The ship enters the Celtic Sea. Below us is the Jones Bank: 70 metres, 180 metres, 90 metres, the depths shift like waves and the chart shows a dozen wrecks near to us. None is named or dated on the chart. The sailing directions describe the world in which they lie. ‘The bottom of the Western approaches to the English Channel appears to consist mainly of fine or coarse sand, a great deal of broken shell, and occasional patches of pebbles, gravel and small stones. Mud may be found in places now and then. The sand is mostly white; although, in many places it is yellow, with black specks. The black specks are often found mixed both with the white and yellow sand; they are very fine, resembling fine cinder dust.’
As we rumble over this submarine desolation there is a sudden lift: ‘Swells.’ ‘Swells already,’ say the Captain and Pieter at once, exchanging a glance. Pieter tilts his head as though listening for something. The Captain nods, frowning so that his jaw juts.
Now they chat about Egypt and Hong Kong and Nigeria, and as they laugh, surrounded by Pembroke’s old honours from ports across the oceans, there is something quietly magnificent about these three Dutch seafarers, something in and out of time, at once nostalgic and actual. I cannot characterise the feeling at first. Each has a personal isolation about him, a sense of a world of worries confined to his cabin, which is familiar, but their cares are padded with a sardonic humour and a sea-companionship I have not noticed among other nationalities I have sailed with. Hendrik Willem Van Loon, writing in 1916, would have had no difficulty ascribing it. His collection The Golden Book of the Dutch Navigators begins with a vision of the Low Countries towards the end of the 1500s, on the eve of the Netherlands’ great age.
‘Wherever a man went in the country there was the high sky of the coastal region, and the canals which would carry his small vessel to the main roads of trade and ultimate prosperity. The sea reached up to his very front door. It supported him in his struggle for a living, and it was his best ally in his fight for independence. Half of his family and friends lived on and by the sea. The nautical terms of the forecastle became the language of his land. His house reminded the foreign visitor of a ship’s cabin. And finally his state became a large naval Commonwealth, with a number of shipowners as a board of directors and a foreign policy dictated by the needs of commerce. The history of Holland is the story of the conquest of the sea . . .’ Van Loon dedicates his book to his sons with a homily: ‘I want you to know about these men because they are your ancestors. If you have inherited any of their good qualities, make the best of them; they will prove to be worthwhile. If you have got your share of their bad ones, fight these as hard as you can; for they will lead you a merry chase before you get through.’
The three descendants of Van Loon’s Dutch navigators are now discussing pilots: the man who saw us through Flushing Roads last night was of the old school, in his tattered jumper and sea monster’s beard, and he knew what he was doing. ‘You know they train the new ones on simulators now?’ says the Captain, sceptically.
‘So I guess we’ll find out about that, one way or another,’ Pieter laughs. ‘You know we are retarding the clocks another hour tonight?’
‘Oh? Thank you. It’s confusing . . .’
‘You should have been here when the ships went slower – we used to go back by half-hours.’
Jannie claps his hand to his forehead. ‘Each twelve hours divided in three watches, so ten minutes different for you, ten minutes for him, my ten minutes – the calculations!’
Nymphe Bank is to the north, Cockburn ahead and below the horizons small unnamed banks, each worked by a solitary fishing boat. The Porcupine Sea Bight, the edge of the European Continental Shelf, is out beyond Cockburn Bank. We are coming up on the line dividing United Kingdom from Irish waters. There are over 350 known wrecks in the chart of our current position, in the south-western approaches to St George’s Channel. The oldest marked is the Thomasina, a full-rigged sailing ship launched in 1873 and sunk by gunfire from the U-35 in 1915, an extraordinary confrontation between the Victorian era and the modern age. Appropriately, perhaps, there was no loss of life: the crew were allowed to take to their boats, from which they were later rescued, before the U-boat fired. Conduct of this kind attended many sinkings of cargo ships in the first war, and persisted sporadically into the beginning of the Battle of the Atlantic. The list of the lost encompasses the end of the age of sail, recording forty more tall ships sent to the bottom in the Great War, several of them by torpedo.
The records are full of echoes – Thistlebank, another sailing ship, was carrying wheat to Ireland from Argentina when she was torpedoed in June 1916 by the same Rudolf Schneider who six months before had sunk HMS Formidable. A third sailer, Sunlight, carrying molasses from Hispaniola to Glasgow for Lever Brothers, was sunk in the same area by another U-boat five days later. In late 1940 there is a spate of six vessels in sequence, three cargo ships and three trawlers, all sunk by air attack. France had fallen: Channel shipping was within easy reach of German aircraft. There is another cluster, this time of U-boats, all destroyed during and after 1943 when the Battle of the Atlantic turned decisively against them. In the latter part of the century fishing boats are undone by explosions, freighters go down when their cargoes shift in storms, yachts suffer flooding and heavy seas and one boat dives down a wave at thirty-eight knots and ruptures her hull – the end of Virgin Atlantic Challenger and her attempt on the Atlantic speed record in 1985.
I end the day writing down two of John’s stories. We returned to the tragedy of the Royston Castle, and the vacuum created by burning oil, which left no one aboard alive. He has survived ‘loads of fires, aye!’ without encountering disaster: ‘Engine room fires mostly. The suppressors dealt with them.’
Then he tells the tale of the worst thing he ever saw.
‘He was an electrician, a Geordie, only young. Twenty-four. He goes to get a torch off the roof of a lift. Someone had dropped it down there, you know, and he thought he’d climb down and get it? It was the case that changed safety regulations about lifts – and I was the one that found it,’ he says, proudly, twice.
‘I get in the lift and it’s all red. So I think, uh? And I look into the gap, and there’s a hand.’
The sun was out and the daffodils were in bloom above St Michael’s Mount, as John described discovering the young Geordie’s corpse, the flattened head ‘three times the size of a head’.
The most sinister story comes from John’s time on the Foreland, a bulker, an ore carrier renamed seven times, a sister ship to the Derbyshire, which went down with all hands when the seas broke off her hatch covers. The Foreland was moored at Hunterstone on the coast of Scotland. This is a chillingly bleak harbour, little more then a terminal at the end of a pier that feeds a power station.
‘I knew it was a strange ship when I first went on but I didn’t know it was an evil ship. My mother came up to see me but when she got there, as soon as she saw it, she said “I’m not going on that ship.” I said: “Why not? You’ve come all the way up to Scotland to see us – what do you mean you’re not coming on?”
‘She says: “I’m not going on that ship.” Wouldn’t say why. In the end I took her hand and dragged her up the gangway. She goes straight to my cabin and she wouldn’t come out. She’d been on loads of ships but she wouldn’t leave the cabin. Offered her a tour of the ship – didn’t want it. The captain said she could stay the night – she wouldn’t have it. She stayed in the cabin until she left and I said: “What was all that about?”
‘“Something terrible happened on that ship,” she says. I knew what it was, but she didn’t. I hadn’t said anything about it. This was in the days before the internet and whatever so she couldn’t have looked it up or anything – she couldn’t have known.’
‘What happened, John?’ I blurt.
‘One of the crew had gone mad and stabbed some of the others. He killed a few of them. I said, “What was all that about?” She said: “Something terrible happened on that ship. Men died o
n that ship.” I said, “Yes, but how did you know?” She said: “I could see them.”’
CHAPTER 17
When Something Snaps
THERE ARE SWELLS in the night as we cross the banks and the wind backs westerly. We wake to misted sky and sea the colour of a submarine. At ten there is a full meeting in the harbour control room. The Captain and Pieter, the chief, are there first.
‘Have you heard about the Maersk Luz?’ asks the Captain.
‘No?’
‘A fight in the crew. Filipino guys. Two dead and there’s one in custody in Buenos Aires.’
‘Jesus, what happened?’
‘We don’t know, they don’t tell us. Maybe the Filipinos know. This is bad stuff. If men are at sea too long . . . they are such happy-go-lucky guys, eh? But if something snaps . . .’
Erwin arrives, downcast. The Captain prompts him:
‘The Maersk Luz?’
‘I know one who was killed,’ Erwin says, quietly.
‘You know him?’ the Captain repeats.
‘Marlon. I sailed with him, a long time. Months. He was a good guy, really a good guy.’
He shakes his head and more of the junior officers appear, all wearing the same expression. The second and third engineers, Reyje and Filemon, Sumy the bo’sun, Erwin and Annabelle are from the same town as Marlon. It is as though all the Filipinos on all the world’s seas are one crew, and all their ships one fleet. By the atmosphere in the room the two dead men are next door.
The Captain goes briskly around the table. The chief engineer is responsible for ordering materials and stores: Annabelle tells Pieter she needs soap powder and soap.
‘It’s not going to be there when we get back to Rotterdam,’ he says, ‘so it’s going to take two months.’
Annabelle says we also need fresh vegetables.
‘Montreal?’
Next come questions about a flight to Cebu for Reyje, the second engineer, a young man with an extraordinary haircut, like a guardsman’s busby, and questions from Filemon, his deputy, about signing off in March.
‘What does your contract say?’
‘April, Captain.’
The Captain makes an eloquent shrug. Erwin asks, on behalf of the crew, if there might be fifty dollars available for new DVDs?
‘Yes, but after we spend three hundred of the remaining twelve hundred to update the anti-virus software in Montreal.’
There is a brief discussion about the lashing bonus. Like Glenn Cuevas, killed by a crate in Rotterdam, this crew will also be doing stevedores’ work, because of safety regulations in Montreal, ironically. At least they will not be doing it while the cranes are working overhead, as Mr Cuevas was.
‘In Montreal they don’t work the cranes until the cargo is unlashed, and the stevedores don’t lash until the cranes have finished loading. That’s five hours – we can’t wait. So the crew do it,’ the Captain explains. A bonus is paid in cash and everyone wants in – only the Captain and the chief engineer exempt themselves.
The meeting breaks up and Pieter offers a tour of his engine room. He shows me around with the same thoroughness with which John showed me the bridge. The engine is an eight-cylinder BMW two-stroke diesel, capable of 28,000 kilowatts of power. The heat and fury, the noise and the gigantic scale are all reminiscent of the Gerd but here brass thermometers protrude everywhere like periscopes. I find the engine control strangely touching. There is a control rod which descends from the bridge. There is a red knob and a brass wheel marked ‘More’ with an anti-clockwise arrow. All this enormous complexity comes down to such a simple, humble control. Constellations of pipes and wires and washers and valves add up, in the end, to a shaft which you can spin ‘more’, ‘less’ and either way. We descend three decks to the level of the shaft, a grease-black whirl of constant motion (we must hope and hope) spinning eighty-five times a minute. The ship’s tail narrows elegantly, like a ribbed fish, cold to the touch.
‘Colder in Montreal,’ says Pieter. ‘You can hear the ice scraping along the sides. It’s fine if it stays out there.’
We tour pumps, coolers, heaters and condensers. He stops by each of his charges and screams its function into my ear. There is a lot of fuel filtering down here because cargo ships use the cheapest, dirtiest diesel. ‘And fuel pumps are very sensitive things!’ Pieter touches pipes, warm and hot; the very hot he pats. Moving parts are daubed lovingly with grease.
Reyje, the second engineer, and Jannie, the electrician, are working on a cylinder head for one of the generators: it has done 12,000 hours of labour since it was last cleaned; when they have finished it will be ready for its next 12,000. They conduct a conversation about a level measurement with Pieter almost entirely in sign language, topped off with a bit of screaming. Eight hours down here with two breaks, with the deck shaking and the roar gouging at the little plugs in your ears! It takes shipping, the history of shipping, to make this seem reasonable. For all the ferocities of the age of sail, it was steam that reintroduced hell to a seafarer’s existence, hell of a day-to-day quality not seen since the slave galleys.
The ‘Black Gang’ now refers to Customs officers; originally it was the appellation of the stokers and trimmers whose labour drove the turbines of the age of steam. R.M. Dunshea, apprentice on the cargo liner Maimoa, described the conditions in which her Black Gang fought the Battle of the Atlantic. The ship was twenty years old when the war began:
‘Each man had to feed his three furnaces with two tonnes of coal every four-hour watch, as well as slicing and raking the fires to ensure good consumption. At the beginning of each watch ash-pits had to be cleaned. Each watch was accommodated in a single, badly-ventilated room in the fo’c’sle. At sea with a seven-day week they had no diversions, in port they usually sought solace in dockland hostelries . . . many fell foul of the ladies, the effects manifesting themselves a few weeks later.’
Lady Nancy Astor suggested that merchant seamen be compelled to wear yellow armbands on shore, as a sign of their potential for carrying venereal disease. In 1938 she told Parliament that a colleague who had seen the way seamen lived ‘said he would not expect ferrets to live in such conditions’.
The young Eugene O’Neill came rather closer to the actuality of the stokehold when he shipped as a deckhand on runs between New York, Southampton and Buenos Aires. When ashore he frequented a New York dive called Jimmy the Priest’s, where, O’Neill said, ‘you could sleep with your head on the table if you bought a schooner of beer’.
‘I shouldn’t have known the stokers if I hadn’t happened to scrape an acquaintance with one of our own furnace-room gang at Jimmy the Priest’s. His name was Driscoll, and he was a Liverpool Irishman. It seems that years ago some Irish families settled in Liverpool. Most of them followed the sea, and they were a hard lot. To sailors all over the world, a “Liverpool Irishman” is the synonym for a tough customer. It was through Driscoll that I got to know the other stokers. Driscoll himself came to a strange end. He committed suicide by jumping overboard in mid-ocean.’
O’Neill addressed the conditions of the stokers in his play The Hairy Ape. His stage directions for its third scene are more telling than any photograph:
The stokehole. In the rear, the dimly-outlined bulks of the furnaces and boilers. High overhead one hanging electric bulb sheds just enough light through the murky air laden with coal dust to pile up masses of shadows everywhere. A line of men, stripped to the waist, is before the furnace doors. They bend over, looking neither to right nor left, handling their shovels as if they were part of their bodies, with a strange, awkward, swinging rhythm. They use the shovels to throw open the furnace doors. Then from these fiery round holes in the black a flood of terrific light and heat pours full upon the men who are outlined in silhouette in the crouching, inhuman attitudes of chained gorillas. The men shovel with a rhythmic motion, swinging as on a pivot from the coal which lies in heaps on the floor behind to hurl it into the flaming mouths before them. There is a tumult of noise – the b
razen clang of the furnace doors as they are flung open or slammed shut, the grating, teeth-gritting grind of steel against steel, of crunching coal. This clash of sounds stuns one’s ears with its rending dissonance . . . And rising above all, making the air hum with the quiver of liberated energy, the roar of leaping flames in the furnaces, the monotonous throbbing beat of the engines.
The lowest of the gang in wages and status were the trimmers, who retrieved coal from the bunkers, spread it out evenly at the feet of the stokers, raked out the ashes and disposed of them. The worst work of the men of the Indian Empire – as they flung coal up an incline in the holds of a ship on her side in the Pacific – was the daily routine of the trimmers. They bunkered coal and balanced its bulk, moving it around as it was depleted, to keep the ship level. As stocks in the lower bunkers were burned the trimmers shifted tonnes out of higher bunkers, so the longer the voyage went on the more labour they had to accomplish. The only concession to their health and safety amid the choking dust was a wet rag tied across the mouth.
Nor was it enough that the stokers should simply shovel the coal, as in O’Neill’s description. They must also ensure it burned ‘like an incandescent cloud of vapour rushing from the top of coals towards the rear of the furnaces – it was not a “fire”, but a bed of incandescent fuel on the grate’.1 In wartime it was particularly important that this ferocious combustion was achieved: anything less and the ship would produce undue smoke and fall astern of its convoy, making it easy to spot and easy to sink. This meant a stoker had to be close enough to the blaze to use his tools effectively, the names of which speak eloquently of the work. He broke up clinkers of unburned coal with a slice bar, or dragged them out with a devil’s claw. He raked the gratings clear of ash with a pricker bar and levelled the surface of the inferno with a firing hoe before adding more coal, and repeating the process. To complete the echo of the age of the galley slaves, the work in the stokehold on many ships was coordinated by the mechanical striking of Kilroy’s Stoking Indicator, which beat a metallic time.
Down to the Sea in Ships Page 21