PRINCE OF THE REALM

(From MAGIC HARBOR by Don Berry)

 

 

 

There was an aura of doom about the derelict freighter OCEAN CHAMPION from the moment it was towed into the harbor. The little tug FAVORITE brought it in just after sunset one day in early spring. The massive, tar-black hull towered over the tug and made an angular black silhouette against the lights of The City, as though a hole had been cut out of the world.

Half as long as a football field, OCEAN CHAMPION looked like a vessel in the ancient tradition of the Flying Dutchman; a ship of Lost Souls. So strong was the impression I thought for a moment I could hear the moaning of the Damned coming across the water, but it was only the creaking of her rigging. There were no signs of life on deck.

FAVORITE slipped the huge boat neatly alongside the long pier at Trask's shipyard, where it seemed to groan and settle down like a great beast dying. Twenty minutes after it entered the harbor, it looked as though it had been there for twenty years.

Within a few days it was evident the boat was not by any means deserted. In fact, there were several families living aboard. The day after they arrived, lines of laundry began to festoon the superstructure, ranging from children's jeans to bras and panties.

The skipper's family was the more or less permanent center of this little community. His wife was aboard, and his seventeen year old daughter lived with the first mate, also on board. The first mate, Frank, was a lean, hard young man with lanky black hair tied back in a ponytail. The daughter was a stunning redhead whose appearance on deck always turned a few heads in the harbor.

About a week after OCEAN CHAMPION first appeared, the dive-boat VIKING RAIDER came storming into the harbor just after dawn and rafted up to the derelict. The crew of the RAIDER swarmed aboard, and there was a major party that night you could hear across the harbor.

I was already familiar with VIKING RAIDER, one of a fleet of small dive boats that scour the bottom of Puget Sound for sea urchins and sea cucumbers. The boats are pretty generally disreputable, their decks cluttered with dive gear and stacks of white plastic buckets for packing the catch. The uniform color scheme in this little fleet seems to be rust streaks overall, even on the occasional wooden hull. Each boat has a six digit state identification number roughly scrawled across the cabin, giving the impression that while they might have to put numbers on the boat, they didn't have to like it.

The sea urchins are taken for their eggs, a delicacy in Japan, and the slug-like sea cucumbers for their skins and meat. In Asia the skin of the sea cucumber is reputed to have aphrodisiac qualities and brings a good price. The entire catch of this tiny fleet is sold to Japanese buyers.

The urchin divers don't mix much with the other water denizens; they keep to their own world. The divers are all quite young, mostly in their early twenties, because the physical demand is enormous. The urchins are picked off the bottom by hand, one at a time, and an urchin diver may spend as much as eight hours underwater in a day. They breathe directly from compressors on the surface that pump air through long hoses down to regulator mouthpieces like scuba gear. The rig is called a hookah.

These hookah divers seem to share a common temperament. They are not only enormously fit, they are enormously edgy. They seem to range from sullen to aggressive, and always seem to be on the prod about something. I've been told this is a consequence of breathing highly pressurized oxygen all day. It would make me edgy, too. Oddly, almost every urchin diver I know is a heavy cigarette smoker.

With this general reputation for aggressiveness, it was no great surprise when first mate Frank was picked up at the public dock on outstanding county warrants the second week the freighter was in harbor. Frank got into a hassle with the arresting officer and roughed him up considerably before the other two squad cars arrived as backup. They trundled Frank off to the county jail in Port Orchard in handcuffs, and the local paper duly reported the scuffle as originating in the crew of OCEAN CHAMPION.

The shoreside world reacted to OCEAN CHAMPION much as European villages used to react when the gypsies suddenly arrived and encamped outside town; they began to blame everything that went wrong on OCEAN CHAMPION and its crew.

There were, of course, immediate and persistent rumors of drug dealing. These increased in intensity when it was learned that "O.C.", as the crew called it, was renting out berths at $10 a night to anyone who happened along.

It was easy enough to imagine the derelict in a late night black and white movie, with ladders of narrow berths stacked up in the hold, thick clouds of gray-white opium smoke, and Humphrey Bogart commenting wryly on the nature of Man and his Dreams.

The theme of Man and his Dreams was not that far off the mark. Over the next couple of weeks I talked to various crewmen, and pieced together a little history. The skipper, Ross Oie, had bought "O.C." for $10,000 from an owner who was desperate to get rid of it. (Nothing down, pay me out of the profits, but get the damned thing out of here.)

The freighter was intended to be a living base for the dive ventures of VIKING RAIDER and a couple of other boats. It was the consistent opinion of the crewmen and divers that everybody was going to be pretty rich by about October. The figure of a million and a half dollars was often mentioned. The details of how this was going to come about were not clear to the crewmen, but the skipper knew.

Before that, there was the problem of fixing up OCEAN CHAMPION, of course. She had been completely gutted when abandoned by her previous crew, who even cut out and stole every foot of copper wiring in the huge hull. The amount of work was awesome, and nobody seemed to be interested in doing it.

I didn't run into the skipper for about a month. Then, one morning as I was leaving the public dock to row back to my boat, he was coming to shore in his dinghy. We met about thirty yards out from the dock and stopped for a chat. We pulled the dinghies together and I hung one foot over his gunwale to hold the boats together.

Ross was about forty-five, with a leathery face and the characteristic bad teeth of so many water people. His jeans were tar spotted, and there was no telling what color his grimy gray cap had been in the beginning. The dinghy had taken on about three inches of water in the few hundred yards from OCEAN CHAMPION.

"You're OCEAN CHAMP?" I said. "You've got quite a project on your hands."

It amazes me how often the first thing anyone says about themselves is an open vision of their whole inner nature. it happens time and again on the water, and this was one of the times. The very first words Ross Oie ever spoke to me were:

"I am a prince without a throne, without a kingdom, and without any money. So I have to work my ass off."

Somehow I knew he was speaking absolutely literally. He intended no metaphor, but a perfectly factual statement of his affairs.

"How can you be a prince without a kingdom?" I said. "They pretty much go together."

"I'm the true and rightful heir to the lands and possessions of Eric the Red," he said. "It's my family."

I tried to calculate what the empire of Eric the Red would be worth now, particularly if you took Leif Erickson into account.

"Does that include America?" I asked. He seemed pleased I understood there might be some claim on America, but he shook his head.

"Wouldn't work," he said briefly. "I'm a prince, not a fool."

He had, he said, documentary evidence of his rightful claim, a geneological history written in the front pages of the family bible, tracing his descent directly from Eric.

We talked for a while about Vikings and putting together old boats. I looked over his shoulder at the black hulk of OCEAN CHAMPION, and the persona of the derelict began to change. I could see it as the last remnant of the fiefdoms and estates of a great Viking monarch, a thousand years down the line.

This all sounds rather bizarre as I write it down. But in rafted dinghies in the middle of the harbor it was not particularly unreasonable. Then, too, by temperament I believe whatever anybody tells me about themselves is true.

"What do you think about all that?" Prince Oie said after while.

"Well, I don't know how legitimate your claim is," I said. "But even if it is -- you know it's been a thousand years, man. I wouldn't quit my day job." He laughed.

About this time, the county sheriff's boat came slowly up to the public dock, towing ROMANCE. ROMANCE was another derelict, an abandoned houseboat that had been hanging around in the back harbor for years. It was an old barge hull, kept afloat only by stuffing it full of styrofoam blocks. It was such an eyesore the city police had finally been forced to seize it, a task they're not equipped to do.

ROMANCE caught the attention of the prince. While I was looking over his shoulder a thousand years into the past, he was looking over mine into the future. He called out to the police sergeant who seemed to be in charge of the operation.

"What are you going to do with that?" he said.

"Damned if I know," the sergeant said, shaking his head. "Get rid of it somehow." It was evident he had no clear idea of exactly how that was going to happen.

"Can I have it?" the Prince said.

"Well -- I don't know," the sergeant said. "You'd have to talk to the chief." But it was clearly the first glimpse he'd had of a way out of lousy situation.

"Where is he?" the Prince said.

"Just up at the station," the sergeant said.

"Talk to you later," the Prince said to me. He quickly rowed the remaining thirty yards to shore and set off up the dock. I rowed back out to my boat.

The next morning two of the OCEAN CHAMPION crewmen came and towed ROMANCE away. The prince had somehow talked the city into giving him the abandoned vessel. Naturally, this did nothing about the eyesore problem, since they just tied it off next to "O.C." to serve as a convenient garbage scow. All they had to do was throw the garbage directly overboard from the deck of OCEAN CHAMPION into ROMANCE.

The fleet of Eric the Red had been augmented by one vessel. I suppose, in the inverted scenario that was playing out, adding another derelict was a successful venture. Success, I am told, is getting what you want, and Prince Oie wanted ROMANCE.

The prince took to dropping by my boat for conversation from time to time. I'd pour us out a couple of Scurvy Preventers and we'd drink and talk about a variety of stuff, not always his princedom. I wanted to learn what the heir of Eric the Red considered success; what he wanted.

His vision was on a grand scale. OCEAN CHAMPION, it seemed, was only the first small step toward a mega-corporation that would virtually control the flow of food from the sea. Prince Oie wanted -- and fully intended -- to become the largest, most powerful food processing corporation in the world. He visualized an empire that circled the globe, vertically integrated, ranging from a fleet of catcher boats through processing vessels and into a multi-national cartel for marketing and distribution. It would be, to the seafood industry, what De Beers is to the diamond trade.

"And what does your family want?" I asked him. "How about your wife?"

"Oh, she's tough," Prince Oie said. "But she doesn't care a lot for boats. Basically she wants a little house on land with a picket fence and that kind of stuff."

"How about your daughter?"

"She wants to be an astronaut," he said. "She could do it, too. She's good at math."

 

end

 

 

 

Prince of the Realm
©1995 Don Berry