Tampico is a port of call on Joe Williams’s voyage aboard the Montana, a new Standard Oil tanker. The town appears through the sailors’ short stay: a place of dance halls, bars, brothels, heat, and mosquitoes, where the crew spends its money quickly and returns to the ship before midnight. Its narrative significance lies in that sharp contrast between the port’s restless entertainments and the perilous sea the tanker enters when it leaves.

A stop on the tanker’s route

After leaving Brooklyn in a lashing snowstorm, the Montana sailed south and reached Tampico. Joe had signed on as an able seaman after abandoning his treatment in New York. The tanker was bound light for Tampico; beyond it, the sailors speculated that the voyage would continue east, perhaps to Aden or Bombay. Those destinations remained uncertain among the crew, but Tampico was a definite call: the tanks were pumped full there before the ship went back out to sea.

The waterfront and the crew’s brief stay

The account presents Tampico as a port where music and movement spill out of bars and dance halls. Mechanical pianos and bands play at full tilt; dancers wear hats and carry guns, and fights break out amid the crowd, which includes drunken Texans from the oilfields. Brothels stand open to view, their rooms decorated with white pillows, religious images, ornate lamps, and colored paper. The description is filtered through the sailors’ coarse, racialized perspective, rather than offering a broader picture of the town or its inhabitants.

The crew finds the prices so high that its money is gone almost at once. They return to the Montana before the night is far advanced, and the port’s heat follows them aboard: mosquitoes get into the forecastle, sandflies come out by day, and nobody can sleep. The stay is therefore less an escape from shipboard discomfort than a short, costly interruption to it.

Departure into danger

Once the Montana’s tanks have been filled, the ship heads out into the Gulf of Mexico and encounters a norther, with water sweeping the decks and spray lashing the bridge. Within two hours, a man is lost overboard from the monkeywalk, while a boy named Higgins has his foot crushed as he tries to lash down the starboard anchor after it breaks loose. The crew resents the skipper’s refusal to lower a boat, though older sailors believe no boat could have survived those seas. Instead, the skipper circles back broadly, taking waves on the beam that nearly stove in the steel decks. The passage turns Tampico from a lively port into the threshold of a voyage marked by immediate danger and loss.