Page - 39 - in Mobile Culture Studies - The Journal, Volume 1/2015

Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 1 2o15 Arnd Schneider | An anthropology of sea voyage 39 of the efforts which, somewhere and on someone’s part, were being made. The men who were actually running the ship did not want to see the passengers more than the passengers wanted to see them. (The officers, too, had no wish for the two groups to mingle. ) All that we could do was to drag ourselves round the great carcase of the ship; a sailor retouching the paintwork, or a steward in blue overalls swabbing down the first-class corridors – these are much as we saw, or would ever see, in token of the thousands of miles that we were covering. ” (Lévi-Strauss 1970: 68) fieldwork, ethnography, participant observation – the methodological toolkit of the anthropol- ogist provides something akin to an epistemological window, a potential view on the first-hand experience and meaning of sea travel by immigrants, now only possible through retrospect con- versation and material remains of such travel. Life histories, of course, are collected in retrospect and the episodes of sea travel contained within them often refer to a distant past. In the following, I will briefly review three immigrants accounts of their sea travel. When I collected these in 1988/1989, my main interest had not been in the details of the voyage itself, but in the larger canvas of their life histories, and how they inserted themselves into the process of making it in Argentina, epitomized by the proverbial expression of ‘making it in America’ (hacer la América, in Spanish, or fare l’America in Italian). Enrique Gerardi, recounted his sea voyage as part of his life history to me in downtown Buenos Aires in 1989. he had become a successful industrialist, but was five years old when he disembarked at Buenos Aires on 26 October, 1906. his father, his mother, a brother and two sisters had accompanied him. One of his mother’s brothers had come to Buenos Aires in 1899. “I can still remember the crossing. The steamer took the route, Genoa-Dakar-Buenos Aires. In Dakar, I remember the young black kids who swam near the boat where the passengers threw them coins. One of them smashed his head [on the ship]. – When we arrived at Bue- nos Aires we had to disembark in a small vessel because the port lacked sufficient depth. “ (Schneider 2000: 116) children diving for coins thrown by passengers, especially in African and Brazilian ports, are reported in many accounts of the time. Looking back at the end of his life, without any sen- timentality or nostalgia to what he had observed as a five-year old, it would signify the exact antithesis to his own achievements, making money through hard work, and eventually becom- ing a successful industrialist, not off the alms thrown by others. The next account of which I only reproduce here the part relating to the sea voyage is framed by Domenico Donatello telling me the history of his anarchist father rebelling against the moral and political order at the time, and his own later live as a melancholic music lover. “I embarked in Genoa on a french ship, the Formose of the Lloyd Latino based in Mar- seilles. And [by chance] I witnessed the sinking of the Principessa Mafalda. 11 We were near the Brazilian coast and eating on the lower deck. When we came up on deck, the 11 The sinking of the Principessa Mafalda on 25 October, 1925, “. . . resulted in 314 fatalities out of the 1,252 pas- sengers and crew on board the ship. With a casualty rate ten times that of the Andrea Doria, the sinking is the greatest tragedy in Italian shipping and the largest ever in the Southern hemisphere in peacetime. ” (wikipedia, “SS Principessa Mafalda”, accessed 12/6/15)