Read Looking for a Ship Online
Authors: John McPhee
Looking for a Ship (18 page)
Confusion therefore occurs and follows. Fast-crackling rifle shots. Bullets slamming the mangroves. A pirogue full of pirates fleeing for the swamps, pursued by more bullets.
Very powerful boats appear. One of them circles the ship. Two lingering pirates cling to the bills of the anchor not in use. They stand on the flukes. They plunge into the river. Swiftly receding in the brown current, their heads bob. Their heads become dots in the water as they are swept away.
The pirates' forty-horse pirogue, with stores seized from the upper forepeak, reaches a sandspit at the edge of the
manglar
. There are six aboard. They take off, running.
manglar
. There are six aboard. They take off, running.
An official launch from Guayaquil, making no apparent adjustment to the turn of events, comes alongside, business as usual: the port agent, the port officers, the necessary papersâthe process known as clearing a ship. Short-sleeved, bureaucratic, the visitors climb the gangway from the launch. Smiles. Greetings.
Con mucho
gusto. Encantado.
Muy amigo mÃo
. Evidently, nothing that has occurred in the last fifteen minutes has surprised them, or even much interested them. They go into the thwartships passage. They follow one another up stairways to the boat deck. Captain Washburn descends from the bridge to meet them. The captain is in dress whites, white shoes. A .38 revolver is tucked in the back of his belt. The port agent hands him manifests and mail.
Con mucho
gusto. Encantado.
Muy amigo mÃo
. Evidently, nothing that has occurred in the last fifteen minutes has surprised them, or even much interested them. They go into the thwartships passage. They follow one another up stairways to the boat deck. Captain Washburn descends from the bridge to meet them. The captain is in dress whites, white shoes. A .38 revolver is tucked in the back of his belt. The port agent hands him manifests and mail.
After a time, the powerful boat that was circling the ship pulls up at the bottom of the gangway. Sprawled on the floorboards are two wet prisoners with black bags over their heads. Their wrists are tied behind their backs. These were the swimmers who dived from the anchor flukes. The powerboat has a crew of four. Two of them carry .45s, another a shotgun. They wear sports shirts and ordinary trousersânowhere a uniform, not a clue in the clothing to who is who or means to do what. A short, trim, serious man about thirty years of age comes up the gangway with a .45 tucked in his belt and under his unbuttoned shirt. If you are standing there beside him when he steps on the deck, you can be pardoned if you wonder who he is. Does he know those prisoners? Are the prisoners a ruse? Is he the pirate king? In the center of his finely structured and handsome faceâset like a gem in one of his front teethâis a gold star. He says that he is a naval officer. A colleague joins him. They ask to see the captain.
Captain Washburn is informed by walkie-talkie, “These two say they are active-duty Navy men, but they are wearing no uniforms and are walking around the main deck with cocked .45s.”
Washburn says, “That's the best uniform I know.”
Scarce has this exchange occurred when the Guayaquil port officials reappear in the thwartships passage and, with nothing more than a frank glance at the trussed and hooded pirates, file down the gangway to their launch. Each port official carries two cartons of cigarettes and a six-pack of Coca-Cola. In the slop chest of the Stella Lykes there are
many cigarettes and much cola for the visits of port officials. Sometimes they hand back unfiltered cigarettes and ask for filters.
many cigarettes and much cola for the visits of port officials. Sometimes they hand back unfiltered cigarettes and ask for filters.
The day settles down in the Explosive Anchorage. The Navy men patrol the main deck. Captain Washburn, in his office, pauses to read his mail. I leave the group of crewmen at the head of the gangway, go through the thwartships passage, and walk the starboard side. One of the Navy men is thereâthe one with the star in his incisor. He is intently watching the mangrove shore. He has seen six men shuttling among the plants, making their way toward the tin shacks. Around my neck is an eight-power monocular on a nylon cord. With a sweep of the
manglar
, I see them, too. He asks if he may borrow the glass. I lift the cord and drape it around his neck, tiptoeing away from the .45. He watches the walking pirates. He asks me to report them to the captain, so the captain can, in turn, radio the port.
manglar
, I see them, too. He asks if he may borrow the glass. I lift the cord and drape it around his neck, tiptoeing away from the .45. He watches the walking pirates. He asks me to report them to the captain, so the captain can, in turn, radio the port.
Washburn, at his desk in his dress whites, is smoking a cigar. “Our security forces have seen a party of pirates on the beach,” he says into a transceiver, and goes back to his mail. Ordinarily, Captain Washburn is not a smoker of anything. He bites off and lights up only when the Washington Redskins have won a football game. He looks down fondly at the letter before him. It contains the name of a new human being: Zachary David Howell. Jacqueline has written to the captain, “Smoke a cigar. Your great-grandson is at least as good as the Redskins.”
A
s evening closes in on the four-to-eight watch, cargo lights have been hung off the main deck, brightening the surrounding water. Andy is on the bridge. Mac and Calvin are deployed on deck, on patrol. At 5 P.M., Calvin calls on his transceiver to say that all is well. The anchorage is quiet. No apparent pirates. Andy calls Mac.
s evening closes in on the four-to-eight watch, cargo lights have been hung off the main deck, brightening the surrounding water. Andy is on the bridge. Mac and Calvin are deployed on deck, on patrol. At 5 P.M., Calvin calls on his transceiver to say that all is well. The anchorage is quiet. No apparent pirates. Andy calls Mac.
“Are you still alive and kickin'?”
“No. Just kickin'.”
Mac has been posted to the fantail, where he sits on a chair under the American flag and sends his eyes on patrol. The sun is down and the river dark long before the end of the watch. In his lap is a flashlight.
“Who gave you the flashlight?” I ask him.
He answers, “The mate.”
“What are you going to do with it?”
“Shine it in the eyes of the banditos, then drop it and run.”
With his flashlight and his transceiver, he looks like a night watchman. “When you come down to this bandito country, you take your life in your hands,” he says. “The people hereâthey treat this ship like a chicken. They pluck it whenever they wish. Why do I carry all this stuff? If the banditos attack, I am going to run anyway.”
It was here on the fantail that the two sailors were tied up at knifepoint on the earlier voyage. This has made Calvin especially nervous. The crew on patrol carry no weapons. They are now supported, however, by six guards hired from shore who are armed with 16-gauge shotguns and are spread about the decks under the leadership of an Ecuadorian marine. Their headgear fails to suggest the equator. One guard is wearing a thick wool ski cap. Others wear balaclavas, with candy stripes and white tassels. Like knights' helmets, the balaclavas are drawn down to cover the lower face and the chin, leaving only slits for the guards' eyes. The air temperature is around eighty, the relative humidity sixty-two per cent. A guard in a chair politely shifts his gun so that it ceases to point at my knees. The guns are loaded not with shot but with large lead slugs. To one of the guards David Carter says, in Spanish, “If you miss the pirates, you'll sink the boat.”
In being a merchant mariner, there is danger enough without pirates. A couple of days ago, Mac took hold of a ladder rail and it came off in his hand, rusted rotten. The ladder led from the fo'c'sle deck to the cabin deck, at the extreme port side. The ship was in a deep roll. Mac looked over his shoulder and straight down to the green sea. He
was virtually hanging over the side. He struggled through another roll, teetered, and remained aboard. At Ascension Island some years ago, he was painting the hull of a tanker from a small boat that was lifted by a swell and driven underwater as it smashed against the ship. Just in time, he leaped free.
was virtually hanging over the side. He struggled through another roll, teetered, and remained aboard. At Ascension Island some years ago, he was painting the hull of a tanker from a small boat that was lifted by a swell and driven underwater as it smashed against the ship. Just in time, he leaped free.
“I almost lost my life. There were fish of every denomination in that water.”
Men fall down hatches on merchant ships: a hatch cover may be ajar; they walk over an open edge and are killed by the long fall into the hold. On diesel ships, you breathe heavy fumes. You fight diesel fires. Near diesel engines, you wear ear covers or you are stone-deaf within a year. In Stella's engine room, David Carter always has a hand on a rail. He says there's an unwritten rule: “One hand for the
load
and one hand for your
self
.” David got his first job after a guy going down a ladder fell and broke his leg. “You'll
notice
a lot of guys in the engine room have burns all over them. It doesn't take muchâjust a little
jolt
. You hit a
steam
line and you got a nasty
scar
.” Bill Boone, a utility man in the galley, says that he was on a Victory ship some years ago when he saw a mooring line snap and do so much damage that four amputations were required. And a funeral. The line, contracting, drew an ordinary seaman into a Panama chock and killed him. A Panama chock is a large square eye that mooring lines pass through. During a voyage to North Europe while Andy was on the tanker Potomac, the bosun tore up his knee in a fall, a line snapped and broke another man's arm, a winch tore open
a pumpman's arm and crushed it from shoulder to wrist, an ordinary seaman fractured his skull walking through a watertight door, and the cook fell to the deck hallucinating, writhing, and babbling incoherently after rupturing his spleen. On the Prudential Lines' LASH Pacifico, the chief mate once performed an appendectomy in the middle of the North Atlantic while a doctor spoke to him by radio, telling him what to do. There is a service called Amver provided by the Coast GuardâAutomated Mutual-Assistance Vessel Rescue System. Before your ship sails, you file a voyage plan, and it is updated in a central computer while the voyage proceeds. When a spleen ruptures, the computer locates every ship within two hundred miles of you, displays on your screen a list of the paramedics aboard them, and says what ships (if any) are carrying doctors.
load
and one hand for your
self
.” David got his first job after a guy going down a ladder fell and broke his leg. “You'll
notice
a lot of guys in the engine room have burns all over them. It doesn't take muchâjust a little
jolt
. You hit a
steam
line and you got a nasty
scar
.” Bill Boone, a utility man in the galley, says that he was on a Victory ship some years ago when he saw a mooring line snap and do so much damage that four amputations were required. And a funeral. The line, contracting, drew an ordinary seaman into a Panama chock and killed him. A Panama chock is a large square eye that mooring lines pass through. During a voyage to North Europe while Andy was on the tanker Potomac, the bosun tore up his knee in a fall, a line snapped and broke another man's arm, a winch tore open
a pumpman's arm and crushed it from shoulder to wrist, an ordinary seaman fractured his skull walking through a watertight door, and the cook fell to the deck hallucinating, writhing, and babbling incoherently after rupturing his spleen. On the Prudential Lines' LASH Pacifico, the chief mate once performed an appendectomy in the middle of the North Atlantic while a doctor spoke to him by radio, telling him what to do. There is a service called Amver provided by the Coast GuardâAutomated Mutual-Assistance Vessel Rescue System. Before your ship sails, you file a voyage plan, and it is updated in a central computer while the voyage proceeds. When a spleen ruptures, the computer locates every ship within two hundred miles of you, displays on your screen a list of the paramedics aboard them, and says what ships (if any) are carrying doctors.
On through the night we lie at anchor in a pool of festooned light, abristle with shotguns, braced for attack, and awaiting the call to a berth. It comes on the four-to-eight, in the predawn. We have little to leave in Guayaquil. The last time we ran the gantlet here, a fortnight ago, the pirates missed, among other things, five hundred VCRs. They missed half a ton of photographic supplies, three tons of plastic tape, five tons of synthetic rubber, twenty tons of crude talc, forty tons of tinplate, and three hundred tons of drilling mud. They missed five thousand six hundred barrels of resin. They missed a container said to contain seven tons of mixed windshield wipers, hubcaps, and musical jewel boxes. They missed the container said to contain sixteen
thousand six hundred and thirty-six pounds of shower curtains, telephones, and wall clocks. They missed a container said to contain seventy-seven cases of bathroom locks, and four containers said to contain twenty-four thoroughbreds.
thousand six hundred and thirty-six pounds of shower curtains, telephones, and wall clocks. They missed a container said to contain seventy-seven cases of bathroom locks, and four containers said to contain twenty-four thoroughbreds.
We laid all that on the dock and went to Valparaiso. From Valparaiso to Guayaquil we have brought phosphates, automobile tires, and veterinary medicine. There is a full day's work for the longshoremen, though, as we pick up seven hundred sacks of goosefoot, ninety drums of passion-fruit juice, a hundred and eighty-two thousand board feet of balsa wood, and one million four hundred thousand pounds of coffee. We pick up thirty-two empty containers. That is one of the differences between container and break-bulk freight: you have to move the empties. For transporting what may amount to about a hundred million cups of coffee from Ecuador to the United States the steamship company is charging the coffee people $69,486.78. This is Lykes Brothers' sip.
The waving shotguns and the tasselled balaclavas protect us through another night. We cast off at dawn. A Norwegian pineapple ship will take our berth. Mac, at the wheel, hand steering, says, “That ship is so sparkling clean you could eat off her deck.”
Just the thought of a shipful of pineapples makes me very hungry. Happily would I get down on my knees and eat a chunk from a deck. A Norwegian deck. I say to Mac, “I wonder what the cook will be cooking today.”
“Port ten,” the pilot says.
Mac swings the wheel at a bend in the river. “Left ten,” he responds. Then he says, “If he's a cook, I'm a surgeon.”
We retrace our way through the Explosive Anchorage and pick up speed in the current. At five-fifty-one, Calvin arrives, takes over the wheel. He does not so much stand as droop.
Mac is a youth of fifty-eight. Calvin is sixty-one. Yesterday, Calvin's day began when he was called at three in the morning to prepare to stand what he describes as “my security watch with armed guards.” For four hours, he walked the deck with his transceiver, reporting to the bridge every twenty minutes, and expecting at any moment to be attacked by pirates and lashed to a turnbuckle, as his watch partner had been a few months before. At eight, he had breakfast. At nine, he turned to for deck maintenance, chipping and painting forward of the house. He greased the topping lifts on the No. 2 and No. 3 cranes. He tidied up the shelter deck. He painted the main deck around the jumbo crane. He second-coated the davits for the gangway port and starboard. This may not have been New York, but the Ecuadorian sun was hot. After lunch, he chipped and painted from one until four, when he resumed walking the foredeck, on patrol. As evening approached, he spent more than an hour crawling under catwalks between hatches to find electrical outlets in which to plug the cargo lights meant to keep pirates away. At 8 P.M., when the watch ended, he went into Guayaquil with the port agent and called North Carolina, in his concern over the health of his father-inlawâ“my wife's daddy”âwho is ninety-two years old and is in the hospital. He returned to the ship and fell into bed at midnight. At three, he was awakened for the four-to-eight watch. Now he stands at the wheel, worried more than ever about his wife's daddy, looking for the moment almost ninety-two himself, paint-spattered from shirt to shoes, posture caving toward the letter S, a wire loose behind his hearing aid, his white cap no longer clean, his outsized bluejeans scuffing the deck. He admits defeat. He says, “I'm pretty well rest-broken now.”
Calvin and Mac would be paid their usual $135.68 apiece for that exacting day painting and patrolling in Guayaquil. McLaughlin remarks as he prepares to go below, “Eighteen hours a day for decent take-home pay.”
The ship carries considerable cash, so that the crew, en route, can draw what they need. In a small office on the cabin deck, Mac came upon fifteen hundred dollars one day, left there by mistake after a draw. He carried it upstairs and gave it to the captain.
It is 6 A.M. in the Republic of the Equator. The twentieth of August. Sixty-eight degrees. The Woermann Wakamba is coming up the river. We will pass her port to port. She flies the flag of Panama and has a big white bone in her teeth. This large bow wave, spreading to the sides, is followed by another wave, some distance back. If you measure the length of the bow waveâthe distance from the first wave to the secondâyou can tell how fast a ship is going. The distance in this case is two hundred and twenty-five feet. How do I know? I'm guessing. It's a convenient guess,
because 1.1 times the square root of the length of the wave equals the speed of the ship in knots. The Woermann Wakamba is doing better than sixteen knots. She draws a big sea. Ships can make surf even at sixteen knots.
because 1.1 times the square root of the length of the wave equals the speed of the ship in knots. The Woermann Wakamba is doing better than sixteen knots. She draws a big sea. Ships can make surf even at sixteen knots.
We are disturbing someone's breakfast, As the Stella Lykes and the Woermann Wakamba pass each other port to port, each is passing a third vessel, inconsiderable in the river: a needle boat, a pirogue, under a homemade sail. There are three men in it. One is wearing a jacket and tie. There is a campfire in the boat, with food cooking on it, sending up flavored smoke.
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