by Voyage East- A stirring tale of the last great days of the Merchant Navy (retail) (epub)
It was an odd sensation to stare down from the elevation of the bridge at the road to Ismailia or across the arid and shimmering sands of Sinai. For three hours we steamed steadily south in the wake of the Greek liner, an easier task than might at first be supposed, for the advancing bulk of a ship’s hull pushes the water aside, increasing its density and forming a cushion on either bow which helps the helmsman keep the vessel in midstream. The atmosphere on the bridge was relaxed, the pilot giving the occasional order and the officer of the watch adjusting the speed as required. An attentive midshipman kept a careful record of all engine movements and China Dick maintained a ‘presence’, coming and going as he thought necessary. We slid past the tower and flag mast at El Qantara signal station, a vital control-point in the days before VHF radiotelephones. Shortly after El Qantara we swung into the New Cut, a five mile long lay-by where, with the help of our boatmen, we tied up to mooring points on the bank and waited for another northbound convoy to pass us.
* * *
It is often claimed that the Suez Canal killed the clipper ship by slashing 3,000 miles off the distance to the east, but the truth is somewhat more complex. By dramatically improving the long-distance performance of marine steam-engines, Alfred Holt himself had as big a hand in the murder as the canal. The expansive potential of steam had been recognised as early as 1791 when a certain Jonathan Hornblower patented a device intended to harness it, using the expanding steam vented from one cylinder to drive a larger at a lower pressure and thus increase the power of an engine. The exploitation of this theory foundered on the inability of contemporary boiler design to produce steam at a high enough pressure to harness this ‘compounding’. A John Elder had built a compound marine steam engine by adding a high pressure unit to Watt’s design, but it failed to live up to its promise and it fell to Alfred Holt to solve the problem.
Holt came from humble Lancashire stock, his family migrating to Liverpool, bringing with them a strong Unitarian tradition. Alfred himself was a clever, practical and single-minded man who became first a railway engineer, then a consultant, before finally going into ship-owning in a modest way with his brother Philip. When compelled to sell their little fleet in the face of strong competition in the West India trade, they retained one vessel, the Cleator, for experimental purposes. Encouraged by his friend and employee Captain Isaac Middleton, Alfred decided to modify the Cleator and in December 1864, having fitted immensely strong and innovative new boilers, succeeded in raising steam at 60 pounds per square inch, three times the then common working pressure. This radical improvement was combined with a new tandem compound engine to give the Cleator an increase in speed as well as a reduction in fuel consumption of a staggering 40%. Middleton took her on a proving voyage to France, Russia and South America. It was axiomatic in Liverpool shipping circles that ‘steamers may occupy the Mediterranean, may tentatively go to Brazil… but China at least is safe for sailing ships.’ To the Holts, such a shibboleth seemed ripe for destruction. In the spring of 1866, under Middleton’s command, the brand-new 2,300 ton screw steamer Agamemnon sailed for the Far East. It was the very year of the greatest tea-race of them all, when the clippers Ariel and Taeping entered the English Channel neck and neck after 14,000 miles; three years before the building of the Cutty Sark and the opening of the Suez Canal. The Blue Funnel Line was born and the China trade was no longer safe for sailing ships.
It took seven hours for the northbound convoy to pass, seven hours during which a light rain fell and the sudden damp disinterred clouds of mosquitoes whose stings added to the irritation caused by the flies that plague the country. It was dark as we approached Ismailia, named after the Khedive from whom the canny Disraeli purchased shares, so securing Great Britain a controlling interest in the canal. On our forecastle sat the huddled figure of the Electrical Officer, adjusting the beam of the searchlight. The beam picked out the sloping sides of the canal, enabling pilot and helmsman to gauge the midline of the waterway.
The lights of Ismailia slid past and the dark waters of the canal suddenly expanded into Lake Timsah, slashed by the furrowing wakes of the launches attending each ship as we changed pilots. The new pilot boarded first, relieving the old with a few words in English. I shook hands with the departing Egyptian as he swung himself over the rail. Returning to the bridge I found China Dick chatting affably to the new man, an ascetic-looking Russian named Lavrov. In addition to Egyptian nationals there were Russians, East Germans and Poles among the ranks of the Canal Authority’s pilots, replacements for the French and British ousted in 1956. China Dick showed no sign of resentment at the Russian’s presence; one seaman respected another, political camps notwithstanding. Besides, I suspected our Captain’s flinty soul approved of the hard-bitten Russian and had despised the sybaritic lifestyle of his predecessors. They chatted companionably as Lavrov gave his orders in heavily accented English and we made the short leg into the Bitter Lakes.
The Great and Little Bitter lakes were used as another passing place and here we found another north-bound convoy, only this time it was we who had precedence. The wide expanse of dark water reflected the lights of the waiting ships as we increased speed through the anchorage in rigid line astern. Here, some exegetists maintain, Yahweh divided the sea for the escape of the chosen people from the pursuit of Pharoah. Beyond the lakes we made one long slow curve to Port Tewfik and Suez Bay. Lights from pilots’ houses, administrative buildings and the huddle of the township were interspersed with the motionless dark fronds of palm trees; they slid astern as the Bosun lowered the canal boat into the water where it rode behind a massive bow-wave then slipped its painter and curled away into the desert night. China Dick waved Mr Lavrov off as the pilot launch turned away to service the next ship astern.
‘Full speed away!’ ordered China Dick, setting course. The engine-room telegraph jingled in the double-ring that told the engineers below to work Antigone’s engine up to full power and switch to the lower grade fuel that we used for passage-making. More ships lay at anchor in Suez Bay, coming in to form yet another convoy bound for the Mediterranean and Europe. Ahead of us Eagle slowed and turned her huge bulk out of the fairway, followed by the Greek liner, moving to anchor and re-embark her passengers after their diversion to Cairo and the Pyramids. One could sense China Dick’s pleasure in leading the convoy past the screw-pile lighthouse on the Newport Rock and into the narrow corridor of the Gulf of Suez.
We left Conrad’s ‘dismal but profitable ditch’ behind. Being a sailing-ship man he could not be expected to regard it with anything other than a jaundiced eye. For myself, I thought it wholly appropriate that Nasser had nationalised it in the name of the fellahin; they had precious little else.
The Gate of Tears
Dawn came up fantastically; the shadowed mountains of Sinai striated and fissured in deepest purple, their jagged summits etched hard against the luminous east. To the west a similar landscape emerged rose-coloured in the growing light, while the sea between the two escarpments ran blue, its wave-caps sparkling whiter and whiter in the intensifying daylight. We were launched on one of the world’s oldest trade routes, ancient beyond the memory of European history and revived by the cutting of the Suez Canal. The gulf and the Red Sea beyond form part of the Great Rift Valley that runs from the River Jordan to the great lakes of Africa and nowhere is this splitting of the earth’s crust more vivid than in the Gulf of Suez, where the faults stand as escarpments and the sunken wedge becomes a sea-filled ria one hundred and fifty miles long. The geological contortions that produced this can only be guessed at: the distant heights of the Hejaz are formed of sea-bed corals and sandstone.
‘Have you ever read The Seven Pillars of Wisdom?’ the Mate asked. ‘By Lawrence of Arabia,’ he added didactically.
‘No.’
‘My geography had taught me to expect the desert to be a waste of sand, but a book like the Pillars reveals a more complex truth.’
He was given to these odd, professorial aids to my better
education. They had a curious effect, irritating my ignorance until I had followed up his hints, sometimes years later. There was an educative quality to the sea-life that extended beyond the acquisition of merely professional knowledge. True, our learning was usually self-acquired and possessed an explosive indiscipline; but occasionally men schooled it either themselves, or under the tutelage of the College of the Sea. The Mate was of the former kind, his knowledge based on wide and indiscriminate reading.
‘They reckoned Bernard Shaw helped Lawrence write it,’ he went on, ‘but that’s bullshit. Academic jealousy. You could only write about the desert like Lawrence if you’d had sand under your foreskin.’
Faster ships were overtaking us now. Ixion, chafing at being behind us in the canal, was coming up, and so was the Greek liner. By the time the breakfast gong sounded through the ship and we came below, Antigone was passing the lighthouse at Ras Gharib. Exhausted after the prolonged watches of the night transit of the canal, I slept through the morning. By noon the Egyptian coast had fallen back to a low, broken littoral of islets, reefs and rocks dominated by the high, barren island of Shadwan. On the opposite side the Sinai range crowded us, its precipitous spine beetling down and squeezing the racing ships into the narrow Strait of Gubal. We passed through the opening astern of Ixion, just leading the Palatino and the Greek liner, debouching into the Red Sea which sparkled in the sunshine beyond.
The Red Sea is the saltiest of the world’s oceans, at 46 parts per million, and only a degree cooler than the Persian Gulf, the world’s hottest, at 34°C, though not in December. But it was the air temperature in which we were interested the following morning, warm and balmy, the first dawn of our voyage to declare a real change of latitude. The northern winter had lost its grip on us; fugitive, we slipped southwards down the long corridor of the Red Sea. I peered into the Stevenson’s screen and read the dry-bulb thermometer.
‘Sixty-nine, sir.’
‘Soixante-neuf,’ replied the Mate from the wheelhouse doorway. The crude erotic allusion was a measure of our divorce from the society of women, a rueful laugh at our stupidity in following so daft a profession. But, like the ‘fuck’ that peppered our speech, it was also a carapace behind which we hid our private selves.
‘Soixante-neuf,’ repeated the Mate gratuitously, picking up the voice-pipe to the Old Man’s night cabin, blowing into it and then transferring the bell-mouth to his ear. When he heard China Dick’s grunts of attention he switched the thing to his mouth again. ‘Morning sir. It’s six o’clock… fine morning, yes sir, the temperature is up to seventy… very good, I’ll pass the word.’
I went out to take the 0600 fix, swinging the azimuth mirror round to the distant peak of Jezirat Zabargad, or St John’s Island, which lay forty miles off the Egyptian-Sudanese border. We had just turned a page in the Company’s Order Book. Seventy degrees Fahrenheit at 0600, ship’s time, meant we forsook the heavy dark doeskin uniforms of high latitudes and broke out the white drill shirts and shorts of the tropics. We were flying-fish sailors at last.
In the northern part of the Red Sea the winds are generally from the north, fading to a central belt of calm before turning and blowing hot from the south as the ship approaches Perim. As the day passed, the northerly wind lost much of its strength, easing to the same speed as the Antigone, so that we ceased to feel any breeze over our decks and the engine exhausts climbed lazily upwards into the brazen sky. After breakfast, a meal punctuated by mockery at the sheepish appearance of our white skins, a party of mates and engineers turned-to on the forward well-deck to erect the swimming pool. We were encouraged by the passengers, who appeared en masse for the first time. The rising temperature, the brilliant sunshine and the change in dress combined with the steady motion of the ship to bring smiles and bonhomie amongst us. Even the crew, chipping and splashing red-lead on the forward hatch-coamings and winch-beds, chaffed us good-heartedly.
‘Gerron with that Sec, I wanna swim when I knock off today, not tomorrer.’
‘D’you want to jump in before we’ve filled it with water?’ Mike replied, looking more cheerful than he had been. We placed the last wooden planks in their steel frame and dragged the huge canvas bag into the corrida we had set up. Finally we lashed a fire-hose into one corner and opened the hydrant.
‘When will it be ready?’
Mrs Saddler accosted us as we made our way to Mike’s cabin for a cooling beer.
‘Oh, give it a couple of hours,’ replied Mike. ‘Not bad,’ he said when we reached his cabin and had opened the cans.
‘Just the job,’ I replied.
‘Not the beer… Mrs Saddler.’
‘Oh. Bit old for me.’
‘Rubbish. Many a good tune played on an old fiddle.’
I noticed that the photograph of his wife was missing and I recalled his previous introspection, a mood that the morning’s cheerful work had dispelled. It was none of my business.
Our high spirits were short-lived. At noon Sparks arrived on the bridge with a solemn expression on his sallow face. Self-consciously he approached Captain Richards who, sextant cradled, was waiting with the deck officers for apparent noon. The message form rustled in the breeze as the Old Man read it. Looking up he nodded dismissal at the radio-officer, then turned to the meridian, raised his sextant and said, ‘Ixion’s lost a man overboard.’
Oddly, Mike took it worst. By the time I relieved him at 1600 he seemed very depressed. ‘I wonder who it was.’
‘We’ll know when we get to Aden.’
‘I expect it was a suicide attempt… he could hardly have fallen in this weather.’
‘No…’ There seemed little else to say. I took over the watch and began the preliminary working for stellar observations at twilight. As darkness settled a British tanker with whom we had been keeping company all day finally succeeded in pulling ahead. She called us up on her aldis light: ‘Adieu Blue.’
‘Very witty,’ remarked the Mate sourly, joining me at the rail where we stood for a little in silence, staring at the stern light of the tanker.
‘Too bad about that fellow from Ixion.’
‘Yes. D’you know who he was, sir?’
‘Aye, Jamie Fraser, a Glasgow man, Second Engineer…’
‘Oh.’ I did not know him, but it was clear the Mate did. Below us the sea hissed past our hull.
‘Come and have a beer,’ Mike invited as I came below at 2000.
‘I was going to have a swim…’
‘Have a beer.’ His tone was sharp, peremptory.
‘Okay…’ I made myself comfortable on his settee. ‘It was the Second Engineer off the Ixion… the Mate knew.’
‘Yes. Poor bastard.’
‘You still think it was suicide?’
‘What else?’ He looked at me with what seemed withering scorn, as if I did not understand something that was blindingly obvious to him. I wished I had gone for my nocturnal dip.
‘What makes you so sure?’
He was silent and cast down his eyes. It was clear that he had had a few drinks before my arrival. I lit a cigarette and he got up abruptly, pulled open a drawer and threw the photograph of his wife onto the settee beside me. ‘That!’
I picked it up and handed it back, aware that I was walking in a minefield, he took the picture, stared at it for a moment and then tossed it aside onto the bunk. ‘Have another beer.’
‘Last one.’ Emboldened by the sudden knowledge that he had got me there to talk, I asked, ‘Have you got problems?’
‘No fucking mail.’
‘Oh… still she may just have missed the posting date for Port Said. You’re bound to get some in Aden.’
‘Otherwise…’ His voice trailed off and I could see his eyes were dark with the intensity of his bitterness; I thought again of the Ixion’s engineer, with a sense of foreboding. Suddenly he shook off his depression. ‘Otherwise Mrs Saddler…’
It was not only Mike whose attitude was altering, for the sudden onset of tropical weather, th
e passage of the canal and our change of uniform was another milestone on our voyage, like passing Gibraltar. Except for the separation from home it was now a wholly satisfying experience to be at sea. We made better use of the time. The ship’s appearance was trimmer, her paintwork brighter, her cargo gear was being overhauled and made ready for ‘the coast’. We occupied our leisure with swimming, reading and sunbathing. ‘Bronzey-ing’ was pursued assiduously, and certain areas of the ship were set aside for it by tacit agreement. The dedicated few used the after docking-bridge, above the poop-house which contained the Chinese galley and which was well out of the passengers’ view. Below us the Chinese squatted on their tiny wooden stools gambling, smoking and chatting over interminable bowls of tea while above, we Europeans spit-roasted ourselves in the burning sunshine. In those first days we aptly earned the Chinese nickname of fan kwei: red barbarians. Not all of us were that keen; for most, half an hour on the salt-bleached tarpaulin of Number Two hatch, conveniently close to the pool, was good enough. Besides, here we rubbed shoulders with the passengers. It was not generally encouraged in junior officers, a relic perhaps of old Alfred’s rigid non-conformity, but the society of both men and women from other walks of life was pleasant and stimulating, and whiled away the brief leisured hours of the forenoon.
We were beset by calms now, having run south of the northern wind belt, and the sea bore a pock-marked appearance where light airs ruffled it, then left it quiet again. Flying fish lifted from our hull and glided out obliquely on either bow, drumming their elongated lower tail fin on the water to extend their flights.