A proletarian seaman’s worst-case scenario
Gales, an experienced sailor, has found himself comfortable employment on a fine merchant vessel, The Tuscaloosa. After spending a night ashore in Antwerp, however, the ship departs without him, leaving Gales stranded in Belgium. The Belgian police don’t want him there, so they sneak him into Holland. The Dutch don’t want him either, so he is smuggled off somewhere else. He is bounced around Europe from country to country, the victim of exclusionary immigration laws. Gales applies to various consulates in an attempt to acquire the proper papers, but his requests are denied when he comes up against impossible bureaucratic regulations. This goes on for a third of the book, before the “death ship” even shows up. Without any proper papers, Gales is forced to sign on to a shady and decrepit vessel, the Yorikke, on which he is given the lowliest post on the ship, that of “coal drag.” What could be worse than the job of a stoker, who shovels coal into a scalding boiler for hours on end? The coal drag, who serves as the stokers’ underling.
One very likely reason why Traven never achieved widespread recognition is that his writings have an unapologetically anarchistic and socialistic bent. In The Death Ship, Traven exposes and satirizes two main issues of importance to the working class. One is the bureaucratic growth of governments in the early twentieth century, as manifested in their byzantine and draconian immigration laws. The second is the exploitation of labor on ocean vessels. The crewmen in Traven’s novel are unable to acquire passports or proper sailor’s papers, making them men without a nation. This in turn makes them fodder for white slavery, since men without a nation are essentially men without rights. The captive sailors on the world’s “death ships” are forced to perform the most grueling and dangerous work on board their vessels, which Traven details in his vivid descriptions of the hard labor undertaken by the stokers and coal drags on the Yorikke.
The main fault of the novel is that it’s unnecessarily long, and as a result, far too repetitive. The reader learns way more than anyone would want to know about shoveling coal into a boiler, and how many passport horror stories does one need to hear to get the point? On the other hand, much like the muckraking novels of Upton Sinclair, the fact that someone has documented the horrors faced by laborers of this period does have historical value. Another problem is inconsistency of tone. Does Traven intend this to be a comedy or a horror story? The first half of the book is clearly satirical. Every sentence is a punchline that either exaggerates ridiculous immigration laws or paints the Yorikke as the god-awfulest tub on the seven seas. The latter half of the novel, however, is more melancholy and realistic in its depiction of the exploitation of the sailors.
Traven’s writing calls to mind that of Jack London, who was a probable influence on his work. London is better at telling an adventure story, but Traven, writing a few decades later, is better at the kind of brutal socialist realism that London aspired to. Though The Death Ship isn’t as impressive as The Cotton-Pickers or The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Traven’s radical and ballsy writing is always a refreshing change of pace from the mainstream literary canon.
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