Sponge Fishing

I

WE were bound out to the ‘dark water’ of the Mexico Bank in the little thirty-foot sponger Anna. We were after wool sponge, the golden fleece of the Gulf; and we were out for a two weeks’ catch. Possibly the entire floor of the Gulf of Mexico is spawned with sponges. As deep as men have dared to go, they are there, the best ones in the deepest water. But the Greek diving fleet out of the Anclote River in Florida stays on the Banks. Fathoms are the reason. It is healthier working in water that shoals from twenty fathoms. There are two banks — the Mexico Bank, extending out from the west coast of the peninsula to the ten-fathom curve, from the Florida Keys to Cape San Blas, and the Middle Ground Bank in the open Gulf, one hundred and thirty miles offshore.

There were seven of us. Three were brothers, Fugalis by name. Steve-john, the youngest, was captain, twenty-four years old, a bronze perfection — Cellini’s ‘Perseus’ in store pants. He is one of the fastest divers in the fleet. Peteos, with the look of a dignified Greek merchant, was second diver. Fundis was life-line man. He was dried by the sun. The Fugalis forefathers, as far back as the brothers knew, had been spongers. They came from Athens.

Demetri Josh Demetri, the tiller man, was a bull for strength. The sun had penetrated his hairy hide in spots as red as baked stone crab. Trendafalos was cook. In a straw sombrero and the seaman’s garb of drawers that end just below the knee, he looked like a ricefield coolie. To call him ‘Damn Chinee’ — as his gentle enemy, Herakles the deck hand, often did — maddened him. The two quarreled harmlessly. Herakles was an old man. There was a wild spiritual look in his crazy eyes. He would have made a grand John the Baptist in a pageant. Disease had doomed him, and paresis was closing in on his mind. He would talk slowly to himself in a deep voice. These three came from the Greek islands.

On a hot, close morning we cast off and motored down the Anclote channel. Steve-john stood in the steering well, the big wooden tiller between his knees. The crew, in their shore clothes, sat stupidly along the rail. The Anna worked through the coastal islands and stuck her nose into the ground swell of the open Gulf. She rose on it and eased sweetly into the trough. The crew came to life. They peeled off their elastic arm bands and shirts. Straw hats sailed down the companionway. The cook appeared out of the cabin hatch with an empty keg and a sack of green peppers, and sat down on the deck to split them for pickling in brine. Everyone was happy. Old Herakles beamed and pointed to the keg.

‘Gude! Glide!’ he said. He waved his arm at the horizon. ‘Gude!’

It was a day-and-night journey to the dark water. A light southerly breeze was fair for us and we hoisted the loosefooted mainsail. The Anna gavotted to the swing of the swell. She is a double-ender, a chunky little hussy with lines as ancient as Hellas. The paintwork of the sponge boats is still pagan. The Anna’s underbody is ox-blood red. Her topsides are white. The knee-high rail is trimmed with brilliant orange and bright blue. Her houses are blue and her decks buff. At the docks in Anclote the fleet seems a set of gaudy Christmas toys. Once in the open sea the garishness disappears. The ultramarine of the houses and rails is the precise blue of the Gulf water in the sunlight.

Fundis, his bare back the color of new copper, sat on the diver’s seat in the Anna’s nose with one leg tucked under him. His arm embraced the tall curved stem piece, the neck of what had once been the horse-head figure of the sea coursers of the Iliad. Given a bank of rowers behind him instead of the heavy-duty motor, he might have been a lookout, eager for landfall on the towers of Ilium.

The kettle was on the stove filled with thick, sweet Turkish coffee. A pot of Spanish beans with its steam smelling of mace, cloves, and garlic sat beside it. Below decks we were stored like pirates after a raid. Victuals for the galley inventoried a thousand dollars. There were gallons of ripe olives as big as prunes, cases of spaghetti, a hundred and thirty watermelons in the sponge hold, seventy-five gallons of olive oil, choice cheeses, Turkish coffee, kegs of meat, braids of garlic. In calm weather we made sufficient aroma to fill the mainsail.

The crew hacked at watermelons with sheath knives and commanded Herakles to sing. He sang the Athenian ‘ Moon Song ’ in Greek and ‘ La Paloma ' in seagoing Latin, the patois of the Mediterranean. There were times, with the swell just right, when the Anna kept time to the rolling metre of ‘La Paloma.’

There was little room on deck. The small galley, the air pump, the houses over the cabin and engine room, took most of it. The canvas-covered air hose, coiled in a pile three feet high, had the whole starboard deck amidships. It was a living presence, that hose. It had to be treated with more respect than a man. It must never be stepped on or shoved, nor must anything be carried over it, lest it be dropped and the soft rubber bruised. It was the personification of life. It was venerated as deeply as the icon of the Virgin in the cabin. If it failed, a diver strangled.

The sun went down and the stars came out. Our south breeze held true. We sailed all night with Rhumdona, the polestar, two points off the starboard bow. At dawn we were in the dark water over sponge bottom.

II

Fundis conned from the bow, leaning far out to peer down into the depths. There was too much chop for him to see clearly, and he called for the leads. Trendafalos swung to port, Herakles to starboard. They soaped the lead bottoms every tenth cast.

‘ Bar-r-r-r-a! ’ sang Trendafalos, tipping back his head to roll the r’s. (‘I have found the bar!’) He held up the lead to show the white shell, speckled with mashed pink coral. It was fertile soil. Sponges were under our keel. The Anna’s helm went up. Off came the mainsail and she idled in the swell while Steve-john was dressed in his diving armor.

The atmosphere on board quickened. Before, it had been indolent; everyone was equal. Now we had a barking captain, imperious as a knight. Fundis, Trendafalos, and Herakles were his submissive squires. They handed him his wool socks and cap. They held the rubber suit while he stepped into the legs. Each took a sleeve and greased the tight cuff with soap. Steve-john stuck out his feet and the great leather shoes with soles of half-inch cast iron were lashed in place. The shoulder piece of bronze went over his head and was screwed down to the suit. He sat straight upright on his canvas-upholstered seat, proud and disdainful. The whole process was ritual.

Herakles tended the helmet. The four circular windows were washed with a torn-off finger of a ‘ diver’s hand ’ — a bright orange sponge growth roughly shaped like a wrist with long searching fingers. He dipped the bronze dome into the sea and filled it, then emptied it. The air motor began. The old man leaped to the rail and passed the helmet forward, outside the shrouds, in a long graceful swing. Steve-john smiled at last with a gleam of white teeth and waved me goodbye.

The headpiece descended. Fundis handed him the sponge hook, Trendafalos the netting sack. There was a moment’s pause for a short ‘Ave’ breathed inside the helmet, and then Steve-john hurled himself over the rail. His arms swung out, his body made a half-turn and plunged into the sea. It was a curious gesture of complete abandon — a child throwing itself into the lap of its mother.

The heavily weighted body plunged down ten feet, then bobbed up again. A wave sloshed over the bronze dome. Steve-john pushed his head hard to the left against the air valve inside the headpiece. The air escaped and he slid slowly down the fathoms to find the bottom, forty-eight green, mysterious feet away. The limpid water had swallowed him, but you could guess within a yard of his position. Fundis showed him to me.

‘There!’he pointed. His arm jumped ahead. ‘Now there! He walks. No sponge yet.'

Off the bow a column of air bubbles burst in a round humped boil or slick. Ahead of it were luminous white columns rushing upward through the green void. They were ghostly — a drowned boat’s crew in their sailcloth shrouds heaving up from the bottom to the sunlight on Ascension morning. Steve-john left them behind as he walked. The intermittent push of his head against the air valve was timed with his stride. It released the air in jets that soared to the surface. The forward progress of the rising shafts ceased abruptly, and they became a single column.

‘Still now,’ said Fundis. ‘Sponge!’

We had begun. The breeze died away and the sun became a blasting fire. The Gulf was polished gun metal in the glare, soft green under the shadow of our rail. The cook had rigged a small awning over the cabin house.

Fundis on the bow seat sat in his birdlike fashion, one leg tucked under him, his back, all bones and burnished skin, hunched up at the sun. The life line, quarter-inch twisted silk and cotton, led from the deck to a dozen coils in his left hand, out through his right fingers and down to the diver. His fingers held it delicately, like a duchess holding a teacup. His hands were never still. In a coil — out three — then in again as the diver slacked or moved ahead. It went to his mouth when he rolled a cigarette, his tongue holding it against the inside of his teeth.

His vigilance was superhuman. For twelve or fourteen hours, with the Gulf sun flailing his dehydrated bones, he could keep his mind alert, his hawklike eyes focused on the signs that told what was happening below.

Demetri Josh Demetri stood at the tiller. It was his task to keep the fifty fathoms of floating air hose and the diver always on the starboard hand. The diver wandered where he willed and the boat must follow him. Up helm, down helm, in clutch, out clutch. The sun beat Demetri unmercifully. He could not dry out or transform his skin into leather. He shook his fist at the sky.

III

Fundis’s hand jumped twice as the line tugged it. ‘Bo-o-o-she!’ he called. (‘A sack!’)

The first sack was coming up. Steve-john hauled fifty feet of his life line to the bottom, made it fast to the sack, and Fundis brought it to the surface. The two deck hands swung it in over the rail and cascaded its unearthly contents into the scuppers. Herakles stooped and handed me a dripping head. It was featureless and had for skin a shiny black membrane, deeply pockmarked — the nob of some sub-sea slave whose blood was salt water.

‘Wool sponge,’ he announced. ‘Like gold.’

In my hands he placed another ' thing ’ — hippopotamus liver cured to a dirty red by the smoke of no terrestrial fire. It was irregular in shape, a chunk. It smelled like a tidewater flat, heavily seasoned with garlic. It was the low-priced yellow sponge, easy to find. The divers gather enough to pay expenses, and then concentrate on the precious wools.

The sun mounted higher. The Gulf was breathless. A haze obscured the horizon. The Anna was awake at both ends — the bow where Fundis coiled and uncoiled his line, and the stern where Demetri swung the tiller. Amidships she was somnolent. Peteos sat on the cabin top under the awning with legs crossed tailor-fashion, drowsing. Trendafalos slowly scoured his pots with wood ashes, squatting beside the rail. Herakles was stretched out on deck in the shade of the cabin house, asleep. The motor droned smoothly. The sacks came up two or three times every hour. Then everyone woke up for a moment and, save for bow and stem, went back to drowsing again.

‘E-e-e-e-sa!’ Fundis cried. (‘He comes up!')

Steve-john was coming up. The helmet broke water thirty feet off the starboard bow. He came in at the end of the life line like an exhausted fish, the dead swell washing over him. He weighed six hundred pounds and he plodded up the boarding ladder until his helmet could be twisted off. He shook his freed head like a wet terrier. He was soaked with sweat. Diving in subtropical waters is one of the hottest tasks imaginable. After the coldest norther the depths are still tepid, and the air hose, heated by the sun, sends the diver a desert blast. Dangling against Steve-john’s chest, tied with the loose end of the life line, was an enormous stone crab. It was to be our lunch, baked on top of the stove.

He sloshed his shirt over the side and hung it out to dry. He came to the awning, balancing two cups of coffee, and told me of the bottom. It was all aglow with green diffused light. He could see a hundred feet horizontally. The surface was plainly visible in our present depth of nine fathoms. There were no bright colors such as the flowers ashore. Gray grasses were kneehigh, sometimes breast-high. There were dark red growths and black. There was a constant movement, a swaying. Fish were everywhere, swimming about unafraid. He was conscious of the sun and used it, plough-hand fashion, to tell the time. He had come up within a few minutes of noon, the end of his long shift below.

Walking was no great effort. One lay forward on the water, using only the iron-plated toes and stepping with a much longer stride than is possible on land. Six and eight miles an hour are not uncommon. There are hills and valleys on the bottom, not deep, but often very steep. A long push on the air valve and the diver settles gently into a valley. A plateau may harbor a sponge. He increases his buoyancy and floats up to see, then sinks slowly back to the floor. There is much to see, and Steve-john has curiosity. He once watched a ring of porpoises fight three hours with a shark and kill it.

It was my task to catch enough fish for a course every night. It was easy, with grouper and blackfish plentiful; ten minutes with a two-hook drop line usually sufficed. The single responsibility was to guard against fouling the air hose or the life line. I made a cast from the port rail when Steve-john’s slick seemed well off to starboard. The line had barely straightened when the burst of bubbles broke the surface directly under my feet. A terrorstricken haul at the fishline was too late. It was fast, very likely in the air hose. My yell brought Demetri from his tiller. He tugged in rapid jerks at the line and nodded his head.

‘All right,’ he reassured me.

He handed me the line again. From the dead heaviness I decided that I must have hooked a big grouper. But it proved to be a large wool sponge. Steve-john had seen my line, walked to it chuckling, held it between his knees, and tied on the sponge.

IV

The Banks are lonely waters. They belong to the sponger. Three days we worked slowly back and forth. There was always another sail far out on the horizon, but it never proved to be other than the squat mainsail of a sister diving boat. At nightfall we drew together, but only close enough to see one another’s riding lights. Sometimes there were three or four in sight.

One afternoon off to the southward we sighted a homeward-bounder making knots. Steve-john climbed into the rigging and looked at her a long time. She was the deep-water Poseidon that had started out for the Middle Ground Bank a few days before us. She was hurrying home, probably, he prophesied, with an injured diver. The deepwater boats are unhappy ships. They frequently bring men up from twenty fathoms very sick with the bends. Since it has been learned that putting them back into the water again, while unconscious, is helpful, there have been few fatalities. But it means months in the hospital — and the sooner ashore, the better.

The joyous cry of ‘Buoya! Buoya!’ from the bow put the scudding Poseidon out of our minds. Peteos, on the bottom, had come on a fertile bar and was calling for a buoy to mark the spot. Fundis allowed himself only a series of hoarse croaks to show his pleasure, but the rest of the crew danced in glee. The buoy, a spar with our red and white flag whipping at its top, bobbed in the swell astern.

‘It means good sponge,’ Steve-john told me. ‘Peteos is old diver.’

The first sack came up, all big fat wools. Fundis cheered down the life line with a series of otherwise meaningless jerks, and the answer came back.

‘Look! Look!' shouted Fundis, holding his hand far out so that swift, excited tugs on the line from below could be seen.

‘Gude Peteos! Gude boy!’

The air shafts in the water were moving almost straight ahead and rapidly. It was a long narrow bar. The sacks came up in quick succession. It promised to be a rich haul. Sometimes, Steve-john explained, it was possible to fill a hold in three days. We sat on the cabin top and watched the growing mound of black skulls. Fundis shouted a question in Greek. Steve-john shook his head.

‘He want me to go down because I am fast. Lots of time. Peteos my brother. Why make him mad? He come up pretty soon.’

But twenty minutes later Fundis screamed and shook his fist at the northern horizon. Five sails were in sight, bearing directly for us. All were spongers.

‘From St. Mark’s water,’ Steve-john announced. ‘If they sail on, they see our buoy.’

Their course held true. Fundis pleaded. The sponges came up faster than Herakles could grade them. It was too good hunting to share with the undeserving. The first of the intruders changed her helm a point. She had sighted our marker and was heading for it. The crew joined Fundis and pleaded with the captain. The staccato Greek words sounded like hail on a tin roof.

Steve-john could resist no longer. He reached for his wool cap and Fundis brought the astounded Peteos in hand over hand. His black scowl glowered from the helmet window as he broke water. He came up the ladder as near running as possible. The torrent of his rage began to flow before the helmet was unloosed; as his dripping head was exposed, it burst forth in a flood. Fundis shouted and pointed. Peteos turned and saw the boats. His rage subsided and he came over the rail and hurried out of his suit.

The ritual of dressing Steve-john went on at its set pace. He would brook no hurrying, with its chance of fumbling slips, even though time worth gold was going. The first of the fleet, the, Athenia, was at the buoy; the crew were getting their diver ready. He would search for a time, hoping that the bar had more than one lead, and, when he found it did not, would be on our line.

Steve-john plunged over and we moved ahead. The rest of the fleet — Peteos called their names, Hios, Dolphin, St. Paul, Symi — were bunched together. They closed in on the Athenia. We could see the divers on their seats. One after another they splashed into the water.

V

Off to the eastward a squall was making. It became another potential competitor. Steve-john was picking sponges like cotton. Attempts to grade them were forgotten. They buried the starboard deck as high as the rail, rounding up inboard to the top of the two houses. Everyone lent a hand, stealing a look at the boats falling away astern. The Hios was the first to realize that we were following a narrow trail. She came sliding down on us, her crew all clustered on her forward deck. They hailed us good-naturedly and eyed our loaded decks. Surprisingly enough, the answer from the Anna was not ill-tempered. On two cod fishermen or two snapper smacks, the air would have been blue.

The Hios carried on for a hundred yards, and her diver went over. It took him some time to get started, and he proved a snail compared to Steve-john. In ten minutes we were drawing alongside. Fundis sent the two long pulls, ‘ Watch for a diver,’ down the life line, and our air hose floated over the other. The two air columns were twenty feet apart when Steve-john sighted his rival. He made straight for him and I turned to Peteos. He guessed my fear.

‘No fight.’ He shook his head. ‘Never fight. All Greeks. Just talk!’

Now the two air columns blended together in one seething boil, and I pictured a slow-motion battle with the sponge hooks. They are wicked twentyfour-inch weapons with four talon-like prongs. In a moment they were apart and Steve-john went on. We left the Hios astern. The others pulled their men from the bottom and went a half mile ahead, but the bank dwindled off in another hundred yards. We had picked it clean. It was a rich haul while it lasted. We took as many sponges in three hours as we had taken before in three days.

The squall was a dark threat when Steve-john came up and we started back after our buoy. He explained what had happened on the bottom. He saw the Hios’s man first and was upon him from behind without the other’s knowledge. He was about to pull a sponge when Steve-john reached his hook in front of him and took it. Divers talk on the bottom by placing their lower helmet windows tight together and yelling. They embrace so that they do not sway apart. Stevejohn embraced me.

‘I say, “You stay behind! I go fast. You no foul my line.” He just laugh and say, “All right!” I give him back sponge. Good fellas.’

The squall was upon us. Fundis’s hawk eyes sighted our buoy in the first burst of the rain, and we picked it up in a rapidly making sea. Steve-john decided to anchor with the other boats. They were snugging down for the night where we had left them three miles astern. We had all we could lug to make it. The Gulf is a placid pond upon most occasions, but even in midsummer it can snarl. The seas make up with terrorizing rapidity, short and steep and often confused. The way of the Anna was beautiful to see. She was on top of everything, buoyant, responsive, with never a jerk or a pound. Those old Greeks who drew her lines, centuries ago, knew how to lay down a hull.

We made our mooring between the Hios and the Athenia. Their vivid coloring stood out stark against the slate sea and angry horizon. Astern of us the western sky was clear and luminous with a rich sunset. A short shaft of rainbow stood in the east. Trendafalos, his oilskins streaming, braced himself against the rail and stirred the ‘ pelafee,’ our supper of lentils and onions and rice. He lifted the lid cautiously from the lee side and the wind tore fragments of odor loose from the pot and whisked them aft under our noses. It was a good cook, Demetri yelled, who could make a pelafee with enough smell to live in a squall. In return for our praise, Trendafalos squatted in the scuppers and cleaned grouper fish and fried them in deep oil.

The rain stopped suddenly, but the wind howled on out of the clearing sky. We spread our supper in the customary place on the tiny lazaret hatch cover, three inches off the deck. Our tablecloth was a scrap of black canvas tarpaulin. Piled sponges gave us a shelter as we crouched. The wind whistled over our heads, unfelt. Seas swept by alongside, rearing their heads high above the rail in the twilight, licking their teeth. Peteos sat tightly wedged in the stern. I faced him across the board. At times he looked up at me as the Anna’s bow mounted a crested sea. Then I looked up at him as her bow went down and she lifted her tail like a hunter going over a fence. The others, jammed in cheek by jowl, sat in the scuppers.

We were snug and it was a jolly meal. One held a grouper fish by the tail and ate it between dips into the pelafee pot. The pot slid back and forth on the tipping hatch with impartial regularity.

Steve-john had been meditating. He tossed a fish backbone over the rail and asked me: ‘Where did everything — all things ’ — he made an encompassing gesture — ' begin ? ’

He asked it solemnly and kept his eyes glued to my face as he interpreted to the rest. They all watched me. It was a test. I had proved my stomach. Here was something else. Where did all things begin? Genesis? The Flood? Suddenly it was very clear.

‘Athens,’ I said.

They nodded, one to the other. My wisdom was great.

VI

‘Sleep! Sleep!’ Peteos insisted, pointing at the sponges. ‘Hard work tomorrow ! ’

We spread our blankets on the deck. My place was hard up in the starboard bow, where I could stick my head under the diver’s seat and keep rain from my face. There was but one way to keep from rolling about, and that was to wedge tightly against the rail. When the Anna rolled down, the hissing water was inches from my ear. All night we heaved to the swell. The mast swung in regular beat to point the stars low on the horizon. I awoke to see Herakles standing with his arm in the shrouds, staring up at the scintillating sky. The late-risen moon shone on his bearded face.

The slimy work of cleaning our big catch began at daybreak. Trendafalos and Herakles sat on the low cleaning stools and scraped with knives at the dead sponges. The black membrane had died in the night. It sloughed away and blended with the bottom mud and thousands of small crustaceous creatures that must have been baby shrimp to make a slippery ooze over the deck. The sponges, white and clean after the scraping, were tossed to Demetri, who graded them by size and shape between swings of the tiller. The work of diving went on as usual. The boat resolved itself into three castes: the divers — aristocrats; the bow and stern — dependable middleclass workmen; Herakles and the cook — old men ordered and cuffed about. Theirs is the labor, filthy and hard, in no manner connected with life and death.

Over everything lay the smell. It carried to windward and to leeward. It was not unpleasant. It was heavy with ammonia and that bottom smell, ‘stinking sweet and rotten, unforgettable, unforgotten.’ Father Neptune had neglected to clean his stables. There was something about it that made everyone hungry. A cigarette never tasted better than it did that morning.

By noon we were festooned with cleaned sponges strung on fathom-long strings. They draped over the rigging and over a long pole lashed to the mast ten feet above the deck and running aft to a gallows. We basked in their shade, and their moisture cast off an invigorating coolness. The similarity to heads was still striking. They were blond heads this time. The Anna seemed a head-hunting chief’s abode, strangely afloat and dipping.

That afternoon, while we were passing the dried strings forward for stowing in the hold, old Herakles quietly went mad. The thin threads that moored his mind suddenly gave way. His eyes lost their focus and his legs the ability to hold him up from the rolling deck. He sprawled before the cabin companionway, gibbering in Greek. No one paid him the slightest attention until the task was done. Then Stevejohn knelt beside him and talked to him in his native tongue. Harsh at first, the young captain’s words finally became soft and full of pity. He rose, shaking his head, and ordered the old man carried below. He was lowered into the cabin like a sack of meal, and moaned on his bunk.

‘Maybe just lazy,’ Steve-john said, ‘but I think Herakles is bad off. Tomorrow we shall see.’

He looked very much disturbed. A man with his mind gone is a serious matter two hundred miles from home in a crowded thirty-foot hull. But that was not what was worrying the captain.

‘Eight hundred dollars he has cost me in doctors’ bills. I shall never sec that again. The sponge hold is but half filled. We lose two days to go in. Maybe I get drunk and lose more days before we can come back. I will stay on sponge bottom and let him die. You can pray for burial?’ he asked me.

I shook my head.

‘ I will sew him in old bags, then, and put diver’s shoes to make him sink, and we will not pray.’

‘But yes!’ said Demetri. ‘If you should meet him diving sometime!’

‘I would not care,’ insisted Stevejohn. ‘I would push him away with the hook.’

That was a lie. Steve-john sat up all the night smoking in the stern and tending the old man, who slept and then woke and cried at intervals until dawn.

Steve-john went over as soon as he could see and stayed down until noon. His catch was small and he moved slowly over the bottom. Fundis shook his head and pointed.

‘No good,’ he said. ‘Stop and think. Not look for sponge.’

One by one the crew crept to the hatchway and looked at the wan Herakles.

‘ Bad — bad,’ they said to one another, and shook their heads slowly.

The old man failed to react to anything until he spied the pinched face of Trendafalos peeking over the hatch. He reared up on his elbows. ‘Damn Chinee!’ he screamed. ‘Damn Chinee!’ He hurled a chunk of bread at the startled cook.

Steve-john waited until the sun told him it was noon, and then came up. He went directly to the cabin and squatted beside the old man. He came on deck after a moment with the compass in his hand and put it in its chocks before the steering well.

‘Home,’ he said.

The tiller went up. We swung on the course, south, a half east. The breeze, from the west, was fair. The mainsail went up the mast and Demetri caught the sheet and made it fast. In a moment the Anna was bowling along with a nice beam roll and a gurgle under her forefoot.

The motion roused old Herakles. He swung his arms and sang ‘La Paloma’: ‘The day—that I left my bride for — the rolling sea.’

He sang bravely and in fine rhythm.