do better than the company relying on liner services alone. Companies United Maritime Group Seabulk D/S Norden TORM In fiction Tramp steamers and freighters are associated with off-the-beaten track, romanticized adventure and intrigue in pulp stories, children's books, novels, films, and other fictional works. When characters such as spies or resistance fighters are on the run, or lovers are fleeing from an affair gone wrong, tramp steamers are used to slip in or out of a country. The crew of a tramp steamer is often a picaresque mix of societal outcasts and rogues with colourful (or even illegal-activity-filled) pasts who cannot or who do not want to work elsewhere. Steamers are often depicted as operating in a grey area of legality, both in terms of their lax observance of steamship safety regulations and their plying of black market trades and smuggling of goods and passengers. Fiction writers depicted tramp steamers as a way that penniless adventurers can explore exotic ports by being taken on as a crew member. Examples In the film The Lost Continent (1968), a dilapidated tramp steamer Corita is smuggling a dangerous explosive cargo. The Captain ignores a customs launch wanting to inspect his ship as he is smuggling white phosphorus. Some passengers are trying to escape their past indiscretions or eluding capture (one with stolen bearer bonds). In the film The Long Voyage Home (1940), a British tramp steamer SS Glencairn goes from the West Indies to Baltimore and then finally to England. The crew is a motley, fun-loving, hard-drinking lot who are smuggling rum. The crew thinks one aloof crew member might be a German spy because he is so secretive and he has a locked box under his bed. In the film The African Queen (1951), a tramp steamer, the African Queen, is converted into a torpedo boat to sink a German gunboat. In the 1937 musical comedy film Something to Sing About, hoofer Terry Rooney (James Cagney) takes his bride, singer Rita Wyatt (Evelyn Daw) on a tramp steamer for their honeymoon. They are the only passengers. Rooney is turning his back on Hollywood, disgusted by his experience working on one picture. The film is a hit, but no one can find him. When the ship returns at last to San Francisco, he discovers that he is Hollywood's newest star. There is a long scene aboard ship where the crew joins in a