Down to the Sea in Ships

by Horatio Clare

  ‘Have you met John? He’s a character,’ says Pieter.

  ‘Oh he’s quite a character,’ the Captain chuckles. Jannie grins and shakes his head.

  John Holmshaw, the second mate, is a Geordie. We snap together in the corridor like old friends. A fellow Brit! What a treat. John is tall and broad, a fine fighting outline overlaid with softness. The expression is warm and friendly, humour in the eyes given an exclamation mark by a wayward tooth. He can look unbelievably shabby, a sea tramp, or surprisingly smart in uniform. His legs seem permanently bent at the knee. This gives him a miraculous, shuffling stability. He immediately informs me that he is the best paid second officer in the fleet.

  ‘Ah’ve got a master’s certificate, like, and they want me to sit for chief officer, but naa, ah don’t want to. Too much work. Ah’m happy with second.’

  A lot of John’s conversation is conveyed with gestures and expressions. His face is compelling, with appealing eyes below black, once-thick hair and above a chin of two pendulous bulbs. He shows me a picture of Theresa, his girl, who spends part of her time on the Tyne, waiting for him at his place in South Shields, and part of it on the Gold Coast of Australia, where she has a house. John’s favourite picture of Theresa has her sitting on a bed in a cell, behind bars.

  ‘Locked her in,’ he burbles happily, ‘so she’ll be waiting for me when I come home.’ Theresa is blonde and beautiful and she gazes at John’s camera with utter love.

  John’s cabin, next to mine, is worse than any teenager’s room. It looks as though it has been shelled. Everything is broken. The drawers under the bed are held shut, or perhaps together, by gaffer tape. An extraordinary thing like an art installation dangles from the air vent in the ceiling, apparently an unsuccessful attempt to block it, giving the impression of a giant dressing hanging off a wound.

  John says we may do a Great Circle to avoid the storms. In any case we will pass far north of where the Titanic foundered, in April 1912.

  He has been thirty-two years at sea and he collects disaster stories. John’s stories should be heard in a Geordie accent. They are accompanied by an intense, assessing gaze on the part of the teller. His eyes search your expression for gratifying signs of horror, distress and amazement. Within about five minutes of meeting John I am engrossed in the fate of a ferry making a run from Savannah, Georgia, up to New York.

  ‘The Captain dies, so everyone moves up. But they didn’t know their jobs. A fire breaks out in the bow, right, and the chief officer, who’s the Captain now, increases speed. Increases! So of course the flames blow back over the ship. People tried to get out of their cabin windows but they didn’t quite fit, and that’s how they found them . . .’

  I feel a bit sick. John continues.

  ‘There was a British ship on the River Plate passing a tanker in fog. And they touch, you know, and fire breaks out. The air rushing to the fire causes a vacuum. Seventy-two people died. Asphyxiated. The tanker crew survived by jumping into the water on the opposite side.’

  ‘Christ.’

  ‘It’s my job to show you the lifeboats and things but there’s no rush,’ he says.

  ‘John, if anything happens I’m sticking to you.’

  He shows me the controls on the bridge as if at some point I will be taking over. My favourite detail is a piece of A4 paper mounted on the chart table, a hand-drawn map labelled NEWARK. Red crayoned arrows coming up from the south turn left short of the Statue of Liberty, encounter a felt-tipped green TUG, pass a tank farm and a football field, turn right, avoiding New York container berth, which is marked with a cross, before turning left and coming to rest at the foot of a sketched aeroplane on the runway at Newark airport. Whatever else happens, the Pembroke will always be able to find her way there.

  I go up and down the ship after this, doing my washing and feeling her spirits. She may be at the furthest end of the aesthetic spectrum from the tall ships Chateaubriand describes, but she is still a sentient structure, invitingly higgledy-piggledy. There is a library of near-smashed paperbacks. Hammond Innes, Ken Follett, James Hadley Chase, Clancy . . . You feel she has been lived in and loved in and loved.

  ‘She has been all over the world,’ the Captain said, and the bow shows it. Driving through westerlies and pushing through ice up the St Lawrence, she is down to her bare iron.

  ‘If we can do without an icebreaker we will but sometimes you hit it and it does not move,’ said the Captain.

  * * *

  1 Terry Coleman, The Liners: A History of the North Atlantic crossing, Allen Lane, 1976.

  CHAPTER 15

  Down-Channel

  THE PILLOWCASES SMELL of old sweat, the sheets of unwashed men and tobacco. You wake to reeks of diesel. The ship gently lists as containers are loaded, rising from the deck and approaching the level of my window. If only one could disable the ventilator the diesel fumes might be stemmed. I resolve to sleep with the door open. On the way to breakfast I meet a man called Book. He is a fitter, a junior mechanic who leads the oilers and wipers in maintenance work in the engine room.

  ‘Why are you called Book?’

  ‘Because I am handsome!’

  ‘OK!’

  He talks about being chased by pirates. ‘We should be pirates,’ he laughs. Book wears a pirate headscarf.

  All day, under rain and container booms, the ship lists and twitches as if she is being slowly beaten. The draughts in the stairwell complain. The crane operators break for lunch and tea. You would not see that in the East.

  At 1630 we leave the berth. The Schelde out of Antwerp must present the least promising, most grey and rainswept, most blurred and smoking, towered and glowering, twisted, flat-banked and ship-stormed road to the ocean in all the world. The Deurganck nuclear power station pours steam unbroken into cloud and the river seethes at its outfall. The turns are tight as we join a press of ships, all leaving on the tide. The southern shore is a low marsh of dreary non-colours. The opposite bank is fired with refinery towers and warning lights. The river looks closer to dirt than water, thrashed by the passage of the ships.

  The King Daniel, home port Palermo, is a villainous tanker. There are Hapag-Lloyd container carriers and the Philadelphia Express, a fat car carrier, and even they look smarter than poor Pembroke. The cargo planners have broken our lines into lumps of containers, apparently scattered at random. Naked grey hatch covers shine with rain. Asymmetric blocks of reefers catch the wind, which is strong from the south-west and growling around the bridge.

  After the Gerd we seem quixotic, a battering barge to her cargo liner. How much difference can our containers possibly make to the vast hinterlands of Montreal? With freight rates currently below the cost of shipping the containers, and the oil price high, our only certain achievement is a speck of red on the chart of the company’s losses. But the ship rushes on, fixed on the doing of the thing; the why of it as little concern as the low green farmland and the black trees darkening behind the dykes. We alter course every few minutes, three hundred degrees now, as the river turns north-west. The bo’sun, Edgar ‘Sumy’ Sumudlayon, is at the wheel. Sumy is the tallest of the Filipinos, a tough young man whose attention switches between the course, the river and the rate-of-turn indicator. In the left seat is the pilot; Captain Koop on the right. Flemish and Dutch come over the radio and the river switches again.

  ‘Starboard twenty!’

  That is a rate of turn. Now the pilot asks for ten more degrees and we round another red buoy. We pass grain elevators, cement works and jumbles of boats as a flight of greylag geese come over, thirty birds in five skeins.

  ‘Full ahead!’

  A container carrier comes up, A La Marne, blue and red, carrying K-Line and Hamburg Sud boxes, her bows like ours a snarl of rusted steel. The sky is towering and gigantic now, grey-white cumulus to the horizon. We overhaul a Dutch barge. They look so mighty on the Maas, as you walk in Rotterdam, but they are bike couriers on this coast. The north shore is closer as we come back to 325, blocky build
ings behind sprays of bare woods with pylons behind them. Ships travelling at speed heel over as they make their turns. There are lilac clouds now and the river is rot-gut green. It is thrilling, this weather, this twisting exit, this speed, as we turn into the Overloop Van Hansweert, which leads to the bend of Gat Van Ossenisse. We will soon be down there, where the Das Van Terneuzen leads to the Rede Van Vlissingen, Flushing Roads. The Captain shows the bend on the chart, just after our dog-leg out of Deurganck, where container ships go aground. We are deep in the water, ten and a half metres: going into Flushing there are only five or six metres of water under the keel.

  Flushing Roads in a February dusk is no place for an amateur; I am surely the only one out here, circling the deck as the light dies. The walkway is narrow, pitted and sheened with spray and grease. The wind bursts between the cargo stacks and ships bigger than ours pass, dark and huge in the dim. Our foremost cargo is some sort of tractor, wrapped in a flapping tarpaulin. The bow is too slippery, too low-gunnelled to be safe. I skid from hand hold to hand hold and retreat, wuthered, chilled and trepid as a kitten. After a bolted supper I am back on the bridge.

  ‘Force six-o-seven, Captain?’

  ‘Ah, she always sounds loud! Five-o-six. Maybe seven further out. I hope we can get the pilots on and off . . .’

  In Flushing Roads the river pilot puts the ship hard to port, making a lee in which the pilot boat approaches. The Captain hauls on his jacket and cracks open the iron dogs, the clips which secure the bridge doors. He peers out into the rain while the river pilot descends and the sea pilot comes up, blowing into his extravagant beard. The forecast is gales from the south-west.

  The Pembroke is a living thing tonight. She helps you open some doors and puts an invisible shoulder against others. When the draughts around her bridge are not moaning they cheep and whistle to themselves like birds. The windscreen wipers take irregular rests between wheezing cycles. As the slacking tide meets the sea you can feel the ship wobble, like someone stepping into sudden darkness. Beyond the screens there is blackness, rain, the channel markers and now the low orange glow of Zeebrugge to the south.

  It is impossible to pass the harbour lights and not think of another bitter night, 6 March 1987, when the ferry Herald of Free Enterprise capsized there. Within two minutes of leaving Zeebrugge harbour with her bow doors open the ship was on her side, resting on a sandbar. Many of the passengers had saved up coupons from the Sun newspaper which promised a day return to Belgium for a pound. One of those, Simon Osborne, was then nineteen years old.

  ‘The noise was horrendous from start to finish,’ he told the BBC, ‘a terrible, unbelievable mechanic grinding noise, breaking glass and the screams of people who were injured, falling or terrified. I was trapped in the lounge area of the ship. There were a lot of people around me, but as time wore on it became clear that many were dying, presumably from the cold . . .’

  A hundred and ninety-three people perished in the worst disaster involving a British ship in peacetime since the Titanic. For weeks the media carried images of the bright orange corpse of the ferry lying in the water under the lights of rescue vessels, and of the haunted faces of survivors and the bereaved.

  The immediate cause of the ferry’s capsize was the negligence of two seafarers – the assistant boatswain, who had overslept, and the first officer, who was hurrying to return to his station on the bridge. Each thought the other would close the doors. But if the Herald of Free Enterprise was a symptom of her era, then, according to the findings of the inquiry into the sinking, 1987 was a time of a corporate hunger for profit which alienated workers from management. Seamen’s requests for a monitoring system to inform captains that the bow was secured for sea had been dismissed as unnecessary expense. The ship left her berth in a rush, as was her custom, and slightly overweight. The cross-Channel ferries were still immensely lucrative in the years before the Channel Tunnel opened; the Herald was designed to load and unload quickly, and to accelerate fast. She reached eighteen knots only ninety seconds after leaving the harbour, piling up a bow wave which swept inboard and sank her ‘as quickly as a glass of water falling over’, Simon Osborne said.

  Though the Court of Inquiry condemned ‘a disease of sloppiness’ ‘infecting every level of the company’, a charge of corporate manslaughter against the operators collapsed, the judge directing the jury to acquit the company and its management. No evidence existed to show that a single senior figure had behaved recklessly, he said. Perhaps the most telling aspect of the tragedy is this failure of the law to hold the parent company, P&O European Ferries, to account. At the time corporate manslaughter was much more likely to be pursued successfully against small companies in which one person could be held to be a ‘controlling mind’. Suits against large corporations were (and still are) rarely successful because the bigger the company, and the higher the degree of delegation within it, the less chance there is that one person could be said to be ‘a controlling mind’. A revision of the law in 2007 exempts individuals from prosecution, allowing instead for companies to be fined. In the months after the disaster Labour Members of Parliament expressed outrage that a management shuffle was the only apparent price paid by the ferry company. Hansard records a typical reaction from the left-wing benches to a statement on the disaster by the then Secretary of State for Transport, Paul Channon.

  Mr Max Madden (Bradford, West): Is the epitaph of the tragedy that profit prevailed over safety? [. . .] Will the Secretary of State understand that many people believe that the captain and crew have been made scapegoats and that the company has been protected, as a major contributor to the Conservative party?

  Mr Channon: I hope that, on reflection, the hon. Gentleman will regret that remark. [. . .] I have been extremely scathing about the company, and in doing so I have echoed what the judge said.

  The controlling mind on the Pembroke seems at ease this evening. As the lights of Walcheren in Holland diminish behind us the Captain whistles ‘The Magic Flute’, unconcerned by any superstition. The names of the sandbars around us could have been announced by the rolls of the tide on the dark thrusts of the banks themselves: Raan, Droogte Van Schoonveldt, Wandelaar.

  At 2130 the pilot leaves us, taken off by a scarlet catamaran. Two searchlights blaze the water as men in red and yellow safety suits catch the pilot and haul him down to safety.

  ‘They use the catarmaran in force seven or above,’ shouts the Captain, watching from the bridge wing. ‘But it damages very easily. It’s always off for repairs.’

  Twenty-seven ships light the sea ahead, anchored off the Wandelaar Bank. We bear west into the oil-black Channel. The clouds part ahead and we sail into a cold and moonless clear; Venus is so bright we mistake it for a helicopter. Orion shows to the south and the lights of the coast are French now, not Belgian. The chart is shoaled with banks to landward, the memories of a continent that once reached further west. They set the autopilot, turn out all the deck lights and the gangway crew stand down. No one else will leave or join us and we will touch no land until Canada. Even the little blue leading light on the foremast is dimmed. The Captain shows me the Aldis lamp, familiar from war films in which they were used to flash Morse code from ship to ship. He talks of rumours that GPS is going to become less reliable: ‘The satellites are getting old. They’ll have to shoot stars again!’

  Studying the automatic identification system, the radar, and the lights outside, the Channel seems busy to me, even by its standards of five hundred ship passages every twenty-four hours. It is glutted with vessels, many, like us, plunging to repair deadlines broken by the strike. We are cutting north-west across the traffic to the south-bound lane on the English side. We will turn south once we reach it and follow the lanes and traffic control schemes all the way to the Scillies.

  ‘It’s all different now,’ the Captain says. ‘When I first went to South America we carried the equivalent of three hundred and fifty containers but there were no containers then. Ships had two derricks, you link
ed one to a line from a crane on shore and controlled them both. You had to be pretty handy! Mostly it was done by stevedores.’

  Their route went Amsterdam, Bremerhaven, Hamburg, Recife, Buenos Aires. They took cars and electrical goods to Latin America, bringing back coffee, tobacco, hardwoods and beef, the latter in freezing holds.

  ‘You would be a week unloading and a week loading! Wonderful! You did not want to come back. I did not save any money . . .’

  The shorescapes of Captain Koop’s memories were gradually then entirely erased by what became known as the intermodal shipping container. Our steel boxes were invented in 1955 by Malcolm Maclean, the owner of a trucking company in North Carolina. By the end of the following decade, centuries-old cultures of rackety docks and sailors with the time to spend wages were gone or going, along with the waterfront worlds the Captain remembers. Container ships needed deep quays which could support huge cranes; the containers needed miles of space where they could be stacked and shunted; the trucks that carried them to and from the ports needed fast connections to motorways. The piers and warehouses of some of the world’s greatest cities, the capitals of the ages of sail and steam, were now obsolete: London, Manhattan and San Francisco still have their docklands and wharves but the only cargo ships that work them are becalmed in photographs on the walls of bars and restaurants. Big ships still ply the lower Thames, and the Mersey, but they are straggled remnants of the great fleets of the past. Even here in the Channel, the world’s busiest freight lane, the Captain says there are fewer ships these days. Trade has shrunk since 2008, and ships have grown bigger, he says.