Allen and Dee get jobs on a small freighter and sail to Roatan and Belize City in July 1965

 When I was a little boy way back in the dark ages, one of my favorite books was a picture and storybook called “Pirates, Ships, and Sailors,” which was full of colorful pictures that set my mind to dreaming of setting sail some day for exotic lands way beyond the horizon.

In the spring of 1965, I was getting ready to graduate from Austin College in Sherman, Texas, and I was ready for adventure.

So, when my best friend Dee Johnson (Milton David Johnson III) told me that he planned to spend the summer in Tampa, FL, and invited me to come with him, I was all for it.  Together we hatched a plan to get jobs on a ship, since Tampa is a busy port and sail away to Europe or Asia or some other exotic location.

Dee Johnson & Allen Hallmark as we looked in the Austin College yearbook for 1965 our senior year.

 The plan entailed sharing the guest bedroom in the home of Dee’s mom, Jack, who had retired after serving many years as county clerk of Midland County, TX, and had married a lawyer, who moved them to a condo in a high rise in Tampa.  Jack had been a single widow for many years since Dee’s father died in an airplane crash in World War II when Dee was just an infant.

Dee’s stepfather, Frank Bezoni, was considerably older than Jack.  Still working as an attorney at a local law firm and nightly drinking a fifth of Canadian Club whiskey that he kept in the freezing compartment of his fridge, Frank let us know that he wasn’t happy about having two 20-something boys cluttering up his apartment and urged us to get jobs pronto.  Dee and I didn’t need much prompting to get out of his hair every evening.

Most weekdays Dee and I scoured the Tampa newspaper’s want ads for notices of shipping firms needing crew members (which were few and far between) and going down to the harbor to inquire in person.  We soon discovered that there was a Catch-22 involved in getting hired to work on a U.S. flagged merchant ship:  you had to be a member of the maritime union of ship workers (I don’t recall its formal name but probably a predecessor of today’s Seafarers Union International), but in order to join the union, you had to have plenty of experience as a merchant ship sailor or know a union member who would sponsor you. 

Since Dee and I had neither experience as sailors nor any relatives or friends who were union members, our hopes of sailing the Seven Seas seemed to have evaporated.

“I remember everybody laughing at us,” Dee says about our weeks of fruitless searching for ship jobs. 

By now it was July, and we were still freeloading at the Bezoni apartment and Frank was getting grumpier with every passing day.

Some days, when we tired of looking for a berth, we drove down to St. Pete Beach.  That’s where I met a gorgeous young blond gal in the skimpiest bikini.  But that's another story.

Then, one fine day shortly after the 4th of July we were down at the dry dock where guys were stripping old paint off a small freighter.  We asked one of the dark-skinned guys stripping paint if the boss was around – it required some time to get him to understand what we were asking – finally, he pointed toward the stern of the boat, and a short walk later we found Captain Abrejo in conversation with a couple of other guys.  Captain Abrejo was a tall Hispanic wearing a short-sleeved tan uniform with insignia indicating his rank. (For the purposes of this story, I shall call him Captain Abrejo, since I’ve forgotten his real name.)

We introduced ourselves and asked the captain if he was hiring crew for his ship.  In an accented but excellent English, he said he needed a couple of men to help with getting the ship ready to sail.  If we worked hard and he approved our work, he might add us to his crew for a trip to Belize in one week.  Captain Abrejo said he couldn’t pay us union wages or much at all, he mentioned $5 a day, take it or leave it.

British Navy photo of a World War I minesweeping ship (from Wikipedia).  Trudy M looked something like this.

 Dee remembers his reaction of the ship: “I don’t think I was impressed with the boat at all, and I was less impressed when I found out it was going to British Honduras.”  That’s right, our destination was the Central American nation now known as Belize but was then a colony of the British Crown. 

Not having any other options, we signed on and went to work that day stripping the old paint off the hull of the boat for three days and then painting it for four more.  It was hard physical labor with our crewmates who spoke a lilting tongue, a mixture of Spanish, English, French, Dutch, and indigenous languages, which we found out later is the patois or creole dialect of the Caribbean that allows working class folks who come from different islands or Central American nations to understand one another.  Only trouble was, we didn’t understand creole and they didn’t understand us.

When Captain Abrejo declared the ship, called the Trudy M, ready to sail, he told Dee and me to go home and return the next morning at 6 am ready to sail for Belize City, which was then the capital of British Honduras.

“How long will the voyage take?” I asked Captain Abrejo, who said we’d be back in Tampa in two week and that he was planning two trips to Belize.

Then, he told us that he had two different jobs, and we would have to decide which one of us would take each of them.  The first job was to be one of the four helmsmen, who would steer the ship following the course set by Captain Abrejo with a gyrocompass, which was installed just above the big steering wheel.

 

Photo by Randy C. Bunney, Great Circle Photography, of a helmsman on a modern freighter – not the Trudy M, which had only one wheel.

The other job was to be the assistant to the Chief Engineer, whose job was to keep the diesel engines maintained and operating optimally.

Fearing to be stuck in the engine room where I might constantly be hitting my head on the steel ceiling, I instantly requested the helmsman job – not bothering to consult with Dee at all.  I justified it on the grounds that I was 6’ 1” tall and he was only 5’ 8”.  I’m surprised that our friendship survived that miserable moment.  I’m really sorry, dear friend Dee.

My photo taken in the engine room of a small Alaskan cruise ship in 2021.  The Trudy M’s engine room was much more primitive.

“How could you do that to me?” Dee always asks me when the subject of our voyage comes up.

Anyway, the next day we went to the designated dock and got a good look at the Trudy M for the first time since until then, the ship had been on land in dry dock with the deck and superstructure far above our heads.  Captain Abrejo had told us that the ship was 135 feet long and that it had been a British minesweeper in World War I, designed to locate and destroy German mines set at strategic locations to destroy British war and cargo ships.

Captain Abrejo introduced Dee to Chief Engineer Webster, a no-nonsense black man with a big heart, who took him down to the engine room, which Dee recently described for me:

” The engine room was down below, you had to go down this ladder to get there. And the ship was powered by two 200 HP Buda engines.  Webster was very friendly, I liked Webster.  He was Black, the only Black guy on the ship.  One of my duties was to pump diesel fuel into the engine. I had to clean up a lot down there and to make sure the engines were clean, I had to rub them down and that kind of stuff, but mainly I was supposed to stay down there to constantly check on everything.  It was f’ing hot down there.  I would pop up out of the hold onto the deck to get some relief and the captain would always get mad at me for that if he saw me.” 

After we left Dee to learn his job in the Engine Room, the captain took me up to the bridge or wheelhouse where the ship was steered and introduced me to the three other crew members with whom I’d share the duty of steering the ship.  One of the three was assigned to be my partner, whose name I regrettably don’t recall, so I’ll call him Jari here. We would be on duty for six hours and off six hours around the clock until we reached our destination.  During our six hours on duty, Jari would steer for one hour while I kept watch.  Then, I would steer for an hour while he kept watch.

Captain Abrejo explained how the gyrocompass worked and gave me the basics about how to keep the ship on the heading that he set and occasionally reset after making calculations as to our position at sea. 

Luckily, it usually wasn’t too difficult to keep the boat on course when the weather and the sea were benign, and the captain seemed to be pleased with my progress.  Communicating with my partner Jari was somewhat limited but it turned out that he had more English than any of the other helmsmen and perhaps that’s why the captain paired him with me.

Captain Abrejo then took me to the galley to meet the cook and learn about mealtimes served in the adjacent small mess hall.  I wasn’t too impressed with the galley, which was pretty dirty and had a cockroach problem. Next, he took me to one of the two heads or bathrooms on the boat and showed me how to flush the toilet with a bucket with a rope attached to it that you slung over the rail to fill it with seawater.  The toilet was plumbed but he emphasized that it was best to use the bucket and save fresh water for other uses.  After that, he showed me my bunk, equipped with a board about four inches taller than the mattress to keep me from falling out when the ship would be rockin’ and rollin’ in times of rough seas. 

The tour being over, Captain Abrejo reminded me that my shift in the wheelhouse would start in one hour when we would shove off and start our voyage to Belize. I used the time to stow my belongings in the drawer under my bed, including my twin-lens reflex Minolta camera.  (Unfortunately, all the photos that I took on that voyage were burned up in the Almeda wildfire of September 2020.

During my first shift on duty, Captain Abrejo spent a lot of time with me to be sure I knew what I was supposed to do.  A pilot came on board to guide our ship out of the Tampa Bay area and then left the ship in his small pilot’s boat when we were safely out into the Gulf of Mexico.  Jari took the first shift at the wheel with me as the watch and Captain Abrejo instructed me in what to look out for and what kinds of things, I needed to report to him.

Soon, I got used to the rhythm of the job and enjoyed the ever-changing view of the ocean as we plied our way south-southwest toward Belize City, the largest city of the British colony of British Honduras.  Night duty was scarier because I couldn’t see much of anything out the big windows of the wheelhouse and depended on Jari to warn me of any obstacles ahead.

Another tough part of the job was learning how to get enough sleep during our shifts of six hours off duty.  But I was 21 so I didn’t need all that much sleep. I can’t remember whether I had an alarm clock, but being late to the wheelhouse was not something you wanted to be.

The toughest thing, though, was the food.  Being a Texas boy born and bred, I loved steak and potatoes and veggies with the occasional fried chicken dinner with mashed potatoes and gravy, string beans, and fruit salad.  And each lunch and dinner had to be followed by dessert.  But on this ship, we got poor cuts of meat, if any, with beans -- no potatoes – but with lots and lots of plantains, a very large variety of bananas that has to be cooked to be eatable. And bananas for dessert.  It was pretty much plantains for breakfast, plantains for lunch, and plantains for dinner too.

Dee recalled that the captain asked him to drive to a supermarket before our voyage began to get provisions.  Dee adds: “The captain was very impressed with my Mom’s car, a 1960 (Pontiac) Bonneville.  It had a huge trunk.  At Austin College when we would go to the drive-in to watch movies, I could put at least a couple of friends in that trunk.  

Dee continues: “The captain piled a bunch of food in the trunk that I didn’t recall ever seeing when we ate meals on the boat.  The food we got was terrible!  The highlight was Jello.  I seem to remember pigs’ knuckles for some reason.  I still won’t eat plantains.  I won’t go near them.” 

The weather was perfect all the way to our destination, which at some point I learned was not going to be Belize City as we had been told at first.  Instead, we would be anchoring first in Dixon Cove on the island of Roatan, a possession of the Republic of Honduras.  About halfway there, we sailed out of the Gulf of Mexico with Cuba off our port bow and the tip of the Yucatan Peninsula off our starboard bow and into the Caribbean Sea.

Dee recalls his first impressions of being far out on the ocean:  “I remember when we got out to sea, the water was so incredibly blue.  I remember the dolphins or porpoises that swam alongside the ship and popped up out of the water, I thought that was terrific.”  For us two Texas boys who had never been to sea before, it was pretty cool stuff. 

Today, Roatan is a famous destination for scuba divers because the world’s 2nd largest coral reef (after Australia’s Great Barrier Reef) sits just offshore of Roatan.  But back in 1965 it was an isolated island with just a couple of villages and no tourists.  It had hills and lots of palm trees and reminded me of a kid’s book I loved about pirates, Spanish treasures, and deserted islands.  As we came into the harbor on the leeward side of the island a rusty old ship that had wrecked on rocks near the shore many years earlier made the scene even more picturesque.  (Googling Roatan recently, I found pictures of that same old wreck by Dixon Cove.)

 

Cover of one of my favorite books of my childhood

I happened to be steering as we pulled into Dixon Cove and managed to follow Captain Abrejo’s orders well enough to get to a safe place to lower the anchor.  I was probably sweating with anxiety and elated at the same time.

Just a couple of our crew members went ashore to deliver something to someone in the village.  Soon, we were under way again and headed for our main destination:  Belize City, the biggest city of British Honduras. It was a short passage that just took a couple of hours.

Once again, I was the guy steering the Trudy M as we approached the Belize harbor, but a local pilot soon came aboard to guide us into a safe anchorage, which took quite a while until finally we dropped anchor about a quarter mile from shore.  The harbor wasn’t dredged deep enough to accommodate ships, so even small ones like the Trudy M couldn’t get to a dock.

Captain Abrejo went ashore by himself and was gone for several hours, maybe even overnight.  He had assigned us deckhands a schedule for being on guard watch throughout day and night.

The next day the captain announced that a crew he had hired would be off-loading our cargo to a barge to be hauled ashore and delivered to the buyer.  Our cargo consisted of a hold full of 80-pound bags of fertilizer, soon to be sold to local farmers to improve their crop yields.

A launch soon arrived with 20 or more Black men onboard.  They weren’t chained together but otherwise they looked like slaves as their white master ordered some of them to board the Trudy M and others stood on the barge to accept the large bags from their brothers onboard and stack them neatly on the barge.  A couple of the men stood on top of the hundreds of sacks in the hold and hoisted them onto the net of a small crane that lifted them out where the line of men tossed them to the next man down the line and onto the barge.

All the men had their shirts off and their muscular bodies glistened in the morning sun.  Soon as they got into the swing of their labor, one of them started a shanty chant and before long, they all joined in swinging those heavy sacks and sometimes stomping their bare feet to the rhythm of the chants, which reminded me of the prison chants that I’d heard on records, like the Parchment Farm songs recorded in the 1940s by Alan Lomax. 

It seemed to me like a movie of a scene that took place centuries ago, but it was real and happening before my eyes.  I was enthralled by what I was seeing and hearing, which seemed at the same time barbaric and heroic.

Dee shares this memory of that scene: “I remember when we got into Belize and the unloading of the boat.  I remember the big old boss man – we’re talkin’ 300+ pounds.  ‘Give me a little sweat for my money, boys.’  They didn’t seem unhappy.”

When that incredible chain gang had emptied our hold, they were loaded into the launch and driven back to Belize City.  I wondered what their lives were like and whether they felt like slaves or got paid decently enough to have wives and kids they were raising in the colorful houses of the isolated port city.

The only cargo that was left on the Trudy M was a brand new brown MGB and the next day, it was driven off the deck where it had been tied down onto a plank ramp and onto another barge and was floated into Belize.

Later that day, Captain Abrejo allowed about half the crew to go on shore leave.  Dee and I climbed into the ship’s dinghy, an outboard motorboat used to ferry crew members and passengers ashore and back.  We were given a strict curfew by which time we had to be back on the Trudy M so that the other crew members could have their few hours in the town.  There were no tall buildings back then and all the houses and businesses were built of wood that in most cases were brightly painted in primary colors, except for a couple of British government buildings that were drabber.

After wandering around Belize town for half an hour or so, we all gravitated to a bar that seemed to be the liveliest place in town.  Everyone in the bar was brown or Black except for a couple of British men seated at the bar in what I assume was standard British garb for army officers or bureaucrats on assignment in the tropics.  They were even wearing pith helmets!  I thought I had stepped into an old movie scene.

                                 A pith helmet, favored by English gentlemen in the tropic

Dee shares his memories of Belize City that day:  “I remember it was very British.  It seemed like we were in a part of England at times.  I think it was the buildings and the fences.  I was really impressed by this.  It was like we were in a foreign nation – we were -- but I didn’t expect that in Central America.  We had some of the crew with us.  They were more than happy to be with us.” 

Dee thinks what we drank was absinthe.  It was our crew members’ suggestion and we bought it.  Dee adds, “Oh man, I was as drunk as I’ve ever been or close to it.  How we ever got back to the boat, I will never know.  I was sicker than you.  I was throwing up overboard and then I got the dry heaves.  It’s the only time in my life that I ever got the dry heaves.  And Webster took pity on me because it was my turn to work but I couldn’t.  I got into my small bunk and put one hand against the hull of the boat and one hand on the side of the bunk and the same with my feet.” 

That absinthe or whatever it was, it was nasty stuff, but we all drank it anyway until the bottle was empty.  One of our crew members got so very drunk that he soon couldn’t walk and two of us had to half-carry him back to the dingy.  We couldn’t row in a straight line and we barely made it back to the Trudy M on time to beat the deadline.

I soon became so sick to my stomach and wretched overboard for the longest time.  Lying in my bunk below deck made me feel worse, so I went up to Captain Abrejo’s cabin and was told in pidgin talk by the guy on watch that he had gone ashore again and probably wouldn’t be back anytime soon.  So, I crawled onto Captain Abrejo’s bed and soon went to sleep.  When I woke up, it was the middle of the night, and Captain Abrejo hadn’t returned (thank God!!).  I felt much better and relieved the guard on duty for the rest of his shift.

The next day, Captain Abrejo came back on board and the Trudy M soon motored out of Belize harbor with the help again of a harbor pilot and we were on our way back to Tampa.

Dee remembers an accident he caused during the voyage back one day, he says he was climbing either up or down the ladder when he spilled a five-gallon container of diesel oil all over the engine room and the engines. It created quite a mess, which he had to clean up by hand all by himself. 

It was during this return voyage that we sailed into the brunt of a tropical thunderstorm that raged throughout most of the six-hour shift when me and my steering partner Jari were on duty.  When we came up to the wheelhouse as night was falling, Captain Abrejo was waiting for us as the two guys on the previous shift went below.  He explained to me in his heavily accented but good English how to handle the wheel in a storm.  There was no way to keep the wheel still in that maelstrom, it was going to rotate, and our job was to twirl it back in the opposite direction and try our best to keep the ship on its compass course.

The captain watched me for a while until he was satisfied that I could handle it.  He let me know that other crew members had strung safety lines along the deck and that if I needed to go below during my shift, I needed to hold onto that line.

My three hours on the wheel during that six-hour shift was an ordeal that I’ll never forget.  The wind must have been blowing 40 knots per hour, sometimes we were headed straight into and at other times is came at us from starboard and then from port. The heavy seas with huge waves caused the ship to pitch, yaw and roll in every direction.  Whether I was the steersman or the watch, I couldn’t see anything through the windshield in the black of night.  It was almost impossible to be heard over the deafening roar of the storm and rain pounding the windshield.

After my first hour of steering my arms fell to my side like lead pipes.  I was completely exhausted, but I had to keep watch and be sure Jari was up to the task.  As a more experienced sailor, he was able to keep the ship on a truer course than I.  When I began my second hour of steering, I started hallucinating, seeing scary-looking creatures in the blackened windshield. They seemed very real and very scary to me.  I wish I remembered exactly what I thought I saw in that windshield but it’s been too many years. Later, I realized that ancient mariners must have also hallucinated in similar storms and that’s where the legends of sea dragons had come from.  (Note: I had not yet experimented with LSD or other hallucinatory chemicals.  That came a few years later.)

After this second shift of steering, I felt the need to drink some coffee, which was always on in the galley.  I got permission from Jari using sign language to go below and I pushed open the door against the gale and stepped out onto the very slippery deck, which was bobbing and weaving.  I found the safety line and had made it to the door to the galley, when a huge wave hit the boat as I let go of the line and reached for the handle of the steel door. In that moment I lost my balance and almost got washed into the tempestuous sea, but just as I thought I was lost, my hand grasped the railing of the ship, and I was able to get myself into the galley.

Of course, there was no one else on deck at the time.  If I had been washed overboard, I would have been lost and gone forever.  Jari would have missed me when it was my time to steer and would’ve alerted Captain Abrejo, but there would have been nothing for him or anyone else to do.  It would have been the end of my story.

As it was, I poured myself a mug of coffee with a big slug of sugar and headed back to the wheelhouse, somehow managing not to get washed overboard and keeping the coffee in the mug.  It was disappointing not to be able to tell Jari of my near miss, but he didn’t have enough English and besides the storm was too loud for sharing.

The storm began to abate as our shift came to an end and we were two very worn-out seamen who limped below to try to get some sleep before we would be back in the wheelhouse again in six hours.

Dee missed the whole storm.  “When the storm hit, I was so out of it, Webster let me sleep,” Dee recalls. “And I basically slept through it and it was a very sound sleep.”  Lucky guy!

Buoyed by good weather the rest of the way, Dee and I were happy to get back to Tampa.  But we decided that two weeks and one voyage was all the seafaring we needed.  In truth, I would have gone for a second voyage except for the fact that the food was so bad, and I was so tired of eating plantains that I couldn’t get off the Trudy M fast enough.

So, we informed the captain that we were quitting, he wasn’t happy at all with us reminding us that we had signed on for at least two voyages, but we weren’t about to be browbeaten into enduring another week of plantains for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.  I think Dee was sick of the engine room as well.

Dee’s mother, Jack, was very happy to see him.  I’m sure she had worried constantly while we were gone and were totally out of touch since those were the days long before cell phones.

I made a phone call to my parents from the Bezoni’s apartment and found out that they were planning to go on a vacation trip to Colorado in two days’ time.  They invited me to join them if I could get home in time.  I immediately called the Greyhound station and found out that if I got on a bus leaving Tampa that afternoon, I could get to Fort Worth just in time.  I called my folks and they promised to pick me up at the Greyhound station on their way out of town.

It turned out that I had taken a two-week trip to Belize and back to Tampa, followed by a two-day bus trip across the South, followed by a drive from Fort Worth to Raton, NM, where we spent the night on the way to Lake City, CO.  What a strange long trip it was!

I’ll give Dee the last word:  It was an adventure and I’m glad we did it but I would never do it again.”