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The Death Ship

4.17 of 5 stars 4.17 · rating details · 377 ratings · 60 reviews

The Death Ship tells the story of an American sailor, stateless and penniless because he has lost his passport, who is harassed by police and hounded across Europe until he finds an 'illegal' job shoveling coal in the hold of a steamer bound for destruction.

The Death Ship is the first of B. Traven's politically charged novels about life among the downtrodden, which have so...more

Paperback, 384 pages

Published September 1st 1991 by Chicago Review Press (first published 1926)

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Jun 26, 2012 Rod rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: down-n-out, the-high-seas, favorites

I like sea stories, and I like stories about people who are down on their luck and downtrodden, so yeah, I was bound to like this. Some complain that it gets boring in the middle with a lot of talk about furnaces (hi, Maureen!) and boilers and such, and there definitely is a lot of time spent on the workaday drudgery of the firemen and coal-drags working in the stoke-hold of the titular ship, but I felt this was there for a reason. Traven succeeds in making you feel the backbreaking toil, the fi...more

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Apr 24, 2012 Maureen rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2012

b. traven played me like a fiddle with this book. i found myself muttering darkly about the bloodless bureaucracy that runs the world, piling up money that will never been seen by the poor, and the honest workers who do their best to stay afloat. it is this kind of rhetoric that stoked my fire:

"There is no getting used to pain and suffering. You become only hard-boiled, and you lose a certain capacity to be impressed by feelings. Yet no human being will ever become used to sufferings to such an...more b. traven played me like a fiddle with this book. i found myself muttering darkly about the bloodless bureaucracy that runs the world, piling up money that will never been seen by the poor, and the honest workers who do their best to stay afloat. it is this kind of rhetoric that stoked my fire:

"There is no getting used to pain and suffering. You become only hard-boiled, and you lose a certain capacity to be impressed by feelings. Yet no human being will ever become used to sufferings to such an extent that his heart will cease to cry out that eternal prayer for all human beings: "I hope that my liberator comes!" He is the master of the world, he who can makes his coins out of the hope of slaves."

and

"There is justice in this world. Heaps of it. But not for sailors, and not for working-men making trouble. Justice is for those people who can afford to have it. We are not those people. Everybody knows well you cannot go to a consul. If you could, you would not be on the Yorikke. But your consul is not for you. You cannot pay the fee, and you cannot rattle a hundred-dollar bill among the papers on his desk and forget it there."

this book made me rage more than usual against the world order, and made me more aware of how shifting borders could disenfranchise people born on that land because all of a sudden they are part of a different political landscape -- the realities of being a native of a place like alsace-lorraine after WWI, where whatever language you were taught at your nana's knee makes no difference because now you are french, even if you were german, but only if you have the necessary papers.

and gale, the protagonist, loses his when he's left behind at antwerp after a last-minute decision for an enthusiastic shore leave, and he learns without papers he is nothing. the first section is spent watching gale flail about, trying to find a place that will accept him with no passport, no documentation. he ends up being tossed from country to country by officials who will do nothing for him. part 2 finds him aboard a new ship, convinced to ply his sailor's trade, manipulated into taking on the grueling job of coal drag on a steam ship, the death ship, the Yorikke. a death ship because eventually it will be sunk, in order to recover insurance money, it is crewed by the hopeless, and the lost, who might as well already be dead. the conditions are deplorable but it is the only work these disenfranchised folk can find. and somehow gale endures. he meets stanislavski, the other coal drag who becomes his friend, who shows him how to survive the job he's been given, and confirms what he already knew to be true: that gale's story is not unique, that there are many people who are forced to take whatever they can get in order to survive by the people who control the bureaucratic machine that controls all the money. i won't describe the third section, but given the subject matter, give that this is a book called the death ship, you'd be wise not to entertain thoughts of a happy ending.

while the novel is truly compelling, i can't give it five stars. the first part was funny even as it was frustrating, but some parts in the second part, like learning how to be a coal drag, really dragged for me, and with stanislavski, paul aka frenchy, and kurt from memel's stories all compounding gale's, i started to get impatient for something else. and a little part of me wished i was reading the night visitor again. now to find the jungle novels!(less)

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Nov 09, 2007 Ramorx rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: people of good constitution.

O my fucking christ, this is the most miserable, insufferable book I have ever read. I could only continue reading because its fucking brilliant, and Traven is a genius.
The first part is an occassionally amusing odyssey of a man without a passport dealing with authorities, but mostly its just an painful journey of the absurd into the depths of bureaucratic and legal inanity.
The second part of the book is where it gets really gruesome. Mr No-passport gets a job working in the bowels of the Deat...more

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Aug 18, 2008 Dave rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

B. Traven is the author of the book behind the famous movie Treasure of the Sierra Madre. He also authored a series of books I've read, on the Mexican revolution, that are now out of print. B. Traven is a mysterious personality who has been identified as being Rett Marue a German national. Whatever he was, this book is memorable as a Kafka-esque tale of a stateless sailor who is tossed across national borders and ends up on a "death ship" with the job of stoker in a hellish engine room. I've rea...more

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Sep 21, 2008 Rich Martin rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

B. Traven may be the most mysterious author of all time, at least in modern days. No one knows who he was, though most think he lived in Germany and was forced to live because of political turbulence. Some think he was more than one person. Whatever, he wrote some great stuff. "Treasure of the Sierra Madre" is a terrific book and a great movie. (Bogie was a perfect villain.) But "Death Ship" might be better. Apparently Traven, whoever he was, worked on a ship that was marked for destruction by t...more

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Sep 19, 2012 Nick Jones rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Although I took three books on holiday, this, in a 1934 edition translated from the German by Eric Sutton, was on the bookshelves of the house I was staying at...and we should always read other people’s books, so I read it. I had previously read B. Traven’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, which is fun but its main interest is that it provided the source of the film. And, overall, Traven seems more interesting as an enigmatic legend than as a writer. I hadn’t even heard of The Death Ship. It is...more Although I took three books on holiday, this, in a 1934 edition translated from the German by Eric Sutton, was on the bookshelves of the house I was staying at...and we should always read other people’s books, so I read it. I had previously read B. Traven’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, which is fun but its main interest is that it provided the source of the film. And, overall, Traven seems more interesting as an enigmatic legend than as a writer. I hadn’t even heard of The Death Ship. It is divided into 3 parts, although the last is only about 30 pages, and I found the first the most successful. Written in first person, the protagonist, an American sailor, misses his ship out of Antwerp. Abandoned, without papers, the sailor attempts to regain a legal identity: he goes to the American consul who refuses to help him because he can’t show he is an American citizen (well, he hasn’t got any papers); when the Belgium police pick him up they don’t know what to do with him (he hasn’t got any papers) and finally they send him illegally across the border into the Netherlands (he thinks he is being taken into the countryside to be shot); when the Dutch authorities eventually pick him up they don’t believe his story that the Belgians pushed him across the border (they wouldn’t do such a thing) but finally they send him back to Belgium in the same manner. And so it goes on. The American consul in Paris tells him that without evidence of his birth he does not exist. All this is coolly comical, the world as a ridiculous bureaucratic nightmare. But there are moments when this nightmare is suddenly humanized: however bureaucratic the officials are they will suddenly switch to responding to the sailor as a person rather than a problem, thereby expressing their own humanity. Politically the book could be described as expressing a sentimental Anarchism: the State, with its borders and bureaucrats and legal definitions, is the great evil. The sailor finally finds his Utopia: Spain. Here, even the police don’t move on vagrants, he is always given a meal and no one expects a man to work if he doesn’t want to. (And the book is about men: women don’t get much of a look in.) (There is an incident where the sailor is outside a prison and hears the screams of the tortured and dying, but he is told that they are Communists who want to impose the order of the State, so the sailor accepts the reason.) In the second part he is taken aboard a death-ship: the worst of ships, where none of the crew has papers and therefore can go nowhere but to another death-ship, which carries the most dubious of cargoes and will eventually be sunk for the insurance money. Much of the humour is now lost. There are long descriptions of the horrendous working conditions and the gruelling nature of the work. There are back stories of members of the crew that echo the sailor’s experiences, e.g., a German-Pole who has lost his nationality with border changes after the First World War...all this tends to be a repetition of the first part, but without the humour. The most interesting thing about this part is the way the sailor gets used to his conditions. In the first section there are a few passages where the narrator explains the way of the world, but these become longer and increasingly didactic, often dominating the text. The more the book takes itself seriously, the less serious it becomes. The root of all evil is the state and men just want to be left alone. Although I find this politically trite, more important is that Traven cannot make it anything other than thematically repetitious and shallow. (But the book’s hatred of the State shouldn’t be identified with the rhetoric of the modern libertarian right: Traven has a respect for idleness and a hatred of the boss that is antipathetic to the Right.) But, for all the limitations of the book, I am glad I came across it and read it. (The casual racism of the narrator is often startling and the book does not challenge it: the Anarchist brotherhood of man does not seem to include those of African or Asian descent.)(less)

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Mar 31, 2012 Steve Evans rated it 4 of 5 stars

Traven's first best-seller, written in Mexico after he shipped up there in the 1920s. The first half is quite amusing actually as the narrator slyly pokes fun both at his own fecklessness and bureaucracy; the second half goes grim and gets down to the nitty-gritty of 20th century life as the author saw it.

Traven's identity was a puzzle even long after he died. The discovery that he was a German national who concocted a variety of identities to fend on the curious had to wait till then. His widow...more

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Jan 17, 2010 Colleen rated it 4 of 5 stars

The story starts out tongue in cheek. The sailor is a smart ass who gets left behind when he spends the night with a girl he meets at a port bar. Unfortunately, he's also left his sailor's card and other identification back on board the ship too. The story turns Kafkesque when he has to prove that he's American and if he can't the police will escort him to the border. It's the early 1930s and most of Europe is unemployed and hungry. After awhile he does get a job on a ship, but it's so old and t...more

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May 11, 2012 HA rated it 4 of 5 stars

Woo. The mysterious B. Traven uses the lives of post-WWI merchant mariners as a vehicle to convey his feelings about statelessness, heartless bureaucracy and the downward spiral human beings can find themselves in at the bottom of the socio-economic spectrum. Well done...great story about a sailor without identity papers who keeps finding himself in one bad deal after another. Very interesting book, if you keep in mind it's the viewpoint of a Communist who fled Germany in the 20'a or 30's on Ame...more

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Sep 27, 2012 Clark rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: made-ups

Ever be talking about some band or something that has long since kicked the bucket as far as modern cool goes, like, "Dude, yeah, I can't listen to 'em now or anything but The Pixies were my shit back when I was fifteen." but then you go home and on the right night you throw on the Come On Pilgrim LP and it's totally just as good as it was when you were a pissed off high school kid and you're singing along and getting this totally weird bittersweet-but-more-on-the-sweet-side feeling? Ever done t...more

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Mar 07, 2007 ElizaBeth rated it 3 of 5 stars

This book starts well and ends well, but a long part of the middle is just really, really boring. (Sorry Adam, I know you love it.)

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Jan 14, 2009 James rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, favorites, adventure, death

The death ship it is I am in,
All I have lost, nothing to win
So far off sunny New Orleans
So far off lovely Louisiana.
(from "Song of An American Sailor")

This was B. Traven's first novel, published in 1934, and it is my favorite of his works. It is a sea story unlike any other, being a story of men at sea as a metaphor for men against what Jack London infamously referred to as the "Iron Heel" of modern industrialism.
Gerard Gales misses his ship, the Tuscaloosa, in Antwerp and is picked up by the...more The death ship it is I am in,
All I have lost, nothing to win
So far off sunny New Orleans
So far off lovely Louisiana.
(from "Song of An American Sailor")

This was B. Traven's first novel, published in 1934, and it is my favorite of his works. It is a sea story unlike any other, being a story of men at sea as a metaphor for men against what Jack London infamously referred to as the "Iron Heel" of modern industrialism.
Gerard Gales misses his ship, the Tuscaloosa, in Antwerp and is picked up by the police. After some back and forth between Holland and Belgium he ends up in Paris and, since he has no "papers" and cannot prove he is an American he becomes a "nameless" creature. He makes his way to Cadiz, Spain and signs on to the Yorikke, a "death ship"; that is a ship which has been condemned by her owners to go to the bottom of the sea so that they may collect her insurance. Gale has further adventures, surviving against all odds. The book is an attack on a certain sort of pernicious business practices, nationalism, and bureaucracy; its viewpoint is anarchist; its humor is sardonic, grim, and cheerful by turns; its style is ironic; its hero is both wise and naive, an American "innocent' who suffers his "fate" though he is fiercely indignant at the injustice of the prevailing social conditions. The novel's vision is tragicomic, deeply involved yet highly detached.
Bruce Catton called the book "a startling novel about the horrible things that can happen to a man in the cock-eyed post-war world of Europe if he can't prove he is who he says he is. . . Our sailor is entangled in a world gone mad,a world in which justice and sanity have simply ceased to exist." A few decades later and several wars as well, and the world seems at times to be just as cock-eyed, no more just or sane.
What intrigued me, perhaps even more than this mesmerizing first novel, is the mysteriousness with which B. Traven hid his personal life. Even after many more novels, including the great Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Traven continued to hide behind a post office box in Mexico City. However that does not matter since his novels stand for themselves as exciting and daring adventures into the world of men and nature. This reader found Death Ship was a novel with hypnotic power, timelessness, universality and authenticity. Traven approaches the ability of Joseph Conrad to make the sea come alive, and for that alone I would continue to read and enjoy the his novels. (less)

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Oct 26, 2009 j to the muthafuckin R rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: everyone

Some quotes from the book:

"No use to preach to the working-man courtesy & politeness when at the same time the working-man is not given working conditions under which he can stay polite and soft-mannered."

"Morals are taught & preached not for the sake of heaven, but to assist those people on earth who have everything they need & more to retain their possessions & to help them to accumulate still more. Morals is the butter for those who have no bread."

"The regular work on the Yori...more

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Jan 02, 2013 David Koblos rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: sea-yarn, freedom

What is it like to be without a passport in this regulated post WWI world? B. Traven gives us a very intensive and cynical taste of it, as we accompany an American sailor through the intricate web of bureaucracy, trying to get help from consuls and other officials, after having missed his ship, with all his documents on board. Eventually, the only viable option for cases like him, which we are introduced to along the story, is working on an over-insured death ship, under incredibly bad condition...more

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Sep 27, 2012 Mike Snyder rated it 5 of 5 stars

I read this book while working on Scandinavian freighters in the early '70s and so could relate to everything in the book, although we didn't have to shovel coal since we had diesel motors. Moreover, I was attracted to anarchist thinking at the time, too, so of course I loved the anti-authoritarianism of the story. It had the kind of bleak hopelessness that I find very appealing, since I have that view of mankind's future. The ending is terrific. No cop-out happy ending. The movie version with H...more

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Nov 02, 2011 Sarah rated it 5 of 5 stars

Um, wow. How had I never heard of Traven before? Apparently he's a big deal... and I now see why. I would not have expected to love a novel about sailors and bureaucracy as much as I did this book. A brilliant novel of the interwar period, scathing socioeconomic critique, hilarious and heartbreaking. And voice? This book has got it.

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Oct 06, 2012 Maple Street rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: clark-recommends

Crazy American anarchist gets stranded in Europe and makes a wild journey home. It's so funny. I loved it. I'd probably have gone around telling people it was my favorite book if I'd read it a decade and a half ago. Ah! I'm smiling just thinking about it!
-Clark Allen

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Jul 18, 2010 Noah rated it 4 of 5 stars

An overall great read. I'd say 3/4ths of the book is an absolute masterpiece. However, like many of Traven's lesser known works, it fails to end the story in a way that does justice to the rest of book.

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May 17, 2007 Gregorus rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: young people, anarchists, people who work in offices

The metaphors are ripe in this book even as the language is plain. Or, maybe there aren't any metaphors at all.

The book tells a compelling story that just so happens to rail against government bureaucracy, the taboos of society, and the modern idea of 'work' in an unsubtle yet tragically comic way. Since I tend to agree with all of these sentiments, I enjoyed the book. I would be curious what its tendency would be on those who don't feel the same way.

As a sailor without papers in Europe, the pr...more

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Nov 28, 2012 Murphy Daley rated it 2 of 5 stars

There is a separate category of book that I had to give up on. I started this book and couldn't finish it.
I know that it was kinda good, but it was just a bit too grim and depressing.

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Aug 29, 2011 Az rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: marxy, fiction

This is how my friend Hugh described this book to me: In the first part of the book an American sailor misses his ship somewhere in Europe and has no papers, so he gets deported and kicked out of a dozen countries, sent to jail, left at the border with a sandwich, all of these things taking place at a time when European nations had just begun to require people to have passports, so the officials are always incompetent and don't know how to deport him right. Finally he gets a job on a death ship...more

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Jan 25, 2012 Lochlan rated it 5 of 5 stars

I thought this was far far better than the Treasure of the Sierra Madre. As it says in the intro teh ending take it 'out of the hallucinatory and into the sublime'

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Sep 19, 2012 Lean rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I have to add to all the reviews that this is a miserably brilliant book that there are some funny parts in it - like the Konigsberger Klopse joke.

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Jun 07, 2012 Chrissy L rated it 1 of 5 stars

Shelves: book-club-pick

To say I didn't like it would be an understatement. Of all the books we've read for book club, The Death Ship is the standard for hated books.

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Sep 09, 2009 Mills rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Poignant, even with the sometimes difficult 1930's parlance. A little ranty, but somewhat accurate portrayal of life on a merchant ship.

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May 27, 2011 Eric Stone rated it 5 of 5 stars

My other favorite Traven novel. Terrifying, beautiful, poignant and full of truths about the ugly side of the human condition.

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Mar 07, 2008 tENTATIVELY, cONVENIENCE rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: people considering borders

Shelves: literature, politics

This was the 1st Traven bk I read. He's most known for "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" wch was made into a film by John Houston starring Humphrey Bogart. "The Death Ship" starts out humorously enuf as a comedy-of-errors: sailor gets separated from ship, doesn't have papers, etc. However, the real content of the bk is a critique of a world full of borders & capitalist corruption. There aren't any spoilers in this little review. I'll just say that the situation goes from bad to worse until...more

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Aug 26, 2010 Dr Edward Diesel rated it 5 of 5 stars

This is a book for anyone who has been exploited as a worker...which means anyone who has ever had a job.

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Apr 23, 2012 Viola rated it 4 of 5 stars

Excellent about being without a passport, stateless working on a dangerous ship.

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Apr 21, 2013 April D. marked it as to-read

http://libcom.org/library/death-ship-...

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About B. Traven

B. Traven (February, 1882? – March 26, 1969?) was the pen name of a German novelist, whose real name, nationality, date and place of birth and details of biography are all subject to dispute. A rare certainty is that B. Traven lived much of his life in Mexico, where the majority of his fiction is also set—including his best-known work, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1927), which was adapted as...more B. Traven (February, 1882? – March 26, 1969?) was the pen name of a German novelist, whose real name, nationality, date and place of birth and details of biography are all subject to dispute. A rare certainty is that B. Traven lived much of his life in Mexico, where the majority of his fiction is also set—including his best-known work, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1927), which was adapted as the Academy Award nominated film of the same name in 1948.
Virtually every detail of Traven's life has been disputed and hotly debated. There were many hypotheses on the true identity of B. Traven, some of them wildly fantastic. Most agree, that Traven was Ret Marut, a German stage actor and anarchist, who supposedly left Europe for Mexico around 1924. There are also reasons to believe that Marut/Traven's real name was Otto Feige and that he was born in Schwiebus in Brandenburg, modern day Świebodzin in Poland. B. Traven in Mexico is also connected with Berick Traven Torsvan and Hal Croves, both of whom appeared and acted in different periods of the writer's life. Both, however, denied being Traven and claimed that they were his literary agents only, representing him in contacts with his publishers.
B. Traven is the author of twelve novels, one book of reportage and several short stories, in which the sensational and adventure subjects combine with a critical attitude towards capitalism, betraying the socialist and even anarchist sympathies of the writer. B. Traven's best known works include the novels The Death Ship from 1926 and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre from 1927, in 1948 filmed by John Huston, and the so-called Jungle Novels, also known as the Caoba cyclus (from the Spanish word caoba, meaning mahogany), a group of six novels (including The Carreta, Government), published in the years 1930-1939, set among Mexican Indians just before and during the Mexican Revolution in the early 20th century. B. Traven's novels and short stories became very popular as early as the interwar period and retained this popularity after the war; they were also translated into many languages. Most of B. Traven's books were published in German first and their English editions appeared later; nevertheless the author always claimed that the English versions were the original ones and that the German versions were only their translations. This claim is not taken seriously.(less)

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