The Longest Ride – Part XI: Homeward Bound!

Good news awaited the cowboy crew of the S. S. Carroll Victory when they pulled into port at Piraeus, Greece, March 7, 1947, with their 277 South African horses and 278 mules. “The UNRRA man here says there won’t be another trip back to South Africa,” Charlie Lord wrote his wife. “I think its probably because of the poor quality of horses. Of our last load 150 have died they say. Also because the Agriculture branch of UNRRA may fold any day, was supposed to on March 1. The last order the Captain has is to come straight to the States.”

During the short stay in Piraeus to unload the horses and manure, Lord had one more wish on this third stop in Greece. He and two other cowboys went to the UNRRA office to inquire. “I asked about how we could get two boxes of BSC relief food past customs and they told me. Then I asked if I could get to an UNRRA horse anywhere near Athens and take pictures of it and the family that owned it. After considerable telephoning, they found where some horses were. The UNRRA official took the 3 of us out to a jeep, he and his driver drove us over the most pilled and bumpy roads I have ever seen out to a little town. There we found a horse in a stable. The man brought it out.” Lord took pictures to his heart’s content of the horse and family, the woman and girls running a loom and spinning wheel in their home, and another UNRRA horse coming back from plowing.

Greek farmer with his UNRRA horse. March 1947. © Charles Lord

Greek farmer’s family in their work room. March 1947. © Charles Lord

“I feel I’ve covered the field now,” Lord said. “I’m finished with Athens.”

By March 10, the ship was on its way home, but a pleasure trip it was not. While in the Mediterranean, the cowboys were tasked with the job of cleaning the livestock holds – twice, as the first day’s work didn’t pass the Chief Steward’s inspection.

Cowboys at work cleaning the stalls on the S. S. Carroll Victory, March 1947. © Charles Lord

Approaching Gibraltar, Lord wrote, “Everyone is getting a little bit excited about our approaching Atlantic passage to the wonderful States. This has been a very long trip, even for regular seamen, and merchant marines.” Uncooperative weather, however, stretched a trip across the Atlantic that took ten days on the trip over to thirteen on the way home. The ship ran into gale force winds most of the way across, slowing it down considerably.

On March 22, Lord’s shipmate Maynard Garber noted in his journal, “The wind is blowing at a mighty gale and waves 75 [feet] high appear like mountains when we go down with a 40 degree angle. The ship is pitching like a seesaw so our speed is cut down to 10 knots or else the ship would break up. We still have 1250 miles yet to go.”

“Prow of Carroll Victory up after it just smacked its nose down into a big one,” Lord notes. “White caps show wind was over 50 mph. Sometimes it was 70. We were on edge of hurricane.” © Charles Lord

Lord noted, “Like the old Model T, we travel further up and down than we do ahead. . . . Richter said he had a book on the side of his bed. It was rather weird to see the book rise from the bed, sit in mid-air, then fall on the floor.” After a particularly rough night, Lord said, “About 1:30 this morning this old tub really bounced. All the light bulbs on the fan tail [quarters] screwed out from vibration during the night and broke on the floor. . . . It took me a long time to get to sleep, what with sliding one way and then the other on my sheet.”

Course of the moon on a rough night, taken with the camera held solid to the ship with the lens open. © Charles Lord

Weather wasn’t the crew’s only problem. On leaving Gibraltar May 15, Lord had noted, “Our food supplies are getting low. We’ve been out of butter for about 4 days. They say we have 200 lbs of flour left, enough for about 6 days.” By the 19th, he wrote, “The whole ship is on bread rationing. Yesterday we got 2 slices of bread per meal. Today it was 1 slice per meal.” March 25, three days before reaching New York, Lord said, “We haven’t had any white bread for 2 days, flour is all gone. Had corn bread for lunch that had cereal or something in it, too. Only powdered eggs yesterday and today. Our food is running out. They say that yesterday the captain said, ‘Full speed ahead. We’d just as well drown as starve to death.” Neither was their fate. On March 28 the S. S. Carroll Victory safely reached New York.

Approaching New York City, March 28, 1947. © Charles Lord

Garber noted, “Today at noon we at last saw the Statue of Liberty. It was foggy so we were close before we saw it. This afternoon we dropped anchor out in bay and will be on the boat until the customs have cleared us.

The S. S. Carroll Victory outside New York City, March 1947, soon to be retired as a livestock ship and move on to further adventures. © Charles Lord

Garber concludes his journal: “Thus after 143 days on ship, we spent 89 days on the sea, 54 days ashore and 46 days at work.”

On the inside cover he quoted this Walt Whitman poem:

The untold want by life and land ne’er granted,
Now voyager sail thou forth to seek and find.

And so the seagoing cowboys of the S. S. Carroll Victory had.

The seagoing cowboy crew and Captain of the S. S. Carroll Victory, March 1947. Photo by Paul Beard.

The Longest Ride – Part VIII: Havoc in Haifa

In January of 1947, a second stop in Haifa, Palestine, gave the seagoing cowboys of the S. S. Carroll Victory a chance to further explore this country of unrest under British control in which Jews were being resettled after World War II.

On arrival, the cowboys walked around and shopped in upper or “New Haifa” which Charlie Lord described as “the beautiful Jewish section on top of Mt. Carmel.” Some made a trip the second day to Tiberias and the Sea of Galilee.

New Jewish office building, upper Haifa, Palestine, January 10, 1947. © Charles Lord

Arab mosque beside the Sea of Galilee, January 11, 1947. © Charles Lord

Maynard Garber and a friend chose instead to hike up Mt. Carmel that day, meeting two English-speaking young Arab men on the way. “They were much disturbed over the problems arising over the Jews,” Garber noted in his journal. “They admitted that the Jews were smart people and could help Palestine a lot, but they said the Jews wouldn’t want them once they got control. . . . Young Arabs here with an education are very brilliant, but they say we will soon be fighting the Jews for this country.”

The next night, January 12, Lord wrote a lengthy letter to his wife. “Today has been a hundred days, a book condensed into one page.” It began with a tour by several of the cowboys of the Jewish HaZore’a kibbutz, a 45-minute bus ride out of Haifa.

HaZore’a kibbutz near Nazareth, January 12, 1947. © Charles Lord

“All eat together, share everything in this commune,” Lord said, describing the tour in detail. “Doesn’t sound very exciting yet, does it,” he said. “It still didn’t when we came back on the ship and sat down to supper. I had just started on my jellitin [sic] dessert when there was a loud boom and the 7500 ton ship shook beneath us.” Two blocks away from the ship’s berth – at 5:20 p.m. according to two cowboy diaries – a truck full of bombs exploded at the Northern Palestine police compound. The New York Times the next day headlined an article, “Haifa Blast Ends Palestine Truce: Kills 4, Injures 142.”

The blast set off a scurry of activity for the seagoing cowboys. Some of them were in town near the compound when the bombs went off. Fortunately, none were seriously hurt. Lord and others on the ship grabbed their coats and cameras and headed into the city. “The guards let us thru much to our surprise,” Lord said.” The cowboys witnessed plate glass from the store fronts covering the sidewalks on lower Haifa’s main street Kingsway, shopkeepers frantically picking up contents from their stores, firemen fighting the fire in the police compound, and the wounded being carried out on stretchers. When attempting to take pictures of the broken glass, an Arabian Palestine policeman grabbed Lord by the coat and dragged him into an office in the shattered building and through a narrow alleyway of barbed wire to find a British authority to whom to turn Lord over. Fortunately for Lord, and much to the disdain of the policeman, the Britisher let him go when Lord explained who he was and what he was doing.

Fellow cowboy Robert Richter got pulled into the action in a much more poignant way. While standing near an ambulance, a British soldier said to him, “Help me bring my buddy down, will you?” Richter did. Filled with emotion, he slowly shared the gory details with his shipmates back on the ship. Richter also learned from the guards the details of the bombing, which pretty well match this account found online.

The driveway at the Haifa police compound where the truck full of bombs parked. The force of the bomb bowed out the heavy wire screens. January 13, 1947. © Charles Lord

Store owner sweeping up glass broken from the force of the blast. Haifa, Palestine, January 13, 1947. Photo by Paul Beard.

Another shopkeeper cleaning up after the bombing. Haifa, Palestine, January 13, 1947. Photo by Paul Beard.

Lord and others were able to take their photos of the aftermath the next morning before the Carroll Victory departed with 5,000 tons of phosphate, per Garber’s account, for Mozambique.

~ to be continued

 

The Longest Ride – Part VII: Post-war Life in Athens, Greece

After a long, hot ride over the Christmas holiday from Durban, South Africa, back up to Greece with a load of horses and mules, the S. S. Carroll Victory pulled into port at Piraeus on New Year’s Day 1947. “We reached the harbor about 12 noon,” Charlie Lord wrote his wife, “were finally snubbed tight to the dock by 2 PM. The dock further down is a bombed out shambles. This is the first place we have seen considerable bomb damage.”

World War II bomb damage, Piraeus, Greece. January 1, 1947. © Charles Lord

With Piraeus being the port for Athens, the cowboys took advantage of the inexpensive commuter train into the city. The cost: 300 drachma, equal to 6 cents American money). Lord and fellow cowboy Maynard Garber explored the Acropolis their first full day in port.

The Acropolis as seen from Mars Hill where the Apostle Paul preached. January 2, 1947. © Charles Lord

The next day, “We wanted to shop some,” Lord said, “but the stores were closed because of a strike against a government 100% tax on some commodities.” Instead, Lord spent some time at the National University of Athens, where he hoped to find a copy in the library of the most recent issue of Consumer’s Report.

Lord struck up a conversation there with a “homely, short dark girl” who could speak French (which Lord, although not fluent, could also speak) “She is a graduate of the University,” Lord said, “teaches in a school in the city. She gets 100,000 drachma a month, or the equivalent of about $17 in the States. That’s standard pay for teachers, and while telling about how poor and hungry the Greek people are, she reached into her coat pocket and pulled out a crust of bread about 2 inches square. The professors even at the National University receive only about $30 a month. They have 30,000 students. Many of the students have scarcely enough money for books and food.”

A woman and her daughter dig for roots for food on the side of the Acropolis, January 1947. © Charles Lord

In the library, the girl introduced Lord to a male student who could speak a little English and some French. “We had a long discussion,” Lord said. “I explained the beliefs of the Quakers to them for one thing. She told me their attitude toward the English, don’t like them. There are some Communists in Greece they said, and they are growing because so many people are hungry. They were all praise for UNRRA and the United States. Several other boys talked some with us from time to time. Most of them had thread-bare clothes, with grayed edges, some were obviously sewn up.

A home below the Acropolis, January 1947. © Charles Lord

“I didn’t find the magazine at the library, or any magazines. The poor students – looked to me like the newest books on the shelves were 10 or 20 years old. They tried to get me to take a novel to read, written by an Englishman, published 1899. . . . The library was unheated, students sat reading in overcoats. I had my tan shirt, heavy flannel shirt and raincoat on, and I was slowly freezing to death, so I said I must go.”

After his return to the ship, Lord said, “I helped Trostle and others in doghouse [Lord’s nickname for their quarters] shame Kohn out of taking a sheet ashore to sell. People really beg for sheets ashore, will pay high prices. Crew members sell them in every port. Three cattlemen sold some yesterday, which gave Kohn the idea. He needed the money.”

After four days in port, Garber said, “our ship was moved out in the stream to unload manure. All that rich manure was thrown in the bay. It was a pity to waste it but there seemed no other way of getting rid of it.” The next afternoon, the ship departed for a second trip to South Africa with stops in Haifa, Palestine, and Beira, Mozambique. “We started scraping and washing the floors and boards down,” Garber said. “The ship had to be finished before we get to Haifa so it will be ready to take on hemp and phosphate.”

Cleaning stalls on the S. S. Carroll Victory, January 1947. © Charles Lord

Little did the cowboys know what havoc awaited them in Haifa.

~ to be continued

The Longest Ride – Part V: Bumboats in Port Said

Getting from Greece to South Africa meant going through the Suez Canal for the seagoing cowboys on the S. S. Carroll Victory. When they arrived in Port Said, Egypt, they had hoped the ship would take long enough to get its orders to enter the Canal that they would have time to explore this modern city and do some shopping for souvenirs. 

Port Said, Egypt, November 30, 1946. © Charles Lord

A short four hours in the harbor, however, did not allow time for shore leave. But they needn’t have worried—the shopping came to them. The bumboats that bustle around many Mediterranean ports teemed around the Carroll Victory after the ship anchored in the bay.

The S. S. Carroll Victory attracted bumboats like a magnet in Port Said harbor, November 30, 1946. © Charles Lord

Charlie Lord describes the scene in a letter to his wife: “Egyptians immediately swarmed over the sides from row boats and motorboats like the pirates of yore. They threw ropes up from the boats and began pulling up all kinds of trinkets and goods to sell and trade.

Bumboat activity, Port Said, Egypt, November 30, 1946. Photo by Paul Beard.

“They had leather goods of all sorts including suitcases, hassocks, billfolds, handbags and blackjacks. They had inlaid-wood boxes, knives, rings and bottles of Spanish fly. You know what that is don’t you? Very handy for sailors when in port to give young girls. They had copper rings with glass or quartz, something which would cut glass anyhow, which they sold for gold with 3 diamonds. One cattleman gave 2 shirts and a pair of pants for one. Harry says he gave a sports coat, 2 shirts, and 6 pair of socks for his, worth about five cents perhaps. One of the stones fell out at lunch. I looked at a suede leather woman’s handbag, the Egyptian asked a lot, I said less and got it. So please don’t buy a new handbag.

Seagoing cowboys barter with Egyptians for souvenirs on the S. S. Carroll Victory, November 30, 1946. © Charles Lord

With camera bag in hand, Charlie Lord looks longing to shore in his newly purchased Egyptian fez. Photo courtesy of Charles Lord.

“The ‘pirates’ stole everything they could lay their hands on,” Lord said. “We had our portholes locked and door locked all the time thank goodness. Lots of seamen lost clothing. The third junior mate said the men bring all their stuff aboard just so they can get on to steal things.”

The sailboats in port captivated the seagoing cowboys. “There was a line of hundreds of sailboats, with the longest curving masts,” Lord said. “They made a dramatic picture.”

Sailboats lining the harbor at Port Said, Egypt, November 30, 1946. Photo by Paul Beard.

Lord’s shipmate Harold Jennings noted in his diary, “Entered the Suez Canal at about 1 o’clock today. Weather supposed to get warmer from now on out.” And that it did.

One day out of Port Said, Lord wrote home, “Cattlemen and crewmen busied themselves making hammocks and swings in which to enjoy the warm sun. Men peeled to polo shirts and shorts or just shorts. The weather is wonderful so far.” His tune changed two days later. “Yesterday was very hot,” he said. “A head wind blows smoke from the stacks back on the aft part of the boat and every single thing is covered with the fine black grit. If you pick up a book, the cover feels like sandpaper.”

Seagoing cowboy Maynard Garber beats the tropical heat with a book, December 1946. © Charles Lord

Four days after crossing the Equator and after enduring 11 days of heat with little to do, the sight of Durban, South Africa, on December 11, 1946, lifted the spirits of the restless cowboys. Another foreign world awaited them.

(to be continued)

The Longest Ride – Part III: Greek Odyssey in Kavalla

The seagoing cowboys on the S. S. Carroll Victory had some tense moments before putting their feet on dry land in Kavalla, Greece, in November 1946. Charlie Lord wrote to his wife, “A sudden squall struck us this morning and blew like fury, with rain. Our ship went off the course and we wandered through mine fields without knowing where the cleared channel was. Then the weather cleared and we came into this beautiful harbor about 8:31 A.M.”

Kavalla, Greece, November 18, 1946. © Charles Lord

“An ancient castle dominates the scene with a Roman viaduct crossing the narrow valley below. The rest of the wide-flung area of mountainside is covered with white and yellow square houses with rose-colored roofs, set one above the other, step like on the mountain side.” Fellow cowboy Maynard Garber noted in his diary, “Kavalla in Paul’s time was known as Neapolis. The castle was probably frequently visited by Paul during some of his missionary journeys.”

The Carroll Victory stayed six days in port at Kavalla, giving the cowboy crew plenty of time to explore the area and absorb its history. On their second day, Lord said, “The British army took the whole cattle crew to Philippi, just over the mountain in a transport truck this afternoon. We had a marvelous time, looking at the ruins of the ancient Roman city.”

Exploring the ruins of Philippi, November 20, 1946. © Charles Lord

Garber noted, “To some of the fellows, the place was just a pile of stones, but to most of us the place had some meaning. It was here that Paul on one of his missionary journeys built a church. As we walked around on the wide stone foundations we knew that it was here that Paul preached. We then had the privilege of seeing the prison where Paul was imprisoned for the night.”

Entrance to the prison where the Apostle Paul was held. © Charles Lord

The Carroll Victory cowboys had the joy of seeing some Heifer Project animals that had previously been distributed in villages around Kavalla. “In one home,” Lord said, “the woman gave up her room to the heifer, and she sleeps with the children.”

This woman slept with her children so her beloved gift from the Heifer Project could have her room. © Charles Lord

Five of the cowboys got a ride with a British army truck over the mountains one day to find a village of thatched huts. “Fog was very thick,” Lord said. “We started walking up a path away from the road. We went about the distance we thought it should be to the village though none of us had been there. Then we stopped debating what to do. The fog lifted and there was the village across a ravine.”

The thatched village near Kavalla, Greece, visited by seagoing cowboys, November 23, 1946. © Charles Lord

“It was like a picture from a storybook,” Lord said. “The people in their black woolen and fur clothing were carding wool, sewing clothing, and putting up the pole framework of another hut. The people were friendly if their dogs were not, and let us take all the pictures we wanted.”

Woman on right spinning wool in her thatched-hut village near Kavalla, Greece, November 23, 1946. © Charles Lord

“We came back over a very high mountain, saw lots of fortifications on the top . . . then ran down the mountain strate [sic] to supper. They threw a birthday party for the Chief Steward tonight. He asked me to take pictures for him. I did, figuring they may fit in my interracial story since captain and chief mate sat next to him at the table.”

Chief Steward of the S. S. Carroll Victory Ivory Dennis with the ship’s captain on the left and chief mate on the right. © Charles Lord

“The steward said it was best birthday party he’d ever had,” Lord told his wife. “Captain said he was glad to see cattlemen there, was sure we’d have a good trip.

“We have had a wonderful six days in Greece. We will probably spend 2 or 3 days in Haifa getting a boiler fixed, then on to Durban, S. Africa.”

~ to be continued

Once again, my thanks to Charles Lord for so graciously sharing his letters and photos with me.