Alongside her dock in the sun-baked harbor of Alexandria one day last week lay American Export Lines' S. S. Excalibur, loading to the rattle of donkey engines and the babble of Levantine tongues. Day before, as the Excalibur docked, three days out of Naples, Italy had declared war, and the whole Mediterranean Sea had become a war zone barred by the neutrality laws to U. S. ships. Ahead of grim-faced Skipper Samuel Norman Groves lay stops at Tel Aviv, Haifa and Beirut, a run through the eastern islands to Piraeus, second calls at Naples and Genoa. Then, late this month, he would head under the guns of Gibraltar towards home.
When Captain Groves, bronzed in the service of the No. 1 U. S. Mediterranean ship operator, leaves the Rock, a fat slice of international trade will end.
Last year U. S. exporters sold $162,763,000 worth of goods in the strange ports that line the Cradle of Civilization. Excalibur's manifest was a cross section of this lost market: automobiles, steel, chemicals, machinery for Alexandria, Tel Aviv, Haifa and Beirut; iron, lubricating oils and tinplate for Genoa and Naples; an assortment of flour, corn products, hides, apples, wool, tires, lead, wearing apparel, paper, missionaries. From Mediterranean docks, the U. S. got a $153,677,000 import trade. Of this, too, American Export freighters carried the lion's share: long-staple cotton from Alexandria, olive oil from Piraeus and Leghorn, china from Beirut, cheese, rayon and vermouth from Genoa, pistachios, gum arabic, rags, onions, rice and tobacco. All told, the spread of war to the Mediterranean cost the U. S. a $316,439,000 export-import business, to be added to the $470,177,000 already lost in trade with Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia and subsequent victims of Nazi might. This is 14% of all U. S. export-import trade in 1939.
American Export Lines, whose development of the Mediterranean and Black Sea trade was the most profitable post-war achievement of the U. S. merchant marine, must now content itself with calls at Lisbon. But no strategic material from the Mediterranean (except perhaps mercury) is irreplaceable. And U. S. processors of cottonseed oils knew what to do about an olive-oil shortage; U. S. rayon and silk men shed no tears at the blockade of Italy; California growers saw a widening market for domestic wine. One product would be partly missed: cork, of which Mediterranean countries (plus Portugal) produce 100% of the world's supply. Last week Armstrong Cork's President Henning Webb Prentis Jr. was glad he had a six to nine months' stock on hand. This would not go far if his next cork supply had to come from this hemisphere, since cork trees take 40 years to mature. But Portugal and Spain, where 70% of the cork trees grow, still have Atlantic ports open to U. S. ships.
No great shakes as a world producer or a world market, the Mediterranean bulked far larger as a world highway. Through Suez and Gibraltar poured a grimy stream of freighters carrying oil from Iraq, Iran and Russia's Batum on the Black Sea, mercury from Italy and Spain, chrome from Turkey, manganese from the U. S. S. R. Of these the U. S. had to worry only about mercury and manganese. But mercury is still available from Spain, and manganese is plentiful in Cuba, India, Brazil, the African Gold Coast, even (in low-grade form) in the U. S.