Boat drill is more entertaining than frightening as we do not go near the boat. Mark has the best life jacket; I would give my journal to him. We stand under the boat and run through the list of who is responsible for bringing the blankets, who the provisions and who frees the life rafts. In this wind we would never see them again. Erwin says the whole lot was overhauled last year, so we know the lifeboat engines started then. No wonder some of the crew have faraway looks.
Around this meridian, to the north of us, lies the wreck of the City of Benares, a liner torpedoed in the early hours of 18 September 1940. She was carrying 231 children, evacuees from the Blitz and mostly working-class. They were to have been resettled in Canada at government expense in an initiative designed to redress the imbalance of children who had been sent to safety, the majority of whom were sons and daughters of the well-off. The Captain, the convoy’s commodore and 120 of her sailors and officers went down with the ship. Over 150 of the children were saved, including six boys in the care of one Miss Mary Cornish, who were taken into a lifeboat commanded by the fourth officer, Ronald Cooper. In the North Atlantic in an open boat, through gale force winds and heavy squalls, with their meagre water supply running out, heartbroken by the sight of a ship that might have rescued them turning away oblivious, with their food ration running out, and despite cases of delirium, depression, hallucinations and trench foot among adult survivors, the quietly extraordinary Cornish and Cooper contrived to keep the children occupied and the little vessel afloat and running eastwards through six nights, seven days and nineteen hours.
Miss Cornish led the singing of popular songs and devised games. She and a Father O’Sullivan told the children stories. ‘When she detected whimpering, Miss Cornish would brusquely ask “Don’t you realise that you’re the heroes in a real adventure story? Did you ever hear of a hero who snivelled?”’ She massaged the boys’ limbs ‘continuously’, Cooper reported, while he made or lowered sail depending on the wind, streamed a sea anchor to thwart a gale which threatened to capsize them, and ensured that the spray broke over him, in the stern, rather than the children huddled under the cover of a hood in the fore end. When they were eventually rescued ‘all the children were in good form’, Cooper said. ‘Everyone behaved very well, and a spirit of loyalty to orders and comparative cheerfulness prevailed.’ You cannot help wondering how we would do in similar circumstances, our enclosed boat notwithstanding.
The word is that a painter on the Maersk Luz stabbed Marlon and the other man to death. The painter had ‘trouble at home’, apparently.
‘If they are on for nine months it’s too much,’ the Captain says. ‘People start to gather in places around the ship. Production goes down. And still people ask for extensions; seven months, eleven, thirteen . . .’
‘Can you do that?’
‘Now some ports want to see the contracts but if I have a fax for extension then it’s fine.’
‘Seven months is too much,’ Erwin said quietly. ‘Go crazy.’
‘Six months is enough,’ the Captain agrees. ‘Maybe this will change things.’
Maybe. The International Transport Federation will have to be busy, because Maersk is unlikely to publicise the incident and needy seafarers will push for more time on board and captains and shipowners will look for ways around any new limit, and many countries will not check contracts. It might be different if Filipino seafarers were better or even fairly paid, but no one on any of the seven seas believes that is about to happen.
‘At sea there is no hope that the road, or the host, or the lodging will improve; everything grows steadily worse; the ship labours more and more and the food gets scantier and nastier every day,’ wrote Eugenio de Salazar of his Atlantic crossing in 1573, when he took his wife and children to Hispaniola on the Nuestra Señora de Los Remedios, a ship which Salazar judged ‘better by name than nature’.
Salazar found a dark comedy in the condition of his ship and would have recognised the same spirit on the Pembroke, though he would have scoffed at the comparative discomforts. However, in only two-metre swells Pembroke pitches and lurches plenty. The fan in my cabin is trying to poison me with diesel fumes and will not be shut off. The strip lights make reading a yellow misery, seeming to close the front of the eye while swelling the back up to your temples. The internet is a disaster: sitting under the router in the corridor at 3 a.m. you are lucky to read one email. (According to the ITF 80 per cent of seafarers and 97 per cent of ratings have no internet access while at sea.) Little Richard, the junior steward, sixteen at the outside by his appearance, dutifully sprays the cabins with God-knows-what toxin, daily. I am becoming embarrassed about eating the Eternal Salad at lunch and dinner: I know the little choir of vegetables so well it is like mistreating a friend. The bed contrives to rack my shoulders into yelping knots. The sheets, pillowcases and duvet are a bouquet of old sweats. The Queen of Holland seems gaily amused by your career choice as you hunch, oppressed by her Thatcherite hairstyle, contemplating another frankfurter, and suspicious of Mark’s overkindness, which you feel must be replaced, when your back is turned, with ludic mockery. The wide gap between the containers and the bridge means we travel with a permanent hurricane audio effect. And it is all for nought, according to the one email I was able to open today: shipping rates have fallen to $790 a container, which is less than the cost of carrying them. Maersk, CMA and MSC plan to take ships out of commission – 30 per cent already are – and hike the charges. One Gerd would do away with the need for Pembroke and Palermo at a stroke and make the run faster. The wide spaces on the deck speak literal volumes: I can see room for fifty more containers from my window. The Pembroke is due in dry dock a year from next month. It will be interesting to know if she makes it back to sea.
Around 1300 the waves climb quickly, eager as early guests to a party. Three metres, John reckons, and several times in the next hour they are big enough to stop her with a thump. We reduce revs and speed from 85 and 18 knots down to 83 and 16. By 2 p.m. the guests, in pyramidal lumps, have found friends. Hanging their arms round one another’s shoulders they now form ranks hundreds of metres long, some self-effacing, sliding by, while others make a point which sends lucent turquoise-white spray up high on either side, lending butterfly wings to the bow. Apart from our impacts there is almost no white water, just these dark-crested creatures furrowing in front of the rain showers. It is strange how warm it is: we are to turn south towards ice. My head feels gummy and sneezey, nose running.
At four we turn into the waves. She rides much better now, and faster by the feel and the noise. There is a higher, running whine from the machinery and a sub-whistle from the draughts, just short of a note, which sighs in tandem with the pitching, as if the wind blows us along to the end of a breath which catches as she digs in. John comes down at the end of his watch, lists the inaccuracies in Diamonds Are Forever and The Towering Inferno and offers a Dead Calm DVD. He says there is one millisecond when you can see that much of Nicole Kidman’s arse. He has taped his air vent over with a bin bag.
The Captain stands his watch in clean uniform, whistling Leonard Cohen’s ‘Famous Blue Raincoat’. It is still a shock to hear whistling at sea. The Dutch and the Danes have different superstitions, evidently.
‘Now we are in the eye of the storm,’ he says. ‘You can see here: the barometric graph falls steeply, then bumps, and now runs level. But there are two systems coming together.’
The air is a peculiar blue. Waves no longer march out of the mist but seem to spring out of the green-grey like sudden ideas. It is twelve degrees outside with little wind, just these well-up swells.
The Captain’s hands run like large crabs across the chart table. ‘I have calculated we can stand six-metre waves. We won’t make any speed but the vessel can stand it.’
He marks our position with a pencil stroke: just west of the Azores but twelve degrees north of them; our present heading takes us in to the Labrador Basin passing north of the Flemish Cap.
Jo
hn’s air-vent-blocking contraption now piles uselessly on the floor. He has discarded his shirt and sprawls on his bunk reading a maritime newspaper. He is quite a sight.
There is the merest yellowing of the sky around 1500, at 1740, sundown, there is an eerie clear. Suddenly the horizon ahead jumps back a dozen miles below clouds spun from pearly air. There are white-blue and black-blue distances around us crossed with lines of darkness, behind is a dimly luminous aquamarine. We are sailing across the Atlantic’s dark pupil, surrounded by its iris. Pieter comes up to join the Captain and they both stand, gazing across the eye, weather-worried. Pieter balances easily, hands folded behind his back. So many, many seas he has travelled, down in the engine room. Morning and evening conferences on the bridge are almost all he glimpses of them. Our lives are in his hands more than anyone’s: it is the howling, hungry and tireless engine that is the main miracle out here, from which all else hangs. His contemplation is moving to witness, as though you see a man looking at his life.
There is a lot of lurching and thumping after dinner but you can sleep through it. Mark, the steward, was right. He said fatigue was the key.
CHAPTER 19
Storm
ERWIN HAS ALL the bridge lights on, as it is 6 a.m., and therefore morning, though it is still entirely dark outside.
‘Lovely day, Erwin! Thank you!’
‘Yes, yes, very nice. But it can’t be guaranteed later on . . .’
Day does not so much break as night lightens. I dismantle my air vent and stuff it with my overall. Success! The diesel draught abates. We are on the edge of the depression. The barometer has fallen to 978, stormy weather, but the brute is to the south of us. There are eleven-metre waves on our original course. Chicoy had thirty-degree rolls on Christmas Day four years ago.
‘I was scared, really I was scared, but the Captain stood with his arms on the back of the pilot’s chair. Everything’s falling around the bridge. He didn’t look round. He just said, “Second Mate, something is moving. Fix it.” Something moving – fix it! I look at him and think OK, maybe not so bad . . .’
He says the first day of pitching makes him feel dizzy but once he has slept on it he is better. He is generously talkative today and he briefs me on the lashing business. The (un)lashing bonus is three hundred dollars and the midnight to 4 a.m. watch earn it exhausted, as they start unlashing at 8.30. It will be done in the St Lawrence so that if something goes wrong it will not happen in port where an accident would bring an investigation. Handling the lashing rod – which frees the catches at the corners of the containers – is hard and dangerous because the rod is long and very heavy. With ice and snow it is more difficult. They will unlash everything except the outside containers. The bonus is paid in cash and worth a lot to a rating whose salary is seven hundred dollars a month. As second mate Chicoy is on three and half thousand a month.
As we talk he calls the bo’sun on the radio: ‘Make sure he still on the ship.’
Chicoy has never seen inside a container: ‘Maybe plenty girls and drugs!’
I ask him about Maersk Luz. ‘Maybe you come on board and have enemy,’ he says. The rumours report that alcohol was involved. ‘Maybe he stabs one and the other cannot get out of the cabin.’
A crewman he knew sided with a bo’sun who had an enemy, and the enemy had a cousin on board. The bo’sun was small and thin. The enemy and his cousin beat him but the bo’sun used his knife.
Chicoy reckons it is better if the Captain and the chief engineer are ‘white people’. ‘Then if chat chat Captain does not know anything. If Captain Filipino he knows. He hear something. Who tell him? Chat chat . . .’ The internet can cause strife, too: ‘Someone always say “Who used all the gigs? – You?”’
When a Filipino Captain or senior officer has favourites, Chicoy says, the structures fall apart. He sailed on one ship from which the Captain disappeared.
‘Did someone throw him over the side?’
‘Maybe.’
‘Which is more dangerous, man or the sea?’
‘Man,’ says Chicoy, ‘because man thinks. If white people shout at Filipino –’ he shrugs. ‘But if Filipino shouts . . .’ he grimaces.
Force eight now; the wind veered in the night and has now backed, more or less abeam, coming at us sideways from the north. We bash through short, punitive seas. There was a strange yellow light in the air before we went into it. Doors are lashed open and there is chatter in the stairwell where Mark and little Richard are mopping the steps. Annabelle is dicing cantaloupes in the galley and the eerie music still plays from the crew’s mess. Pieter says he hears voices in it, conversations. I track it down to a screensaver called Waterfall. It never ceases.
The chair slides under me as I write. Jannie has been stripping and cleaning generator cylinders for two days. I have a cold; he does not, though I have been diligent with greens he does not eat. The consensus is that the lurid green minty cherry thing I ate for pudding last night is responsible for the ailment, as no one else touched theirs. Jannie prefers rolling to pitching but currently we are corkscrewing – doing both at once. An hour ago it was eight degrees outside but we are currently holding on four and my cabin windows have steamed up. A hissy rattle of spray-rain fills the air. Four black fins came plunging in towards the bow; they must have been dolphins but they looked sinister – perhaps they were orcas. To think this is only the edge of the storm! (Thump, groan, roll, thump . . .) I would not go out on deck for any money. The bo’sun and his party are back inside. Chicoy knew a bo’sun who was washed off the deck to his death. It was during that Christmas storm – he went forward with the captain to see what damage the anchor had done to the bow while they were rolling thirty degrees.
Now there are long white streaks down the waves which the Captain says mean force eight or above.
‘What are you doing?’ Chicoy asked, genuinely perplexed, as I stared out of the screens and frowned and scribbled and tried to keep my balance, and the scrawl legible.
‘I’m trying to – describe – this! Look at it! How do you capture this?’
Sometimes in darkness, sometimes in hail, through mist, rattling rain and footprints of sun, the Pembroke tries conclusions with waves. Short, angry punchers; long heaving monsters; black swells, green roarers . . .
Chicoy laughed.
‘Average wave height five metres, with exceptions seven metres,’ the Captain declares. The windward side of the bridge is a wuthering buffet scored by the bridge screens’ wipers. The faces of the waves are chipped with liquid ridges and their backs with flying white. Now and then they explode before we reach them as if a monster is breaching. We are making seventeen knots but the wind is still rising and backing, coming now from the north-north-west. When the ship misses her footing there is a deep boom in her steel chest and a white curled hand of a billion droplets leaps as high as the foremast and caresses back towards us, whistling and falling as tears on the screens. The containers look as if they are on fire under the gusting spray.
After lunch the gale still roars but the sky clears partially. It is a violent and lovely day now, the sea purple. There are many birds, northern fulmars, kittiwakes bright against the dark water, and I think a great skua. Now it is sunny and rainy with dark-bellied clouds, broken rainbows and ice-blue clears all at once. John stirring his tea with a spoon makes a strangely domestic counterpoint to the billow-bellow gale. Hail comes in rattle blasts and the white streaked foam down the backs of the waves joins with the scars on their faces, forming long straggled lines pointing into the wind’s mouth.
You feel much more exhilaration than fear: I see why John likes storms. Fear is quite hard to find in true sea stories, though so many are fearful and fear-filled. Men are not quick to admit it or describe it: to do it justice is to feel it again, and who wants that? Much better to pass on to the happy ending, to the deprecating laugh, as Chicoy did: ‘Really I was scared but . . .’ Admissions of fear in the Atlantic war are rare. Perhaps it was so ubiquitous it was
not worth writing about, while ‘talking things through’ was not necessarily the habit of the time. An extraordinary exception occurs in the writing of Humphrey Knight, who dramatised an encounter with a psychiatrist after one of the Arctic convoys to Murmansk. These convoys, from Scapa Flow via Norway’s North Cape to Russia, matched and surpassed the Atlantic’s horrors. The cold, the seas and the conditions aboard the ships were monstrous, and the convoys were within range of German aircraft most of the way there and back. The psychiatrist asks Knight’s narrator how he feels. The narrator can make only non-committal answers, but he tells the reader the truth.
The bewilderment may keep you calm. Even when the fear runs into the joints like hot glue, delaying the reflexes, delaying all save one. The instinct to duck when the dive-bombers scream over the mastheads like express trains with wings. The instinct to plunge deep back into the darkness of your primeval self. The passionate desire to get down into a hole, into the earth (only there is no earth), to take cover. Here is no earth; here is liquid emerald twenty degrees below zero. The feet press into the deck, seeking resilience. Seeking earth which is known to you. No earth here, no earth . . .
You would tear the deck like a dog after a rat. You would throw yourself flat and hide your head in your hands. You would cry for a woman’s breast where you could lay your head. You might even think of your mother, for you would cry where once you had sucked life. Life that has brought you here where life and death compare their hideous notes.
Only you don’t. You just turn your head from the blast and keep on handing up the shells . . .
At the height of the Battle of the Atlantic, in 1943, more than sixty U-boats were concentrated here, in mid-ocean, ranged in four patrol groups. In March of that year forty of them were directed to attack two laden convoys, eighty ships all heading east, which had come into proximity across a vast area approaching the western end of the Black Hole, where we are now. In the melee of a battle which stretched across days and nights, pitching over hundreds of square miles of ocean, it was not unusual for an escort commander to receive contact reports of half a dozen submarines at a time. Three days of fog and gales ragged the convoys at the outset: what followed was as horror-ridden as any engagement of the Atlantic war. Reading Richard Woodman’s accounts of the battle produces a kind of numbed awe, as the mind wonders at the montage of images. A tanker, the Southern Princess, blazing so fiercely the heat could be felt on the decks of passing ships, her oil leaving the sea burning where she sank. Men so thick in the water that the lights of their life jackets seemed to a witness ‘like a carpet of fireflies’. Torpedoed ships abandoned, their derelict hulks refusing to sink. A ship, the Elin K, going down so fast that neither the escort commander nor the rescue ship realised she had been hit. The surface of the sea scattered with the frozen carcasses of Argentinian cattle that washed out in hundreds from a huge hole blown in the side of the Royal Mail cargo liner Nariva. The Coracero carried the same cargo; one of the hands killed in her engine room was a trimmer named Robert Yates who had gone to sea under the alias J. J. Elder. He was fourteen years old. The Canadian Star, hit twice, poised vertically, her bow high in the air for five minutes before she sank. Most of her crew made the boats, but they were overloaded, and the water wild and terribly cold.
Down to the Sea in Ships Page 23