Down to the Sea in Ships (34 page)

‘Would you leave this, if you could?'

‘Oh aye, I would have left twenty years ago. I applied for a job as a fireman but I wasn't fit enough. I was supposed to join the family pilot business – we had a business, river pilots on the Tyne. My grandfather was killed in the war. Climbing on to a ship all blacked out he slipped – crushed between the ship and the pilot cutter. Then the government said anyone could be pilots and we lost the business.

‘My first voyage was in 1979. Bahrain. We were in an accident in a bus and we missed the ship. Chased it for six hours in a launch – chasing this tanker! When I got on I said to the captain, what's my station in an emergency? He said don't worry about it tonight. So I went to bed and then the fire alarm goes off – fire in the engine room, on a tanker.'

‘But you still wanted to do it?'

‘Oh aye. It stopped being fun ten years ago. We used to have women officers and cadets – that's all gone. You think I want to stand and count boxes coming off and on? The companies don't like English officers. Too expensive. If I could get a job on shore I would . . .'

After bemoaning bad captains (killjoys, authoritarians and brutes), John contrasts them with one Captain Robinson, a New Zealander who played music on the bridge, whose wife made smoothies and who used the engineers' passage for ten-pin bowling.

‘He'd come up in the middle of your watch and say I've scored this much – you have a go, and he'd take your watch for you!'

Everyone seems to be waiting to get off, except perhaps the Captain. Clearly the Gulf of St Lawrence in February is not the place to look for enthusiasm in seafarers, but the feeling that we are the only ones ‘stupid enough to be here' is palpable and often repeated. We take comfort from the sight of other ships, as if they are proof that this bitter, lonely and profitless thing we are doing is something which needs to be done. The two ghost ships we have seen only serve to confirm our quixotic quest. If they were there at all they were both going the other way.

A walk around the deck reveals six inches of snow on the lee side. Nestor is checking reefers: he visits 209 of them twice a day. Vegetables from Poland and Belgium, pork from Holland, Tunisian octopus, Irish meat for Jamaica, Uruguayan beef (well-travelled), juice concentrate from Argentina (also crossing the Atlantic twice on its way to Canada), German cherries, Polish fish, a mass of ‘foodstuff' from northern Europe, as well as mystifying ‘coffee extracts' sent from India to Costa Rica all depend on Nestor if they are not to melt, though the thought of anything melting out here seems ludicrous. Nestor climbs a ladder in the open bay forward of the bridge in horizontal snow. Thirty seconds' exposure of your hands is too much. A circuit-breaker on one of the refrigerated containers has tripped. At the top of his ladder, thirty feet up, Nestor leans sideways perilously, catching the inspection cover as the wind plucks at it. For a second the forces are in terrifying balance, then Nestor pulls it back, makes an adjustment and descends. He has been at sea seventeen years. With luck the next trip will be his last.

‘My family have moved to Toronto. If I qualify for residence, and if my wife does – she's a nurse – if we pass all the tests, including language, it will all be worth it. Children get free school, free health care.'

If the dream comes true then the couple's labour will change the future of all their descendants decisively: they will be Canadians, not Filipinos. Seventeen years of voyages, all those reefers, all those days and nights will have turned the globe.

John is back from his supper and listening to his compilation: the same every time, which starts with the bars with which Universal Pictures begin their films, and progresses to Queen, Robert Plant and Dire Straits.

Our evening clear, which is traditional now, shows a dark bruise-blue sky and the lights of Baie Corneau and the Betsiamites Indian Reserve. We have turned into the mouth of the St Lawrence River; the southern shore is hidden in cloud. The river here is a steep-shelving gorge, giant and deep, which is good, as we are sailing across an explosives dumping ground. We have a rendezvous with Escoumines pilots at midnight.

Supper, after a muted start, turns into an excellent evening. First Pieter and the Captain describe Antwerp on the cusp of containerisation.

‘Ships went right into the Scheldebank,' says the Captain. ‘We tied up in the centre of the city. We unloaded tobacco, beef and coffee – the Antwerp stevedores were the fastest in Europe.'

‘There was always something going on,' says Pieter, ‘until the first containers came.'

‘We used to lash them to the deck any way,' the Captain laughs. ‘And the decks then were covered in bitumen to protect the steel, which was not so good in the Persian Gulf. We stuffed the cargo into the containers on board, at first.'

From Antwerp we travel to Central America, Pieter recalling two cadets persuading a watchman to report an illness, as it was the only way they could get a launch to take them ashore in British Honduras, now Belize. One of them immediately met a girl he knew on the dock.

‘Ah, sometimes they travelled with you!' says the Captain.

This leads to memories of Colombia. Jannie takes over. An Indonesian he knew attempted to befriend another man's girlfriend in Colombia and was consequently shot in the arm. In hospital he sprayed urine around the ward: ‘Maybe he was angry, or maybe just excited. The next day a taxi driver comes to the ship, says this man owes him money. The captain says “You take him then!” The guy came back later, said his drink was spiked.'

Now we are in Jamaica, Kingston, a dangerous and popular port. Assuming a deep voice Jannie says, ‘Black stone, black stone, make chikki-chikki all night!' He repeats this with relish and emphasis.

‘What is this black stone?'

‘Ach, you rub it under your hat,' Jannie says, pointing to his crotch.

The ship has a tilt to her now, wind-heeled, and our little blue foremast light is on again. There is quite a large town on the southern shore, New Brunswick. I try to imagine what they do in New Brunswick on a February night. Bars, DVDs, suppers, studying, dating, putting children to bed and reading to them, watching the news – the same as everywhere else in the Western world, perhaps, but it all seems remote, unlikely and isolated from the perspective of the
Pembroke
; from the shore we are just three lights passing, far out in the darkness.

The bridge after supper is fun, now: we become a happy Filipino ship, energised by the proximity of land and the prospect of unlashing, activity and landfall. Chicoy is in his chair, someone is on the phone calling home: you can hear a woman's voice on the line, compressed and eager. Sumy, the bo'sun, is supervising Mark, the steward, who is practising his steering. Mark does not want to stay a steward but so far his advancement is limited to occasional night driving. He has been on two ships before this one; a bulker and a ro-ro. He liked the latter because all the accommodation was on one deck: ‘No stairs!

‘On first ship I was so homesick, so homesick, I hit myself here, here.' He mimes punching the side of his head. ‘I hit myself until I bleed. I said to the Captain I am so homesick I hurt myself but maybe I hurt someone else?'

The Captain sent him home, where he became a salesman. But he was not successful so a friend helped him find another ship. Mark talks about doing another twenty years at sea.

‘We sacrifice ourselves,' he says.

We discuss books and cheap razors: he wants to know which are the best and interrogates me closely, with his mobile face near mine and his fragile eyes beseeching.

‘Well,' I manage, never having thought about it, ‘I am quite a fan of Wilkinson's Sword.'

‘Wilkinson's Sword? OK! These I will get in Montreal and sell them at home. If only I could grow a beard like yours,' he says, wistfully. ‘I wish I could have that beard.'

‘No you don't! When you have to shave it is a complete pain in the ass.'

‘I think anyone who can have one does not want it, and anyone who can't does,' he says.

By 0445 we are steering for the leading lights of Saint-Michelle-de-Bellechasse with two pilots aboard. Their French is too quick and Quebecois for me. We trundle through thick and shattered ice. The wind is very bitter and the Ile d'Orléans glows blue with snow. Now we can see the lights of Quebec City ahead. It looks as though it will be a lovely day, but cold, cruelly cold, for handling lashing rods. We pass a ship in the channel, all blacked out, her men working her through the darkness like an echo of war. We go quickly towards a freezing clear sky where the stars are fading. We are close to the shore of the island now and it is strange to see normal things: trees, houses, a street, all so domestic and yet remarkable, after all the ocean. There is a church, a garbage truck and tall pylons: Is this life, then? A world of mundane miraculous things? The channel narrows and spurs of ice reach towards us. We are about to start breaking a passage through it. Now sheets seven inches thick snap and rock in the greenish river.

Just before sunrise on a Sunday morning Quebec City stands brave on its bluff, Cap Diamant, between air and water of luminous blue. What a defiant, magnificent outpost it is, with its back to the Laurentian Mountains which roll away under skies of shivered, snow-pregnant cloud. The spires and turrets of the Château Frontenac hotel – part baronial, part Gotham, part French fantasy – are harmonious with the skyscrapers, the French apartments and grand houses on the river, with a rampart of grain silos and the few moored ships, as if a single glance over the ice floes encompasses a way and a means of surviving, living and prospering here, at the mouth of the wild remote. The Quebec pilots are jolly and macho.

‘This is the best day this week, Capitaine. Sun today, snow tomorrow, snow for the rest of the week. You were delayed, eh?'

‘Two days of strikes,' says the Captain. ‘They cost this ship three hundred thousand dollars.'

Maple leaves and fleurs-de-lis look brightly assertive in the frigid wind. We pass the Plains of Abraham, now a park, where James Wolfe died in 1759, and then the cliff he had climbed, leading his troops in the storming of Quebec. A British defence of the city in the winter of 1775 ended the northward advance of American revolutionaries, eventually determining the separation of Canada from the United States. The Americans found the ground so hard they could not entrench their cannons, while the defenders had five months' supplies behind the walls. No army could fight this cold. A moment or two on the bridge wing has you crying freezing tears; the cold burns through all the bulk of my jacket and sweaters in an instant.

The sun rises and a goods train keeps pace with us along the ridge of Sainte-Foy. It has four engines, dragging trucks with wheat symbols; we pull ahead before it crosses the bridge at Cap Rouge. It is rousing to see the Canadian Pacific Railway in operation from our ship, in this pre-dawn blue. Through the efforts of the railwaymen and the seafarers was all this made possible, from the lamp posts down to the paperweights in the big houses overlooking the water. One imagines, battered though we are, that our ship greatly adds to their view. The St Lawrence here is more a seaway than a river, fierce rather than pretty. The ground is low-rising to spinneys of bare trees. The great north tolerates this little cling of habitation, but no more than that. An arctic essence seems in only temporary abeyance, as if a really strong ice-gust could render it pristine.

‘Yes! Make some money!' says Annabelle, and snaps more instructions at Richard. How he handles a rod will be interesting. There is great excitement in the galley and throughout the ship: everyone is going unlashing. As well as her usual work, putting away breakfast and prepping lunch, Annabelle is also making extra meals for the pilots and clearing decks for business. Nestor pads off to do his first reefer round.

At 0830 precisely a line of swaddled figures set off down the starboard side. The sun brightens the battered primary colours of the containers and icicles glint on the hatches, handrails and ladders. The lashing rods are zinc-coloured and unforgiving, criss-crossing the ends of the boxes. The tension in each must be broken with a sharp lunge and heave of the clawed wrench. The cold cuts through gloves as the crew crane their necks back, arms up, wrestling with the long bars. The long bars, ten metres of unwieldy metal with hinged bolts at the tip, secure the second layer of containers. These bolts must be broken from their iced sockets. Wincing and straining, the men jerk at them until there is a crack, ice falls and the bolts are loose. Sometimes they leave the bars hanging and work on along the bay. The teams are split into pairs and almost nothing is said. The sounds are the clash of bars, the crack of spanners and the shuffle of feet in the snow.

On the windward side – and the St Lawrence snakes slowly, changing the angle of the wind's eye, exposing us all, turn by turn – the conditions are cruel. Your cheeks freeze painfully and you are aware of liquid running down your face, from your nose, mouth or eyes you cannot tell. Six hours of this they estimate, at fifty dollars an hour. Ships pass, a bird flaps on a floe and the bow wave sets off a clinking of broken ice. It is a sparkling and bitter day, this day to make money. Annabelle is hard at it, wrapped in a heavy-duty orange jacket and a yellow helmet. Everyone is wearing as much as possible, overalls, balaclavas, goggles, hard hats and scarves.

The emptying out of the ship's interior and the scattered profusion of the crew in the bays is like a sudden disclosure, a thin swarm of men and one woman working in plain sight, where they are usually hidden away. They have no attention for anything but the threat, weight and resistance of the rods and bars. At ten they come back in, puffing and blowing: imperturbable Nestor, little Richard dishevelled, John poking his tongue out.

‘How heavy those long bars are!' he pants. ‘And we've got the long ones. Everyone else has the short ones.'