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101. Both outlived their son Theodore.
    The family lived in a three-story wood-frame house, coal-heated, with a sweeping roofline, halfway up a steep hill on Pope Street, a block from the water. A cupola provided views of the harbor and the ocean farther off. From up there, Morde could see a good storm blowing in, its swirling blackness, like a pugilist’s new bruise, swelling above the water before it came ashore.
    A transformation soon overtook young Morde. The exact timing is imprecise. Perhaps it was in middle school, when he was working for pocket change at the local pharmacy and imagining life outside the city, or later on, when he began to linger on the docks, the salty air in his face, reading the names of the ships, watching the men as they packed their boats and sailed off to catch whales, returning weeks or months later, the boats’ hulls full of blubber. He heard the fantastical stories of travel and conquest. It was hard to compare that excitement to his own family’s settled existence in New Bedford. His father owned a twenty-six-foot cabin cruiser named Star Dust . Theodore liked to fish as much as to stare off at the distant horizon and daydream of all the sailors heading off to remote places. What was out there in the world for him? More and more, he wanted to get away and find out.
    Sitting in a classroom bored him, despite his interest in books, and Morde kept itching. He graduated from New Bedford High School in 1928 and picked up work at the local radio station, where he became a reporter. Eventually, he enrolled in Brown University, where he studied Spanish and French—until one day he simply disappeared.
    The details of his life are mostly murky from that point on. Whether or not he’d been planning his flight is a mystery. He was eighteen or nineteen years old. And for a period of days or weeks, no one heard from him. The rumor among the family was that he’d stowed away on a ship to Germany. There are no records of how he got there, only of his return.
    On February 4, 1929, according to a ship manifest, he sailed back in style to New York from Hamburg on the SS Washington , a 722-foot luxury steam liner with four masts and two smokestacks. Then one of the most beautiful and opulent ships at sea, she boasted an “electric gymnasium,” “electric staircases,” and murals and statues inside recalling the life of the first U.S. president.
    After that, it was as though he’d been asleep for the first part of his life and was now suddenly awake. He understood something important: his life ran parallel to all the other lives he might lead, other places he might see, so many stories he could one day tell. Later on, his family would talk about his charm, his good looks. But some would also say that once he left New Bedford, he became someone else, an enigma. He could be there with you, laughing and showing you every affection, and at the same time, in his mind, be a million miles away. The day he decided to leave on that ship for Germany was likely the same day that the improbable and perplexing life of Theodore Morde began.
     
    BETWEEN 1928 AND 1937 , Morde sailed 250,000 miles and circled the globe five times. It was not a life of comfort, but comfort was not the point. He traveled in crowded, squalid crew quarters, sleeping on bunks or on the floor. The rooms were tight, the air fetid, the ship never still.
    Sometimes, he worked as a bellboy, other times as a cook. Some crew members played poker and drank in down moments, but Morde read; he could quote Kipling and kept at his Spanish and French.
    The living conditions were worse on the tramps, roaming work vessels that claimed no port of call and followed no fixed schedule. Like migrant workers, the freighters wandered the ocean looking for jobs, and Morde wandered with them. It was nearly impossible to have close friends because people never stuck with the same ship. He endured long stretches alone, but he seemed to enjoy that time. It made him