Quotes of the Day

When I was a lad, I dreamed of running away to sea. It was a harmless enough fantasy for a kid living in middle-class suburban Houston, who was just as likely to become an astronaut as a sailor. When I grew up, I did go to sea—every now and then, aboard luxury cruise ships plying the Caribbean, the Mediterranean and the Aegean. Seven years ago I went on a South American cruise along the coast of Chile, through the Strait of Magellan and on to Buenos Aires. It was a spectacular voyage in many ways, but I swore it would be my last: the problem was that the aspect of being at sea that interested me the most, the being-at-sea part, was minimized to the point that I almost forgot I was on board a ship. The entertainment was relentless—bridge tournaments, tango lessons, fancy-dress balls and mini-Las Vegas floor shows—and so was the food. Before my cruising days began, I had imagined myself braving the elements, face-to-face with the majesty of the sea under an immensity of sky. Instead, I seemed to be part of a team effort to break the world record for the consumption of ice-cream sundaes.

Yet my dream of experiencing the life of the sea endured. So when a friend from my youth told me she was shipping out on a cargo boat and invited me to join her, I leapt at the chance. Davien, a native Manhattanite, was taking a sabbatical from a successful career in the entertainment industry to launch a new chapter of her life, aboard a 197-meter cargo ship. She embarked in Brooklyn and cruised halfway around the world, tracing the route her grandfather, a sea captain, followed 80 years ago. She hooked up with me in Jakarta, Indonesia's capital, where I now live, and together we sailed westward from Java, across the Indian Ocean and through the Arabian Sea to Bombay.

The modern containership is a magnificent machine, a floating factory with a pleasant little village attached to it, which can be operated by a complement of 25 officers and crew. When one first approaches a freighter such as the M.V. Ingrid Oldendorff, its physicality is overwhelming. The poop deck, which houses the accommodations, common areas and the bridge, soars 51 meters from hull to antenna, the height of the Leaning Tower of Pisa; the length from bow to stern is two proverbial American football fields, including the end zones. Davien and I were the only noncrew passengers aboard (supernumeraries, in the lingo of the sea), so we had a vast expanse of tranquil time and space at our disposal. On a cargo ship the entertainment is the ship and the sea—and the self. I've never had so much personal time. For anyone who is at all serious about reading or writing, traveling aboard a cargo ship such as the Ingrid Oldendorff is a dreamlike interlude of heavenly peace on earth. I suppose it would be the same for people who want to paint or embroider or listen to the works of Frank Zappa: you sleep when you want to, and when you wake up there's really nothing you have to do, which is the state of mind most conducive to doing what you want. The telephone in our cabin was a purely ornamental object.

Most cargo ships that accept passengers have room for two to eight people; the Ingrid Oldendorff has a family suite, a living room and two sleeper cabins, each with its own head and shower en suite. Our cabin wasn't superluxurious, but it was as comfortable as most of the cruise-ship accommodations I've seen, attractively furnished and fitted out with a little fridge and a stereo. Davien and I swapped off using the lone desk, which had an inspiring view of containers piled high (and the sea beyond), until I discovered a boardroom by the captain's office that was never used, and I made that my daytime lair.

War on Iraq broke out while we were at sea. Davien and I learned about what was going on not from the hyper-reality shows on the cable news channels or from printed sources but by listening to the BBC World Service on shortwave radio, in the hushed late-night darkness of the bridge. I never felt the gravity of war more profoundly.

The only structure to the day was the meal schedule: breakfast at 7:30 a.m., lunch at noon and dinner at the faintly ridiculous time of 5:30 p.m. The cook was an ebullient, roly-poly Czech named Victor, who had had a previous career as a lounge singer in the U. S. The cuisine was the only category in which the Ingrid Oldendorff failed to match the standard of the cruise ships I've sailed with: the meals were ample, well cooked and tasty enough but monotonous, with an emphasis on meat and potatoes and garnished alternately by pickles and pineapple. (We did have ice-cream sundaes, on the appropriate day of the week.) Yet Victor's cooking went down well with the crew—young guys from the Philippines, Maldives and Sri Lanka, who needed heavy doses of protein to fuel their labor. When I felt a push against the waistline of my pants, I started visiting the ship's little workout room for stationary cycling and pulling on the weight machines.

One of the most enjoyable entertainments on a luxury cruise is observing the flirty machinations some passengers will employ to wangle an invitation to sit at the captain's table. Davien and I, as supernumeraries, sat there for every meal. The master of the Ingrid Oldendorff is Oleksandr Ponomarenko, a tall, handsome Ukrainian man, who genially introduces himself as Alex but is never called anything but "Captain." Like many intelligent seamen, he has a melancholy disposition, which he constantly tries to lighten with humor.

After war broke out, a perceptible gloom descended on the ship, so the master ordered a party, a barbecue on the portside deck. Victor outdid himself, orchestrating a splendid, meaty feast with all the fixings. He consulted me, as the ship's temporary resident Texan, for advice about making barbecue sauce; in the end, he stretched it with leftover watermelon. (Strange, but perfectly good form: as any Texan will tell you, you can throw whatever you like into a barbecue sauce.)

Before I embarked, I wasn't sure what hanging out with seamen would be like: Would it be a raucous life of "Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum"? In fact, the crew was a soft-spoken, temperate lot: for a party of 27, two bottles of booze proved adequate—one indeed was rum, the other scotch. By 9 o'clock only a hard core of officers and supernumeraries were left on deck.

I asked the captain what he thought of the line's policy of letting paying landlubbers sail with his ship, and his answer surprised me. "A ship is a closed community," he said. "The crew is very limited in experience, information and resources. But having passengers like you and Davien on board gives them a great opportunity to talk with people whose experiences are totally different."

Of course, the reverse was true to an even greater extent: our prolonged contact with the quiet harmony that flourished among a crew whose origins span most of the Eastern Hemisphere, who come from most of the major religions and speak a dozen languages taught us more than I imagine we returned, in the form of tales of city life and barbecue recipes. But perhaps that's the point.

• Jamie James
• Activity-packed cruises leave you breathless? Try a tranquil voyage via containership