Into the Raging Sea

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Into the Raging Sea Page 12

by Rachel Slade


  The US merchant marine is different. Few succeed in the shipping by questioning authority. Fresh out of school, cadets are no better than servants; they do what they’re told. They might have to scrub and squeegee the cavernous holds of an oil tanker while choking on the fumes or fetch someone’s coffee while the ship rocks and rolls. A third mate never forgets that he’s at the bottom of the heap, nothing more than a pair of eyes watching the sea and a pair of hands to assist the other officers. Second mates have the whiff of authority about them, but like the middle child, they’re forever caught between giving commands and taking them. Even chief mates wait respectfully outside the captain’s cabin until they’re invited in.

  On a ship, the captain reigns supreme. The final word. That’s one thing that hasn’t changed since Herman Melville wrote Moby-Dick in 1851.

  “Dost thou then so much as dare to critically think of me?” cried Captain Ahab to his chief mate, Starbuck. “There is but one God that is Lord over the earth, and one captain that is lord over the Pequod.”

  Some masters solicit the opinions of their mates and actively encourage their officers to think for themselves. They’re the teachers and mentors of the merchant marine committed to making their officers better mariners.

  Captain Davidson had a dangerous swagger that belied a fragile ego. He jealously guarded his power and wrapped his authority around his heart like a shield.

  Danielle knew that as second mate, she wouldn’t be able to convince the captain to change course. Instead, she encouraged Chief Mate Shultz to give it a shot. To her, it was obvious that they were heading for trouble; armed with the facts, she assumed, he would have to act.

  “Got the latest weather report from the SAT-C,” she told Shultz when he returned to the bridge to take over watch after supper. “We and the storm are gonna be at the same place at the same time.” She stood by waiting anxiously for the news to sink in so that they could turn the ship out of the path of the hurricane.

  “Joaquin’s tracking farther south and west than we saw in the last report,” observed Shultz, examining the report.

  “Yeah,” Danielle nodded emphatically, ponytail bouncing. “It’s right on our track line.”

  “Fascinating.”

  Not the response she was hoping for. Well, she’d done her part. She left the bridge to get some sleep before her midnight to 4:00 watch.

  But Shultz had heard her. When Davidson arrived on the bridge after dinner, Shultz screwed up his courage. Clearing his throat, he said tentatively, “Did the second mate mention the weather?”

  “Yeah,” the captain grimly replied.

  After some minutes of silence, Shultz said, “Get the BVS weather email yet?” He knew that Davidson didn’t have much patience for the text-based NHC reports that came off the dot-matrix printer and was hoping the new BVS update would corroborate the other.

  “I’ll shoot it up as soon as I get it,” Davidson said.

  Ten minutes later, Shultz pushed further. It was already 5:40. Shultz had a feeling that the new forecast was sitting in the captain’s in-box. “Is it . . . is it five o’clock that the BVS report comes in?”

  “Nah, it’s 18:00.”

  The chief mate thought for a moment. He knew he was right. The last report had come in around eleven o’clock that morning. Six hours later meant they should have had a new one at five o’clock. In fact, that particular BVS report was available for download at 5:03 p.m.

  Davidson wouldn’t admit he was wrong. But after being pressed further, he finally said, “I’ll go down and check.”

  As chief mate, Shultz was in a tough spot. He had to step gingerly around his prickly captain.

  He already had his hands full trying to figure out how to manage the crew.

  Shultz had spent much of his career sailing in Alaska where the crews are often of Middle Eastern descent. He hadn’t worked much with North Florida’s black population, a group that, for generations, has had to deal with crushing racism.

  According to some studies, white Florida is more racist than any other state—an attitude rooted in the state’s late entry into slavery. Under the Spanish, Florida was a haven for fugitive slaves from Georgia and Alabama. But when the territory became part of the US in 1822, opportunistic settlers rushed in to establish cotton and sugar plantations. By 1845, half of the state’s population was enslaved by these parvenu slave owners, the dregs of the slavery establishment. Some say that the word cracker comes from the crude Florida slave owners’ fondness for the whip.

  Like many former slave regions, Florida had trouble adjusting to post–Civil War America. Racism festered in the Deep South and especially the Sunshine State—isolated by virtue of its geography, it bred a particularly virulent strain. Between 1900 and 1950, more blacks were lynched in Florida than any other state. The KKK thrived there. Black towns suffered raids and massacres perpetrated by whites. Jim Crow laws maintained strict segregation until Congress passed the Civil Rights Act in 1964, but many white Floridians still use the n-word without hesitation. As a result, members of its black communities have learned to stick together and distrust the white folks while outwardly deferring to them.

  America’s deep-seated racial divide has always played out on a microscale in the US Merchant Marine where close quarters aboard ships mean close encounters with prejudice. Far from shore, simmering anger can erupt into violence. Everyone has to be vigilant.

  On El Faro, tensions between white officers and mostly black crew increased exponentially after the 2012 shooting of seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida, and the subsequent exoneration of his Latino killer, George Zimmerman. The tension further escalated when, in 2013, TOTE ordered its officers to clamp down on overtime. Everyone’s paycheck was affected, but as the manager of the unlicensed crew, the chief mate stood on the front lines of this wildly unpopular shift in compensation. The mostly black ABs viewed the change as another indignity forced on them by their white bosses and became increasingly passive aggressive.

  The ship’s boatswain’s job was to mediate between the chief mate and the crew. If the boatswain wasn’t plugged in or committed, things could get difficult aboard the ship. Work would take longer. Rumors would spread. Fuses got shorter.

  By 2015, hostility and resentment aboard El Faro were at an all-time high, presaging the shift in national political rhetoric from President Obama’s conciliatory tone to President Trump’s white supremacist leanings. (Florida would go on to vote for Trump.)

  The white administrators in TOTE’s Jacksonville office were well aware of the racial issues aboard their ships. In a memo regarding Steve Shultz’s candidacy for chief mate sent on July 30, 2015, the crewing manager wrote that she planned to brief him on the “divide and conquer with regards to the crew cooperation, etc.”

  Shultz was about to be thrown into a hopelessly complex situation.

  Divide and conquer? Where would he start?

  Shultz didn’t want to compromise his authority. But he also didn’t want to overtly question his crew’s competence. He simply wanted to trust that the people he was hired to manage did their jobs well, while he took the time to learn about the ship. He was working hard to establish order and camaraderie among his fellow officers, too. Especially Captain Davidson.

  Alone on the bridge, Shultz’s attention turned to his helmsman. Frank Hamm looked sullen and worried. Shultz tapped the big man’s shoulder. “You all right?”

  “Me?” Frank said, shaking off his bad thoughts.

  “Smellin’ the weather?”

  “Yeah,” Frank said. “Looks like it’s buildin’ up.”

  “Yup,” Shultz said. “I’m gonna log it as Force Six.” (On the Beaufort scale, that meant 22- to 27-knot winds, up to thirteen-foot seas.)

  Frank was used to watching everything that happened on the bridge and keeping his mouth shut. That’s how he kept his job. But when he looked at the BVS projection, he got nervous enough to say something. “It looks like that doggone picture
you showed me this mornin’ when we was on the outskirts of that yellow,” he said. “If that’s the eye, we’re right here, getting close.”

  Meanwhile, the SAT-C printer started grinding away again with the latest news from Miami. Shultz ripped off the paper and studied it.

  “What’d it say?” Frank asked anxiously.

  “They’re saying a bunch of numbers, positions, times, millibars,” said Shultz condescendingly.

  In fact, what Shultz read scared him. Joaquin had rapidly expanded and intensified since he’d last looked at the weather—now it had swelled into a big morass feasting on the unusually warm waters of the Atlantic.

  “It looks like we gettin’ close to that eye,” Frank said, hoping that the officer standing in front of him would challenge the captain.

  “I’ll make a recommendation,” Shultz said.

  Frank chuckled. Making a recommendation sounded so namby-pamby. What they really had to do was turn the ship around. Get the hell out of there.

  But Shultz’s job was to stand by his commanding officer and not foment insubordination or panic, so he downplayed the situation they were in. “I’ve rode these ships through horrible storms,” he told Frank. “I’m not scared to go through it. We’re stable. Remember in the Perfect Storm with that container ship rocking and rolling and rolling?”

  “I saw that but I don’t like watching that,” Frank said, laughing uncomfortably at the thought of those monstrous CGI waves. “I saw it but when I seen it, I did not like that movie. ’Cause I’m on that ship, you know?”

  Shultz kept needling his nervous AB: “I got pictures of these ships with all them trailers out there layin’ on their sides—hangin’ over the railings. I mean literally trailers hangin’ over the sides with chains hangin’ down in the water.”

  “I ain’t never seen these containers with chains dropping, destroyed. Know what I’m sayin’? I ain’t been in anything, nothin’ like that before. Knock on wood I won’t be a part of nothin’ like that.” Frank had no need to wrestle with a hurricane to prove he was a man. Life was hard enough. He was there for the paycheck and the peace at sea, not to test his grit.

  “I’ve seen water chest-deep down there on the second deck,” Shultz continued, now thinking about the ship riding under him. “And that’s why I said those scuttles need to be dogged, not just flipped down. You know—they need to be spun and sealed.”

  On El Faro’s wide-open second deck, you could wander the narrow alleys between the parked trailers and containers, stepping over a spaghetti of thick electric cables that kept the refrigerated ones chilled in the Caribbean heat. Close to the hull on both sides of the ship were three pairs of manholelike hatches, called scuttles. A mate could climb through them and descend a ladder to take a look inside the vast holds to check lashings to make sure nothing had come loose.

  If a ship is sealed up with all her hatches closed tight, she can survive nearly any storm, thanks to the fact that air is lighter than water. Like a plastic bottle with its lid screwed on, you can push it under and it’ll always pop back up. You could even load it with rocks, and as long as the weight-to-air ratio remains below a certain point, it will float. Add enough water though, and that ratio shifts. Add enough water and the thing will sink like a brick.

  In other words, if you’ve got buoyancy—if you’re not overloaded—you can get slammed by anything nature throws at you, and you’ll still float. Your cargo, though, might suffer great indignities.

  El Faro’s mammoth cargo compartments were dimly lit and crowded—a vast lot of trailers chained like wild animals to the deck crouching in eerie silence. But there was plenty of air in those holds, each acting like an enormous steel balloon.

  Huge hydraulic watertight doors running the width of the ship segmented the ship’s length into compartments so that flooding or fire could be contained. At sea, all five two-story holds on El Faro acted like individual air pockets vital to the ship’s buoyancy. But the man-size doors cut into the hold doors were sometimes left open after the ship was loaded. If a cargo compartment flooded and these small doors weren’t closed, water would get everywhere.

  Cut into the second deck, the six scuttles were equipped with heavy steel lids, similar to manhole covers, hinged along one side. To make them watertight, you’d have to spin a wheel on top to engage the dogs—thick metal prongs that keyed into the sides—like a bank vault door. Some of El Faro’s hinged hatch covers required up to fifteen turns of the wheel to secure the dogs, but this number varied. It could be half that, depending on the scuttle. A lot of times, the deckhands just flipped over the lid and gave the wheel a few spins. But that didn’t guarantee they were locked.

  Could a hatch fly open? In 1929, British writer Richard Hughes went to sea as an able seaman and nearly died when his ship’s wooden hatches blew apart in a storm. “When a hurricane blows off the roof of a house,” he later wrote, “it does not as a rule get inside the house and burst it from within. The flow of the wind over the roof makes a vacuum on the lee side, and so sucks it off. When the Archimedes heeled over away from the weather, her deck made an angle very similar to the lee side of a roof: therefore the suction this wind exerted on it must have been terrific. But decks, of course, are enormously strong. Hatches, on the other hand, are not.”

  As the hurricane brutalized Hughes’s ship, the high winds turned air into water: “Though no heavy seas were coming on board, the spray was so nearly solid water that hundreds of tons would find their way below in a very short time.”

  Before El Faro hit bad weather, a vigilant mate would have made sure those scuttles were closed tight. Water was bound to wash over the deck, so batten down the hatches, and triple-check them. But crew used these scuttles a lot; it wasn’t easy to track when the doors were left open during a voyage. And some of the scuttles may have been too banged up to seal shut anyway.

  The ship had lots of large openings in the hull on the second deck, many of which had been blocked with steel plates to prevent pirates from boarding when El Faro served in the military. Shultz worried that they’d given the crew a false sense of security. “Yeah, they won’t keep the water out,” Shultz said, thinking about El Faro’s blocking plates. “They might be good for breaking waves but they’re not watertight. They’re just like breakwaters. They’re all bent up, beat up. It’s not like you can lock them or anything. Get a lot of green water over the bow, this thing is gonna crack in half. It’s scary.”

  Shultz knew their best defense was challenging the captain’s route.

  He got his chance when Davidson came up to the bridge a little before 7:00 to share the two-hour-old BVS report. It had caught up somewhat with the other forecasts, but still underestimated Joaquin’s intensity.

  “BVS says the same thing as the NHC report,” Shultz said, observing the brighter crimsons and purples of the hurricane’s dangerous center spreading deeper into the region. It showed the hurricane continuing its southwest course, trapping them against the shallows of the Bahamas. They were running out of open water. If Joaquin kept coming for them, they’d have nowhere to go but rock. “Got it going farther down south than the last time.” Davidson didn’t respond.

  Silently, Shultz formulated a way to suggest a course change that wouldn’t offend his master.

  Clearing his throat, he finally said, “Um, would, would you consider going the other side of San Salvador?”

  San Salvador was 124 miles south of El Faro’s current position. It’s thought to be the first land Christopher Columbus encountered when he sailed to the New World. An underwater monument marks the spot where the Pinta is said to have anchored. Traveling at 18 knots, they’d reach its lee in six hours, around one o’clock in the morning. Easy sailing down there for a deep-draft vessel. The sixty-three-square-mile windswept scrap of sand is actually the wispy remains of the peak of a fifteen-thousand-foot-high submerged mountain, wasted away by storms and seas to little more than a sliver of dry land. All around it, the ocean floor bottoms out two an
d half miles down.

  “Yeah, I thought about that,” Davidson said distantly, gazing out at the deepening gray.

  But inside, he seethed. When he’d gone down to his stateroom to download the latest BVS report, he discovered an email from TOTE sitting in his inbox. The director of labor relations was asking whether Davidson wanted to take a week off when he got to San Juan. The offer sent a chill down his spine. Shipping companies didn’t interrupt a captain’s tour of duty for no reason. Pulling a captain was disruptive to the pace of the ship and the crew. What was TOTE trying to tell him? The whole thing seemed suspicious.

  TOTE was churning through its captains; no one’s job was safe. Axelsson had unceremoniously resigned from the company in August after being told that his services were “no longer required.” Standing next to Davidson was a chief mate he barely knew, one of many cycling through these days.

  The turnover was so disruptive that Jeff Mathias, the extra chief engineer aboard El Faro, had written an email to Tim Neeson, the port engineer, in August: “We’re on our third new chief mate this month and he’s still trying to find the mess deck.”

  Davidson himself was considered a temporary hire, although he’d been working for the company for a couple of years.

  “I don’t know what the deal is here,” he grumbled to Shultz, obsessing over the hidden meaning of the email. “It said, ‘Captain so-and-so needs to get back to work.’”

  Was TOTE going to put a new master in his place and never call him back? Davidson had written back to Neeson declining the offer—he’d serve until his time was up on December 30. But he couldn’t help being bedeviled by the unsettling email.

 

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