Down to the Sea in Ships (2 page)

‘I like the engine room!' Joel says, eyes shining.

Joel is the fourth engineer. He is small with a boy's smile, quick as a Thai boxer.

‘I do – because I really like the engine.'

The ship is the limit of Joel's world for months on end. It is his hardest taskmaster, a job which is never finished, a danger, in great and small ways, his safety (you take to the lifeboats only in drills and nightmares) and, strangely, because it is ruthless in taking the shortest routes, and arriving and leaving on schedule, the ship is something to him beyond life and work combined.

‘It's freedom!' Joel insists. ‘Yes. It is freedom. It is!'

Joel is unusual, even by the standards of unusual men.

We are out far in the blue when another ship prepares to cut across our course. She ought to pass behind us because we are on her starboard side, but though there are conventions at sea, traditions and international agreements, and there is good seamanship and poor, really there are only three determinants in this world: how the weather changes, what ships can manage and what captains decide to do. This is why the sea is still the place where strange and worse things happen. The radar tells us what is going to happen now and the chief officer mutters:

‘Where is she going?'

She is going to Long Beach, says the computer. Now she comes too close, too fast.

‘What is he doing?' cries the chief, and curses, his irritation switching from the ship to her captain. Though there is little to choose between them – men and vessels being almost one out here – seafarers are quicker to blame men than ships. Bad captains, lousy helms and poor pilots are all facts of life. A bad ship, on the other hand, is a nightmare.

Bad ships might be old and slow, or run by crooks, or cantankerous to handle, or battered by thrift, poor maintenance and hard driving. There are truly terrible ships out there, ships abandoned by their owners, their crews unpaid, rotting at anchor off shores where the authorities want nothing to do with them. There are ships at sea which have seen stowaways thrown overboard, cadets raped, ships which have known murders and hijacks. There are once-powerful ships out there now, being flogged too hard, their machinery straining and deteriorating; there are ships being beaten through endless nights by harsh captains and miserable, desperate crews. Seafarers believe there are cursed ships, too.

In 1895 Walter Macarthur produced ‘The Red Record', a list of cruelties and abuses on American Cape Horners. Cape Horners worked between the West Coast, principally San Francisco, and ports on the Atlantic. These were the dusk days of sail and wood, the dawn of the iron and steam. Perhaps the worst reputation in the Cape Horn fleet belonged to a full-rigged sailer known as ‘the bloody
Gatherer
':

‘On one passage round the Horn to San Francisco two of her men were driven to suicide and a third was shot by the mate. This was too much even for San Francisco and the master, Sparks, had to relinquish the command while the mate, Watts, went to prison. The “bloody
Gatherer
” arrived in San Francisco after another of these hell-ship voyages and the mate had to be smuggled ashore to escape the consequences of having killed one of the crew . . .'

It is as though ships have spirits, good or ill, which are not merely the sum of their histories and the personalities of their crews. You feel that spirit late at night, when the corridors and the stairwell are silent but for the strum of the engine. You feel it in the deserted spaces of the poop, the low deck at the stern where the wake boils up below you, thrashed to white fury by the propeller. You feel it on the fo'c'sle, the foremost point, the quietest part of the ship, where the bow is a spear driven on and on into the hissing sea. You are quite alone in these places. The ship is alive to the swells and the wind and the beat of its diesel heart. The refrigerated containers, the reefers, moan and whirr. Steel boxes grate together, screaming and wincing. There are bangings and knockings from places in the stacks, as though ghosts or stowaways are imprisoned in the towering boxes. High above it all the bridge screens gaze forward, unblinking eyes staring down at the sea roads of the world, at the thousands of nautical miles and storms and calms to come.

FELIXSTOWE ON A
late August day offers fish and chips and a beach hut called Larfalot. In a mini amusement park a tiny train goes round a tiny track. A pub caters for Events, Weddings and Funerals. Thirty-five pounds buys a room with a sea view at the Grafton B&B, and being a seafarer knocks a fiver off, since you will be gone by nightfall.

‘Moving on, I at last came to a dim sort of out-hanging light not far from the docks, and heard a forlorn creaking in the air; and looking up, saw a swinging sign over the door with a white painting upon it, faintly representing a tall straight jet of misty spray, and these words underneath – “The Spouter-Inn: – Peter Coffin”.'

Ishmael met Queequeg in the Spouter-Inn; Queequeg with his unearthly tattooings, lofty bearing, ‘simple honest heart' and tall harpoon. There is no Queequeg in the Grafton, only the proprietor, his wife and a low-voiced couple who might be having an affair. There is a picture of the frigate HMS
Grafton
in the hall. The proprietor wrote to her captain, asking him if he would like to visit.

‘He wrote back saying he couldn't, but he sent us the picture and his condolences.'

You can see why the captain of such a fine fighting ship might send condolences to his land-stranded namesake but perhaps they were premature. The frigate now belongs to the Chilean navy, according to the proprietor, along with twenty-five million pounds' worth of sonar gear.

‘They'd only just fitted her with it!' he says, aggrieved.

The day you sign on to your first ship is special, one way or another. ‘Signing on', British slang for receiving unemployment benefit, means the opposite at sea. The phrase descends from the beginning of the age of sail, through merchant ships, pirates, privateers and whalers, whose crews all signed contracts with their captains, known as the Ship's Articles, which specified shares of the profits of the voyage. Seafarers now enter into agreements with companies rather than captains, but when you sign on you still have your life in a bag and no idea of the friends or enemies you will make, no idea of the worlds you will see nor the adventures, and the boredoms, you will share. In Melville's time a whaling voyage could take three or four years, assuming you lived. Today the sentence is two or three months for a senior officer, who works half the year, and much longer as you go down the scale. For the poorest paid, often the youngest, signing on means nine months minimum, commonly a year and more. In all those months a man might reasonably expect to be off the ship a few times, for a few hours, but it may also be that he is not able to disembark at all. There is a tension between underpaid crewmen who beg for their contracts to be extended to thirteen months and beyond, and shipowners, who worry about the psychological costs of such endeavour, because of their effects on the men's efficiency.

So you say goodbye, hoist your bag and travel to the end of the land. This counts as an unusual departure not least because I am a Briton taking ship in a British port: most seafarers travel to work by aeroplane. A seaman from the Philippines, for example, commonly finds himself taking his first flight to his first foreign country in the days before he joins his first ship. By the time you reach your port of departure your ability to do anything about normal life has all but vanished, blocked out for months to come. You may be able to send emails from the ship. You may be able to make one phone call a month. You find out when you board.

There seems more happening at sea than on land in Felixstowe. The horizon is busy with wind turbines, a lightship, buoys and towers – or are they ships? They look like broken blocks in loose clusters, sawn-off things, monster vessels belonging to the private Swiss company MSC and to COSCO, the Chinese government's shipping line. One in, one out all day, along a dog-leg channel which takes them to the north-east before they turn away. The sea is a mulling brown and the light changes towards teatime, grey showing it has as many shades as any other colour: black-grey, silver, blue-grey, white.

The
Gerd
comes in towards the beginning of evening. She moves quickly, her bow wave the only foam on all the sea. She is light: there are a couple of towers of containers but most of the deck bays are low or empty, revealing her lines. The
Gerd
looks like a ship that Hergé might have drawn for Captain Haddock, bonny in her red, yellow and blue, and a bit dirty, and very big. She does not seem to slow for the pilot boat which goes out to meet her. She turns in towards the cranes and the port, withdrawing around the corner behind the beach huts.

Graham, the agent, appears in a van. He wears an orange tabard and hard hat. We might be on our way to a building site.

‘All right? It's been mad today. Hectic.' The agent is the ship's link to the port. He or she arranges crew accommodation, transfers, medical attention if necessary, the ship's mail and all the paperwork involved in arrival, departure, tugs and cargo. Graham casts an unimpressed eye over Felixstowe. ‘It's all about the port,' he says. The port is divided into city blocks of containers. The cranes are gigantic; the new ones at the far end are the biggest in the world, ready for ever-larger Danish and Chinese ships. Seafarers say China owns Felixstowe. Hutchison Whampoa Limited owns it, along with forty other ports. HWL is controlled by Cheung Kong Holdings, a Hong Kong property developer, and you can see the connection. Felixstowe's Trinity Terminal is a little piece of Hong Kong on the Suffolk coast.

Along the quays the giant machines are moored, higher than castles, longer than villages. This close to them you cannot see any entire. Vast hulls loom like steel walls at the end of the world, their bows the axe-heads of titans. Mooring lines are tight and hard as beams. I crane my neck back to try to take them in, but there is no reducing ships like this to any kind of scale. No photographer could frame them. Way above, severe and straight-browed against the sky, are their bridges. The
Gerd Maersk
is just tying up. The ship is not officially here until her gangway touches the quay. The gangway is a sloping ladder running up, up – four – five storeys? My sense of scale is hopelessly overrun. The ladder bobs under me as I climb. Filipinos in hard hats and dark overalls smile uncertain welcome.

‘Not scared of heights, are you?' Graham asks, at the top.

At first the ship is a cliff-edge of dark red steel. We hurry past stanchions, rails, up steel ladders, pass below a tremendous roaring from the engine air-intakes, step over sills through doors which wince behind us, sealing tight. Inside the passages are warm, yellowed by strip lighting. There is a smell of institutional cooking and diesel. Now we are in a steel lift. We rise eight floors to the Captain's deck, and prepare ourselves to meet the Old Man, as Graham calls him, ‘But never to his face!'

What is the aura about a ship's captain? The word comes from the Latin
caput
, head. Though it is the highest rank and title on a merchant ship, it is still a title; the real prize is master, from the Latin
magister
, ‘chief' or ‘teacher'. This signifies a Master Mariner, a term dating from the 1200s in Britain, meaning someone as qualified and as expert as a seafarer can be. All captains must hold a ‘master's ticket'. Should you receive a message from one, as I did, giving you permission to join his ship (no company, however large, can compel a captain to do this) he will not sign himself off ‘Captain', but, in my case, ‘Brgds/master/ Henrik Larsen'. (I had not seen the ‘Brgds' before, either, and knew I would never be the kind of man whose work would allow him to make such an elision of ‘Best regards' without seeming foolish.)

The image of the true sea dog, the old salt, has something of the ultimate man, the first and last about it – for man is or aspires to be a voyager, a returning Odysseus, though our Scyllas now come as monthly bills and Charybdis as traffic jams. We do not see sea captains these days, since the decline of the British merchant marine. He has become a story-book figure, the Old Man retired to land; pictured living like Captain Cat in a religiously ordered house where small trophies hold incommunicable memories and dreams of foreign shores drift like motes in the silence. You imagine he is much admired by his neighbours, who find him cheery and always immaculate, and mock him lightly for the way he walks.

You could not mock or mistake Captain Larsen. He is small and wide with narrow eyes, a short beard and thick grey-white hair. He would look like a child's idea of a sea captain if he were not wearing shorts, sandals and a sweatshirt of uncertain colour. He smokes Marlboro Reds and scratches eczema on his leg. The scars and marks on his large hands and arms are not from eczema.

His greeting is warm, fierce with humour and assessment. He and Graham snap through their drills, exchanging paperwork. He shows me my accommodation.

‘Your cabin, Clare. Clare?'

‘Horatio, Captain.'

‘We will try to remember that.'

‘You need gloves if you're going out on deck,' says Sorin, the chief officer. He is a tall, fair-haired Romanian, rangy-tough, with friendly and searching eyes behind rimless octagonal specs. ‘It's dirty out there. But it's good! Operational dirt.'

In the days of sail the mate, now known as the chief officer, was his Captain's fists. The chief is still our Captain's hands: in an emergency the latter's place is on the bridge, while the mate deals with the problem. Sorin is all competence and strength; there is a compactness about his movements that makes you doubt he has ever dithered. It takes something to carry it off in a sky-blue overall like a romper suit, though his has three gold braids on each shoulder.