Arthur Lewis, of Massachusetts, had served as a radioman in the Coast Guard in the 1920s, then on a Liberty ship for several years with the Merchant Marine during WWII. He was working aboard the S.S. Steel Vendor, a former troop transport that had become a commercial cargo ship after the war, when he died at sea in 1959 while transiting from a Red Sea port to Djibouti city. At the time, Djibouti was still known as French Somaliland. He was buried in a little-known Christian graveyard for foreigners in the Horn of Africa.