Some years ago, I came across "Steaming To Bamboola: The World of a Tramp Freighter" by Christopher Buckley. This is a slightly fictionalized (to protect the guilty) account of the author's working passage aboard an actual tramp freighter in the 1980s.

I have since mined it extensively, both for background color:

*One of the ship's heads - adjacent to the senior chief's stateroom - began to flush continuously for no apparent reason. The mechanic and his mates spent hours tinkering with it, to no effect. Then - after some two weeks of driving the chief progressively more insane - it simply stopped.

*Another head required at least half a dozen flushes to swallow so much as a cotton ball.

and for character color:

*One of the crew enjoyed the nickname Dog Breath, for his severe halitosis. This condition was only alleviated temporarily - after extensive mouthwash use - whenever said individual got shore leave (and was thus seeking to get laid).

*The book title comes from a story related to the author about another tramp, whereon a Filipino steward possessing only fractured English (but extensive knowledge of the sea around Bermuda) discovered - late one night - that the ship's heading was set directly for a reef. Said steward - unable to reset the autopilot himself - ran through the officer's quarters in a panic, pounding on doors and screaming, "Bamboola! Bamboola! We hit Bamboola!" The autopilot was reset . . . only to be found later that same night by the same steward *re-reset* for "Bamboola." [The storyteller could only speculate that someone - possibly the master - had been paid to wreck the ship for the insurance.]