‘Oh yes,’ he says, in his lilting Indian voice. ‘You can be Mr Lonely up here.’
The bridge is dark, the screens turned right down. On either side of the funnel is a sliding door leading out to bare decks behind the bridge, each equipped with an ashtray and a hose. On the starboard side another ladder leads up to the monkey deck, the roof of the bridge. This highest point is studded with radar, satellite communications, aerials and an orange dome containing the voyage data recorder. On the topmost rail is a white box containing a float and a radio transmitter: if the ship goes down this will break free and broadcast signals, giving rescuers our last position.
Our container towers are all in darkness. The view is broken water surging away from the hull, the black sea and the sky. You descend a red-lit stair to J-deck, the Captain’s deck, also red-lit. At the starboard end of the corridor is the Captain’s suite of rooms, at the other end the chief engineer’s. Between them is the library and the pilot’s cabin – mine. The library has novels in Danish, a copy of Daniel Deronda in English, an anthology of three John Le Carré novels, a dozen American thrillers – police, slasher and historical – of varying quality, and a couple of lads’ mags in Russian.
The pilot’s cabin offers an Anglepoise lamp on a desk, a chair, an empty fridge, a sofa, a wardrobe and a shower cabinet. The window above the desk faces the foremast and the sea across the container tops. The bunk is a little wider than a standard single. With a faint sway on the ship’s hips and the only sound the rumble of the engine, sleep is a deep wide sea. Shoals of dreams come bright and vivid.
At daybreak the view makes no sense. There must be something wrong with the window or my eyes: nothing – nothing – fog! Thick grey-blue vapour shrinks visibility to less than a hundred metres. You can barely see the stern of the boat, never mind the bow. Sorin is on watch.
‘How can you see where you’re going?’
‘I can’t!’ he laughs. ‘Everyone has to give way.’
We are in a Traffic Separation Scheme (TSS), a controlled shipping lane in which north- and south-bound vessels are separated into two streams, thirty-four miles from L’Ile d’Ouessant, an island off the Brest peninsula notorious for the violence of its storms and currents. Coming in from the Atlantic and preparing to run up the Channel, with the south-westerlies behind you, Ouessant, Ushant to the British, makes a vicious lee shore – a sailors’ grave. On the chart the TSS is a purple corridor, a checkpoint, a chicane in the sea. There are invisible ships all around us, coming north in the lane on our port side and going south in ours.
‘It’s worse in China,’ Sorin says. ‘So many fishing boats you can’t see them.’
‘What do you do – post a lookout in the bow?’
‘No! He can’t see them until it is too late and I can’t do anything about it when he tells me. Reduce the radar to three miles and –’ he shrugs. ‘We go round them or they get out of the way.’
Sorin explains the different readings on the monitors. Speed over ground is eighteen knots, speed through the water is sixteen knots.
‘So we are in counter-current. Two knots.’
The fog has shapes in it, wraiths. You think you see a ship but the radar paints nothing there. The fog hushes sounds and plays with distance. The waves seem doubly far below the bridge: these are our waves, the sea is flat. Leviathan rumbles on, steering herself, knowing like a clairvoyant where the other ships are. We see nothing; her computers know all, and she drives her vast cargo forward. The crew risk their lives to carry the cargo; for cargo they leave their homes and families for months, even years, and yet most of them have no idea what is in the containers. Even Sorin, the best informed, knows only a little about it. The cold-stored goods in the reefers – refrigerated containers – are known, because the reefers have to be kept at a certain temperature and checked. Ours contain meat, chocolate and fruit. The dangerous cargo is also listed because in the event of fire or accident we must know where the threats are. They are stored in the bow, as far away from the accommodation and control centres as possible.
We are carrying solid-state sodium hydroxide, paint materials, solvents and thinners. We have hazardous cargo belonging to Procter & Gamble. We have some small-bore sporting ammunition from Germany, destination Malaysia. The sailors say they are kept in ignorance of everything else deliberately, so that they are not tempted to steal. Informed guesswork suggests we will have flashy cars in some of the boxes – the kind no one wants to risk on a car carrier – and scrap metals for China’s hungry markets, and paper and plastic waste for recycling or disposal. We are also carrying naphtha and perfumery products, marked flammable and polluting.
In 1925 Captain Clark sailed with a man who had made a voyage in a Nova Scotia barque at the turn of the century from New York to Rouen in the dead of winter; they too were carrying naphtha. This man told Captain Clark that the master of that wooden ship considered the cargo so dangerous ‘no fires were allowed, even for cooking, despite the bitter conditions’.
With a yellowish light astern the sun rises and the sea hisses as our turbulence surfaces in translucent bubbles. Now the sun throws peculiar figures and different densities on the fog: above us is clear blue, aft all is pearly silver and gold-grey, while forward is a blind world. We add our own fumes to the sky, a trail like a foul banner, drifting behind us in a gaseous worm. This company carries 18 per cent of the world’s container trade. It made a net profit last year of ten billion US dollars. It added as much carbon dioxide to the atmosphere in that time as did the entire nation of Denmark, where the company is based.
The giant exhaust worm is not as poisonous as it will be. We are burning low-sulphur fuel to comply with the emissions regulations of the English Channel. We will switch to high-sulphur when we are through the invisible gate at the end of Ushant’s Traffic Separation Scheme, sixty-five nautical miles – about 130 kilometres – south of the Lizard. We pass Parson’s Bank and leave Kaiser-I-Hind Bank to starboard.
‘Pacific is also great place for fogs,’ says Sorin, staring forward, where the foremast comes and goes.
We enter the Biscay and begin to roll in following swells. Swells are the memories of storms. We are crossing a sea like a failing memory; the fogbanks thicken and thin and thicken again. Now you can barely see a hundred feet, now the vapour falls back, forming opalescent curtains on all the horizons so that we sail in a barrel of sun.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge came this way on his voyage to Malta in 1804. He was not a good sailor and often beset by seasickness; the journey, as he records in his notebook, did not begin auspiciously: ‘In weighing anchor the men grumbled aloud a sort of mutiny – not half our complement of men – Two pressed in the Downs, one ran away at Portsmouth, a rascal of a one-armed cook better gone than stayed. Now we are a Captain, Mate, 2 boys, 4 men, 3 passengers, one sheep, 3 pigs, several ducks and chickens, one dog, a cat and two kittens.’
He was sick and feverish at first. The Captain advised him to lie down, which he did, but when night came he slept ‘diseasedly’: ‘In consequence partly of the build of the brig, & partly of its being so heavily laden at its bottom, the cabin rocks like a cradle when a cruel nurse rocks a screaming baby. On Monday night we travelled like a top bough on a larch tree in a high wind, pitching and rocking . . .’
By the time he reached our latitude, in the bight of the Bay of Biscay, the poet was much happier: ‘Delightful weather, motion, relation of the convoy to each other, all exquisite – and I particularly watched the beautiful surface of the sea in the gentle breeze! – every form so transitory, so for the instant, & yet for that so substantial in all its sharp lines, steep surfaces, & hair-deep indentures, just as if it were cut glass, glass cut into ten thousand varieties / & then the network of the wavelets, & the rude circle hole network of the foam. And on the gliding vessel heaven and ocean smiled!’
A line later he writes suddenly, ‘Why aren’t you here?’
He gives no hint as to whom he is thinking of, but his marria
ge to Sara Coleridge was in dire trouble and he was partly in love with Sara Hutchinson. Though I sometimes share his wish to enjoy the excitement and beauty of this voyage with my partner, my family and certain friends, I feel none of the ache of that line – I am selfishly, absolutely enjoying the separation of this adventure. But then I am only at the beginning. I have no concept of what it would be to be parted from home for months and years, unlike N, who would prefer not to be named.
N has just finished sweeping and spraying the deck at the bow, beneath the hazardous cargo. He is small, barely up to my shoulder. He has a red kerchief around his neck and wears ear defenders perched on his head like the ears of Mickey Mouse. Like most of the Filipinos he has a sweet welcome of a grin.
‘One child!’ he smiles, then instantly frowns. ‘Two, three not possible – cannot afford.’
You can see how much he wants more children but his wages are little more than a thousand dollars a month. Some years he is home for two months, but more often only one. These months are unpaid: though the officers are Maersk employees, with annual salaries and benefits, the crew are on Voyage Contracts. Like N, the crew are employed by a manning agency, which pays them and bills Maersk, thus relieving the company of responsibility for the great majority of its seafarers. N has signed a contract which entitles him to basic pay, overtime pay and ‘hardship pay’, a bonus he receives when the ship crosses the areas of pirate danger between the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean. His figure of a thousand dollars includes these extra payments.
If the ship were covered by an agreement between Maersk and the biggest seafarers’ union, the International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF), N could expect to receive more than twice his basic pay, plus seven dollars per hour of weekday overtime, and thirteen dollars per hour of weekend overtime. (Until recently rest times were regulated but not enforced, so you worked all hours and as many as a man could stand.) There would have been no point N researching the Gerd on the ITF website before he signed his contract with the manning agency. Shipowners have everything to gain by avoiding unions and they do so with impunity. Looking up the Gerd in the ITF’s files returns a simple message: ‘Vessel not covered by ITF agreement.’
As a newcomer to the sea I am confused by N’s position. This company is supposed to be the industry leader. Filipino seafarers run, clean and maintain the world’s cargo fleet: they make up over a quarter of its manpower. (Their nearest rivals are Chinese sailors, who endure worse conditions.) Their tireless work ethic, positive disposition and sea-going tradition make Filipinos indispensable. Barely a shipping company in the world could survive without them.
‘You need a union, don’t you?’
‘Union is no good! Weak! Good for themselves . . . You make story!’ N cries, as a farewell, and returns to work.
When the Filipinos reach home they are ‘one-day millionaires’ in their own phrase, rich for the time it takes for family, friends and relatives to pile in with their needs and wants. Manila is the centre of a global trade in the skills and endurance of Filipino seafarers, symbolised by the open-air market at Luneta Park where manning agencies run recruitment stalls which offer seafaring jobs on boards. These stalls are famously unregulated, operating in the absence of certification, licence, taxation or oversight, and were recently declared illegal. In an ironic parallel, the park has been officially named Rizal, not Luneta, since the 1950s – but both the illegal stalls and the old name endure.
Because of their country’s low cost of living it is undoubtedly true that one dollar spent in the Philippines goes further than a dollar spent in Denmark. The shipowners argue that this redresses the massive imbalance in wages paid to Filipinos compared to the money Indians and Europeans receive. The shipowners are apparently content that in the engine room there are two officers of the same rank, possessed of the same skills, performing the same task, one of whom is receiving less than a third of the wage of the other merely because he holds a different passport. The ten billion dollar profit is the excuse for this disparity. Filipinos accept the situation with a shrugging fatalism: this is just the way it is. It is identical to the way it was under apartheid in South Africa – it was ‘fair’ to pay blacks much less than whites because money went further in the tribal areas, the authorities said. Our world then was revolted by this formula. Our world now relies upon it.
CHAPTER 6
Bay Life in the Biscay
ALBATROSS! IT FLIES the length of the ship and veers off west, huge wings never stirring. The bird that brought the fog and mist, wrote Coleridge, and this one does too: a rain-grey bank, dark behind the brown and white bird, now swallows us.
Dolphins! Common dolphins, Delphinus delphis, break out of the water in a hectic chasing pair off the port bow. More appear to starboard, charging the ship. They come right at us, disappearing beneath the bridge. Did they dive under the hull? We watch them playing in the wake waves, huge in the water they seem and so fast. There is such thrill and unity in the way they fly in pairs together, then six in a pod, torpedoing under then breaching in a volley. One turns in a wave and leaps back, reversing its course in an instant.
Whales! A pair blowing just off the starboard bow, moving slowly to dead ahead. The blow looks V-shaped, so they are baleen whales. They stop on a perfect collision course and float there until they disappear under our line of sight. Move! Move out of the way! Should I ask Sorin to change course? But I do not know where the whales are going, and it takes too long to turn . . .
They are gone; the spray of their blows hangs in the sunlight. I scan the sides and the wake, praying for no red. Long minutes. Then – there! One blows, port side, away aft, and now the other. They were just playing with us.
‘Phew! I thought we’d hit them.’
Sorin laughs. ‘We would have felt it.’
‘We can’t go round the world running down whales, Sorin! Imagine the publicity!’
He is from the Danube delta: ‘I was always around boats. I first went to sea as a motorman-electrician but I don’t like the engine room.’ He prefers the northern latitudes because of the climate. ‘Malaysia and Hong Kong just kill me in three days.’
He says China and Hong Kong smell distinctive from the sea. For colour only the Caribbean comes close to the Mediterranean’s intensity of blue.
‘New Zealand is green. The land is green, the sea is green, the air is green . . .’
Two more whales surface, one briefly close to the ship before it vanishes, and another. Humpbacks, I think at first: they are like two humpbacks I saw once, but how alike? Just as whaley, certainly. At least twenty different species have been seen in these waters. Humpback sightings are not common. They could be fin whales, they have that great length, and give an impression of U-boat-like narrowness, and we saw swept dorsal fins. But they are the eighth and ninth whales I have ever seen, not counting the Blue in the Natural History Museum. I could be quite confident of identifying that. These beasts surface seventy miles south of La Chapelle Bank as we head south west across the Biscay Abyssal Plain, with four kilometres of water below the keel. The sun puts out its flare path and dusk comes on.
Another whale passes us in a whale-coloured sea, ominous and dark grey. Its singularity recalls Shakespeare’s sketch of a crocodile in Antony and Cleopatra. Antony has been drinking when he mocks Lepidus with a description which would certainly go for this whale:
‘It is shaped, sir, like itself; and it is as broad as it hath breadth. It is just so high as it is, and moves with its own organs. It lives by that which nourishes it, and the elements once out of it, it transmigrates.’
‘What colour is it?’
‘Of its own colour, too.’
All we see is one long heave of the great beast’s back, heading north. The sight brings two planets into overlap. Only when you see a whale do you catch a glimpse of theirs, given scale by an inhabitant, a huge native; only then does its full wilderness, its wide desolation, strike.
It is Shubd’s watch. He agrees wi
th Sorin: of all the countries he has visited (excluding India, naturally) New Zealand is the best, for three excellent reasons: ‘It is extremely nice and extremely beautiful and the people there are most friendly, yes, they are extremely helpful, very kind, you know.’
We look at the moon through binoculars. The seas of tranquillity, the craters and the ridges beyond the shadow line are no stranger than this world we cross. The whole orb of it hangs there, not far above the horizon and huge, so close. Yesterday the crescent was gold; tonight silver-white.
‘Do you like cricket?’ Shubd asks, hopefully.
Shubd would like to be a District Administrator. He says this is a very good job. He looks as though he would make a wonderful District Administrator, too; round-faced, hair neatly parted, his expression open, ready smiling and fair. We talk about women, about love, about ports, stars and ghosts. Shubd tells tales of thousand-kilometre train rides to see his girl, and of his brother’s encounter with a haunted house where a spectral party was in progress.
Tonight’s action includes the overtaking of the African River. We can see her lights one point (ten degrees) off the starboard bow. The computer gives her course, speed and destination – Abidjan, Ivory Coast. Our next waypoint, the next point at which we will change course, is 260 nautical miles away, off Finisterre.
We wake to a morning of rains. You see each squall coming a long way away, a lump of darkness like a giant mushroom, black water at its base. As the gloom reaches us Sorin appears suddenly on a walkway below the bridge, checking the reefers. The ship sways; the rain rags down; Sorin concentrates, acknowledging the conditions with the slightest frown as the water streams down his specs. Every other chief officer and bo’sun and first mate who ever crossed this sea looked the same way, you realise, as he stared straight through whatever it threw at him, at whatever had to be done.
After the rain comes a blue clear and a bright-skied afternoon. Marlon makes tea in the crew mess. Marlon was chased by a pirate. He was on the Albert Maersk doing twenty-two knots across the Gulf of Aden.
Down to the Sea in Ships Page 5