Down to the Sea in Ships (15 page)

‘Don't take your dog for a walk there, or your girlfriend, they are bigger every time,' says the Captain. ‘And they are angry, like crocodiles. And sharks also. Sharks are born angry. Once we have a shark in the pool, I don't know how, someone catch him in. This shark was a baby but it was angry! It was
very angry
.'

We head into the deep water with light hearts. China is three days distant and there is a typhoon called Nesat in the way. Nesat is generating seventy-five-knot winds – over a hundred miles an hour – and fourteen-metre waves. It is composed of a hurricane sixty nautical miles wide, a storm surrounding it with ten-metre waves, and gales around the pair of them covering an area 360 nautical miles across where waves are over six metres. The whole heaving fried egg of low pressure is moving at a stately eleven knots.

‘Let's run over a buoy and smash it up with the propeller, just to complete the party,' says the Captain, in holiday mood.

Day retreats quickly but the light rekindles in the same quarter: the west is lit by a huge flare of burning gas, a billowing, wallowing inferno in the sky which paints the sea flickering orange and ruddys the lower clouds. At its base is a tiny city lit up: the rig. It is an unearthly sight, an alien normality. Who knew this was here? What world is this, where they burn the night above the water?

We navigate north-west then north into four-metre waves, barely big enough to put a sway on us. There are squalls of rain; hot, dark and quick. Our usual course to China would take us up between the Macclesfield Bank to the east and the Paracel Islands to the west; in certain seasons, Chris says, the currents favour a more westerly course between Vietnam and the Paracels. But because of the typhoon we are swinging far out to the east, east of the Macclesfield Bank. The Captain plans to go around behind Typhoon Nesat and chase it up to China.

Although almost a third of all cargo shipping passes through the South China Sea the radar shows nothing but wave-echoes. We carry many birds; we still have a signature egret and there was a flight of nine, earlier, which seemed undecided, and went away. On the deck there is a wagtail, and a russet sort of wheatear. There was a falcon too, I think a peregrine, which paused for a perch, then flew, and there is our most endearing figure, a squat sort of heron with a broad bill which hunches on a container and endures and endures the wind and the rain. The wind is thirty-four knots now, almost seventy kilometres an hour, and the sea is the colour of a shark's back under the short and purplish dusk.

Under dim navigation bulbs on the bridge the charts are palimpsests of pasts and futures. The South China Sea is the shape of a dinosaur's head, craning over the top of the Philippines to graze on the coast of Borneo. British navigators marked its neck with Scarborough reef and Truro shoal – though the British were latecomers to these waters, Admiralty charts still map the seas for much of the world's fleet. Flora Temple reef – part of the Spratly Islands group which speck the dinosaur's jaws – was named by tragedy. Flora Temple was a famous American racehorse. Her namesake ship was a clipper carrying coolies, Chinese slave labourers, from Macao to Havana in 1859. She struck the reef and began to break up. The forty-nine crew escaped, explaining to the subsequent inquiry that they had not sufficient lifeboats for the coolies. The crew also said the coolies had terrified them the day before the wreck in an attempted mutiny during which one of the crew was killed. The inquiry heard that the Chinese were locked below decks while the ship foundered. All 850 died.

Their grave, the Spratly Islands, is a constellation of reefs, sandbanks and islets claimed by Taiwan, Malaysia, Brunei, Vietnam, the Philippines (which they are closest to) and, most firmly, by China, from which they are furthest away. These little curves of sand and chips of reef offer nothing but access to the fossil layers at the bottom of the South China Sea. Over two hundred trillion cubic feet of natural gas and a billion barrels of oil are believed to lie beneath us, which may be why China recently included the Spratlys on maps in Chinese passports. Meanwhile the Philippines builds a pier on one forlorn sandbank with American help and other claimants say it will be a US base. Vietnam sends monks to an islet, to minister to the spiritual needs of a military garrison. China ‘detains' Vietnamese fishermen and asserts its title to the entire chain, as well as the Paracel Islands, around the dinosaur's eye. If you did not know humans for an equitable, rational race, and nations for just and trusting collectives, you would predict a bloody future for the Surging Sea, the Boiling Sea, as Chinese navigators called it. The US Secretary of State referred to part of it off our starboard bow as the West Philippine Sea recently, which brought growls and rattles from all around its rim.

Around one in the morning we hit bigger waves; at two they are bigger still. By five, off the Macclesfield, we are rolling and yawing in the tail of the storm. We sail through the colours of a typhoon dawn. The vapours thicken so that daybreak seems to hesitate and retreat before coming on. Swirls of mist darken to bruised magenta, then thin claws of light appear and the sea turns from grey-black to black-green.

The conversation at breakfast is all about the barbecue. There have been rumours about it for days.

‘Coming to the barbecue?' we ask one another, almost anxiously.

The ship's motion is the reach, turn and pull of a giant scoop, as though we are raking the scum of some elixir from the surface of a boiling tub. Typhoon-sent swells are marching down out of the north-west, six-metre monsters in fat ranks, arrogant with power. We lurch across them until we hit one square: the bow slides aside in a thump of spray and bucks upward in a tottering rise. At the same time wind-driven waves chase up behind us from the south-west. The swells and waves intersect in lumpen water sculptures of alps and pyramids, periodically exploding. In among them the boobies and albatrosses fight over flying fish. The fish fire out of the water in silver volleys and twist out of trajectory suddenly, skewing away between the wave tops as the birds come hurtling down. The boobies in particular are ferocious fliers. They are scruffy gannets skiing inches above the turmoil of the waters, screwing and skidding in pursuit. A snatch brings faster, unburdened hunters; as often as not a pirate steals the catcher's fish.

Every few minutes our headlong pitch brings the propeller out of the water. The governor reins it in, then, as the bow rises and the propeller submerges, the governor releases the power again and the deck judders as if the engine has just started. A great shake runs through the ship.

‘So. We are rolling ten degrees. I know ten because my glasses fall off the table,' the Captain smiles. Ten degrees off vertical means we are yawing through twenty with each roll. The Captain is enjoying himself.

‘The day you got your first command, Captain –'

He breaks in with a bark of pleasure.

‘You need to be old to get it! Chief officers are always hungry! Of course it is a life's ambition. But you need to be calm. You need to have sharp eyes which know when to blind. You can't be like Captain Bligh, no no!'

The barbecue takes place on D-deck, in a rectangle of space near the base of the accommodation block, on the leeward side. A disco light is hung above two picnic tables. Two braziers char chops, steaks, mussels and squid. The music is lovers' elevator rock, a Filipino speciality. Everyone smiles at everyone else but conversation is stilted to stillborn. We grill our own suppers. Everyone enjoys that bit. Then we rush our food: we hurry partly out of shyness, partly because the music is too loud and partly because here, relatively near the water, the speed of the ship is keenly felt. The waves rush by as we plunge tilting on. Being on deck is not relaxing. It is vital and stimulating: you feel yourself alert and you breathe deeply, but the pace of the water passing is infectious. We cut and chew, everyone thinking of other braziers, shared with family and women, when there was beer to drink and friends to tease and grass or sand to sit on.

‘You can't have a conversation because of the music!' shouts Andreas, the chief engineer, with a mournful satisfaction.

It is not his music or his stereo, nor is this the place for an officer to impose his taste on the crew. Someone has turned the volume up to encourage a party feeling and no one dares turn it down. Perhaps we fear that no bubble of conversation will rise to fill the sudden quiet. We load the grill again and concentrate on the spitting flesh, turning our choices over and over. We are not fooling ourselves now. There is no drowned-out laughter; there are no conversations waiting to erupt. This is a sad scene, brave and pointless as the disco light. We swap smiles, the grills smoke in the hot grey air and everything is wet with spray.

Night comes in under grim veils. The waves increase with the darkness; Shubd logs them at seven metres before the weather shifts and the swells realign, from fifteen degrees off the port bow at midnight to beam-on in the small hours. The cargo bangs and creaks as if steel beasts have woken up in the containers. By two in the morning I know we are rolling through more than twenty degrees because my curtains are opening and closing by themselves. There is no hope of sleeping. Now there is a snapping crack from the cargo, then a long screech, now a resounding boom. There may be a pattern to the sounds, as there may be a pattern to the rolls, but it hovers just beyond the rhythm of prediction. Some subconscious part of you has feelings for which way the deck will tilt: your balance compensates for the churn, tug and shove of changing forces. But outside, in the rushing dark, every crash from the container stacks is sudden and angry, an unpredictable violence. I cower my way round the deck, heart beating like a bird's.

THE NEW WORLD
appears first as shallowing water, green under clouds like towering sea horses. Then it is a string of sandy islets, each bigger than the last, forming a chain we must pass through. There are thirty degrees of heat on deck and the sun has a yellow-grey bruise around its throbbing eye. More islands rise in small pointed mountains as we come upon a line of junks. It is like seeing New York's skyscrapers and yellow cabs for the first time, the same dizzy exultation at watching the legends resolve to truths in front of you.

The junks have formed a line abreast and are carrying out a sweeping trawl, their stern castles arranged in a neat curve. On the nearest deck ten men are bringing in miles of net, hauling by hand, a rhythmic tug-of-war with a tolerant sea. They wear blue boiler suits and conical straw hats. It is something about the overlap between what you have heard, what you have seen, the assumption you make that things are not quite like that and the discovery that the world really is like that which makes the sight of fishermen in conical hats so pleasing. Chinese junks and Chinese hats – what cliché next? A pilot whose exquisite manners will make us all feel like gauche yobs, perhaps. As we pass Zha Zhou Island the containers flicker with passengers stirring. Birds flap and flit-hop between crates; others take flight. The swallows have made it, and a pied wagtail, and a dove. The squat enduring heron has survived, too.

We are running through Guangzhou Large Vessels Typhoon Shelter, according to the chart, and it is well stocked. The great ships lie on the water, a clutch of blunt knives on a rucking green cloth, bows to the sea.

‘You see he is rolling more than we are,' says the Captain, pointing at a black bulk carrier. ‘I was leaving Cape Town in a tanker going to the Caribbean and where those currents meet, the Benguela and the Agullas current, even in a flat sea with no wind at all you will roll so waves break over the ship. This is current.'

‘Crikey!'

‘Oh yes. You see how they are anchored? The angle of the anchor chain tells you the strength of the current. You must reckon with it, passing these islands. You need plenty of speed here. At least twelve knots. At least. We cannot slow down here, no no no we cannot do it. Not with all these anchored ships.'

We are heading for the Lantau Channel as the pilot comes aboard. He will be our first contact with the world's next superpower, the hungry heir presumptive to the global throne.

The pilot takes a long time to entrust himself to our ladder. He gestures up at Chris vigorously but the same tactic the Suez crew employed has no more effect now. Flanking the pilot are two men who grab and tug at the ladder, pointlessly, while the pilot prowls and gestures and gives up and comes back, becoming entangled with his men's harnesses. Finally he makes his leap. He appears on the bridge soon afterwards.

‘How do you do, Mr Pilot? Hello hello . . .' booms the Captain, in standard greeting.

‘Why you no answer me?' shouts the pilot. He is trembling. ‘I call you on thirty-seven, on twenty-four, on twelve, on thirty-seven . . . why you no answer?'

‘We have only one radio,' the Captain says, taken aback, indicating the VHF. (Actually we have two, but one of them listens to Channel 16.)

‘Why you no answer? You should answer!'

‘We couldn't hear you because of all the talking on the radio,' Chris says. Chris suddenly looks like a defiant fifteen-year-old. His defence seems to me to be more like an admission of guilt, though it is true the radio is rarely silent or intelligible at the moment.

‘Why you not answer when I call you you should answer me!' yells the pilot.

‘You should not talk to me like this!' the Captain bellows, roaring anger like an oven billowing heat, his finger pointing skywards, possibly calling on Thor, Odin and Wodin to agree with him – or perhaps to indicate the position of the nearest of the microphones linked to the voyage data recorder.

Captain and pilot are now staring each other out.

The telepathy for ‘Ignorant arrogant aggressive uncultured foreign megalomaniac . . .' is identical in Danish and Chinese.

‘Would you like a cup of tea? Or coffee?' I try, aiming at the pilot.