Down to the Sea in Ships (24 page)

‘Force six-o-seven, Captain?'

‘Ah, she always sounds loud! Five-o-six. Maybe seven further out. I hope we can get the pilots on and off . . .'

In Flushing Roads the river pilot puts the ship hard to port, making a lee in which the pilot boat approaches. The Captain hauls on his jacket and cracks open the iron dogs, the clips which secure the bridge doors. He peers out into the rain while the river pilot descends and the sea pilot comes up, blowing into his extravagant beard. The forecast is gales from the south-west.

The
Pembroke
is a living thing tonight. She helps you open some doors and puts an invisible shoulder against others. When the draughts around her bridge are not moaning they cheep and whistle to themselves like birds. The windscreen wipers take irregular rests between wheezing cycles. As the slacking tide meets the sea you can feel the ship wobble, like someone stepping into sudden darkness. Beyond the screens there is blackness, rain, the channel markers and now the low orange glow of Zeebrugge to the south.

It is impossible to pass the harbour lights and not think of another bitter night, 6 March 1987, when the ferry
Herald of Free Enterprise
capsized there. Within two minutes of leaving Zeebrugge harbour with her bow doors open the ship was on her side, resting on a sandbar. Many of the passengers had saved up coupons from the
Sun
newspaper which promised a day return to Belgium for a pound. One of those, Simon Osborne, was then nineteen years old.

‘The noise was horrendous from start to finish,' he told the BBC, ‘a terrible, unbelievable mechanic grinding noise, breaking glass and the screams of people who were injured, falling or terrified. I was trapped in the lounge area of the ship. There were a lot of people around me, but as time wore on it became clear that many were dying, presumably from the cold . . .'

A hundred and ninety-three people perished in the worst disaster involving a British ship in peacetime since the
Titanic
. For weeks the media carried images of the bright orange corpse of the ferry lying in the water under the lights of rescue vessels, and of the haunted faces of survivors and the bereaved.

The immediate cause of the ferry's capsize was the negligence of two seafarers – the assistant boatswain, who had overslept, and the first officer, who was hurrying to return to his station on the bridge. Each thought the other would close the doors. But if the
Herald of Free Enterprise
was a symptom of her era, then, according to the findings of the inquiry into the sinking, 1987 was a time of a corporate hunger for profit which alienated workers from management. Seamen's requests for a monitoring system to inform captains that the bow was secured for sea had been dismissed as unnecessary expense. The ship left her berth in a rush, as was her custom, and slightly overweight. The cross-Channel ferries were still immensely lucrative in the years before the Channel Tunnel opened; the
Herald
was designed to load and unload quickly, and to accelerate fast. She reached eighteen knots only ninety seconds after leaving the harbour, piling up a bow wave which swept inboard and sank her ‘as quickly as a glass of water falling over', Simon Osborne said.

Though the Court of Inquiry condemned ‘a disease of sloppiness' ‘infecting every level of the company', a charge of corporate manslaughter against the operators collapsed, the judge directing the jury to acquit the company and its management. No evidence existed to show that a single senior figure had behaved recklessly, he said. Perhaps the most telling aspect of the tragedy is this failure of the law to hold the parent company, P&O European Ferries, to account. At the time corporate manslaughter was much more likely to be pursued successfully against small companies in which one person could be held to be a ‘controlling mind'. Suits against large corporations were (and still are) rarely successful because the bigger the company, and the higher the degree of delegation within it, the less chance there is that one person could be said to be ‘a controlling mind'. A revision of the law in 2007 exempts individuals from prosecution, allowing instead for companies to be fined. In the months after the disaster Labour Members of Parliament expressed outrage that a management shuffle was the only apparent price paid by the ferry company.
Hansard
records a typical reaction from the left-wing benches to a statement on the disaster by the then Secretary of State for Transport, Paul Channon.

Mr Max Madden (Bradford, West): Is the epitaph of the tragedy that profit prevailed over safety? [. . .] Will the Secretary of State understand that many people believe that the captain and crew have been made scapegoats and that the company has been protected, as a major contributor to the Conservative party?

Mr Channon: I hope that, on reflection, the hon. Gentleman will regret that remark. [. . .] I have been extremely scathing about the company, and in doing so I have echoed what the judge said.

The controlling mind on the
Pembroke
seems at ease this evening. As the lights of Walcheren in Holland diminish behind us the Captain whistles ‘The Magic Flute', unconcerned by any superstition. The names of the sandbars around us could have been announced by the rolls of the tide on the dark thrusts of the banks themselves: Raan, Droogte Van Schoonveldt, Wandelaar.

At 2130 the pilot leaves us, taken off by a scarlet catamaran. Two searchlights blaze the water as men in red and yellow safety suits catch the pilot and haul him down to safety.

‘They use the catarmaran in force seven or above,' shouts the Captain, watching from the bridge wing. ‘But it damages very easily. It's always off for repairs.'

Twenty-seven ships light the sea ahead, anchored off the Wandelaar Bank. We bear west into the oil-black Channel. The clouds part ahead and we sail into a cold and moonless clear; Venus is so bright we mistake it for a helicopter. Orion shows to the south and the lights of the coast are French now, not Belgian. The chart is shoaled with banks to landward, the memories of a continent that once reached further west. They set the autopilot, turn out all the deck lights and the gangway crew stand down. No one else will leave or join us and we will touch no land until Canada. Even the little blue leading light on the foremast is dimmed. The Captain shows me the Aldis lamp, familiar from war films in which they were used to flash Morse code from ship to ship. He talks of rumours that GPS is going to become less reliable: ‘The satellites are getting old. They'll have to shoot stars again!'

Studying the automatic identification system, the radar, and the lights outside, the Channel seems busy to me, even by its standards of five hundred ship passages every twenty-four hours. It is glutted with vessels, many, like us, plunging to repair deadlines broken by the strike. We are cutting north-west across the traffic to the south-bound lane on the English side. We will turn south once we reach it and follow the lanes and traffic control schemes all the way to the Scillies.

‘It's all different now,' the Captain says. ‘When I first went to South America we carried the equivalent of three hundred and fifty containers but there were no containers then. Ships had two derricks, you linked one to a line from a crane on shore and controlled them both. You had to be pretty handy! Mostly it was done by stevedores.'

Their route went Amsterdam, Bremerhaven, Hamburg, Recife, Buenos Aires. They took cars and electrical goods to Latin America, bringing back coffee, tobacco, hardwoods and beef, the latter in freezing holds.

‘You would be a week unloading and a week loading! Wonderful! You did not want to come back. I did not save any money . . .'

The shorescapes of Captain Koop's memories were gradually then entirely erased by what became known as the intermodal shipping container. Our steel boxes were invented in 1955 by Malcolm Maclean, the owner of a trucking company in North Carolina. By the end of the following decade, centuries-old cultures of rackety docks and sailors with the time to spend wages were gone or going, along with the waterfront worlds the Captain remembers. Container ships needed deep quays which could support huge cranes; the containers needed miles of space where they could be stacked and shunted; the trucks that carried them to and from the ports needed fast connections to motorways. The piers and warehouses of some of the world's greatest cities, the capitals of the ages of sail and steam, were now obsolete: London, Manhattan and San Francisco still have their docklands and wharves but the only cargo ships that work them are becalmed in photographs on the walls of bars and restaurants. Big ships still ply the lower Thames, and the Mersey, but they are straggled remnants of the great fleets of the past. Even here in the Channel, the world's busiest freight lane, the Captain says there are fewer ships these days. Trade has shrunk since 2008, and ships have grown bigger, he says.

He brings up an electronic chart of the Atlantic and clicks though the weather map. The ocean is swirled around with fletched arrows in spirals, indicating wind directions. Each feather on an arrow's tail indicates ten knots of wind speed. The western ocean is dark blue with projections of low pressure and high waves. Our course leads into an area of forty-knot winds and four- to five-metre swells.

‘We can survive that, but no bigger,' he says. ‘If you go too fast in six metres you kill your ship. The bow cannot take it.'

The Captain is desperate for speed but whichever way he plots the course the map's predicted waves demand a day of slow steaming, survival speed, at no more than ten knots. This means we need speed now, as we turn into the southbound lane at South Falls buoy, a critical point for ships transiting the Channel. Heavy traffic converges here and the sand waves on the seabed are in constant migration, monitored annually by the United Kingdom Hydrographic Office, which frets about vessels of ever-deeper draught on ever-tightening schedules making this crucial turn over sands that are never still. Our instruments say we are making eighteen knots' speed over ground, minus one knot of counter-current: the flow of the ebbing tide we came out on. We can see the lights of the French coast to port; to starboard is the orange twinkling of Ramsgate. We head straight for Orion and it is a freezing night.

I miss Shubd and Chris and Sorin! It's true, I miss my shipmates, Joel especially, and their mighty machine. I do like
Pembroke-Sydney
– she is a beguiling character – but the
Gerd
will always be the ship to measure others by. And Captain Larsen, so inimitably himself, so fearsome and gruffly kind, is my template. Captain Koop, with his moustache, looks a little like a rugby-playing John Cleese. He is entirely obliging and tirelessly helpful – ‘Look, I'll show you' is his catchphrase. The third mate, Chicoy, has the size and shyness of a boy. He wears it severely, humourlessly, as if in compensation. I wait up for John, though time is confusing here. We are going back an hour at some point. He should be up soon.

The
Gerd
was such a luxurious machine, with miles of glass bridge wings and the wonderful after deck: there was always somewhere sheltered from the wind.
Pembroke
has iron emplacements on either side of the bridge which you can imagaine shooting from, and nowhere to hide from the weather. She is much more feminine, with her homely and scattered accumulation of books, charts, coffee cups, magazines; her curtained-off radio and computer area, her wind-chatter and history. She seems to demand an equal return of masculinity: Captain Koop, with his bulk, is her perfect counterpoint. But there is an apprehension sailing with us. We are behind schedule, heading into bad weather, with boy-men instead of the easy professionals of the
Gerd
's crew and only old and battered bow plates between us and the ocean which is always angry, so sailors say. This is what I hoped and bargained for but I feel a little like I did on my first night away from home.

Chicoy is excited about the Dover Strait because he will get a signal on his phone. Even with the lights of shores on either side of us he says, plaintively, ‘Just like the Atlantic – no ships!' (It must be a relative judgement as I can see several.) He says we will not see any when we get out beyond the Scillies. From Bishop Rock, to the west of the Scillies, we will make a Great Circle into the cold, in the hope of outmanoeuvring the weather.

The sea can take forever and swallow it but land goes quickly. After Ramsgate come the lights of Dover; a ferry to Calais crosses the black water ahead, lit like a festival. The duty-free shops, the bars and cabins, the food . . . Does some smoker on deck see our lights? Certainly they do on her bridge, as we pass behind her.

Dover Coastguard, the voice of England, sounds tired, but his questions are all alert. By his tone you picture a man no longer young, in a white shirt – clean on today but past its best – with insignia on the shoulders, sleeves rolled up. Perhaps there is grey in his hair, which is retreating fast, and a coffee cup not far away, though not near enough the instruments to cause any damage in case of upset. He is wearing a headset, the microphone suspended in front of his chin. The windows above his screen are dark and the light in the room comes from the computers. He looks at us, a triangle denoted by our name and call sign, Papa Delta Hotel Yankee, with our course, speed and destination all a button-press away. He recognises us, perhaps. He has a host of ships to contact; he may be weary but his questions are very courteous and he listens carefully to what we tell him. He knows dozens of ships can hear him, tuned in to his frequency, and dozens of judgements may be made each time he speaks. I cannot help wondering if he has a wife and children waiting for him somewhere in the dark mass of England, not far away. He sounds as though he has. You can imagine him serving toast to a teenager. He is not quite paternal with us, but he is not quite fraternal either. We are all working, this freezing black night. His voice has the assuredness of dry land about it but all his attention is out in the Channel with us. It is not surprising he sounds tired; it must be a stressful time for him. The coastguards are under assault from government cuts: eight of nineteen stations are being closed. Those remaining are tasked to cover wider areas and more ships with fewer officers. Our guardian, overseeing the world's busiest shipping lane, is now manning a downsized twenty-four-hour ‘substation'.