Bobby Shafter’s Gone to Sea

It was on a T-2 tanker, some years ago, that I became a particular friend of the steward. He was a stocky, smooth-spoken young man of about thirty, of mixed Negro and Indian and Irish ancestry. His name was Bobby Shafter, and what happened to the two of us, one steamy night in Panama, I am only now beginning to understand.

We had been knocking around the Caribbean for some months: Aruba, Curaçao, Galveston, La Guaira, Mobile, Paramaribo, but with very little port time in any single place. So we were delighted with the news that we’d be laying up at Balboa to wait for engine room parts.