What It Means When Someone Calls You Shipmate (Part 1)

Boarding Day

Often, when I am meeting my audience on a cruise ship for a presentation after we are together for a while, I'll welcome them to the talk and greet them as Shipmates.  Then, I'll tell them what I mean when I call them shipmates.  Here is an expanded version of what a shipmate is in my lexicon.

For me and for people who have spent significant time at sea, shipmate is not a throwaway term.  Way, way back when I was a young Navy guy on a Pacific Fleet destroyer we would get underway from our home port for maybe a week or a couple of days or a six month cruise to the other side of the Pacific to do our bit to keep the world safe for democracy in the Cold War era.

American Destroyers in Singapore 1971

If we were lucky we would be pulling in the mooring lines from a pier and, depending on how long a cruise we were leaving for, maybe there would be girl friends or wives standing on the pier waving or crying or looking suitably forlorn.  Tin Cans didn't have a lot of pull and berths alongside were very limited.  We usually found ourselves hooked up to a mooring buoy out in the middle of the harbor or even swinging from our anchor when we were getting underway for long cruises.  No one on the pier, no bands, no ruffles and flourishes, just casting off, setting a course and cranking on the turns.

Leaving a pier can be a big deal but retrieving our bow line from a buoy out in the stream is pretty much of a non-event.  You have a boat in the water, yours or one from a friendly neighbor who gets to stay home that day.  A sailor jumps on the buoy and backs off the bolt on the shackle that holds the bow line to the buoy.  He tosses the bitter end of the line into the water and a batch of deck apes on the bow heave around and haul the line aboard.  A honk or two from the steam whistle and away you go.

At 15 or 18 knots it usually takes around an hour or so for our home port to slip under the horizon over the stern.  You stand there on the wing of the bridge or on the main deck and when you look back all you see is the line of your wake pointing to the home port that gets farther and farther away with every turn of the screws.

Once we went over the horizon and left the home port behind the world shrunk quite a bit.  The world was no longer a place where there were movies or roads or Main Streets to stroll or football games to play or take your girl to see.  The world was just this piece of iron and aluminum that was 376' 8' long with a population was you and another 210 sailors.  I forgot to tell you that there was, of course, no TV, Black and White or Color.  In fact, now that I think about it I never saw a TV set on a US Navy ship until maybe the late 60's.  No CNN because Ted Turner was still trying to pass English Comp at Brown before they threw him out for excessive naughtiness.  No cell phones or any kind of phones and, of course, no computers.  I mean NO computers, not even for steaming or fighting the ship except for some primitive units built so deep into electromotive gear we did not know they were in there, much less what they did.  No radio other than the ones in the Radio Shack and they were dot and dash machines except for the ones that squawked  messages between us and any nearby ship that was steaming  with us.

Shipmates in the Show Room  

MORE TO COME IN PART TWO