The Propeller Is Bronze

by B. Traven, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

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On the morning of the two hundred and nineteenth day the Concord Pride had on board eleven men, four tons of diesel oil, nineteen sacks of rice, a quarter of a sack of onions, one goat that the cook had bought from a fishing boat and could not bring himself to kill, and a debt.

The debt was the largest thing on board. It was larger than the ship, in a manner of speaking, though not in the manner the court would speak of it later. The owners owed the eleven men nine months of wages. They owed the chandler for the rice before last, and the agent for his fees, and the port for its dues, and the bunker company for oil that had been burned long ago, in another sea, when the ship still went somewhere. The owners did not answer the telephone. The owners were a company with an address on an island, and the address was a room in which a woman answered for two hundred companies, and none of them had ever been there.

The ship lay at the outer anchorage of a port on the Gulf. Which port does not matter. There are forty such anchorages in the world, and in every one of them, on any morning you like, some ship is lying with its anchor down and its crew on board, waiting for a man in an office to remember them. The flag at the stern belonged to a country none of the eleven had ever seen. It was a good flag, as such flags go. It cost little to fly and asked no questions, and now that it was needed it was not asking any either.

Elpidio Sarmiento, oiler, from a town on the island of Samar, went down at six to start the generator. It ran four hours in the morning and four at night. Between those hours the ship was dark and hot and the refrigerator was a cupboard, and the men lay in the passageways where some air moved and told one another what they would eat when they got home. In the first months they had told it in great detail. Now they only said the names of the dishes, the way one says the names of the dead.

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You may ask why eleven men stay on a ship that does not pay them. It is a fair question. A man who is not paid by a factory goes home. A man who is not paid by a farmer goes to another farmer. The eleven men of the Concord Pride stayed on board because of the law, and the law, here as elsewhere, had been written with great care by people who had never been on a ship that does not pay.

Mrs. Haddad from the seamen's mission explained it to them in the third month. She came out on the launch every two weeks with rice and telephone cards and a box of old newspapers in four languages, and she sat in the mess room with her handbag on her knees and explained it slowly, so that the chief engineer could put it into Ukrainian for the two motormen and Elpidio could put it into Waray for the bosun, who understood English well enough but preferred to have bad news in his own language.

The wages, she said, are a lien on the ship. That means the wages stick to the ship. Not to the owners, who are a room on an island. To the ship herself, to the steel and the engine and the anchor chain. When the court sells the ship, the wages come first, before the bank, before the chandler, before the port. That is the good news.

"And the bad news?" said the chief engineer, whose name was Hnatyuk and who had been at sea for thirty-one years and did not believe that there is good news without bad news attached to it, like a barnacle.

The bad news was that the court would not sell a ship that nobody was guarding. A ship without a crew is a danger to navigation. A ship without a crew drags her anchor in the first storm and goes on the rocks, and then there is nothing to sell and nothing for the wages to stick to. And a crew that goes home has abandoned the ship, and a crew that has abandoned the ship will find it harder, much harder, to stand in front of a judge on another continent and say: that ship owes me.

So the men must stay. They must keep the ship afloat and lit and safe, they must run the generator and check the anchor and pump the bilges, so that she can be sold, so that they can be paid. They were guarding their own debtor. They were the warders of the prison and its prisoners at once, and they were not being paid for either job.

"How long?" said Captain Raghunathan.

Mrs. Haddad said courts are slow.

Then she gave them the telephone cards, and they went up on deck one by one to the place by the funnel where there was a signal, and talked to their wives about other things.

---

In the fifth month the agent came out. He was a young man in a white shirt who held his briefcase above his head as he climbed the pilot ladder, as if the briefcase were the thing that might drown. He did not sit down in the mess room. He laid papers on the table, one for each man, and a pen beside each paper.

The papers were releases. A man who signed one received an air ticket home and forty per cent of what he was owed, in cash, at the airport. In exchange he declared that he had no further claim against the vessel or her owners, now or ever, in this world.

"Forty per cent," said the agent, "is very good. Some crews get nothing. Some crews wait two years and get nothing. Forty per cent today is better than a hundred per cent never."

This is true, and it is the kind of truth that has kept a great many people poor. It is always true. It was true for the man who sold his land to the hacienda for a quarter of its worth because the hacienda could wait and he could not. A rich man can wait for a hundred per cent. He has his time, and he can spend it. A poor man has only his time, and every day he spends it there is less of him left.

Three men signed. The second cook, whose mother was ill. Yaroslav the motorman, whose wife had stopped answering the telephone, which was worse than an illness. And the cadet, Ko Min Thu, who was nineteen and had been at sea for the first time when the money stopped, and who said, folding his paper very small, that he was sorry, and that he would send them something, and nobody believed him and nobody blamed him. They went down the ladder after the agent with their bags, and the launch took them away across the brown water, and Ko Min Thu stood in the stern and did not wave, because he was ashamed, and then waved anyway, because he was nineteen.

That left eleven. The chief engineer did the sum on the back of a newspaper and said that the owners had saved, by those three signatures, a little over fifteen thousand dollars. "So the ship has made a profit this month," he said. "First time since Durban."

Nobody laughed. But the bosun, who was the oldest after Hnatyuk, put his finger on the newspaper beside the figure and kept it there for some time, as if he were holding it down so that it should not blow away.

---

The Concord Pride weighed nine thousand eight hundred tons empty. This is called her lightweight, and it is the only number that matters about a ship at the end of her life. Her tonnage and her cargo gear and her classification and the story of every port she ever entered, none of that matters any more. At the end a ship is sold the way a cow is sold to a slaughterhouse, by weight, and the price per ton is printed every week in a little bulletin that is read with great interest by men who have never been to sea.

Elpidio learned this from the chief engineer, who learned it from the newspapers Mrs. Haddad brought, and who worked out on another margin what the ship would fetch. It was a large number. Then he worked out what the eleven men were owed, including the captain, whose wages were the biggest because his responsibility was the biggest, though it was hard to see on the Concord Pride what the responsibility was for. That was a smaller number. It was so much smaller that the chief engineer looked at it for a long time.

"The propeller," he said at last.

"What about it?"

"The propeller is bronze. Manganese bronze. Twenty-two tons of it." He wrote another figure. "The propeller alone would very nearly pay us. All of us. Nearly everything."

After that the men looked at the stern differently. Elpidio would go aft in the evening when the generator was running and the deck lights were on, and lean on the rail and look down at the place in the water where the propeller was, though he could not see it. Twenty-two tons of bronze, turning nothing, under the brown water. It was a strange thing to know, that the whole of what they were owed hung down there in one piece, and that a man could not get it off with a spanner.

---

In the eighth month the court sold the ship.

The court did this in a room on shore, and nobody from the ship was there, because nobody from the ship could leave it. They heard about it from Mrs. Haddad, who heard about it from a lawyer, who telephoned her on a Wednesday. The ship was sold to a company that bought ships for breaking. The price was a little under the chief engineer's large number. The wages would come first, as promised. The judge had signed. The money would be paid out of the proceeds, said Mrs. Haddad, when the proceeds were received.

"When are the proceeds received?" said the captain.

On delivery, said Mrs. Haddad. The buyer pays the balance when the ship is delivered to the buyer's beach.

The buyer's beach was in Gujarat, a thousand miles and a little more to the east, a beach where the tide runs very far in and very far out and ships are driven up onto the sand at the top of the spring tide and cut to pieces where they lie. A ship cannot be carried there. A ship must be sailed there. It needs an engine, and men to run the engine, and a master to sign the log.

The buyer's man came out the following week. He was not young and he did not hold his briefcase over his head. He climbed the ladder like a man who had climbed a great many ladders, and he sat down in the mess room without being asked, and he put on the table not papers but a bottle of whisky, which was a thing nobody on the Concord Pride had seen in eight months.

He was very reasonable. He explained that the buyer would pay for fuel and provisions and that the crew would take her across, five days, perhaps six, and that on the beach, when she was delivered, every man would be paid from the proceeds in full, and flown home, and that the buyer would add a bonus of five hundred dollars a man for the voyage. He said that he understood their situation. He said that they had been very patient. He said that patience is always rewarded in the end.

The captain said that he would have to consult his officers.

"Of course," said the buyer's man, and he went up on deck to telephone, and left the whisky.

---

It was the bosun who said it first, and he said it in Waray, so that Elpidio had to say it again in English for the others.

"He says: when we are on the beach, we are on the beach."

Nobody needed it explained. A ship on the beach is not a ship. It is nine thousand eight hundred tons of steel lying on the sand of another country, and the men who brought it there are eleven foreigners standing on that sand with their bags, waiting for a man to bring money from an office. The ship is no longer a ship, so the wages are no longer stuck to it. They are stuck to nothing. And the men who have been on the beach before, the ones on other crews who have done this voyage, could tell you how long a man waits on that sand, and how often the money arrives in full, and how often the office is closed that week because of a festival or a death or a change of management.

On the anchorage, the eleven men were guards, and that was all the power they had. On the beach they would not even be guards.

"So we refuse to sail," said the second engineer.

"Then the ship stays here," said the captain, "and we stay with her. The buyer will find another crew. There are always men."

That was true too. There are always men. That is the first law of the sea and of every other place where work is done. The buyer could fly in a riding crew from anywhere, eleven men who had not been unpaid for nine months, men who would be glad of the work and the five hundred dollars and the beach. The eleven of the Concord Pride would be put ashore with their judgment and their lien on the proceeds, and then they would be eleven men in a seamen's hostel in a port on the Gulf, telephoning a lawyer.

Hnatyuk said nothing for a while. He had drunk a little of the whisky, not much, because he did not trust whisky that was given to him. Then he got up and went below, and Elpidio, who was his oiler and went where he went, followed him down.

---

The engine of the Concord Pride was a big slow two-stroke of six cylinders, older than Elpidio. For eight months they had turned it over by hand every week, as one turns over a sick man in his bed, so that it should not seize. Nobody had told them to do this. Hnatyuk had done it because an engine that is not turned over dies, and he had been an engineer for thirty-one years and could not watch a thing die that he knew how to keep alive. He had not thought about who would own it when it lived.

He thought about it now. He stood in front of the engine with his hands in the pockets of his boiler suit and looked at it the way the men had looked at the propeller.

"A riding crew," he said, "comes on board. They are good men, probably. Good engineers. They have never seen this engine. It has not run for eight months. What happens when they try to start her?"

"She starts," said Elpidio. "We kept her."

"She starts," said Hnatyuk, "if her twelve fuel valves are in her. Two to a cylinder."

He sent Elpidio for the tools.

It took them the rest of the afternoon. They worked the way men work who know a job so well that they do not speak. Elpidio held the lamp. When each valve came out, Hnatyuk wiped it and wrapped it in a clean rag, as one wraps a fish to keep, and Elpidio carried it up the ladders to the galley. There the cook, a thin quiet man from the delta called Ko Aung, opened the eleventh of the nineteen sacks of rice and buried each bundle in the grain, deep, the way his grandmother had buried her money. Then he tied the sack again and put it back in the row with the others, and the goat watched all of this from the doorway and kept the secret, as goats do.

There are spare fuel valves on every ship. The Concord Pride had had spare fuel valves as well, once. They had been sold in the sixth month to a launch-boatman for rice, with the captain's permission and an entry in the log, and the entry was still in the log, in the captain's careful hand, where any surveyor could read it.

---

The buyer's man came back the next morning for his answer. The captain gave it to him in the mess room, in English, without any whisky.

The crew would sail the ship to the beach. They would sail her with pleasure; she was a good ship and deserved to go properly. The crew would also be paid in full, here, at the anchorage, in cash, counted on this table, before the anchor came up. After that they would sail. Not before.

The buyer's man smiled. He said this was not how it was done. He said the proceeds were not released until delivery. He said, kindly, as one says it to a child, that the buyer could put another crew on board within a week.

"Certainly," said the captain. "The chief engineer will be glad to hand over the engine room."

The buyer's man went down to look at the engine room, because he was not a fool, and Hnatyuk went with him and showed him everything with great courtesy: the main engine, the generators, the purifiers, the log of every weekly turning. The buyer's man knew engines. He looked for some time at the tops of the six cylinders. Then he asked where the fuel valves were. He knew, as Hnatyuk knew, that valves for an engine of that age are made by nobody any more, and must be found in some warehouse in Rotterdam or Piraeus, and come in weeks, not days.

Hnatyuk said that the spares had been sold for rice. It was in the log.

"And the ones in the engine?"

Hnatyuk said that a ship which has been at anchor for eight months has many things missing. He said it was a great pity. He said it in Ukrainian first, and then in English, and the buyer's man understood him well enough in both.

The buyer's man did not shout. He was too experienced to shout. He telephoned from the place by the funnel where there was a signal, and he talked for a long time, and he walked up and down while he talked. Then he went down the ladder to his launch without saying goodbye, and the launch went away across the brown water. Elpidio, on the rail, watched it go, and thought that perhaps they had been very foolish, and that now nobody would come at all.

---

The money came eleven days later. It came on the mission launch, with Mrs. Haddad and the lawyer and a man from the court and a second man from the buyer who was much younger than the first and carried a canvas bag. It was counted on the mess-room table, in dollars, man by man, against the judgment. It took most of the morning, because the young man counted badly and had to begin again twice, and because the captain insisted on checking each pile himself, and because nobody on the Concord Pride was in any hurry. They had learned not to be.

Then each man signed for what he had received. It was the first paper anyone had asked them to sign in nine months that gave them something instead of taking it away.

When the counting was done Ko Aung went into the galley and untied the eleventh sack.

---

They took her across in six days. The engine ran beautifully. Hnatyuk stood beside it for most of the voyage and listened to it with his head on one side. He had never listened to an engine with so much love as to this one, which was carrying him to its own death, and he did not pretend otherwise.

They came in to the beach at the top of the evening spring tide, as the light was going, with every lamp on board burning, because there was fuel enough now for lamps. The captain put the engine full ahead, and the Concord Pride ran at the shore at twelve knots, the best she had made in years, and climbed the sand with a long shudder that went through every plate of her, and stopped. And there she stood, high and almost dry, leaning a little, like a cow that has lain down and cannot get up.

In the morning the tide was out and the ship stood on the sand a long way from the sea. They put the pilot ladder over the side and climbed down it one by one, with their bags, onto the beach.

The men who would cut her up were already coming across the mud. There were perhaps forty of them, barefoot or in rubber sandals, with cutting torches on their shoulders and the gas hoses trailing behind them, and they came the way men come to work at seven in the morning anywhere in the world, without hurrying, talking among themselves, not looking much at the ship, because there would be time enough to look at her.

A boy among them, younger than Ko Min Thu had been, stopped beside Elpidio and looked at his bag, and then at his face, and said something in a language Elpidio did not know.

Elpidio did not know what he had been asked. He took a packet of cigarettes from his shirt pocket, the good kind, bought with the dollars counted on the mess-room table, and held it out. The boy took one, and Elpidio took one, and they lit them from the same match, and then the boy hitched the torch higher on his shoulder and walked on toward the stern, toward the place where the propeller was, bronze, twenty-two tons of it, standing out of the mud now in the morning light for anyone to see.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem septimum decimum Kalendās Novembrēs (16 October 2026), ā B. Travenō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

B. Traven, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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