Down to the Sea in Ships (27 page)

It seems amazing that this time yesterday we were snaking out through the rain and surrealism of the Schelde. The sea treats time, distance and men's lives as mutable things, unfixed. For example, John has two weeks to add to his thirty-two years before we get back to Bremerhaven, then he will be off for a month and a half. After that he has no idea what ship he will be sent to, sailing where, with whom, for what, in what condition. Custom and tradition are his only certainties: John knows his watches will start at noon and midnight and end at four and four.

He told me horrifying stories this afternoon as we swept slowly out past the end of Cornwall. It was very funny in an awful way, trying to extend one's feeling to the place's moment, with the mariner tipping appalling tales into your ear. They are better set down at night.

As the sun sinks Captain Koop does his exercises. He marches the length of the bridge with great vigour, arms not quite swinging, then turns and marches back, accelerating towards the centre of the bridge like a man with a plane to catch, before slowing rapidly at the end, turning on his heel and setting off again. Captain Koop is pacing the Atlantic out with a mighty pathos, a formidable determination to have more life, more days on land. With every stride he is reclaiming time, paying into a pension of existence beyond his coffin-shaped ship. Captain Koop is defying the sea. It seems an eminently sensible policy, pursued with manic commitment. He would run you over, you think. I do not know how many widths he sets himself but he surely hits his target.

Dinner is at the bar because it is Sunday. Pieter the chief engineer gives out lemonade and alcohol-free beer and relaxes on a stool behind the counter, happy. There are no uniforms tonight; the Captain is dressed as if for football. We eat chicken again, with green beans and noodles, strawberries for pudding. The strawberries have done their share of seafaring, from Kenya to Holland to the Atlantic. The mood is jolly.

‘We had to bribe Lagos Customs with cigarettes,' Pieter grins, ‘And we had these cigarettes, they have – they're from Canada? – they have these photos of cancers, lungs, horrible stuff – and the Nigerians didn't want them! No, no, not these! Marlboro Red – didn't want them! We had to – [Pieter relishes English and often seeks the
mot juste
] – compensate them with extra Coca-Cola.'

There is much laughter from all three of them at the legendary chief mate who ‘couldn't see' the Cambodian and Vietnamese boat people, who fled the aftermath of the Vietnam War in the late 1970s, taking small boats into the international shipping lanes in the hope of rescue and resettlement.

‘Couldn't see them!' they chortle.

In his cadet year Pieter was with a ship that picked up sixty boat people and took them to Singapore. The Dutch government accepted them. Pieter recently had a letter from one of the refugees, a young boy at the time, who is organising a reunion. Untold numbers of boat people died at sea: the UN estimates up to a quarter of a million. It is not the numbers that make an impression on the Dutchmen, but the means. They have all done sea-survival courses.

‘The tricky bit is getting into the life raft from the water,' Pieter says, not laughing. The talk turns to drowning, to water in the lungs and how long the brain survives without oxygen, and hydrostatic pressure, when the squeeze of the water around the legs keeps blood near the vital organs. When you lift the body out of the water the pressure is removed and blood drains back to the legs. This is why some victims of the storm which struck the Fastnet race in 1979 waved to rescue helicopters from the water but were dead by the time they had been winched up. Casualties are now lifted in slings or baskets, horizontally.

The ship enters the Celtic Sea. Below us is the Jones Bank: 70 metres, 180 metres, 90 metres, the depths shift like waves and the chart shows a dozen wrecks near to us. None is named or dated on the chart. The sailing directions describe the world in which they lie. ‘The bottom of the Western approaches to the English Channel appears to consist mainly of fine or coarse sand, a great deal of broken shell, and occasional patches of pebbles, gravel and small stones. Mud may be found in places now and then. The sand is mostly white; although, in many places it is yellow, with black specks. The black specks are often found mixed both with the white and yellow sand; they are very fine, resembling fine cinder dust.'

As we rumble over this submarine desolation there is a sudden lift: ‘Swells.' ‘Swells already,' say the Captain and Pieter at once, exchanging a glance. Pieter tilts his head as though listening for something. The Captain nods, frowning so that his jaw juts.

Now they chat about Egypt and Hong Kong and Nigeria, and as they laugh, surrounded by
Pembroke
's old honours from ports across the oceans, there is something quietly magnificent about these three Dutch seafarers, something in and out of time, at once nostalgic and actual. I cannot characterise the feeling at first. Each has a personal isolation about him, a sense of a world of worries confined to his cabin, which is familiar, but their cares are padded with a sardonic humour and a sea-companionship I have not noticed among other nationalities I have sailed with. Hendrik Willem Van Loon, writing in 1916, would have had no difficulty ascribing it. His collection
The Golden Book of the Dutch Navigators
begins with a vision of the Low Countries towards the end of the 1500s, on the eve of the Netherlands' great age.

‘Wherever a man went in the country there was the high sky of the coastal region, and the canals which would carry his small vessel to the main roads of trade and ultimate prosperity. The sea reached up to his very front door. It supported him in his struggle for a living, and it was his best ally in his fight for independence. Half of his family and friends lived on and by the sea. The nautical terms of the forecastle became the language of his land. His house reminded the foreign visitor of a ship's cabin. And finally his state became a large naval Commonwealth, with a number of shipowners as a board of directors and a foreign policy dictated by the needs of commerce. The history of Holland is the story of the conquest of the sea . . .' Van Loon dedicates his book to his sons with a homily: ‘I want you to know about these men because they are your ancestors. If you have inherited any of their good qualities, make the best of them; they will prove to be worthwhile. If you have got your share of their bad ones, fight these as hard as you can; for they will lead you a merry chase before you get through.'

The three descendants of Van Loon's Dutch navigators are now discussing pilots: the man who saw us through Flushing Roads last night was of the old school, in his tattered jumper and sea monster's beard, and he knew what he was doing. ‘You know they train the new ones on simulators now?' says the Captain, sceptically.

‘So I guess we'll find out about that, one way or another,' Pieter laughs. ‘You know we are retarding the clocks another hour tonight?'

‘Oh? Thank you. It's confusing . . .'

‘You should have been here when the ships went slower – we used to go back by half-hours.'

Jannie claps his hand to his forehead. ‘Each twelve hours divided in three watches, so ten minutes different for you, ten minutes for him, my ten minutes – the calculations!'

Nymphe Bank is to the north, Cockburn ahead and below the horizons small unnamed banks, each worked by a solitary fishing boat. The Porcupine Sea Bight, the edge of the European Continental Shelf, is out beyond Cockburn Bank. We are coming up on the line dividing United Kingdom from Irish waters. There are over 350 known wrecks in the chart of our current position, in the south-western approaches to St George's Channel. The oldest marked is the
Thomasina
, a full-rigged sailing ship launched in 1873 and sunk by gunfire from the
U-35
in 1915, an extraordinary confrontation between the Victorian era and the modern age. Appropriately, perhaps, there was no loss of life: the crew were allowed to take to their boats, from which they were later rescued, before the U-boat fired. Conduct of this kind attended many sinkings of cargo ships in the first war, and persisted sporadically into the beginning of the Battle of the Atlantic. The list of the lost encompasses the end of the age of sail, recording forty more tall ships sent to the bottom in the Great War, several of them by torpedo.

The records are full of echoes –
Thistlebank
, another sailing ship, was carrying wheat to Ireland from Argentina when she was torpedoed in June 1916 by the same Rudolf Schneider who six months before had sunk HMS
Formidable
. A third sailer,
Sunlight
, carrying molasses from Hispaniola to Glasgow for Lever Brothers, was sunk in the same area by another U-boat five days later. In late 1940 there is a spate of six vessels in sequence, three cargo ships and three trawlers, all sunk by air attack. France had fallen: Channel shipping was within easy reach of German aircraft. There is another cluster, this time of U-boats, all destroyed during and after 1943 when the Battle of the Atlantic turned decisively against them. In the latter part of the century fishing boats are undone by explosions, freighters go down when their cargoes shift in storms, yachts suffer flooding and heavy seas and one boat dives down a wave at thirty-eight knots and ruptures her hull – the end of
Virgin Atlantic Challenger
and her attempt on the Atlantic speed record in 1985.

I end the day writing down two of John's stories. We returned to the tragedy of the
Royston Castle
, and the vacuum created by burning oil, which left no one aboard alive. He has survived ‘loads of fires, aye!' without encountering disaster: ‘Engine room fires mostly. The suppressors dealt with them.'

Then he tells the tale of the worst thing he ever saw.

‘He was an electrician, a Geordie, only young. Twenty-four. He goes to get a torch off the roof of a lift. Someone had dropped it down there, you know, and he thought he'd climb down and get it? It was the case that changed safety regulations about lifts – and I was the one that found it,' he says, proudly, twice.

‘I get in the lift and it's all red. So I think, uh? And I look into the gap, and there's a hand.'

The sun was out and the daffodils were in bloom above St Michael's Mount, as John described discovering the young Geordie's corpse, the flattened head ‘three times the size of a head'.

The most sinister story comes from John's time on the
Foreland
, a bulker, an ore carrier renamed seven times, a sister ship to the
Derbyshire
, which went down with all hands when the seas broke off her hatch covers. The
Foreland
was moored at Hunterstone on the coast of Scotland. This is a chillingly bleak harbour, little more then a terminal at the end of a pier that feeds a power station.

‘I knew it was a strange ship when I first went on but I didn't know it was an evil ship. My mother came up to see me but when she got there, as soon as she saw it, she said “I'm not going on that ship.” I said: “Why not? You've come all the way up to Scotland to see us – what do you mean you're not coming on?”

‘She says: “I'm not going on that ship.” Wouldn't say why. In the end I took her hand and dragged her up the gangway. She goes straight to my cabin and she wouldn't come out. She'd been on loads of ships but she wouldn't leave the cabin. Offered her a tour of the ship – didn't want it. The captain said she could stay the night – she wouldn't have it. She stayed in the cabin until she left and I said: “What was all that about?”

‘“Something terrible happened on that ship,” she says. I knew what it was, but she didn't. I hadn't said anything about it. This was in the days before the internet and whatever so she couldn't have looked it up or anything – she couldn't have known.'

‘What happened, John?' I blurt.

‘One of the crew had gone mad and stabbed some of the others. He killed a few of them. I said, “What was all that about?” She said: “Something terrible happened on that ship. Men died on that ship.” I said, “Yes, but how did you know?” She said: “I could see them.”'

THERE ARE SWELLS
in the night as we cross the banks and the wind backs westerly. We wake to misted sky and sea the colour of a submarine. At ten there is a full meeting in the harbour control room. The Captain and Pieter, the chief, are there first.

‘Have you heard about the
Maersk Luz
?' asks the Captain.

‘No?'

‘A fight in the crew. Filipino guys. Two dead and there's one in custody in Buenos Aires.'

‘Jesus, what happened?'

‘We don't know, they don't tell us. Maybe the Filipinos know. This is bad stuff. If men are at sea too long . . . they are such happy-go-lucky guys, eh? But if something snaps . . .'

Erwin arrives, downcast. The Captain prompts him:

‘The
Maersk Luz
?'

‘I know one who was killed,' Erwin says, quietly.

‘You know him?' the Captain repeats.

‘Marlon. I sailed with him, a long time. Months. He was a good guy, really a good guy.'

He shakes his head and more of the junior officers appear, all wearing the same expression. The second and third engineers, Reyje and Filemon, Sumy the bo'sun, Erwin and Annabelle are from the same town as Marlon. It is as though all the Filipinos on all the world's seas are one crew, and all their ships one fleet. By the atmosphere in the room the two dead men are next door.

The Captain goes briskly around the table. The chief engineer is responsible for ordering materials and stores: Annabelle tells Pieter she needs soap powder and soap.

‘It's not going to be there when we get back to Rotterdam,' he says, ‘so it's going to take two months.'

Annabelle says we also need fresh vegetables.