Voyage East
Page 4
If my father had wished me a more sedentary occupation, he compounded the folly of that utterly thrilling steamer trip by another on the Royal Daffodil, one of the General Steam Navigation Company’s Thames steamers which took tourists round London’s Docks. Gently shoving aside the empty, drifting lighters that awaited collection by the bustling tugs, we stared at the great ships that lay in the Royal Docks. Vestey’s Stars discharged Argentine beef, the big passenger-cargo ships of the New Zealand Shipping Company and the Federal Steamship Company landed Canterbury lamb and New Zealand butter. More meat and bales of Australian wool swung out of the holds of the grey-hulled Port Line vessels and the hatches of the Shaw, Saville and Albion’s fine liners. Tea and teak came ashore from the British India ships and the bellies of the dingy cargo liners of the P & O, tucked astern of their huge, white passenger-bearing sisters, the Canton and the Chusan. At the far end of the King George V Dock where we swung with a great thrashing of paddle wheels, were two modestly elegant cargo-liners, their vast funnels black above red. They had an impressively workmanlike appearance as fitted the successors of the China clippers. The Glenartney was discharging tea and rubber, the Glenearn loading ‘general’ for the Far East. I did not know it then, but I was to sail on both of them in later life. A few foreigners were tolerated in this Pale, a single vessel of the United States Line and a former enemy, regarded oddly by many of the occupants of the Daffodil’s deck, a mail-liner of the Nippon Yusen Kaisha. Somehow these foreigners were a counterpoint. All, all without exception, were heroic to me, opening vistas that stretched vast beyond the airless boredom of the classroom.
The books were chiefly to blame. That first of English novels, Robinson Crusoe, and the exciting shipwrecks of Marryat and Ballantyne, led on to more specialised reading. In Alan Villiers I found a mentor more comprehensible than the magister who failed to coach me beyond the second declension of Latin nouns. But I had been born too late to cruise on the Joseph Conrad and the last commercial barque to fly the red ensign, the Garthpool, had been wrecked before Hitler’s war. I had once seen the rusting hulk of a deep-water sailing vessel decaying in Ramsgate harbour, but she was unseaworthy and the revival of sail in Great Britain was, as yet, some years off. What was to be done?
Amongst the debris of war a few battered sailing dinghies had found their way into the ownership of the Sea Scouts and the stories of Arthur Ransome stimulated the idea of self-generated adventure. I learned how to use a sextant aboard Scott’s tethered Discovery and pulled bow-oar in whalers on the tidal waters of the Thames. When a crew was to be found from among British scouts to enter the sail-training race of 1960, my parents generously bent to the seaward-blowing breeze and I spent much of my final exam year afloat. After successfully competing in the North Sea race from Oslo to Ostend aboard Hugh Astor’s beautiful yawl Nordwind, I scraped by some fluke into the indentured employment of Alfred Holt, as a midshipman. Fortunately Holt’s were eclectic in the selection of their trainees. There were young men from Gordonstoun and Wellington as well as from the secondary-moderns of Merseyside. Those from the training establishments of Conway and Worcester, or the School of Navigation at Warsash, earned remission on the length of their apprenticeships. This made a possible age-difference on entry of between sixteen and eighteen. I was sixteen, with four years to serve. What we experienced in common was a gruelling Outward Bound Course at Eskdale or Aberdovey, where our weaknesses of character or physique were expertly exposed. Only survival of this ordeal with a good report meant that Holt’s would accept us.
Like Melville’s Ishmael, I found myself accommodated in a twin-berthed room, above the porticoed entrance of the Company’s hostel in Liverpool, unaware that occupation of the room contracted certain obligations. In a thoroughly seamanlike manner I had battened the window against the stink of an oil refinery across the river and turned in, uncertain who was supposed to occupy the other bed. My Queequeg turned out to be an angry and very senior South African midshipman with the name of a Boer general who, after climbing a drain-pipe, expected the window to be open. His return after lights-out from an evening of fornication was marred by my ignorance, and he revenged himself by walking unceremoniously across my bed.
‘Liverpool judies know the score, when a merchant seaman walks ashore’ went the old sea-song, but neither they, nor we, were indiscriminately promiscuous. Nevertheless, sexual torments were inescapable and how men dealt with them determined their character at sea. Incurable romance was the anodyne chosen by the Antigone’s Chief Mate; others fell victim to drink; some merely submitted willingly to the great worm of lust. Even staid married men were cankered, and the permissive society of the 1960s undermined many marriages. None of us was a saint and all suffered more or less from the affliction or its remedy.
What then was the lure, as the Mate had asked me? Mere childhood illusions mostly; later augmented by the practical necessity of earning one’s keep and, later still, the comfort of the familiar. ‘Like habitually drinking in a shitty pub’, the Mate was to say to me later in the voyage when we were discussing the matter.
‘So you want to be a Blue Funnel master?’ the huge, bearded and beer-goitred Second Mate of the Glenartney had asked me on my first voyage as a midshipman.
‘Yes sir,’ I had replied, astonished by the wild laugh he brayed into the night. I thought I could hear its echoes that windy, grey morning as, free of the lee of Ireland, the Atlantic Ocean heaved beneath our keel. But that was the nub of the matter. It has an unfashionable, elitist ring now, this matter of command, but the guts of it were not about the domination by one of many. Most of those who went to sea did not sail as masters, mates or even aspiring cadets. Most fulfilled other functions as engineers, seamen, sparkies, stewards, all ideas of ultimate responsibility far from their minds. The powers of the master were rarely deeply resented, the yoke of articled agreement was freely entered into, and if it gave the master feudal powers in theory, these were in practice rarely invoked and when they were, proved largely empty. In exchange one gained access to two thirds of the planet’s surface. Old Men were as necessary as rudders.
For me, command of a ship offered a medium in which my hitherto unrevealed skill might find expression. Seamanship would be my vocation, my own attempt at excellence. Active command of a ship, therefore, was concerned not with domination, but with self-fulfillment. And if this seems overly self-indulgent, it was loaded with such a weight of responsibility that it presented a challenge for, as Conrad put it, ‘The genuine masters of their craft… have thought of nothing but of doing their very best by the vessel under their charge. To forget oneself, to surrender all personal feeling in the service of that fine art, is the only way for a seaman to the faithful discharge of his trust.’
So I thought at sixteen, and so my positive affirmative provoked the mirth of the Glenartney’s Second Mate. This sense of pervading disillusion was the first intimation that all might not be quite as I had imagined. Were all those books wrong? Had I read on, Conrad would have provided his own caveat: ‘The taking of a modern steamship about the world (though one would not minimize its responsibilities) has not the same quality of intimacy with nature, which… is an indispensable condition to the building up of an art… It is, in short, less a matter of love.’
Alas, one did not read or understand such warnings at sixteen.
* * *
And so Antigone rolled and pitched upon her southward way, her new crew full of the sadness of farewell. This the sea embittered with more of her ‘murderous innocence’, throwing our unsteady bodies about until our heads cleared of the fumes of the taproom and our sea-legs returned.
Below the bridge the Junior Midshipman carried out the duties of mess-peggy, scrubbing out the half-deck for his seniors. Periodically he retched and spewed miserably. The contents of his bucket slopped across the deck and his chief admonished him: ‘If you want sympathy at sea, you’ll find it in the dictionary between shit and syphilis.’
By that first noon of t
he voyage Antigone was clear of the land, stretching her course across the maw of the Celtic Sea and the chops of the Channel, with the Atlantic and the Bay of Biscay ahead. Out here in the open ocean, the wind was more regular, a strong air-stream of 35 to 40 knots, the Force Eight of Admiral Beaufort’s notation. Damp showers of rain swept down upon us, leaching the colour out of the day and rolling off to leeward where the surge of the waves beat on the iron-bound coast of Cornwall beyond the horizon. It was too overcast for sights of the sun at noon and I contented myself with recording the weather, dutifully writing ‘S.W.-8’ upon the slate.
‘D’you know, Laddie,’ remarked the Mate in his odd, didactic way, ‘he used to sleep with his sister?’
I looked up, uncertain of whom he spoke. ‘Pardon?’
‘Your Admiral Beaufort.’
He seemed to fix me with his eyes, a man climbing out of the shell of shoreside existence in the same way as China Dick had proved himself in the early hours of the same day. He made me, it seemed, an accomplice to this historic incest; shock treatment, testing reaction.
‘Aye, bloody odd lot, sailors,’ and he turned to the Old Man who had just entered the chart-room, while I escaped to the open air of the bridge-wing.
The afternoon passed in a state of limbo as Antigone continued to roll and pitch through heavy seas. Her motion was a product not merely of the weather, but also of the genius of her designer, for she shipped little water. On her forecastle, her ‘pointed’ bow was elliptical, though at her waterline below, her cutwater was sharp as a knife. The originator, Holt’s chief naval architect Henry Flett, had developed this idea from the successful hulls built just prior to the Second World War for the Glenearn-class. Like the ‘three-island’ hull, the great funnel and the pronounced sheer, it was characteristic of Holt’s ships.
Unlike a sailing vessel whose hull, though enormously stressed in other ways, never has to contend with the head-on collision of heavy seas, a steam or motor ship has to be built to withstand enormous forces meeting her bow. The sailing ship cannot sail into the wind and so her motion is more regular. Driven by the same force which moves the surface molecules of the sea, a sailing ship’s hull achieves a sympathetic motion, steadier and more rhythmical, despite the fact that for weeks she may heel to leeward. But a power-driven vessel is forced forward in any direction. When that direction is to windward, into the wind-created sea, she adds to her forward motion an upward and a downward component which is a function of the period of the seas and her length and speed. A fine, razor-bowed ship will slice through such seas, but she will ship water, making her sluggish and dangerous in really heavy weather, so that what advantage she has in initial speed will be swiftly lost as conditions deteriorate. Indeed, this shipping of water may result in more than a loss of speed or damage to her deck fittings and cargo; such a vessel may be overwhelmed and founder. It is therefore desirable that the extremities of a hull, which for obvious reasons taper, also contain some volume, or reserve buoyancy.
Compromise governs the designs of many things, perhaps none more so than a ship which has both to float and move forward to fulfill its existence. Flett recognised the tremendous forces to which a bow, thrust out of a wave and unsupported by anything but air, was subjected. As the hull tipped, the same bow, driven onwards by its motive power and accelerated by gravity, dropped some forty feet into solid water and the breast of the next wave. Such pounding up and down with sudden accelerations and decelerations caused ‘panting’ forces within the hull. In heavy weather this was quite audible, and clearly even the speed with which the hull allowed this deceleration to occur was a matter of delicate compromise.
Flett’s solution was to build an immensely strong hull and provide it with as sleek an underwater body as cargo-carrying capacity would allow, paying particular attention to it at its entrance, that is, the shape of the forward waterline. In moderate weather the hull possessed the virtues of a slim shape. Above this, however, he flared out the bow so that, between the vertical plating at the cutwater and the forecastle bulwards, the shell plating curved through some forty degrees.
As Antigone plunged into Biscay’s great seas the bow was slowed in its descent, the frustrated water was thrust outwards, away from the decks which remained substantially dry to all but spray and the twin jets that snorted up her hawse pipes. The great strength of her build prevented damage at the most vulnerable point of a hull, one third of her length from the bow. Here, Antigone was strapped with massive butts, five lines of rivets holding them secure.
All these refinements in which we put unthinking trust did nothing to stop the inevitable motion. Of the passengers we had as yet seen nothing, except for one stalwart grey-haired gentleman who had gallantly attempted a few circuits of the promenade deck. The dreary routine of four-hours-on and four-hours-off in such conditions so numbed the brain that it missed all but the most obvious perceptions. Neither the Mate nor I was sorry that the continuing gale and the grey fractus that overcast the sky were going to prevent us obtaining a position by the stars. Antigone ran on into the night during the four-to-eight watch on dead-reckoning. Our position was in the northern part of the outer Bay of Biscay, well west of Ushant, and China Dick had decreed that our fortuitous occupation of the watch nicely enabled us to set our proper sea-watches. We would be followed during the eight-to-twelve by the Third Mate. In turn he would be relieved by the Second Mate for the twelve-to-four. Both officers would be assisted by a midshipman. We used no fancy naval terms for our watches, they were known by their hours and went unchanged by any dog-watches throughout the voyage.
The light went out of the west; all was a monochromatic meeting of sea and sky, relieved only where a wavecrest tumbled over. The air was filled with the roar of the gale and the damp sting of salt spray that periodically swept aft over the bridge-wings. In the stays and heavy wire funnel guys it howled a note or two higher, while the crash and hiss of the sea and the thunder of the diesels throbbed below. Beneath our feet the deck see-sawed with the pitch, and oscillated with the roll. These rhythms were interrupted as the bow rose, the screw was forced down into deeper water and the ship climbed against the sky. Then the wave passed under the hull’s point of equilibrium and the immutable laws of physics resolved themselves. The bow dipped, sliding downwards in a sharp dégringolade to thrust itself into the next wave, sending a great half-moon of white water out round the bow. At the same instant she jerked with a shudder felt throughout her length at the braking force acting upon her and, casting her stern into the air, her screws came up into the passing crest where less-dense, aerated water caused her propellor to race, shaking her other extremity. Such a buffeting speeded up the nervous reactions necessary to reacquire our sea-legs and, as the day faded, most of us achieved this little miracle of evolution. Below the passengers lay, wondering how much of this punishment the ship could take, certain that she was breaking up, that their doom was imminent, only to be vastly disappointed a day or two later when China Dick declared it had been ‘No more than a bit of a blow.’
But the watch-keepers had their first reward of the voyage. Just at sunset a narrow, horizontal fissure split the clouds to the west. It opened for no more than a minute or two, a great rent spreading across the western horizon for perhaps thirty miles. It showed the sky beyond as a red slash of blood, masked almost as soon as it appeared, the winking of a huge, crepuscular eye that presaged a fair tomorrow.
As night claimed us I was kept busy. All day we had seen ships passing north, bound for Liverpool or Glasgow from the Mediterranean, often on the dead reciprocal course to our own that required an alteration of heading to starboard in accordance with the ‘rule of the road’. Now we met a drifting fleet of Breton tunnymen, riding out the worst of the gale until they could get their gear over again and fill their fish holds. The bright illumination of their decks eclipsed their navigation lights and we could see the violence of their rolling motion as they corkscrewed wildly, infinitely worse off than ourselves.
The Mate joined me on the port bridge-wing where I leaned on the rail, waiting for my relief and the prospect of eight hours below.
‘They’re the real sailors,’ he said, nodding at a gyrating hull half a mile away. I had been right; the romantic was beginning to show his true colours.
* * *
Theoretically, it might be supposed, somewhere aboard a ship labouring in heavy weather there should be a null point, where the motion is least felt. After all, if the bow rises and the stern falls, a natural fulcrum must exist where the hull does neither. Coming below, one fervently wished for that centre of inactivity to be under the pillow on one’s bunk. Alas, theory is unhorsed by practice. The ship moves simultaneously on several axes and if such an approximate null exists anywhere it is suspended uselessly in the great void spaces of the engine room.
It is a hallmark of the seamen that he can sleep anywhere and at any time, but so early in the voyage after unbroken nights of shore-side sleep, the habit has yet to be re-formed. After the elemental racket of the bridge, however, one’s cabin represented a haven. The deck-officers were accommodated below the bridge, on the boat-deck abaft the master’s suite, their cabins surrounding a communal bathroom and a small central stair-well which led, via the promenade deck lobby, to the saloon on the centre-castle. The rooms themselves were sparsely comfortable. Washbasin, mirror, waterglass and carafe occupied a section of bulkhead next to a small chest of drawers. Against the outboard bulkhead stretched the settee, or day-bed, provided by a munificent Company for those cat-naps that revived the spirit, and on which one might sit to write at the adjacent table. The other bulkhead was occupied by a high bunk over more drawers, and a small wardrobe. The bunk was furnished with leeboards to prevent one being utterly rolled out.