Down to the Sea in Ships

by Horatio Clare

  ‘We are about to commence gunnery firing,’ says Dragon, sounding more conciliatory now. ‘Could you alter your course southwards, so that we can proceed with our serial, over?’

  The Indian lets him sweat again. By the time he agrees to go to Channel 8 to discuss the matter Warship Dragon is calling him ‘sir’.

  Now a French fishing vessel, Flaneur, crosses our wake coming up from the south and heading into Lyme Bay. He immediately attracts Dragon’s attention. The fisherman calls Dragon ‘sir’ in the most delightful French accent but fails to change his course by a single degree. I wish I could see Dragon; she must be lying to the north-east where there is a warship-coloured haze against the land. The rest of the horizon is a sharp cut line, slightly bowed.

  Coffee is taken at 10.30 in the harbour control room, a happy occasion, blessed with Annabelle’s cinnamon apple tart. Pieter makes us all laugh, Jannie makes the Dutch laugh in Dutch and the Captain tells a story about the Filipinos’ love of music. Apparently their union, which struggles protect or significantly enrich them, has won them the right to have a karaoke machine on any ship with a given number of Filipino crew.

  ‘One captain of the Palermo [our sister ship, on the same run] bought them a drum kit, keyboards and two guitars. The next captain hates the noise they make, so he has it all shifted to another ship. Two weeks after he’s done it he gets transferred to the same ship!’

  On the bridge, studying the day and the instruments, I note that she claims to have done 608,738 nautical miles. This indicates that Pembroke is just embarking on the equivalent of her second return leg from the moon. She is burning seventy tonnes of fuel a day at our present speed – eighteen knots – and thereby costing the company over fifty-six thousand US dollars every twenty-four hours. At twenty-three dollars a day the services of Richard, our assistant steward, are cheap indeed.

  ‘It’s always warm down here,’ says Pieter, as a lovely pre-spring day passes by outside. There are five black-backed gulls in the water; I wonder which pirates’ souls they are. Judging by our position, south-east of Plymouth, probably Drake and his men. Their voyage around the world, only the second circumnavigation of the globe, started badly hereabouts, according to Francis Pretty, a gentleman at arms who sailed with him.

  The 15th day of November, in the year of our Lord 1577, Master Francis Drake, with a fleet of five ships and barks, and to the number of 164 men, gentlemen and sailors, departed from Plymouth, giving out his pretended voyage for Alexandria. But the wind falling contrary, he was forced the next morning to put into Falmouth Haven, in Cornwall, where such and so terrible a tempest took us, as few men have seen the like, and was indeed so vehement that all our ships were like to have gone to wrack. But it pleased God to preserve us from that extremity, and to afflict us only for that present with these two particulars: the mast of our Admiral, which was the Pelican, was cut overboard for the safeguard of the ship, and the Marigold was driven ashore, and somewhat bruised. For the repairing of which damages we returned again to Plymouth; and having recovered those harms, and brought the ships again to good state, we set forth the second time from Plymouth, and set sail the 13th day of December following . . .

  British understatement has been somewhat diluted by time. A contemporary writer would struggle not to make more of the dire battle to cut the mainmast off the Pelican (later renamed Golden Hind) in order to save the ship from the tempest. Being driven ashore in the Marigold at the height of the gale would surely leave her and her crew, now, more than ‘somewhat bruised’.

  There are a few trawlers about, and the gannets still, but it is the land which draws the eye. Francis Pretty must have glanced back at it four hundred years ago. What that low green line has meant to so many, over so many ages! Ever since we went to sea it has been our home, for home is a thing sailors and travellers have to leave to know. You can still hear the leavened joy of reaquaintance on the deck of a ferry approaching Dover. You detect something of what the Welsh call hiraeth, a kind of longing, when your aeroplane drops below the cloud base on approach to Heathrow. People peer down at sodden fields and motorways of rain and say, ‘Oh God, look at it!’ with mock-horrified affection.

  As the coast curves away towards Fowey and St Austell, and the voice of Brixham Coastguard comes over Channel 16, I match the names on the chart to the little clusters of habitation, staring through binoculars and sounding their syllables with a funny feeling in my stomach. Salcombe, Plymouth, Falmouth . . . is it sentimental, is it silly, to feel this – whatever it is – at their parade of echo and association? People from these shores and their hinterlands have set so much by them, done so much from them and for them. The towns on the edge of the sea have so rung with news of blood and valour. It means what, that I feel I can almost hear it? That I am British? That I am one of the tiny multitudes who recognise these places, though I do not know them, though I have no personal connection with any, beyond this feeling, a throb like lost familiarity? To the majority of passing seafarers – even to the minority who actually see them, those on the bridges of ships who unfold this scroll of places with their charts – the names and the notches of coves, the white crumbs of structures and the lights that signify them at night tow no freight of meaning, tell no story, teach nothing.

  I know a man who met a pirate off Brixham. Pete was sailing with his brother when a vicious-looking man in a speedboat pulled up alongside and gave Pete an evil look. Pete called his brother up to the deck, and the man powered off. A few minutes later there was a shout over the radio and a puff of flame and smoke from a yacht ahead of them. The pirate had thrown a petrol bomb at it. Pete and his brother went to give assistance, the fire was extinguished, the yacht saved and a search launched for the pirate. He was found, later, having lost his boat, clinging to a buoy.

  Chicoy is talkative this morning. Neither of us could believe the other’s age: he is thirty-six, and looks much younger. He thought I was younger too. He has three children.

  ‘When you need money you have to go to sea,’ he says. He sadly regrets not buying property years ago – now land in the Philippines is very expensive. Manila is jammed with traffic, and he needs money, money, money. How far from home he is in this foreign sea. He would do three months on, three months off if it were not for the money. He sees no way around this exile.

  ‘No chop-chop for voyage contractor,’ he smiles, bitterly, rubbing thumb and finger together, ‘No chop-chop . . .’

  He says he could not sleep after his watch last night, because he was worrying about money. His sparse beard makes him look so young.

  Eight fishing boats surround us now, including one with a red mizzen sail from Guernsey. When the nets are down rafts of gulls sit on the water, waiting for the hauling to begin, whereupon they fill the air, a white and screaming sky-wake. Fulmars are the most active of all the birds, in their ceaseless soaring.

  By noon the thermometer shows thirteen degrees and it is hot on the bridge with all the radiators on. Cornwall is blue as hardened sky. We seem to have sailed into the first day of spring. The sea is soft and we ride soporifically.

  John comes up at ten to twelve, splendid in white uniform shirt and polished boots. He shows me where the life jackets are, five floors below us, in a red box on the deck on the port side. I am assigned to the port lifeboat. Even if we are fleeing over the starboard side I must still go to port to get my jacket. If any alarm goes off my station is on the bridge. An emergency seemed thoroughly unlikely on the Gerd but quite possible here.

  The gannets have found a shoal, five of them are missiling into it, throwing up gouts of white spray, as the Cornish coast curves back towards us. The land slopes, low rumpled hills flatten down to the Lizard. Two tankers – I am learning to call them Very Large Crude Carriers – are moored at the pilot station off Falmouth. John thinks they are waiting for a space at Milford Haven or taking on North Sea pilots. The tankers are forbidding-looking hulks, but at least Falmouth Roads, once the most vibrant anchorage in all the
world, is not entirely empty.

  From before Drake’s time until 1850, when steam replaced the sail-driven packet ships, Falmouth was the principal landfall for the information Britain gathered from the globe. Rather than have ships sail on up the Channel, risking Ushant and the Goodwins before negotiating the Thames estuary, their tidings were transferred to mail coach at Falmouth. News of fortune, disaster, triumph and reversal came ashore here, systematised with the Falmouth Packets in 1688. These light, fast ships carried mail to and from the garrisons, embassies, courts and governments of Europe and the New World, at first via Spain and the Caribbean, later via New York, Charleston and Halifax. Sending a letter from London to New York in 1788 cost four pennyweight of silver, currently worth about three pounds; the fastest Post Office service today costs £7.78! (Though your missive should arrive within six working days; in 1788 the typical run of a packet ship beating ‘uphill’, west across the Atlantic against the prevailing winds, was the best part of two months.)

  The dish aerials at Goonhilly Down point towards America. We can see wind turbines and cliffs, and a shore more bittern-brown than green. Could it be any northern isle? Something about the slanted light, this Sunday afternoon, and the indeterminate season speaks of England, though John, in his torn chair, as he gazes without expression at the waves, looks like a man who could be anywhere.

  We pass the Helford river, St Mawes, Porthscatho, the Whelps and the Bellows. Five gannets use our bow wave of air for a lift, sometimes resting on the fo’c’sle. South of St Michael’s Mount the mobile signal comes and goes. John curses. One gannet cruises by the bridge wing, giving us the eye.

  Porthcurno passes, then Land’s End. Nine miles out is Wolf Rock, its tower a vertical scratch on the horizon, an apple stalk standing on the sea. It took three years to lay the first thirty-seven stones of its granite lighthouse, so difficult were the conditions on an welv, ‘the lip’, Wolf’s Cornish name. An alternative explanation suggests the builders’ challenge: wind scouring through the rock’s fissures sounds like a lupine howl. The charts and pilot books of this sea are stippled with peril. Carn Base is marked by an east cardinal buoy, and the chart notes ‘Heavy seas during gales’. ‘Many of the dangers in this area are steep-to and the soundings do not provide a warning of approach,’ say the sailing directions. ‘It is essential to use every opportunity to ascertain the vessel’s position. Careful consideration should be given to the effects of wind, currents, and tidal current in order to ensure keeping S of the Scilly Isles. Recent prevailing S and SW winds, combined with the influence of surface drift and tidal current, almost always result in a N set.’

  In 1967 this confluence of forces and that ‘North set’ were partly to blame for catastrophe.

  ‘There’s plenty of room between Carn and the Seven Stones,’ John says. ‘Seven Stones reef, you know, where the Torrey Canyon struck?’

  John tells the story. A series of miscommunications, an inexperienced navigating officer, contradictory course alterations, the set of the drift and tide, confusion, then panic combined to run the supertanker Torrey Canyon aground on Pollard’s Rock, one of the Seven Stones. At ten to nine on the morning of 18 March 1967 she hit as squarely as if she had come thousands of miles from Kuwait, via the Cape of Good Hope (she was too big to pass through Suez) like a slow arrow, perfectly flighted to the target.

  There are two extraordinary pictures of the Torrey Canyon’s master. Captain Pastrengo Rugiati was photographed on the bridge of his ship, then one of the largest in the world, when she was hard aground. Half the face almost lifts towards the lens, the way faces do, in an instinctive desire to put on some kind of show. Rugiati had served in an Italian submarine in the Atlantic during the Second World War, later transferring to a destroyer. When this ship was seized by Germany, Rugiati was sent to a concentration camp in Poland. Under his beret is half of a captain’s face, rugged and set, the face of a man who has seen and endured indescribable scenes, and surpassed them, and risen to the height of professional seafaring. He is still a captain, and still on the bridge of his ship, though he looks like a bystander with the slackness of shock about him. The other half of his features, furthest from the camera and out of shadow, appear to have been washed out by light or surprise. All expression falls from this face; it looks like the sketch of a spectre. The second photograph shows him cowering on his side, cramped into a space like a locker. This picture was taken two months later in an Italian hospital. In dressing gown and pyjamas, his knees drawn up towards his chest, Rugiati is under his bed in a foetal curl, as if in fear of some nightmarish beast. In fact he is trying to hide from journalists. He gapes at someone behind and to the left of whoever took the picture: more than one paparazzo has found his way into the ward. In Rugiati’s face is something which horror films aspire towards and will never attain. Terror-pale, the eyes bulging black, the brows high on the forehead in disbelief, the picture shows a man in the instant that the monster discovers him. He does not scream; he stares. The expression is that of someone – something – hunted, trapped and still looking for a way out.

  The Torrey Canyon was carrying over 119,000 tonnes of heavy Kuwaiti crude. The grounding caused the world’s worst oil spill. Rugiati’s last, frantic spinning of the ship’s wheel brought her round through ten degrees, audible on the bridge as the gyro compass clicked through each one, slowly. He knew the impossibility of changing a supertanker’s destiny in a hurry; he saw the inevitable moments after it became so and had to watch as he bore down upon it. In his face you seem to see it all.

  After the Scilly Isles the echo sounder loses signal as the depths drop away. We ride the swells, taking longer steps now. The ship is now burning high-sulphur fuel – Pieter made the switch as we crossed the Marine Pollution Line south of Mount’s Bay. The afternoon colours change, clouds come down, the sea seems to be pondering. At sunset the Scillies are over our starboard shoulder, lying low off the coast. A lash of cloud supports the Bishop Rock light.

  ‘When you see that you know you’re home,’ John says.

  We steer west-north-westerly, course 278 degrees, starting our Great Circle. The Scillies are tiny, tinier and gone, and now there are bigger waves. There is only one ship on the radar, inbound to the south of us under mares’ tails of cloud. We are nodding through a still evening with no whitecaps and only one bird, a gannet that has taken the albatross station over the foremast.

  It seems amazing that this time yesterday we were snaking out through the rain and surrealism of the Schelde. The sea treats time, distance and men’s lives as mutable things, unfixed. For example, John has two weeks to add to his thirty-two years before we get back to Bremerhaven, then he will be off for a month and a half. After that he has no idea what ship he will be sent to, sailing where, with whom, for what, in what condition. Custom and tradition are his only certainties: John knows his watches will start at noon and midnight and end at four and four.

  He told me horrifying stories this afternoon as we swept slowly out past the end of Cornwall. It was very funny in an awful way, trying to extend one’s feeling to the place’s moment, with the mariner tipping appalling tales into your ear. They are better set down at night.

  As the sun sinks Captain Koop does his exercises. He marches the length of the bridge with great vigour, arms not quite swinging, then turns and marches back, accelerating towards the centre of the bridge like a man with a plane to catch, before slowing rapidly at the end, turning on his heel and setting off again. Captain Koop is pacing the Atlantic out with a mighty pathos, a formidable determination to have more life, more days on land. With every stride he is reclaiming time, paying into a pension of existence beyond his coffin-shaped ship. Captain Koop is defying the sea. It seems an eminently sensible policy, pursued with manic commitment. He would run you over, you think. I do not know how many widths he sets himself but he surely hits his target.

  Dinner is at the bar because it is Sunday. Pieter the chief engineer gives out lemonade and alcohol-free beer
and relaxes on a stool behind the counter, happy. There are no uniforms tonight; the Captain is dressed as if for football. We eat chicken again, with green beans and noodles, strawberries for pudding. The strawberries have done their share of seafaring, from Kenya to Holland to the Atlantic. The mood is jolly.

  ‘We had to bribe Lagos Customs with cigarettes,’ Pieter grins, ‘And we had these cigarettes, they have – they’re from Canada? – they have these photos of cancers, lungs, horrible stuff – and the Nigerians didn’t want them! No, no, not these! Marlboro Red – didn’t want them! We had to – [Pieter relishes English and often seeks the mot juste] – compensate them with extra Coca-Cola.’

  There is much laughter from all three of them at the legendary chief mate who ‘couldn’t see’ the Cambodian and Vietnamese boat people, who fled the aftermath of the Vietnam War in the late 1970s, taking small boats into the international shipping lanes in the hope of rescue and resettlement.

  ‘Couldn’t see them!’ they chortle.

  In his cadet year Pieter was with a ship that picked up sixty boat people and took them to Singapore. The Dutch government accepted them. Pieter recently had a letter from one of the refugees, a young boy at the time, who is organising a reunion. Untold numbers of boat people died at sea: the UN estimates up to a quarter of a million. It is not the numbers that make an impression on the Dutchmen, but the means. They have all done sea-survival courses.

  ‘The tricky bit is getting into the life raft from the water,’ Pieter says, not laughing. The talk turns to drowning, to water in the lungs and how long the brain survives without oxygen, and hydrostatic pressure, when the squeeze of the water around the legs keeps blood near the vital organs. When you lift the body out of the water the pressure is removed and blood drains back to the legs. This is why some victims of the storm which struck the Fastnet race in 1979 waved to rescue helicopters from the water but were dead by the time they had been winched up. Casualties are now lifted in slings or baskets, horizontally.