Down to the Sea in Ships

by Horatio Clare

  He brings up an electronic chart of the Atlantic and clicks though the weather map. The ocean is swirled around with fletched arrows in spirals, indicating wind directions. Each feather on an arrow’s tail indicates ten knots of wind speed. The western ocean is dark blue with projections of low pressure and high waves. Our course leads into an area of forty-knot winds and four- to five-metre swells.

  ‘We can survive that, but no bigger,’ he says. ‘If you go too fast in six metres you kill your ship. The bow cannot take it.’

  The Captain is desperate for speed but whichever way he plots the course the map’s predicted waves demand a day of slow steaming, survival speed, at no more than ten knots. This means we need speed now, as we turn into the southbound lane at South Falls buoy, a critical point for ships transiting the Channel. Heavy traffic converges here and the sand waves on the seabed are in constant migration, monitored annually by the United Kingdom Hydrographic Office, which frets about vessels of ever-deeper draught on ever-tightening schedules making this crucial turn over sands that are never still. Our instruments say we are making eighteen knots’ speed over ground, minus one knot of counter-current: the flow of the ebbing tide we came out on. We can see the lights of the French coast to port; to starboard is the orange twinkling of Ramsgate. We head straight for Orion and it is a freezing night.

  I miss Shubd and Chris and Sorin! It’s true, I miss my shipmates, Joel especially, and their mighty machine. I do like Pembroke-Sydney – she is a beguiling character – but the Gerd will always be the ship to measure others by. And Captain Larsen, so inimitably himself, so fearsome and gruffly kind, is my template. Captain Koop, with his moustache, looks a little like a rugby-playing John Cleese. He is entirely obliging and tirelessly helpful – ‘Look, I’ll show you’ is his catchphrase. The third mate, Chicoy, has the size and shyness of a boy. He wears it severely, humourlessly, as if in compensation. I wait up for John, though time is confusing here. We are going back an hour at some point. He should be up soon.

  The Gerd was such a luxurious machine, with miles of glass bridge wings and the wonderful after deck: there was always somewhere sheltered from the wind. Pembroke has iron emplacements on either side of the bridge which you can imagaine shooting from, and nowhere to hide from the weather. She is much more feminine, with her homely and scattered accumulation of books, charts, coffee cups, magazines; her curtained-off radio and computer area, her wind-chatter and history. She seems to demand an equal return of masculinity: Captain Koop, with his bulk, is her perfect counterpoint. But there is an apprehension sailing with us. We are behind schedule, heading into bad weather, with boy-men instead of the easy professionals of the Gerd’s crew and only old and battered bow plates between us and the ocean which is always angry, so sailors say. This is what I hoped and bargained for but I feel a little like I did on my first night away from home.

  Chicoy is excited about the Dover Strait because he will get a signal on his phone. Even with the lights of shores on either side of us he says, plaintively, ‘Just like the Atlantic – no ships!’ (It must be a relative judgement as I can see several.) He says we will not see any when we get out beyond the Scillies. From Bishop Rock, to the west of the Scillies, we will make a Great Circle into the cold, in the hope of outmanoeuvring the weather.

  The sea can take forever and swallow it but land goes quickly. After Ramsgate come the lights of Dover; a ferry to Calais crosses the black water ahead, lit like a festival. The duty-free shops, the bars and cabins, the food . . . Does some smoker on deck see our lights? Certainly they do on her bridge, as we pass behind her.

  Dover Coastguard, the voice of England, sounds tired, but his questions are all alert. By his tone you picture a man no longer young, in a white shirt – clean on today but past its best – with insignia on the shoulders, sleeves rolled up. Perhaps there is grey in his hair, which is retreating fast, and a coffee cup not far away, though not near enough the instruments to cause any damage in case of upset. He is wearing a headset, the microphone suspended in front of his chin. The windows above his screen are dark and the light in the room comes from the computers. He looks at us, a triangle denoted by our name and call sign, Papa Delta Hotel Yankee, with our course, speed and destination all a button-press away. He recognises us, perhaps. He has a host of ships to contact; he may be weary but his questions are very courteous and he listens carefully to what we tell him. He knows dozens of ships can hear him, tuned in to his frequency, and dozens of judgements may be made each time he speaks. I cannot help wondering if he has a wife and children waiting for him somewhere in the dark mass of England, not far away. He sounds as though he has. You can imagine him serving toast to a teenager. He is not quite paternal with us, but he is not quite fraternal either. We are all working, this freezing black night. His voice has the assuredness of dry land about it but all his attention is out in the Channel with us. It is not surprising he sounds tired; it must be a stressful time for him. The coastguards are under assault from government cuts: eight of nineteen stations are being closed. Those remaining are tasked to cover wider areas and more ships with fewer officers. Our guardian, overseeing the world’s busiest shipping lane, is now manning a downsized twenty-four-hour ‘substation’.

  ‘Maersk Pembroke, Maersk Pembroke, Dover Coastguard, Dover Coastguard over.’

  Once contact has been established the questions come.

  ‘Maersk Pembroke, what is your last port of call, over?’

  Chicoy tells him.

  ‘And your next destination, over?’

  ‘Montreal,’ Chicoy says.

  ‘How many persons on board, please?’

  ‘Twenty-four, figures two four, over.’

  ‘Thank you – and are you carrying any dangerous cargo, over?’

  Chicoy replies in the affirmative and reads a list of number and letter codes, corresponding to the contents of our dangerous, lethal and pollutant-carrying tanks and containers.

  ‘And do you have any dangers or deficiencies to report, over?’

  ‘Negative, Dover,’ Chicoy says.

  ‘Maersk Pembroke, Dover Coastguard, thank you. Have a good watch and a safe passage to your next destination.’

  He wishes everyone the same thing. Each time the benediction sounds sincere.

  ‘Thank you, sir, same to you,’ says a Russian officer. He is going to Vigo with a long list of dangerous cargo. A Swede is going to Shoreham with a cargo of timber; a Brit is planning to ‘steam up and down and kill time’ until the tide is right at Rochester. An Indian is going to Santa Marta, Colombia, arriving on 1 March. What an exotic and curious place is the Channel! Add the stories of the hundreds on the ferries, and the ghosts of night-fighters and bombers in the air above us, not to mention the late long-haul flights and the last of the day’s low-cost flocks, and the plans and tales of the seafarers, and the gripes and scores of the fishermen, and the missions, hopes and love-longings of those in the last trains in the tunnel below the seabed, and the English Channel is a universe, a dizzying nebula of life and history, all around us in the night.

  When William of Orange dispatched four hundred ships through here in November 1688, on the way to Torbay, the landing site for his invasion of England, his fleet was so large it was able to salute Dover and Calais simultaneously. On our right lie the Goodwin Sands, ‘a very dangerous flat and fatal, where the carcasses of many a tall ship lie buried, as they say’, Salarino describes them in The Merchant of Venice. The chronicles of the crossings of this narrow sea begin with human history almost as far back as we can measure it. The first identifiable individual who made the journey did so around 2300 BC, in the very early Bronze Age. Known as ‘the Archer’ because of the sixteen arrowheads interred with him, he was buried with great wealth and ceremony at Amesbury, near Stonehenge, but oxygen isotopes in his teeth reveal he grew up in Switzerland or the Tyrol. He is likely to have made the voyage on a very calm day in a sewn-plank boat. The oldest example of a sea-going craft of this kind, dating to 15
50 BC, was discovered beneath the streets of Dover in 1992. Before the invention of nails their planks were stitched together with roots and flexible wooden fibres. The enterprise and courage of the Archer notwithstanding, more than two millennia after his crossing, in 55 BC, Julius Caesar’s legionaries protested that his expedition to Britain would require them to fight on the other side of what Romans called ‘the green sea of darkness’. The Emperor Claudius had the same problem in AD 43. On being ordered to board their transports some of his soldiers sat on their spears and objected to fighting ‘beyond the inhabited earth’.

  John’s alarm clock rings for a full minute before he is awake enough to silence it. He comes up to the bridge, acknowledging Chicoy’s handover in gentle grunts, sleepy but interested. John produces his BlackBerry and mourns the absence of signal. He shows me some more pictures of smiling Theresa. He scrolls down to find some ‘which show her figure’.

  They are going to marry this year.

  ‘She misses me terribly when I go to sea.’

  When they have been together for two years the company will let him bring her aboard for a trip. As we pass over power lines and the Channel Tunnel, John recounts his education at a ‘terrible school’. ‘No English O-level, but I did get Chemistry, Physics and Maths. Went to sea with BP – four years on VLCCs – you know? Very Large Crude Carriers. You get a purge pipe spouting thirty foot of petrol, straight up. You’re soaked in it. And you’re in the Gulf, it’s hot there and you’re breathing petrol the whole time – you’re high.’

  Next he was on bulk carriers, which was much better, and then a multi-purpose carrier, which was the best.

  ‘Party every night! The Captain was great, yeah. He let us do cargo-watch from the bar. Went Rio a lot, girls and dancing, you know . . .’

  All our lives are in John’s hands until 4 a.m.; within moments this sleepy-looking man spots a crucial mistake. Chicoy has missed a way-point, a course change, and plotted our progress straight into the south cardinal buoy at the tip of Varne Bank. John fiddles with the computer, lower lip stuck out, until we are safe. The threatened gale is beginning as a fresh wind from the English side. We have passed Boulogne and Dungeness now, Orion has ridden westwards and the sea ahead is so dark you cannot believe that there is anything there at all. John wants to talk on, about photography, but I must, must sleep.

  CHAPTER 16

  The Western Approaches

  WE SAIL THROUGH an exhilaration of white horses and rainbowed spray, into a clear morning with gannets diving. The temperature is six degrees but the wind is teary cold. Portland is just visible to the north and the Cherbourg peninsula of France is a low line to the south: it is a surprise to be able to see both at once, this far west. From a beach in Dorset you feel France might be out there somewhere, but to paddle for it you would have to be either mad or expert. By 750 BC there was a busy trade between the two; Britons exchanged metals for wine and pottery from Amorica. This morning all the trade is passing through the Channel rather than across it. There are ships in lanes around us, mostly small coasters, and two large carriers out ahead, one off each side of the bow.

  Erwin is on the bridge, a young man with a real thrust to his jaw, such as you would need if you were to be a chief officer at the age of twenty-eight. His last run was the Gulf to Somalia and back, over and over again, carrying containers. He puts his success down to luck and learning. He and Chicoy are the same height, barely five and a half feet, but Erwin is a lesson in accrued authority, lightly worn.

  The chart says we are heading into the Western Approaches. To preceding generations, and to anyone reared on the novels of Nicholas Monsarrat, Alistair MacLean or Geoffrey Jenkins, the phrase means more than the sea area it describes. The Western Approaches were the first of the killing grounds of the struggle at sea in the Great War, and, even more terribly, during the Battle of the Atlantic, 1939–45. That conflict took the lives of more than 100,000 seamen and sent more than fourteen and a half million tonnes of merchant ships to the bottom, along with 175 of the Allied warships that tried to protect them and 783 German submarines sent out to destroy. As we surge three abreast with two coasters, on this gannets’ morning, with the sun bright behind us and England falling back into Lyme Bay, we are setting out across a monstrous graveyard.

  On the seabed directly ahead of us, upside down in sixty metres of water, is the wreck of HMS Formidable, a British battleship torpedoed in the small hours of New Year’s Day 1915. As dusk fell on the first year of the Great War, Formidable was returning from gunnery exercises with her full complement of 780 men. She had been launched in 1898; for all her Krupp armour and fifty-tonne guns she was obsolete when war broke out. A submarine had been reported in the area but the weather was so rough it was thought that no U-boat could attack. The U-24, under the command of Rudolf Schneider, struck at twenty past two in the morning, torpedoing the ship’s starboard side. Formidable’s Captain, Noel Loxley, thought at first that he might make land, but the battleship listed rapidly. In gale-force winds, rain and hail, with swells running to nine metres high, Loxley gave the order to abandon ship. To lower a boat in such conditions would be a desperate business even from a modern vessel in perfect working order. As Formidable leaned twenty degrees to starboard the crew struggled to get their boats away. Some hit the water upside down, some were smashed as they fell, others were swamped. Schneider’s second torpedo struck the ship’s port side. It was reported by survivors that in her final moments, when the ship gave a tremendous lurch, Captain Loxley cried, ‘Lads, this is the last, all hands for themselves, and may God bless you and guide you to safety.’ He is then said to have lit a cigarette and walked to the forebridge. The battleship capsized, rolling over men in the water as she sank. Five hundred and forty seven died, including the Captain.

  Most of the dead have no headstone. ‘Auf einem Seemannsgrab, da blühen keine Rosen’ ran a German folksong of the era: ‘On a sailor’s grave no roses bloom’. Among those whose bodies were washed or carried ashore were twins, John and Henri Villiers-Russell, aged twenty-nine, who are buried in the churchyard of St Michael’s Coppenhall in Cheshire. Employed at the Crewe Railway Works, they were also members of the St John Ambulance Brigade and the Royal Navy Sick Berth Reserve. During their summer holiday of 1914 they joined Formidable for a week’s training. War broke out when they were aboard and they volunteered to stay on. Like those of many of their shipmates, the twins’ names are recorded on a memorial to the dead in the parish where they grew up; many more of the names of the ship’s dead are inscribed on panels around the bases of the Naval Memorial obelisks at Chatham, Portsmouth and Plymouth. The body of Captain Loxley’s fox terrier, Bruce, was washed ashore. As a war dog, his grave is kept at Abbotsbury Gardens in Dorset.

  The volunteering twins, the scattered memorials to the crew, Loxley’s perfect fulfilment of naval archetype and the grave of his dog seem to cut a cross section across the grain of the Great War, and of the spirit of the dying Empire: class, rank, heroic tradition and reverence for animals, all undone by the assumption that new weapons would not work in foul weather. HMS Formidable was the first British battleship to be sunk by enemy attack in the First World War, her fate a sign of the terrible efficacy of the U-boat campaigns. By mid-1916 Britain’s food stocks were perilously low; at the end of the year the Admiralty was reporting to David Lloyd George, the new Prime Minister, that the war at sea was all but lost, and advising him to negotiate a peace with Germany. Lloyd George refused, and ordered the inauguration of the convoy system. The idea of grouping merchant ships together under naval escort faced great resistance, not least from shipowners and speculators, war profiteers, who were making huge sums out of insurance on ships that were sunk, as well as government subsidies and dividends paid to investors in shipping. The contrast between the situation of these figures and that of the men who crewed their ships could scarcely be more savage. A merchant seaman’s pay was stopped from the moment he took to his lifeboat. If he survived he could not e
xpect to be paid again until he joined another ship in one of the convoys which saw the country through the end of the first war and sustained it throughout the second. Some men were torpedoed and rescued three times: 100,000 of them were less lucky. It is the heaving grave-waters of the convoys’ crews and the sailors who fought to protect them that we will travel through. Most of the iron carcasses we will pass over will not be warships, but merchant vessels, the ancestors of our own.

  Breakfast is mango yoghurt, hard fried eggs and something like catfood with potatoes. Annabelle is making beautiful cinnamon and apple tarts. She gives me to understand that 8.15 is rather late. Mark, the steward, says his admirable figure is thanks to his use of dumb-bells. ‘I quit smoking!’ he cries triumphantly, then confides, ‘I saw all these actors with good bodies and I wanted to have one too.’

  Now there are heather-coloured cloud shadows on the green water.

  ‘Warship Dragon, Warship Dragon, Warship Dragon,’ announces the radio. ‘Live firing, Lyme Bay. Go to channel eight, out.’

  Tune in or get shot, runs the apparent subtext.

  Someone ignores him magnificently. Warship Dragon – one of Britain’s new Type 45 destroyers, carrying one of the world’s most sophisticated radar systems and enough weaponry, it is reported, to down all the warplanes in South America pretty well simultaneously – calls repeatedly, imploring the renegade to respond. Warship Dragon gives his antagonist’s course (220 degrees), position (seven miles south-west of Portland) and speed, thirteen knots, and receives no reply. The mystery vessel lets him sweat for a while (there is no way they cannot hear Dragon), until at last a laid-back Indian-sounding voice acknowledges.