A Captain's Duty

or days.
    Coming up, I’d made a study of how that was done. And how it wasn’t.
    The first lesson I learned came from a merchant marine legend named Dewey Boland. Exhibit number one in how not to command a ship.
    Dewey was a tall thin guy in his sixties, an Idaho horse farmer who’d taken to the sea for what reason, only God knows. He was well known and dreaded throughout the merchant marine. I’ve been in union halls where a sweet assignment has come up on a ship and a guy throws down his ticket to get a job on a ship. “Looks good. Who’s the cap?” “Dewey Boland.” And the guy would snatch up his card. “No thank you.”
    Dewey never called you by your name, only by your job on the ship. “Hey, Third,” he’d yell, for “third mate.” It was a way to put you down. I was the third mate on one of his ships. Dewey really had it in for me because I graduated from the Massachusetts Maritime Academy and his son had just been thrown out of the federal academy, probably for being a carbon copy of his father.
    Every day at 12 p.m. sharp, we’d do what is known as the “noontime slips,” where you chart your position, your average speed, your fuel consumption. Depending on how you did the calculations, there was a variance of a few miles or so on the number you’d come up with. So I’d get out my books and tables and calculator and I’d get the number. And here would come Dewey at 1300, climbing up to the bridge to compare notes. He did his own calculations by taking a divider—the two-legged compass used in geometry class—and sending it skittering across the map. In three seconds, he had a number. Who cared if it was completely inaccurate?
    “Hey, Third, what do you say? What number did you get?”
    “Cap, I got three hundred and ninety-four miles.” Meaning 394 miles from our last position.
    Invariably, Dewey would blow a gasket. Invariably.
    “Jesus Christ, what the hell are you talking about? I got three hundred and ninety-six.”
    Two miles difference means absolutely nothing in nautical terms. But Dewey specialized in exploding over nothing. His aim was to make your life miserable, not for endangering the ship or steering it into a jetty, but for the most mundane stuff possible. I was ready to go back to driving a cab. You might be able to get away with being Captain Queeg in the navy, but not on a merchant ship.
    Dewey taught me not to put the energy into screaming. I actually had a chief mate once tell me that I was too soft-spoken. “You need to yell more,” he said. I told him what I tell everyone: “It’s when I get quiet that you need to get worried.” That’s the truth.
    I’ve learned as much from terrible captains as I have from good ones. I’ve had captains who stayed in their rooms all day and watched The Big Chill over and over. I’ve found captains hiding in the bowels of the ship, crying because they didn’t feel like the crew loved them. I’ve had captains who nearly capsized the boat by sailing straight into a typhoon because they didn’t want to get in trouble with the company by being a day late into port.
    That happened to me coming out of Yokohama on a steamer. We hit thirty-five-foot swells going forty miles an hour and they put us into a synchronous roll, which happens when your natural motion is accentuated by the seas themselves. It’s a good way to flip a ship over. The captain’s reaction? He sidled up to me and, nervously chewing on the end of a cigarette, mumbled under his breath: “I better call New York and see what the weather is like.”
    “We know what the weather is like, Cap,” I said. “It’s a typhoon .”
    But this captain was such a company man that he was terrified, not of sinking, but of pissing off some bureaucrat back at headquarters. He was willing to endanger the lives of twenty men so that he could make his schedule. Meanwhile, I was holding on to the bulkhead for dear life and hearing chains snap down below and watching equipment fly off one bulkhead, shoot straight across the ship, and crash into the other bulkhead forty feet away, without once touching the deck.
    That’s what you call a roll. And that’s what you call a failure in leadership.
    Another time, I was on a tanker taking heating oil from the refineries in the Gulf of Mexico up the East Coast. We ransmack dab into a hurricane. In three days, we went minus twelve miles. We were just trying to keep the bow of the ship pointed into the wind while the ocean was