The Last Cruise of the Hermann Maru

Copyright © 2000 by Earle N. Lord.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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Contents

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

CHAPTER THIRTY

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

To the merchant and navy gun crews of the Liberty Ship, S. S.

Stephen Hoskins who on September l942 accomplished in

reality what the Hermann Maru could only manage in fiction.

And to the merchant and navy gun crews of the Liberty Ship,

S.S. Henry D. Thoreau, (now lamentably scrapped), with

whom I served in the South Pacific theater of war.

CHAPTER ONE

End And Beginning

I write this account of some experiences I had over fifty years ago because they were important to me and because they influenced the rest of my life. I’ve had a peaceful existence since then. Nothing has come close to equaling the events that took place that year in 1943 during the last cruise of the Hermann Maru. Much of my life has been affected by these events. My character and personality were certainly much influenced. I’ve carried with me elements of that doomed ship and its weird crew through all the years and will no doubt carry them with me to my grave. Perhaps some of those elements will now be transferred to the reader of these pages.

My story begins at the end of the cruise. I, Christopher Nelson, age 21, was lying face down on the pitching wooden deck of a life raft in the Antarctic Seas many miles south of New Zealand. I was trying hard not to bleed or freeze to death. A three inch furrow on the left side of my head was flowing freely and I was holding a bloody handkerchief tightly against it with one hand. With the other, I was gripping one of the wooden slats of the raft to avoid being washed off it.

I had never been more uncomfortable in my life. My head ached from whatever had hit me in the battle and I still had blurred vision from the blow. It was probably a minor concussion. I was soaked to the skin from the ice water that sloshed up through the slats of the raft and washed over me in bathtub size dollops at regular intervals. My steel-rimmed glasses had survived the recent catastrophe but were so fogged with blood and salt spray I could barely see through them. The wind, a terrible relentless force of frigid air was sucking the warmth and life right out of my body. I could feel it leaving.

Old timers called the region some distance north of this area the Roaring Forties. I was further south in the middle fifties where there is no land on earth to check the winds which eternally circle our planet at thirty knots plus. I was alone on an eight foot square speck of wood about six hundred miles southeast of New Zealand, and was being blown eastward at four or five knots. The nearest inhabited land mass in that direction was four thousand miles away. I groaned at that dismal calculation and began to settle down into a numbing painless sleep. I realized dimly it was the last sleep I would ever experience on this watery planet and did not particularly care. I remember thinking drowsily that it was ironic to die of exposure after surviving the fantastic events of the last two hours and wondered what the point was of all of this.

The raft lurched and I felt a heavy thump behind me. Something poked me sharply in the back through my pea coat and sweater. I rolled over wearily with a groan and forced myself up into a half seated position and opened my eyes. I almost did a back flip off that raft. I was suddenly wide awake, alert, and wondering if I was hallucinating. A giant penguin was standing on the raft staring quizzically at me, looking like he was going to say something witty. He was probably only four or five feet tall but from my point of view he looked like the King Kong of the bird world. He had somehow managed to jump on the raft and was apparently fascinated by little old me. I was equally interested in him, in his huge black beak and yellow patches behind comic little eyes. I wondered whether these things bit people. I still did not believe what I was seeing and took off my glasses to check them out. That made him look bigger and fuzzier but he was still right there on the raft staring at me intently.

I had always been fond of penguins in bird parks and zoos and even was carrying a little ceramic penguin with me as a good luck charm. I wondered if the blow to my head was making me imagine things. The giant bird opened his beak and hissed at me. This angered me and I tried to kick him in the middle of his white dinner jacket. Damn it, you weird bird, I yelled into the humming wind, haven’t I enough trouble without some damned joke of a bird nagging at me?

I was probably a little delirious. My mind began turning over like a broken record, chanting insanely: this is strange, this is ridiculous, this simply can’t be happening. I have to be dreaming. I can’t be floating on a life raft hundreds of miles from civilization arguing with a giant penguin. Not long ago I was a bank clerk working on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles. What the hell am I doing out here? I know I once asked a history teacher what difference did it make in my life if Hitler marched into Czechoslovakia and she told me it could make a big difference. I looked up and said to God over the shoulder of that penguin: Please don’t rub it in, Lord. It has made a difference. I promise not to ask any more dumb questions if I ever get back into a classroom again.

The bird seemed to take offense at this remark. He hissed at me again, turned around, flicked the tail of his dinner coat at me and dove into a passing swell neatly and cleanly without even making a splash. I immediately missed him intently because he was another living creature and I felt even more alone than I had before his arrival. I sat up and surveyed the howling seascape around me and began to shiver violently.

The nights are about four hours long in this part of the world at this time of year. It was apparently nearing the end of one of these short nights. One horizon was much brighter than the other. That one I decided was probably east and that was the way the great wind was pushing me. The gray oily seas were covered with huge rolling swells moving eastward with the wind. Why there were only a few whitecaps I did not understand. The raft was moving, pushed by the steady blast. I could only see about fifty to a hundred feet around me because of poor light and an atmosphere full of flying scud and water vapor. I then saw the taught rope on the other side of the raft and crawled over to it, trying not to get blown off as I slid across the slippery surface.

The raft had cleats on two sides. A two inch manilla line had been figure-eighted around one of the cleats and secured with a half hitch. This rope extended straight out into the watery gloom and with my blurred vision and salt-sprayed eyeglasses I couldn’t make out where it went. I peered into the wind and all I got for my pains was a bucket of icy spray in my face. The rope was headed straight into the wind and seemed to have tension on it. When I pulled on it, it had weight behind it, something with great mass.

I was not thinking clearly. My head ached from whatever had ploughed a furrow alongside my skull. My teeth were chattering so hard from the cold that the vibration hurt my jaw. I was especially numbed by the thought of being all alone in this god-forsaken end of the world. However, there was something familiar about that rope and it nagged at me. I thought about it in a dim and muddled manner for a minute or so, then it struck me. Before the ship went down, we lowered a lifeboat on the port side not quite all the way down into the water. It was left hanging in the rope falls. To keep it from swinging out too far and banging back into the ship, the bosun had ordered it secured fore and aft with frapping lines, ropes that ran from both ends of the lifeboat back and forth up to the deck of the ship. I had secured one of the lines, myself, to a cleat on the aft life raft. Thinking it over later, I realized it was a stupid thing to do. If that boat had been lowered into the water before the raft, it could have jerked it right off its big stand. Stupid move or not, it was an error that later on saved my life.

It took a while for the significance of that rope to sink in. I’ve never been a quick thinker to begin with and in this situation I was operating at one quarter speed. Then it hit me. This two inch manilla line might be still attached to a lifeboat which had survived the sinking of the Hermann Maru, a boat provisioned with food and water and which had sides which might give me some shelter from the killing wind. That lifeboat might even have people in it. I grabbed the line and gave it a mighty pull and almost jerked myself into the water. It was not going to be easy to pull the raft over to the boat.

I sat down and studied the seas for a while, then worked out a pattern. When the raft went up the face of one of the swells, the line tightened but when it went back down the reverse side of the swell, the line slackened and eased off. I took the half hitch and two of the round turns off the cleat and began working the raft closer to the lifeboat during the slack periods. I was pulling in about two feet of line with each swell. The swells were rolling in at a rate of about two a minute. I tried to do the arithmetic in my muddled, numb brain. It took me about five minutes to figure out that I ought to be able to bring the boat and raft together in one or two hours.

It was daylight now, which in this Alice in Wonderland country meant it was about three o’clock in the morning. I put the half hitch back on and tried to wash off my glasses to see if the lifeboat was visible. I didn’t need the glasses. I could see the gray shape of the boat about thirty feet from my raft. It was riding low in the seas, disturbingly low, and it was empty of passengers, but it was a beautiful sight, nevertheless. I began to cry. I had billions of gallons of ice water underneath me. I was wet to the skin through all my layers of clothing, so I now added about a half ounce of salt tears to this watery hell. The thought struck me as absurd, and I began to laugh and cry simultaneously. I never knew until that moment how much I really wanted to live.

The last thirty feet were easy. I was soon able to crawl into the lifeboat from the raft. I secured the manilla line to the second cleat on the raft and let the raft drift free from the lifeboat. When it had blown about ten feet from the boat I resecured it to the bow cleat with two lines.

The lifeboat had two feet of water in it and I went to work with a bailing bucket and bilge pump and got most of it out in an hour or so. I was lucky. The wooden cover frames and been left in the boat and the canvas tarpaulin had been stuffed in the stern end. Under the canvas I found a bundle of extra blankets the Captain had ordered placed in each lifeboat when we moved south into the Antarctic sea. One of my duties as a deckhand had been lifeboat maintenance. I was the guy who had stowed the blankets in each boat! Wrapped in canvas they were still dry.

When I got the water down below the floor boards, I went to work on the covers, putting the wooden frame back in its place and lashing the tarpaulin back over them on one whole end of the boat, the end that was headed into that chilling wind. The raft, pushed by the wind, was dragging the other end of the boat to the east, causing the covered end to fishtail back and forth. I dug out the sea anchor that comes with every boat, attached it to a cleat on the covered end and threw it over. Its drag stopped the fishtailing. I stood up and surveyed my nautical engineering. The boat was being dragged through the water by the raft faster than the underlying eastward current and the sea anchor was holding the covered bow of the lifeboat into the wind and swells. Pretty good for a bank clerk!, I thought.

I opened a locker underneath one of the thwarts you sit on when rowing and took out a tin of water. I drank about a pint, then went to work and finished bailing the bilges of the boat. I covered all but about ten feet of the lifeboat with the tarpaulin and lashed it to the eye bolts on the railings. I then opened the package of blankets and, crawling forward under the tarp, fashioned myself a woolen cave up in the bow end, a dry sheltered fairly waterproof cavern that could actually become warm in this frigid water. I could develop a little body heat in there.

Using a flashlight and crawling around on the bottom of the boat, I then ran an inventory on the equipment, a task I thoroughly enjoyed. The second month I was on the Hermann Maru, I had been ordered by the bosun to conduct the annual stripping and inspection of the liberty ship’s lifeboats and life rafts. I was given a printed check list to work with and ran through the audits like a bank examiner. That list was still in my brain. I could rattle it off like a song: bailer, bilge pump, boat hooks, bucket, compass, ditty bag, drinking cups, first aid kit, flashlights, hatchets, heaving line, jackknife, lantern, lifeline, life-preserver, mast and sail, matches; milk, condensed,(twelve pounds;) mirrors, signaling; oars; oil, illuminating and storm; painter, plugs; provisions, twenty four pounds of hard bread; rowlocks, rudder and tiller, sea anchor; signals, distress; water, thirty six quarts; whistle, and fishing kit. There was another equally large cache of milk, bread, and water in the raft. I had enough food and water to circumnavigate the globe if I could manage to catch a few fish or birds.

There were extras, provided by the Captain and not required by maritime law, twelve blankets, a fine meshed funnel net to catch something called krill, and one American Air force hand powered radio signal generator. The ship had been leased to the Royal Australian Air force, hauling troops and material up to New Guinea for them, and Captain Levining had persuaded some of their brass to obtain these precious signal generators for us. You put the black box between your knees, extended a pull out antenna up into the air, then cranked the thing like a coffee grinder. The gadget was supposed to send out distress signals for two or three hundred miles in all directions.

There was a small problem here. The Hermann Maru, because of the navigation of our mad captain, was about five hundred miles south of the normal shipping lanes between Australia and South America. There were no ships two or three hundred miles north of us and only icebergs, whales, penguins, and a few lonely whalers to the south. However, I figured there might be another maniac like Levining in charge of a wandering vessel or I might be within range of a stray whaler so I planned to give the thing a try. It would give me something to do during the twenty hour days while I was being blown towards the Straits of Magellan.

I broke out one of the hatchets and chopped up a boat hook, then used the pieces to prop up the roof of my cave in the bow. I stared long and lovingly at the mast and sail lashed in the center of the boat. With another man, I might have been able to step up the mast and set the sail and run the boat up into the shipping lanes to the north. It was really a three man job, and there was no way I could manage it by myself. I ground away at the signaling machine for five minutes when my wristwatch said it was noon, then stowed it back under the tarp. I took out a tinned container of hard bread and a small can of condensed milk and crawled back under the canvas covering into my woolen cavern. A few minutes later I felt a strange sensation, one I had not experienced in twenty four hours, a faint glimmer of bodily heat. I also felt safe. These were lovely sensations. They were wonderful. They made the sawdust flavored bread soaking in the tinny tasting canned milk taste like ambrosia. I fell into a snug, warm, and dreamless sleep after praying a little..

CHAPTER TWO

Organization

I slept through a long day and short night and awakened just before dawn of the second day. I found a pencil in my pea coat, also my seaman’s papers, some American and Australian paper currency, the ceramic penguin, and a fire opal ring all sewn into a pocket. I began recording my voyage on the back of some provision check lists.

Day one: I guessed it was November 1 and a Monday. We had just crossed the dateline and I couldn’t remember whether we gained or lost a day. The last days on the ship were confusing because we were at battle stations and the normal work schedule was disrupted.

Distance covered: Five nautical miles and twenty four hours. 120 miles. Too optimistic. Make it 100. Distance to go, about 4,000 miles. Which was forty days. I’d seen the charts. The captain let me study them because of my special status as the college boy of the ship. We had made this trip once before but not so far south, and I knew there was no land whatever between me and Cape Horn. The nearest inhabited land to the East was Pitcairn Island, a flyspeck, 2,000 miles to the north-east, up above me out of reach.

All of this meant I had to be very patient. When I used to work at night in a bank clearing house and tried to go to college during the day, I prayed that someday I would have more time to do what I wanted to do. My prayers had been answered.

I set up a routine. Every morning I would crawl out of my canvas cave and bail out the boat. I would then crank the radio signal sender for five minutes, do some exercises, then settle down to a sumptuous breakfast of hard biscuit and canned milk.

I took the drop line provided by the U.S. Maritime Service and set a line over the side, using a piece of cloth as bait. Remembering some words of wisdom from a deckhand who had once spent fourteen days in a lifeboat, I took the fine net which was designed to capture the mysterious little creatures that whales fed on, attached it to a yoke of fishing line, and threw it into the sea behind the boat. My target was something called krill, a tiny shrimp-like creature that supposedly lived in these waters by the trillions.

That second morning, I hauled the raft over to the boat and boarded it with the sail that came with the lifeboat, a hammer, and a package of roofing nails that the Captain had added to the lifeboat equipment, why I did not know. I may have been sleeping a lot but my brain was still working. The raft had twelve pounds of condensed milk, twenty four pounds of biscuit, and thirty–six quarts of water in its lockers, and I did not want to lose them some night in a storm. I transferred all of these provisions to the lifeboat along with some of the other gear. Then I doubled up the manilla lines to the lifeboat, nailed down the canvas on the side of the raft facing the wind and propped up some of it on pieces of boat-hook pole and nailed that down. The more wind I could catch the sooner I got to South America. By this time I was half frozen and chattering again, so I crawled back to my cave, sipped some more milk and chewed some more biscuits.

When I thawed out, I crawled out of my hole and checked my fishing line and fine net to find nothing. I cranked away at the signal sender, then crawled back into the cave again. I was wide awake and could not sleep and realized I had a big problem. When I worked as a merchant seaman, I frequently complained about the loneliness of the job. You steered the ship for an hour and twenty minutes twice daily and you were alone with your thoughts staring at a number on a compass. You sat in the mess hall every night on standby for another eighty minutes, usually alone. At least you could read then.

Worst of all you stood in the quiet apex of the bow on lookout for another eighty minutes a night and this was an absolute torture. On a dark and cloudy night, it was like standing in a closet. I thought time had dragged when I worked in a bank and waited for 5:00 p.m. to arrive. On lookout, time crawled much more slowly.

Now in my textile cave, I realized that I had reached the ultimate horror of slow time and boredom. I might have thirty- nine days ahead of me, if I was lucky. If the wind blew my flotilla south of Cape Horn, I had until my provisions ran out. Cape Horn was the only inhabited land that came this far down. The rest was salt water.

I had just experienced the ten most interesting months of my life. I had met and lived with the most fascinating group of men I had ever seen or heard of and had experiences I still found hard to believe. Now I was in danger of going mad from boredom. I decided that inasmuch as I had nothing to read and nothing to do mentally for much of the days that I would try to carefully and slowly relive the experiences of the last ten months. If I could do that and sleep a lot and perhaps catch a fish or a bird or some krill, I might be able to survive mentally as well as physically.

CHAPTER THREE

Origins

In my canvas cave I decided first to explain how a bank clerk who dreamed of becoming a high school English teacher had managed to get himself into a lifeboat being blown around the bottom of the planet in the Antarctic Circumpolar Current. Since the seventh grade in junior high school I’d had a vague feeling that world events were closing in on me, but my situation was now absurd. This was much more personal participation than I ever had planned on.

Since that seventh grade watershed in my life, I felt I was being haunted by a man called Adolph Hitler. He came to power the year I entered junior high and I can remember how comical a creature I thought he was. At that age you think all grown ups are somewhat peculiar. To have a world leader who looked like Charlie Chaplin, the comedian, was fantastic.

When I entered senior high Hitler was not so funny any more. He marched troops into the Rhine land and there was a big war scare. That did not worry me a bit in the tenth grade. When I became a senior, he seized Austria and Czechoslovakia and there was another war scare. When I asked my history teacher that dumb question about what difference it made to me if he took it, I was probably expressing an unconscious worry that it was somehow going to make one in my life. I had been a very militaristic sixth and seventh grader, reading a lot about the civil war and the air battles of World War I. During that period my two great heroes and models in life had been Stonewall Jackson and Manfried von Richtofen. Now that I was closer to an actual participating age for war, I became much less militaristic. I began to develop some strong pacifistic leanings. I had a feeling that the way in which I was liable to take part in real combat was to become a battle casualty.

In September 1939, a high school graduate, I had to give up my plans of becoming a famous newspaper reporter because no one would hire me even as a copy boy. The Great Depression was in full swing and jobs were non-existent. I became instead a bank clerk in a clearing house and tried to start working my way through college, objective: English teacher. Hitler chose this particular month to invade Poland and start World War II. Our president promised to keep us out of the war. This was nice to hear but I and no one else believed him. In April, 1940 when I was struggling through my second semester at U.C.L.A., Hitler gobbled up Norway and Denmark. Next month I dropped out of college to avoid being fired for inefficiency by the bank and asked for day work. I was sent to a branch bank on the Miracle Mile on Wilshire Boulevard as a batch clerk and assistant teller. This was the month during which Hitler bushwhacked France and the English endured the ordeal of Dunkirk. The Battle of Britain began and went on during most of that summer. In October the United States began conscripting twenty-one year old males and I began to get extremely nervous on the general topic of international relations. Next June, I was still in the branch bank when Hitler invaded Russia. I hoped he had finally bit off more than he could chew and that I was going to be left alone.

That summer I reached my twentieth birthday and reluctantly, went up to a summer church camp in the mountains and met the girl of my dreams. This girl met every specification I could think of as a future wife and many I had previously been unaware of. I began to read books about pacifism and seriously considered becoming a conscientious objector. This did not jibe at all with the plans the assistant manager in the bank had for me. As an officer in the California National Guard, he thought all healthy young men my age should be volunteering for combat duty in the infantry or marines. When he spotted some of the books about pacifism I was reading in the back of my teller’s cage, he called me in for a fatherly talk. He became disturbed when I asked why he didn’t set a real example for young men like me by signing up himself for immediate active duty. He began to bird dog me in the bank. I wasn’t the best bank clerk in the system. My mind wandered from time to time and I made occasional errors so he had plenty to work on.

I had taken a week end job with a grocery store to help keep me alive on my bank salary of twenty-five dollars a week. Every Sunday morning, my first task always was to mop the entire floor area of the market. It was prophetic and symbolic that I had a mop in my hands and was using it when a morning music broadcast was interrupted with the news that the Japanese were bombing Pearl Harbor. I used a mop a lot more during the war than any offensive weapon. (It would have been even better if I had had a brush in hand and was painting something.) The next day Hitler declared war on the United States and Congress announced it was going to draft all young men eighteen years old on up. When I did not dash out and volunteer the next day, the assistant manager really went to work on me and two weeks later I was transferred to a big downtown branch where I could run an adding machine all day without contaminating the general public. I never gave that man the satisfaction of telling him I had given up the idea of being a conscientious objector and decided to volunteer for something. (When the war was over, I did give myself the satisfaction of checking on this zealot’s military record. He spent the entire war in the quartermaster corps in Chicago.)

I had decided that my objections to becoming a soldier were not really religious in nature. They were personal. I simply did not like the idea of getting shot at or of shooting at people. I did not care for the notion of living in the dirt and marching long distances in heavy shoes and scratchy clothing.

Harking