Herman Ensley Mitton

Devil’s Island in French Guiana [South America]. We went in there, we were the first ship in five years, but they wouldn’t… We had shore leave there, anchored out, unloading. They brought the prisoners aboard. If you killed somebody in France, they give you 20 years in jail there. So, anyway, there were guards at the top, with grates, they were all underneath. They came aboard selling souvenirs. They were just skin and bones. The first thing, they were in the garbage cans. They were digging in the garbage cans for steak bones. They were starving. Nothing to eat. There was only two, how many years it was open, I don’t know, years, I guess, but there was only two ever escaped there. Full of sharks around there. They swam over to another island, I think, there. I guess it’s closed down now, I guess, that was in… We went into Venezuela. We were unloading into Maracaibo… a skip went in there, they wouldn’t let us ashore. Venezuela, every six months they had a revolution. They’d… dynamite they used that time and blew the city up. I had pictures of all that too, they’re gone. Anyway, went back there the second trip after, so we went ashore and to look at the place. But they had a dictator government there and they’d throw them out every six months. I was a mess boy, right. So we stayed in the Manning Pool. We got two dollars a day when we were in the Manning Pool, room and board, waiting for a ship. We had to go after two ships, right, if you turned them down... Went on the [SS] Wentworth Park, right. That’s what I did. I was a mess boy [ship steward]. I stayed on the same ship worked with the boson on deck, right. So I learned to steer and all that, and I went to ordinary seaman. And the last trip I made, I was able seaman. It was after a year and a half, but in peacetime, you’re supposed to have three years before you’re an able seaman. In 1943, 1946 and that’s strikes, right, and they decided then to sell the ships off. The government did that; and they had no pensions for merchant seamen, but they were going to keep them on the ships, that’s why they didn’t pay them off, or have a duty to them, or whatever. So 1992 [under amendments to the Pension Act] when they had the strike, so they get a few dollars out of it, whatever, we got back pay. So it’s a long history anyway. But I have a video at home of it ̶ “Jail or Sail” (Sail or Jail,1999), right. That time, if you paid off a ship, then you went, after 30 days, if you didn’t show up at the Manning Pool, they’d come and pick you up, the police or whatever, so. And so you had all the freedom, no more than in the army or whatever. The coal burner built in Pictou, Nova Scotia. That’s where they built all the 4,700s [4,700 tonne capacity] there mostly. Twenty-six built there. So anyway, it was a coal burner. After they changed to oil… Picked up general cargo, right, hauling it all over: Montreal, Newfoundland and South America. After, I was on the [SS] Waverley Park that was running to England. Mostly after the, what do you call it, the occupation forces there, right. We were hauling stuff there and bring the stuff back from England, or whatever. The occupation forces. You stayed on one ship, right. You could pay off if you want, sign back on or you’d go into Manning Pool, catch anther ship. If you turned two down, you had... I said I was a mess boy, right, and then I went ordinary seaman. That’s working on deck, right, steering, you’re on watch, right. You’re on four hours and off eight. There’s two ordinary seamen on the watch and the able seaman. And on four, off eight. And when you come into a port, sometimes you had, like today it’s all containers, right, back then we had booms. We sometimes had to get the booms ready for the longshoremen. Take the tarps off the holds, right, had booms across, take them out, three booms and all these hatches, lift them out by hand, everything’s by hand in those days. Maybe you’d have to stand the watch, right, after so many hours. That’s why the first part of the war, they wasn’t paying overtime. They got organized into a union, right, Canadian Seamen’s Union. That’s when the government got in, the American government come in. They broke the Canadian Seamen’s Union. Seamen and Fishermen’s Union. When I went back the last year of the war, right, there wasn’t that many torpedoes or whatever, but there was storms come up. When you sailed in the Atlantic, you get a storm, you’d lose a rig and lose everything. One storm I got in there was a 10,000 tonne Liberty Ship [American cargo ship], broke in half, right in the centre. The only thing that held it together was the lumber. We had a 4,700, half the size; and it went through the storm because Canadian ships were overlapped riveted, right. The American ships were just pieced together like that and they’re welded, so they break easy. Mass production, that’s why they built over 3,000 Liberty Ships. Most of them fell apart, or whatever.