The Voyage to America

By 1965, Bhaktivedanta Swami had spent nearly three decades preparing, in one way or another, to carry out a single instruction from his spiritual master: preach the teachings of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu in the English-speaking West. He had the sannyasa vows, the completed First Canto of his Srimad-Bhagavatam translation, and almost nothing else. At sixty-nine, with no independent income, no institutional backing, and no contacts in America beyond a family of strangers who had agreed to sponsor his visa, he set out anyway.

Planning a Passage He Could Not Afford #

To leave India at all, Bhaktivedanta Swami needed three things he did not have: a sponsor willing to vouch for him in the United States, official clearance from the Indian government to travel, and a ticket. A sponsor eventually turned up almost by accident. Years earlier he had been a guest at the Agra home of a man whose son, Gopal Agarwal, had emigrated to America to study engineering and settled there. In conversation, Bhaktivedanta Swami had casually asked whether the son might sponsor his visa for a month. He did not know at the time how seriously the father had taken the request, but months later the paperwork arrived: an American, a stranger to him, had agreed to sponsor his entry. What happened once he reached the Agarwals' door is its own story of the precarious first year in America. The ticket was a separate problem, and a much harder one to solve.

Approaching Sumati Morarjee #

For the ticket, he turned to Sumati Morarjee, head of the Scindia Steam Navigation Company and a longstanding well-wisher — she had once given him five hundred rupees in exchange for a copy of his Bhagavatam. He asked her for free passage to America on one of her company's cargo ships. By his own account, she was reluctant, telling him plainly that his age made the undertaking questionable:

"Swamiji, you are so old, you are taking this so responsibility. Do you think it is right?"

He told her it was all right. She relented, arranged a ticket for him on one of the company's freighters, the Jaladuta, and went further still: she made sure the ship's captain, Arun Pandia, understood that his passenger was a vegetarian brahmana and arranged for extra fruit and vegetables to be carried for him on a voyage otherwise provisioned for a merchant crew.

Bureaucratic Hurdles in Delhi and Bombay #

A ticket and a sponsor were still not enough. Indian foreign-exchange regulations required a P-form sanctioning his travel, and an official at the State Bank of India initially refused to approve it, on the grounds that he was being sponsored by a private individual rather than an institution and might be left stranded abroad after a month. Bhaktivedanta Swami pressed the case upward, eventually reaching Mr. Rao, the bank's chief controller of foreign exchange, who approved the paperwork without further objection. Between the sponsor, the ticket, and this last piece of government clearance, the passage to America had taken shape only through a string of individual people deciding, each in turn, to say yes to an aging swami with no institutional standing behind him.

Departure From Calcutta #

The Jaladuta left Calcutta at nine in the morning on Friday, 13 August 1965, under Captain Arun Pandia. Bhaktivedanta Swami, sixty-nine years old, was the ship's only passenger. Ahead lay a 35-day crossing, by cargo freighter rather than passenger liner, to a country where he knew no one apart from a family that had agreed, sight unseen, to vouch for him.

What He Carried Onto the Jaladuta #

His possessions for the voyage, and for whatever came after it in America, fit easily into a small space:

• a suitcase
• an umbrella
• a supply of dry cereal
• forty Indian rupees, worth about seven US dollars
• two hundred three-volume sets of his English translation of the First Canto of Srimad-Bhagavatam

There was no money set aside for lodging, no return plan beyond the return half of his ticket, and no cushion if the reception in America proved as uncertain as the journey to reach it.

Seasickness and Two Heart Attacks at Sea #

The crossing was hard on him almost from the start. His diary, a complimentary appointment book from the shipping company that he had begun using as a travel journal, records recurring seasickness, dizziness, and vomiting through the Arabian Sea, worsening rather than improving as the days passed. On 25 August he wrote only a fragment: "Beginning from today down." The five days that follow have no entries at all. Then, on 31 August, he wrote:

Passed over a great crisis on the struggle for life and death. A separate statement has to be written on this crisis area.

He had suffered two heart attacks during those days, alone in a cabin on a cargo ship with no doctor aboard, a passenger no one on land yet knew to worry about.

A Dream and Renewed Resolve #

Years later, recalling those days in a room conversation with his own disciples, Bhaktivedanta Swami described what had gone through his mind in the middle of the crisis: a dream in which Krishna, appearing in many forms at once, was in a boat and told him not to fear, but to come along. He offered the recollection briefly and without embellishment, but its effect on him at the time was evident in what followed — the entries resume, his health stabilizes, and the diary's tone shifts from crisis to endurance.

The Rest of the Crossing #

By early September the worst had passed, though not the discomfort. Entries from the Mediterranean and the Atlantic describe fog off Gibraltar, lifeboat drills, and a slow return of appetite. On 9 September, twenty-four hours into the Atlantic crossing, he wrote that he was "taking my food regularly" and finding "some strength to struggle," adding that his real source of endurance was not the food but his ongoing reading of Chaitanya Charitamrita, which he called "the nectarine of life... the source of my all vitality." He also recorded, more than once, a longing for Vrindavan and the deities he had left behind there, alongside a plain statement of why he had left at all: to carry out the order of Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati.

A Poem Written in Boston Harbor #

On 18 September 1965, the day after the Jaladuta docked, Bhaktivedanta Swami composed a Bengali poem aboard the ship, later published under the title Markine Bhagavata-dharma. It is less a record of the voyage than a prayer addressed directly to Krishna about what came next, and it captures the same self-doubt and surrender that run through the diary itself:

How will I make them understand this message of Krishna consciousness? I am very unfortunate, unqualified, and the most fallen. Therefore I am seeking Your benediction so that I can convince them, for I am powerless to do so on my own.

Further on, he wrote of himself as an instrument rather than an agent:

O Lord, I am just like a puppet in Your hands. So if You have brought me here to dance, then make me dance, make me dance, O Lord, make me dance as You like.

He signed the poem by returning to the title he had received in 1939, treating it now as a task still unfulfilled rather than an honor already earned: "I have been designated as Bhaktivedanta, and now, if You like, You can fulfill the real purport of Bhaktivedanta."

Arrival at Boston Harbor and On to New York #

The Jaladuta docked at Commonwealth Pier, Boston, on the morning of 17 September 1965, and immigration processing took place there on the spot. Bhaktivedanta Swami then waited at the dock for several hours for a bus, arranged in advance by his American sponsor, that would carry him onward that same day. He arrived in the country with the same suitcase, the same forty rupees reduced further by five weeks at sea, and two hundred sets of a scripture translation that almost no one in America yet knew existed. What happened once that bus set out, and in the uncertain year that followed, is recounted on the struggling in New York City page.