The final leg—Colombo to New York, around the Cape of Good Hope—took 33 days, longer than expected owing to a Force 10 gale in the South Atlantic. I remember the feeling of barely controlled panic as I took my turns at the helm, the unwelcome knowledge that 31 lives depended on my ability to steer a shuddering, heaving 520-foot ship straight into mountainous seas. When the next man relieved me, my hands were too cramped and shaky to light a cigarette. Even some of the older guys, who’d seen everything, seemed impressed by this storm: “Maybe ve sink, eh?” one winked at me, without detectable mirth.

They were Norwegian, mostly, and some Germans and Danskers (sorry, Danes). The mess crews were Chinese. I was awoken on the first cold (November, as it happened) morning by a banging on my cabin door and the shout “Eggah!” It took me a few days to decipher. Eggs. Breakfast.

This was long before onboard TVs and DVD players. Modern freighters, some of which carry up to 12 passengers, come with those, plus three squares a day, plus amenities: saunas, pools, video libraries. If I embarked today as a passenger aboard a freighter, I’d endeavor not to spend the long days at sea—and they are long—rewatching The Sopranos. I prefer to think that I’d bring along a steamer trunk full of Shakespeare and Dickens and Twain. Short of taking monastic vows or trekking into the Kalahari, a freighter passage might just offer what our relentlessly connected age has made difficult, if not impossible: splendid isolation.

You can’t tell what’s aboard a container ship. We carried every kind of cargo, all of it on view: a police car, penicillin, Johnnie Walker Red, toilets, handguns, lumber, Ping-Pong balls, and IBM data cards. A giant crate of those slipped out of the cargo net and split open on the deck as we were making ready to leave San Francisco. A jillion IBM data cards, enough to figure out E = mc2. It fell to me to sweep them into the Pacific. I reflected that at least they made for an apt sort of ticker tape as we left the mighty, modern U.S. in our wake and made for the exotic, older-world Far East.

The crossing took three weeks. I didn’t set foot onshore in Manila until four days after we landed. As the youngest man on board, I had drawn a series of cargo-hold watches. My job, ostensibly, was to prevent the stevedores from stealing, a function I performed somewhat fecklessly. On the last day in Manila, after I’d stood a 72-hour watch, another huge crate slipped its straps and crashed to the deck. Out poured about 5,000 copies of The Short Stories of Guy de Maupassant intended for Manila’s public schools. The stevedores seemed confused as to whether these were worth stealing. By now I was beyond caring. I yawned and told the foreman, “Good book. Go for it.”

At sea in those latitudes, temperatures on the ship’s steel decks could reach 115 degrees. During lunch breaks, I’d climb down the long ladder to the reefer (refrigerated) deck at the bottom of Number Two Hold. There were mounds, hillocks, tons—oh, I mean tons—of Red Delicious apples from Oregon. I would sit on top in the lovely dark chill, munching away, a chipmunk in paradise. One day I counted eating eight. I emerged belching and blinking into the heat, picked up my hydraulic jackhammer, and went back to chipping away at several decades of rust and paint.