by Voyage East- A stirring tale of the last great days of the Merchant Navy (retail) (epub)
The cabins were panelled in wood, light oak or mahogany veneers, with walnut in the passengers’ cabins. Individual decorations varied. The pin-up was indispensable among the younger men, though other spirits exhibited photographs of wives and many had those of girlfriends, cars or motor cycles, reminders of another life to be regained as soon as the calendar permitted. Among the family men pictures of children proliferated, and these were the most poignant evidence that we lived our lives in fits and starts.
The small bookshelves were usually occupied by a mixture of professional tomes, a few magazines, perhaps a serious work or two and the light reading referred to as ‘cunt-yarns’. There was occasionally a sign of a serious hobby, a box of oil paints or a half-completed model, and usually a radio or tape-recorder.
The deck officers shared their flat with the Purser, and further aft along the boat-deck, in a four-berth caboose known as ‘the half-deck’ lived the midshipmen. Beyond that lay the radio room and Sparks’s cabin. Captain Richards occupied a suite running the beam of the ship immediately under the bridge.
Below the boat deck was the promenade-deck, down the starboard side of which were quartered the engineers and electricians, the chief of whom shared a fine forward view with the passengers’ lounge. The passengers’ staterooms ran down the port side of this deck, a little larger and with better facilities than the officers’ accommodation, but scarcely luxurious.
Descending from the prom-deck, one came to the centre-castle deck with the dining saloon extending across it, except for a small cabin on the starboard side where the ‘doctor’ lived. Ship-owners were not obliged to carry a fully qualified medical practitioner if the total number of certified crew and passengers was below one hundred souls, but Holt’s regarded the matter more sensibly and we bore a male nurse on our Articles whose popular title disregarded his lack of status: we called him ‘Doc’. The Chief Steward and petty officers like the Bosun and Carpenter occupied the starboard side of this accommodation, the galley and the crew’s mess the port. Through this whole block, the upper reaches of the engine room rose in diminishing tiers to culminate high above in the huge funnel. Stores, chilled rooms and fridges lay below the centre-castle, sharing its space with the stowage areas of Numbers Three and Four hatches. At either end of the centre-castle deck was a deck-house. At the forward edge it contained the winch control gear and was called the contactor house, at the after end it was a larger affair, a ‘Liverpool House’ in which lived the seamen. Right aft, within the poop, lived Antigone’s Chinese, a small expatriate community with their own cook, mess and galley.
* * *
The Mate and I were on watch again by 0400. The wind had dropped, but a thin veil of cloud obscured the sky and time passed slowly. Dawn was a gradual infusion of light that revealed an uncertain horizon and a large, lumpy swell, the residue of the gale. There was a sticky humidity in the air that indicated our steady southerly progress across the Bay of Biscay, and slowly the ship awoke to her first ‘proper’ day.
Watch-keeping was a ceaseless routine, kept on the bridge, the engine-room and, at specified times relative to GMT and our time-zone, in the radio-room. But the domestic life of the ship was carried out by the ‘day-workers’, a portion of the seamen, the petty officers, cooks, stewards, electricians and sundry other sybarites who had all night in their bunks.
First to be called were the cooks and the stewards, the Bosun and hands (those seamen not helping the watch-keepers by standing lookouts). While the galley was stirring to life, the deck crowd turned-to, to wash down and scrub our teak decks. Only the well-decks and the forecastle were exposed steel, and there was much grime and neglect to wash out of odd corners. On the bridge the two Junior Midshipmen appeared. Their seniors were each on watches, one with the Third Mate and the other with the Second, but these boys had as their especial charge the cleanliness of the bridge itself. They had to scrub out the wheelhouse as well as their own accommodation in the two hours before breakfast, burnish the brass and sand-and-canvas the bridge rail. This abrasive scouring of the teak caprail kept it immaculate and the standards of such things were often the measure of the ship. On these points China Dick and the Mate were punctilious.
At dawn the Mate went below to shave, relieving me for the same purpose around 0700 when the Bosun would come up and they would discuss the day’s work ahead. For the first days of the voyage this consisted chiefly of repairing the ravages of a long coasting, but it also contained a component of that long battle with the sea, the maintenance of the ship against the onslaught of rust. For the time being the gale had died, and the smell of eggs and bacon uncoiled itself from the galley ventilators and wafted about the turbulent air around the bridge. By 0800 when relieved by the Third Mate, we had rediscovered both our sealegs and our appetites.
The quality of a shipping company could always be measured by the generosity of its menus. A good ship was, by definition, a ‘good feeder’. To eat well was considered part of one’s wages and, besides, meals were the focal points of the ship’s social life. A ship was ‘okay’ if you were served two eggs for breakfast. Antigone was one such ship, where fruit juice, cereals, a fried breakfast of seemingly infinite combinations, tea or coffee and toast might be finished off with wheat cakes and syrup. We ate like fighting cocks.
By noon the predicted improvement in the weather was confirmed. The overcast broke up, thinning to high altitude cloud that threw no more than a veil across the sky. A watery sun presented itself for the first time since Liverpool and we dutifully assembled on the bridge, lugging our sextants out to obtain an observed latitude by an ex-meridian sight. We were well west of the Greenwich meridian, so that apparent noon at the ship (that is to say, that moment when, through our sextants, we might visibly see the sun culminate on our meridian, reach its highest point for our latitude, and begin its postmeridian descent to the horizon and sunset) would occur well after the ship’s clocks registered twelve. We therefore cheated, shooting the sun before its culmination, assuming (pretty accurately) we knew our longitude and making a small adjustment to our readings, to compute our latitude for twelve o’clock ship’s time. This juggling of figures is central to what King Charles II rightly called the ‘arte and mysterie’ of navigation, for it is certainly no science, rather a finely-tuned series of compromises that satisfies practical demand to a remarkable degree. This was not the place to examine it too closely, for there were other aids to navigating the Bay of Biscay: radio-beacons and the distant Consol stations at Ploneis and Bushmills. Soon we hoped to raise the lighthouses of Spain and Portugal, and keep the outline of the Iberian Peninsula on our radar screen.
For the time being this noon assembly was not absolutely essential, although in deference to Captain Richards we entered into the spirit of it, each calling our sextant observation in turn, junior first. China Dick decided on a mean value from which we all computed the ship’s latitude, signing a chit to that effect and spiking it in the chart-room.
The Mate and I did better at twilight, both of us filing a proper fix, both latitude and longitude obtained from a rapid-fire series of stellar observations which put us eighty miles off the north west corner of Spain. By the time we came on watch the next morning the loom of Cape Villano lighthouse was fading astern on the port quarter and the rugged indented coast south of Cape Finisterre as far as Vigo was glowing yellow on the screen of the Kelvin Hughes radar. The wind had hauled right round, veered into the north-east, bringing off the land subtle hints of its presence which, before the days of radar and lighthouses, would have been our first intimation of its presence.
We coasted past the needle points of the Islas Berlingas, known to generations of British seamen as ‘The Berlings’, and the great estuary of the Tagus slipped astern. The cloud cleared, the afternoon turned warm and the sea deep blue. The ship ploughed a white furrow as straight as a rule. She was doing sixteen and a half knots when I took over the watch again at 1600. Cape Espichel and Punta de Sines drew astern, and the sun
dropped towards the horizon, a great red ball, expanding as it shone through the increasingly dense layers of dust that encircled the earth. This refraction played strange tricks; the sun’s perimeter seemed to ripple and flicker with a scarlet intensity that threw the sea into a jade contrast.
‘Are you hoping for the green flash?’ The Mate joined me.
‘Yes, the conditions are about right.’
‘Aye.’
As it neared the horizon the ever-expanding image of the sun seemed to strike a reciprocal frenzy from the sea. The rays of light were so vibrantly refracted that they appeared to boil the surface of the water. Watching, it was perfectly obvious how the ancients conceived the idea of the edge of the world, for was not the setting sun making it molten? In the final moments of its descent the motion of the sun was vertical. Suddenly the orb ceased to pretend it was circular, its lower ‘limb’ stretched downwards as if striking the extinguishing power of the sea. The whole mass changed shape into a vast mushroom and the glowing ball elongated briefly before it began to sink. From the extremes of the solar equator the edges of the sun’s face retreated; the semi-circle broke, as though water had rushed over it and severed its upper part. The trick of the refracted light dismembered the upper ‘limb’ and it shrank to a lenticular shape, growing ever smaller. At the instant of its disappearance it was bright green.
No wonder the ancients feared the night; refraction had given the impression of the sun’s defeat.
‘Ah,’ said the Mate, straightening up from the rail, ‘pretty good, eh?’
He was smiling with satisfaction at the splendour of the phenomenon. ‘You’d better go down and have your dinner.’
When I came back half-an-hour later and relieved him so he could eat with his passengers, we were rounding Cape St Vincent. The pink rocks of the sheer cliffs were night shadowed and to seaward there was nothing but the fading day to show where Sir John Jervis had earned his earldom and a certain Captain Nelson had saved the day by disobedience.
Even the Admiralty chart did not let one forget history hereabouts. In the great bight between Cape St Vincent and the entrance to the Mediterranean in which lay Cap Trafalgar, site of the most famous sea-fight of them all, the River Guadalquivir debouched into the Atlantic at San Lucar de Barrameda. Beside the hachured polygon that marked the town on the chart was a note that Magellan had departed from the port for the first circumnavigation of the globe in 1514.
It was a warm tribute and I know of no other such; since the demise of the fathom chart and capitulation to the French revolutionary metre I suspect it is removed. The Mate had a story of his own apprenticeship to mark it.
‘I was sent into the chart room by the Chief Officer to look at the chart and locate all the lights I should keep a lookout for. When I got back to the bridge-wing the Chief Officer asked me if I had noticed anything unusual on the chart.
‘“Yes, sir,” I said, “it mentions that Magellan sailed for the first circumnavigation in 1514.”
‘“Bollocks,” said the Chief Officer.
‘“Sir?”
‘“Bollocks, it was 1492…”
‘“Er… no sir, er, I think you’ll find, sir, that 1492 was when Columbus discovered America, sir.”
‘“Bollocks, I was in Gib bunkering when the bugger sailed past.”’
* * *
We were off Trafalgar early the next morning, no sky ‘blood red reeking into Cadiz Bay’ as Browning has it, but a fresh easterly Levanter, warm and humidly cutting up a choppy sea. Our track into the Mediterranean was through the middle of the Strait, to take advantage of the inward set that flowed there. A counter-current drifted westwards close inshore and we would make use of that when homeward bound, but at the moment, despite the contrary wind, the ship was tearing along, pushing seventeen knots as though eager to leave the Atlantic. Shortly after 0600 we altered course off Cape Spartel, close to Tangier. The lighthouse was one of the earliest maintained by international agreement and beyond it rose the toe of the Atlas Mountains. Africa almost met Europe in a mighty wall of precipitous brown rock, its vertiginous fissured face rising 2,750 feet sheer above the Gut to the summit of Sidi Musa, dwarfing the ships below. Beyond this great buttress of rock lay the Moroccan city of Ceuta. To port the white-walled Spanish town of Tarifa, the most southerly outwork of Europe, jutted a ravelin into the Strait, in the angle of which stood another lighthouse. Behind Tarifa the cordillera of Gitano rose thirty feet lower than Sidi Musa on the African shore, shrouded in cloud, as if ashamed of its inferior height. We passed between the Pillars of Hercules, the land fell away on either hand, and then to the north Algeciras Bay opened its bight to reveal the great grey slab of The Rock.
As we reported by aldis lamp to the Lloyd’s signal station next to the red and white column of Europa Point lighthouse, we underwent the subtle sea-change which accompanied the knowledge that we had passed Gibraltar and were in The Med. Rounding the Rock meant the voyage was well under way, that the first leg was over; we were reconciled to our part in it now, ceased to think of the past and began to anticipate the future.
As the passage progressed we were soothed by the ship’s routine. It was, as Conrad said, ‘a great doctor for sore hearts and sore heads… There is health in it, and peace, and satisfaction of the accomplished round… He who loves the sea loves also the ship’s routine…’ We had washed off the grime of the coasting; the teak decks were scrubbed white, the caprails on the bridge-wings and along the promenade deck had been sand-and-canvassed by the midshipmen. The brass-work was losing the verdigris of neglect and bright spots of red-lead dabbed scuffed paintwork as the bosun rendered first-aid to Antigone’s superstructure.
We did not see much of China Dick in these early days. He kept to his cabin mostly, his presence marked by the daily ministrations of his personal ‘Tiger’, Zee Pang Yun, and a steady stream of discarded gin bottles. He made his routine appearances: leading the formal little procession of senior officers on the daily inspection, taking his noon latitude and writing his night orders; but the ship, as far as the upper decks were concerned, was the domain of the Mate, the Bosun and the Crowd.
As I relieved the Second Mate at 1600 that first Mediterranean evening I found the Senior Midshipman coiling up the flex of the aldis lamp. There was an air of conspiratorial amusement I instinctively associated with the battered frigate with the pennant number F 347 on her hull that had just passed us, west-bound for Gibraltar. On the poop, the duty seaman of the twelve-to-four watch was belaying our ensign halliards after acknowledging the superiority of armed might by dipping our colours.
‘Been chatting to the Grey Funnel Line?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ the Second Mate nodded, ‘Loch Lomond… silly bastards, full of Dartmouth bullshit.’ They convulsed into laughter.
‘What’s so unusual in that?’
‘Oh, they signalled they had three Old Conways on board and asked if we could do better…’
They rocked with laughter again, sharing their private joke. ‘And?’
‘We replied: “Yes… none”.’
There was more to this exchange than mere sharp wit, for that passing frigate had touched a deep grievance rooted in the psyche of the British merchant seaman. It was a complex matter, due in part to a class-system that conferred status to naval rank and despised those engaged in trade and industry. The very content of the warship’s enquiry was evidence of the continued and assiduous cultivation of a brüderbond within the Royal Navy, a fact that added piquancy to our reply. Such things, we felt, had no place in the modern world. We were victims of that peculiarly British attitude to its revenue earners; yet in time of war we would not be gentlemen abed in England, but impressed chair à canon. It was partly a legacy of the Second World War where the lives of merchant seamen had been squandered with prodigal indifference, and partly a continuing sense of bitterness at the ramparts of privilege that the Royal Navy retained. I sailed with many men whose feeling upon this matter was intense, and the torch of
disillusion was handed on to my own generation. On that bright autumn afternoon, as we butted our way into the Mediterranean, the twelve-to-four watch had scored a notable victory for the under-dog.
We had our last glimpse of Europe at sunset; the Spanish coast turned north at Cape de Gata and the Mesa de Roldan stood black against the blood-red sky. The next dawn rose over Africa, flooding the sky with a yellow radiance above the brown coast of Algeria. Cape Tenes was jutting against the glow, lying along the prism of the starboard azimuth mirror. It was a good watch, the four-to-eight, a watch of twilights, sunrises and sunsets, those periods of infinite variety. Dawn and dusk are not sequential reversals of the same phenomenon, they have quite different characters, the first fresh and hopeful, the second weary and melancholic. These moods varied in their intensity, for the visual effects could be quite stunning, or, as we had seen in the Bay of Biscay, the mere monotonous merging of an indistinguishable sea and sky.
We had also the great satisfaction of marking those neat crosses on the chart (evidence of our activity at the crepuscular hour with sextant and chronometer) which indicated our progress from stellar fixes. And added to these natural advantages were the purely selfish considerations of eight hours below during the night, and eight hours of relative liberty during the day.
‘Me Dad doesn’t work, Miss,’ the boy was supposed to have replied to his teacher when asked what his father did, ‘he goes to sea.’
The passengers were in evidence as we passed Algiers. Their faces were more cheerful, having lost their waxy complexions. They took turns out of the wind up and down the starboard promenade deck in the sunshine. The first game of deck quoits was played during that afternoon, a tentative affair in which the Chief Engineer gave a lesson in the simple game to Mrs Saddler. She was in her mid-thirties, plumply voluptuous and pleasant looking with hair that reflected auburn lights. She was striking enough to have attracted considerable male interest and her laughter suggested it pleased her. Her husband looked on with apparent indulgence at the attention she was receiving from the Chief.