Down to the Sea in Ships

by Horatio Clare

  A ship appears on the AIS: the Anvil is somewhere to the south of us, near the Terre Nova oil and gas field.

  ‘This is a terrible place,’ the Captain says. ‘Always waves and storms. Truly terrible. You need a psychologist if you stay there.’

  The wind drops to the point that we can go outside. The sea temperature is minus one and the air is two degrees. Towards dusk there is a lightening, a single gold bar on the horizon, pale and dead ahead, as though we steered for the end of the ocean. The Captain produces the chart of a formidably desolate and fractured coast.

  ‘You must be mad to live here,’ he says. Sable Island to the south of us is known for its currents, sandbars, cross-seas and multiple wrecks as ‘the graveyard of the Atlantic’. Its thin grin of dunes, marram grass and pounding surf supports a population of wild horses descended from shipwrecked Shetland ponies. In 1598 a French marquis, Troilus de Mesgouez, had sixty convicts transported there. Within five years forty-nine were dead. The plight of the surviving eleven so impressed King Henri IV that he pardoned their crimes and paid compensation for their suffering. Miquelon Island, to our north, was assigned to France by the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 and is still marked French on the chart. French fishermen no longer exercise the right to land and cure their catch there, but they did in the eighteenth century, when it was said that the cod ran so thick in these waters that they slowed the passage of ships.

  The wind drops as we cross the one hundred-fathom line, for a short while the wuthering relents. The constant, echoing rushes and whistling growls are the hallmark of this strange voyage, along with the ghostly piano, the diesel, the pitching and slamming and the Eternal Salad.

  CHAPTER 20

  The Hold

  WAKE AT FIVE – our clocks have moved again – to dolphin cloud, a wind bitter to listen to and a shuddering sea. In these waters the North Atlantic convoys formed for the easterly run to Britain, while arriving ships dispersed to St John’s, Halifax and New York. Leif Ericson came here around 1001, according to the sagas, followed nearly five hundred years later by the Venetian Giovanni Caboto, known in England as John Cabot, who sailed from Bristol in 1497. No one knows where Cabot landed (the Canadian and UK governments have settled on Cape Bonavista, where there is a plaque) but there are four accounts of what he saw, three written by people Cabot talked to when he returned. The most vivid comes from a letter apparently by a Bristolian who signed himself ‘John Day’, which scholars now believe was a nom de plume for a London merchant named Hugh Say, writing, it is near certain, to Christopher Columbus. The thrill of first contact, or almost first contact, is palpable. The ‘he’ of Say’s letter is Cabot, the ‘master’ Columbus, and the events take place in a very different season, midsummer, 24 June.

  He landed at only one spot of the mainland, near the place where land was first sighted, and they disembarked there with a crucifix and raised banners with the arms of the Holy Father and those of the King of England, my master; and they found tall trees of the kind masts are made, and other smaller trees, and the country is very rich in grass. In that particular spot, as I told your Lordship, they found a trail that went inland, they saw a site where a fire had been made, they saw manure of animals which they thought to be farm animals, and they saw a stick half a yard long pierced at both ends, carved and painted with brazil, and by such signs they believe the land to be inhabited. Since he was with just a few people, he did not dare advance inland beyond the shooting distance of a cross-bow, and after taking in fresh water he returned to his ship. All along the coast they found many fish like those which in Iceland are dried in the open and sold in England and other countries, and these fish are called in English ‘stockfish’; and thus following the shore they saw two forms running on land one after the other, but they could not tell if they were human beings or animals; and it seemed to them that there were fields where they thought might also be villages, and they saw a forest whose foliage looked beautiful . . .

  Through a mottled sky of mauve and grey comes our first contact, a Canadian accent over the radio, a coastguard, brusque in static. We are south of the Avalon Peninsula, surely ironically named, below Placentia Bay. In the night we cut inside the Virgin Rocks, turning with the elbow of the wide channel into the Gulf of St Lawrence. South of us are the Grand Banks, and their former bounty is everywhere on the chart: Halibut Channel, Haddock Channel, Whale Bank, St Pierre Bank. These were once the richest fishing grounds in the world, before the stocks collapsed around 1990. There are no birds, no signs of life.

  ‘Another day in paradise,’ Erwin smiles.

  You hope to smell something in the wind, now we are closing with the land, ozone or salt or something, but the wind smells like cold steel. A fire alarm goes off but it is nothing special, though you look at the freshening gale and the indifference of the sea with fresh eyes, for a few minutes, while it rings.

  At coffee the Captain reveals the ice route we have been sent – rather further north than he was hoping. Afterwards I destroy my careful lagging of the air vent, extract my boiler suit and follow the deck crew forward to the cargo hold. You have to be nippy to catch them as they move quickly along the filthy deck, doused with spray and within the waves’ grasp, even on the leeward side. We climb a short ladder to a passage between the containers. We pick our way between whining reefers, greasy iron protrusions and bundles of lashing rods. A hatch cover stands open, a ladder below descends vertically into the gloom – or as vertically as the rolling allows.

  First we descend three storeys, changing ladders carefully, stepping around a hole in the floor. Behind you, as you climb, is nothing – empty gaps dropping to darkness. The rungs of the ladders are diamond-shaped in cross-section, flaky and stinking acidly, like leaking batteries. We climb down two more ladders and move sideways, then two more down. I must be the only idiot to have done this without gloves. You hang on grimly as the rolls pull you away from the ladder. The smells are an evil concoction of metallic, rusty and chemical-fishy.

  At the bottom a doorway leads into a cavern four containers wide, three long and seven high, but we are not surrounded by containers. On either side, before, behind and in the gloom high above, are container-sized tanks of sodium-methylate solution, liquid acid and toxic organo-phosphates. Everything is marked with hazard and pollutant symbols. You have to shut your imagination away. If anything leaks, falls or bursts here, anything at all . . .

  In one corner Jannie is working with a shrieking angle-grinder, producing showers of sparks, reeks of hot steel and smoke. He is balanced on his haunches. The floor is an inch deep in water which sloshes from side to side and tilts with the motion of the ship. You are grateful for the islands of rust on the deck because there are no hand-holds and the metal is slippy. You are carefully not thinking of the thousands of gallons of acids and toxins around you. Jannie goes on grinding at a rusty hatch cover, the steel screaming. We should be wearing respirators; the air is foul. Your senses are assaulted by the dripping decks, the rusting ladders, the vertical drops, the cut-away holes in the walkways, the lurch and slide, the stink and prickle in your nose, the peril, the scale, the darkness and the toxic slop washing around your boots. Outside is the mouth of the Laurentian Channel, into which we pitch and slam quite hard. Force seven has swelled to eight and the waves are twenty feet high. Jannie carries on, wreathed with smoke, steel-howl and sparks, for all the world like the devil’s apprentice doing DIY in hell, with the angle-grinder’s flex trailing away through the water. Now he pauses. There is a light in the hole below him, then a voice.

  The hatch cover in the floor leads to a half-height passageway, a ballast tank, from which Erwin emerges, his work jacket streaked with black oil. Even a man accustomed to all this shakes his head. ‘Horrible down there, horrible,’ he says. He has been checking the hull. One of the waves has left its mark on one of the hull’s plates, battering a dent into steel designed to take fifteen tonnes of pressure per square metre; it probably dents at double that. When Jannie has d
one what he can the hatch is replaced and bolted down and we retreat, wincing and gripping up all the ladders and through the hatch, stumbling back down the deck.

  Just after noon we glimpse a lump of Newfoundland, the island of St Pierre: grey-yellow rock, high cliffs and banking hills patched with snow appear briefly in the distance. Leif Ericson may have thought it relatively tropical but it looks bleak to me. The wind has strengthened and the foremast describes churning, crushed ovals. There are one or two northern fulmars and a very small auk, black, white and fluttering, barely blackbird-sized. We dive and climb quite dramatically, punching up container-high spray.

  John spots the bo’sun going forward.

  ‘He shouldn’t be on deck,’ he says, ‘not in this.’ He seems aggrieved. ‘Perhaps he doesn’t know it’s got worse.’

  ‘Can’t you tell him?’

  ‘How can I? They haven’t got a radio.’

  At that the radio crackles: the bo’sun reporting in.

  ‘You are welcome to go out,’ says the Captain. ‘You have signed your indemnity.’

  The working party are picking their ways between the containers collecting torn shreds of plastic, the blasted remains of the tarpaulin which covered the tractor on the bow. The tractor is a shining green and orange machine attached by pipes and joints to a precision air seeder. We wonder at it: can it be destined for the grain prairies? Surely Canada has its own tractors? Its German manufacturer says it will plant and deliver seasonal yields over 1,500 hectares. We dig fragments of its tarpaulin out of corners and gaps between the containers, unable to face the freezing spray with open eyes as it pours across the ship. The working party are done up in bulky jackets and balaclavas, their brown faces as pale as they will ever be. ‘Like nice weather?’ shouts Sumy. We bend and pick and pluck, everything around us hard, cold, filthy and catching, lurching in motion with the ship.

  The Captain is tense. He needs fifteen and half knots but we can only make fourteen in this, a sea as bad as anything we have had: massive, confused, lugubriously hostile, with waves breaking in blue and white calderas to a near horizon smoked with rain.

  In mid-afternoon the sun comes out and the wind blows ever stronger – force nine coming from dead ahead, six-metre waves and the sea furious, Atlantic-black. Beyond the rain to the north are the Blue Hills of Couteau. The rolling and pitching must have paused at some point in the last four days but I cannot remember when. When the propeller is yanked up towards the surface it loses its grip on the water and cavitates, threshing in foam or air, which causes deep rumble-shakes. They rattle up your spine. Using the stairs is never less than interesting; you manoeuvre yourself with your arms as much as your legs.

  We see our first ship, Flevob, emerging like a ghost through the sleety clouded air. Flevob is a Dutch freighter, smaller than us, 120 metres, belonging to the Wagenborg Line. She rolls heavily and quickly.

  ‘They carry everything,’ says the Captain. ‘They go through the locks up to the Great Lakes – wherever the cargo is they go. Coal, iron ore, wheat, paper, newsprint – this is what you get from Canada.’

  A crew of twelve, he guesses, and she is toppling from side to side, spray flying around her so that she seems wreathed in her own mist. She steams past us into the worst weather map the Captain has seen of the Atlantic.

  ‘What a brave little ship!’

  ‘Yes,’ the Captain laughs. ‘Yes. We complain but . . .’ Then another thought: ‘They probably have beer on board.’

  The sky ahead of us opens to an icy clear, fog-white on the horizon rises to soft horizontal knives of cloud, then palest blue, then harder blue, luminous. It suggests an eternal tranquillity but we batter and wallop towards it, the gale’s noise never relenting, only adding or subtracting a whistle in two parts, one like a child blowing a recorder as hard as possible, the other like a devil sucking its teeth.

  The chart tells a frank story of Newfoundland. Working eastwards from a point due north of our position are Grey River, Bear Head, at the mouth of White Bear Bay, Bay de Loup, Six Mile Hill, Bread and Cheese Hill, Muddy Hole Point, Grand Bruit (we know the feeling) and the Highlands of Grand Bruit, where someone saw five deer at a brook and called it Cinq Cerf Brook. You wonder who Rose Blanche was, but, ship or woman, she must have known and feared Pointe Enrage at the entrance to Cabot Strait. Basque fishermen came here in the early sixteenth century; they are commemorated in the names of a port and a traffic control scheme.

  During the Captain’s watch the wind changes again, dropping as we steer into it towards a high clear, most beautiful. The chief comes up and a new moon comes out, fabulous glowing silver with one planet attendant. I go out on the bitter bridge wing and show it fifty pence, make a wish and consign the coin to the Cabot Strait. It feels right and exhilarating.

  Supper begins with green-lipped mussels, from New Zealand, Jannie says. ‘They stay alive quite a long time before you have to fridge them.’ There is no calculating the nautical miles the mussels have done but it cannot be much less than two months by sea from New Zealand to Antwerp. The mussels now seem to dare me to eat them. The green lips grin: Have we come all this way for nothing, nancy? Jannie, oblivious to my communion with the shellfish, talks about making his own vodka, which his wife turns into Tia Maria.

  ‘That was a hell of a job in the hold,’ I say, swallowing a morsel.

  ‘Ja. Shit tool, cheap rubbish, wouldn’t bore out the bolts,’ he growls, and gurns at the memory of the smell of the dangerous cargo, while I grimace at the gassy taste of the green-lip.

  Before sleep I go out to the bridge wing. The lights of Basque Harbour and Pointe Enrage make clusters of white and orange, a tiny broken necklace in the wilderness. The stars are in their utmost profusion: there is the Milky Way, the Plough, the planets, strange satellite flashes very high up and a plane heading for New York much lower. But there are nets of further stars between those you normally see; heavens within heavens. You can scarcely believe the night’s darkness could contain so much tiny light. The crescent moon turns gold. I sleep and dream of ice clunking against the hull, and think I hear it, and wake to a changed sea.

  CHAPTER 21

  Ice

  AT 0600, IN mist, the Maersk Pembroke is twelve miles south of the Ile d’Anticosti and bearing into the Gulf of St Lawrence, the world’s largest estuary. Anticosti is home to a thousand moose, many bald eagles and a great many white-tailed deer, which ate the island’s black bears to extinction, both species sharing a taste for berries. The island is said to be ringed with over four hundred shipwrecks; weather like this must have done for many of them. You can see nothing in the icy murk of dawn. Without radar our first intimation of danger might well be the mariner’s death-knell, waves breaking on rocks, too close to be avoided. Daylight reveals a narrow, vague field of vision beyond the ship’s rail.

  There are streaks in the water like foam made solid, which lengthen, stretch and harden into broken white slabs, heaving with the waves. The wind is from the north-east now and the sea more ice than not. Visibility is shrunk to barely four hundred yards ahead and though we are doing eighteen knots we barely seem to move. The ice deadens the motion of the sea, crushing its vigour and will. Broken frozen sheets form perfect, rocking mosaics. Larger chunks have snowy edges and dark centres, like the tastebuds of giant and freezing tongues. We pass in and out of the white fields and our passage seems very quiet, as if we are trying not to be noticed. There are no waves now and the air is full of tiny snowflakes. By seven the snow is sticking, whitening the containers. The slicks in the sea are called grease ice, or grey water. The occasional crystalline fins, little crests, are brush ice and the suckers are pancake ice, according to the almanac.

  As we reach the longitude of the tip of Anticosti, Cap aux Anglais, the engine stops. The wind is back up to gale force as we drift, blown sideways through a black and white sea, barely wallowing despite the storm; the Cap shelters us from the worst of it and the ice keeps the swells down. Off this cape on 13 August
1535 a world-changing conversation took place between the French explorer Jacques Cartier and two Iroquoians whom Cartier had kidnapped the year before, during his first voyage, when he had explored the eastern half of the gulf.

  ‘It was told us by the two savages that to the south of it [Anticosti, which Cartier named Assomption] lay the route from Honguedo where we had seized them . . . and that two days journey from this cape and island began the Kingdom of the Saguenay, on the north shore as one made one’s way towards this Canada. The two savages assured us that this was the way to the mouth of the great river of Hochelaga and the route towards Canada.’

  The ‘savages’ assured Cartier that it was possible to travel so far up the Hochelaga ‘that they had never heard of anyone reaching the head of it’. Cartier found the river and followed it to the site of what is now Montreal, then a huge Iroquoian settlement, where rapids were all that prevented his further progress to China, he believed. He claimed the Gulf, the St Lawrence and the hinterland for France. Nothing remained of the St Lawrence Iroquoians seventy-five years later, when Cartier’s successor, Samuel de Champlain, arrived and founded Quebec. Their disappearance remains a mystery. We are drifting in the Honguedo Strait – their only memorial is its name, taken from their language.

  In the engine room Pieter directs the changing of a leaking damper on a fuel-injection unit and comes up smiling: ‘Easy! Getting the tools out and putting them away again took more time than the repair.’

  We emerge from shelter into an evil wind which blows straight down our back from the Labrador coast, driving blizzards across the black water, whipping up waves which curl and crackle with ice chunks, tearing the tarpaulin off a container below the bridge to reveal a blue seed drill. Sumy, the bo’sun, took advantage of the stop to unlash the anchors and returned safely.