Down to the Sea in Ships (17 page)

We tie up almost below Stonecutter Bridge, right in the middle of the action, it feels, though I am shortly and almost fatally to discover that this is not quite true. I charge down the gangway as soon as it is lowered. We have six hours of freedom and several of the crew intend to enjoy it. I am to meet an old friend: we have settled on the bar of a hotel I can see from the ship. It really should be easy from here.

On the dockside is Antonio, a Hong Kongese who used to live in Argentina where he was in the restaurant trade. He was happy there, but he has a wife, an ex-wife and children in Hong Kong, so here he is, working security on the dock. His cheekbones are high and sharp, his eyes narrow even by local standards. His smile reveals very long teeth.

‘Are you happy in Hong Kong?'

‘Hong Kong people, Chinese people only love money,' he says. The more he spoke of his home the lower his opinions sank. ‘Love money not heart,' he says. He is a complete gentleman, escorting me on to the shuttle and helping solicitously with the port exit. Minutes after thanking Antonio and assuring him I will be fine I am not.

The hotel is not supposed to be approached without a combustion engine. I find myself in a storm drain below a motorway looking out for snakes and wondering why I sometimes end up in such places. Reversing the course I walk along a hard shoulder, then a no-hard-shoulder motorway sliproad. I imagine my (more cautious) brother's face shouting at me, telling me this is mad and insisting we go back. Death is postponed by a surprised taxi. The hotel has no bar; men clutch plastic bags of booze bought from the mall in the basement. Signs in the lobby warn of incoming typhoons and weighty rain falls outside.

My friend appears, Caroline, a photographer, ceramicist and teacher. She says the Chinese do their drinking in restaurants or at home. She has bought some cans in a plastic bag too, but though he agrees they are hers, the concierge cannot hand them over without authority from the reception manager. Everything in China takes ages, Caroline says, and deference to authority is automatic. We set off to town and I am beguiled by narrow trams curving through British street furniture: the bollards, lights and road marking could be in Luton. Central district has three canopy layers of human forest. At the base is a street-level strip of light and bustle, then up in the air are the mid-levels, which are high walkways, connecting to escalators which climb hills. Above all are the towers, so high they give the impression of having no tops, reaching like so many Babels to a dark and mastered heaven where the luxury, power and penthoused wealth can only be fantasised. Soho is steep streets and contours packed with bars, which are packed with Westerners.

The air seems full of sex and money, though I am head-spun and this is all relative to life in my cabin. It is Monday night but the drinkers are watching rugby on TV and getting smashed. We find a palace of kitsch which serves Chinese food. We smoke shisha pipes provided by an Egyptian who speaks no English. Above us lights burn in a sweatshop, its windows stuffed with new dresses. Hong Kongese girls drink cocktails and expats befriend one another in shouts. I rather long for an opium den. Caroline talks about the ease with which her Western male friends have found Chinese partners. It is more difficult for Western women, she says. Chinese boys, raised as ‘Little Emperors', in the common phrase, regard Western women as too challenging. We catch up on gossip from the other side of the world and too soon it is ship time again. I walk back to the
Gerd
between the containers. Her size is always a shock; you can only see fractions of her at a time, giant fractions.

A few of the crew go ashore in the small hours, to buy DVDs and compare the prices of electrical goods. Joel finds some ice cream. Chris buys a tablet computer he is pleased with but the internet has been unplugged: ‘We maxed out the download limit in two hours,' he says. The cranes work in a frenzy. We are close to full at 4 a.m. and leave fully laden in the morning, weighing 115,000 tonnes. Much of the cargo was meant for other ships but they ran rather than face the typhoon. MSC, CMA and Maersk have a cargo-sharing agreement by which they pick up each other's missed loads, the only way they can compete with the Chinese giant, COSCO. We have four cylindrical forty-foot tanks in the bow, labelled Super Heavy – Danger – Benzyl Alcohol, made in India, destination Los Angeles. Sorin says we have a lot of frozen shrimp in the reefers: close to a thousand tonnes. ‘Quite a prawn cocktail, eh?'

The manifest, which the company releases months later, says America has ordered six hundred tonnes of televisions and phones from Hong Kong, along with three hundred tonnes of computers, twenty tonnes of clocks and watches, ninety-five tonnes of books and magazines, fourteen tonnes of batteries and sixteen tonnes of parts for cars and bikes. American families will inspect our four hundred tonnes of handbags, wallets and school bags and wash with ten tonnes of soap. American children will play with our five hundred tonnes of toys. American aesthetes may make a distinction between ‘art, antiques, collectors' pieces and bric-a-brac', but we do not, lumping three tonnes of them together in one forty-foot container. For Mexico we add seventeen tonnes of computers and a hundred tonnes of electronics, to be transhipped in Los Angeles. The load of the night is four tonnes of ‘aircraft, spacecraft and parts thereof', made in India – most likely for an aircraft manufacturer, but just possibly for NASA.

AS SHE CURVES
out of Hong Kong, fully loaded, the
Gerd
heels over and stays tilted to starboard for twenty minutes before rolling back. Andreas says we used 175 tonnes of heavy fuel steaming fast through the big seas on the way to China. The relative value of oil versus freight rates forms the fulcrum on which shipping tilts between profit and loss. Currently oil prices are rising and freight is falling, so shipping lines are trapped in overcapacity and sliding profits. Everywhere we have been half-empty giants pass each other in the seaways. Maersk is also in the oil business: gains there are more or less balancing their losses in the ships, but it is tight. There is talk of a return to wind power, to a new generation of cargo ships which will have sails as well as engines. The sails will be rigid and retractable, echoing the great junks of China's age of exploration, which were ten times longer than the greatest European galleon.

Andreas says there is a problem with the shaft generator. It ought to use excess revolutions to make electrical power but it is playing up. In Denmark they will be studying printouts and tables of our kilowatts, speed and fuel consumption and shaking their heads.

‘A greener solution would be smaller engines which run faster and make better use of less fuel,' Andreas said. ‘But the key to the whole thing is freight charges. If everyone put them up there would be more jobs in Europe. We rear chickens in Denmark but because the rates are so low we carry them to China to be butchered and then carry them back to Europe to the shops!'

Sorin talks about ‘the windscreen wiper' – travelling backwards and forwards across the Pacific on Great Circle routes. ‘Five-week trips over five months,' he says. He did it for Hyundai Lines, carrying cars.

The night is wild in the Taiwan Strait, so dark you cannot even see the water and a gale blowing, the wind roaring and whistling round the bridge. The sea seems haunted sometimes.

‘If we're going to sink,' says Chris, nodding at the radar screen, ‘this is a very good place to do it.'

The radar is spotted with small ships travelling between Chinese ports, and smattered with heavy elephants like us, bearing east for America. The difference here, compared to everywhere else we have been, is that those ocean-going ships are all huge, and they are all fully laden: the great imbalance of trade in action.

A glumly grey sea and a heavy-feeling day which we try to dispel with activity. Shubd and I hit a punchbag, inconclusively. Sorin discovers me without shoes and says it is bad luck to go barefoot on steel, especially on a ship. Fishing fleets fill the night sea with their green and white fires.

Giant blue skies over a heaving royal sea, sparkling and braided with white. We are in the Japan Current, Kuro Shio, which gives us an extra two knots of speed, and passing between Kingushan, which we cannot see, and the islands of Mi Saki and Yakushima, which we can. The former is a battleship-shaped volcano. Our course takes us out of the East China Sea and into Nansei Shoto.

Now we are passing a volcano, Satsuma. It rises from the sea, bubbling white cloud. This is no Etna, but Satsuma's surge straight out of the water makes it monumental and alive.

‘It glows at night,' says the Captain.

It must have been a beacon for mariners in these seas always. Satsuma's sides are scarred and dribbled stone. They are creatures, volcanoes, more than mountains. Just short of it is a green island of slopes, cliffs and bays, deserted but for a lighthouse. It looks as strange as a dream in the sun.

The calendar says we are nine days from America but we will repeat Tuesday when we cross the date line. New DVDs are available, purchased by Prashant in Hong Kong. These are not good, on the whole. I caught them watching
Thor
last night, which was incomprehensibly poor, but there is
Black Swan
among the new haul. Among the films posted missing on the mess door are
Dirty Dancing
and
Sex Drive
. Perhaps someone threw them overboard when they did not live up to their titles. Sex is a distant thing now, a concept, a memory, a somehow unbelievable hope. While the urge for a drink fades with the wake, desire comes back in waves. Our situation seems to amuse my female friends on email. ‘Hello, sailor!' several of them say. A French ex-girlfriend sends me a photograph of herself in her knickers, with wishes for my satisfaction. It is impossible not to flirt with certain correspondents: it is like being a teenager again, returned to the stage when I saw pornography for the first time. But sailors are not great consumers of porn because the data download ration does not permit it. Some men load films on to their computers before boarding: one of the things the UK Customs ‘Black Gang' were looking for when they searched the ship in Felixstowe.

When I said I was going to sea there was a near-universal catcall from my friends, with much bawdy advice about watching out for sodomy and the lash. ‘It's all boredom, buggery and wanking, isn't it?' said one, a photographer, and among the best-travelled men I know. There were certainly broad strains, if not traditions of sexual activity among the male crews of sailing ships, both consensual and abusive. Attacks on women are now more common on cruise ships (where levels of assault are significantly higher than they are on land) than on trading vessels, no doubt because cargo shipping is an overwhelmingly male environment. There are atrocities too. The International Transport Workers' Federation reports that mistreatment, beatings, the enslavement of seafarers forced to work without pay, and rape are all common in the worst 10 per cent of the world's cargo fleet. Little escapes from that darkness and almost nothing of what happens there is reported. Peter Morris, formerly a transport minister in the Australian government, who became Chair of the International Commission on Shipping, described an infamous incident from this netherworld to a congress of the Apostleship of the Sea. The ship involved was the Panamanian-registered MV
Glory
:

‘The Indonesian radio operator, Budi Santoso, died in the sea near the ship several hours after being beaten with an iron bar by officers before he and his five shipmates jumped into the sea about 1.30 a.m. on 1 November 1995 some ten miles off Port Dampier, north-west Australia. To the best of my knowledge Budi Santoso's death has not been investigated, no one has been charged, the ship was sold, changed its name, changed its flag and sails on merrily, no care, no responsibility.'

Morris's target was the grotesque irresponsibility of registeries like Panama which routinely fail to investigate incidents, and the cynicism of shipowners who flag their ships in countries they know will take no action. But horror also visits ships owned by companies as responsible as Maersk, flagged in states as ostensibly committed to human rights as the United Kingdom.

In 2010 the body of Akhona Geveza was found in the sea off Rieka in Croatia. An hour before the nineteen-year-old cadet disappeared, her co-cadet, Nokulunga Cele, told the captain that Akhona had been repeatedly raped by a senior officer. Their ship, the
Safmarine Kariba
, was owned by Maersk, operated by a Belgian subsidiary, Safmarine, and flagged in the UK. In a vicious irony, Akhona and Nokulunga were aboard as part of a South African-run training programme designed to encourage more women to go to sea.

After talking to the captain, Safmarine's then CEO, Thomas Dyrbye, reported that Akhona had told the captain she had not been subject to any abuse and had mentioned she had ‘suicidal considerations'. Although Akhona had told Nokulunga that the chief officer had first tried to kiss her during a swimming lesson, then summoned her to his cabin in order to apologise to her, and there raped her, and subsequently forced himself on her ‘many times', Safmarine and the Croatian police chose to believe she had simply jumped over the side.

Calls for action in the United Kingdom, including one in the House of Lords, brought no meaningful change. An investigation by the South African
Sunday Times
found several cadets on the training programme had been abused. Officers threatened their careers if they did not consent to sex. Two male and two female cadets said they were raped; a third man claimed to have been sent home for refusing sex. ‘It was like we were dumped in the middle of a game park,' one female cadet told the newspaper: an analogy that gives an impression of the ravening reception the young people received, but which does not convey the particular hell of being stalked aboard a ship.