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Forms to be Filled out for Each Interview FOLKLORE
FORM A NEW YORK
Circumstances of Interview
STATE New York
NAYE OF WORKER Herman Partnaw
ADDRESS 557 West 144th Street
DATE July 6, 1939
SUBJECT Maritime Folklore -THEY FLY BACKWARDS TO KEEP THE DIRT OUT OF THEIR EYES.
1. Date and time of interview June 29, 1939
2. Place of interview Federal Art Project
110 King Street
New York City
3. Name and address of informant
John Beach
4. Name and address of person, if any, who j?ut you in
touch with informant. Clarence Weinstock
44 Morton Street
New York City
5. Name and address of person, if any, accompanying you
Clarence Weinstock
44 Morton Stbeet New York City
6. Description e r-wm, house, surroundinj,, etc.
(Use as many additional sheets as necessary, for any of the forms,
each bearing the proper heading and the number to which the material
refers.)
STATE
New York
FORM C
TEXT OF INTERVIEW (UNEDITED)
NAME OF WORKER Herman Partnow
ADDRESS
DATE
SUBJECT
FOLKLORE
NEW YORK
557 West 114th Street
July 6, 1939
Maritime Folklore -THEY FLY BLCKNARD TO KEEP ilib DIRT OUT OF THEIR EYES.
This was the English ship layin over in Brooklyn near Robbins Drydock.
I was wanderong on board the ship. It was a punky-lookin job. The officer
wanted a lot of yessin but I got it. We pulled out with a load of ten cent
good and curios. They flash these things around in the Congo. We picked
up these kernel nuts there that they stick into Psilm olive soap. Two or
three days out the bully comes over. I wanta buy your bunk. I'll give ya
six pounds. The bully bought 10 bunks. We didn't know why then but we found
out later. We had to sleep on deck. Well, we galloped into the Congo and
transferred the cargo to a monitor covered with steel neeting for protection
against snakes hangin on the trees in the jungle, and the mosquitoes. These
mosquitoes were big as butterflies and they used to fly backward to keep the
dirt out of their eyes.
Up the Congo River we stoppea at a little native village and we got a
new pilot. A river pilot, along with a white overseer, the screwiest lookin
bird, looked like he couldn't sign his name to a check. He was wearing spats,
the top part of a swim suit and a walking cane but he knew those jungle rivers
all right. We got up 600 miles when he sees a branch river which ends in a
wood. Take a chance, he says, it might be a short cut through the Congo,
save a day's run. But this river was no river, it was just a flood in the
jungle. Well, we went up and the water receded as soon as we got in and
there we were with out boat in the middle of a river bottom, high and dry.
Right off a lot of little dugouts and canoes came up with little men the
size of peanuts. Women too maybe, you couldn't tell, they were so small.
They were letting go of these poisoned dogs and we were risking possible
death from a chance poisoned spear. They got over to our grating and tore
it open and they swarmed in and dragged off our cargo. I remember thousands
of them lugging one of our tractors. In a while the river filled up again,
it comes out of the jungle steam, mother nature breathes up and dawn and
things happen, you see.
Well, we went off again and in one jumping off town we began to un-
load a feller, some white overseer, he was educated at Cambridge, wearing
a bathrobe and a business suit. He came out like a sarang, they call
them in India. He said, "If any of you sailor boys come ashore take care
of the women folk in the hope that England may have some children." What
happens? After them children were four years old they were sent to the
island of Sea Englore. And when they were fourteen years old, the govern-
ment hoped to conquer the jungle with a lot of these soldiers. Well, it
was a mixed crew and they all dashed out after those women while the native
guys sniped at them with blowtorches. The forgot about the cargo. I was
like a sightseer for the mating of these future generations.
The village had a lot of match shacks and the natives, they didn't
wear Pond's cream even to keep the mosquitoes off them. There were two
hundred species of bananas growing theres, some of them two feet long.
Most of the saiaiors got dysentery. When we got back to New York, Hoff
man's Island used to be a quarantine, four of the fellers died on the way
back. There's a rule of the road, the maritime code, to stop a
s#ip and dump the body at twelve o'clock midnight but what's a sailor?
A few extra chains to weigh him down, and he's dropped over the side
and that's all.
I remember I asked the doctor at the Island, why doesn't anything
ever happen to me? He said; "You travel too fast, that's why. In a year
you can be in the West Indies, the Persian Gulf and Australia and you're
in New York two months and you beat it out. If you're sick you can trace
it to rotten food, that's all." And we had it. Some weak tea and a can
of jelly made out of turnips or something.
Well, that bully I was telling you about while the crew was att-
ending to their matrimonial parts he was buying stuff and storing it in
these bunks, see, that he bought fram us.
My mother had been telling ma about the beautiful women in Persia
and Arabia and when I got past the age of three I decided I'd some day
go to the Orient. I went to South Street, and I asked some Holland boys
I had befriended these boys, so they showed me to the captain of a vessel.
He said: Want a job? I said: Yeah, bring it up and let ne take a look at
it. That's haw it was in those days, plenty of jobs. Well, he was taking
some oil pipe and gear for the Standard Oil company, they were going to
the Sahr of Persia to break into the rich oil fields there. So we beat
it across the North Atlantic and there was a lousy speed-up those days,
the pipes weren't stored right in the hold we went so fast we shook
them pipes off the ship. We galloped over to Cannes and Nice, I don't
mean a can, and we rounded up the crew and turned into Port Said.
Those Arabs came down to the boat, they got fifty uncles and aunts
a piece and none of them want to leave until he gets something, even if
it's the paint off the sides of the ship.
Well, we galloped through the Red Sea and wait, we picked up
a French actress, she was going to walk nude through to Tibet, she
heard about the llamas there but she had fifteen trunks of clothing
and she used to give her underwear to the sailors to wash and they
used to walk around in it on deck. She VMS going to walk through the
jungle and the desert, nude, just for a lark or something, I don't know,
we picked her up at Marseilles and then dumped her trunks and never
heard of her again.
So we gallop to the Persian Gulf and, you see, it's like a racer,
they shoot the gun and he's so excited the other guy'll be there before
him, in Persian you gotta run and make the river before that pile of sand
at the head of the Euphrates stops your ship and the river is so full of
goddam sponges near Burshire on the Persian side and first the water
snakes. At Burshire a man of war sloop drew alongside and some screwy
lookin guy give us health instructions, he was almost faded away himself,
that was because he had no potatoes for two years. "Don't touch water,"
he says, "or whiskey or you'll drop dead. Drink beer." Funny thing,
in India them health inspectors tell ya to drink whiskey. That was the
German angle. We found out later that whole highway between Mongol and
Bagdad was full of German beer bottles, they marked the highways with
German beer bottles. That Euphrates, it's a funny thing, the pilot takes
you up to three feet of the bank and then you're pulled back into the
middle of the stream, that tide's so fast. They got dug -out canoes there
with poles, you walk along the edge of the bank, with the date trees on
a beautiful night, boy: We took up a crew of longshoremen who went into
the coal bunkers and lived there, they attended to their duities in the
coal and boy, did that stink, they all brought their prayer mats with
them and a little bundle of curry and rice. Those fellers why, they
always pick out the feller with most syphilitis, pimples, can't even
work on deck and they make -him cook. Dirt: The natives used to pack
dates with their feet. A beautiful sight, date trees, when you go a
quarter mile into that desert, and if there's a moon and them jackals
are crying. No part of the world, though, remember this, is anybody
wild. You can take the Staten Island Ferry to the Island and you act
the same in the Congo, and nothing hapfens to you either.
Well, we were laying ahsore and I wanted to go up to see Bagdad
but I didn't have no dough. So I got out my bath towel and a pair of
shorts and I tried gettin out under the sun. The captain had bought
some German beer and with tow or three bottles What a glorious,
beautiful wonderful drunk you can get. Well, I went over to an Arab
dentist and he went to work on me with a drill like they use for sub
mays and a carpenter's mallet. He had a gadget there for pulling teeth,
it needed two hundred slaves with pulleys and a whole complicated system
of block and tackle that was strung may outside the office to the desert,
and these two hundred men, they pulled and hauled this whole system of
pulleys until the pressure was minimized down to the screwy thing that
pulled your tooth. Well, I got the money all right the bill for that
labor there was two rupees but I told the dentist to sign 15 rupees and
I split with the captain and he gave me enough to get to Bagdad. But
that dentist there he stuck cement insteada plaster into my tooth and
my face swelled up so much I had to go the British Military Hospital.
Them captains are good that way, if ya fight for chow they'll put ya
in irons but if ya're drunk or in a spot they'll give ya the shirt off
their backs, it's the code of the sea.
Well, on the road I men another guy who was startin out for Bagdad,
there was one Ford left in town and he had it. Tilat Ford was the
first airoplane made out of a car and when you raced out in that
car people just faded away on both sides. Those roads were put down
with date trees and German beer bottles. On the way we fell out or
dropped out, all I know, that Ford just wa,n't under us there. One
day, we found ourselves, this buddy and me, on a railroad built by
Germans over to India. Imagine that, them Germans were sneaking a
railroad in the middle of the desert. Well, we got to the outskirts
and climbed into a sugar car and went back home. But, first, when
we got to those box cars we were just ready to get in when somebody
yelled. I saw this bayonet. And I yelled: Americano. He was a
punjab or somethin, he didn't shoot. In Portugal once, I said Am-
ericano and the other guy said: Nericano, my ass and he swung his
rifle down and almost split me in two pieces. But in Persia they
got em trained like seals. Well, we never got to Bagdad.
You don't keep time in that part of the world. Maybe it was
the same day, maybe a week later, I'm lookin out at the horizon, and
I see a fire in the desert. This Arab says there's nothing there,
nothin around to burn anyway. Then up comes a big hand on that hor-
izon. Them Jews when they said a hand rose, they knew what they were
talkin about, it was the beginnin of a sandstorm and boy, it 'nose and
crept up forty or fifty miles away. It was three o'clock and by five
we took our bread and all the tin cans and wrapped handkerchiefs around
our eyes and buried it. You talk about thrills. There was yellow all
around our eyes and sand. And wind. 1Nhy, when we unpacked the cans,
why in the middle of those cans there was sand. I've spoken to the
explorer's club and Lief Ericson, you knew, Byrd, the rest, they say
the same thing.
Well, in that hospital I was tellin ya, it was the darkest and
romantic lookin place in the world, I was in
lounge, I said to a man there: What you doin
Lawrence, I.E. Lawrence I was talkin to. He
the lobby there or the
here? That man was
said: NV:job is political
officer on the Firefly out there. We beat it up the river and when we
find a village we fire two guns and if any of them shieks don't care
to come aboard and cough up with some dough, we just blow the whole
village to hell. You know, those villages are a bunch of tents. They
dig big blocks of clay out of the river and fuss around and there's a
village. I was surprised. Why? I said. Well, he says, sometimes
fifty fellers come aboard, they're spoutin all kinds of dialects and
our interpreter tries fifty kinds of dialeot on them, you know, so
many tribes, you can't
hits the right one, he
uhat you fellers got?
tell if they're Yeinkees or Giants. When he
says: The Great White Mother is protecting you.
The chief says We're broke. Be says: What?
With all them bold belts there, this pot here, that gold pan? COMB
on, bring it aboard. Then they pile on it and beat it up the river
again.
Well, we got aboard again, I was tellin ya I was in Persia, and
we c acked into the stern of a ship and got into a whirlpool and so
forth but we were going to the Sheik or Mahatajah. This boy gets up
six o'clock in the morning and he never even gets out and prays but
thenatives there bring him presents of mules and jackasses and that
puss of his, he never cracks a smile even. He must be a union man.
Well, right behind him are two buildings. This Sheik lives in the
little outhouse and his hah-reem lives in this palace. Now on top
of this palace is a row of little windows around the top faik floor
and I was determined, after what my mother told me how willowy these
Arabian women were, I wanted to get in and see this hah-reem. So
we got liquored up and my buddy, Shorty, his name was, climbs up to
the window ledge, he shinnies up a kind of rain spout and he's hangin
inside by the ledge, all I see is his mitts hangin there. He says to
me Slim, it's dark in here. There's no floor. He sounds like a murder
mystery. He says: Come on. But I'm hangin back. Then I see Shorty's
hands disappear and I hear him go plop on them cushions the hah-reem
reclines and a long yell, then a lotta yellin, Shorty, I guess, woke
up the w#ole goddam hah-reem and that's the last I ever heard of Shorty,
I never found him around anywheres.
Well, England gave that Sheik there a navy and he used to fire a
gune very day five o'clock at night. It was a coupla mud scums, a loatin
bath tub and 3 or 4 gas boats. You coulda got the whole thing at Robbins
Drydock for 500 doallars.
This sheik was going to marry the Shar of Persia's daughter and
I saw the Shar, he was the caricature of an Oriental, fat face with a
funny little white hat on. That was some wedding procession there on
the river. All the people got into these black dug out canoes, the men
in the first canoe and the sheik sat in the rear, the women were in the
back beating tom -tams and the men were blowin on shrill whistles. One
thing about those Arabs, they wait for the cuSrent and then drift down,
as far as the current goes, they never try to raw against the current,
then at ebb -tide or whatever you call it, the current turns and they
go back the other way. That was some wedding. It was an exuursion,
some Albany night boat or somethin, an outing
I had a lotta brains. If any of the sailors got into a tough
corner, I'd have to jump in, I was the only brains workin in those
crews.
One time I was in Rome when Mussolini marched on the town. I
was just out of jail in some town, I forget, and they wanted to get
me out, so they offered me three trips. I took the one to Rome. I
got stewed and got on the third class train. In Italy the third class
is local, it drags along down. In Pisa, I remember, that train waited
for three artists to get their easels out of the way. Well, a bunch
of fellers with black shirts and fezzes on their heads got on. Jesus,
talk about your Robin Hood gangs. They had pitchforks tied to their
guns, and old swords and pickaxes, anything. They were all carrying
big wooden boxes and I asked one of them what was in it. I figured
it was bombs or something. He opened it; inside was some half starved
bologny and a bottle of wine. This one had been in America and he
showed me a postcard. See this? he said. Brookalyna Bridge. I asked:
That are ya? Adult boy scouts? He says: If any of these comrades here
xxima asks for a seat in the name of the King give it to em or you'll
never see Genoa again. Well, we get into Rome and a lot of carabinieri
charge up to the train and herd us all into the waiting room. They're
tearing up dresses and rippin and shootin and going to work seriously.
So I uses my haat and crawls into a toilet. I didn't give myself time
to fish out a nickel, I just crawled in underneath. I musta been there
five hours. dhen I got out five o'clock in the morning there were cara-
binierie all over the place, standing at every door. I'm tellin ya,
those were some days, if ya sat in a restaurant and a waiter got you
your drinks he'd go out and do a little shooting and then come back
again.
Well, .1 went to the American consul in Rome to get him to get
me out. There was a typical tourist up there about fifty years old,
he was disgusted and the old lady he was with was disgusted too, I
10
can't get into the museum he was sayin, I come three thousand miles
and they won't let me in. So the consul says: But, sir, it's four
o'clock and in Italy, it's a custom to close down. I don't care,
says the monkey, I blah blah blah. And that consul listens to that
butter and egg man but when it comes to me. Listen, I says to the
consul, you listen to this monkey. Cons across with some liras,
willya? But, says he, that's Mr and Mrs Horse Manure from Baltil..ore.
Aah.
Later, on board the ship, there were forty new cops, green police,
they call them, beautiful green capes with a Genoese emblem on top.
They were after me._ I hid away and tried to get the bullets out of
the gun and I did, all except one, that one stuck, but I threw the
rest of the bullets into the toilet. What I should of done was throw
the gun overboard but I didn't think of it then. Well, I was in jail
all day Sunday, then they released me providing I go back on the ship.
I was in jail in Norfolk once when a guy comes in in the middle
of the night and says he wanted a farmer. That's what I thought. What
he meant MAS a fireman. But I didn't know it until I end up in Newport
Nevis on an old tub rigged out with oil -burning lamps and back -aft they
had a big icebox and the only electricity aboard was a tiny dynamo for
the radio room. It was a Greek ship flyin a British flag and shippin
American grain to SOMB Dutch port, Amtwert, I think. A real Internation-
al mix-up.
Well, I says to the boys when we're out at sea: Boys, when I was
in jail in Norfolk I had a dream. I dreamt I was gonna be on a ship
that was gonna sink in the middle of the ocean. I don't believe in
dreams, I didn't believe in it myself, but it's a fact, I dreamt that.
We're out about two days when Radio operators won't ever tell
11-
a sailor, ya know, but one day he says to me: I think we're on our
way in, boy. I was dumpin ashes then and this radio man says: We're
in for to. blow. We started to get back to New York but the first
radiogram, see, said make for port, there's a gale a hundred miles
an hour comm n along. A gale's rarely that much, I think it's about
fifty or sixty miles generally, but these hurricanes came up from
Jamaica, Nassau or Salvador or some place and come up to the ocean
past Norfolk like the Gulf Stream, the same road, 90 we're in line
with New York outside Sandy Hook when we get a second cable tellin
us to start out across the Atlantic and it's blowin like hell already.
Imagine, Wooden decks on the goddam tub, a focale Why, you
wash yerself with a bucket, the same as you pee in.
Well, we're out three four days when the tail end of that hurri-
cane hit us. The sailors were lashing things down and by ten o'clock
we were just like a cork on the ocean, just picked up and slammed down.
Ilize coal in the bunker shifted. There were three passengers aboard
and the captain got them to shovel coal with the rest. But I didn't
feel like it. The old man, the skipper comes over with a gun and says
sort of kindly: Son, you shovel or I'll have to blow your brains out,
son. So I threw my shoes off the side you can't shovel in your naked
feet. But those sons of bitches wrapped burlap bags around my feet
and I started shiftin cargo.
Well, all four lifeboats went. Ever see them davits, they're that
thick, they were just loosened out like pins. The smokestaks stayed, I
don't know who. There was some oil tanker pumpin out oil nearby. The
average sailor thinks oil calms the ocean but it only calms them ripples
on the waves, but the waves are just the same. That navy tanker Max=
there went dawn. First there was one part of its smokestack, then there
12
was nothin but oil over the whole ocean. It was the Arethusa, you
can check up if you want to. Twenty one ships went down that night.
There was the moon lookin down at us. It's the first time I ever
saw the moon with a real face.
That tremendous icebox there, we lashed it with steel cables
but the sea broke it loose and even took the donkey winches off too.
Those guys out in Africa must of fed off corned beef washed up from
that icebox two years later.
Well, I opened up the galley and the water poured out. There
Was a big pan they used to make bread in, a silver tray, it was all
battered in, all the steel pots were hammered into pulp. I took a
drink of water and when I pumped up the water it was full of salt.
Then I went down into the engine room. The engineers dawn there
were workin with a little tiny drill and they were trying to put a
hole through the bulkhead, there was sweat on their faces. Then the
ventilators on the port side broke away and this whole load of grain
and special boxes of lumber. The ocean tter had gone down into the
grain and they told us if we didn't get that water out, each of them
grains would get swollen bigger and bigger and the load of swollen
grain would bust the ship open and these engineers were born a hole
through this bulkhead with this midget drill to let the water out.
The water ;:as already filling the bilges and the stink was enough to
kill ya. At the same time the water was risin and the water in the
fire room put the fire out and when the water hit those hot ashes it
made a smoke and gas enough to kill ya.
I was hungry. We hand't anything from the day before and I came
down to the storeroom. Well, when I opened that door everything came
out like brawn tomato catsup and the porthole glass was broken. The
13
only thing there was Australian rabbit in a can and some flour that
was wet. We went and shovelled that flour up and got a pile of news-
papers and made a fire and tried to dry up that flour, which was salty,
and we mixed that Australian rabbit and the dough. Listen, it was like
garbage but I ate it like wverybody else.
During the night an Italian passenger ship came alongside and
radioed: Abandon ship, we'll take crew. It was lovely to see the
lights of that ship there but haw could you get to it, it was impossible.
We were listing, and I was walking at an angle. Well, one guy had been
an Irish Republican Repel, he had killed his mother and three aunts,
he was an arsonist, a rapist, a whatnot. He asks me: Are you scared,
Slim? Jesus Christ, I say, no. He yells: What you use his name tit a
time like this? And he backs me up and hauls off with a haymaker.
Pretty soon the captain orders all hands in midship. We knew it
was the end. Like when the chaplain comes to pray for you in prison,
you know it's the last mile. I was thinkin, Jeez my mother don't know
where I am. It'w a hell of a thing to meet death without anybody knowing
about it, nobody to say good luck to you, you sonofabitch.
The seas were like mountains, half as high as the Rockies. Water
was pourin over the voosle head and I was standing underneath. It was
like being on the bottom of the ocean and yet breathin.
We passed a three masted schooner. I was the only man who was
mumigx ever on a sailing ship. She had only one jib up, no, a reefed
mainsail. I said to the captain I'd be millin to go out and row over
and help someone on that boat. Here was I facin death and I was worried
about those screwy monkeys on that tub in the trough of the ocean. I
claim those men were lashed to the heaving line and I should of gone out
and saved. But I didn't.
14
Then out of the blue sky along come a ship and threw us a cable
overboard but we threw it right back and then we got to the Azores.
I had a Bull Durham bag of foreign coins that I'd been picking
up in different parts of the world. Ahen the captain wouldn't let
me off the ship I got up on the anchor chain and jingled the bag. In
a minute every native in port came rushing up and took me off the boat.
I VMS put in the calaboose. It Was like heaven. All day the
prostitutes used to cone in with these oranges and these scruffy lemons
and cigarettes and corn meal bread and jugs of milk. Those native pros-
titutes came down to be examined and they brought all this stuff along.
Abenever I wake up in a foreign port now I look up and see if there's
bars on the windows. It was heaven.
Of course they used to teach me the dirty words first. And the
cheif of police he was Portugee, he used to say: Sailors are put in my
calaboose because the skippers frame them.
Boy, that a country, those Azores.