Down to the Sea in Ships (20 page)

‘Someone always forgets this,' Andreas confides.

I go on the rounds with Joel and Prashant, completing a checklist. We climb up inside the funnel casing, a huge, hot and oily vertical chimney veined with a single ladder. The steel of the rungs and guard rails is hot. I have no idea of the temperature in here but it feels like forty degrees. Joel and Prashant test fire hatches and hydraulic systems with blasts of compressed air. Everything works, all the boxes are ticked. The men are bubbly at the prospect of land.

Over lunch Andreas talks about bunkering, which we are due for in LA. ‘When you take on 3,450 tonnes of fuel the thing to worry about is the force of the air pressure. As it is expelled from the tanks you get static, so you can get static discharge and fire.'

Somehow we get on to the Old Days again.

‘You used to get two beers, thirty-three centilitres, every day, one bottle of whisky a month, and some wine. Then you could get together and have a party. The old ships had bars and smoking saloons adjoining the mess, with a sliding partition between the officers and the men. But now no alcohol. No conversation either!'

He laments that no concessions are made at Christmas.

‘Before 2008 we used to get buckets of no-alcohol beer on Sundays,' Shubd says. ‘And much better contracts.'

An entertaining conversation develops with Hermanath about the next generation of ships, the Triple Es. They have two engines.

‘How would you feel about two engines, Hermanath?'

He looks rather shocked.

‘It would be like having two wives!'

There is a lovely moment on the bridge towards sunset. The Captain is in his chair, arms crossed, leaning back, relaxed. Chris is looking at something on the computer and Andreas has joined us. The Captain and the chief talk quietly in Danish and then they fall silent. The sun makes bright bars as it sinks and the sea is an endless dream, as though it has forgotten it can be anything but kind. I look at the faces of the men as they look at the sea, with equanimity, with satisfaction and an unexpressed awareness of the temporary and the timeless, with acceptance and certainty that this was all and nothing at all, and that everything is always changeable, and that they are a crew whose completeness would only be proved tomorrow when it will be broken, and that they had brought their great ship to land again, almost, and that foul weather and hardship lay in her futures and in all their separate courses, and that there would be ports, hopefully, at the end of them. And I thought for a moment I understood a little of seafaring men.

It was after this, in the lift, that the Captain said:

‘No one understands, when you are at home. They ask you about what it is like and maybe they have a few pictures. But all they think is sunsets and sunrises, clouds. They have no idea, actually, how
vast
the oceans are.'

A dark calm night and the voices of America reach us across the water. The radio crackles for the first time for over a week. We hear two women, San Francisco and Los Angeles Coastguards. I cannot resist teasing Shubd.

‘I like the sound of this San Francisco girl, Shubd. She sounds like a natural woman.'

‘Oh yes, I think this is true.'

‘But this LA woman, she is a babe.'

‘Ha ha! You think she is beautiful?'

‘Don't you? Listen to her!'

‘Yes. Perhaps she is.'

‘She's incredibly beautiful. Blonde or brunette?'

‘Blonde maybe.'

‘Blonde for sure. I think she may have had breast enlargements and liposuction. If it's a choice I'm going with San Francisco.'

‘You have a very good imagination.'

He calls Plead control, the missile people, and pleads with them not to rocket us. The LA woman tells us to carry on.

A changed beat from the engine jolts me awake – what has happened? Then it comes back: this is the last morning of the voyage, we are slowing down. Day opens in dark low cloud and a brownish sea, with a line of fanned light streaming below the lid, and there off the port bow are promontories, the tumbled arms of America. They are mountainous, dark crumpled gold; a monumental wild land seems to hove over the horizon, as though it is resolving out of low cloud and spreading towards us over the sea. It seems amazing that the ocean has a limit, a shore, and we have reached it. We are somewhere north of Los Angeles; the coast is too distant to make out detail but it looks uninhabited and – peerless. What a landfall! No one knows who first crossed this ocean the way we have, from the Orient to America. When the old sailors spoke of the New World they referred to its east coast, but the shock of this grandeur, of these dark mountains which answer the ocean's might and scale – this is a new world, now, here, forever. The Cantonese word for this coast is ‘gumshan', gold mountain. Originally it referred to the gold rush, which inspired tens of thousands of Chinese to voyage this way in the late 1840s, but it is an accurate term this morning. The mountains are still giants of darkly glittering ore.

The Captain is unusually loquacious. ‘We will berth near the
Queen Mary
. This is a beautiful ship – you will see her. She made over one thousand Atlantic crossings, during the war also. I have keyring made out of bronze from her propeller.'

He also has a ‘magic priority pass' for airports.

‘I have three hours in Amsterdam so I can get some breakfast. Some beer. Some more beer. Some cognac!'

The islands of Santa Rosa and Santa Cruz roll by off our port side and we drive east towards Santa Catalina. Joel finds a minute to come up to the fo'c'sle.

‘Ah, I love it here! This is beautiful.'

‘Do you ever come here, normally?'

‘Ahhh no! Not really, no.'

‘Because you're always in the engine room.'

‘I like the engine room.'

‘But how can you? It's terrible!'

‘Nooo! I like it. It's a puzzle. You have to think about it and – try things. And you are always learning, and I like that.'

‘You seem such a happy man, Joel – are you really?'

‘Yes. Yes I am. You have to be. This is very important. You have to do your job and not worry too much. You must be positive. Or – you cannot do your job.'

‘OK, but the thing is, I find it – extraordinary, that you can have two men, let's say two engineers, doing exactly the same job, the same rank, but they are not paid the same because they have different passports. You told me the Filipinos are 25 per cent of the world's seafarers, and yet you are paid far less because you are Filipino. How can that possibly be right?'

‘Mmm – but this is the market.'

‘But it's not fair, is it?'

‘If you don't like your contract you don't sign it. If you don't like the terms that are offered don't take the job! But if you sign the contract and take the job you can't complain.'

‘But – oh! Look!'

As I am asking the question there is a splashing in the sea and a school of dolphin cut across our bow.

‘In Argentina we had to slow right down because there were so many whales. They were spouting! There are many whales there in September.'

‘Where do you like, in the world?'

‘I like Gioia Tauro. You can see the volcano – Etna. And the sunsets and the sunrises. The sky . . .'

Now Santa Catalina comes out of the haze, huge, pitted and mountainous with high cliffs. We see something tossing and splashing in the sea – killer whale? – and a head – a manatee? Probably a sea lion. The waters are full of life and mystery, including a sinister ship, CS
Global Sentinel
, which is laying fifty-two kilometres of cable from Monterey with an earthquake sensor on the end and low-light cameras. Why? What is there to see down there? The island of Santa Barbara passes, looking like a pirate HQ. I was sad when I woke but the approach to this other empire is full of beauty. And such colour! Californian sunshine beats Chinese tone and gloom. There is far more wildlife here; there are brown pelicans, dolphins, glossy gulls and a hummingbird, a moment ago, buzzing from Santa Catalina to the mainland. The Captain compares the port of LA by area to the goings-on in China. They have six kilometres of the biggest cranes in Shanghai, which is the world's busiest port; apparently Los Angeles is the biggest by area. The train schedules in Los Angeles are the key to the whole thing, the Captain says.

We approach the mainland from the north across the Gulf of Catalina. The Palos Verdes Hills are green, some ridges are built over but many not, because the hills are sand and cannot support structures. Through binoculars we study bluffs, and then a lighthouse like an old pepperpot. It is the Angels Gate Light, position 33 degrees 42 minutes 31 seconds North, 118 degrees 15 minutes 03 seconds West.

Chinese coastal waters are thick with fishermen: here there are one or two trawlers and long-liners going out of San Pedro Bay but the sea is scattered with yachts and two-masted schooners and water skiers and fast ferries; the champion spends while the contender earns. It is evidently cheaper to catch all the fish in the East and bring them to the West Coast than it is to catch them in the West, or even to catch half of the fish in each place and leave the rest to swim.

A low speed limit makes us sedate and there is very little container traffic compared to China: six or seven ships. There are bars of grey pollution above the land now and mountains in the far distance; Los Angeles lies below and between. Down the coast is Orange County, Laguna and La Jolla. The names and their associations contain America's trick of preparing everything for you in a thousand ways, prophesying itself, upstaging your discoveries.

After all, leaving was so quick.

‘What's the plan tonight?' I asked Joel.

‘We're going to Walmart!'

‘Really? Why?'

‘Really cheap, yeah, cheap.'

So at the end of their voyage the sailors go to the shop which sells the goods their ship has carried, and they buy some of them.

‘What are we doing tonight, Chris?'

‘Going to Hooters.'

‘Hooters! What – isn't that where the waitresses . . .?'

‘They have really good chicken.'

‘O-K. Look, I might see you but I think I'm going to go out on the town actually . . .'

US Customs could not have been more pleasant. Backed up by a couple of big officers, a young woman with a gun at her hip studies all our passports and takes details and issues shore passes. The Captain was entirely charming – the officer was charmed, as you would be – and our agent, Divna, stood by, seeing all well. Divna is an Amazonian blonde and very famous in our world, like certain captains. She was waiting on the quay using her phone as Captain Larsen brought the
Gerd
alongside for the final time.

‘Ah, there is Divna!' he cried, spotting her as a tiny blonde blob. ‘Good, we will use her to position the ship.'

He did, too.

‘Do you see the time, Clare? Two thirty.'

After two months, ten ports, half the globe, a cracked cylinder casing, pirate dangers, a fuel leak, one confiscated computer, visa problems (mine), a typhoon, four dodgy pilots, several storms, multiple corruption demands, multiple, multiple collision opportunities and God knows how many carrots eaten resoundingly by his chief officer, the Captain has brought his ship, crew and a record cargo into Los Angeles to the hour, to the minute, and, the log will show, to the second. Stand up, stand up for Captain Larsen, and for all of his kind!

There are no emotional farewells. Sorin gives me a Maersk t-shirt of which I am inordinately proud; Chris presents a laminated copy of the ship's vital statistics. I had not realised we had lamination facilities and the gesture is typical of Chris: sweet, and highly practical. We joke in the queue for the library where the immigration officers are and for once we are all together, all in the same boat, our hierarchy that of boys in a line, or on a team bus – irrelevant. Whoever is funniest holds the floor. Andreas looks truly playful for the first time, and – he is very tall – is subconsciously appointed head boy in the playground. We make jokes to make him laugh particularly. Every time a name is called we all shake our heads and groan. No way will they let Joel in! But of course they do. I had not understood at first that seafarers' goodbyes are a peculiarly final kind. When will we ship together again? Apart from the back-to-back officers, probably never. Will we meet in our own lands, or someone else's? Probably not. Handshakes with everyone, thank everyone, and Divna says OK, are you ready? And I am.

I WANTED COLD,
I wanted storms and I wanted a ship nothing like the great
Gerd
. In size and sophistication she was near the crow's nest of container shipping: now I wanted to experience life in the bilges. Maersk runs a regular service between the Low Countries and Montreal, using old ships. In the middle of a hard winter I asked for a place on the
Maersk Pembroke
, which plies between the ports of northern Europe and eastern Canada. Photographs of the ship showed a ragged old battler, pummelled and butted by the Atlantic.

It seemed I might be able to join her in Rotterdam, the shipping capital of Europe. The Zeemanshuis, the Seaman's House, a cheap hotel on the banks of the Nieuw Mass river, is not necessarily the place you would choose to stay if you had just spent nine months on a ship and wanted a change, but it offers discounts for seafarers.

There are mooring posts in the dining room and pictures of ships on every wall. There are tugs in the stairwells and tankers in the bar. There are liners and caravels in glass cases and many, many photographs of brave, clean, modern ships, all sailing under blue skies, all impressive and all ugly; most of them very ugly. Seafaring gave the world its most exalting technology, the tall ship, then replaced it with boxy utility. We build few beautiful vessels now. Writing in 1822, Chateaubriand describes what we have all but lost.