England

England enters Joe Williams’s story as a destination imagined through the promise of homecoming, then becomes a place where wartime suspicion governs his movements. His passage to Liverpool brings him under British escort and into contact with the police, the courts, and the American consulate; the encounter ends only when he secures passage out on the Tampa. The country is at once a land he has never seen and a system of authority that can detain him before he has a chance to explain himself.

The approach to Liverpool

The approach begins with uncertainty. Joe’s ship is bound for Liverpool, but the crew has heard that German submarines are cruising near the Lizard. After the Scilly Island lights come into view, the radio operator reports that they have joined a convoy and will have a destroyer escort through the Irish Sea to the Mersey. A British victory at the Battle of Mons is also reported, and the captain distributes rum. The escort’s sudden appearance in the fog initially frightens the men, who mistake the destroyer for an enemy vessel; once it identifies itself, the crew cheers it. The destroyer’s officer, however, rebukes the merchant ship for failing to steer a zigzag course and for making noise in wartime. The episode makes the passage into England feel less like an uncomplicated homecoming than entry into a tightly regulated maritime zone.

For Joe, the prospect of arrival carries a more personal anxiety: he has no passport and is cold for lack of warm clothes. His status as an American becomes a source of friction during the voyage, where other sailors criticize the United States for staying out of the war and argue with him about its involvement. By the time the ship reaches Liverpool, he is already exposed as an outsider among men who see the war as a shared obligation. England is not simply the destination of his journey; it is the place where that disagreement meets official power.

Liverpool under wartime suspicion

Joe is asleep in his bunk when an English policeman wakes him and tells him to come quietly. The ship is already alongside the wharf. Without saying goodbye to his shipmates or receiving his pay, Joe is taken down the gangplank, escorted across the wharf and through iron gates, and put into a police vehicle. A small crowd watches in the fog; someone insults him, and others boo and jeer. He sits alone in the dark, cold and shivering, still wearing paint-spotted clothes and felt slippers. His cigarbox is among the few belongings he carries with him.

At the police station, an inspector approaches him as though preparing to strike him and speaks in what Joe takes to be German. Joe cannot understand, and his grin at the exchange becomes a small, inadequate defense against the situation. When the inspector orders a search of his slippers, a corporal cuts them apart with a penknife. The corporal notices how cold Joe is and offers to get him a blanket, but the inspector refuses. The details make detention physical as well as legal: Joe loses even the shabby footwear that had kept his feet covered, while the officials control whether he receives warmth.

The interrogation invokes the Defence of the Realm Act. The inspector warns that cooperation will determine how severe the consequences become, threatens a duration in a concentration camp, and asks Joe for his name, birthplace, parents’ names, and sailing history. He then tests him with another question in German. Joe’s inability to answer is treated within an atmosphere of suspicion rather than as an ordinary language barrier; the inspector says that the authorities already know about him. England’s wartime order thus reaches Joe through both formal procedure and the assumption that an unfamiliar sailor may be a spy.

The consulate, court, and release

After his detention, Joe is released onto the street with his old clothes and cigarbox. England is suddenly ordinary again: he sees buses and tall trolleycars, and only then remembers that he has never been there before. But his freedom is conditional and his practical needs remain urgent. At the American consulate, he waits in an empty office while a clerk prepares papers. He is hungry, and the berth arranged for him is on the American steamer Tampa, sailing from Pensacola. The consul gives him a shilling after Joe explains that the previous ship did not pay him off and that he was nearly starved in jail, while making clear that no further assistance is available.

Joe also faces a court appearance with other American sailors who have been fined for drunken and disorderly conduct. The magistrate lectures them about wartime conduct and the duty he believes Americans owe to Britain and Belgium. The men are fined three shillings and sixpence each, plus costs. Joe is held after the others because his consular paper lacks the stamp of the proper police station. He is eventually released with a warning not to come ashore again, and that returning would bring worse consequences. His legal passage through England is therefore not a resolution of the suspicion surrounding him so much as a limited permission to leave.

Departure and narrative significance

Once aboard the Tampa, Joe is back on an American ship, marked by an American flag painted on its hull and by its name and home port in white lettering. The clean bunks, cornmeal mush, syrup, and coffee contrast with the cold, hunger, and bitter tea he has experienced in England. When the vessel leaves Liverpool and moves down the Mersey toward the sea, the change is both practical and emotional: Joe has a berth, food, and wages ahead of him, and feels better than at any time since leaving home. After fifteen days, the ship reaches Hampton Roads and unloads its cargo at Norfolk.

England’s role in this episode is concentrated in a chain of thresholds: the escorted passage, the wharf, the police gates, the interview room, the court, and finally the gangway back to an American vessel. Each boundary changes Joe’s position without making him secure. The country first appears as the long-awaited destination, but its most consequential effect on him is to make his lack of papers, warm clothing, and local standing newly dangerous. His departure restores movement and a measure of comfort, while the warning against returning leaves the encounter defined by exclusion as much as by arrival.