A young sailor from New Orleans falls behind his modern comfortable ship, the Tuscaloosa, and ends up completely alone—without money or any documents—in the Belgian city of Antwerp. The vagrant without a passport is detained and deported from one country to another again and again. After wandering through Europe for several months, the man ends up in Spain, where he gets a job on an old ship, blackened with time, called the Yorrika. On board he meets several dozen other sailors like himself—without documents and with no rights—whom they treat only a little better than oarsmen on ancient galleys.