The Eire Pub in Boston's Dorchester neighborhood is not really a sailors' saloon, but it is an inviting, friendly place. I met there several times in the 1980s with John Moynihan, who lived nearby.
Over a few pints, John spun out his theories on Walt Disney's influence on American culture and the flaws in American higher education amid a smorgasbord of topics. An engaging young man of many talents and many interests, he had inherited his parents' sense of humor and sense of adventure.
John once mentioned an ocean voyage he had taken. I should have pressed him for more information, but fortunately he took notes. The result is The Voyage of the Rose City, published posthumously. He died in Australia at 44 of a sudden ailment in 2004.
In 1980, he took a break from Wesleyan University, but not by sipping espresso in the shadow of the Sorbonne. He chose real-life work worlds away. The S.S. Rose City was an oil tanker 894 feet long, 105 feet wide and 64 feet deep, whose vast tanks Ordinary Seaman Moynihan had to explore to help fix a possible leak.
Before he signed on, an official at the Seafarers International Union advised him to say his father was "a West Side bartender," which Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan had been. Once aboard, the sailor blurted out the truth and received heaps of Merchant Marine scorn. "College boy" was the kindest epithet. Some of his woes were self-inflicted: "I had neglected to bring work gloves with me."
Eventually, hostility and John's fears faded into the thrill of the sea. Like most crew members, he took a turn at the helm. "I allowed myself a wry smile," he writes. "What would the executives of Texaco do if they knew a 20-year-old beer-drinking ex-hippie who had been out to sea for only two and a half days was controlling the destiny of one of their largest supertankers?"
His writing style is mature beyond his years, documenting the port-and-starboard glories of the sea as well as the coast of Africa and Japan. He knew he had to mature quickly: "I had gone from an overgrown playground where Westchester Marxists drove Daddy's car to the protest and conversation focused on feminism and boycotting Nestle into a vengeful situation." He survived, indeed prevailed.
At Wesleyan, John Moynihan's writing teacher was Paul Horgan, the great chronicler of the American West. After reading Rose City, Horgan said, "Keep sailing -- you're on your way."
Stories of young men at sea have fascinated readers for centuries. I have happily sailed aboard the barque Judea with Joseph Conrad in "Youth" and with Herman Melville's Billy Budd on The Rights of Man and HMS Bellipotent. In that tradition, John McCloskey Moynihan has written a stirringly authentic saga, The Voyage of the Rose City.