailor, found the idea of an adventure at sea exciting and set out to help him get his Seaman’s Papers. When John was sworn in, he was given one piece of advice: to not tell the crew that his father was a United States senator.
The job ticket read “forty-five days from Camden, New Jersey, to the Mediterranean on the Rose City,” a supertanker. As the ship sailed the orders changed, and forty-five days became four months across the equator, around Africa, across the Indian Ocean, and up to Japan—a far more perilous voyage than John or his mother had imagined. The physical labor was grueling, and outdated machinery aboard the ship, including broken radar, jeopardized the lives of the crew. They passed through the Straits of Malacca three times, with hazardous sailing conditions and threats of pirates. But it was also the trip of a lifetime: John reveled in the natural world around him, listened avidly to the tales of the old timers, and even came to value the drunken camaraderie among men whose only real family was one another. A talented artist, John drew what he saw and kept a journal on the ship that he turned into his senior thesis when he returned to Wesleyan the following year.
A few years after John died in his early forties, the result of a reaction to acetaminophen, his mother printed a limited edition of his journal illustrated with drawings from his notebooks. Encouraged by the interest in his account of the voyage, she agreed to publish the book more widely. An honestly written story of a boy’s coming into manhood at sea, The Voyage of the Rose City is a taut, thrilling tale of the adventure of a lifetime.
The Voyage of the Rose City: An Adventure at Sea Reviews
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Written by the son of Senator Patrick Moynihan, this book was submitted as an assignment to Paul Horgan’s writing class, promptly forgotten, and then resurrected by his mother after his untimely death at forty-four from a reaction to Tylenol. John had signed on an as ordinary-seaman on a tanker for a voyage that became much longer than he had anticipated. His father, who had served in the Navy, thought it was a bad idea; his mother thought the contrary, having a more naive and more glamorous view of the sea - perhaps much as I do. (Whenever I took those blasted career tests, they always came out librarian or ship captain. Then again they were pathetically easy to manipulate. I guess the reality was I wanted to sit around and give orders while reading.)
John worked on a supertanker. The bow was a quarter-mile from the stern and to walk from one end to the other took about 5 minutes at a brisk pace. They never walked briskly since the five minutes were like an additional break. “And always carry something like a wrench to make it more like work,” he was advised. Obtaining the job through connections his father had with the Seafarers Union, he was not popular with the crew who saw him as taking up a job someone else needed. That most of them spent their time trying not to work was beside the point. As an ordinary seaman, he had to be taught everything until he can make a contribution. His description of his first turn at the wheel is lyrical: The first sensation was the immediate contact with the shudders and tremors of the ship. Between the grinding vibrations of the all-powerful engine room and the pounding of the sea at her unyielding steel sides, the ship was an animate mover. She pushed her way through the ocean, raising her bow with every swell and hurtling back down with a deafening crescendo. I could feel the movement, the huge screw in the back working to propel her forward. The horizon became less of a definition between sea and sky than a tangible object that could be sought, reached, left behind.
The union, the officers, the company are all to be derided. Contrary to Coast Guard rules, they have to repair a crack in the superstructure by welding and John is the only one (in his ignorance) willing to stand in the empty tanks with a fire extinguisher in case sparks start a fire. I hadn’t realized it, but when a tanker is light, the danger of igniting volatile fumes is at its greatest. Our captain, it suddenly occurred to me, was not only violating Coast Guard law by welding on deck, he was sending us down into vapor-filled tanks with an open flame. It also came out that the radar on the bridge had gone out the first full day at sea, and instead of stopping off in South Africa to have it repaired we were going to wait until we got to Japan. It didn’t matter that we’d be going through the Straits of Malacca in typhoon season: Business is business, and the insurance will pay off anything that might go wrong. . . I did take out my silent revenge on Texaco and the Seven Sisters by pissing in the tank, hoping that somewhere, six months later, some stockholder’s Cadillac wouldn’t start as a result. The tanks had been washed out first, a task that must be done between each loading. Again, on the high seas, the rules were routinely ignored. It is not difficult to tell whether a tanker is cleaning its tanks. Having washed, buffeted, and generally rinsed out the tanks, we could see the dirty water discharged from the side of the ship through the manifold. For hundreds of miles we left an oily slick on the surface of the ocean without thinking twice about it. Anywhere in the Atlantic, Indian, or Pacific Oceans the residue of tankers can be seen. At one point we followed the course of another tanker that had left a trail of pollution across several latitudes.
The yearning to avoid work was understandable. The peculiarities of their contracts made it difficult for seaman to reach retirement age since they needed twenty years of duty to make their pensions: twenty years of sea time which meant actually they needed forty to forty-five years of working before qualifying.
Monyihan does have his lyrical moments. In between the monotany (it would get so bad that scrapping paint was to be looked forward to) he did learn to appreciate the sea: In the absolute still of the morning watch, in the rapt hour before the dawn when the only light was the dull glow of the electric compass and the useless pulsings of the broken radar, in the foaming seas of another hemisphere and on another side of the planet, I relished the thought that all those fuckers back there at the university were scratching one another’s eyes out with the same old bullshit. There was none of that here. None you could get away with, anyway. This was life and death with every turn of the compass. It was real. It was a strangely comforting thought. On the seventh the clouds began to gather. Monsoon season...
The book goes off the rails somewhat after the ship arrives in Japan and it becomes a quasi journal, e.g., bummed around Nara, went to a bar, looked for a place to sleep, had a beer, etc.
Note: I believe the Rose City was delivered to the Navy and became the hospital ship Comfort in 1987. Here’s a picture of her engine room.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ima... It looks like something from a space ship. -
A true journal. The literature is by no means beautiful moving but the ideas and experiences behind the book demand respect. I love the idea of John Moniyhan deciding on a whim to join the Merchant Marines and see the world- it encapsulates some romantic in all of us eager for adventure. His experiences, slow fight to be recognized as one of the crew, and his descriptions of magical nights in ports around the world as well as his appreciations of nature made me smile. I understand completely why he undertook this journey and I respect that he documented it in such a way- it would have been all too easy to hold the memories in and let them slip into the wily file cabinets of his brain where they would be unshared and jumbled.
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This book was an entertaining and easy read. As the daughter of a Merchant Marine engineer, I was interested to see what a typical voyage was like from a mate's perspective. Many of the anecdotes were familiar to me and I really enjoyed at least the first half of the book. Unfortunately, the author lost me when he detailed his decent into debauchery with the "boys," upon whom the "old timers" rightly resented for their perpetual drunkenness on duty, fighting, and antagonism of any and everyone. Even his language seemed affected and silly at times-- what's with using the word "t'was" in seriousness? He left me feeling like he was just too phoney. Ultimately my disappointment in the attitude of the author by the end of the voyage colored the otherwise interesting story. I think any seasoned merchant mariner would scoff at a story that oozes this much naivete.
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The introduction was extremely interesting and primed me for a great book... and then I got this one. I realize that this was published posthumous, and you shouldn't speak ill of the dead, but this was just boring.
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This review aims to do John Moynihan the honor of considering “The Voyage of the Rose City” on its merits rather than dwell on the fact it is written by famous a U.S. Senator's son who left the world too soon.
“Rose City” refers to the merchant tanker ship the author took a character-building job on back in 1980. A well-heeled boy with a developed intellect and soft hands, he comes in for a good deal of disdain from the hard-bitten types that make up the Rose City's crew.
Moynihan's narrative drags when he gets into the nuts and bolts of industrial labor on a big tanker. Yes, he's diving for pearls those of us with regular lives are unfamiliar with, but the detail is too heavy. Of course, another seafaring text, “Moby Dick” is guilty of the same crime where facts about whales and the industry that harvests them are concerned. So there you have it.
He also frontloads his portraits of the crew so that you either have a great memory or have to mark the descriptions and return to them when a character surfaces with little more than a name clipped to his ear. But lots of great novelists have used that technique as well. So there you have it.
“Rose City” isn't so much a story as a literary documentary about life on a merchant vessel. The only narratives that exist are of the small bore type and focus on Moynihan's evolving relationship with individual crew members. These have mostly satisfying results as he slowly begins to blend in with those different than himself (becoming less different through the seafaring life), but they are not very deep.
A lot has happened since 1980 that both add and detract from the value of the text. Now, of course, it is a timepiece describing a bygone world. A book about work, which is rare these days, much as we are all saddled with the obligation.
As you read, the idea of the cell phone keeps popping into one's mind as these modern men endure the pain of separation from loved ones that today would have made their lives much easier.
The western literary canon offers many a diary of life at sea and Moynihan's is a worthy addition to that canon, for those who revel in adventure, and for those that dream of doing what this one writer did. -
nice adventure in the modern merchant marine. Taken from Moynihan's journals, and i assume he wrote them up into book form. Ship left new jersey, east bound, and finished in Seattle after filling up twice with millions and millions of gallons of oil and this took place in 1980. Author died tragically young. Book has maps, photos, and author;s drawings. the supertanker (1/4 mile long) Rose City, was sold to the us navy and turned into a hospital ship, and i think still going.
here are some pics of the usns comfort (the old rose city) and though it looks much different from a supertanker, you get ideas of its size (gigantic)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USNS_Com... -
An interesting travel account by a young man (the son of Senator Patrick Moynihan) who joins a merchant marine crew to experience life at sea on a round-the-world voyage (Africa, round the horn to Japan, then to West Coast). The book was a college writing assignment that was published after his death (in his forties). Its value is less for its literary merit than for its insights into crew behavior aboard a tanker, which might make some people cringe when they read it. I enjoyed it. Would it have been published had it not had powerful backing? Probably not, but that really does not diminish the story.
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A sweet, and very poignant little book.
Passively, I thought a lot about the semester I took off from Wesleyan, and different as it was (and I never would want to have spent it aboard the Rose City), I felt a kinship for a 19 or 20-year old moved by all the new things he saw and the strange (and in Moynihan's case) sometimes disturbing new acquaintances he met.
The writing is wonderful but also leaves you lost a lot of the time. Unless you have worked as a ship hand, many of the descriptions are as if in a foreign language you know pretty well but have no feel for.
Still - could I have written all this, and in a hurry? The story of the book is as much a part of the story. -
Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan's son (20) takes a year off college to work incognito on a super tanker going around the world. It gets more interesting when they hit ports; especially insights on Africa, Japan, and Indonesia. Street level observations make the pages fly!
[Author deceased] I'm impressed that his mother did not bowdlerize the parts about the pot, the drunkenness, the whore houses . . . we all have our faults. Impressed she had this book published. Perfectionist editing. -
I finished this one earlier today, feeling underwhelmed, and I'm not exactly sure why; it should've worked, but the parts never made a whole. Understandable that his mother would want to have the journal published (the drawings are quite good!), though the material would've been better used for a semi-fictional account, in greater depth, after John was a bit older.
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I found this book both sophomoric and unsatisfying. Having been a lifelong lover of the sea and a professional naval officer, I was surprised at the naïveté and ignorance of one who has had so much schooling. A definite disappointment. -
Really nice story of life as a modern merchant mariner. Find life dull? Sign on and ship out. Sad that the author died young.
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Articulate journal of a young student taking a semester off to crew an oil tanker. Alienation, loneliness, descriptions of rainbows and waves.
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Best part was the drawings.
When I was a boy with never a crack in my heart.
WB Yeats "The Meditation of the Old Fisherman" -
Very interesting memoir of a 3-month voyage on a supertanker.
