Rare 1943 US Seaman’s Passport With Border Stamps

The Only Stamped US Seaman’s Passport I’ve Ever Found

I have handled several US Seaman passports over the years, but until this one landed on my desk, I had never seen a single one carrying border stamps. That alone would make it worth writing about. What makes it a genuine puzzle is that the stamps in this booklet were applied years after the entire document type had officially ceased to exist.

A Wartime Passport That Was Never Supposed to Be Stamped

I always wondered why Seaman passports came back from my research completely unstamped, so I put the question to an officer at the U.S. Department of State who dug through the archives on my behalf. Her reply pointed me to the legal foundation of the whole program:

“On June 21, 1941, Congress passed 55 Stat. 252 amending law from WWI which effectively required everyone entering or leaving the United States to carry a passport. Department Order 1003 outlined the particulars which put the law into effect at 0600 on January 15, 1942. I can’t find any mention anywhere about whether stamps would or would not be put in the passport. However, it was only required as a war measure to identify who came and went. As such, I could see why there wouldn’t have been a need to put stamps in the books and why it might have been a security measure not to record their comings and goings. Or it could just be that they were moving from the continental U.S. to U.S. bases or territories and therefore wouldn’t have needed stamps.”

That June 1941 act (55 Stat. 252) is well documented: it revived the wartime passport control originally established under the Travel Control Act of 1918, and it’s the same statute the National Archives cites as the legal basis for mandatory US passports from 1941 onward. The Seaman’s passport itself was a narrower, purpose-built offshoot of that system, introduced specifically for merchant mariners on February 23, 1942, a few weeks after the general passport requirement took effect.

Richard Henry Carignan, Eighteen Years Old, Hartford, Connecticut

This particular passport was issued to Richard Henry Carignan of Hartford, CT. Richard was born on October 31, 1924, which made him barely 18 when the passport was issued on July 15, 1943, right in the thick of the Battle of the Atlantic. His booklet carries two separate serial numbers, something I don’t see often: No. 118013 stamped at the upper margin, and US 24260 at the lower margin.

Richard’s passport didn’t arrive alone. It came bundled with two reference letters from American Export Lines, the New York shipping company that operated troop and cargo transports for the U.S. War Shipping Administration throughout the war. Alongside those were his U.S. Merchant Marine Officer licenses dated June 1956 and a U.S. Coast Guard Certificate of Discharge from April 1953, a small paper trail that lets you follow this one sailor from wartime teenager to postwar licensed officer.

Istanbul in 1951, Alexandria in 1953

Here’s where the document stops being merely rare and starts being genuinely strange. On the last page, I found two border stamps: one from Istanbul, Turkey, dated 28.12.(19)51, and one from Alexandria, Egypt, dated May 28, 1953.

A Seaman’s passport with any stamp at all is unusual. A Seaman’s passport with stamps from two different Mediterranean ports, applied years apart, is something I have not encountered again since.

A Document Type That Was Already Retired

This is where the riddle deepens. Seaman’s passports were discontinued on August 28, 1945, roughly three weeks after Japan’s surrender ended the need for the wartime measure. That means the Istanbul stamp was applied more than six years after the document type stopped being issued, and the Alexandria stamp followed nearly eight years after that. Exact issuance figures for the Seaman’s passport program were never centrally published, which is part of why surviving examples, stamped or not, are so hard to come by today.

Making matters odder, Seaman’s passports carried no printed expiry date, either on the data page or in the fine print on the inner back cover. When I shared this with my contact at the Department of State, her reaction summed it up better than I could:

“What an interesting find!!! And how odd. The lack of expiry date actually throws me. Since the very beginning passports have had at least a two year from the issuance expiration date, even if not written on the document. I need to go back and view more bio pages for the seaman’s passport and then review all the regulations of the time to get a better understanding. But this is definitely a treasure!!!”

Was Richard’s Passport Still Being Honored After Discontinuation?

The obvious question is whether Turkish and Egyptian border officials simply didn’t know, or didn’t care, that this class of American document had been retired years before Richard presented it. Without an expiry date printed anywhere in the booklet, there was nothing on the page itself to tell them otherwise. It’s a small, human detail that captures how bureaucratic categories from Washington didn’t always travel cleanly to a border post in Istanbul or Alexandria.

For readers curious about a very different but equally improvised approach to wartime travel documents, I’ve also written about the Ładoś Group’s fabricated Paraguayan passports, which used forged paper to save lives rather than to record a sailor’s routine port calls, but which shares that same wartime instinct to bend a document’s rules to fit the moment.

Richard Henry Carignan’s Seaman’s passport remains, as far as I’m concerned, a great piece of US passport history and an unsolved one. If you’ve ever come across another stamped example, or have insight into how these documents were treated at foreign borders after 1945, I’d genuinely like to hear about it.

 

Tom Topol | Passport Historian & Author
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