Down to the Sea in Ships (10 page)

We are in the Eastern Mediterranean Basin, heading for the Ionian Abyssal Plain. Last night, after leaving Pantelleria and Cape Bon to the south of us, we passed Terrible Bank to the north.

In Italy I spoke to a man who should have died on Terrible Bank. Originally from Benin City in Nigeria, Charles was working in a garage in Tripoli until the war came. He bought a place on a boat which aimed to make the run to Italy, fully loaded with refugees. The first boat turned over in the harbour. Sixty passengers were drowned. Charles, on the upper deck, survived to try again with the second boat. Its engine stopped in the vicinity of Terrible Bank. The captain was able to broadcast one call for help before his radio battery died.

‘The sea was very strange,' Charles said. ‘It was a white sea, all white, the waves were big. Everybody was sick. I was sick a lot, so sick, and there was no water. One boy said his spirit had drunk all the diesel for the engine. He was crying. Everyone started to pray to their own gods.'

An Italian Coastguard cutter found them. The first Europeans Charles spoke with were two Italian navy divers. ‘They were very tired. They said the place where we were found is somewhere no one survives. They call it the dead zone. I will never forget all that white, the white sea . . .'

As all seas, this one is a soup of bodies. The Strait of Gibraltar alone is believed to swallow a thousand would-be human migrants every year; no one knows how many perish attempting to cross the wider Mediterranean. It is migration season in the natural world, now: a billion birds are adding their mortality rates to the waves. Two warblers rest on the containers astern. The seafarers are doleful about their chances – any non-seabird seen on board is reported, once my enthusiasm is known, with a regretful shrug.

‘These small ones die,' says Sorin, but it is not necessarily so. Ornithologists believe that birds like warblers migrate via memory maps, making regular stops at the same places. Why would a ship not count? There is not a day of the year when many ships our size do not pass this way. We carry a small population of insects, and sometimes rainwater. The
Gerd
might well be a link in a chain of predictable, accommodating stopovers.

A yellow wagtail appears next, and a ragged line towing itself through the morning resolves into a flight of fifteen purple herons, followed by a yellow-billed stork and more swallows, all going south.

In these waters Coleridge's ship also attracted migrating birds: he travelled through the spring, nature's other season of changeover. His ship, the
Speedwell
, was one of a convoy escorted by men-of-war, as a defence against French privateers and Barbary pirates:

Hawk with ruffled feathers resting on the Bowsprit – now shot at, & yet did not move – how fatigued – a third time it made a gyre, a short circuit, & returned again. Five times it was shot at, left the vessel, flew to another & I heard firing, now here now there & nobody shot it but probably it perished from fatigue, & the attempt to rest upon the wave! Poor Hawk! O Strange Lust of Murder in Man! – It is not cruelty it is mere non-feeling from non-thinking.

Quarters of the blue world still host populations of pirates: the Arabian Sea, the Strait of Malacca, the South China Sea and in the Bight of Benin particularly. Their combined activities cost around seven billion dollars a year, most of it spent on prevention measures and patrols, rather than ransoms. But the sum is a mere mote compared to the spectacular economic and geo-political changes effected by Aruj, Ishak and Khizr, the Barbarossa brothers, born in the 1470s on Lesbos, then under control of the Ottomans. Their father was a warrior-turned-potter who had a small boat which he used to trade his goods; his sons must have become proficient sailors when still very young. They rapidly graduated to privateering: early reversals saw Ishak killed, their boat seized and Aruj imprisoned for three years. Khizr sprung his brother from captivity and the two began an astonishing campaign. In the early sixteenth century, when the Mediterranean was the Barbarossas' hunting ground, the ships of their prey – Spanish, French, Genoese and Venetian merchantmen – were rowed by slaves, often Turkish or other Muslim captives. When the Barbarossas boarded the Muslims were freed and Christians took their places, shackled to the rowing benches. They were not unchained for any reason. The downwind stench of galleys was infamous.

The success of the Barbarossas was partly due to man-management. Their preferred attack craft were galiots, small boats with two masts which could also be rowed by volunteer crews with a stake in the expedition. Part of the ferocity that achieved their victories came from the morale of these unchained men, who leapt from their oars to join the battle. Starting with two galiots, the Barbarossas fought, boarded, captured, raided and traded their way to extraordinary power, enslaving tens of thousands along the way. Aruj besieged and took Algiers, proclaiming himself Sultan, before shrewdly relinquishing the title and joining his domain to the Ottoman Empire. He was killed in a battle with 10,000 Spanish soldiers under Charles V. By the time Khizr died in 1546 the younger brother had become Hayreddin Barbarossa, master of the North African littoral and Grand Admiral of the fleet of the Turkish Sultan.

Two and a half centuries later, when Coleridge sailed this way in April 1804, the threat of the Corsairs was still not extinguished. Only two months before Coleridge watched the hawk a desperate action had been fought in the harbour of Tripoli by men of the nascent United States Navy and Marine Corps, who lost, retook and set fire to an American ship that was being used as a gun battery to repel American attacks on the Tripolitan fleet. It was the United States' first foreign war. Another two centuries on, America has been again engaged in military action in Tripoli, assisting the overthrow of Colonel Gaddafi. Bizarrely, this part of the Mediterranean currently smells as dreadful as ever it did in the days of the Corsairs.

‘God's teeth – that smell!'

(My rather BBC English amuses Shubd, who remarks ‘You speak very well!' I am now experimenting with antique exclamations in place of the traditional Anglo-Saxon expressions with which my shipmates are well acquainted.)

You cannot but complain about the stink. You step out of the cool bridge into North African heat and a sickening reek issuing from Bay 26.

‘Animal skins in brine,' Sorin says. ‘Not nice, eh?'

The stink falls halfway between rotting meat and rotting fish; it becomes stronger by the hour. ‘The brine overflows and washes around the decks,' Sorin says, darkly relishing. So this is what you walk through if you are idle enough to be taking morning and evening strolls. As the voyage goes on and the stench increases, and more foul water sloshes about the decks, Sorin requests more information about these skins.

‘They are cow heads,' he reveals.

‘What!'

‘Cattle heads in brine. From Algericas to Malaysia. We are going to need to hire some people to clean the bays . . .'

We make faces as we imagine every wave that rocks us setting all the cattle heads bobbing and nodding in their dark tank.

We pass the Archimedes Seamount and push out over the Abyssal Plain. The clouds at sunset are puffy flotillas and you feel you can see for ever – the sinking light effects a sudden widening and deepening of the space on the horizon. All at once what appeared fixed, the range of vision, is revealed to be an illusion. There is more distance there, now, much more, gulfs of coloured sky and burnished water diminish to a new limit of sight. For a few moments you seem to glimpse the impossible, some mythological West over the curve of the world.

Hotter, hotter, this must be an Egyptian heat. Sorin talked to his family last night, as he tries to every night, on Skype or Messenger. He shows me a photograph of his wife and son.

‘How beautiful they are!'

‘Yes,' he says. ‘Thank you very much.'

We talk about superstitions.

‘No whistling on the bridge.'

‘Why not?'

‘It brings storms. In fact no whistling anywhere.'

‘OK, anything else?'

‘Don't turn your back on the sea. No harming any birds on the ship.'

‘Why not?'

‘This Turkish bo'sun told me about a guy who found a bird on the fo'c'sle, shitting everywhere – bird was sick. So he killed it – broke its neck – and throw it over the side. Within one week he lost his whole arm in an accident.'

‘Whoa!'

Sorin is not smiling. ‘If it had been a Russian, a Romanian or a Bulgarian I would not believe – but these Turkish guys don't lie.'

Shubd holds the same belief, about birds rather than Turks.

In superstitious vein we discuss women on ships. It seems that this taboo – still held by the skippers of certain Scottish fishing vessels – left the merchant world a long time ago.

‘In the old days the agent in Bangkok couldn't get on board the ship for all the girls on the gangway,' says the Captain, and chuckles.

Boogie Street, he said, was the place to go. Singapore was also held to be special: ‘Beautiful girls,' says the Captain.

‘South America,' says Shubd, dreamily. ‘Brazil.'

As often, mention of the Old Days brings further reminiscence of their glories. When they broke down in the Old Days everyone started fishing off the boat. They don't break down so much now, and the fish are harder to find. In South American ports, Shubd says, you can be besieged by fishermen offering catches, and also peddlers of very high grade marijuana, he hears.

It is very hard not to whistle. Nobody else does. Coming out of the crew mess with a cup of coffee, heading for the saloon where we eat, a few notes escape – barely notes, more like a pursed prelude to more tuneless humming (semi-tuneful humming is one of the commonest sounds of the ship). In the saloon the Captain, Andreas the chief engineer and Sorin all raise their gazes from their plates. Their faces are expressionless: alarm and disapproval is conveyed psychically, with considerable force. I hum and ‘sing' louder, as if trying to drown out the memory. There is the smallest pause before Sorin chomps a chunk of melon. Breakfast continues.

Lifeboat, fire and man overboard drills are all publicised in advance. When the alarm goes at ten thirty I hurtle as carefully as possible down to the ship's control room on the main deck to find everyone lounging around waiting for their name to be called. This achieved, Sorin informs the Captain, now alone on the bridge, that all are present.

‘Very good, carry on,' says the radio.

We divide to our assigned lifeboat stations, port or starboard, where we don life jackets. I have seen more pathetic buoyancy aids but cannot remember where.

‘This is a piece of shit!' I pronounce over the four blocks of foam held together by a scrap of orange plastic, pleased to be able to demonstrate something like expertise, having spent time on lifeboats.

‘Well,' Shubd says, ‘it is very economical.'

We check that the lights switch on and that the whistles blow, then we file into the lifeboat. An orange capsule like a suppository with a little turret, the lifeboat is painted pistachio-green inside. No one can see out except for the helm, who would be Shubd or the Captain – Sorin and Chris are on the port boat. We strap in. Every face betrays the same feeling: this is ghastly.

‘The first thing that happens is we issue seasick pills,' says Andreas, ‘otherwise someone will puke and then everyone will puke.'

There is no doubt about that. Strapped in, facing each other, blind to the sea, acting as a kind of meat ballast in the bottom of a capsule which would be upside down half the time, in any sort of storm, you would certainly puke.

Shubd starts the engine. It runs first time, the only piece of good news, as far as I can tell. The engine is capable of five knots – five! You would be lucky to keep the boat's head to the wind.

We are all relieved to conclude lifeboat drill, but now the horn blasts and bells sound again: fire alarm. The ‘fire' is in a container. Two of the crew, ‘smoke-jumpers', pull on breathing apparatus and flame-retardant suits. They mime attacking the fire. Moving urgently, one holds a spike against the container while the other pretends to strike it with a sledgehammer. Others connect hoses and pretend to cool down nearby containers. A perforated nozzle is then held over the ‘hole' in the burning container and a hose connected to it. It is easier to imagine the smoke-jumpers being horribly injured than it is to picture them suppressing the blaze, but everyone knows what they are supposed to do and everyone takes it seriously. The Captain would turn the ship so as to create a lee between the fire and the wind. Sorin would be his eyes, and to a great extent his judgement: the Captain remains on the bridge, the chief commands the fight. The Filipinos, led in this case by Ray and Mike, would do the fighting.

There are many more examples of conflagrations at sea which ate lives like air than there are stories of fires which were successfully fought. Wind to fan flames, toxic materials to poison smoke, distance and situation to cut off help and a demonic alternative of burning or drowning put fire first among the nightmares of the sea. Seafarers collect these stories almost in spite of themselves, horrors which do not bear close study, except perhaps by those whose business it is to prevent them.

One that might stand for many was the fate of the
General Slocum
, a paddle steamer which caught fire on an excursion up the East River of New York in 1904, approximately where the Triborough Bridge is now. In full view of hundreds on shore, over a thousand people perished – a disproportionate number of them women and children. New York was shaken with an agony of grief, a foreshadowing of September 11th 2001, the only tragedy in that city to surpass the
General Slocum
in loss of life. Newspaper headlines tell of mourning crowds at the water's edge in the days following the disaster, of people so beset by anguish that they had to be prevented from throwing themselves into the river.