In June of 1928, according to a breathless newspaper account, a restless Australian music teacher named Jeanne Day transformed herself into a stowaway of the “modern school.” She’d learned that two ships docked in Port Lincoln were about to race fourteen thousand miles to England. Day, a “brave bohemian,” furtively boarded one of the ships, a Finnish barque, after cutting her dark-brown hair short. Not long after the voyage began, she turned herself in, but the crew found her so charming that she was allowed to stay on board, as a cabin hand. Although Day’s story made international news, it was by no means an anomaly. In the late twenties, the world was in the grip of a stowaway craze.
As long as there has been transportation to faraway places, people have been sneaking on board. But the illicit act didn’t have a name in English until 1848, when “stowaway,” a derivative of “stow away,” entered the language. By the end of the nineteenth century, stowaways had become a regular feature of immigration to America’s Eastern Seaboard. Many American families have passed down stories of ancestors whose new life began with a jump at port and a swim to shore.
The stowaway fad, however, was a different kind of social phenomenon. It was part of the attention-seeking aesthetic of the Jazz Age, a larksome activity similar to flagpole sitting, outrageous swimming challenges, and “buildering”—the art of climbing skyscrapers. But, unlike other stunts, becoming a stowaway wasn’t just for kicks. Many of these rapscallions, like the New Yorker Billy Gawronski, who dived into the Hudson and climbed on board an expedition to Antarctica, were determined to see new worlds. Such youngsters wanted a taste of the adventures they had glimpsed at the movies. And, in the new age of the mass media, each stowaway’s story of success incited more attempts.
The fad reached its peak around 1927 and 1928, when more than five hundred stowaways were caught and deported from Ellis Island, including many young women who were looking for a shortcut to fame. In 1929, one reporter asked, “Who are the flapper thrill-seekers who now run away to sea—usurping a prerogative once held solely by the boys?”