The Man Without a Country
It takes the ferryboat Lee Hong four hours to make the 40-mile trip from British Hong Kong along the South China coast to the Portuguese colony of Macao, and another four hours to return. It makes the round trip every day and collects fares from all its passengers — except one. The passenger who does not pay has a glib tongue, a fund of stories about his adventures in the Far East, but no passport.
He can’t get off the ferry at either end of the run for Macao who says that he only had a temporary permit to go through that colony when he arrived there from China and the Hong Kong authorities refuse to let him land without a passport. An International Red Cross certificate issued in Shanghai describes him as a 57-year-old stateless Irishman. He claims to be American. The U.S. claims otherwise. By his own admission his past is somewhat foggy. This is the story of Michael Patrick O’Brien, the man who became known around the world as “The Man Without a Country”.
SEPTEMBER 18, 1952
The motor vessel Lee Hong has just left Hong Kong for it’s daily 40-mile run back to Macao. The low-ceilinged lounge in the ferry is again filled with people travelling between the two colonies. In one of the small booths that line both sides of the dance floor, as far as possible from the passengers’ gangway, sits a solitary man. With his elbows on the table, he stares morosely down at an empty cup, stained with black Chinese coffee.
He has a worn, creased, swarthy face, dark eyes under heavy black brows, and black hair cut institutionally short. His nose is rather flat; a reporter describes him as “how Humphrey Bogart tries to look in the movies.”
“I broke my nose playing semi-pro baseball in the early 20’s,” the man says. “And I have trouble breathing. It pulls my lip up when I breathe, so people think I’m sneering. I’ve been embarrassed a lot about that…”
He is wearing a light blue shirt unbuttoned at the neck, a coarse grey cardigan, an open navy-blue woollen jacket, flimsy grey trousers and highly polished, wrinkled black shoes. On his left wrist, tattooed, is the American eagle with the Stars and Stripes, and a scroll bearing the name, “Helen.” The right wrist tattoo is four aces and the phrase “Good Luck.” This is Michael Patrick O’Brien, alias Robert Stephens, alias Stephen Stanley Ragan, and he has just realized that he can’t get off the boat. Both the Portuguese authorities in Macao and the British authorities in Hong Kong refuse to let him land because he is without proper credentials.
The news travel quickly about the passenger aboard the Lee Hong. International correspondents soon start to frequent the ferry, pestering Michael with questions. Who is he? Where did he come from? And why does he claim to be an American but have an Irish name? Michael has had bad experiences with journalists before but finally he resigns.
“You won’t believe my story. I’ll probably shock the devil out of you. What would you say if you knew I earned my first money robbing Indian graves at the age of six? We lived on the outskirts of Tacoma, Washington. Yeah, me and a bunch of other kids used to dig up these mouldy chiefs and sell their headdresses for $25 each.”
One of seven children — there are four other boys and two sisters — Stephen Stanley Ragan grows up in north-eastern United States. The big family begins to disintegrate early. He never knows his father who leaves for Hungary “to fight in the hussars” when Stephen is very young and is never heard from again. One brother goes with the father and, in Stephen’s opinion, “probably hit the salt mines in Siberia.” His mother Anna only speaks Hungarian and Stephen never learns the language. They can’t talk to each other except through his sisters. He never gets along well at home. He’s seven when they send him off to a boarding school for truants.
“I learned a lot in that truant school. I learned how to use my fists from a boxing coach. I can still take care of myself. I cut when I hit. Anybody who’s been in a street brawl with [me] has been scarred for life…”
After that he doesn’t have any stomach for staying home. At the age of 13 he goes to work in a sash and door factory in Rainier, Oregon. Thereafter, he has a series of labouring jobs between stays in reformatories. When he’s 16 he jumps on a coastwise steamer from Seattle, Washington, to Seward, Alaska, and works as a waiter for eight months. For a short time he earns his living playing pool for wagers in Yakima, Washington until “the sheriff ran me out of town.” That’s when he decides to enrol in the army.
OCTOBER 13, 1952
Michael is bored. Yesterday he made his 24th trip in 24 days from Hong Kong to Macau on the Lee Hong. Today will be his 25th. He loves the sea — but not that much, he had told one of the many correspondents who now had become a common nuisance since the news about him started to spread around the world.
There seems little he can do about it. He can’t get off at either end because he has no passport. The ferry line lets him ride free though and a friend has sent him money to buy food on the boat. The Lee Hong’s captain William M. Layfield knows him quite well by now and often invites him to share breakfast. Layfield tells a reporter that Michael is no trouble, “but he can’t stay here forever.”
According to a newspaper a week ago a United Nations representative was looking into Michael’s nationality but he hasn’t heard anything of it since. The U.S. State Department thinks he is a Hungarian. The Hungarians make no comment. Meanwhile he keeps telling everyone that he is an American born as Stephen Stanley Ragan. Various consulates have already passed his case back and forth almost as many times as he himself has crossed the South China Sea.
Michael is not worried. “I’ll stay aboard just so long,” he says. “Then, if nothing happens, I’ll go over the side.”
At night he sleeps in ship‘s ballroom but when it docks he looks wistfully ashore.
In 1919 he joins the United States Army. Trained as a cook, for a short period he bakes about 400 pounds of bread daily. He dislikes the work, so much that one day he goes on a 48-hour pass to El Paso, Texas, “and kept right on going.” Almost immediately afterward, out of funds in Hutchinson, Kansas, in 1920, under the name of Robert Stephens, he joins the United States Navy.
A Navy friend warns him that the Army is on his trail, so he gets a quick discharge from the Navy and, still as Robert Stephens, hides where the Army seems least likely to look for him — in the Army.
This ruse postpones trouble for almost four months. He is serving in a field artillery unit stationed at West Point when he is arrested. General Douglas MacArthur, then the Military Academy commandant, signs the court-martial’s recommendation that Stephen serve ten years in prison. He would never forgive MacArthur for that. Washington later cuts the sentence to just one year for desertion.
OCTOBER 29, 1952
So near but yet so far. Lee Hong is heading into dry dock for her annual check-up. Everyone needs to get off the ship. After having endured 43 straight round trips between Macau and Hong Kong, Michael is finally setting his foot on land. Or so he thought. He is only permitted the run of the dry dock. But at least he get’s a change of culinary. Immigration men, who check on him daily, permit him to eat at a dockside restaurant. An old employer in Shanghai is paying the food bill.
Michael gets the news that friends have failed in efforts to clear him to go to America, some South American Country or even a monastery. Nobody wants him. When the ferry 19 days later is put back in the water, her constant passenger is aboard as usual.
They turn him loose in New York with $10 in his pocket. It’s 1922 and not a job can be found in the metropolis. Michael soon finds himself in a gang planning to steal some silk from a warehouse. Everything starts off well. They get into the loft and start tossing bales down to the street. It’s when the seventh bale hits the ground that the cops show up. The driver gets away but the rest of the gang, including Stephen, is arrested.
“I wouldn’t admit to nothing. But a lawyer finally talked me into taking the rap by pleading guilty, because the other guys were three timers. Under the name of Robert Stephens I was sent to Sing Sing for 2 ½ to 5 years.“
He gets out after serving 18 months and goes back west to Portland. Things go along pretty well there. Around the Portsmouth pool hall in North Portland, Steve Ragan becomes known as a young fellow with a pleasant personality and considerable skill as a baseball sandlotter. He marries a girl — Violet — his first wife. Together they move to Eugene, Oregon, where he gets a job mixing concrete. One day they cross the state line to Washington to visit Violet’s grandmother. A decision he soon regrets. A few days later three FBI agents show up and take him back to Portland, charged with violation of the Mann Act, the White-Slave Traffic Act, because of Violet…
“The way she was stacked I thought she was about 18 or 19. Turned out she was only 14. Her family wanted to get me out of the way so they tipped off the cops. But they couldn’t make it stick because Violet wanted to stay married.”
But there he was, with a wife and no job again. It was 1924 and he couldn’t find any legitimate work. He goes into a less legitimate partnership with another man who had encountered similar difficulties. Together they do a series of holdups jobs, a few gas stations, a couple of big stores. Once he is fired on by police. A bullet deeply penetrates his leg, just below the kneecap. He gets away, successfully extracts the bullet, and finds that his operation has cured him of an old ailment — water on the knee.
On a subsequent occasion he isn’t as lucky. On one job his partner pulls a gun while Stephen is driving. The cops catch them. His partner turns state’s evidence; and claims it was Stephen who had been armed. He is sentenced to twenty years on a charge of assault while armed with a dangerous weapon with intent to kill or wound. The future looked grim yet again.
“I went up to the state pen at Salem, Oregon, and my lawyers appealed the case. A year later the charge was reduced to assault with intent to rob. But the judge hated my guts, so he told me: ‘Well, Ragan, since you’ve served a year, I’ll take it easy on you. I’ll cut your sentence to 19 years.’ Nice guy, huh?…”
After six years the warden tells him they are pardoning foreigners. United States law is that an alien convicted of illegal possession of a firearm may be deported, after serving a prison sentence, to the country of origin or to a country of the alien’s choice, if it will have him, and if his recent conduct has not been of a certain seditious or loathsome nature. In the penitentiary Stephen’s behaviour had been fine.
“So I said. ‘Tell ’em I’m Hungarian.’ The warden put my papers through, but the Hungarian consulate said they wouldn’t accept me. Well, then, I said, ‘Tell ’em I’m Italian — born in Fiume.’ The warden tried again. Still no soap. The Italians wouldn’t claim me. I had the idea Shanghai was an open port so I offered to pay my way there if they’d let me out.”
The warden fixes it up for him. He is told he can take a boat to Shanghai, if he is willing to go without any papers, on the understanding that he would not be welcomed back to the United States ever again. Stephen agrees.
He can’t pay his way though, because then he’d have to get a passport. A deal is worked out between immigration, the FBI and the ship for Stephen to become a work-a-way. That way he doesn’t need papers. In May he works his way across the Pacific Ocean at a rate of pay of 25 cents a month. But when he arrives, the door isn’t as open as he had thought.
“They didn’t want to let me into Shanghai, but I just threw a rope over the side and boarded a sampan, a little Chinese boat, and went ashore. That was 1931.”
DECEMBER 24, 1952
It’s Christmas Eve but for Michael the day looks the same as any other. His daily routine is simple: At 5 A.M. he gets up from his leather sofa. He washes and shaves in the lounge men’s room, because he’s not allowed to use the showers below deck. He dresses and shines his shoes. And then he just sits around until about 11 o’clock at night, and it’s time to go to sleep again.
Pattison, a former employer, continues to pay for his food and provides him with 50 Hong Kong dollars a week (about $8 United States), which takes care of incidentals, such as toilet articles, laundry, haircuts (he regularly sends ashore for a barber) and an occasional bottle of light and fiery Portuguese brandy, which costs only about $1.25 United States in Macao.
It’s over a glass of brandy that a couple of correspondents find Michael in the darkened salon of the Lee Hong. The only seasonal spirit he has is the one in his glass. Christmas gifts which he expected from the Australian base at Kure, Japan, had failed to arrive. Before he empties his glass he tells the reporters that he do have a Christmas wish though: Get off the ferry. A wish that less than a day later suddenly looked more promising than ever before…
Shanghai is his kind of town. After the Japanese had invaded Manchuria, they soon occupied large parts of Shanghai, which had become a refuge for immigrants. The city is booming with nationalities and opportunities.
In the 1930’s Stephen is working as a waterfront bartender, as the manager of a cabaret, and as overseer of gambling joints catering mostly to the United States navy. Soon after he gets there he makes his reputation by quieting down the English welterweight champ of Shanghai out in an alley.
“After that I was always able to make a good living, mostly as bouncer in bars and gambling joints. Finally, I got my own place, the Shamrock Bar on Blood Alley. I guess those were the best years of my life.”
Bloody Alley, or Rue Chu Pao San as it was officially named, was a short road between Rue du Consulat and Avenue Edward VII. It got its nickname because of the frequent fist fights between foreign sailors and soldiers and was a notorious haven for criminals where white slavery, procurement and dope peddling were rumoured to be routine occupations. A reputation that later would come back and haunt Stephen…
DECEMBER 25, 1952
It’s Christmas Day in Portland, Washington. Mike Ragan is reading his daily newspaper when he suddenly finds himself staring at a photograph of a man who looks almost decidedly like his long lost brother. No, he is confident; the man who for three months has been making a daily run on the ferry between Hong Kong and Macau because authorities won’t let him ashore is in fact Steve Ragan, his older brother.
The last he had heard of his brother was an inquiry letter which reached him while he was in the Army in England during the war. As he remembered, Steve was in some trouble as a prisoner of the Japanese or maybe the British in the Orient. But that was the only contact over 20 years…
Over 800 miles south of Portland, a Los Angeles school custodian at Metropolitan Junior College is reading the newspaper and sees the same photo of the man who calls himself Michael Patrick O’Brien. The custodian is Joseph Ragan, 52, of 4521 S Van Ness Ave, and he too recognizes the ferry-passenger as his long lost older brother Steve. Joseph hasn’t seen his brother since 1923. Of course, he needs to be doubly certain before he goes public about it. A couple of days before New Year’s he finally succeeds in placing a person-to-person call to the Lee Hong travelling on the South China Sea.
“I sure was surprised,” he tells the press afterwards. “He’s changed his name, just why I don’t know. But he’s my brother all right. His name originally was Steve Ragan. He always was a wanderer, sort of the family black sheep, you might call him. On the telephone I asked him two or three questions that nobody but Steve Ragan could answer correctly. He has the right answers — about the time I nearly drowned on the Puyallup River and the time we ran away from home together when we were about 12 years old.”
Joseph confidently states that his brother indeed is an American, born in 1905 in Tacoma, Washington. Immediately after the telephone conversation he sits down and writes a letter to Pierce County authorities in Tacoma, asking them to search out for his brother’s birth certificate and forward it to him. He also writes a letter to his brother, requesting him to send his fingerprints and other vital statistics. He dispatches it special delivery.
Back on the Lee Hong Michael hangs up the phone. A reporter from United Press, who has been following the conversation, asks how it went.
“I talked to Joe, that’s all I know,” he says. “I still recognized his voice.”
It was 29 years since they had spoken. He had only managed to speak with his brother for a few minutes before the connection was broken. But Joseph had told him he will do everything he can to get Michael back home.
As New Year’s arrive the ferryboat Lee Hong is in Hong Kong. Only a few hundred yards away from the ship, revellers noisily greets the New Year. As for Michael, when the boat’s lights are turned off, he curls up on the settee in the unused ballroom and goes to sleep.
One night in 1932, when on an extreme bender, Stephen takes a shot at a Japanese guard. The police get interested and he decides it is time to change his identity. He can’t take the risk to get thrown out of Shanghai, where would or could he go then? With some money and a harbour city full of immigrants and seamen he soon finds himself both a new name and nationality.
“For 50 bucks I bought a set of seaman’s papers from this guy O’Brien — Michael Patrick. I suppose he must be dead by now.”
Stephen Stanley Ragan is from that day an Irishman named Michael Patrick O’Brien.
In 1937 Japanese forces finally take full control over the city of Shanghai from China. At first nationals such as British and Americans are still allowed to live and work under Japanese occupation but after Pearl Harbor, almost all privileges are removed. Stephen, now as Michael, ends up in a Japanese concentration camp at Poo Tung, across the river from Shanghai. They take his passport and intern him as an American citizen. For two and a half years he is held as a prisoner during World War II. It is there he starts losing his teeth. He also drops from 219 to 132 pounds.
“But I didn’t have it so bad in a way. I got a good gambling game going. I shot the winnings on black market food for some of the basics. It cost $10 U.S. for an egg. Imagine — $10 for one lousy egg!”
JANUARY 4, 1953
In Michael’s childhood hometown of Tacoma, there’s a young Polish seaman in the federal tank of the city jail. His name is Zygmunt Walentynowicz, he is 22 years old and he has been in jail for 20 months while his attorney and U.S. immigration officials have been figuring out how to deport him. He arrived in Tacoma aboard a British steamship in October, 1951, and was picked up by U.S. authorities in Seattle a few months later after he missed the ship. A deportation order was signed by a federal judge in September, 1952.
Authorities have been unable to arrange Polish passport for the young seaman. He was held in a concentration camp in Poland during the war — his parents were killed in another camp — and he doesn’t care to fall into Iron Curtain hands at this point.
His attorney has drawn up an affidavit which Walentynowicz may be able to use a travel document. The attorney is contacting neutral countries, hoping to find one which will accept his client, and contacting steamship lines, hoping to find one which will give him work.
While his future is being negotiating Zygmunt sits in his cell and rues the day he left his ship. He would give anything to get another ship right now and leave the U.S. far behind. That’s when he hears about Michael Patrick O’Brien, the perennial Hong Kong ferry rider. Would it be possible?
Michael straightens himself up. It’s been 108 days now since he boarded the Lee Hong and he’s just been handed a wire from a Polish seaman who’s in a much similar situation as him. He offers to trade places, Michael to the jail in Tacoma, and the seaman takes his place on the Lee Hong. Michael jumps at it immediately, telling a reporter confidently:
“I believe I could get out of that jail easier than off of this bucket.”
But any glimmer of hope is soon crushed when the U.S. justice department sends out a statement after doing an investigation into Michael’s story. The verdict: he is not an American citizen. The justice department says immigration service records list Michael’s real birth name as Istvan Ragan, born June 15, 1905 in Budapest, Hungary. He came to the U.S. with his mother and brother in 1907 via New York City and settled in Washington State, but was never naturalized as citizens. Michael would later insist that 1902 is his correct year of birth, not 1895 or 1905.
The final blow however comes at the end of the statement, the investigation also dug up his deportation from the U.S. as a result of the robbery and burglary convictions. That made him ineligible to return. He can shout and scream as much as he wants about being an American citizen; as far as the United States is concerned, Michael Patrick O’Brien is persona non grata.
Soon after the war Michael marries his second wife, Helen (the name tattooed on his wrist). Violet, his first wife, had died while he was in prison. Her parents would never tell Michael where they buried her. Helen too, is stateless, a White Russian without a passport, about 25 years his junior. They have a son, Patrick, born in July 1947. Later that year he ships out of Shanghai on an oil tanker but the captain fires him when they arrive in England. He doesn’t have any papers but they let him go ashore and live in London. And it is there his journey could have ended if not his wife hadn’t sent word from Shanghai that she and the kid were in trouble.
The company pays his way back to Hong Kong and from there he smuggles himself back into Shanghai in 1948 by just walking off a boat with some friends in the British customs. Patrick, their son, is having trouble growing up in the now communist country and they need to get him away.
“When we met a couple who were leaving Shanghai for Sydney, Australia, we persuaded them to take Patrick with them. They promised to write and let us know how the boy was doing. But they never did. I guess they want to raise him as their own.”
Michael ships out a few times as a merchant seaman, always returning to get employment in Shanghai. He’s able to keep up this living for while, until the Chinese regime one day says he can’t go to sea any more unless he joins the communist union. The problem is that no foreigners are allowed to join the union. The situation is dire. Michael and Helen are able to subsist on an allowance from A. P. Pattison, Michael’s most regular employer. Pattison wants to help the couple and starts to look for a way to get them out.
FEBRUARY 18, 1952
Today begins his sixth month as an involuntary, constant passenger aboard the Lee Hong. Every week he gets scores of letters from all over the world from well-wishers. Not all of them are serious. The United Nations Commission for Refugees and its affiliate, the Intergovernmental Committee for European Migration, have taken up his case, and the commission’s Hong Kong office has compiled a massive file of letters about him. Nothing much has however actually been accomplished on his behalf. Actually, they say, he doesn’t even have the right qualifications to be classified as a refugee.
A more colloquial situation arises when he gets acute toothache. After long consultations and some argument, arrangements are made for a Hong Kong dentist to come aboard. One dentist offers to do so for 500 Hong Kong dollars. Thankfully another agrees to do it for about one tenth of that price. A tooth has to be extracted. The operation is performed without any anaesthetic on the Lee Hong’s bridge. Someone takes a picture of the dentist and patient which Michael keeps as a souvenir.
His daily social life is limited largely to parrying questions from well-meaning bores who crash his table during every day’s crossings. He feels he ought to join a circus sideshow if he ever does get ashore. He is more amused by the amateurish criminal activities of the ship’s crew, all Chinese, who run contraband Chinese wine and cigarettes into Hong Kong. He himself keeps up a profitable smuggling trade through a porthole.
His actions and never ending stay has however started to create rifts with the crew. It has become more miserable with each tour and one day it explodes. He gets into a row with the captain who throws him in the brig for threatening to “break every bone in your lime-juice body.”
“Along about last April I did get clapped into the lousy brig. One of the stinking captains — I wore out four of them — couldn’t drink, and it made him mad to watch me. He told me to stop, and I told him where to go. So I was locked up. I had it fixed with a pal in the crew to unlock the door to the brig every night. That blasted ferry rolled like a washtub.”
He’s now not just trapped on the ship, but he’s also imprisoned. If there ever was a chance of getting off it looked slimmer than ever.
At the end of 1951, the conditions for non-Communists in Shanghai are becoming almost intolerable. Michael applies to the Portuguese consulate for a temporary visa for Macau, the small Portuguese colony on the south China coast. The plan is for Pattison to fix Michael up as a third assistant engineer on a ship, the Laura Pattison, which will pick him up in Macau. Outside China Michael will have a chance of getting Helen out. She can’t get an exit permit until she has someone to go to.
It takes eight whole months before the Portuguese give him the necessary transit papers to catch the boat. He travels by rail from Shanghai to Canton. At Canton he boards a filthy, overcrowded Chinese barge and is towed down the Pearl River for sixteen hours to Macao. Such barges, overloaded with refugees, arrive at Macao frequently, straining the colony’s already congested camps for the destitute. Hong Kong tries hard to exclude Chinese refugees, but they manage to slip across the border into Kowloon, the British colony’s mainland city, and across the water from Macao by smugglers’ junks and sampans.
He’s too late. The ship has come and gone while he had been on his way. He then receives a letter from the Macao immigration authorities, saying that he had entered under false pretences: He obviously doesn’t have a ship. They give him five days to get out of Macao.
He figures that the best way is to bust through Hong Kong, rather than go back to communist China. Without any valid credentials of any kind, Michael watches the time run out. Close to the last minute, in desperation, he persuades the master of the Lee Hong to take him across, hoping he then could slip ashore. The plan is to stay aboard in Hong Kong until the immigration men leaves. Then he would just walk ashore. Easy.
He choses to go across on a night run, when the Lee Hong is having a dance in port at Macao. At 2:00 pm he sneaks aboard without any baggage and has someone else bring his things aboard after him. He sits at the captain’s table for a while. Then, shortly before sailing time, he goes below, and shuts himself in a cabin. But someone in the crew gets cold feet. When they arrive his name is listed on the passenger manifest. He doesn’t have a change after that.
The Hong Kong immigration authorities turns Michael back and warn him that if he ever tries jumping ship on their side of the daily shuttle he’d get seven years. The day is September 18, 1952.
JULY 30, 1953
At 8:00 am on July 30th, a group of Hong Kong police come aboard the Lee Hong and tells Michael to get off. Two hours later, after 315 days; forty miles once a day and back again, the ferry leaves the Hong Kong port for its daily drive to Macau, for the first time without her regular guest. Michael Patrick O’Brien is finally ashore. Help had come from someone Michael had come to know quite well over the 10 months he’d been travelling back and forth.
“The police commissioner there, D.W. MacIntosh, was the best friend I had. He helped get my wife, Helen, out of Shanghai and send her to Brazil. Well, he told me I was going to Brazil, too. The International Refugee Organization arranged it. So the next day, I took off in a KLM plane to Rome.”
Together with over thirty other refugees, mostly White Russians, he leaves Hong Kong behind him and heads for Brazil, where Helen is now residing for some months and hopefully waiting to meet him. But he isn’t getting too comfortable yet. If there’s one thing he has learned the last year is to never count your chickens before they’re hatched.
In Rome they take a train to Genoa and together on August 3rd they board the French liner Bretagne, sailing as third class passengers for Rio de Janeiro.
“My troubles aren’t finished yet,” Michael tells a reporter. “I still have one more sea voyage before me — and I hate, hate, hate the sea.”
AUGUST 20, 1953
“Não.”
Michael looks out on to Rio de Janeiro from aboard the Bretagne. Brazil says she won’t have him. They’ve changed their minds. The Brazilian maritime police refuses to admit him on the grounds that he is an “undesirable” and “is operating under two names.” He hears from authoritative sources that the refusal is based on printed reports that he has been involved in drug smuggling. Michael is mad. No, he is furious.
“Look, pal, I’m a straight shooter,” Michael says before the Bretagne is about to leave Rio with him still on. “That stuff published in magazines and newspapers about me being a white-slaver and a drug peddler is a bunch of lies. White-slaver and dope peddler, for God’s sake! I’d rather have a murder rap on me. There’s some excuse for murder but none for that. I committed a crime — nothing serious — in the United States and I served my time. I wish I could have a chance to settle down and work. I’m a third assistant ship’s engineer and mechanic and that’s all I want to do in life. But I’m tired of riding around in ships’ brigs.”
After Brazil revoked his visa and sent him back on board Michael had been searched thoroughly before being locked in the brig. Even worse, Helen is somewhere ashore but he hasn’t heard from here since she left Shanghai many months ago. He stares sullenly at the newsmen through the small window in the door. He feels like a monkey in a cage.
The Bretagne’s officers aren’t impressed with their celebre guest.
”He’s just a passenger to us. If he cannot get off in Uruguay or Argentina, we’ll take him back to Genoa, Italy.”
Asked what they will do if he can’t disembark at Genoa, where he boarded the Bretagne, the officers merely shrug. Well, they’ll soon find out. Uruguay says no. Argentina says no. Neither country feel like offering Michael a solid ground under their feet, so Bretagne has no choice but to take him back to Europe.
SEPTEMBER 16, 1953
Two days before the one year mark of him walking aboard the ferry in Macao and he becoming the man without a country — Michael is no nearer to find a place that will take him. The French refused him permission to land two days ago when the Bretagne reached Marseille, and what feels like another nail in the coffin — today Genoa said no.
All countries which the ship touches have now refused to admit him. In Strasbourg, the British Conservative Gilbert Longden intervenes before the Council of Europe’s Consultative Assembly, asking if whether the Convention of Human Rights can do anything for Michael, maybe help give him “the most basic of all rights, the right to settle somewhere and become a homeland to have”. France’s Vice-Premier, Pierre-Henri Teitgen, regretfully informs him that the rights of the Convention apply only to nationals of Member States or to persons living in those States, not a man without a country.
Michael is now on the long voyage back to Rio from Genoa — for perhaps an indefinite, senseless back and forth wandering. Instead of the Lee Hong, the Bretagne, and instead of the 40-mile journey between Hong Kong and Macao, the whole Atlantic Ocean between the continents Europe and South America.
OCTOBER 12, 1953
In the editors office at Parade Magazine there is much rejoicing. As the rest of the world, and especially all the newspapers in the U.S., they have followed the adventures of the man known as Michael Patrick O’Brien. What they just achieved though is more than even politicians have managed.
While Michael was rejected again and again, travelling back and forth between Europe and South America, they decided to send a request to the government of the Dominican Republic to grant Michael a haven. Their reply has just come in:
“It has been generalissimo Trujillo’s policy to grant asylum in the Dominican Republic to anti-communist elements and to help those forsaken by the world … Mr. O’Brien will be cordially received in the Dominican Republic. Citizenship may be granted to him in due time.”
The offer reaches Michael while the Bretagne is anchored in Buenos Aires. The Dominican Republic has granted not only him, but also Helen and their son permission to live there. He is quick to respond that he would be delighted to accept the offer. Sitting on the bunk of his cramped cabin aboard, he says:
“It is the first really good news I have had since I was told in Shanghai, at the end of the Second World War, that I was not considered an American citizen. I’m more than ready to settle — anywhere.”
OCTOBER 20, 1953
Photographers and newsmen are ready when Michael Patrick O’Brien at last puts his feet on land as he goes ashore at Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. A sympathetic Rio lawyer has obtained a writ of habeas corpus which permits Michael to disembark from the Bretagne. Parade has arranged to have Michael flown from to Ciudad Trujillo in the next couple of days.
The Spanish-speaking island, originally named Santo Domingo, had since 1931 been under the dictatorship of Generalissimo Rafael L. Trujillo, leader of the country which Columbus called “The Fairest Land Under Heaven.” Michael would not be the first immigrant getting asylum there. Trujillo had made a practice of inviting the homeless, particularly technicians and skilled workers, providing them with a country and a use for their skills in improving the island. The first large group of immigrants to come in were Hitler-ousted Jews, who settled at Sosua on the northern coast, and refugees from the Spanish Civil War. Now many European refugees were being brought there free aboard a Dominican-owned ship. And in just a day’s time, Michael would be joining them.
“So you want to know what it feels like to be a man without a country, huh? Okay, I’ll tell you. It’s like being a miserable old hound dog that gets kicked off every doorstep.”
Michael looks out at Ciudad Trujillo, Dominican Republic, and for the first time in years he feels like a human being. It’s October 26th. Just six hours ago, he had stepped off a plane from Rio de Janeiro. This climaxed 13 ½ months in which he had been kicked out of nine countries. Only a few hours of freedom had worked magic with his haggard features. His long jaw is shaved to a blue shadow now, and his jet black hair shine in the lamplight. With Parade paying the bill he has gotten the, much needed, first new suit fitted in years. He only had three shirts and one pair of pants.
He solely has gratitude to the Dominican Government who invited him to the country. Jose Villaneuva Jr., the first secretary of the Dominican Embassy, had come aboard the Bretagne in Rio de Janeiro and shook Michael’s hand. Right away Michael was calling him Joe. Newspapermen were falling all over each other trying to find him after he went ashore, but Joe had hidden him in a little hotel. Then the reporters tried to find Helen — who Michael found out had divorced him.
“They were looking around for some dame about 40, so they never even noticed her when she came to the airport to see me off. She’s only 25. Anyway, Joe brought Helen to see me. Now when I get settled, she’s coming up to marry me again. Then we can get our boy back.”
Michael pours a drink. The soft whisper of the surf, mingling with the voices of diners on the terrace below, drifts through the open window of their room in the plush Hotel Jaragua.
“You know, Joe asked me when I got off the boat if I ever thought of committing suicide. I just laughed at him. Hell, I’ve been in tougher spots than this. Seems to me most of my life I’ve been sweating something out. I knew there would be a new deal just around the corner. There was, too. And now that I’ve got it, I’m going to play my cards right this time, I’m going to show the Dominican people that they’ll never regret betting on Michael Patrick O’Brien!”
APRIL 8, 1954
An aeroplane arrives to Ciudad Trujillo, Dominican Republic. Among the passengers is Joseph Choate, a Californian lawyer. His mission: try to arrange for Michael Patrick O’Brien aka Robert Stephens aka Stephen Stanley Ragan, the former “man without a country,” to finally enter the United States…
This story was compiled from hundreds of news articles from five different countries spanning the years 1952 to 1960.
Read the story of the other man without a country, who boarded the Bretagne together with Michael…
