Down to the Sea in Ships (7 page)

‘One child!' he smiles, then instantly frowns. ‘Two, three not possible – cannot afford.'

You can see how much he wants more children but his wages are little more than a thousand dollars a month. Some years he is home for two months, but more often only one. These months are unpaid: though the officers are Maersk employees, with annual salaries and benefits, the crew are on Voyage Contracts. Like N, the crew are employed by a manning agency, which pays them and bills Maersk, thus relieving the company of responsibility for the great majority of its seafarers. N has signed a contract which entitles him to basic pay, overtime pay and ‘hardship pay', a bonus he receives when the ship crosses the areas of pirate danger between the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean. His figure of a thousand dollars includes these extra payments.

If the ship were covered by an agreement between Maersk and the biggest seafarers' union, the International Transport Workers' Federation (ITF), N could expect to receive more than twice his basic pay, plus seven dollars per hour of weekday overtime, and thirteen dollars per hour of weekend overtime. (Until recently rest times were regulated but not enforced, so you worked all hours and as many as a man could stand.) There would have been no point N researching the
Gerd
on the ITF website before he signed his contract with the manning agency. Shipowners have everything to gain by avoiding unions and they do so with impunity. Looking up the
Gerd
in the ITF's files returns a simple message: ‘Vessel not covered by ITF agreement.'

As a newcomer to the sea I am confused by N's position. This company is supposed to be the industry leader. Filipino seafarers run, clean and maintain the world's cargo fleet: they make up over a quarter of its manpower. (Their nearest rivals are Chinese sailors, who endure worse conditions.) Their tireless work ethic, positive disposition and sea-going tradition make Filipinos indispensable. Barely a shipping company in the world could survive without them.

‘You need a union, don't you?'

‘Union is no good! Weak! Good for themselves . . . You make story!' N cries, as a farewell, and returns to work.

When the Filipinos reach home they are ‘one-day millionaires' in their own phrase, rich for the time it takes for family, friends and relatives to pile in with their needs and wants. Manila is the centre of a global trade in the skills and endurance of Filipino seafarers, symbolised by the open-air market at Luneta Park where manning agencies run recruitment stalls which offer seafaring jobs on boards. These stalls are famously unregulated, operating in the absence of certification, licence, taxation or oversight, and were recently declared illegal. In an ironic parallel, the park has been officially named Rizal, not Luneta, since the 1950s – but both the illegal stalls and the old name endure.

Because of their country's low cost of living it is undoubtedly true that one dollar spent in the Philippines goes further than a dollar spent in Denmark. The shipowners argue that this redresses the massive imbalance in wages paid to Filipinos compared to the money Indians and Europeans receive. The shipowners are apparently content that in the engine room there are two officers of the same rank, possessed of the same skills, performing the same task, one of whom is receiving less than a third of the wage of the other merely because he holds a different passport. The ten billion dollar profit is the excuse for this disparity. Filipinos accept the situation with a shrugging fatalism: this is just the way it is. It is identical to the way it was under apartheid in South Africa – it was ‘fair' to pay blacks much less than whites because money went further in the tribal areas, the authorities said. Our world then was revolted by this formula. Our world now relies upon it.

ALBATROSS! IT FLIES
the length of the ship and veers off west, huge wings never stirring. The bird that brought the fog and mist, wrote Coleridge, and this one does too: a rain-grey bank, dark behind the brown and white bird, now swallows us.

Dolphins! Common dolphins,
Delphinus delphis
, break out of the water in a hectic chasing pair off the port bow. More appear to starboard, charging the ship. They come right at us, disappearing beneath the bridge. Did they dive under the hull? We watch them playing in the wake waves, huge in the water they seem and so fast. There is such thrill and unity in the way they fly in pairs together, then six in a pod, torpedoing under then breaching in a volley. One turns in a wave and leaps back, reversing its course in an instant.

Whales! A pair blowing just off the starboard bow, moving slowly to dead ahead. The blow looks V-shaped, so they are baleen whales. They stop on a perfect collision course and float there until they disappear under our line of sight. Move! Move out of the way! Should I ask Sorin to change course? But I do not know where the whales are going, and it takes too long to turn . . .

They are gone; the spray of their blows hangs in the sunlight. I scan the sides and the wake, praying for no red. Long minutes. Then – there! One blows, port side, away aft, and now the other. They were just playing with us.

‘Phew! I thought we'd hit them.'

Sorin laughs. ‘We would have felt it.'

‘We can't go round the world running down whales, Sorin! Imagine the publicity!'

He is from the Danube delta: ‘I was always around boats. I first went to sea as a motorman-electrician but I don't like the engine room.' He prefers the northern latitudes because of the climate. ‘Malaysia and Hong Kong just kill me in three days.'

He says China and Hong Kong smell distinctive from the sea. For colour only the Caribbean comes close to the Mediterranean's intensity of blue.

‘New Zealand is green. The land is green, the sea is green, the air is green . . .'

Two more whales surface, one briefly close to the ship before it vanishes, and another. Humpbacks, I think at first: they are like two humpbacks I saw once, but how alike? Just as whaley, certainly. At least twenty different species have been seen in these waters. Humpback sightings are not common. They could be fin whales, they have that great length, and give an impression of U-boat-like narrowness, and we saw swept dorsal fins. But they are the eighth and ninth whales I have ever seen, not counting the Blue in the Natural History Museum. I could be quite confident of identifying that. These beasts surface seventy miles south of La Chapelle Bank as we head south west across the Biscay Abyssal Plain, with four kilometres of water below the keel. The sun puts out its flare path and dusk comes on.

Another whale passes us in a whale-coloured sea, ominous and dark grey. Its singularity recalls Shakespeare's sketch of a crocodile in
Antony and Cleopatra
. Antony has been drinking when he mocks Lepidus with a description which would certainly go for this whale:

‘It is shaped, sir, like itself; and it is as broad as it hath breadth. It is just so high as it is, and moves with its own organs. It lives by that which nourishes it, and the elements once out of it, it transmigrates.'

‘What colour is it?'

‘Of its own colour, too.'

All we see is one long heave of the great beast's back, heading north. The sight brings two planets into overlap. Only when you see a whale do you catch a glimpse of theirs, given scale by an inhabitant, a huge native; only then does its full wilderness, its wide desolation, strike.

It is Shubd's watch. He agrees with Sorin: of all the countries he has visited (excluding India, naturally) New Zealand is the best, for three excellent reasons: ‘It is extremely nice and extremely beautiful and the people there are most friendly, yes, they are extremely helpful, very kind, you know.'

We look at the moon through binoculars. The seas of tranquillity, the craters and the ridges beyond the shadow line are no stranger than this world we cross. The whole orb of it hangs there, not far above the horizon and huge, so close. Yesterday the crescent was gold; tonight silver-white.

‘Do you like cricket?' Shubd asks, hopefully.

Shubd would like to be a District Administrator. He says this is a very good job. He looks as though he would make a wonderful District Administrator, too; round-faced, hair neatly parted, his expression open, ready smiling and fair. We talk about women, about love, about ports, stars and ghosts. Shubd tells tales of thousand-kilometre train rides to see his girl, and of his brother's encounter with a haunted house where a spectral party was in progress.

Tonight's action includes the overtaking of the
African River
. We can see her lights one point (ten degrees) off the starboard bow. The computer gives her course, speed and destination – Abidjan, Ivory Coast. Our next waypoint, the next point at which we will change course, is 260 nautical miles away, off Finisterre.

We wake to a morning of rains. You see each squall coming a long way away, a lump of darkness like a giant mushroom, black water at its base. As the gloom reaches us Sorin appears suddenly on a walkway below the bridge, checking the reefers. The ship sways; the rain rags down; Sorin concentrates, acknowledging the conditions with the slightest frown as the water streams down his specs. Every other chief officer and bo'sun and first mate who ever crossed this sea looked the same way, you realise, as he stared straight through whatever it threw at him, at whatever had to be done.

After the rain comes a blue clear and a bright-skied afternoon. Marlon makes tea in the crew mess. Marlon was chased by a pirate. He was on the
Albert Maersk
doing twenty-two knots across the Gulf of Aden.

‘The pirate came up behind so the Captain increase speed – twenty-seven knots. The pirate can't keep up. He come on the radio and say “Fuck you fuck you!”'

‘You see many in the Gulf of Aden,' says the Captain. ‘Sometimes they are fishing but they are towing skiffs. They have a dual role.'

Chris says the skiffs are no good, unstable in swell and frail beside our great mass moving at speed:

‘The lowest part of the ship is the poop but the hull curves inward so they wouldn't be able to come alongside.'

‘But what if they come over the rail?'

‘We would put the hoses on them and bash them,' he says, confidently. ‘A Russian ship caught some pirates. He put them in a zodiac and cast them off. Without a motor.'

You can imagine that Chris, Sorin or the Captain bashing anyone would leave that person insensible, but it is hard to see what use sea-water hoses would be against Kalashnikovs. Besides, my tough shipmates are not fighters in the conventional sense. It is much easier to fight someone else than it is to combat your own desires, whether you crave booze, sex, recognition or advancement. The ship offers none of these. For the duration of the voyage all you have is your job and your bunk – battlegrounds a monk would recognise.

We ride swells from astern all day as we run south round Finisterre and parallel the Portuguese coast. It is Saturday so there is ‘Special Tea': a tradition on merchant ships. At the head of the table are the King and Queen of Denmark. They look slightly pained, perhaps at the necessity of wearing traditional ornamentation over contemporary evening dress. The awkward and dutiful air emanating from the portraits is echoed along the table they survey. At Special Tea everyone eats together: officers and cadets at the Captain's table, and crew at the other, normally unused, table in the same room. There is much less life and noise than when they are in their own mess, round the corner. Avocado and prawns are followed by steak and chips. Everyone plugs away at the food with enthusiasm but there is a definite feeling that many of us would rather be next door, jammed in, forced to accommodate elbows and meet requests for the salt.

We do our best.

‘Steak, chips, green beans!'

(For all that I am the company's official writer in residence, taking no money from them, and working industriously with notebook and microphone, I am a beneficiary of these men's work, and feel at mealtimes like a guest in an extremely unusual hotel, and find myself praising the meal as one would at a host's table.)

Rohan raises an eyebrow, grins.

‘All we need is a good glass of red . . .'

There is a deal of feeling in the faces responding to this. The Captain was not joking about his plan to go out for a ‘nice fish and a glass of water' in Algeciras. For the duration of your voyage you cannot even drink on shore.

‘When they brought in the no-alcohol policy they had to put some of the captains and mates through rehab,' Chris says. ‘They couldn't afford to lose them but they had to dry them out.'

We see whales after supper. The Captain hums and says, suddenly: ‘I want to get that whale and take him home to my wife.'

He offers no further explanation.

CAPTAIN IS SLEEPING says the sign on his door, the following afternoon. We are arrowing across a glittering paradise of sea. Our wake is the only flaw on its flashing surfaces, our smoke the only stain in the air's pavilions above. A sailing ship, now that would be the thing! But it is such a day, such a hot afternoon, with the sun bright beyond every doorway, that you imagine we might just be forgiven our pounding diesel. You can believe it as long as you do not look at the long banner, like a burned belch, stretching away behind our funnel.

Carl-Johann is sleeping too. He is leaving us tomorrow; perhaps he is dreaming of his first meal at home, which he has already planned: crab. His wife will prepare it and they will sit down with their two daughters.

‘One wants to be a navigator,' he says, proudly. ‘And the other a journalist.' Because officers may have wives or family on board for up to two months of the year, given a certain length of service, Carl-Johann reckons his daughters have had twenty-four months of sea time.

‘More than most first officers!' the Captain puts in.

Cadiz passes somewhere to the north of us; we should see land in an hour and a half if it stays clear. Noon to four is Chris's watch. I suggest we take a right and go down to Casablanca for some fun.