Down to the Sea in Ships (6 page)

A STILL EVENING
and satisfactory: bunkering is complete, the piston casing replaced. The crew have eaten supper and retired to their cabins, apart from two men in the bow and two in the stern who will handle the lines. Shipping is the only industry in which schedules are devised not according to hours of work but, rather, by mandatory hours of rest, otherwise there would be no rest time at all. The pilot is aboard, the tugs are alongside and we have clearance to depart.

‘Let go forward spring line,' the Captain says.

Chris echoes him on the walkie-talkie and the procedure rolls once more. Turning the ship to face the sea is a behemoth ballet. The breakwater south of us has a bulge in it, forming a semi-circular manoeuvring area. With one tug pulling the bow to port and the other tugging the stern to starboard, and the Captain's hand on the bow-thruster controls, they spin her in this space like a compass needle in its setting, rotating her perfectly, as if she were twirled slowly by a titan's fingertips. Dead slow ahead when she reaches her apex sets us in the channel and moving seaward. The mood on the bridge is both alert and easy, an atmosphere you begin to recognise, the professional calm of men who maintain the world, out of its sight.

In the voyage to come pilots will sometimes mistake me for an officer, and sometimes hesitate, realising I am not one.

‘Writer,' the Captain will say, sometimes, as casually as if announcing that he has been asked to transport a Martian, and someone's got to do it. If I am recording he says ‘Journalist', with the kind of nod which is one step away from a shrug. Sorin is entertained by my Rycote, the fluffy windshield which goes over the microphone. ‘Ah, the Chinchilla is back!'

Joel is the first of the Filipinos to ask what I am up to. I explain and he seems delighted by the idea. ‘So you want to tell our story! Great! Come and spend time with us.'

I do, I try to, but it is difficult. When the watches are working they are in no position to talk. When they finish they disappear into their cabins. As the voyage goes on I catch them in the gym or the library, on their laptops, and we watch films together. We often meet late at night, and exchange smiles and greetings, but then I stay out of the way, because they tend to be absorbed in messaging home.

‘Ships used to be much more social places,' the chief engineer says, ‘but now everyone takes DVDs to their cabins.'

Fishing boats come out with us on the falling tide. It is an hour to low water. Little sailing boats are all but becalmed, save one optimist with his spinnaker out. Our tugs, unleashed, escort us between the breakwaters into a mellow and sleepy sea. The helicopter comes and takes the pilot away, his sunglasses still in place. The Captain talks to Shubd. Eight to twelve, morning and evening is the third officer's watch. He is the most junior of the navigators, with the most to learn, and therefore the most likely to need the Captain. His shifts are matched to times when the Captain is most likely to be awake.

‘It will be good to see this in future navigation,' the Captain says, showing Shubd something on the electronic chart. ‘There's no ships now.'

The Captain rests his foot on the rail behind the bridge, briefly, as we leave Le Havre, and stares out. Cormorants in packs pass below us, heading in towards the estuary, and sailors in yachts stare up. Who knows what the Captain is thinking? Is leaving harbour always soul-stirring, on a great ship and the ebbing tide – even for the thousandth time?

We are steering thirty degrees north of the sunset. The western sky is turquoise, feathered with few clouds. There is no wind, only our turbulence, as we pick up speed to fifteen knots, then eighteen, and the leading lights of Le Havre, two dazzling white glares, slip out of line astern. We will head north-north-west into mid-Channel until we are nearly equidistant from Dorset and Cape Ouessant, then turn south and west for the Bay of Biscay.

‘The Biscay can be a real pig,' Chris said, heavily, this morning. He has a deeply stolid manner but there were traces of enthusiasm, even hope about him, then.

The Captain goes below and a watchman comes up. Mike is from the Philippines. He will gaze at the darkness ahead of us for the four hours of the watch. Normally he and Shubd would have the bridge, the vista of the ship and the whole wide ocean to themselves. Radios chatter. Solent Coastguard and Jersey offer weather information and respond to vessels which have called them.

There is a lurch underneath us, suddenly: current, the North Sea draining vastly right to left. Night comes on and the stars are tremendous; the planets bright as leading lights. The Plough hangs off the starboard bow and the Milky Way is a sparkling arch above. Every half hour Shubd marks our position, a little pencil cross on the ruled line of our course. The ship is steering herself now and she is vocal about it – every ten minutes a bridge alarm goes off, requiring that Shubd presss a button to silence it, proving that he is still alive and awake.

‘Oh yes,' he says, in his lilting Indian voice. ‘You can be Mr Lonely up here.'

The bridge is dark, the screens turned right down. On either side of the funnel is a sliding door leading out to bare decks behind the bridge, each equipped with an ashtray and a hose. On the starboard side another ladder leads up to the monkey deck, the roof of the bridge. This highest point is studded with radar, satellite communications, aerials and an orange dome containing the voyage data recorder. On the topmost rail is a white box containing a float and a radio transmitter: if the ship goes down this will break free and broadcast signals, giving rescuers our last position.

Our container towers are all in darkness. The view is broken water surging away from the hull, the black sea and the sky. You descend a red-lit stair to J-deck, the Captain's deck, also red-lit. At the starboard end of the corridor is the Captain's suite of rooms, at the other end the chief engineer's. Between them is the library and the pilot's cabin – mine. The library has novels in Danish, a copy of
Daniel Deronda
in English, an anthology of three John Le Carré novels, a dozen American thrillers – police, slasher and historical – of varying quality, and a couple of lads' mags in Russian.

The pilot's cabin offers an Anglepoise lamp on a desk, a chair, an empty fridge, a sofa, a wardrobe and a shower cabinet. The window above the desk faces the foremast and the sea across the container tops. The bunk is a little wider than a standard single. With a faint sway on the ship's hips and the only sound the rumble of the engine, sleep is a deep wide sea. Shoals of dreams come bright and vivid.

At daybreak the view makes no sense. There must be something wrong with the window or my eyes: nothing – nothing – fog! Thick grey-blue vapour shrinks visibility to less than a hundred metres. You can barely see the stern of the boat, never mind the bow. Sorin is on watch.

‘How can you see where you're going?'

‘I can't!' he laughs. ‘Everyone has to give way.'

We are in a Traffic Separation Scheme (TSS), a controlled shipping lane in which north- and south-bound vessels are separated into two streams, thirty-four miles from L'Ile d'Ouessant, an island off the Brest peninsula notorious for the violence of its storms and currents. Coming in from the Atlantic and preparing to run up the Channel, with the south-westerlies behind you, Ouessant, Ushant to the British, makes a vicious lee shore – a sailors' grave. On the chart the TSS is a purple corridor, a checkpoint, a chicane in the sea. There are invisible ships all around us, coming north in the lane on our port side and going south in ours.

‘It's worse in China,' Sorin says. ‘So many fishing boats you can't see them.'

‘What do you do – post a lookout in the bow?'

‘No! He can't see them until it is too late and I can't do anything about it when he tells me. Reduce the radar to three miles and –' he shrugs. ‘We go round them or they get out of the way.'

Sorin explains the different readings on the monitors. Speed over ground is eighteen knots, speed through the water is sixteen knots.

‘So we are in counter-current. Two knots.'

The fog has shapes in it, wraiths. You think you see a ship but the radar paints nothing there. The fog hushes sounds and plays with distance. The waves seem doubly far below the bridge: these are our waves, the sea is flat. Leviathan rumbles on, steering herself, knowing like a clairvoyant where the other ships are. We see nothing; her computers know all, and she drives her vast cargo forward. The crew risk their lives to carry the cargo; for cargo they leave their homes and families for months, even years, and yet most of them have no idea what is in the containers. Even Sorin, the best informed, knows only a little about it. The cold-stored goods in the reefers – refrigerated containers – are known, because the reefers have to be kept at a certain temperature and checked. Ours contain meat, chocolate and fruit. The dangerous cargo is also listed because in the event of fire or accident we must know where the threats are. They are stored in the bow, as far away from the accommodation and control centres as possible.

We are carrying solid-state sodium hydroxide, paint materials, solvents and thinners. We have hazardous cargo belonging to Procter & Gamble. We have some small-bore sporting ammunition from Germany, destination Malaysia. The sailors say they are kept in ignorance of everything else deliberately, so that they are not tempted to steal. Informed guesswork suggests we will have flashy cars in some of the boxes – the kind no one wants to risk on a car carrier – and scrap metals for China's hungry markets, and paper and plastic waste for recycling or disposal. We are also carrying naphtha and perfumery products, marked flammable and polluting.

In 1925 Captain Clark sailed with a man who had made a voyage in a Nova Scotia barque at the turn of the century from New York to Rouen in the dead of winter; they too were carrying naphtha. This man told Captain Clark that the master of that wooden ship considered the cargo so dangerous ‘no fires were allowed, even for cooking, despite the bitter conditions'.

With a yellowish light astern the sun rises and the sea hisses as our turbulence surfaces in translucent bubbles. Now the sun throws peculiar figures and different densities on the fog: above us is clear blue, aft all is pearly silver and gold-grey, while forward is a blind world. We add our own fumes to the sky, a trail like a foul banner, drifting behind us in a gaseous worm. This company carries 18 per cent of the world's container trade. It made a net profit last year of ten billion US dollars. It added as much carbon dioxide to the atmosphere in that time as did the entire nation of Denmark, where the company is based.

The giant exhaust worm is not as poisonous as it will be. We are burning low-sulphur fuel to comply with the emissions regulations of the English Channel. We will switch to high-sulphur when we are through the invisible gate at the end of Ushant's Traffic Separation Scheme, sixty-five nautical miles – about 130 kilometres – south of the Lizard. We pass Parson's Bank and leave Kaiser-I-Hind Bank to starboard.

‘Pacific is also great place for fogs,' says Sorin, staring forward, where the foremast comes and goes.

We enter the Biscay and begin to roll in following swells. Swells are the memories of storms. We are crossing a sea like a failing memory; the fogbanks thicken and thin and thicken again. Now you can barely see a hundred feet, now the vapour falls back, forming opalescent curtains on all the horizons so that we sail in a barrel of sun.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge came this way on his voyage to Malta in 1804. He was not a good sailor and often beset by seasickness; the journey, as he records in his notebook, did not begin auspiciously: ‘In weighing anchor the men grumbled aloud a sort of mutiny – not half our complement of men – Two pressed in the Downs, one ran away at Portsmouth, a rascal of a one-armed cook better gone than stayed. Now we are a Captain, Mate, 2 boys, 4 men, 3 passengers, one sheep, 3 pigs, several ducks and chickens, one dog, a cat and two kittens.'

He was sick and feverish at first. The Captain advised him to lie down, which he did, but when night came he slept ‘diseasedly': ‘In consequence partly of the build of the brig, & partly of its being so heavily laden at its bottom, the cabin rocks like a cradle when a cruel nurse rocks a screaming baby. On Monday night we travelled like a top bough on a larch tree in a high wind, pitching and rocking . . .'

By the time he reached our latitude, in the bight of the Bay of Biscay, the poet was much happier: ‘Delightful weather, motion, relation of the convoy to each other, all exquisite – and I particularly watched the beautiful surface of the sea in the gentle breeze! – every form so transitory, so for the instant, & yet for that so substantial in all its sharp lines, steep surfaces, & hair-deep indentures, just as if it were cut glass, glass cut into ten thousand varieties / & then the network of the wavelets, & the rude circle hole network of the foam. And on the gliding vessel heaven and ocean smiled!'

A line later he writes suddenly, ‘Why aren't you here?'

He gives no hint as to whom he is thinking of, but his marriage to Sara Coleridge was in dire trouble and he was partly in love with Sara Hutchinson. Though I sometimes share his wish to enjoy the excitement and beauty of this voyage with my partner, my family and certain friends, I feel none of the ache of that line – I am selfishly, absolutely enjoying the separation of this adventure. But then I am only at the beginning. I have no concept of what it would be to be parted from home for months and years, unlike N, who would prefer not to be named.

N has just finished sweeping and spraying the deck at the bow, beneath the hazardous cargo. He is small, barely up to my shoulder. He has a red kerchief around his neck and wears ear defenders perched on his head like the ears of Mickey Mouse. Like most of the Filipinos he has a sweet welcome of a grin.