by Voyage East- A stirring tale of the last great days of the Merchant Navy (retail) (epub)
‘There’ll be a wee spot o’ trouble with that one,’ remarked the Mate darkly as he came up from the boat deck, sniffing the perceptibly warmer air after the damp misery of the Atlantic. ‘Cape Bougaroni by the end of the watch?’
I laid our 2000 position off the Cape on the chart, handed over to the Third Mate and went below.
‘Beer?’ offered Mike, the Second Mate.
‘Yes. Thanks. I thought you’d be turned in.’
‘Tried, but couldn’t drop off.’
We sat in Mike’s cabin and opened two cans of Tennant’s lager that he took from a case beneath his settee, smacking our lips appreciatively. I lit a cigarette. A large photograph of a pensively beautiful woman stared at us. It was the only decoration in the cabin. He followed my gaze and his eyes narrowed.
‘Any kids?’ I asked, vaguely embarrassed.
‘No.’ He paused, then asked, ‘You married?’
‘Me? Good God, no!’
‘Foot-loose and fancy-free, eh?’ Again that familiar refuge in a cliché.
‘No, not exactly… but nothing permanent.’
‘Best keep it that way.’
‘You don’t recommend marriage then?’ I asked, beer-emboldened and staring at the photograph. He too looked at the picture.
‘No. Not if you’re going to stay at sea.’
‘Well, the Mate’s not married and he’s not what you’d call radiantly happy.’
‘No, but he’s content… no worries… there’s a difference.’
‘Oh.’ An awkward silence fell between us. The woman’s impassive stare was putting me on edge. ‘And you’re intending to stay at sea, are you?’ I asked to break the silence.
He shrugged, then bent and took out two more cans of lager. ‘What else can one do?’ He was twenty-seven and a master-mariner.
‘Does your wife work?’
‘Yes… teacher.’
‘She’s, er, very beautiful.’
‘Yes. That’s the trouble…’
* * *
Algeria became Tunisia during the night and we were off the island of Galita at dawn. Among the ships’ lights around us were a set coming up astern at a spanking pace. I plotted her on the radar: twenty-one knots, a passenger liner or fast cargo ship. To starboard Africa humped up and out, a salient stretching towards Sicily and the Calabrian toe of Italy. One recalled it as the home of ancient Carthage and classroom memories stirred of Regulus being rolled down-hill in a nail studded barrel: Carthago delenda est. The land fell away into the Gulf of Tunis and the fast ship astern came roaring up abeam of us. The Mate joined me on the bridge as we admired her sleek hull and the effects of her bulbous bow. The innovative new hull was one of the first to be built for Holt’s, to Lloyd’s A100+ standards and therefore less massive than Antigone. She was a precursor of more stringent economic times.
‘Glenlyon, eh,’ remarked the Mate, lowering his binoculars.
‘Yes. I was a midshipman on her maiden voyage; joined her at the builders…’
She swept past us without doing more than acknowledge our dipped ensign, her master a little senior to our own and a well-known stickler for rigid bridge routine and radio silence.
‘The old bastard,’ said the Mate without rancour, turning to the Bosun who had come up onto the bridge for his daily orders. The two men leaned companionably on the rail, discussing the day’s work.
The Crowd were called out at 0530 and turned-to half an hour later. Pre-breakfast routine was the same every day the ship was at sea. The decks were washed down and ‘barbarised’ when required to maintain their whiteness; the junior midshipmen scrubbed out the wheel-house and polished the bridge brasswork, while the Carpenter and his Chinese mate took the daily soundings of all oil and water tanks, chalking the results on the boards on the bridge and engine room, for such matters were of crucial importance to our stability, trim and draught, and the cause of much worry to my watch-mate. At that moment, however, in conversation with the Bosun he was relaxed and the result of their conspiracy became obvious after breakfast.
It began at exactly one minute after 0900, an orchestrated cacophony that lasted, with the statutory interval for Smoke-O, until noon. The thunderous persistence of a Kango hammer was supported by the battering staccato of chisel-peined chipping hammers which varied according to the energy of the individual operator. The entire Crowd was attacking the fore-deck rust, backed up by the two junior midshipmen who laboured grubbily with the mariners even if they were permitted to eat with the gentlemen. In blue denims and checked shirts, the Crowd dispersed along the scuffed and rusting steel-work under the eagle-eye of the Bosun; they set up a noise that reverberated throughout the fabric of the ship, carried to its furthest extremity by the unique telegraphy of the riveted plates.
Up and down the isolated forward section of the boat-deck immediately under the bridge, China Dick strode ferociously, from port to starboard, to and fro with the measured tread that would eat up five miles in sixty feet laps before he called for his Tiger and a large gin. Above him we calibrated the ship’s radio direction finder, using the distant lighthouse on Cape Bon. This was a periodic job, comparing the equipment’s radio-bearings with those taken visually as we passed the lighthouse. Errors in radio-bearings were caused by the distorting properties of the ship’s fabric. In addition to its conspicuous visual characteristics, Cape Bon was fitted with a radio-beacon, whose signals we could interpret on our direction-finder. It seemed that this metallic refraction was actually audible as the Crowd hammered their way through the forenoon.
There was no chipping or scaling in the afternoon. The time was hallowed for siestas, for watch-keepers’ supplementary dozing and passengers’ relaxation. The Crowd swapped their keen-edged hammers for paint brushes, and ladled red-lead upon the bared steel; for a night’s dew, or a patter of spray would start the relentless oxidisation of the steel again. The ship swung into the Malta Channel and raised the distant blue peak of Pantellaria island. The wind dropped and by the evening the lights of Gozo and Malta sparkled to the northwards. We laid a rhumb-line course for the Nile Delta and left the land astern.
It would take us two and a half days to transit the Eastern Mediterranean, two and a half days of astro-navigation out of sight of land, pursuing an easterly heading. This made dawn earlier every day, sunset later. Our ship’s time revolved around noon, originally the traditional start of the new ‘day’ and still used navigationally in the ‘day’s work’, that combination of the course and distance-made-good since the previous noon. If ship’s officers were shooting the sun for latitude, this had to be done at ‘apparent noon’, detectable by sextant as the moment the sun’s observed arc of transit across the sky culminated on the meridian. This was due south (if one was in the northern hemisphere and north of the sun, as we then were), or due north (if one was south of the sun). For practical reasons this observed apparent noon had to be made to coincide as nearly as possible with twelve o’clock, ship’s time, so the Antigone’s clocks were advanced at midnight. At our present latitude a day’s run approximated to a change of longitude of 7½°, and this was a time difference of half an hour. At midnight, therefore, we had been shifting the clocks ahead thirty minutes. The eight-to-twelve and twelve-to-four watches split the difference, the rest of us lost sleep. As we arrived at our various ports of call we should thus automatically be on the local time (zones being an hour earlier than GMT, or UMT as it now is, for every 15° of easterly longitude).
As we approached Port Said we met other ships. A few converging with us, more diverging in the opposite direction, spewed out of the canal in the daily convoys organised by the Suez Canal Authority. We were again overtaken, this time by Ixion, a larger, faster, steam-turbine driven ship bound for Australia with thirty-six passengers. We occupied our watches below writing letters and later, turning out to answer the summons of clamorous klaxons that called us to muster at our boat and fire stations. This exercise, known as ‘Board of Trade Sports’, was a Friday ritual ob
served by British merchant ships all over the world. The day closed with a wintry northern overcast and spectacular forked lightning through heavy cloud bellying down over Egypt.
The following morning we sighted Brulos lighthouse and at 0800, off the Damietta Mouth of the Nile, we met Glenfalloch, homeward bound and speaking of delays in the canal. Just before noon, nine days out from Liverpool, we dropped anchor in company with thirty other ships off Port Said. To the south the low alluvial coast of Egypt stretched away, broken in its monotony by the lighthouse, minarets and huddle of buildings that marked the northern entrance to the Suez Canal. Ixion was already at anchor, though Glenlyon had made the previous day’s southward convoy. Lloyd Triestino’s new cargo-liner Palatino also lay at anchor, but dominating us all was the grey bulk of the aircraft carrier, HMS Eagle.
‘Brought up,’ said the Mate on the telephone from the forecastle, indicating the anchor flukes had bitten and would hold the ship.
‘Finished with engines, Mister,’ responded Captain Richards, his battered old glasses on the aircraft carrier. ‘Bloody bastards…’ he said, turning away for his cabin.
A Dismal but Profitable Ditch
At noon the pilot, a huge bullet-headed, handsome Egyptian, brought Antigone through the breakwaters, past the plinth of De Lesseps’s memorial. We moored in the tiers on the Sinai side, lying at right angles to the canal. Across our anchored bow, beyond the main fairway, Port Said shimmered in the hot sun. Our stern was tethered to the east bank, where lay the low and less salubrious huddle of Port Fuad. All the south-bound cargo and passenger ships moored within the port. Tankers, returning to the Persian Gulf for crude oil, remained outside, their empty tanks potentially dangerous with the explosive fumes of their last cargoes, objects of cautious handling by the Canal Authority. Only one tanker was laden, a Russian ship, down to her marks with Ukrainian crude oil and partnered by an Odessa-registered cargo-ship: Soviet vessels, like nervous spinsters, invariably travelled in pairs. On our port side lay a gleaming white Greek passenger liner while to starboard our old friend Clan Ranald had caught us up.
The missing statue of De Lesseps was the only evidence of the troubled days of 1956. Apart from the natural desire of the near-indigent to rook us, the bum-boat people of Port Said, with whom the ship swarmed during the long, hot afternoon, seemed to bear us no ill-will. On the contrary, they still addressed us as ‘McGregor’ with a cunning and feigned obsequiousness that seemed a throwback to earlier, colonial times. Their infamous obscene photographs had a dated air, vintage couplings over which the Eighth Army might have tittered, and, with swordsticks, whips, wooden camels, rugs and sandals, as well as common necessities such as soap-powder and razor blades, formed their traditional wares. These vendors came under the auspices of an entrepreneur named ‘Rifle-Eye’, a man disfigured as a result of some alleged incident with an infantry rifle. One of these opportunist rogues had ventured into the officers’ alleyway and accosted me as I returned from reading the ship’s draught in the agent’s launch.
‘Hey, McGregor, what you want, eh? Shufti? Pictures? Spanish Fly? I got very good Spanish Fly…’
He was barefoot and villainous-looking under a grubby turban, and wore what might once have been a Dunn’s sports-jacket over a ragged robe.
‘Very good,’ he repeated, waving a small phial of cloudy liquid under my nose.
‘Tell him to fuck off.’ The Mate appeared from his cabin. ‘Go on Ali, fuck off. Take that camel-piss away…’ With a fatalistic shrug, the Egyptian went in search of easier prey.
‘You shouldn’t encourage the buggers,’ he grumbled to me. ‘Go and tell those middies that I want one of them on each watch going through the canal.’ He took the draught-chit from me and retreated to his cabin and his interminable responsibilities.
In the half-deck I found the midshipmen being entertained by the Gully-gully man.
‘Gully, gully, gully, gully…’
A small, bewildered and occasionally squeaking yellow chick was disappearing under one of three bronze cups and reappearing under a different one or from the Junior Midshipman’s nose with bewildering rapidity. The magician, dressed well in light-weight jacket, slacks and casual shoes, was a more urbane and acceptable rogue than the aphrodisiac-seller. He looked up at my intrusion.
‘Ah, Mr Mate, how are you sir? I remember you last trip, ’nother ship, Glenearn…’
He was right, of course. ‘Hullo, how are you?’
‘I do special trick for you.’ He turned to the Junior Midshipman who sat in stunned wonderment. ‘You give me coin please? Any coin.’
‘Go on, give him something’, the Senior Midshipman bullied, affecting a worldly indifference to the proceedings but unable to tear himself away. Reluctantly the boy rose, produced a half-crown and put it in the gully-gully man’s outstretched palm with the bereft air of someone who had unwillingly given away his last crust.
The Gully-gully man pulled out a playing card, gave it to the boy and asked him to mark it with a pencil. Mesmerised, we watched the boy obey.
‘Now, I give you money back, you look at money. See, it is same money… now you fold money in card… look at card, six of diamonds, okay? Now you fold card tight. Okay?’
The Junior Midshipman followed the instructions carefully, his face showing suspicion, concentration and curiosity.
‘Now, hold out hand with card and money…’
‘Gully, gully, gully, gully…’ The magician made a series of elaborate passes over the boy’s hand. ‘You still holding card and money?’ The boy nodded. ‘Good, now you go and throw over the side.’ The midshipman hesitated, looked around at our faces, hoping one of us was going to tell him not to be a fool. At last, without a word he rose, went out onto the boat deck and hurled the tiny parcel over the lifeboat into the water far below. When he had resumed his seat the Gully-gully man produced eggs and chicks from various bodily apertures and then, quite suddenly, there was a crushed playing card, apparently pulled from someone’s nose. He held it out to the Junior Midshipman. The boy unfolded the marked six of diamonds, lifted out the silver coin and confirmed it was the same 1953 half-crown. He looked up at the de-camping Gully-gully man with total mystification.
An hour later Eagle came in from the roads. The vast grey bulk of the aircraft-carrier with its sinister hum of internal machinery slid across our bows, her upper decks, devoid of aircraft, filled with an untidy milling of her company in their fatigues rig. Clearly her captain had decided against making a show of naval pomp. The ugly, angular shape of her island dominating her asymmetrical hull made an odd contrast to the little schooner that slipped out from Port Fuad in her gigantic shadow. Later we heard the strains of her bugle at sunset and could see, beyond our Greek neighbour, the great white ensign slide smoothly down her staff.
We were still awaiting orders to proceed south into the canal at four the next morning. The Mate and I lounged on the bridge, wrapped in the fragrance of his tobacco smoke.
‘I went ashore here once,’ the Mate remarked, ‘you rode about in an open carriage. Probably still do…’
The shimmering water of the canal reflected the lights of Port Said, opposite, periodically obscured by the intervening bulk of the ships of the north-bound convoy as they passed on their way into the Mediterranean. Running in and out between them the agents’ and pilots’ launches attended to the final business of the canal transit without slowing the great ships. This bustling activity set the reflections of the lights dancing and it was clear that our own wait would not last much longer.
‘I rather like the Gyppoes,’ went on the Mate, puffing out clouds of St Bruno. ‘Likeable rogues, considering what we did to them in fifty-six.’
He had obviously mellowed since his ejection of the cantharides seller that afternoon. ‘There’s no malice in them. I suppose it comes of living on the breadline. When I went ashore here we sat outside a cafe. A wee laddie came up to us. “Hey Joe,” he said, “you want jig-a-jig? You want my sister? Only leetle-b
it syphilis…”’
The VHF radio-telephone squawked into life. We were ordered under way at once, the pilot would board in minutes. ‘Wait for bloody hours and then you have to panic,’ grumbled the Mate as he roused the ship and we hurried to stations, hoisting up a canal boat and its crew of three men who would accompany us and assist in mooring Antigone when it became necessary. Their neat, brightly painted boat hung from a derrick wire, lashed at the rail abreast Number Four hatch while its crew set on tawdry rugs spread on the hatch tarpaulin, bowing in prayer towards Mecca at the appointed hours. It was already dawn when we finally moved off into the canal. Eagle led us, followed by the immaculate Greek liner, her white hull and superstructure on fire from the sudden spread of sunlight, picked out with the traditional blue of her national colours. The intense pride was typical of Greek seafarers and was emphasised by her ensign staff, a barber’s pole of blue and white spirals.
We were the next vessel, letting go our stern ropes and weighing anchor, to edge ahead under easy revolutions of our screw and full port helm. Behind us fourteen cargo ships and as many tankers followed us, all these last (except the single Russian) in ballast, bound for the Persian Gulf and the oil terminals of Kharg Island, Ras Tanurah and Mina al Ahmadi. The canal ran dead straight on its first southward leg. To port stretched the seemingly endless eastward vista of ochre sandhills, the shifting barchans of the Sinai desert. An occasional nomad on his camel breasted the slope and stared at the passing ships. To starboard a strip of palms and scrub lined the twin arteries of road and railway that accompanied the canal south to Ismailia. The three means of transport seemed to huddle together for company as they assaulted this level and terrible terrain. Beyond, the great lagoon of Lake Manzala was dotted with the high lateen sails of feluccas shining in the morning sunshine, reminding us of the presence of the Nile.