The Stowaway
Description
$32.95
ISBN 0-385-31146-7
DDC C813'.6
Author
Publisher
Year
Contributor
M. Wayne Cunningham is a past executive director of the Saskatchewan
Arts Board and the former director of Academic and Career Programs at
East Kootenay Community College.
Review
The world first became aware of the allegations of Romanian stowaways
being abandoned at sea when the container ship Maersk Dubai docked in
Halifax harbour in the mid-1990s and the ship’s Taiwanese officers
were detained. Toronto-based award-winning author Robert Hough has
fashioned a first-rate account of the horrific events of the voyage,
their attempted cover-up by the ship’s officers, and their eventual
disclosure after soul-searching by the Filipino crew members.
In researching the background for his novel, Hough scoured the legal
documents and newspaper records connected to it, “consulted too many
resource materials to list,” and travelled to Algeciras, Spain, to see
first-hand the underground trail that young Romanians followed to escape
the oppressive Ceausescu regime by stowing away on ships headed to North
America. He also held “exhaustive interviews” with several of the
sailors involved with the stowaways and relied on an original letter
they sent to Father Rudolpho Albano to bolster the authenticity of his
fictional details of the tragedy.
An outstanding example of creative non-fiction, Hough’s seafaring
adventure is told with the dark suspense of an Alfred Hitchcock film and
the illuminating introspection of a Joseph Conrad narrative. The
flashbacks to the backgrounds of the stowaways establish their reasons,
good and bad, for wanting to flee Romania. The detailed descriptions of
the cramped, airless spaces that the stowaways cling to below decks
become suffocatingly unendurable. And the tension becomes almost
unbearable after two stowaways have been jettisoned and the ship’s
officers, suspicious that there are others on board, try to set the
anxious and frightened crew members against each other with threats to
some and rewards for others. And even when the crew members reach the
perceived security of a Canadian port and tell their chilling tale, they
learn the hard lessons that laws, like rules, are made to be broken and
that the meek do not always inherit the Earth.
Hough’s book is worth reading as much for its insights into the
complexities of the human psyche as for its fictionalized record of
stowaways cold-bloodedly consigned to the sea.