Down to the Sea in Ships (3 page)

The Europeans look grey and tired. Their faces are pallid, their skin dry and flaked; everyone's eyes are reddened. Inside the ship there is no sea air, only the dry air conditioning and the diesel seep of the engine. No one is saying why they are late. Graham, the agent, mentioned fog in Bremerhaven, their last port of call, but he sounded uncertain.

Everyone works now. Only fog thick enough to blind crane operators, winds above sixty knots and Christmas Day stop the work at Felixstowe. Every minute of every other day and night cranes lift and lower, trucks line up to receive or deliver containers, stevedores fix and loosen lashing rods, agents arrive and depart, seafarers sign on and off, cargo planners board and disembark, officers supervise, crews from fifty countries work, dockers take or cast off lines, pilots climb or descend gangways and the big ships come and go. Under arc light, in the small hours, in summer dawns and winter darknesses, this never stops.

We will leave at 6 a.m.

‘Four on the gangway,' the Captain says, over the top of his glasses.

Departure times are subject to change; the first version is chalked on a board near the gangway. While we are alongside a constant watch is kept there by a seaman with a clipboard which visitors must sign. For most of the crew this is as much as they see of the nations of the world, very occasional shore leaves excepted. Container ports look broadly the same. The main differences are climate and the languages of stevedores.

In his strip-lit office, the Captain prods his keyboard, muttering. He might be in a small meeting room in some chain motel were it not for the view. Beyond the portholes is the extraordinary. The body of the ship is a space station under a sky like a wet blue cloth, through which containers swing and float and fly. The cranes' claws, the ‘spreaders', are yellow, the ship's holds red and the vista is lit by orange-pink floodlights, studded with white lamps in the hold. You can pick out ladders made miniature by the scale of the ship. The cranes are four-legged monsters, their necks thrust over us. Far up in the crown of each is a tiny human in his dark cabin. The dipping and winching is nearly silent. Sometimes a container booms hollow as it settles. The holds are deep, deep, dropping ten storeys down beneath hatch covers the size of barn ends. The hold looks like three demolished city blocks partitioned by giant circuit boards, gaunt and monumentally skeletal. When the holds are filled cargo is stacked another eight storeys high atop the hatches.

We are accustomed to miniaturised technology; to devices in the hand that talk to satellites. Seeing technology on this scale is hypnotic, awe-striking. This is how we will explore space and colonise planets, you realise, with giant machines operated by men made near-invisibly small by comparison. The eight winches stern and aft are three times the size of a car. They adjust automatically, tightening lines you would struggle to encircle with two hands. Every fifty seconds a container is deposited or removed by each of the four cranes working on the
Gerd
. A tug is pulling a huge COSCO ship out of her berth ahead of us. It seems impossible the little boat has any influence on the leviathan. Their relative sizes make it a match between a hedgehog and a horse.

Every passenger must have a tour. Prashant will conduct this one. He is a Dual Cadet, upright and alert in his immaculate overall. (The crew wear dark-blue overalls with reflective seams and MAERSK across the back; the officers have Sorin's light blue version with braid on the epaulettes and the Captain has an immaculate white shirt with full gold insignia on the shoulders, which he produces on entry into ports, complete with fold lines.) ‘Dual' means Prashant is being trained both as an engineering officer and a deck officer, one of the elite. He is from New Delhi, twenty-two years old. He has done ten months at sea: in another year, when he has passed his exams, he will be a junior officer.

‘My instructors are real sea dogs,' he grins. His friends were becoming seafarers, and making good money, so he did it.

‘The engine is something else,' he says.

The Captain says it has a problem that we are going to address in Le Havre. He waves a finger at Prashant.

‘Give him the tour!' he says. ‘Not less than one and a half hours.'

Prashant did not know the Captain before the Old Man took over the ship in Bremerhaven, but rank and procedure seem to simplify all relations. The Captain is the boss and uncle, Prashant the eager nephew.

We set off at a lick down the main deck, more than 360 metres of it. The
Gerd
is longer than the biggest US aircraft carrier. You cannot quite see the end of the deck, which is painted dark red and is almost flawless, with barely two spots of rust. Prashant points out hydrants for sea water and fresh water, ticks off their pressures (eight bar), lengths of containers (forty and twenty foot), the ship's capacity (she can carry the equivalent of nine thousand twenty-foot containers), and her deadweight tonnage, which is the total weight she can safely bear, including cargo, fuel, water, food and us: 115, 700 tonnes. He points out bay numbers (twenty-footers in the odd bays), lashing rods (adjustable iron stays which are fixed criss-cross to the ends of the first two layers of containers), hatch covers, winches and anchor chains, lifeboats and life rafts.

When we are done I sign something and Prashant returns the paper to the Captain. Correctly signed papers, piles of them at every stage of every journey, are the price of the Captain's power.

On a ship in the age of sail the Captain was among other things Master Sailmaker and ship's surgeon – ‘the only such, in a dangerous life, too: her disciplinarian, accountant, keeper of the Official Log under the Merchant Shipping Act, magistrate, chief steward, legal guardian of his apprentices – not his but the ship's, which needed them: there were no extra hands – and instructor to them too, if anyone was. Above all he was the sailor, the driver, the squall-dodger, who made the best not only of fair winds but whatever winds might blow.'
¹
With the exceptions of steward, sailmaker and surgeon, Captain Larsen is still all these.

The objective of the sailing ship's master was the same as Captain Larsen's: to bring cargo and crew safe to port in the minimum possible time. The sea cities of Britain then were twinned with the furthest reaches of the world. Swansea and Iquique were linked by copper ore, Liverpool was joined to San Francisco by gold and to Quebec by timber. Newcastle upon Tyne and Fremantle in Australia were brothers in coal. Famous runs were achieved, records set and broken. During the mass emigration of Portuguese to Hawaii in 1880 (11,000 made the journey) the British ship
Highflyer
, a former tea clipper, made the run from Portugal, around the Horn against the winds and up to the islands in ninety-nine days – no rival did it faster. Eight years later an iron sailing ship,
British Ambassador
, put up a record passage of twenty-nine days between San Francisco and Newcastle, New South Wales.

A fast ship, fair winds, good luck and a canny captain were all for nothing when you hit the doldrums or struck a patch of calms. One record from May 1897 describes fifty-four sailing ships becalmed in latitude 45 North, longitude 26 West, many short of food and water.

In his journals Coleridge records seeing such a ship becalmed at sunset in the Bristol Channel:

he rendered it, in his
Rime of the Ancient Mariner
. But imagine fifty-four of them together! Thirsty ghosts on a breathless sea: a glimpse of the measure of the age of sail.

With the coming of steam the ports of the world filled with unemployed sailing ships, trapped by plunging freight rates, made obsolete by technology which did not need the wind. Photographs of the port of Calcutta in 1898 show a dead forest of tall ships' masts. They could not use the Suez Canal (which opened in 1869) for a voyage to the East because of unfavourable winds in the Red Sea. Any sailing ship coming to Calcutta from the Atlantic would have made the Indian Ocean via the Cape of Good Hope, adding at least three thousand miles to a voyage, half of which was against the South Atlantic's southerly trade winds: you had to sail most of the way to Brazil, in a wide sidestep known as the volta, in order to circle back to Cape Town on the clockwise cyclonic winds. Steam changed captains' conceptions and maps of the oceans. Their world was still a bundled question of winds, currents and seasons, but the answers were far simpler calculations. The blue became inscribed with steamer tracks, the shortest safe passage between ports. We still use them. Voyage courses and times became predictable, more or less.

The
Gerd Maersk
is scheduled to cross the Channel tomorrow. She will leave Le Havre the day after that for Algeciras, the Suez Canal, Salalah in Oman, Tanjung Pelepas in Malaysia, Vung Tau in Vietnam, Nansha and Yantian in China, Hong Kong and finally Los Angeles. We have an arrival date in Los Angeles two months from now, 16 October, and a time: half past two in the afternoon.

The route we will travel is a main road on the map of a parallel world which sustains the one you inhabit. Rotterdam is the capital of Holland and of Europe. Antwerp is the first city of Belgium. Felixstowe rules Britannia. Hamburg is the capital of Germany and Bremen its second city. New York still counts, thanks to Newark, but while the sea makes a place for Savannah in Georgia, Washington, DC, is nothing. Shanghai is the world's first city; Beijing does not figure. San Francisco was long ago surpassed by Oakland, on the other side of the bay, and both are dwarfed by Long Beach. The great Mediterranean capitals are Valencia, Algeciras and the gangster feasting-ground of the port of Gioia Tauro, the buckle on Italy's shoe.

‘Hello, Mr Pilot!'

They shake hands.

‘Good morning, Captain.'

‘A grey dawn on the sea's face and a grey dawn breaking', John Masefield wrote, and it is running through my head not just because the view from the bridge is precisely that – a wash of non-colours between calm and dismal, and a rain falling which you would call dirty in a city – but because I am in a state of suppressed exultation. I had to recite ‘Sea Fever' at school when I was ten and I longed to do this then. Now, at last, I am on a great ship going down to the lonely sea and the sky.

‘Let go forward line,' Captain Larsen says. Three hundred metres away in the bow is Chris, the second officer, who repeats the order back over the radio.

‘Let go forward spring lines . . . Let go aft line . . . Let go aft spring lines . . .' The spring lines are the ropes which run from the bow and stern of the ship back towards her centre, balancing the pull of the main mooring lines.

‘There's a problem with the aft spring line,' says the radio.

‘Well, it's quite urgent now,' the Captain says calmly, ‘as we have left the berth.'

On the bridge are the Captain, humming to himself softly in between giving orders, Duncan, the pilot, who talks to the tug over his radio, and Sorin, checking the paper chart against the electronic chart, plotting, listening, double-checking, watching everything.

The Captain makes small adjustments to the little levers which control the bow and stern thrusters, then even smaller changes to the main engine telegraph. A long spear of green-brown water opens between us and the quay. The aft spring line rapidly behaves. Three men in the tug, six on the lines, and these three on the bridge – a dozen men are sending a giant machine, a chunk of steel cape, it seems, away to sea.

Now a helmsman appears and takes over the steering. The
Gerd
's wheel is smaller than the kind which controls a Mini.

‘Starboard ten.'

‘Starboard ten!'

‘Steer one-oh-six,' says Duncan.

‘One-oh-six!' echoes the helmsman.

‘Six knots.'

‘Six knots,' the Captain confirms.

The pilot and the Captain confer about the wind and the current and the dredger ahead of us in the channel. The exchanges are brief, not quite laconic. The Captain's air is approving. Seafarers are quick judges of character and competence.

‘You look for someone serious,' Sorin says.

As we move down the buoyed channel through rain nothing stirs in Felixstowe. The nape of a sullen night hunches away to the west as we turn northwards and increase speed.

‘You can come up to eleven knots, Captain.'

‘Eleven knots! Yes, yes . . . hum humm, di-dum dumm . . .'

With every yard we travel the atmosphere on the bridge lightens. Sea is safety, land is danger. Duncan readies himself for departure as the tiny pilot boat pitches towards us. Duncan will descend the gangway down our huge flank, transfer to a rope ladder, descend a few more metres almost to the water and step on to the little arrowhead of the pilot boat's nose.

‘It's quite exciting in a gale,' he says mildly. ‘You can tell how the economy is going by the height of the ship in the water. Since 2008 it's been a fair old climb . . . Oh aye it's all changed – especially the drinking,' he grins. ‘In the old days we wouldn't have made it around the world unless we were half cut! That's all gone now.'

‘There are many more
things
in the sea here,' the Captain says.

‘Oh yes, the turbines, they're putting more up there. The winds are getting stronger. We get much more strong wind now than we used to . . . Right, Captain, I'll be off.'

‘What speed would you like, Mr Pilot?'

‘Ten knots should be fine.'

‘Ten knots. Starboard side?'

‘Starboard side. Thank you, Captain. Safe journey.'

‘Yes, yes! Thank you, Mr Pilot, thank you.'

¹
Preface by Allan Villiers to Captain George Clark,
Four Captains
, Brown, Son and Ferguson, Glasgow, 1975.

‘THE WORST?'

Sorin grins. It must be the question they are asked most often. Setting out with them, it is the first thing you want to know. Sorin's eyes take on a steady look as he sees the storm again. (His English is excellent, accented, and occasionally dispenses with articles.)