Down to the Sea in Ships (35 page)

Luckily he also has Jannie, who seems much less bothered. In fact other bays, and smaller men, also had the long bars. There is a definite impression in his smiling face that John is more fond of his grievance than stung. Trying it, though, you understand the difficulty. The long bar is a horrible thing to manoeuvre; thirty feet of steel weighing eighty pounds. Starting in the middle and taking the weight of one lying flat, a moderately strong man can raise it to waist height without difficulty. After that it must be manipulated by pivoting or heaving it beyond the border of control. Pushing it up needs two of you.

‘Ja, heavy bastard,' Jannie expectorates.

On the way back they will do all this in reverse: lashing is therefore worse than unlashing, as they will be erecting rather than dismantling with gravity's help. The only thing they will be spared is the mechanism of the locking pin. At each corner of the containers a steel cable with a toggle on the end must be jerked free. Releasing the second layer is easy, the third not so hard, but layers four and five require a kind of aerial fishing with a very long pole. Next, all the hatch covers must be freed in the same way.

The aerial toggle-fishing is not so bad if you are tall: Chicoy lets me use his hook and it is no trouble. But Chicoy is barely three-quarters my height, so he balances on bundles of lashing rods. The temptation is to sidle sideways, eyes on the target, but this is a mistake as none of the walkways are free from hatch covers, bars, protruberances and cables. High-voltage wires go into the reefers and vile smells come out. Malevolent gases vent from the engine room and stink rises from the cargo holds. There are steel stills to catch your shins and low plates to hit your head. As in the hold you are grateful for the pitted and rusty decks because everywhere is iced.

At Lac St Pierre the horizon drops back, opening up twenty miles of water; the southern half is frozen and the northern is a deep and glittering blue. A wooded shore and pale lilac ground lifts to far hills and you have no conception of Canada's great lakes until you see one too small to qualify. A small bulker curves ahead of us up the channel and there is a buzz of snowmobiles on the frozen white. The glare is spotted and dotted with the huts of ice fishermen.

‘Oh yes,' says our pilot, his Quebecois accent growling through his beard, ‘you cannot complain. You'ave a stove and some wood, you drill an'ole . . .'

I bet they do well for sustenance and refreshment, too. The huge space of the lake, making miniature the ships, is an uplift, a sudden welcome from the wild. As the afternoon unrolls at the pace of the speed limit, ten knots, we pass frozen marshes, deserted bird sanctuaries, snow and etchings of woods. There is beauty in the naked birches and pale bronze reeds, but it is a beauty of emptiness, of space, where the earth seems little more than a rind of frozen sky.

As the channel squeezes in and the inhabited banks return, lights come on behind windows, timer-tripped residues of life. There is just enough breeze, this ghostly mid-winter, for the bridge to whistle its storm song softly. As the sun gutters orange a mountain rises over the frozen plains. This mountain has skyscrapers attendant, poking angular heads above the trees, some of them winking: Montreal.

We nose in past oil refineries and power lines, pylons and warning lights, reds, greens and cities of sodium orange reminiscent of Antwerp, as though we have circled a world, not crossed one. It is Sunday night so I sit at the bar with Jannie and demolish a burger which is served with a paper Filipino flag flying from the bun. Jannie has sympathetic, pale blue eyes in a pallid and hard-lived face, tough and enduring; he is gentle and often amused. He married at twenty-four and his wife sailed with him for the first three years. They brought their son on board when he was three; when he turned fifteen Jannie added a week to the boy's holidays and took him to the East.

‘There were lots of children on board in those days, and wives – it was great, great fun . . .'

Jannie has an endearing way of collapsing his expression into hopeless despair at his past exploits: ‘Fifteen beers every night – achhh . . .'

His grandfather sailed with the Dutch East India Company. ‘His first trip was a year and a half at sea.' Jannie's father did a few months at sea, but for the son: ‘One minute sitting in a classroom, next minute sitting on a ship. When you are falling forwards you must be working. When you are falling backwards you must be sleeping, and if you are not falling you are at home.'

He is on the
Pembroke
until May. Each time he is in Rotterdam his wife will drive to see him. Their twenty-five-year-old son is still at home, too: Jannie makes shooing motions, laughing. In six years' time, after thirty-eight years, Jannie's sea days will be done.

‘And then what will you do?'

‘Retire. Don't know. Take it easy. Make vodka, do the garden . . .'

The
Pembroke
ends her voyage in the same haphazard style with which she arrived in Antwerp. Someone has disconnected the bow thruster for maintenance and forgotten to plug it in again: Pieter puts it right while the Captain tries not to fume on the bridge. The tug comes out on schedule but there is no Chicoy to receive it. There is a swearing pause and they make it fast. We come to a dead stop and the younger of our two pilots takes over.

He issues orders to the tug, commands to Eugene at the helm for main engine and rudder (helming is the only part of his job that Eugene enjoys) and instructions to Erwin for the thruster. The young pilot balances the effect of the wind and the strength of the current, spinning us so that
Pembroke
rests facing her next port, bringing us alongside slowly and perfectly, making allowances for a gangway which is not quite where it should be (lowered too far down) and a general feeling that no one else is going to show any initiative. The Captain is not sure of our berth, between the two vans, he thinks, so that is where we go, and here we are, snow thick on the ground, the St Lawrence deadly black, the stevedores ambling like orange bears and downtown Montreal glittering upriver.

‘Do you have time for much maintenance, Captain?' the young pilot asks, with great tact.

‘No, we are in the Atlantic, difficult for the crew. And supplies take months to get.'

All the life of Montreal is just there but we cannot leave the ship because immigration is not working tonight. There will be no unloading until 8 a.m. and the internet is down. Jannie is disappointed to learn we lack clean linen. ‘Two weeks in my sheets already and there are no others,' he frowns. Our families do not know we have arrived safely: perhaps it was ever the sailor's condition to feel forgotten, but the men trading this ancient, semi-defunct route really do feel themselves beyond the world's bother. At least we have arrived safely, though. Jannie recalls a trip across the Bay of Biscay last November.

‘At 3.30 in the morning the general alarm went. Think oh God, what's this. I got out of bed, get in an overall, went up. Two ships had collided. Waves were six metres. We went to help but an American ship was closer. You couldn't lower lifeboats it was too dangerous, so we put nets ready over the side. The Americans got everybody, everybody survived, but we saw the ship go down. There's lots of traffic there, everyone in lanes – somebody must have fallen asleep . . .'

Before bed I watch a crane operator, presumably training or practising, miss a box four times before giving up.

I WAKE IN
panic: why have we stopped? I stumble to the window: where are we? Holland? It looks like Holland, but is the river entirely frozen? Is that ship stuck in it?

‘I thought I was still dreaming.'

‘It's because you are up early,' Jannie says. The bridge is locked, the deck doors are locked, the internet is down, so no booking a hotel for tomorrow night. There is a telephone call.

‘Immigration you go now,' says Chicoy's voice. It is not entirely clear what this means but I descend hopefully to the harbour control room. The Captain is radiating charm at two enormous and heavily padded immigration officers. One has a wire in his ear; the other smiles and says little.

‘It is his fault we have storms,' the Captain says, introducing me.

‘You said it was Annabelle's fault before.'

‘Yes, maybe both of you.'

The officers muster a laugh and issue a visa.

Annabelle is in a smart leather jacket and pink baseball cap, Richard and Alberto, an ordinary seaman, are also nattily dressed in denim with accessories (Alberto uses a checked handkerchief to wipe snow out of his eyes), and I am letting us down in a dumpy green coat which is warm if not at all trendy. I am about to see a seafarer's version of Canada: we are going shopping. A security van takes us through the container wilderness to a gate where guards call us a taxi and tell us where to find it. Richard shivers and Annabelle sets a rapid pace. Our Montreal, under a cement sky, is dismal suburbs, flyovers, banks of dirty snow and slushing traffic.

We arrive at the Galeries d'Anjou, a retail park and mall. Richard investigates cameras in Best Buy. He wants an SLR, and declares these a hundred dollars cheaper than in the Philippines. ‘Maybe next time,' he says, wistfully. At three hundred dollars they cost half his monthly salary. We go to Zeller through heavy snowfall. Two Filipinos from another ship pass us, nodding. Zeller is first a cut-rate clothes shop, then a mall, then a giant retail bunker with no obvious end. Annabelle says it is very small, compared to one at home, the Mall of Asia: ‘They have firework displays every week.'

Richard, Annabelle and Alberto buy crisps, sweets and ice cream. We sit in a consumption space and gaze at the shops. Scarab, Subway, Chez La Famille Burger, Thai Express, Suki Yaki, Franx Supreme, Kojax Souflaki, Cultures and SAQ Wine. People sit at tables on red plastic chairs, eating and staring. I find it confusing and discombobulating. Where are we? Only the Banque de Montreal gives a hint.

‘So this is Canada!'

Alberto laughs. Men like him carry most of the contents of most of the shops. Like their compatriots in LA, the first thing they do, given the brief freedom of the city, is to look for fragments of their cargo which they can afford. In Melville's day the crew of a whaling ship would have shares, or fractions of shares, in the profit of the voyage. No crew agency would contemplate giving their contract labourers anything like a share in the great Maersk corporation: Alberto would laugh at the idea.

Traffic and snow fill the horizon outside as a digger works over a torn patch of mud and ice. Annabelle leads us to a bus; twenty minutes later we arrive at a metro station where we discover we must make a huge horseshoe, from St Michel to Assomption, in order to return to the ship. Richard talks a little about his career.

Richard could sit in any class of sixteen-year-olds and not be thought the eldest. When you have talked to him you would put his age at twenty-one or two – it seemed rude to ask him directly; he is so small. Richard is a steward: he washes up, cleans cabins and mops floors.

‘My last ship? Was Saudi Arabia.'

‘Did you like Saudi Arabia?'

‘Gulf. Cannot get off ship.'

‘What?'

‘Offshore! Cannot leave ship one year.'

‘Richard, sorry, are you telling me you were on a ship for an entire year and you never set foot on land? You never got off?'

‘Never! Aramco. Offshore.'

‘But – for God's sake . . .'

‘Ha ha!'

‘I don't believe it! What was that like? What did you do?'

‘Very bad. Very hot there. Small crew – seventeen. Like prison. Watch TV. Like prison . . .'

Far from being rendered insane or unstable by the sacrifice of a year of his life at its most expansive stage (he must have been eighteen or nineteen) for a wage a European waiter would sniff at, Richard meets your eyes with the steadiest gaze. Travelling on the metro, his hands deep in his pockets, his hat pulled down, Richard looks entirely insouciant, though he has never set foot in this country before. Posing for a photograph, his legs move a little way apart, his chin lifts, his elbows drift outwards, hands still in pockets, and he gazes at the camera with that precise calibration hip-hoppers deploy, at once mocking the camera's interest and taking full advantage of it. His preparation for his year's sentence in the Gulf was some weeks' training in stewardship. But no training on earth could have produced this enduring, good-humoured young man: his character and his job did that, as he served for a year in a floating cell block reeking of petrol under the broiling sun, with other men who showed him, by example, what it takes.

The metro is a kaleidoscope of aftershaves and perfumes; the faces, the voices and languages are beguiling and strange after the ship and the Atlantic air. We arrive at Assomption and wait for the bus. It is cold, bleak and miserable, though the evening paper trumpets Snow At Last! There is plenty. Alberto says his last ship went to Australia and various Asian ports.

‘Redback spiders in the hold. Poisonous. Lots of them, lots.'

He mimes going through the holds shooting invisible spiders – around, above and below – with some sort of spider spray. With all the ladders and drips, the heat, the holes in the floor and the ‘many, many' spiders he makes it seem like a kind of
Call of Duty
, fought with an aerosol instead of a gun.

Shore leave for seafarers is a lot of waiting, confusion over public transport and rapid glimpses of the indelicate parts of town. We take the bus to a supermarket where Annabelle leads an exhilarating burst of shopping. The trolley rapidly fills to the top and beyond with carrots, spinach, cabbage, pasta, cleaning materials, fish and more vegetables. The budget was $120 Canadian and the bill is $125, and the cashier will not take US fifty-dollar bills (our only currency); furthermore, the cashier says, the US bill is $137. Richard and Alberto are worried about how the Captain will react to the overspend but Annabelle is unhesitating. We pool our money and make the target. In a hurry now, because it is 1810 and the Captain expects to eat at 1830, we grab a taxi.