The Sea is My Brother by Jack Kerouac

other side and stood near a pier, Bill’s breast pounded as he saw, docked not a hundred feet away, a great gray freighter, its slanting hull striped with rust, a thin stream of water arching from its scuppers, and the mighty bow standing high above the roof of the wharf shed.

    â€œIs that it?” he cried.
    â€œNo, she’s at Pier Six.”
    They walked toward the Maritime Commission, the air heavy with the rotting stench of stockpiles, oily-waters, fish, and hemp. Dreary marine equipment stores faced the street, show windows cluttered with blue peacoats, dungarees, naval officers’ uniforms, small compasses, knives, oilers’ caps, seamen’s wallets, and all manner of paraphernalia for the men of the sea.
    The Maritime Commission occupied one floor of a large building that faced the harbor. While a pipe-smoking old man was busy preparing his papers, Everhart could see beyond the nearby wharves and railroad yards, a bilious stretch of sea spanning toward the narrows, where two lighthouses stood like gate posts to a dim Atlantic. A seagull swerved past the window.
    An energetic little man fingerprinted him in the next room, cigarette in mouth almost suffocating him as he pressed Bill’s inky fingers on the papers and on a duplicate.
    â€œNow go down to the Post Office building,” panted the little man when he had finished, “and get your passport certificate. Then you’ll be all set.”
    Wesley was leaning against the wall smoking when Bill left the fingerprinting room with papers all intact.

    â€œPassport certificate next I guess,” Bill told Wesley, nodding toward the room.
    â€œRight!”
    They went to the Post Office building on Milk Street where Bill filled out an application for his passport and was handed a certificate for his first foreign voyage; Wesley, who had borrowed five dollars from Nick Meade, paid Bill’s fee.
    â€œNow I’m finished I hope?” laughed Bill when they were back in the street.
    â€œThat’s all.”
    â€œNext thing is to get our berths on the Westminster . Am I correct?”
    â€œRight.”
    â€œWell,” smiled Bill, slapping his papers, “I’m in the merchant marine.”
    At two-thirty that afternoon, Wesley, Bill, Nick Meade and seven other seamen landed jobs on the S.S. Westminster. They walked from the Union Hall down to Pier Six in high spirits, passing through the torturous weave of Boston’s waterfront streets, crossing Atlantic Avenue and the Mystic river drawbridge, and finally coming to a halt along the Great Northern Avenue docks. Silently they gazed at the S.S. Westminster, looming on their left,
her monstrous gray mass squatting broadly in the slip, very much, to Everhart’s astonished eyes, like an old bathtub.

CHAPTER FIVE
    â€œShe’s what we call a medium sized transport-cargo ship,” a seaman had told Everhart as they all marched down the huge shed toward the gang plank, waving greetings to the longshoremen who were busy hauling the cargo aboard, rolling oil barrels down the hold, swinging great loads of lumber below decks with the massive arm of a boom. “She does fifteen knots full steam, cruises at twelve. Not much speed—but she can weather plenty.”
    And when they had shown their job slips to the guard at the gang plank and begun to mount the sagging boards, Bill had felt a strange stirring in the pit of his guts—he was boarding a ship for the first time in his life! A ship, a great proud bark back from homeless seas and bound for others perhaps stranger and darker than any it had ever wandered to . . . and he was going along!
    Bill was lying in his bunk, remembering these strange sensations he had felt in the afternoon. It was now evening.
From his position in an upper berth, he could see the dark wall of the dock shed through an open porthole. It was a hot breathless night. The focastle he had been assigned to was partitioned off from