The Stowaway

The Stowaway is at once a thrilling maritime adventure and a thought-provoking morality tale based on real-life events. The novel begins in the spring of 1996 when Rodolfo Miguel, a bosun on the Taiwanese container ship Maersk Dubai, discovers a hungry and frightened pair of Romanian stowaways. He presents them to his officers, fully expecting that they’ll be put to work or else dropped off at the nearest port. Instead, he and his fellow Filipino crewmen watch in silent horror as the Romanians are cast overboard in a flimsy raft only to disappear beneath the ship’s wake.

The Stowaway moves seamlessly between two storylines. Aboard the Maersk Dubai, Rodolfo and his crewmen must deal with the emotional trauma of what they’ve seen – as well as grapple with how to act on what they know. The atmosphere on the ship grows increasingly tense as fear, anxiety and paranoia grip the Filipino sailors. Trapped witnesses to a crime, they wonder whom they can trust and whether they themselves will meet with the same fate as the stowaways.

Meanwhile, a nineteen-year-old Romanian named Daniel Pacepa heads out on a nail-biting adventure from Bucharest to Algeciras. Poor, brave and full of youthful indiscretion, Daniel is desperate to stow away on a ship and head to a better life in America. Along the way, he meets another Romanian named Gheorghe and together they perform cheap labour, pose as evangelical Christians and do whatever it takes to find their way to the Spanish port of Algeciras.

Eventually the two stories merge when Daniel and Gheorghe sneak onto the ill-fated Maersk Dubai. One man is killed, the other discovered by Rodolfo. Once again, the Filipino crewmen find themselves faced with an excruciating moral dilemma. Do they risk their own personal safety to save the life of a complete stranger?

All of the scenes involving the Filipino sailors are as close to the truth as Robert Hough could manage based on exhaustive interviews with the crewmen as well as on their letters and journals. Though Hough invented the Romanians’ land adventure, he based the story on considerable research, including interviews with Romanian-Canadians who had lived under the Ceausescu regime.

Hough was widely praised for the deft way in which he mixes fact and fiction in The Stowaway. The critics were also unanimous in their admiration for the novel’s ability to seduce with suspense while at the same time posing profound issues for the reader to ponder. “This is a powerful novel that artfully combines the vivid, breathless pacing of the best adventure stories with the moral and metaphysical depth of the best literary fiction,” said Quill & Quire. And from the Vancouver Sun: “Harnessing the force of fiction and the weight of history, Hough has created a powerful, deeply human masterpiece out of tragedy and inhumanity.”

Publishers Weekly

In 1996, nine Filipino crewmen of the Maersk Dubai jumped ship in Halifax, reporting that the ship's Taiwanese officers had murdered three Romanian stowaways. Hough (The Final Confession of Mabel Stark) draws on contemporaneous news reports, court proceedings, interviews with some of the crewmen and his own empathy and exceptional narrative intuition to tell this story of cruelty and courage, crafting not only a maritime adventure but also a resonant, timely morality tale. In the haunting opening chapter, pious Filipino bosun Rodolfo Miguel watches as two stowaways whom he sought to help are set adrift in the cold Atlantic at the orders of the container ship's Taiwanese officers. Hough juxtaposes the efforts of Rodolfo and the rest of the primarily Filipino crew to do the right thing in the tragedy's aftermath with the odyssey of Daniel, a down-and-out Romanian youth desperate to make it to America. Though Daniel and his friend Gheorghe have no connection to the deceased pair, their parallel circumstances make it easy to see where their story is going, as, in a spiral of setbacks, the two move inexorably closer to the Maersk Dubai. Though the valiant Filipinos will risk everything to protect these new stowaways, their fate is far from assured. This is a moving, haunting novel, full of deeply sympathetic portraits of common people being uncommonly brave. Agents, Jackie Kaiser and Nicole Winstanley. (Sept.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Born in Toronto in 1963, Robert Hough knew he wanted to become a writer back in high school. After graduating in 1985 from the Queen’s University, where he wrote satirical articles for the arts paper, Hough worked briefly in advertising before becoming a journalist. For about a dozen years, he wrote for such magazines as Toronto Life and Saturday Night before turning to books.

Hough’s first book was originally intended to be a biography of Mabel Stark, a promiscuous and ribald 1920s lion tamer for Ringling Brothers Circus. Due to a general lack of documentation on Stark, Hough decided to write a novel instead. Published to rave reviews in 2001, The Final Confession of Mabel Stark was shortlisted for both the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book and the Trillium Book Award and was sold into the US, the UK and at least twelve other countries. It is currently in development for a major motion picture starring Kate Winslet in the role of Stark.

Like The Final Confession of Mabel Stark, The Stowaway began as a non-fiction book project. After following the story of the Maersk Dubai in the news, Hough contacted the Filipino crewmen who courageously protected the life of a Romanian stowaway. “I phoned up the Filipino crew members in Halifax and…I couldn’t believe that no one was writing about their story. The more I thought about it, the more I wanted the surviving stowaway’s story. I wanted the reader to root for the guy,” he said in an interview with the Calgary Herald. After he spent a year tracking the stowaway down, Hough’s plan to write a non-fiction account was quashed by the Romanian’s refusal to talk for less than thirty thousand American dollars. Undeterred, Hough decided to write a work of fiction based on actual events. Published in March 2004, The Stowaway has garnered critical praise and has sold into the US, the UK, Holland, Germany and Sweden. Of the experience of writing The Stowaway, Hough says: “In my more optimistic moments, I tell myself I have used the novel in the way it was used in the days of Dickens or Thackeray: to dissect current events. In my less optimistic moments, I feel that I have, by inventing the central character in a non-fiction storyline, somehow misbehaved.” After swearing to never again base a novel on a true story, Hough is currently working on a purely fictional story about a Russian mail-order bride.

Hough lives in Toronto with his wife and two daughters.