Newsletter of the

Society

The Good Ship Werra

[An excerpt. For full article, please contact editor.]

The North German (Norddeutsche) Lloyd* ship the Werra was the steamer on which Katherine Anne Porter and Eugene Pressley traveled from Vera Cruz to Bremen, Germany, August-September 1931. Although the voyage and Porter’s experiences on the ship provided the matrix of Ship of Fools, at the time she made the journey she had no idea it would result in a novel. She thought only “a very short short-story,” based on a scene at the first night’s get-acquainted party, would come of it.

She had chosen the Werra not because it was luxurious but because her friend Josephine Herbst had recommended it as a cheap and efficient vessel. Porter described it to Caroline Gordon in a long letter-log sent at the end of the voyage as “small as any old Ward Line tub plying around the coasts” and “a combination freighter and passenger ship, very steady, very broadbottomed and German in her style, doing sixteen knots an hour and keeping a level keel.” As she depicted her fellow passengers to Gordon, she observed that “876 (exactly) third-class passengers, all Spaniards from the Canaries and the ports of Spain,” came on board at Havana, and, as a result, combined with the first- and second-class passengers, 1200 people were crammed into space designed comfortably for 500.

Information now available in maritime archives reveals that Porter was for the most part correct in her description of the Werra, for indeed it was a very small ship by standards of the time: One hundred, sixty yards long and barely twenty yards wide, it weighed a little under ten tons and had one funnel and two masts. Its average speed was 12.5 knots an hour. And she was right about the crowding. It supposedly had space for seventy-four first class, ninety second-class, and 506 third-class passengers. But the ship’s owners made the accommodations sound more comfortable than they were, euphemistically describing “dormitories” for the third-class passengers that were a far cry from the “very miserable, hot, not clean” lower quarters Porter thought suitable in size for only 100 persons at best and in fact better suited for cattle.

* Wonder what a Lloyd ship is? Germanischer Lloyd was founded in Hamburg in 1867 as an organization for safety and quality control in the shipping industry. Now a non-profit foundation, the organization has continued inspection of vessel design and development of marine safety technology. A ship that announces itself as a “Lloyd” vessel, as did the Werra, is asserting its verified safety status.