by Voyage East- A stirring tale of the last great days of the Merchant Navy (retail) (epub)
‘But what am I going to tell her?’
‘Tell her? Nothing…’
But he wandered off, shaking his head, and I stared after him as the first of the bullocks was lifted by a belly-band and lowing piteously, with its legs rigid, was swung aboard.
They were stuffed on the steel well decks, fore and aft, fifty on each side of the hatches, so that by mid afternoon we had two hundred of them and already the Antigone stank like a farm-yard. Runnels of urine and liquified dung trickled over the side, staining the black gloss of our newly painted topsides.
‘Oh, fucking hell,’ moaned the Bosun, shaking his head despairingly, ‘it’s a bloody conspiracy, Boy-o, a bloody conspiracy.’ He waved his hand in front of his face as a wisp of hay, blown out of the huge sling then coming over the rail, caught his nose, borne on a hot wind. ‘The sooner we’re out of this place the better.’
Beyond the sun-bleached buildings, the land rose to distant hills. Almost brown, their surface was dusted with green, a sparse, vestigial savanna that seemed inadequate to support even the lean steers that stood patiently crammed on our decks.
‘Got to rig fucking hoses, fore and aft,’ the Bosun grumbled, watching the pile of hay on Number Two hatch grow higher, ‘better get on with it…’ He turned away, starting at the sudden appearance of the tall Somali in his blanket.
‘What d’you want, eh?’ he asked.
‘He’s coming with us to Suez,’ I explained, adding, ‘he speaks French.’
‘I don’t know what the Company’s coming to,’ the Bosun said, as if the world had rocked on its axis, and waddled off to turn out the seamen.
The following morning we were clear of the Straits of Bab-el-Mandeb, heading north in company with several other ships. The sun was climbing into an already brassy sky when the VHF radio squawked into life.
‘Antigone, Antigone, this is Greek ship Ellenis astern of you, Greek ship Ellenis to Antigone, come in please.’
I picked up the handset. We had overtaken the Ellenis half an hour earlier.
‘Ellenis, this is Antigone, Channel Six. Over.’
We shifted off the international calling and distress frequency to one dedicated to ship-to-ship traffic.
‘Antigone, this is Ellenis. Hullo, good morning to you, please can you help to me. I have a sick man on board, please have you doctor?’
‘Stand by, please…’
I phoned for the Doc. After a few minutes he appeared. ‘They want a doctor,’ I said, ‘but in the absence of anything better I thought you’d do.’
‘Piss off. What do I do?’
‘Press that to speak and let it go after you’ve spoken so that you can hear him. He sounds pretty worried.’
‘Okay.’ The Doc took the handset from me and spoke into it. ‘Hullo. Ship wanting doctor go ahead. This is doctor speaking…’
‘Over,’ I prompted.
‘Over,’ he added, scowling at me.
‘Oh, please, Doctor, good morning we have sick man, he has very high temperature and also what you call bad fever, yes? and we cannot find out…’
It went on for several moments. Once the Doc stopped, motioning for paper and pencil, and took notes, pausing to reflect, as though ruling out certain conditions on the basis of symptoms he had enquired after. He thought of something else and spoke again into the handset.
‘Please can you tell me if there is inflammation anywhere?’
‘Inflammation… er…’
‘Hullo, yes, inflammation… redness, is the skin red and swollen? Over.’
There was a pause. ‘Surely they can understand ‘redness’, for Christ’s sake!’
‘Hullo, can you tell me if the man’s skin is red?’ He repeated, turning to me. ‘D’you know the Greek for “red”?’
‘Sorry…’
‘Hullo. Greek ship, is the man’s skin red?’ again he repeated the question. At last the answer came back.
‘We cannot tell you this. It is a black man!’
Doc diagnosed a malarial fever in the end, though he thought it a benign variant and prescribed Paludrine, which the Greek Master had on board.
The heat in the Red Sea was almost unsupportable. Off Hell’s Gates a few extra-ordinarily heavy drops of rain fell in the night, bringing down upon us a fine, sandy dust. Those members of the ship’s company who had slept on deck woke with sore throats. And just before noon we saw another of nature’s curious manifestations, that which had given this sea its odd name.
I was on my way to the bridge from some errand, passing the promenade deck where I noticed the passengers’ attention had been drawn to something in the sea. The man from the Foreign Office saw me.
‘Excuse me… can you tell us what it is?’
His daughter was pointing ahead and then we were passing through it, a brilliant red bloom upon the surface of the sea that curled rustily aside as our hull drove through it.
‘It must be dust, Daddy.’
‘No, it’s not dust,’ I explained, ‘Its the marine equivalent of the first shoots of spring leaves. They are tiny blooms of marine plants called diatoms. They won’t last long, because the plankton will multiply in proportion and they in turn will be eaten up by things higher up the food chain.’
‘Big fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite ’em, Little fleas have smaller fleas, and so ad infinitum,’ jested her father.
‘It’s the other way round, Daddy,’ she said sharply, and then turned to me. ‘Touche,’ she added, smiling with precocious self-possession.
‘Each to his trade…’
It was still dark the next morning when we heard the first bellows of pain. On the bridge I could see nothing disturbing the cattle on deck, though the foetid stench of them blew back over us like an exhalation of the damned. But the noise was overwhelming and the Mate went aft to investigate. He came back a few minutes later, tense and silent, striding across the bridge to Captain Richards’s voice pipe. I could not hear what was said and shortly afterwards he went below, leaving me puzzled in the growing dawn. I got the answer in the saloon at breakfast.
‘That young bastard Embleton’s really shit the nest this time,’ said the Purser.
‘What’s been going on?’ I asked. ‘I’ve been on the bridge and the Mate hasn’t let me in on the secret.’
‘Oh, Jock’s absolutely furious.’ The Purser ordered his breakfast and went on, ‘Embleton’s been daubing the cattle with undiluted soojee!’
‘Good God!’
I went aft to see. The cattle could hardly move, so tightly packed were they, but the tormented animals had cleared an area round them by their incessant movement. Soojee, a strong solution of caustic soda, was used for washing paintwork and in the lamp-room a drum of concentrate was kept in readiness, made up from a bag of crystals by the Lamptrimmer. Embleton had obtained a bucket of this vicious mixture and splashed it on the faces and hides of three steers. He would probably have tortured more had not the outraged Somali herdsman been alerted by the bucking and bellows of his charges, for he slept on deck, curled in the warm hay on the hatch.
The animals, maddened by the pain, still bucked and shook their heads, hooking their stumpy horns into the flanks of their neighbours as they desperately tried to throw off the searing irritation. The Bosun and a pair of seamen stood hosing them down so that they slithered in the dung and sea-water, shivering with fear and pain.
There was no sign of Embleton, who had been locked in his cabin, but his shipmates’ protests were loud in their own disassociation from this stupid cruelty.
‘He’s a right fuckin’ hooligan,’ one of them snapped viciously.
‘Little bastard… what’d he want to do a thing like that for?’
‘Kicks.’
‘Kicks? Kicks? Christ, I’d like to kick him, and stick his fucking head in a bucket of soojee.’
‘Was he pissed?’
‘Probably. He came off lookout at four, s’pose he went on the piss and got this bright idea…’
> The Bosun caught my eye. It was clear no-one other than Embleton had had anything to do with the outrage.
‘There’s always one rotten apple in every barrel,’ he said, spitting the adjective venomously, his Welsh accent prominent with anger.
‘D’you know what the bastard said to the Old Man this morning?’ said the Mate during the evening watch, referring to the disciplinary session that had been held earlier in the day in China Dick’s cabin.
‘No.’
‘He said, “what does it matter, Captain, they’re going for slaughter anyway.” Now what kind of logic is that? Eh? I’ll tell you, it’s the kind of logic that Hitler used.’ He pounded the rail with his fist and walked away. I had never seen him so angry.
We discharged the cattle into barges at Suez, one by one. The blue water of the bay seemed levelled to a glassy smoothness by the weight of the sun’s radiation and the distant escarpment to the west shimmered violently. Around the ship swam a pair of huge sharks, grey-blue, clearly visible in the still water, attended by striped pilot-fish. ‘Dem nobbies,’ remarked a sailor, ‘can smell death.’ He nodded emphatically at the water. The sharks, Nobby Clarks in the vernacular sailor-slang, languidly circled Antigone until the last steer left us, lowing with pain. A broken leg, fractured in the shufflingly nervous reaction to Embleton’s assault, dangled helplessly from its hind-quarters. Sitting on the stern of the barge, the Somali herdsman sat wrapped in his blanket, his wand over his shoulder, while the ragged Egyptians carried off his stock for their abattoirs.
‘I wonder what he thought of his association with the white man?’ mused the Mate, his anger ebbed.
‘What’s happening to Embleton?’ I asked.
‘We’ll see to him when we get home.’
After the crushing heat of Suez Bay the transit of the canal was peculiarly unpleasant. There was a drop in the ambient temperature of some 20°C, a plummeting that set our teeth chattering, despite a hurried change into reefer uniforms. As we approached Port Said behind the beam of our searchlight, the same stars that had twinkled over Suez Bay seemed now to shine from an inhospitably chilly firmament, and the wind that met us in the Mediterranean made us pitch, lifting our bow out of the water for the first time since we had left Hong Kong.
‘Nine days left,’ said Mike gleefully, rubbing his hands eagerly, ‘five to the Rock and four to the dock.’
‘Yeah,’ said somebody, ‘it’s all over bar the shouting.’
Visitations of Fate
When it struck, tragedy hit below the belt, the victim of its malice unforeseen. Had I learned, that sad morning two days out of Port Said, that after a lonely watch in his stuffy radio-room Sparks had thrown himself over Antigone’s side, I should not have been surprised. Nor would some extravagant story about Embleton have taken me unawares, for he was said to be suffering some of the milder symptoms of alchoholic withdrawal. Even had the Mate fallen victim to some calenture, I should have felt a certain prescience, for no man could remain immune to the corrosion of the sea-life, no matter how true the steel of his character. But to learn of the death of China Dick seemed somehow monstrously unjust.
He had been within months of retirement and those glimpses of a humanity beneath the tough, uncompromising facade reminded us that he had a wife and daughter at home, that he was a family man like many of the ship’s company. Though he maintained a low profile throughout the voyage, we had never doubted who had been Master of the Antigone or that, whatever dedication the Mate and the Bosun, The Chief Engineer and the Purser and all the rest of us put into the voyage, its success or failure would be judged an achievement of Richard Richards alone. Had Bob and I brought back the motor boat holed on the coral of Bohihan, it would have been China Dick whose name would have been associated with the incident.
‘If you do something brilliant,’ the Mate had said to me one night when in the last hour of the watch we were discussing the bubble reputation, ‘people will talk about it for a week. If you make a monumental cock-up, they will talk about it for years.’
It was a good aphorism for a Master’s responsibilities.
He had died of a heart-attack shortly after dressing that morning, discovered by Mike as he went to make his daily report that the chronometers had been wound. That day the ship was dreary under a mood of gloom; not grief, that was too personal a thing and no one truly mourned him, but a melancholy reflection upon our own transient nature.
The Mate assumed command and we shifted watches, Mike taking the four-to-eight with the Senior Midshipman. I changed, once again, to the eight-to-twelve. Captain Richards stiffened in his bunk, his corpse dressed by the Doctor as telegrams winged back and forth. The Mate was confirmed in temporary command and China Dick’s widow requested that, in accordance with his wishes, he be buried at sea. The Bosun and Lamptrimmer set about sewing him into his shroud while a Midshipman was sent aft to lower the ensign to half-mast.
Shortly after dawn the next morning, irrespective of our watches, the entire ship’s company turned out of their bunks and mustered in silence abreast Number Three hatch. Unbidden, we had all dressed in our best rig; the deck and engineer officers in their dark, gold-braided reefers, the seamen in scrubbed dungarees, the Chinese greasers in immaculate boiler suits, the stewards in their black trousers and white patrol jackets, and the two cooks in their tall hats, white jackets, aprons and checked trousers.
Her engines stopped, Antigone rolled gently in the swell. Disturbed by the strange silence a few passengers appeared above us at the promenade-deck rail. Two women wept discreetly while the daughter of the Foreign Office official cried unashamedly, for China Dick had made a fuss of her, seeing in her, perhaps, something of his own daughter whose childhood he had mostly missed.
We stood round a wooden platform knocked up by Chippy and waited for the burial party, whose appearance startled the passengers. They brought China Dick down from the boat-deck, rigid in his canvas shroud, splinted with steel bars from the engine room. The Bosun and Lamptrimmer struggled with the awkward weight of him and others helped them as they reached the foot of the promenade-deck ladder. The Doctor and the Mate brought up the rear of the cortège, the Mate carrying the Book of Common Prayer, his finger held between the pages as a book-mark. The cover was embossed with the ship’s name and the date 1891, that of the first Antigone belonging to Alfred Holt’s Blue Funnel Line.
They slid China Dick onto the platform and we removed our hats. A low murmur from the Chinese died away as the Mate coughed for silence.
‘I am the Resurrection and the Life, saith the Lord…’ We bowed our heads, staring at the red ensign laid over the canvas bundle, its bunting just lifting in the wind that moaned softly in the rigging.
‘We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain that we can carry nothing out…’
He wasn’t a bad old bastard, you could almost hear men thinking, his very aloofness a sign of the confidence he felt in his officers, for all their ineptitude in grounding a boat on Honeymoon Island. I recalled the anger I had felt when he admonished me for taking a lunar sight – and regretted it, for he had worn the pink and silver ribbon of the MBE, awarded him as a young second mate for bringing in the torpedoed Glencoe after she had been abandoned in convoy during the dark days of 1942. No, he wasn’t a bad old bastard at all.
‘We therefore commit his body to the deep…’
Bosun and Lamptrimmer lifted the platform, their fingers retaining the hoist of the ensign. There was a slither and in the brief hiatus preceding the splash, a sudden crackling sputter of exploding firecrackers filled the air. Driving off malignant devils, the Chinese paid China Dick their own respects.
‘Amen.’
We chorused our amens and they were echoed from the gallery of the promenade deck. Putting on our hats we turned away from the rail. The Mate looked up at Mike, alone on the port bridge-wing. There was a jingle of telegraphs, answered by the duty engineer. Antigone’s engines rumbled into life with a hiss of air and we gathere
d way again. Already the rings marking the splash of the burial were dispersed by the wind.
‘Away aft and hoist the ensign close-up,’ the Mate ordered the Junior Midshipman.
Somewhere far below and astern of us, China Dick’s body bumped on the sea-bed, disturbing the ooze, then came slowly to rest.
* * *
There was a brightening of the weather as we ploughed westward. Suddenly, on the forenoon following, within an hour the ship’s upper-works were dark with the flutter of roosting migrant birds, tired after their long arid transit of the Sahara. There were hundreds of them, swallows, martins and warblers; and with them a sleek pair of raptors, lanner falcons from North Africa living on easy pickings. Each of the two falcons took a mast-table for their killing field and stained the deck below with guano and pellets, staking out a section of the ship for their individual territory.
We carried the birds steadily west during the day, then in the late afternoon they took off, lifting in clouds and circling the ship. By sunset they had all gone, even the lanners, true corsairs returning to the Barbary coast.
The rearrangement of the watches and the assumption of command by the Mate introduced a note of unfamiliarity into our routine. It was typical of him that although he relinquished the formalities of his former rank, he still oversaw the final preparations of the ship for her docking. It was assumed that all Blue Funnel liners berthed in Liverpool in the smartest condition. Open to inspection by the Marine Superintendent or even one of the Company’s Managers, it was a point of honour for Master, Mate, Bosun and all of us, that our appearance should be a credit to Blue Funnel and a reflection on ourselves. Similarly, the Chief Engineer and Willie Buchan and his staff strove to raise the condition of the engine room to the same pitch of efficiency.
With great effort the cattle-dung had been scoured from Antigone’s well-decks; the final touches were being put to her paintwork, limned-in tiddley-work with fine brushes. Brass was burnished to a gleaming finish by the Midshipmen, and the sailors barbarised the decks to a whiteness that would have done credit to a hospital ward. New derrick guys were rove off and new canvas boat covers spread over the lifeboats. Below, the last regular maintenance was completed and boxed up, the casings cleaned and the cream and silver paint touched up. Here and there an instruction plate was high-lit in red gloss, and copper pipes were polished; the final black paint was added to ladders and the bare steel hand-rails given a coat of fine oil so that no trace of rust was visible. Store-rooms were cleaned out, linen prepared for the laundry and the already immaculate galley received a spring-clean in honour of the occasion, so that Antigone rushed homeward like a great yacht.