Adolphe, Edward "Siesta on the High Seas."
Late World War 2 convoy tale, with a comic tone probably attributable to the fact that an Allied victory was now more of a forgone conclusion than during the dark, early days of the War. The freighter ESMERALDA, short a cook and about to embark from San Francisco in a South Pacific-bound convoy, signs up corpulent Juan Angel Francisco Agramonte Bimbo y Machado to fill the vacancy. His culinary creations delight officers and crew alike, though both also suffer greatly from gastric distress every time Juan has his afternoon siesta disturbed. What to do? Juan turns out to have had a South-of-the-border revolutionary past, which stands him in good stead when a Japanese attack airplane wakes him up from his afternoon slumber. An angry Juan mans the ESMERALDA’s .50 caliber gun and single-handedly shoots the fighter out of the sky. From then on, the ESMERALDA’s captain orders, Juan’s siestas are to never be disturbed.
As read today, Adolphe’s prose is decidedly condescending, as in his first description of Juan:
“Juan was a funny squirt, with a circumference about equal to his altitude; he bulged, front and back, like a sack of potatoes breaking loose in the middle. His black hair needed cutting and combing. We guessed, from the bronze of his skin and the black of his eyes and the way his pants had trouble hanging on his hips, that he came from somewhere south of the border.”-- p. 12.
Nonetheless, while “Siesta on the High Seas” is certainly a trifle in terms of fiction, it does provide the reader with something all too rarely encountered in steamship era fiction: a minority hero.