The S.S. Marine Jumper

I left the Navy on August 14, 1946 at Pleasanton, California. I was not entirely sure what I would do in civilian life — or whether I would stay in civilian life at all.

I had been a Gunner's Mate in the Navy, and because that line of work deals mostly with naval artillery and explosives, there is very little demand for those skills on the outside. The first job I got after leaving the Navy was stacking canned fruit in a food processing plant in Santa Clara, California. What the job amounted to was taking cans off a conveyor belt, placing them in cardboard boxes, then stacking the boxes on wooden pallets. When a pallet was filled, a forklift driver removed it and my brother Ted and I repeated the process. The cans came down the conveyor belt at an amazingly rapid rate. Ted stood on one side and I on the other, picking up two cans in each hand and placing them in the box. If you hesitated for any reason — an empty pallet not ready, a loaded one not removed in time — you fell behind immediately. And it was not possible to stop the line.

Ted and I lasted for parts of three days. On the third day, when we broke for lunch, we took our cold sandwiches and soft drinks outside, sat on the ground, and ate in silence. After a few minutes I told Ted I was going downtown to a pool hall, where I intended to get a cold bottle of beer and shoot some pool. Ted, being the more responsible of the two of us, said he didn't think it would be right to leave the warehouse foreman in the lurch. I said I didn't have a problem with it, and furthermore that the foreman was a little overbearing and it would serve him right. Ted eventually came around to my way of thinking and we left the plant, never to return. I have often wondered what happened at the end of the conveyor line when the cans started arriving and nobody was there to catch them.

I have no real excuse for my actions other than that I had just spent three and a half years in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and the job seemed just a little beneath where I wanted to be. I remember there was a clock in the cannery warehouse that I could see from my spot on the line. I tried hard not to look at it because watching it seemed to make the time pass even more slowly. I would avoid looking for what felt like 20 or 30 minutes, finally sneak a glance — and find that only four minutes had passed. It was terrible.

After a few cold beers and a few games of pool the world looked considerably brighter. Ted had gotten out of the military several months before me and had more time to adjust to routine. My mind was still mostly out in the middle of the ocean. At any rate, I was certain I did not want to work in a cannery, and the only work I truly knew was aboard a ship. I told Ted I was going to San Francisco to join the Merchant Marine and ship out on a voyage — I said I'd like to go to Australia. I asked if he wanted to come. He thought it over for a while and decided not to go.

The next day I took a bus to San Francisco, went to the Merchant Marine hiring hall, showed them my Navy discharge papers, and was told to begin training as a common seaman the following morning. I finished the training without difficulty and was assigned to the Marine Jumper. There are two categories of seaman — common seaman and seaman first class — and I started at the bottom. After arriving aboard I was assigned to a watch crew, and as luck would have it my assignment was as helmsman. That meant I would be one of those who actually steered the ship, both leaving port and at sea.

The helmsman on a large ship has the very best position for seeing what is going on — better than a 180-degree panoramic view of everything ahead and to either side. Both of my watch mates knew I wanted to be at the wheel whenever the ship entered or left a port or harbor, and they arranged it so that would happen. I am grateful for that.

I went aboard the ship in San Francisco Harbor in October 1946 and left her in New York Harbor in May 1947. We had sailed out of San Francisco westward through the Golden Gate and returned to the United States sailing westward past the Statue of Liberty into New York Harbor. We had sailed around the world. I later returned to San Francisco by going through the Panama Canal — a true circumnavigation of the earth.

My watch partners were both interesting people, for very different reasons.

The first, Ollie, was a true seaman — about 70 years old, tall and slim but with the physique of a prizefighter, and healthy as a horse. If you were casting a sailor in a movie you would choose this man without hesitation. He spoke with a heavy Nordic accent, had sailed on ships when they were powered by sails, and knew everything there was to know about ships and their crews. He was a wonderful partner at sea and had a serious problem with alcohol when ashore. He was also a wonderful person to talk to — a magnificent storyteller with an endless supply of sea stories. I could listen to him for hours. He was on the Marine Jumper because the tourist trade in the Caribbean had been slow; he usually worked on private yachts. During the voyage he tried to convince me to join him when we finished the cruise — telling me there were rich older women in the Caribbean looking for companionship. I enjoyed knowing Ollie and loved his stories, but I was never tempted by that particular career path.

The second of my watch partners was a young man named Jim, about 25 years old. He had decided to make a career of the sea, and had already been going to sea for about three years. Ollie was an avid reader, a scholar, and a wonderful storyteller. Jim was none of those things. Jim was simply content to do his job on the ship and nothing else. He didn't talk about family, friends from before his sailing days, or any girlfriend. He was just a loner. Many of the sailors I knew going to sea were either problem drinkers or alcoholics. Jim was neither — at least not at that point in his life.

My grandfather, George Mayfield Sharrock — a wonderful man — honestly believed the earth was flat, and that if you traveled in one direction long enough you would fall off the edge. He had told me so for years when I was a small boy. I never believed him but I never argued either; I would just say "I don't think so." After I returned to California from sailing westward around the world, I told grandfather what I had done. He asked if we had made any turns during the trip. I admitted that we had. He simply said, "There is your answer." My grandfather was a wonderful man.

The Marine Jumper made an uneventful crossing of the Pacific and arrived in Tokyo Harbor. Since I had already spent time in Tokyo while in the Navy, I knew the city fairly well. The purpose of the voyage was to transport persons of German ancestry living in the Orient back to Germany. The reasoning of the authorities was that those of German descent were somehow responsible for aiding the Japanese and German governments during the war, and that because of their ancestry they must be punished. Most of the people we transported had never spent a single day of their lives in Germany, nor had they aided either government in any way. Some of the passengers would later appear at the Nuremberg Trials. A temporary brig had been constructed on deck near the stern of the ship where three high-profile prisoners would be held after we brought them aboard later in the voyage — guarded around the clock by United States Marines. During their exercise periods the prisoners were allowed to run from one end of the ship to the other, under guard.

The ship spent several days in Tokyo taking on this cargo of displaced Germans before we proceeded to China. Our time in Japan was otherwise uneventful. The Japanese people were still suffering from extreme poverty and many were on the verge of starvation, but there was evidence everywhere that they were beginning to rebuild. For those who did not see the devastation caused by our bombing raids firsthand, it is difficult to describe the effectiveness of those attacks on the major cities in the Tokyo Bay area. Yokohama and Tokyo were very large cities located about 50 miles apart. The area between them had been a vast industrial region. The first time I traveled between the two cities there was almost nothing standing — only rubble and partial smokestacks. I spoke to several young Japanese students who, incidentally, spoke better English than I did. They said that during the height of the bombing, the sky was darkened with bombs and planes. The one place that had been spared was the Imperial Palace Grounds. We were not allowed onto the grounds, but what we could see from a distance was beautiful — they reminded me of Golden Gate Park in San Francisco.

Our second stop was Incheon, Korea. When we were there in 1946 it was before the Korean War. After the war, Incheon was in South Korea — as you may remember, Korea was divided into North and South along roughly the 38th parallel. Korea was the poorest country I had seen in my travels. Because of political unrest, the ship's company was allowed only a brief stay ashore.

My most vivid memory of Korea in 1946 was the poverty. Everywhere you looked people were begging. I remember standing along the railing of the ship watching Koreans in small sampans scrambling to catch food scraps being discharged into the water from the ship's galley. What amazed me was the extraordinary skill the men used to propel their boats through the water using a single oar — called a scull — at the stern. This technique is used by boatmen throughout much of the Orient.

It would be three more years before I returned to Korea — this time aboard the USS Pine Island, a seaplane tender, during the Korean War.

Our next stop was Shanghai. Shanghai's status within China has changed many times throughout its history. In December 1946 it was a municipality. On May 27, 1949, the communist People's Liberation Army took control and made it part of the new People's Republic of China. As a result of the ongoing Civil War, Shanghai — a city with a normal population of approximately one million people — had swelled to roughly ten million refugees. The city was overwhelmed, unable to accommodate that many people, which caused widespread hunger and considerable chaos.

Up until this Merchant Marine voyage I had always worn a Navy uniform when ashore in a foreign country. Now I was ashore in civilian clothes. A uniform provides a certain status — much like a police officer's uniform. Foreigners dare not attack or harm the wearer, knowing there will be retaliation. Without it you are simply a young man in a foreign city.

My younger watch partner Jim had been told by a shipmate about a wonderful place in Shanghai we absolutely must visit. The common means of transportation at that time was a Chinese man pulling a rickshaw. Jim, who had taken over as our tour guide, negotiated with a driver to take us to our desired destination for a set amount in U.S. dollars. It was still daylight when we started — but fading fast. After several minutes of travel we were completely lost, of course, and it was getting very dark. At this point our driver decided he needed to renegotiate the fare. The discussion became very loud, which attracted a crowd of Chinese onlookers. Within minutes we were surrounded by a huge crowd of people all talking at once in an agitated manner, and not one of them — including our driver — could speak a single word of English.

In most harbor cities around the world, finding someone who speaks enough English to get by is not a huge problem. That was not the case where we now found ourselves in Shanghai. To this day I am not entirely certain how we got out of that situation and made our way back to the harbor area to catch a water taxi to the ship — but somehow we did, not with the help of the rickshaw driver, but on our own two feet.

Where we had originally been headed was the British section of the city. In the 1830s the British and French had opened settlements in Shanghai, and the United States later established communities as well. At any rate, we were not just blindly wandering — at least not until our driver decided he needed more money. We were never able to find the place we had been looking for in the first place.

The ship stayed in Shanghai for about two weeks and we did go ashore several times, mostly spending our time in the English section once we had our bearings. The biggest problem was simply the sheer number of people and the poverty. Millions of Chinese were moving ahead of the Civil War. Before it was over, Chiang Kai-shek would end up in Formosa as the head of a government neither China nor most of the rest of the world recognized, and Mao Zedong would lead the Communist government on the mainland.

Shanghai harbor itself was extraordinary. Many thousands of people live their entire lives on sampans in the harbor, and there was a tremendous amount of activity at all hours — every imaginable kind of watercraft, from tiny boats tied together in nests alongside ancient docks to huge modern ocean liners like the Marine Jumper itself. Many of the small boats were propelled by a scull or a very small inboard steam engine. Entire families lived their lives on them. If you have ever seen the film The Sand Pebbles, you can get some idea of what we saw.

It was obvious that Shanghai had been a beautiful city at one time, and it was obvious it would be again. Most rickshaw drivers, we discovered, spoke very good English. I am still not certain what point our original driver was trying to make by abandoning his English at a critical moment. I suppose I never will be.

Our next port of call was Hong Kong — somewhat like Shanghai in that it was a financial center and major trading hub of the Orient, though considerably better ordered. George's notes on the voyage end here, with the promise of more pages to come one day.