Down to the Sea in Ships (33 page)

In one corner Jannie is working with a shrieking angle-grinder, producing showers of sparks, reeks of hot steel and smoke. He is balanced on his haunches. The floor is an inch deep in water which sloshes from side to side and tilts with the motion of the ship. You are grateful for the islands of rust on the deck because there are no hand-holds and the metal is slippy. You are carefully not thinking of the thousands of gallons of acids and toxins around you. Jannie goes on grinding at a rusty hatch cover, the steel screaming. We should be wearing respirators; the air is foul. Your senses are assaulted by the dripping decks, the rusting ladders, the vertical drops, the cut-away holes in the walkways, the lurch and slide, the stink and prickle in your nose, the peril, the scale, the darkness and the toxic slop washing around your boots. Outside is the mouth of the Laurentian Channel, into which we pitch and slam quite hard. Force seven has swelled to eight and the waves are twenty feet high. Jannie carries on, wreathed with smoke, steel-howl and sparks, for all the world like the devil's apprentice doing DIY in hell, with the angle-grinder's flex trailing away through the water. Now he pauses. There is a light in the hole below him, then a voice.

The hatch cover in the floor leads to a half-height passageway, a ballast tank, from which Erwin emerges, his work jacket streaked with black oil. Even a man accustomed to all this shakes his head. ‘Horrible down there, horrible,' he says. He has been checking the hull. One of the waves has left its mark on one of the hull's plates, battering a dent into steel designed to take fifteen tonnes of pressure per square metre; it probably dents at double that. When Jannie has done what he can the hatch is replaced and bolted down and we retreat, wincing and gripping up all the ladders and through the hatch, stumbling back down the deck.

Just after noon we glimpse a lump of Newfoundland, the island of St Pierre: grey-yellow rock, high cliffs and banking hills patched with snow appear briefly in the distance. Leif Ericson may have thought it relatively tropical but it looks bleak to me. The wind has strengthened and the foremast describes churning, crushed ovals. There are one or two northern fulmars and a very small auk, black, white and fluttering, barely blackbird-sized. We dive and climb quite dramatically, punching up container-high spray.

John spots the bo'sun going forward.

‘He shouldn't be on deck,' he says, ‘not in this.' He seems aggrieved. ‘Perhaps he doesn't know it's got worse.'

‘Can't you tell him?'

‘How can I? They haven't got a radio.'

At that the radio crackles: the bo'sun reporting in.

‘You are welcome to go out,' says the Captain. ‘You have signed your indemnity.'

The working party are picking their ways between the containers collecting torn shreds of plastic, the blasted remains of the tarpaulin which covered the tractor on the bow. The tractor is a shining green and orange machine attached by pipes and joints to a precision air seeder. We wonder at it: can it be destined for the grain prairies? Surely Canada has its own tractors? Its German manufacturer says it will plant and deliver seasonal yields over 1,500 hectares. We dig fragments of its tarpaulin out of corners and gaps between the containers, unable to face the freezing spray with open eyes as it pours across the ship. The working party are done up in bulky jackets and balaclavas, their brown faces as pale as they will ever be. ‘Like nice weather?' shouts Sumy. We bend and pick and pluck, everything around us hard, cold, filthy and catching, lurching in motion with the ship.

The Captain is tense. He needs fifteen and half knots but we can only make fourteen in this, a sea as bad as anything we have had: massive, confused, lugubriously hostile, with waves breaking in blue and white calderas to a near horizon smoked with rain.

In mid-afternoon the sun comes out and the wind blows ever stronger – force nine coming from dead ahead, six-metre waves and the sea furious, Atlantic-black. Beyond the rain to the north are the Blue Hills of Couteau. The rolling and pitching must have paused at some point in the last four days but I cannot remember when. When the propeller is yanked up towards the surface it loses its grip on the water and cavitates, threshing in foam or air, which causes deep rumble-shakes. They rattle up your spine. Using the stairs is never less than interesting; you manoeuvre yourself with your arms as much as your legs.

We see our first ship,
Flevob
, emerging like a ghost through the sleety clouded air.
Flevob
is a Dutch freighter, smaller than us, 120 metres, belonging to the Wagenborg Line. She rolls heavily and quickly.

‘They carry everything,' says the Captain. ‘They go through the locks up to the Great Lakes – wherever the cargo is they go. Coal, iron ore, wheat, paper, newsprint – this is what you get from Canada.'

A crew of twelve, he guesses, and she is toppling from side to side, spray flying around her so that she seems wreathed in her own mist. She steams past us into the worst weather map the Captain has seen of the Atlantic.

‘What a brave little ship!'

‘Yes,' the Captain laughs. ‘Yes. We complain but . . .' Then another thought: ‘They probably have beer on board.'

The sky ahead of us opens to an icy clear, fog-white on the horizon rises to soft horizontal knives of cloud, then palest blue, then harder blue, luminous. It suggests an eternal tranquillity but we batter and wallop towards it, the gale's noise never relenting, only adding or subtracting a whistle in two parts, one like a child blowing a recorder as hard as possible, the other like a devil sucking its teeth.

The chart tells a frank story of Newfoundland. Working eastwards from a point due north of our position are Grey River, Bear Head, at the mouth of White Bear Bay, Bay de Loup, Six Mile Hill, Bread and Cheese Hill, Muddy Hole Point, Grand Bruit (we know the feeling) and the Highlands of Grand Bruit, where someone saw five deer at a brook and called it Cinq Cerf Brook. You wonder who Rose Blanche was, but, ship or woman, she must have known and feared Pointe Enrage at the entrance to Cabot Strait. Basque fishermen came here in the early sixteenth century; they are commemorated in the names of a port and a traffic control scheme.

During the Captain's watch the wind changes again, dropping as we steer into it towards a high clear, most beautiful. The chief comes up and a new moon comes out, fabulous glowing silver with one planet attendant. I go out on the bitter bridge wing and show it fifty pence, make a wish and consign the coin to the Cabot Strait. It feels right and exhilarating.

Supper begins with green-lipped mussels, from New Zealand, Jannie says. ‘They stay alive quite a long time before you have to fridge them.' There is no calculating the nautical miles the mussels have done but it cannot be much less than two months by sea from New Zealand to Antwerp. The mussels now seem to dare me to eat them. The green lips grin: Have we come all this way for nothing, nancy? Jannie, oblivious to my communion with the shellfish, talks about making his own vodka, which his wife turns into Tia Maria.

‘That was a hell of a job in the hold,' I say, swallowing a morsel.

‘Ja. Shit tool, cheap rubbish, wouldn't bore out the bolts,' he growls, and gurns at the memory of the smell of the dangerous cargo, while I grimace at the gassy taste of the green-lip.

Before sleep I go out to the bridge wing. The lights of Basque Harbour and Pointe Enrage make clusters of white and orange, a tiny broken necklace in the wilderness. The stars are in their utmost profusion: there is the Milky Way, the Plough, the planets, strange satellite flashes very high up and a plane heading for New York much lower. But there are nets of further stars between those you normally see; heavens within heavens. You can scarcely believe the night's darkness could contain so much tiny light. The crescent moon turns gold. I sleep and dream of ice clunking against the hull, and think I hear it, and wake to a changed sea.

AT 0600, IN
mist, the
Maersk Pembroke
is twelve miles south of the Ile d'Anticosti and bearing into the Gulf of St Lawrence, the world's largest estuary. Anticosti is home to a thousand moose, many bald eagles and a great many white-tailed deer, which ate the island's black bears to extinction, both species sharing a taste for berries. The island is said to be ringed with over four hundred shipwrecks; weather like this must have done for many of them. You can see nothing in the icy murk of dawn. Without radar our first intimation of danger might well be the mariner's death-knell, waves breaking on rocks, too close to be avoided. Daylight reveals a narrow, vague field of vision beyond the ship's rail.

There are streaks in the water like foam made solid, which lengthen, stretch and harden into broken white slabs, heaving with the waves. The wind is from the north-east now and the sea more ice than not. Visibility is shrunk to barely four hundred yards ahead and though we are doing eighteen knots we barely seem to move. The ice deadens the motion of the sea, crushing its vigour and will. Broken frozen sheets form perfect, rocking mosaics. Larger chunks have snowy edges and dark centres, like the tastebuds of giant and freezing tongues. We pass in and out of the white fields and our passage seems very quiet, as if we are trying not to be noticed. There are no waves now and the air is full of tiny snowflakes. By seven the snow is sticking, whitening the containers. The slicks in the sea are called grease ice, or grey water. The occasional crystalline fins, little crests, are brush ice and the suckers are pancake ice, according to the almanac.

As we reach the longitude of the tip of Anticosti, Cap aux Anglais, the engine stops. The wind is back up to gale force as we drift, blown sideways through a black and white sea, barely wallowing despite the storm; the Cap shelters us from the worst of it and the ice keeps the swells down. Off this cape on 13 August 1535 a world-changing conversation took place between the French explorer Jacques Cartier and two Iroquoians whom Cartier had kidnapped the year before, during his first voyage, when he had explored the eastern half of the gulf.

‘It was told us by the two savages that to the south of it [Anticosti, which Cartier named Assomption] lay the route from Honguedo where we had seized them . . . and that two days journey from this cape and island began the Kingdom of the Saguenay, on the north shore as one made one's way towards this Canada. The two savages assured us that this was the way to the mouth of the great river of Hochelaga and the route towards Canada.'

The ‘savages' assured Cartier that it was possible to travel so far up the Hochelaga ‘that they had never heard of anyone reaching the head of it'. Cartier found the river and followed it to the site of what is now Montreal, then a huge Iroquoian settlement, where rapids were all that prevented his further progress to China, he believed. He claimed the Gulf, the St Lawrence and the hinterland for France. Nothing remained of the St Lawrence Iroquoians seventy-five years later, when Cartier's successor, Samuel de Champlain, arrived and founded Quebec. Their disappearance remains a mystery. We are drifting in the Honguedo Strait – their only memorial is its name, taken from their language.

In the engine room Pieter directs the changing of a leaking damper on a fuel-injection unit and comes up smiling: ‘Easy! Getting the tools out and putting them away again took more time than the repair.'

We emerge from shelter into an evil wind which blows straight down our back from the Labrador coast, driving blizzards across the black water, whipping up waves which curl and crackle with ice chunks, tearing the tarpaulin off a container below the bridge to reveal a blue seed drill. Sumy, the bo'sun, took advantage of the stop to unlash the anchors and returned safely.

‘In this he wouldn't even have two minutes if he fell,' the Captain says. The decks are almost unusable, with pitiless blasts of snow and freezing spray hosing the starboard side, but there are two men down there, prodding at the winch which is meant to lower the gangway. They are oval-shaped in their padded overalls and hoods and they wear safety goggles, so they can just about see out. I manage three minutes on the leeward side. It is horrible.

Nestor, the electrician, descends from the monkey deck, the highest point on the ship, where he has been checking the radar.

‘Is OK,' he says, his nerve as cool as the sea. ‘Shit bad weather, eh?'

Now and then there is a clatter-clang like dropped metal as ice falls from the superstructure to the deck. Milky slicks of ice combine until entire quadrants are white, an aqueous arctic, heaving with the motion of slow rollers. Slabs bigger than dinner tables scrape down the hull with a grating rumble. It seems extraordinary that the men working on the winch out there are not polar explorers but seafarers from the tropics.

‘We'll all be out in it tomorrow, unlashing,' John says, glumly.

Hectares of sea are patched and marbled, rocking white in a grey-blue murk, as the ship climbs waves iced like snowdrifts, and falls into valleys crazed as if with opaque glass. It all seems dream-like, as though we are halfway between life and something else, in a place where nothing is quite solid or quite liquid, as if our steel ship has left behind all certainty of form and element, pushing herself on by the conviction of habit, the only sure thing left in a universe paling away. The impression that we have sailed into a zone of white erasure doubles with the appearance of a ghost ship, a bulker, which emerges from the freezing mist a mile and a half away. You cannot believe there are men aboard her. The wind comes back up, hurling snow-spray. The ice blanket slows the waves until they are white dunes rolling.

Perhaps I have been missing his irony, or perhaps he no longer feels a need to impress, and no doubt ‘What a great job!' can be said the same way and mean different things on different days, perhaps it is all of these, and the psychological desolation of the dismal, borderless ice fields, listless on the black water, but John is very melancholy today.