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and meaningless names for each other) had declared Seattle to be unsurpassed in
facilities, cleanliness and the friendliness of its people. After an excellent lunch,
accompanied by, I vaguely recall, some Washington wine (good, indifferent or
bad mattered not one whit), I returned to the ship to be placed on gangways for
the afternoon; it passed in a sufficiently pleasant haze.
One of an officer’s pleasures (though I was not yet one) was the ability to meet
some interesting passengers. On the way to San Francisco I found myself sitting
over a scotch with an English couple who had embarked in Colombo and stayed
in Sydney during the short cruise from there. Though not really elderly, they were
certainly not spring chickens, and they told an interesting tale. The husband had
retired, and then, like many at such a stage in life, had decided that they had not seen
enough of the world. They therefore entrained for Paris, and upon deciding that
that city was a bit ordinary, elected to catch a train to Poland, itself at that time an
adventurous step by itself, the Iron Curtain showing little sign of any rusting away.
Warsaw they enjoyed, so, fearing little, they took the train to Moscow. This, a drab
and desperately cold city in every sense of the word, they much disliked, and took
the Trans-Siberian Railway to … wherever. The trip, they said, was interesting in
some ways but tedious, the scenery, traversed at excessively slow speed, was boring
(hundreds of miles of birch forests, impoverished villages and populated by people
of almost bovine disposition) and the food execrable (very much as was the view
of Fitzroy Maclean, described in ‘Eastern Approaches’, published by Jonathan Cape
in 1949, as he described a very similar journey). Their expectation was to reach
Vladivostok, but in Ulan Bator they found their welcome much worse than cold;
they were ejected from the train and obliged to hand over all of their belongings. All
but their valuable hoard of photographs was eventually returned, but they decided
that adventure was good only to a point; they had had enough discomfort. With
some difficulty, they travelled by train down to Bombay and Ceylon, and sought
passage on Oriana. I could only feel humbled.

But we did not always meet these unusual people. On the ‘important people’
list in effect while en route down the west coast was Ramon Navarro, a fabled
actor of the silent screen. Born Jose Samaniego in 1899, he entered the film world
in 1917 and made his first talkie in 1929, his romantic image beginning with
his ‘revealing clothing’ in ‘Ben Hur’ (1925). His twin problems – presumably
related – were homosexuality and alcoholism. All that we knew on Oriana was
that his steward reported that he ate alone in his cabin and spent his entire time
drinking and watching TV. We never saw him, at least to our knowledge. (He was
murdered in 1968 by two boys, who stole $20 from him, were convicted, and then
released in the mid-1970s; presumably because of the opprobrium of the US view
of ‘sexual deviance’.)

San Francisco is, of course, one of the more fabled of the world’s ports (and
not always in a good way, its exposure to earthquakes being one of the most

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