Illustration · A captain’s desk at sea: a typewriter, the Big Book beside a framed photograph, and a bottle of Scotch with a handwritten label. Drawn from his letters, not from a photograph.

At sea, from the Gulf of Mexico to Hong Kong · 1946–1976

A loner at sea

A tanker captain stayed sober on the Big Book and letters to New York, and his letters started a meeting by mail.

“It can be done—even on an oil tanker!”

A tanker captain, in a letter to AA’s office, July 1946 · AA Grapevine, 1948

Letters from sea

Merchant seamen had found AA during the war, as 4 · Ink-stained wretches tells, and their first group formed in Manhattan in June 1944. That December it took over AA’s old clubhouse on West 24th Street, and doctors at some of the wartime rest centers for merchant sailors were steering drinkers toward AA. But a seaman on a long voyage had no group at all.

By March 1946 the captain of an oil tanker was writing to AA’s office. The son of a clergyman, he had served in the First World War and then gone to sea. In the Second, his company lost ship after ship and he lost friends, and he drank. In his last year of drinking he commanded a tanker carrying aviation gasoline, then left his ship in Galveston and was drunk most of the way to New York. “I have few contacts ashore with A.A. so I have to rely on the Book,” he wrote.

The office wrote back, and he kept writing, from the Gulf of Mexico, Baltimore, Oakland and Hong Kong. When his pumpman brought him a quart of cold beer, he put it in his closet. That July he slipped, and ended up in jail in Beaumont, Texas. He was ashamed to tell the office, and owned up a month later. “I don’t think I could have done it without the letters,” he wrote that summer.

In September 1947 he got a ship of his own. That November he sailed from San Francisco on a fourteen-month voyage to the East, in a 29-year-old tanker under the Panamanian flag, the Algonquin, as he named her in 1959. He kept a case of Scotch aboard to entertain port officials. On his desk the Big Book lay beside his daughter’s photograph, as a trap: agents, doctors and customs men asked about it, and when the drinks came round he told them he couldn’t drink, that he was an alcoholic. “I’ve caught two that way in a very short time!”

In Sydney in March 1948 he met another AA member for the first time in four and a half months. “Letters help a lot since I can’t talk A.A. much,” he wrote. On July 14, 1948, between Calcutta and Palembang, he was two years sober.

That fall the Grapevine printed his letters, unsigned, as “A ‘Loner’ at Sea.” In 1949 the office began mailing men at sea a few pages of members’ letters, The Internationalists Round Robin. AA came to know him as Captain Jack S., the captain “in a Standard Oil tanker, spreading A.A. as he sailed,” as Bill W. wrote in 1957. At AA’s convention in St. Louis in 1955, lone members came in “from the far reaches and isolated outposts” to meet each other. In 1976 a Loners meeting merged with the Internationalists, as the Loners-Internationalists Meeting. Captain Jack died in December 1988, at 91, a few months after his 42nd AA anniversary.

Listen A loner at sea About 1 minute

From his letters

The captain’s log

Ten of the letters he wrote to AA’s office between 1946 and 1948, oldest first, as the Grapevine printed them.

Places and dates as each letter gives them. The Grapevine printed the letters in its issues of September, October and November 1948. Words in quotation marks are his; the rest is our summary.

At seaMarch 28, 1946
A few meetings with the Boston group, a couple of slips, and now dry for several weeks. Are there any magazines he can subscribe to?
At seaMay 1946
His pumpman plunks down a quart of nice cold beer. He thanks him and puts it in the closet.
Gulf of MexicoMay 17, 1946
His wife wants to meet the woman at the office who writes to him. She has tried for 20 years herself.
At seaAugust 7, 1946
A confession: a slip, a month ago. It has convinced him the book is right: “one drink weakens the will power to resist the second.”
At seaSeptember 15, 1946
Four weeks ashore, at a meeting somewhere every night. Back aboard, there has been very little drinking on the ship.
BaltimoreMarch 27, 1947
“I am really more proud of being an A.A. than being the master of a ship.”
At seaSeptember 9, 1947
A ship of his own. The personnel director who once fired him for drinking says nothing about it.
OaklandNovember 9, 1947
A customs officer sealing the ship’s liquor mentions a son-in-law who drinks. He leaves with the address of the Richmond group.
Hong KongDecember 24, 1947
Christmas Eve. “Now I have turned my life and the care of this ship over to God.”
Calcutta for PalembangJuly 15, 1948
Two years sober yesterday. One bottle of the Scotch that sailed with him now has a label, and he hopes to take it home unopened.

Always a loner

By 1959 the group his letters began had spread, he wrote, “to seamen sailing under many flags.” He was sailing a supertanker by then, and doubted he was any happier than he had been as a loner in the Far East. “I guess I will always be one.”

For a closer look

Go deeper

The label he wrote for a bottle he never opened; where the books disagree about his letters and his ship; and the meeting by mail that grew from them.

The bottle

He had six bottles left of the Scotch that sailed with him in November 1947, for entertaining, and he labeled one to take home.

The label listed its twelve months at sea: storms in the North Pacific, Christmas Eve in Hong Kong, New Year’s Eve in Palembang “when everyone else was three sheets under,” a hurricane in the South Pacific. It ended with a request: use it “solely in sobering up drunks who plan to make this drunk the last one.”

“If the customs want this, they are welcome to it. I don’t want it.”

Which months, which ship?

The Grapevine’s own archive has the three parts in its issues of September, October and November 1948. AA’s pamphlet on the Loners-Internationalists Meeting dates them October to December.

The pamphlet says Captain Jack first wrote to the office on March 28, 1946, the date of the first letter in the series. That letter, though, begins “Since I first wrote to you about A.A.” The Grapevine printed the letters unsigned; he signed his piece of 1959 Capt. Jack S.

Bill’s history of 1957 puts him “in a Standard Oil tanker.” In 1959 he remembered the old Algonquin, under the Panamanian flag.

Tapes and yellow pages

The Round Robin of 1949 was a few pages of excerpts from letters. By 1963 it ran to five or six mimeographed pages on blue paper; since 1980 it has been printed on yellow.

In 1970 a woman in Rhodesia, listed as a Loner, wrote in the Grapevine that she had never been alone. Letters came from overseas, and tapes too; she called a member who traded them a “tapeworm.”

The meeting today counts Loners, Internationalists at sea, Homers who can’t leave home, Port Contacts who meet ships, and Loner Sponsors who write to them all.

Sources

AA Grapevine, “A ‘Loner’ at Sea,” September, October and November 1948.
Capt. Jack S., “From Captain Jack to His Buddies,” AA Grapevine, October 1959.
W. H., “Alone? Not This Loner!” AA Grapevine, February 1970.
AA Grapevine, “Mail Call for All A.A.s in the Armed Forces,” January 1945. For the seamen’s club.
Alcoholics Anonymous Comes of Age. Alcoholics Anonymous Publishing, 1957. The opening chapter, on the convention at St. Louis.
aa.org, “The Loners-Internationalists Meeting (LIM).”