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stronger. The sea was his education. After all the traveling, he was no longer a kid. He was in his late twenties. He sent his family telegrams from faraway places with a simple but cryptic message: “ STANDBY .”
    He traveled with a small typewriter and began writing copy about the distant lands he saw; his byline started appearing in Associated Press wire stories, as well as Reader’s Digest , among other publications. He wrote about confidence men in Paris; a dead man being burned on a pyre in Bombay; cockfighting in Siam. In Nias, a remote island off the western coast of Sumatra, he lived with a tribe of headhunters. He was surprised to find stone houses and paved roads in such a distant place, which made him start to ponder the early seeds of civilization—how does a city like this grow? he wondered. “Where does it get its motive?” he wrote.
    By the summer of 1938, he had plunged headlong into the Spanish Civil War, covering the Popular Front’s struggle against the Nationalists. He was in good company. The war drew Ernest Hemingway and George Orwell. Morde wandered along with them, among the bombed-out front lines in Madrid and Barcelona, through trenches, and into and out of buildings blasted by enemy fire. “The air was full of tracer bullets, long lines of purple across the blue sky,” he recalled later in a lengthy two-part interview with his local newspaper. “With the white puffs of bursting shrapnel it was a pretty, though horrible, sight.” He lost fourteen pounds. It was never easy to find a meal, and in time his sleep-deprived and shell-shocked body felt, as he put it, “the tingling sensations of treading on dynamite.”
    One summer night, when the Nationalist military blocked him from crossing the border into Basque territory in the north, he swam across the Bidassoa River, barely eluding machine gun–armed sentries. “The water was cold, the current was quite fast, but we landed on the other side without mishap,” he recalled in the same newspaper interview. “We lay flat on our faces for a few moments, after which, hearing nothing to indicate the presence of sentries, we inched our way through a corn field to a house on the outskirts of Irun. I could have cheered.”
    There, in Nationalist territory, he disguised himself as a Basque fisherman and made friends with a Spanish spy ring, which helped him navigate the bloodshed. He filed reports detailing the massive casualties, the poverty overtaking the land, and the disturbing rise of “the world’s newest uncrowned dictator,” Nationalist leader Francisco Franco, a friend and ally of Adolf Hitler. As the months passed, Morde believed he was witnessing the collapse of Western civilization—the rise of fascism and the fall of democracy. He worried that the West, and the United States in particular, was blind to the impending darkness.
    The fighting had an intense effect on Morde. At one point, on a small boat that he’d stowed away on in the Mediterranean Sea, he felt for the first time that his life was in danger. Out of nowhere, an enemy military ship appeared. “It was about 4 a.m. when suddenly searchlights were focused on us by some vessel whose outlines we soon discovered to be those of a rebel warship,” he said later. “We stayed in the full beam for a full five minutes, expecting them to shell us at any second. Passenger and crew were in a state of hysteria. Personally, I would have given 10 years of my life to have been back in New Bedford,” he went on, even though the cruiser eventually moved on “for some reason” without firing. “I wish I had never heard of the Spanish War.” All along, he seemed to yearn for another adventure, one that was as exciting as war but maybe not as sinister or political.
     
    BEFORE HE FINALLY returned to the United States, Morde got mixed up in a bit of intrigue. In late 1938, Claude G. Bowers, the U.S. ambassador to Spain, wrote an official letter to Spain’s minister of state, Don