Maritime Labor and Global Travel, Shipboard Worker’s Photographic Record Across Africa, Latin America, and North America, 1930s to 1940s:

Travel Across Africa Latin America

Archive

Early twentieth century travel photo album, compiled by “Jake,”documents the working life and global mobility of a merchant ship crewman during the 1930s and 1940s, with sustained visual attention to port cities across Africa, the Americas, and the United States. The album supports research into maritime labor, informal American commercial presence abroad, and everyday interactions between traveling workers and local populations under late colonial conditions. Photographs taken in Beira and Dondo in Mozambique and Angola, Durban and Cape Town in South Africa, and Accra in the Gold Coast record encounters shaped by European colonial infrastructures and tourist economies, including images captioned “Typical Ricksha Boy” depicting South African rickshaw pullers in elaborate headdress and dress, and scenes of women in Accra balancing baskets and trays of food. Additional captions such as “Sam and his ‘girls’,” showing uniformed workers marked “Sea View Hotel,” and “me and my gals,” portraying informal social contact, provide direct evidence of how American maritime workers framed and recorded relationships with local communities. The album further situates this mobility within a broader circuit including the Panama Canal, Mexico City and Vera Cruz, and U.S. port cities such as Galveston, New York, and Boston.

Travel photo album compiled circa 1930s to 1940s, likely by an American merchant marine crewman identified as Jake. String-bound black cloth album containing 44 leaves with 218 silver gelatin photographs and postcards mounted or cornered in, along with one original sketch of an African man. Images span multiple global locations including Beira, Dondo, Durban, Cape Town, Accra, Vera Cruz, Mexico City, the Panama Canal, Powell River, Vancouver, Galveston, New York, and Boston. Several photographs depict shipboard life and crew activity aboard the S.S. Nemiskam Park, with additional images of small craft landings, including African men canoeing crew members ashore. A sequence of photographs taken in Boston shows the compiler in maritime work gear wearing thigh-high boot wraps, rubber gloves, and an oxygen mask, captioned “At last -- working for a change.” Nineteen photographs document Mexico, including rancheros and rancheras in embroidered dress, scenes of bullfighting, and crew members wearing sombreros and sarapes.

This album provides a concentrated record of interwar and wartime-era maritime circulation linking North American labor to colonial and postcolonial port environments, offering primary visual evidence of how working-class American travelers documented race, labor, and leisure across imperial geographies. The inclusion of commercial signage, hotel uniforms, and transport labor such as rickshaw pulling situates the photographs within local economies shaped by tourism and global trade, while the Panama Canal images anchor the album within a critical artery of twentieth-century shipping and U.S. strategic infrastructure. The juxtaposition of African, Mexican, and U.S. scenes underscores the continuity of maritime networks that connected these regions, and the album’s captions provide insight into informal language, humor, and perception among traveling crewmen. Minor edge wear to album corners with some mounts loosening; leaves and photographs remain clean and stable. Overall very good condition.

Item #20548

Price: $780.00