SUPERCARGO

A rambling love letter to ports, shipping, and all manner of seafaring myth and romance.

Inspired by a magical night in Massawa, Eritrea, in 1997, Australian writer McCamish decides to “plan a trip into the past” by exploring ports around the world. It's not so easy to bum around the ocean these days, but determination and the services of a travel agent who specializes in cargo travel land our hero on the Anneke Schliemann, a “Luxembourg flagged container ship on route to the Levant.” It makes assorted stops, including Athens, Beirut, and Lattakia, Syria, but the lion's share of McCamish's observations are reserved for his relations with the crew and his one fellow passenger. After docking in Calabria, the author then flies to the Canary Islands, where he boards another cargo vessel, the Van Riebeeck, this one traveling to southern Africa. Again, McCamish is assiduous in describing shipboard life; he details the crew's bar with its bachelor-pad decor, the engine room with its 53,000-horsepower engine, and the odd relationships he strikes up with sailors who spend most of their lives on this floating warehouse. Then, in Mauritius, he boards the Anna Bohme, a container carrier bound for India, and a similar round of observations begins yet again. Ultimately, ports play a small role in the work, as the author ends up spending almost all of his time on board the ships and thus has difficulty getting to know those seaside towns that defy discovery for the brief moments ashore. He does, however, have an extensive pool of travel-writers he is fond of quoting and lards his tale with the words of Twain, Hemingway, Conrad, Kerouac, and numerous others.

Like many of the places McCamish visits, this promises romance that is rarely delivered.