Land Ho! : THE ORDINARY SEAMAN.<i> By Francisco Goldman</i> .<i> Grove/Atlantic: 387 pp., $23</i>

The ship underway, we’re told as undergraduates, is a microcosm of the civilized world, of its accomplishments and failures, of its constraints and liberties. Check your Conrad, check your Melville, check your Patrick O’Brian. According to this model of the literary ship, what would we make of the craft in dry-dock? The boat full of holes, without electric power or propulsion, overrun by rats and other vermin, staffed by a crew of shellshocked landlubbers, refugees and dreamers of the American dream? For such is the case in Francisco Goldman’s promising new novel, “The Ordinary Seaman.”

Esteban Gaitan, not a day over 20, from whose point of view we are privy to most of the action, is a Sandinista, a self-described communist (“Esteban loved his battalion: His BLI [Batallon de la Lucha Irregular] conceived not to operate like a regular army unit but like guerrillas living off the land, always moving, relentlessly hunting the enemy, hounding them and sometimes fighting [the Contras] every day for weeks until they’d finally driven them back across the border”) who has borrowed the money and answered the call for marineros to escape the disenchantment of grief when his love, Marta, is lost to a firefight.

Likewise at the airport that day, with dreams of saving the wages from one last sea voyage in order to buy a chicken incubator (“because people always need chickens and eggs, especially now when sometimes in Managua you can’t buy a chicken or even an egg anywhere”), is Bernardo Puyano. He’s the lone voice of experience among the marine crew, the viejo, who has been a shipboard waiter long enough to know immediately how terribly this journey will go awry.

Much of the rest of the crew boards the plane to Nueva York at a layover in Honduras: the cook, Jose Morales; the electrician, Marco Artola; and fellow crew members Tomas Tostado, Bonnie Mackenzie (“a wiry and cherubic costeno from Puerto Cortez” [a Nicaraguan from the Atlantic Coast]); and so forth. Nine Hondurans, five Nicaraguans and one Guatemalan.

Like Esteban, who greets the trip north as the start of a “new life,” the Central Americans are animated on the plane to JFK, but as soon as they touch down the trouble begins. Their craft, the Urus, of Panamanian registry (the maritime equivalent of a particularly bad used car), has “no lights, no electricity,” as Bernardo points out without hesitation. “It’s a broken eggshell, chavalo . . . . The mooring lines don’t even have rat-guards.”

Moreover, the first tour of the Urus reveals that “the cabins and everything else in the first two stories of the deckhouse [have] been stripped of all furnishing or decoration. Even watertight doors and many of the porthole covers [have] been removed.” And if the condition of the ship is not bad enough, there is its berth to contend with--at the cheapest slip in all of Brooklyn’s neglected waterfront, with the projects abutting it: “On the other side of the wall beyond those trees over there, block upon block of government housing for the very poorest people, with different heavily armed drug gangs controlling different blocks of buildings and stretches of street,” as the Urus’ unctuous and ersatz Capt. Elias describes it.

In your literature of the sea, many strange adventures would then ensue, including but not limited to tempest, piracy and mutiny. But the Urus is not seaworthy and so the adventures, mostly opportunities for victimization of the crew, follow upon the waterfront.

First, the men are set upon by “los blacks” from “los proyectos” and liberated of their watches and their meager pocket money. Then the “captain,” nothing of the sort, promises transparently specious promotions and raises, followed by barbecues intended to soften the men to his flattery. There are also the pestilences of rats and shipboard drug addiction (Canario, Pinpoyo and El Tinieblas take up inhaling spray paint propellant), as well as the coming of autumn and, after it, winter. Finally, there’s a fire; the injury of one of the Central Americans goes untreated until Capt. Elias applies his command of herbology (“I was practically licensed in London”), with mixed results.

After some months of this, when no paychecks materialize and the ship never embarks, Esteban begins to steal ashore at night to seize contraband from nearby warehouses. Among his treasures: a giant crate of rubber diving masks and a gross of men’s underwear (in extra large). In the course of his journeys, however, Esteban also stumbles upon the Latino communities of Brooklyn and even lucks into a nova, a flame--Joaquina, cosmetician and collector of colanders--who agrees to feed him in exchange for his sweeping the front step of her salon. Romance gives him the pluck the rest of the crew cannot muster and soon Esteban is making do in Brooklyn as an illegal immigrant, working the graveyard shift at a chair factory, courting his beloved.

And, happily, because labor-related scurrilousness cannot go on forever, even in Brooklyn, the plight of the Urus soon comes to the attention of a port investigator.

Summary should make clear that despite ambition (and publisher’s promotional literature notwithstanding), there’s much about “The Ordinary Seaman” that diverges from the classic novels of the sea. Capt. Elias, a greedy and self-serving dilettante who turns out to be the owner of the Urus and thus perpetrator of its crimes (along with his first mate, Mark), has his Conradian flirtation with the jungle, described at some length in flashback, but these pages feel mannered or inherited. He’s the antithesis of a literary captain. Otherwise we find nothing of the complex psychologizing or remorseful conquest of “Moby Dick” or “Lord Jim.”

Esteban and Bernardo are handled with tremendous sympathy, but the yanqui characters--Capt. Elias and Mark--are mainly villainous or inept, without the moral verisimilitude of their Central American counterparts.

So what’s Goldman up to? In the end, his not inconsiderable accomplishment is more like what Upton Sinclair managed in “The Jungle”: a heartfelt insight into the commonplaces of a business much given to exploitation. “The Ordinary Seaman,” in this view, is a sort of anti-imperialist, post-colonial, democratic, culturally multifarious novel of the sea. Like other novels with a journalistic point of view, it therefore takes great pleasure in its truthful origins, as it should, though there is also at its close a remarkably ineffective five-page acknowledgment that dwells upon Goldman’s own sea voyages. (Stanley Elkin once said that a novel with an epigraph “knows too well what it’s about.” The same may be true of acknowledgments. The less said, the better.)

Despite these lapses, I found Goldman’s portrait of Brooklyn rich and affectionate. More realistic than Paul Auster’s “Smoke” or even the grim, antedated Brooklyn of Hubert Selby’s “Last Exit,” Goldman’s Brooklyn is made fresh: “A row of three-story old brick warehouses, windows sealed with newer brick, rows of star-shaped floor-support caps protruding. Doves cooing resonate inside this darkness too, coming from inside the warehouses, like giant brick bird-cages, warehouses full of pitch-black nothing and doves.”

Faced with this borough, many of us Brooklynites are driven by necessity into the contemplation of the East River or the Hudson--to the promise of the water.