Down to the Sea in Ships (4 page)

‘I was on car carrier. Coming out of Portland into Gulf of Alaska. Winter of 2001.'

In the Bering Sea they ran into a violent storm, force eleven. The Beaufort scale only goes as high as force twelve, which is a hurricane. In force eleven large patches of foam driven by the wind cover much of the sea's surface, which is a maelstrom of exceptionally high waves, spray fills the air, winds are up to seventy miles an hour: above force ten you cannot stand up in them.

‘No visibility. Freezing cold. Wave height ten metres . . . Yeah. It is really terrifying. On car carrier the bridge and accommodation is at the front so, every wave you go up – force maybe two Gs, then you come down – bang! I said if I get out of this alive I will never go to sea again. But . . .' Sorin laughs. Ten metres, though, almost thirty-three feet: most people never see that sort of wave, only fakes created by computers. This storm lasted, undiminished, for three days.

‘We made maybe fifty miles. No one can sleep. You just hang on. We can't use the autopilot because if you go side-on to the sea you capsize. You're steering starboard, starboard, but you're being pushed to port. We just eat toast and cheese, feta, for three days, because obviously you cannot cook.'

‘And if the engine fails?'

‘That's what I kept thinking.'

You do not have to go to the Bering Sea in winter to find storms. The biggest wave Shubd ever saw was off Genoa. Shubd, also from New Delhi, is third officer on the
Gerd
. He was in the dining room on a previous ship when the wave hit them side-on. The ship rolled forty degrees.

‘You can imagine if you are having lunch and you roll over like that. This was really something! Everything – the tables, the plates, all the chairs, cutlery, everything fell across the room. We were all piled up.'

Rohan, the second engineer, was with a new ship anchored off Hong Kong when they received a typhoon warning. Rohan is also Indian, his speech lilting.

‘All the other ships pulled up their anchors and left. But my captain decided we would stay. This was not a very good decision because the typhoon was very bad and it moved so the ship was not in a good place, not in shelter.'

Rohan was also a Dual, like Prashant; now he is working his way up the ranks. He studied marine engineering and is partly in charge of our engine.

‘It has more alarm points than a Boeing 747–800. It has many advanced systems – there is no engine more advanced. In terms of technology we are in space station territory here.'

He is not boasting. None of the seafarers are braggarts. Who is there to impress? Their only audiences are others like them, men who care for deeds. He is just trying to explain what he does. He is twenty-five years old.

‘The thing I will not forget is the water in the storm. With the wind and the spray the rain was so hard it was also raining upwards, coming up off the sea and bouncing off the ship. The air was all water – I have never seen that again.'

The ferocity of typhoons in the eastern seas has led some nations to conclude that the Beaufort scale is inadequate to describe them. In China and Taiwan they measure on a scale of fifteen, with three levels more severe than the Beaufort's hurricane force twelve.

‘The ship was anchored but the strength of the waves was too much. We were very close to the shore and the anchor was dragging. We had to pull up the anchor and ride it out. So the engine had to work perfectly – or . . .'

I imagine one of the
Gerd
's gigantic sisters. (If you walk down from the bridge to the main deck and take a turn around the ship by the time you return to the bridge you have pretty well walked a kilometre.) Picture her riding in the typhoon. It is night and she is all but helpless on her anchor chain. Each link of the chain is as thick as your thorax. The bridge is in darkness, the low glow from the computers and radar the only light. It is cool on the bridge, air-conditioned, but the Captain is sweating. Astern of the ship typhoon waves are exploding on rocks, just there in the darkness. You cannot let go of the rails which are screwed to every edge, not for a moment, or you will be thrown. The whole ship is plunging like a thing insane, rearing and plunging, rearing and plunging.

It is hard to do the simplest thing. Using the stairs takes strength: first they lean under you, and your heavy legs seem stuck to them, though you are trying to descend. Then they topple forward as if trying to hurl you off.

‘How I describe it is – it is not hard to screw a nut on to a bolt. But when you have not slept for three days, and the engine room is flying around in the swells, everything is tilting twenty degrees one way and twenty degrees the other, and you have not eaten properly, and if you don't hold on you fall, and it is very dangerous in the engine room, and now you must put a nut on to a bolt – this is not so easy.'

Rohan is a young man with an infectious smile. Most of the work in the engine room is much more difficult than screwing a nut to a bolt.

‘The engine worked,' he says.

An extraordinary story of a ship in a storm – so small were the odds of it ever being told – is the tale of the
Indian Empire
, which left Newcastle, New South Wales, on 18 July 1895 under the command of one Captain Johnson, with a cargo of coal for Peru. August the tenth finds them in mid-Pacific with a northerly gale worsening and the
Indian Empire
awash. The sea is huge and terrifying, the tops of the waves a white welter high above the deck. Just after midnight she is struck by a monster sea astern which rolls and pitches her so steeply down the sailors think she has begun her last dive. Her bows surface but the coal has moved, tumbling into a heap; the lee (sheltered) side of the deck is now twelve feet under the water. If the hatch covers fail she must sink in moments, but they hold. The hull, which is iron, is still sound.

Dawn came up to reveal three of her four lifeboats gone, the fo'c'sle and the deck house smashed, and the galley, lamp locker and paint store washed away. The lee side was badly damaged and all the navigational equipment was gone, along with all the men's clothes and belongings. By a miracle the carpenter's tools remained to them.

Captain George Clark heard this story from a survivor, who later became Captain Simpson, and was at the time third mate on the
Indian Empire
. In his account Captain Clark now writes: ‘Then began a fight which was only won through sheer courage and tenacity.' Captain Clark published his story in 1975, but he used the understatement of another era.

First, all twenty-eight hands went below, via a ventilator cowl, to try to shovel the coal back to the weather side, but the ship was too far over and they failed. The storm returned on the night of 11 August and the ship was pushed further over. By the morning of 12 August the ship was lying on her side. The sailors set to work to cut away the masts. On the high side, the port side, this was accomplished with hacksaws. The trouble was that the lee shrouds and stays – the wires retaining the masts on the starboard side – were quite deep under water. As the ship rolled the shrouds would emerge briefly, or at least be pulled closer to the surface. Lowering themselves on ropes, the crew fought to cut them loose. Captain Johnson divided the men into two gangs. While one battled to cut the iron fastenings with their hacksaws the other group continued to try to trim the coal, flinging spadefuls uphill in the hold. It is hard to picture the conditions below, the sliding mountains of coal lit by flickering lamps. It is only slightly easier to see the outside crew at work, dangling like spiders from the side of the ship, swinging against the near-vertical deck, tackling steel wires with saws as the waves rise and fall.

A third heavy gale on 15 August broke a spare spar off the deck and water began entering the hold, rising to a depth of eight feet. The battle down there seemed hopeless, with coal rolling back down the incline faster than it could be shifted. Captain Johnson sent Simpson to assess the situation in the aft (rearmost) hold. Simpson reported that water was pouring in through the broken deck bolts and that the ship's stern was leaking at every seam. Captain Johnson told him to say nothing of this to anyone.

The crew sighted another ship and Captain Johnson ordered the carpenter to make repairs to the sole remaining lifeboat, which was badly damaged. Before the boat could be made seaworthy the other ship vanished. Orders were given to put the boat in the water, ready to take off all hands should the
Indian Empire
founder, which seemed likely at any minute.

‘There now occurred a sequence of events which had almost a miraculous quality about them,' Captain Clark writes. Seventeen of the crew, including Simpson, took to the boat, already half full of water despite the sailors' baling. As more men attempted to board the order was given to let go and lie close by on the sea anchor. No sooner was this done than the lifeboat drifted away from the ship. There seemed no way of getting back to her in the wind and sea. As night came down the men in the lifeboat thought they saw the
Indian Empire
go down. They were barely afloat, through constant baling. They had a little biscuit and some tinned beef but just as they were being issued drinking water a sea swamped the rowing boat, and that was the end of the water. Only two oars remained. The men were in rags. That night it blew a gale with hail in the wind. They did all they could to keep the little boat's nose to the sea.

At daybreak the wind relented. Rising high with a wave under them they saw their fallen ship. Captain Clark writes: ‘Had she been anywhere but dead to leeward they could never have reached her with their two oars; and as it was, they were very apprehensive as to their reception, for more than one of those left aboard had gone out of their minds before the boat got adrift. However, a lifebuoy was thrown to them and they got back aboard. It is a good indication of the state of the boat that it was not considered worth keeping and was cast adrift.'

Those men worked twenty hours a day at the pumps, at cutting spars loose, and at dumping coal into the sea. They worked for many days, eventually getting their ship upright and a tattered sail rigged. At three knots they worked their way north into the south-east trade winds. They had no sextant, chart, chronometer or compass; they did not even have a watch. Judging that if they made their way eastwards they must eventually meet South America, they continued, and eventually encountered a German ship bound for Portland, Oregon. The Captain of this ship advised them to abandon the
Indian Empire
, ‘but when Captain Johnson put it to the crew not a man would leave'.

The German gave them charts and navigational equipment.

‘Three days later Easter Island was sighted and anyone who wished to do so was given permission to leave the ship there. But again not a man chose to go.'

The
Indian Empire
was on her side in the Pacific for twenty-two days, and it took another sixty days' sailing to make Callao, Peru. Only one man had been lost. Crews of other ships in the port made a collection of clothes for the gaunt, long-haired and ragged men who had brought her back from the sea.

The story of the
Indian Empire
is echoed in Joseph Conrad's novel
The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus'
. The ship is blown on her side in the southern Indian Ocean, near the Cape. Chaos and destruction roar down on her, all but fracturing the sanity and discipline of the terrorised crew, as they dangle from her perpendicular deck. But Captain Allistoun is inflexible – the shrouds and stays will not be cut, he decrees; they will wait out the storm. Mr Baker, the mate, bullies, chides and enforces the order. The cook saves the company's morale with a miraculous brew of hot coffee, and a credo: ‘As long as she swims I will cook!' The wind changes, the seas abate and the
Narcissus
rises again. Conrad's narrator says of the cook: ‘His saying – the saying of his life – became proverbial in the mouth of men as are the sayings of conquerors or sages. Later, whenever one of us was puzzled by a task and advised to relinquish it, he would express his determination to persevere and to succeed by the words: – “As long as she swims I will cook!”'

Somewhere between the true story of the
Indian Empire
, whose men twice refused to abandon her wrecked shell, and the fable of the
Narcissus
, saved by her iron Captain, redoubtable cook and long-suffering crew, lies a tumultous, evasive but palpable spirit, some essence of the relationship between sailors and their craft. In these early days in which I begin to know the
Gerd
I cannot measure or explain this spirit, but I can feel it, even in the bare corridors. There is no superfluity in the ship, either in her construction, her atmosphere or the bearing of her men. She is so huge and they are so few (there are twenty-one of us aboard) that any emergency would put each character to the sternest test. It is as though the briskness and unsentimentality of the way the least thing is done, right down to making tea, leaving no drop, stain or spoon out of place, is a constant rehearsal for some not-quite-unthinkable disaster.

THE DAY LIGHTENS
as the English coast diminishes over our shoulder and the Channel turns holiday blue. It is highest summer; the wind whips light off the sea and whirls it round the funnel. There are vessels at every point of the compass. A lifeboat passes behind us, shepherding a yacht with a faulty engine towards Rye harbour, beyond the power station at Dungeness which is a tiny nub. The coast of Normandy solidifies as England fades. It is a seascape from a children's book, bereft of threat, and, almost, of children. The young now begin their travels at airports and stations, while many of their parents and most of their grandparents first left the country by ship. Mine was perhaps the last generation for whom Dover's cliffs were the end of Britain and Calais the beginning of the world. I first felt swells on a ferry from Portsmouth to St Malo. It was a night crossing, the moon made a lane on the water and the ship swayed as my brother and I tried to sleep, stretched out on seats. We were worried about the rolling, troubled with that uncertain, low-level fear like a pulse in the chest – the landlubber's first apprehension of the ungovernable. We had no idea how safe we were.