Tempo de John: a história do encalhe do Steam Ship John E. Schmeltzer na ilha de Santo Antão, Cabo Verde em novembro 1947, romance histórico

In the early morning of 25 November 1947, a thunderous noise reverberates across the Cabo Verde island of Santo Antão. “Oh nha mém, oh nha mém, oh diab, oh diab! Vulcan of the Tope de Coroa has exploded? Demonaria ti ta tmá konta de nôs?” (O mother, o mother, o devil, o devil, is the volcano of Tope de Coroa erupting? Have the demons taken hold of us?) Decades later Terezinha remembers how terrified she was. It turns out that an enormous American cargo ship, loaded with tonnes of corn, has run aground just off the southern coast of Santo Antão. Initially, attempts are made to refloat the ship by unloading the corn into the sea, but to no avail.

Tempo de John : a história do encalhe do Steam Ship John E. Schmeltzer na ilha de Santo Antão, Cabo Verde em novembro 1947, romance histórico (The Time of the John : the story of the stranding of the Steam Ship John E. Schmeltzer on the island of Santo Antão, Cabo Verde in November 1947) is a historical novel, but not really.

Famine and corn
It is more like history told through fictional characters, with a narrator in the background. A story about poverty and oppression in Cabo Verde, about war in Europe, about shipbuilding, about the lives of ordinary people on Santo Antão, about belief in witchcraft and about how to make a water bag from the skin of a goat. Above all perhaps, a story about hunger. Due to successive seasons with too little rain, there is famine in Cabo Verde.

The corn in the ‘John’, however, is destined for Europe - actually for Germany and Austria. But, as the blurb for Tempo de John states, the ship arrived, just by accident, in Santo Antão, saving the lives of tens of thousands of Cabo Verdeans.

This sounds like a feel-good rescue story, but Tempo de John, published on Santo Antão as a tourist information booklet, is anything but. In the first few days after the shipwreck, hundreds of islanders die after eating the corn that has been thrown overboard. It has become contaminated and there is no fresh water available to wash and cook it. While contracts for the ship's dismantling are being signed, nobody seems to care about the starving people who gather on the beach in ever-increasing numbers.

That the remaining corn was eventually unloaded and shipped to all the islands is mentioned only in the epilogue; that it ultimately saved the lives of tens of thousands of Cabo Verdeans only in the blurb. So it is clear that the writers had something else in mind.

Memories told in Cabo Verdian Creole
Both born shortly after World War II, one on Santo Antão, the other in a refugee centre in Germany, and both working as doctors on Santo Antão, the authors were struck by the significance of ‘the time of the John’ - the time of famine that became popularly named after the ship - as a communal trauma for the inhabitants of the island. This gave rise to the idea of letting people tell their memories, a project that ultimately resulted in this book. The characters in the book are fictional, but several of the dialogues are based on the stories told by more than a hundred Cabo Verdeans from their own experience and recorded between 1982 and 2018. What is very special is that in the margins of the Portuguese text, bits and pieces of these conversations have been transcribed literally, thus rendered in the Cabo Verdean Creole (Kabuverdianu) of Santo Antão. The German translation of Tempo de John, published in 2022, also contains these authentic transcriptions.

As a historical novel, the book is not entirely successful because too many topics are broached. At the same time, the book contains much interesting and not so well-known information. Above all, it is written from an unmistakable social and humanitarian commitment - from a sense of urgency that hunger, poverty and injustice must be fought wherever and whenever they occur.

Heleen Smits