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15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
Fascinating Story of Life at Sea in the Fifties, 25 Oct 2001
This book is a fascinating account, set in its historical context, of life aboard a tramp steamer in the late 1950s. The author, then in his teens, served as an apprentice on this ship, identified only as "The Tramp".He kept diaries dating from before he joined the ship in January 1958 until his arrival home in June 1959, having more than circumnavigated the globe. The story is made up with excerpts from these diaries interspersed with narrative giving the fuller picture. Humour runs through the book. It runs through his descriptions of daily shipboard life and the social and professional order on board, within which he is adjudged the lowest form of life, even lower that his fellow apprentice who had the seniority of a previous voyage to his credit. The humour begins with his first run ashore when The Lad, as he calls himself, is led astray by hardened seafarers and gets hopelessly drunk. The humour is in their antics to get him back aboard and sober him up. It is there in moments of high drama. Such as his reaction when standing in he bows as forward lookout going through the Straits of Gibraltar, a ship looms out of the dense fog and a collision with the bows is unavoidable. It is there a month later in the Indian Ocean when the ship starts to take in water from a hole in the side and someone has to go over the side while a high sea is running and plug it. It is there in Havana when a Cuban shore guard starts taking potshots with his rifle. The humour is there when the sometimes uneasy relations between the deck and engine room staff come to a head over the erection of a swimming pool, during a long stay at anchor in Colombo.The Chief Engineer who considers himself, but is not quite, equal to the Captain is against the plan. This causes problems. The book has pathos. The Lad on his first trip away from home can't make up his mind whether he is homesick, or for what he is homesick. Or indeed if he is going to have a | 
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