In the galley Annabelle, Mark, Richard and I pose and take photographs of each other. Richard gives me a complicated handshake. There is a turmoil of seafarers in the crew mess, where David from the Seaman’s Mission is helping Alberto fill in forms to send money home.
‘It used to be really simple,’ David sighs. He is a tall, neat man in respectable clothes which suggest a tiny salary. ‘But since the whole security thing it’s much more complicated. They’re worried about money-laundering. Like anyone’s going to launder two hundred dollars . . .’
Chicoy comes in, sporting an extraordinary vertical haircut.
‘Who cuts it?’
‘We do!’
‘Is there someone aboard who is particularly good at it?’
‘Not on this ship – some ships yes . . .’
This explains the second engineer’s busby, the number of close-crops, and Book’s bullet-look. When Cabot made his second, successful voyage he had a barber with him. (He turned back the first time, having found nothing but sea and bad weather.) Scholars assume this gentleman was aboard as a surgeon, but who is to say that Cabot, a Venetian after all, did not believe that seafaring should be done with style?
On deck Ordinary Seamen Bobby Sitones and Wallace Yambao are on watch. No one knows what they are guarding, as the containers continue their cascade. German aircraft, spacecraft and parts thereof fly by unsuspected. The Captain was right about the cheese: we have brought twenty tonnes from Norway. Four tonnes of flower bulbs from Holland we might have predicted, but only an eccentric would have guessed twenty-seven tonnes of Dutch cocoa powder for Chile, or five tonnes of Polish grass and moss, or three hundred and fifty tonnes of Tanzanian seaweed, fertiliser for the prairies. Fifty tonnes of Czech candy have reached their destination, but twelve tonnes of Iranian dates are going on to Colombia.
To survive the winter Canada requires Indian spices, twenty-five tonnes of Greek wine, Danish yeast, British malt, Latvian clothing, six hundred tonnes of Belgian beer, a hundred tonnes of Irish alcohol, Estonian chemicals, German tools, thirty-four tonnes of Belgian chocolate, twenty-four tonnes of Sri Lankan tea bags, Indian seeds, Polish glue, Hungarian tyres, tinned vegetables from Spain, Russian plywood, British sanitary towels, Dutch medicine, Swedish paper – you can see why these things are shipped across the Atlantic in the cold mid-winter. But why ninety tonnes of Argentinian milk, and why send it via Europe? Who plans to do what with two tonnes of used machinery from Congo? What is the second-hand vehicle, weighing almost two tonnes, from Sierra Leone – a diamond dealer’s Mercedes? What is so desirable, in this land of forests, about the three hundred tonnes of sawn timber from Germany, and the eighty more from Russia? (The wood in three containers from the Ivory Coast will not grow in Canada, presumably.)
In Chile someone is waiting for eighteen tonnes of Saudi Arabian carpets. Four tonnes of Polish ‘personal care products’ are on their way to Cuba. The Dominican Republic has been producing tobacco for five hundred years but it needs seventeen tonnes of tobacco accessories from Holland, where a Scandinavian firm owns a factory producing Dominican cigars. British industry is not quite dead, exporting plastic and machinery to Chile, one container of manufactured articles to El Salvador and twenty-eight tonnes of synthetic resin to Colombia, though this triumph is rather overshadowed by the three thousand tonnes of similar resins that Saudi is sending to South America. As we sat in the dry museum of our bar we had no idea we carried almost two thousand tonnes of booze, half of it Dutch and German beer. Britain’s contribution, one container for Panama, is listed as ‘alcoholic beverage’: surely Scotch. The mystery tractor is going to Peru.
‘Got to be strong,’ says Wallace. It is achingly cold out here, and all he and Bobby are doing is watching the gangway. Another container off, and another, and another. Another voyage gone, another to come; another month gone; another to come, and another, and another . . . We say goodbye and Bobby and Wallace wave me off, Wallace offering a brave thumbs-up.
The way back to the other world is patrolled by container trucks, roaring and snorting smoke and impatience. A Haitian taxi driver takes me to the metro. The last I see of the Pembroke–Sydney is her bridge, and dirty flags flying bravely above the smoke stack, just another grimy ship in a bleak container yard somewhere far away.
Wednesday 29 February
She will be on her way to Halifax now. With a bit of help from the current, despite the speed limit, she will be well into the semi-wilds of Quebec. They will have been lashing all this morning, in this hard cold. I hope Jannie’s back is OK – it was hurting him after unlashing. Twenty past four: Captain Koop will be on his bridge, Pieter in the engine control room and John will be listening to the music of his youth. Annabelle and Mark will be resting, counting down to their next shift. Many of the crew will be on or in their beds, watching DVDs, sleeping or trying to get an internet connection. And the ship will be doing what she does, what she has always done and what she will do until the day comes when someone who has never seen her, and never heard her storm songs, and certainly never smelled her, decides she has done enough. All my clothes, even those just washed, stink of her. I woke this morning without a thick and throbbing head for the first time in a fortnight. I barely knew her. But I saw her darkness; I felt her loneliness and her obscurity. I will always be able to hear the moans and whistles of her stairwell, her ghost music, the muted and ceaseless piano of her theme tune, and the enduring, resisting stoicism of the men who sing and hum her on.
CHAPTER 23
Signing Off
THAT NIGHT THE sights of Montreal, the live music in bars, the presence of women, the choice of food and wine and beer were surprisingly scant compensation for the comradeship of the seafarers. I felt like an odd ghost, something like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner: I wanted to take someone by the arm and say, listen, there is a ship at sea tonight, and this is who is on board, and this is what their lives are like, and without them none of this world you call normal could exist . . . The months afterwards were strange. I missed my ships and my friends. One image from Montreal kept coming back. As we hurried back on board that night, with supper to cook, we saw Mark making his way through the containers, striding to his few hours of shore leave. He looked tremendously neat and preoccupied. Perhaps he was going to buy cheap razors and other goods to sell at home. The others laughed, for there was always something slightly off-centre about Mark, about his near-obsequious friendliness and his eagerness to please. You did not have to know his story of punching himself in desperation to divine that he is a man who suffers isolation; he is a nation of one. But I remember him with great admiration. He has as much strength, playing the cheery servant fadelessly, as any man I have known.
Inner strength is the secret of seafaring. Men like Pieter, Jannie, Sorin, Joel, Rohan and the Captains Koop and Larsen must make almost ideal husbands and fathers, though they are so often absent from their families. I did not see them with their wives and children, but I saw them. Their stories have one thing in common: they all begin with wishes. But a wish is not a cautious thing, certainly not when a young man makes it. All these men made the same one, when they were too young to know better. They wished to go to sea. They came to know the imperturbable embrace of the oceans, and the relentless and perilous demands of ships. The life changed and changes under them; in most cases it became and continues to become harder and more demanding; its cushions – in leisure, comforts and pay – all continue to shrink. Their greatness – and it is a greatness – is that they have all fulfilled the demands of another old saw: you made your bed, now you must lie on it. And they do, with great grace – even when it is rocking, reeling and trying to throw them off. On the ships I began to understand that lying on the bed you made is perhaps the condition of adult life.
In recent months Chris has been promoted to chief officer and acquired two fine swallow tattoos, one colourful bird on each shoulder. The old sailors believed that wearing them meant swallows would carry their souls home i
f they were to die at sea. Joel is now a third engineer and the company is keen he sit the exams for second. He writes from the Gjertrud Maersk, which he calls an ‘old turtle’, saying he is in a warship-and-pirate-infested area known to the crew as the Hardship Pay Area. He signs off his all emails with ‘It’s me!! Joel’.
As for the ships, you can sometimes find them on a website which tracks their AIS transponder signals, but its coverage only extends a few nautical miles from land. Searching for Gerd Maersk and Maersk Pembroke returns the same message: ‘Out of Range’. They are working their way across waters far from the world we know. Their futures are more uncertain now than at any time since they were launched. Stringent EU financial regulations (demanding banks hold cash, rather than other people’s debt) mean ship funding is withering: Commerzbank, the world’s second biggest provider of ship finance, has shut down its twenty billion euro shipping fund and now owns a fleet of foreclosed vessels. Cutting costs, the industry increasingly employs riding gangs, non-seafarers whose pay and situation are covered by no agreements, who provide cheap labour, cargo handling and maintenance. In their pursuit of declining profits many shipowners are shameless in rolling back whatever progress has been made in the working and living conditions of sailors. Recent reports by inspectors who detain vessels in the United Kingdom’s ports could have been written fifty or a hundred years ago.
‘The crew accommodation was no longer provided with heating; there were insufficient fruit and vegetables on board . . . There were insufficient life rafts, the sanitary water system was inoperative and there was no fresh-running water. There were no nautical publications and charts were incomplete for the operational area . . . The ship was dangerously unsafe as the engine room bilge wells were full of thick black oil . . . There was insufficient diesel fuel on board for the voyage . . .’
None of this improves the likelihood of fair pay for Filipino seafarers, though the discrimination with which the shipping world treats them is a moral disgrace, but it does explain why the men I met did not complain. A company like Maersk may be content to run ships not covered by international labour agreements, but their conditions are not like those described above.
‘Have you seen a great freighter slide by in the bay on a dreamy afternoon and as you stretch your eyes along the iron serpentine length in search of people, seamen, ghosts who must be operating this dreaming vessel so softly parting harbor waters off its steel-shin bow with snout pointed to the Four Winds of the World you see nothing, not one soul?’
So asks Jack Kerouac in his essay ‘Slobs of the Kitchen Sea’. And so had I looked, and so not seen. I looked at the long tankers hiding from Celtic storms in St Bride’s Bay, at the horizon-bound ships making for the Atlantic out of the Severn Sea, at low slim rectangles on the skyline off the shores of Africa, at the giant and dirty sky-shrinking bulkers streaming up the Bosphorus past the Golden Horn. I see them now more keenly, sometimes from the air, towing their arrowhead wakes, or anchored in the bays of Trieste and Naples, on misty seas evaporating in salt hazes, where great blocks are freighters waiting – their wipers, oilers, engineers, electricians, stewards, officers, chiefs and captains invisible. But when I think of the freighters now I see their swept corridors and the red-lit decks at night. I smell the cooking and the diesel, and up on the bridge I picture the watchman, and the officer making tiny pencil marks on a square metre denoting thousands of miles of sea.
I thought I went to sea to find out about ships and oceans, but though I saw something of these I saw much more of men. The sea gathers congregations of men, from the oldest, the Archer, glimpsed across five millennia, to the youngest, Richard, born barely twenty years ago. It lights up men in terror like Humphrey Knight at his anti-aircraft gun, and Captain Rugiati, hiding under his bed, and men in extremity like the oiled survivor. The ocean offers up heroes of their time like Captain Loxley, going down with his ship on a blessing and a cigarette, and puts the passenger in the hands of the ordinary, enduring, extraordinary men who worked and sailed the ships I travelled on, as I looked at them and marvelled.
Their lives are not like ours. While what it means to be a man and what is asked of a man evolves on land, the sea asks only one question, the same it has always asked. Can you face yourself – and me?
The Maersk Luz sails from Singapore, across the southern Indian Ocean, around the Cape of Good Hope and up through the South Atlantic to ports on the eastern seaboard of South America. With slow steaming – extremely slow steaming sometimes – to save fuel and cut losses, she can be out of sight of land for two months at a stretch. Erwin and Chicoy talked about what can happen to a man on a ship if another takes a dislike to him; about weeks or months or a year of bullying; quarrels relating to feuds at home; trouble with women ashore; men ganging up on a victim, and taking it and taking it until you can take no more. They do not talk about facing yourself, in your cabin, at work, over the meal, in your cabin, at work, over the meal, again and again and again, facing yourself as you lose faith in yourself, and the messages from home get worse. The painter with the knife could not take it. No one knows how many, like him, snap.
The seafarers taught me a great deal, and though I will no doubt forget much of their practical knowledge, I came to feel that the lesson of the sea is that this earth is a ship, and all of us are sailors – wipers, oilers, engineers and captains all at once. I will not forget the ways in which the good ones are gentle with each other and mighty with themselves. I am writing this in the days just before my partner gives birth to our first child: crossing oceans suddenly seems an uncomplicated business, the sea a straightforward place, and being responsible for yourself alone a wonderfully clear task. I know I am not a good sailor in many ways. I am more excited and scared now than at the approach of any storm, and more apprehensive about my inner strength than I have ever been. But I find myself recalling something Captain Koop said, one evening in the Atlantic. He was talking about teaching junior officers to cope with the fishing fleets of the eastern seas, as they guided the Sydney through the darkness towards squadrons of bobbing fire: ‘I always said don’t panic, don’t try to see them all at once. Bring the radar in close. Deal with what is in front of the ship. Let the fishing boats come to you.’
A Note on Sources
THIS BOOK IS informed by a variety of writings but it is is particularly indebted for its accounts of the Atlantic war to Richard Woodman’s The Real Cruel Sea: The Merchant Navy in the Battle of the Atlantic 1939-43 published by John Murray, London 2004
Any reader wishing to know the fullest available account of that conflict will find Mr Woodman’s superb history as engrossing as the story it tells is extraordinary.
Among many volumes and websites consulted in the course of the research I would recommend the following especially, and would like to acknowledge the debt I owe their authors’ scholarship – in every case greater than my own, to which any errors in the text are wholly attributable.
Joseph Conrad: The Major Phase, Jacques Berthoud, Cambridge University Press 1978
Four Captains, Captain George Clark, Brown, Son and Ferguson, Glasgow 1975
The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’: A Tale of the Sea, Joseph Conrad, Doubleday Page and Co, London 1897
The principall navigations, voiages, and discoveries of the English nation, Richard Hakluyt, London 1589; published for the Hakluyt Society and the Peabody Museum of Salem at the University Press, 1965
The Perfect Storm – A True Story of Men Against the Sea, Sebastian Junger, Norton, New York 1997
A Book of Sea Journeys, Ludovic Kennedy, Collins, London 1981
Lonesome Traveler, Jack Kerouac, McGraw Hill, New York 1960
The Golden Book of the Dutch Navigators, Hendrik Willem Van Loon, The Century Co, New York 1916
The Cruel Sea, Nicholas Monserrat, Penguin, 1951
The Hairy Ape, Eugene O’Neill, New York 1922
Argonauts of the North Sea – a Social Maritime Archaeology for the 2nd Millennium BC, Rober
t Van de Noort, Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 72, 2006, pp. 267-287
Coleridge’s Notebooks: A Selection, edited by Seamus Perry, OUP Oxford 2002
Before the Bells Have Faded: The Sinking of HMS Formidable, Mark Potts and Tony Marks, Naval and Military Press, 2009
The War At Sea, 1939-1945: An Anthology of Personal Experience, selected and edited by John Winton, Hutchinson, London 1967
Acknowledgments
My first requests went to Michael Christian Storgaard at Maersk Lines in Copenhagen and were then handled with infinite patience by Claire Sneddon in the company’s London office. I am entirely indebted to these two for all their kindness and trouble, and would like to thank the company for its hospitality and cooperation.
To Captains Henrik Larsen and Petrus Koop, and to their officers and crews, particularly Sorin Simonov, Chris Nielsen, Joel Embuscado, Shubd Prashant, John Holmshaw, Pieter Mulder, Erwin Callarman, Johannes Edelman, Anabelle Salazar, Mark Gigremosa and Richard Duller, as well as to those who preferred not to be named (and to those whose frankness led me to disguise them) I can only offer my deepest thanks and these pages, in gratitude and admiration.
Without the encouragement and support of Zoe Waldie at Rogers, Coleridge and White and Clara Farmer of Chatto & Windus this book would not have been written or published. Thank you both for your blessing, backing and quite wonderful empowerment. Special thanks to Mohsen Shah, Lexie Hamblin, Richard Collins, Lisa Gooding and Susannah Otter, for your great kindness and pains.
John Clare gave the manuscript a going-over at a crucial stage, and saved it from multiple failings. Thank you, Dad.
Mohit Bakaya, Meghan Best, Peter Browne, Candace Cade, Cynthia Clare, Roy Clare, Richard Coles, Roger Couhig, Rupert Crisswell, Suella Darkins, Sarah Dunant, Alison ‘Tig’ Finch, Stephen Fleming, Caroline Flinders, Anne Garwood, Anna Gavalda, Jeremy Grange, Niall Griffiths, Ben Hardiman, Richard Davidson-Houston, Henry Howard, Graham da Gama Howells, Merlin Hughes, Anna Rose Hughes, Robin Jenkins, Chris Kenyon, Rob Ketteridge, Toby Lynas, Elizabeth and James Mann, Gail Marsh, Jane Matthews, Julian May, Michael Molino, Elizabeth Passey, Lawrence Pollard, Laurina Savattieri, Victoria Shepherd, Jenny Shooter, Robin Tetlow-Shooter, Scott Tetlow, Jody Trick, Sian Walker, Mike White and Diarmaid Gallagher contributed especially (and in some cases unwittingly) to the life of this book and the sustaining of its author. Truly kind friends, I cannot thank you enough.
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