The New Yorker:

Why go on a cruise when you can go on a freighter?

By Patricia Marx 

Call him Ishmael. Call me Insane. Some time ago, I had a hankering: wouldn’t it be lovely to take a break from the hurly-burly of landlubber life and the oppressive, never-ending connecting with everybody and everything? What could be more restorative than to voyage across the Atlantic aboard a merchant vessel, and, as Melville said, see the watery part of the world? How great would it be to have the time to read “Moby-Dick” instead of just talking about it? Oh, really? Now that I am about to board the Rickmers Seoul freighter (Chinese-built, German-managed, Marshall Islands-registered), being a passenger on a cargo ship seems a lot like being an inmate in a prison, except that on a ship you can’t tunnel yourself out. Please try to imagine the privations I will brave for three weeks on this six-hundred-and-thirty-two-foot-long, thirty-thousand-ton hunk of steel as it galumphs across the sea from Philadelphia to Hamburg, with brief stops in Norfolk (Virginia) and Antwerp. There will be no Internet, no e-mail, no telephones, no organized entertainments, no Stewart or Colbert, no doctor, no anyone-I-know, and no Diet Coke. There will be twenty-seven crew members, most from the Philippines, including a captain and a handful of officers from Romania, and, piled high on deck and deep in the holds, an assortment of cargo consignments from the world over that might include yachts, submarines, airplane fuselages, generators, turbines—everything, in short, that would elate a boy of five. There are no freighters that haul vats of sushi or Yonah Schimmel knishes, but somewhere out there is a vessel that carries La Mer face cream, and I hope the Rickmers Seoul collides with it.

After checking in at the Philadelphia Tioga Marine Terminal with a stevedore named Rhino, I teetered up a steep gangway to the main deck, where I was greeted by a broad-shouldered, doughy Romanian (age thirty-two) with a handsome face and a clipboard. In his orange jumpsuit, he looked like a giant Teletubby. “I am Paul,” he said. “I am chief man.”

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