Читать книгу Out of the Night - Richard Julius Herman Krebs - Страница 21

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With the zeal of a crusader, I struck out on my career of an underground worker on the Pacific Coast.

For a week I collected information about the Coast Guard service. I haunted the Coast Guard pier at the end of the Embarcadero, and struck up acquaintances with sailors on cutters moored after a turn of patrol at sea. I studied the requirements for enrollment in the service, and followed the men on shore-leave to learn all I could about the haunts they frequented. Late at night, I would steal aboard the cutters and place communist tracts where they would be found by the crews in the morning. At the end of the week, to round out the picture, I went to the Coast Guard station and applied for an official Lifeboat Certificate. Two Coast Guard captains subjected me to a rigid examination on the spot. Together with other applicants, I manned a life-boat and pulled out into the bay for a test of seamanship. One of the officers, Captain Anderson, a rough old sea-dog, barked commands for maneuvers he wanted us to execute. That over, the second captain, whose name was Patricius, took charge of the theoretical end of the examination. Among the eight applicants present, I was the only one who passed the test. I received a document, signed by Captain Patricius, to the effect that I was a certified life-boat man. With this paper in my pocket, I felt safer. That night I wrote a report to Albert Walter, detailing the information I had gathered on the possibilities of communist penetration into the Coast Guard service.

The following five months I roamed the West Coast from Puget Sound to San Diego. Rarely did I stop for longer than a week in any one place. Every steamer of the Roland Line brought consignments of propaganda literature from Hamburg, and I faithfully distributed every piece of it, not even shying from such unimportant ports as Santa Barbara or Eureka or Newport, Oregon. Money I did not receive; Albert Walter’s letters complained of his heavy financial obligations elsewhere. I traveled many thousands of miles in these months, but my traveling expenses were almost nil. The coastwise vessels on which I shipped to go from one harbor to another were the lumber carriers Robert Johnsen and Grays Harbor, the freighter Admiral Sebree and the passenger liner Dorothy Alexander. Often I traveled as stowaway, chiefly using the Yale and Harvard, which were the fastest ships on the Coast.

During these months I never had a drink, never a real day of rest, and never did I go out with a girl. I lived only for the cause. Yet at times I was bitterly lonely. There was a night when I sat on a pile of timbers in the harbor of Tacoma, broken-down and ready to give up and desert. “Life,” I thought, “could be so pleasant, so easy, if only I would strike out for myself; I could learn a trade, start a business, have a big new car and a good home, and life would be all velvet and sweet!” A moment later I became so angry at my own bourgeois thoughts that I snatched a piece of wood from the ground and crashed it over my own head.

Albert Walter, Atchkanov and Ryatt had reason to be content with me. By the end of November, I had brought the Hamburg bureau in contact with small but fairly stable “activist” groups in Seattle, Grays Harbor, Portland, Astoria, San Francisco, and San Pedro. I now decided to invade Hawaii.

In Hamburg I had been given the name of an official of the American Shipowners’ Association who had been reported as bribable by one of Albert Walter’s scouts. This official, we were led to believe, would ship any man on any desired ship for a fee of ten dollars, with no questions asked. It was important to have such a man at hand, and it was equally important that he should have no suspicion that he was assisting communist agitators to entrench themselves in strategic shipping lines. Albert Walter and Atchkanov had put it up to me to follow this lead, and to put it to a practical test.

It was easy. I went to San Pedro and asked for Mr. X., a tall, handsome, smooth-faced young man, in the offices of the Shipowners’ Association. I had labored two days to make a little sailship model in a bottle, and this I presented to Mr. X. He was pleased. The following morning I wrote him a note, reading: “Please get me a ship to Honolulu.” I put it into an envelope, together with ten dollars, and slipped it on his desk. Before the week had passed, I was called up for a sailor’s berth aboard the Calawaii, one of the luxury liners of the Los Angeles Steamship Company. Asked by the chief officer if I was an American citizen, I said: “Yes, sir.” I was signed on without further ado.

The Calawaii, painted a cool tropical white from stern to stern, was a regular vessel of the Hawaiian trade. In the course of each round trip of three weeks, the steamer spent a week in island waters with Honolulu and Hilo as the chief ports of call. Before she sailed, I lived through a hectic night, smuggling aboard my accumulated stock of suitcases and packages full of propaganda literature in the Japanese language.

The passage to Honolulu was balmy. The wild, warm, rock-bound face of Molokai, and Diamond Head pushing its gleaming snout out into the sapphire sea, seemed to laugh serenely at the conception that revolution could ever come to ride these shores. The white breakers foaming over purple cliffs, the wheeling gulls and the lush green of the hills belched gay derision at the puny proselyte of Lenin; they made me think of peacefully humming fishermen, of full-throated brown maidens with enticing hips, and of Captain Cook. Dark youngsters dived for coins in the harbor, and on the wharf the fat brown musicians of the Royal Hawaiian Band hurled a musical welcome. But beyond the crowd of bright-eyed, brightly dressed people, with flame-colored leis around their necks, I saw what I had searched for:—a fringe of Mongolian faces rising above faded dungarees and often sleeveless denim shirts. The proletariat! I was reassured.

I found that forty percent of the population was Japanese, with Filipinos, Chinese and Portuguese the next strongest groups. Most of the Chinese became tradesmen and merchants. The real working class of Honolulu is Portuguese-Hawaiian-Japanese, with an influx of negro blood on the Portuguese side, while the plantation proletariat of the island is mainly Filipino. Contrary to the Comintern’s practice in other “semi-colonial” countries, no nationalist slogans could be raised in Hawaii, since each race there is confronted by a majority of all other races. Moreover, in the streets of Honolulu words like “half-caste” or “half-breed” are taboo. All I saw and heard and read then about the racial and social constellations on the Hawaiian Islands I incorporated in a rambling thirty-page report which I dispatched to Hamburg. Five years later, in 1930, I saw this report in Moscow, in the office of Losovsky, whose real name is S. A. Dridzo, the chief of the International Propaganda and Action Committees of the Profintern. It was marked in red pencil, “Sehr interessant.” And a sentence which stated that Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese and English propaganda literature should be spread concurrently in Honolulu was also heavily underlined in red.

On this first voyage, all I had for distribution were tracts and leaflets in Japanese. I saw to it that the wharves of Honolulu and Hilo were littered with them for days. I deposited them in bundles of fifty and more in water-front ice-cream parlors, in speakeasies, and in the numerous Japanese “massage-salons” which functioned as substitutes for brothels for the poor. I retained my job aboard the Calawaii and returned with her to San Pedro to pick up, in addition to Japanese, all the Spanish and English propaganda material I could obtain. During my second trip to the Islands, I boarded every vessel in Honolulu harbor, including the small coastal steamers, two Japanese ships, and the square-rigged sailship Tusitala of New York. I was put to flight by the officers of several steamers of the Matson Line and the Dollar Steamship Company, but I found promising young sympathizers aboard the liners City of Los Angeles and Molokai and aboard the Tusitala. Their names I sent on to Hamburg, so that “activists” in other ports could be notified to continue the work of building communist units on these ships. In Hilo, I hired a taxi-cab for a six-hour drive through sugar and pineapple plantations. Whenever I saw Filipino laborers at work, I would shout to attract their attention and then fling handfuls of leaflets in Spanish out of the car. A man with a martial reddish mustache took up the pursuit in a rattling Ford, and ordered me to get off the land or go to jail. The taxi-driver apologized profusely. We drove back to Hilo. This was, I believe, the first time in history that the cry “Workers of the World, Unite!” was passed on to the plantation coolies of Hawaii.

My third voyage between California and Honolulu gave me a rare opportunity for personal contacts with a large number of Filipino workers. While in the port of Los Angeles, I noticed that hundreds of rough wooden berths in three tiers were being built into the ’tween-decks of the Calawaii. When I asked for the purpose of these mass quarters, the bosun replied, “Slave transport.” We were to carry to Honolulu a large consignment of plantation workers who had arrived from Luzon a few days earlier.

At sea, the Filipinos were not allowed to come on deck. The fact that the well-fed and well-groomed men and the sleek women of the first and second class could loaf and play and dance and make love in the sunshine and under the stars, while many times their number of dark-skinned toilers were forced to camp in the crowded, evil-smelling gloom of the ’tween-decks, aroused my anger and spurred me on to tireless activity. I spent more hours among the Filipinos than on deck or in the forecastle. These sons of the land of seven thousand islands may have looked like a dull and uniform mass of slaves to the complacent outsider, but the more I dug myself into this mass and endeavored to become a part of it, the more I became aware that these men, who were fed on rice and treated like cattle, had well-defined personalities, hopes, and dreams and plans. They loved their homeland, and many of them were capable of making articulate their will to national independence. A good half of them could read, and about one-fourth could speak and understand English. The communist doctrine which in the case of oppressed peoples combines the slogans of class war with the struggle for national liberation, fell here, when translated into its simplest terms, on fertile soil. My Filipino listeners were visibly intrigued when I expounded to them the doctrine that all men, no matter what the color of their skin, were entitled to equal rights, that the first step of the fight for equal rights was the fight for equal wages with white workers, and that the best method of accomplishing that was through strikes at harvest time. I saw dusky faces light up with comprehension, and then they went on jabbering excitedly among themselves.

One of them, an elderly man with an almost herculean torso, asked me: “Is that the will of God?”

“Most certainly,” I said. “God did not make rich men and poor men.”

More than once, during idle moments, I felt the temptation to become a lazy and contented resident of Hawaii, the true land of flowers, champagne-like surf and tolerant living. But when I returned to San Pedro from my third voyage to the Islands, I found a letter from Hamburg awaiting me at the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Y.M.C.A. As usual, it was written in a simple code—the alphabet starting with M, every fourth letter being invalid, the whole arranged something like a crossword puzzle to be read from right to left and from the bottom upward. Albert Walter wrote that his organization was preparing a worldwide campaign against seamen’s missions, and for this purpose he wanted material on the doings of the Seamen’s Church Institutes of America which were believed to be subsidized by the ship-owners to neutralize the influences of class war propaganda. He also instructed me to collect accurate information on the living conditions of seamen aboard the tank-ships of the Standard Oil Company. Such information was necessary to formulate communist programs of demands for tanker crews. The Standard Oil Company was representative of American tank-shipping. Oil transports would play a vital role in future wars. Communist control of this branch of merchant shipping had been raised to a major issue in the action program of the Marine Section of the Comintern.

I left my berth on the Calawaii in February, 1925, and started out on a four weeks’ journey through the Seamen’s Church Institutes of the West Coast. The Seamen’s Institutes in American ports were the best in the world. They maintained reading-rooms and libraries for seafaring men, they received and forwarded mail, served wholesome meals at lower prices than most restaurants, maintained a free employment service for deck and engine-room personnel, and offered legal advice to seamen. They often gave social evenings, dances and lectures for the men from the ships. They even showed motion pictures free of charge. Some of them had dormitories and single rooms to provide cheap quarters for jobless seamen. The atmosphere in these institutions was clean and cheerful. There were no attempts at aggressive “soul-saving.” Neither were there any guards or bouncers, with the exception of the Seamen’s Institute in New York, a large building on South Street. No membership fees were exacted. Every mariner was welcome as long as he did not disturb the peace of the house. Though they excluded drunks and questionable women, the Institutes were places where seamen liked to gather in idle shore hours to meet friends, to get their mail and to write their letters, to check their baggage, to read, and to play chess.

But from the communist point of view, the Seamen’s Institutes were agencies of the ship-owners, created to preach docility and religion. They were looked upon as supply bases for strike-breakers and as espionage centers against the always numerous rebels and malcontents in the marine industry. So they had to be exposed and fought, tooth and nail. The plan for this campaign was originated in Moscow and Hamburg in 1924. It went along with the decision to establish communist International Seamen’s Clubs in all important harbors. And if the International Clubs (Interclubs) were to thrive as cultural, educational and political centers of the seafaring population, the Seamen’s Institutes had to be wrecked and rooted out of existence. The war against them was waged for many years, and reached its violent climax in the early thirties when sailors’ homes, including the largest of them all, in New York, became the scenes of riots and raids by wrecking squads under communist command.

It was my lot to do some of the earliest reconnoitering and skirmishing in this field. In San Pedro, San Francisco and Seattle, traveling between ports along the Pacific Highway and occasionally as a stowaway on coastal ships, I won the favor of the mild-mannered directors of the respective Seamen’s Institutes by offering myself as a voluntary worker. I undertook to clean reading-rooms and offices, to visit ships in search of sailors willing and able to sing at entertainment evenings. In this way I gained an insight into the organizational structure of these Institutes, and their working methods. I obtained some of their official literature. I lay in wait for unguarded minutes, to glance over the correspondence on the managers’ desks. I did some ignominious sleuthing to determine the outside sources which supplied the Institutes with funds. I even compiled rough statistics about the number of seamen who enjoyed the Institute’s hospitality during a normal stay. Each evening I made detailed notes of all my observations, and at the end of a month I sent the fruits of my labors, including the printed matter I had filched, to Albert Walter in Hamburg. I heartily disliked this petty spying; I was better fitted for action than for lurking and backstairs diplomacy.

I went to San Pedro and bribed Mr. X. to ship me out aboard a Standard Oil tanker.

The ship was El Segundo of the Standard Oil Company of California. Half of her crew consisted of college students turned sailors for pleasure and profit. I went to work upon their minds with gusto, but with almost no results. At sea, often until midnight, the mess room rang with wild political discussions. I also studied the living conditions, the attitudes and grievances of the professional Standard Oil seamen. I induced two of their number, whom I could class as communist partisans, to enter the International Seamen’s Union to carry on disruptive work inside of that organization. I had joined the Union myself during my second voyage on the Calawaii, and had found sufficient raw material among the members of the San Pedro branch to start an opposition group whose task was to discredit the union leaders with the rank and file and to obstruct their plans at the weekly branch meetings. The rest of El Segundo’s crew remained unresponsive to my agitation. Standard Oil sailors were well-fed and well-paid and, as a rule, indifferent to communist arguments. Of the many American tank-ships I had visited during a year of roaming on the West Coast, crew members of only one vessel, the Empire Arrow, succumbed to my drive for a communist ship unit.

Back in San Pedro, three weeks after I had signed on, I dashed back to the ship, but the El Segundo had already departed. At my request, the marine superintendent of the Standard Oil Company, a certain Mr. Pendergast, gave me a letter of recommendation.

A year of single-handed campaigning had left me with the feeling that I was like a man who shoveled water into a barrel without a bottom. I craved for a rubbing of shoulders with men who were better than I. To none of those I had met since leaving Hamburg was I willing to concede that quality. I dreamt of being able, some day, to lead vast armies of workers into the firelines of revolution. I also dreamt of being, some day, master on the bridge of one of the finest liners afloat. But a career in the American or any other merchant marine was barred to me by the law. Aliens were not wanted. And in Germany I was wanted—for taking up arms against the government. A workers’ revolution seemed to be the only way out. The old laws would be swept away, and with them their makers. But revolutions were not made in America. They were in the making in Europe and Asia. I decided to return to Europe. One of my younger brothers had come to the Coast a few months before as a sailor aboard the Norwegian freighter Hoyanger. We swapped a few identification papers. I would be safer in Europe if I used his name.

A curious twinge of conscience made me postpone my departure. I remembered that my Hamburg chiefs had expected me to do something about a harpoon gun used on whaling ships out of San Francisco. The matter had not been mentioned again in Albert Walter’s letters, and I attached no special importance to this mission. I regarded it as one of the usual minor assignments given to young communists to test their talents for industrial espionage. I knew that a special department of the German Communist Party—and probably of the Communist Parties of other countries as well—engaged in this branch of spying to aid the better reconstruction of Soviet industry. The department was known as the “BB-Apparat” (BB-Betriebs Berichterstattung—Industrial Reports).

I journeyed to San Francisco and presented the letter of recommendation given me by the Standard Oil Company in the offices of the California Sea Products Company which operated three whaling ships. I applied for a job, and the official who questioned me seemed impressed by my brawn and my eagerness to go to work. Within two days, I became a deckhand aboard the whaler Traveler.

Our hunting grounds were the waters off the north and south of the jagged Farallon Islands, where the playful humpbacks and the giant sulphur-bottom whales were still fairly abundant. The animals, once sighted, were killed with harpoons fired from small cannon mounted in the bows of the steamers, and were then hauled alongside and pumped full of air to keep them afloat. The floating cadavers were towed to the whaling station near Monterey to be hung up in chains, cut to pieces, and boiled to yield material for the manufacture of soaps, perfumes and margarine. Each cruise lasted from four to five days. In ten days, the Traveler delivered no less than seven humpbacks and one sulphur-bottom to the slaughter-house on the beach of Monterey.

These ten days made me ill. A live whale curving his fifty-ton bulk with wondrous elegance to the surface of the sea was a beautiful thing to behold. I was captivated by this combination of power and grace which life had taken so many years to build. Then came man, greedy, ruthless, slimy, and cunningly adjusted a grenade in the tip of his harpoon to blast to shreds heart and lungs of the whale. The sight of a whale fighting in the sea ahead, hurt, spurting blood, unable to roar his anguish or to kill his murderers, was more than I could endure. His carcass chained and trailing alongside the ship toward Monterey, spreading an intense odor of putrefaction, what a miserable end for the good-natured titan of the sea!

The latest harpoon gun was aboard the Hawk, a newer sister ship of the Traveler. I spent an hour with the Hawk’s gunner at a time when he was lovingly cleaning his shiny cannon. He answered willingly and with pride my questions regarding the intricacies of the gun and its handling. I borrowed a camera from the cook, and made pictures of the gun from six different angles. I was aware that I was doing a slipshod job, but I detested whaling. I had the film developed and sent the negatives, together with a short report, to Hamburg. And then I deserted my berth without even asking for my pay.

I was hunting for a ship in San Pedro to take me to Europe when a curt note from Albert Walter bade me sign on once more aboard the Calawaii. The note, in effect, said: “We have heard that the Filipino plantation workers in Hawaii are contract laborers who will be returned to the Philippine Islands in due time. We are, therefore, greatly interested in knowing if these workers are free enough to attend political schooling circles before returning to their homes. Comrade B—— is now boatswain on the Calawaii, and will co-operate with you. With international salute, A. W.”

When the Calawaii came in, I went straight aboard and demanded to see the bosun. He was a German, a man of about thirty, of the blond, taciturn, hard-bitten type, and an excellent seaman. I showed him the letter from Hamburg, and he saw to it that I was signed on in the capacity of Quartermaster. Comrade B—— had been a war prisoner in Siberia. Like many other German war prisoners in Russia, he had joined the Bolshevik Party after the Soviet Revolution and taken part in the subsequent civil war. He had been sent abroad in 1923 by the Maritime Section of the Comintern as propagandist and liaison man on the west coasts of North and South America.

The second night after our arrival in Honolulu harbor, Comrade B—— had rounded up four or five local communist sympathizers and escorted them aboard for a conference to determine in which districts the largest number of Filipino laborers were concentrated. The conference took place in the small two-man cabin which I shared with Comrade B—— in the forward part of the ship. It was a fruitless session. The pseudo-communists of Honolulu suffered from an excessive dose of what Comintern circles contemptuously call Lokalpatriotismus. Comrade B—— pounded away at them with great patience. We wrangled for hours, and our voices often were louder than prudence permitted. What we did not know was that another Calawaii quartermaster, a young member of some patriotic American organization, was eavesdropping through the thin wooden partition which separated us from the adjoining cabin.

Next day, steaming toward Hilo through cobalt seas, Comrade B—— and I were called out by the Calawaii’s chief officer, Mr. Wells, a handsome and efficient mariner, and nobody’s fool. Mr. Wells, leaning against the rail, looked us over with his penetrating eyes.

“This must stop, gentlemen,” he said. “I’ve been told that you two are I.W.W. delegates. We don’t want Wobblies on our ships. Moreover, I don’t want any more secret soap-boxing on my ship.”

For several seconds we stood dumbfounded.

“Mister Mate,” Comrade B—— said, “I’d like to know what rat—”

“That’ll do,” the mate cut in, turning abruptly. “You know what I mean. That’s all.”

There was no doubt in our minds as to the identity of the ship’s spy. That he had reported us as I.W.W.’s was proof that he had not understood too much of our talk. My dislike for informers was so intense that I wanted to go forward to subject the spy to what Ernst Thaelmann called a “proletarian rub-down.” But Comrade B——, more level-headed and experienced than I, stopped me.

In Hilo, we skipped an afternoon’s work and hired a ramshackle car. As was customary in that port, the Calawaii’s jazzband played on the sundeck, and the officers and passengers were dancing with a bevy of bored debutantes from ashore. We saw Mr. Wells, his face happily flushed, whirling and gliding with a young thing in his arms, and so we slipped away unnoticed. We cruised around the island of Hawaii until dark. The roads were excellent. The towering outlines of Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa against the unmarred blue of the sky were a rare sight which gave our journey the flavor of a holiday trip. But we had only casual glances for the volcanoes. Our eyes hunted for the meandering lines of Filipino workers in the vast stretches of sugar and pineapple. Wherever we saw a sizable crew at work, we investigated the location of the men’s barracks and the village nearest to them. Leisurely we walked through the villages. Comrade B—— and I made notes of everything we thought might be important. It was clear that communist organizers, detailed to recruit and school Filipino plantation workers, would have to establish themselves inconspicuously in these villages; if they could manage to win the goodwill of the local Chinese, they would have plenty of opportunity for association with the Filipinos. The propaganda literature would have to be printed in neutral covers, to look like catalogues or advertising matter. An organizer would not have to go into the plantations himself. Once he had interested a few of the workers, they could carry the discussion and pamphlets into the barracks. We returned to the Calawaii, dusty and weary, but with the feeling that we had done a good day’s work. Comrade B—— did not want to send the report of our scouting expedition from Hawaii. He decided to wait until we were back in San Pedro.

That same night, after a cold shower, I went back ashore in Hilo for some refreshment in one of the ice-cream stores near the docks. When I walked into the place, I saw the youngster, whom I suspected of being the ship’s informer, lurching over a small round table in the background. He had had too much okolehau, and he was slightly drunk and very cocky. He had a knife in his hand and amused himself with cutting a number of grass skirts and other Hawaiian souvenirs from a wall where they had been hung up for display. Seeing me, he pranced and brayed: “Hallelujah, I’m a bum . . . I won’t work! I.W.W. I—Won’t—Work!” Now I was sure. I lunged and with both fists struck him in the face. Then I returned to the ship. At turn-to hour, next morning, I saw that two of his front teeth were knocked out. He looked at me obliquely, keeping silent.

But he had his revenge. The Calawaii had hardly docked in San Pedro ten days later when immigration officers boarded the ship, leaving a watchman to guard the gangway. I was ordered to bring all my papers to the captain’s salon. Comrade B—— had received the same order. In the salon two immigration officials in uniform relieved me of my Able Seaman’s Certificate, my Lifeboat Ticket, and my discharge book of the Shipowners’ Association.

“Wait in your cabin until further notice,” they told me.

A minute later a shipmate informed me that he had heard the gangway watchman say that the officers had come aboard to arrest “a couple of undesirable aliens.” Then Comrade B—— flew into the cabin, cursing.

“We’ve got to vanish,” he said.

We agreed on a meeting-place ashore, and separated. We heard a voice through the companionway on deck, shouting our names. I ran through the ’tween-decks toward a port amidships, used at sea for dumping kitchen garbage. I slipped through the port. The rim of the concrete quay was too far off for me to reach. But at the bottom of the four-foot-wide gully, between the ship’s side and the quay, were heavy logs chained to ring-bolts in the concrete and serving as fenders. I let myself drop to one of these logs. The surface was slimy and barnacled. I crawled along the logs, dodging a column of water which poured from a scupper, until I cleared the steamer’s stern. There was an iron ladder here leading to the top of the quay. I ran up this ladder, and disappeared in the murk of a great cargo shed.

I met Comrade B—— in the booth of a soothsayer in the Long Beach amusement district, a few miles from the Pacific docks. There was a hunt for us going on all over San Pedro and Wilmington. Comrade B—— had salvaged his bundle of notes and his money. I had salvaged nothing. Bare-headed, in khaki shirts, dungarees and canvas shoes, we deliberated in a moving roller-coaster on what we should do. We saw no chance of ever getting another ship in any West Coast port. Both of us were refugees from the Germany of 1923, and were unwilling to invite capture and deportation. Neither of us had any identification papers. Our belongings were still aboard the Calawaii.

I knew an elderly girl in Long Beach, whose failure to win the man she loved had driven her to toy with communism. She worked as a waitress in a sea-shore restaurant. When the restaurant closed at eleven, I met her and explained our predicament to her. She declared herself willing to board the Calawaii to see if there were still any guards on duty. While she went aboard, Comrade B—— and I waited in an empty railway car a hundred yards from the ship. She returned to report that there were two watchmen at the gangway.

In the dark night, Comrade B—— and I slunk through the harbor until we found a skiff. We manned the skiff and paddled through the Pacific docks to the offshore side of the Calawaii. Several barges were moored alongside. In the darkness, I fell through an open hatch into the hold of a barge, and remained unconscious for some time. As if by miracle, I suffered no broken bones. Comrade B—— hoisted me back on deck, and revived me with harbor water. Then he clambered up the side of the Calawaii, and ten minutes later he lowered our belongings into the skiff which I had meanwhile paddled under the steamer’s prow. We glided silently and landed in a deserted part of the docks where there were no customs guards on duty. That night we spent in the tiny apartment of our friend, the waitress from Long Beach.

Comrade B—— intended to make another stowaway journey to the Hawaiian Islands. I asked him if he needed me as his assistant.

“No,” he said. “You are too tall and too conspicuous. You better go on to New York.” He could not forgive me my blunder of hitting the informer in Hilo. He gave me enough money to pay my railway fare to St. Louis, where I went to the German Club, whose members were just then engaged in mass-singing and indoor gymnastics, to ask for financial assistance to continue to New York. I told them I had lost my ship, and intended to catch it again in some East Coast port so as not to lose my pay. I received three dollars and an introduction to a kindly German, a salesman of sewing machines, who was driving to New York and was glad to have a companion on his trip.

New York bewildered and oppressed me. I tarried long enough to induce one of the land-sharks, who acted as shipping masters and notaries public in dismal upstairs rooms along South Street, to procure for me a sailor’s berth aboard the Carlier, of the Royal Lloyd Belge. A fortnight later, in the early fall of 1925, I paid off in Antwerp.