Word: seamans
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...were-there fashion, the scrolls faithfully capture the Americans in every conceivable pursuit: tippling, hunting, surveying Shimoda harbor, laundering their clothes at the beach. They also suggest that U.S. sailors have not changed very much. One picture depicts a tipsy seaman dallying in an inn with five tarts, and the dialogue is suitably arch: "Oh, come a little closer to me!" "I say, I say, it seems you've had too much and can't stand up!" Japanese casualness about sex convinced Perry that they were "a lewd people." When the shogun's commissioners complained that...
Connie Hoffman, a white woman, and Dewey McLaughlin, a Spanish-speaking merchant seaman of Honduran origin, were convicted under this law in Miami Beach in 1962. Each was sentenced to 30 days in jail and a $150 fine. The defendants appealed to the Florida Supreme Court and were turned down in light of what Justice Millard Caldwell called "the sound rule of stare decisis" (following precedents) and "the well-written decision" of Pace. Let the U.S. Supreme Court decide, added Caldwell caustically, "if the newfound concept of 'social justice' has outdated 'the law of the land...
...this isolation-in-the-self come out; at least two that I saw. One was a self-possession that I began to see in my friends and in myself; wherever we were, we began to know who we were. Which is not to say we overrated ourselves, as the seaman doesn't stand too high. But having been flung about we knew how to roll; and lost in the cold woods outside Antwerp or thrown into polite high living at the AMVJ in Rotterdam, we could stand with these formidable foreigners and make conversation, and get the hell back. That...
...seaman--and quickly to the college man at sea--women are tools again. But the distinction man/woman is clearly drawn, and all others as well: you are male, a "buck" or "stud"; or you are homosexual, a "queen"; or, commonly, bisexual, "AC/DC", "Greek", "double-cheeked". (Incidently, the homosexuals in the union hall keep clear and apart, and tend to ship together; anywhere in the fleet you can hear of Tillie, the Queen Bee of the Independence and the sous-chef there.) In the general camaraderie there's a great deal of rough humor about this, but no fundamental questionings: everyone...
Finally, though hardly uniquely, you learn something of an industry and its problems working at sea. American shipping is chronically ill; despite government subsidies (every large seafaring nation subsidizes its ships), there are a host of problems involving costs, replacements, schedules, etc. For the seaman the result is that American wages, though still the highest, are being approached by the Scandinavian and West-European. American living conditions, eventually more important than wages, are the worst, bar none, of any of the industrial nations. There is a phrase you often hear, that Americans don't live on their ships, they just...