“Then we shall be compelled to place you in the hold of the vessel,” the officials snapped back.30 As with France, Spain gave him no hearing or formal charges.31
Trotsky begged to stay in Europe.32 He sent panicked appeals to Spanish politicians and socialist friends across Europe. Switzerland, Britain, and Italy each denied his request for sanctuary or passage. “All my correspondence about going to Switzerland was confiscated by French authorities,” he complained.33 Natalya, sitting in Paris, clamored for help to free her husband. With Trotsky behind bars, it fell on her alone to raise money, care for the boys, take them out of school, pay the bills and bribes, track down political friends, negotiate with steamship companies, and pack up their Paris home.
Spain finally decided to end this headache by sending Trotsky away, not to Cuba but to the United States of America, a country far across the ocean willing to take him and where Trotsky was willing to go. Who exactly made the decision? Did bribes get paid? The full truth may never be known, but the list of behind-the-scene players was long, including top Spanish officials such as Count Alvaro de Figueroa de Romanones, Spain’s Liberal prime minister at the time; a Republican deputy named Roberto Castrovido; a Spanish insurance official named Dupre; future Spanish parliamentarian Julian Besteiro; and the Russian-born Spanish bohemian novelist Ernesto Barc, all mentioned by various sources.34
However it happened, Trotsky quickly grew sanguine with the idea of America. He knew people in New York City. Many Russian socialist friends, including some he’d shared prison time with back in Saint Petersburg, had already congregated there. Trotsky had written articles for their newspaper, Novy Mir. In New York, he would have a platform. Natalya and the boys could live in a stable place. Still jailed in Cádiz, he began studying English, a language totally new to him. “Received two English books,” he wrote one friend from his cell. “Thank you. The English pronunciation now absorbs my attention and makes the waiting painful for me.”35
With arrangements finally set, Natalya brought the family to Barcelona. Here they enjoyed a day or two of sight-seeing before police detectives came to escort them to the Montserrat and place them aboard.
One last complication: At the Montserrat, the ship’s officers claimed to discover a problem with their tickets. Natalya, using cash she had raised from friends and family, had purchased four second-class fares for seventeen hundred pesetas, but the ship’s officers now told them they had no second-class cabins left, only first-class cabins and third-class steerage. To get on board, they would have to pay the difference for first class.
Was this a shakedown? A rip-off? Probably.
Natalya balked. She insisted she didn’t have the money. Trotsky claimed to be down to his last forty francs at that point (about $160). “The family was ready to pay for their second class fare,” she argued, but not more.
What to do? Spain came to the rescue. “Madrid was so anxious to get rid of [us] that it paid [our] full fare for first class,” Natalya later explained.36 And so the family got its first-class cabin with its plenty of fresh air, windows, and light. “It was just about [our] only deluxe travel in [our] whole lives,” Natalya recalled.37 Or, as Trotsky put it to a friend in Madrid, “We ‘enjoy’ the first [class], that is to say, we are conducting a continuous struggle to receive the water to wash in the morning and not receive it in the face during the night, when they wash the boat.”38
All that, and Natalya managed to keep in her pocket some $500 cash (more than $10,000 in modern value), money she apparently failed to mention to the ticket agent.
“The last act of the Spanish police is superb,” Trotsky wrote mockingly to yet another friend. “In Valencia and Malaga, [Spanish] agents and gendarmes surround me on the boat to keep me from leaving with my wife and my children.”39
ONCE AT SEA, they watched the last green hills of Spain sink below the horizon with little hope of returning anytime soon. “The door of Europe shut behind me in Barcelona,” he sighed.40 To a socialist friend in London who had helped in the crisis, he confided, “I press your hand warmly. . . . I hope that we may meet once again in the ranks of fighters for the common cause.”41 To yet another: “This is the last time that I cast a glance at that old canaille [a French curse meaning “vulgar dog”] Europe.”42
As days went by at sea, Trotsky seemed to dislike most of the people he met aboard the Montserrat, chafing at being on this ship at all. “The population of the steamer is multicolored, and not very attractive in its variety,” he wrote. He couldn’t help but notice the many young men fleeing Europe to avoid military service. “There are quite a few deserters from different countries, for the most part men of fairly high standing,” he noted, pointing to an artist carrying away his paintings, a billiard champion, and a few respectable older gentlemen. “The others are much of the same sort: deserters, adventurers, speculators, or simply ‘undesirables’ thrown out of Europe. Who would ever dream of crossing the Atlantic at this time of year on a wretched little Spanish boat from choice?”43 He ventured below deck to explore the squalid, smelly steerage compartment, where the poorest immigrants stayed, and found the mood there sullen. “It is more difficult to make out the third-class passengers,” he wrote. “They lie close together, move about very little, say very little—for they have not much to eat.”44
One person on the ship Trotsky apparently did strike up a conversation with was a twenty-nine-year-old artist and boxer named Arthur Cravan. Cravan, telling the story years later, claimed he had just fought a one-round match in Barcelona against American world champion Jack Johnson. Johnson had knocked him out, Cravan said, but the fight was rigged. Now, like the others, Cravan had booked passage on the Montserrat to flee Europe and avoid serving in the war. Trotsky later described him this way: “Boxer who is also a novelist and a cousin of Oscar Wilde, confesses openly that he prefers crashing Yankee jaws in a noble sport to letting some German stab him in the midriff.”45
By Cravan’s account, Trotsky sat him down one night and told him about his work as a socialist agitator. “In New York, I hope to find support—and funding—for our cause,” he quoted Trotsky as saying. “Think of it: An international movement! War will be outlawed! People will achieve economic justice!”46
Cravan recalled listening to Trotsky and shrugging him off as a sincere lunatic. He warned him to be careful, saying, “You will surely be betrayed by your comrades,” to which Cravan recalled Trotsky saying, “Thanks for the warning, my friend, but I am not so cynical.”47 The two apparently never met again.
Snow fell the night the Montserrat finally reached the other side of the ocean and slipped into New York Harbor. Excitement grew among the passengers when the engines stopped throbbing at 3 AM and the crew told them to prepare for arrival. Finally, after seventeen days, they could all get off that cramped, slow, uncomfortable little ship.
The Montserrat passed directly under the Statue of Liberty as it steamed toward lower Manhattan, though Trotsky made no mention of it. If he or the boys actually did see Lady Liberty through the fog and dark, they might have noticed shrapnel and debris defacing her on the side facing New Jersey. In July, an explosion at the nearby Black Tom military depot had destroyed two million pounds of ammunition awaiting shipment to Britain and France, including one hundred thousand pounds of TNT. The explosion had killed seven men, shattered windows on Times Square, and shaken people out of bed as far away as Connecticut. It damaged Lady Liberty so severely that tourists still were being kept outside six months later.
New York police had determined that the Black Tom explosion was no accident and focused their suspicion once again on German saboteurs. One step closer to war.
Trotsky and his family never had to set foot on Ellis Island, New York’s huge processing center for immigrants built on a small sandbar in the harbor. For first-class passengers, immigration inspectors came to the ship and examined them privately in their cabins. Natalya wore a veil that day and reportedly gave one doctor a withering stare when he tried