Looking for a Ship (22 page)
Read Looking for a Ship Online
Authors: John McPhee
Barring escapes and other complications, the repatriation of the three stowaways would cost Lykes 'Brothers as much as a hundred thousand dollars. This fact further desensitized whatever tenderness the captain might have felt
toward them in memory of his vagabond youth. “They are criminals and I'm the victim,” he said. “They have come into our house and caused all kinds of legal problems just like they came in here and stole something. They have illegally entered here, they have trespassed. They may be dehydrated and thirsty and hungry, but when a guy breaks into your house you don't sit him down and treat him with courtesy until the police get there-feed him and water him and tell him that he did good, that you understand that life is tough and he has a perfect right to do this to you. I understand the system from which they flee, but they're criminals and I'm the victim. They've broken a multitude of laws. Ships have been stuck with stowaways for years. You have to be able to identify them. If you don't know where they come from, how are you going to repatriate them? I have to make sure that they don't escape. If they escape into Panama, the thing multiplies. It's our responsibility anyway. It's double our responsibility if they escape.”
toward them in memory of his vagabond youth. “They are criminals and I'm the victim,” he said. “They have come into our house and caused all kinds of legal problems just like they came in here and stole something. They have illegally entered here, they have trespassed. They may be dehydrated and thirsty and hungry, but when a guy breaks into your house you don't sit him down and treat him with courtesy until the police get there-feed him and water him and tell him that he did good, that you understand that life is tough and he has a perfect right to do this to you. I understand the system from which they flee, but they're criminals and I'm the victim. They've broken a multitude of laws. Ships have been stuck with stowaways for years. You have to be able to identify them. If you don't know where they come from, how are you going to repatriate them? I have to make sure that they don't escape. If they escape into Panama, the thing multiplies. It's our responsibility anyway. It's double our responsibility if they escape.”
The three men in the checker's room were still carrying their Colombian citizenship cards, identifying them as Pedro Antonio Moreno Hurtado, Luis Eduardo Mosquera Yepe, and Miguel Enrique Bonilla Sinisterra. They were twenty-seven, twenty-four, and twenty-two years old. The mate went into the No. 4 hold, found the red plastic water jug, and remembered the man in the gray flannel slacks. He had probably sold his services. He was probably a travel agent for stowaways. The mate said regretfully, “I would have bet my home that no one was down there.”
Past the chain and padlock, through the slightly open
door, people on the deck could observe the prisoners. One was short and chubby. The others were slim and hawklike. As I peered in, one of them came near and pointed with anguish at his stomach. I asked him if he was sick or just hungry. He said he was hungry and no longer sick.
door, people on the deck could observe the prisoners. One was short and chubby. The others were slim and hawklike. As I peered in, one of them came near and pointed with anguish at his stomach. I asked him if he was sick or just hungry. He said he was hungry and no longer sick.
Scarcely had I turned to ask Andy what might be done about the stowaways' hunger when Victor Belmosa appeared on deck with rolls and bread. In large gulps, the three ate the rolls and the bread. Andy went down to the galley for more bread and a jar of jelly. The port police arrived, with a slogan on their car that said “1995âNOT A STEP BACKWARD.” Handcuffed together, the stowaways were taken down the gangway carrying a bag of bread.
Duke Labaczewski said, “My grandfather on my mother's side and my grandfather on my father's sideâthat's how they came to the United States.”
Victor Belmosa looked gently at Duke. Victor had also entered the United States as a nautical stowaway. At the age of seventeen, he had left Trinidad hidden in a Moore-McCormack ship bound for Alabama, he said. Mormac caught him. “A Mormac man in Mobile chewed me out. Then he helped me get a job. That's how I got here.”
I
t could be said of our poor stowaways that they picked the wrong Merchant Marine, for in a sense their presence was betrayed more by the age of the ship than by any other factor. It is less than a day's voyage from Buenaventura to Balboa. I imagine them relatively cool and confident at 4 A.M. that morning, successfully stowed away, feeling the ship's great momentum as a venturous rush, up the dark Pacific. Not far away, in the engine room, David Carter has been checking the pumps, the generators, the air-conditioning. With Karl Knudsen, he has started to transfer fuel oil. He checks the pressures of the gland steam, of the high-pressure steam chest, of the high- and low-pressure bleeds. He checks the temperatures of the bearings (around a hundred and forty-five degrees), the temperature of the desuperheater outlet (five hundred and ninety-five degrees), the temperature of the main steam at the throttle (eight hundred and forty). He and Knudsen change a couple of
burners, noticing certain inconsistencies in the fuel-How apertures, which make no sense to them, so they study the boiler manual. They read it standing together, as if they were sharing a hymnal.
t could be said of our poor stowaways that they picked the wrong Merchant Marine, for in a sense their presence was betrayed more by the age of the ship than by any other factor. It is less than a day's voyage from Buenaventura to Balboa. I imagine them relatively cool and confident at 4 A.M. that morning, successfully stowed away, feeling the ship's great momentum as a venturous rush, up the dark Pacific. Not far away, in the engine room, David Carter has been checking the pumps, the generators, the air-conditioning. With Karl Knudsen, he has started to transfer fuel oil. He checks the pressures of the gland steam, of the high-pressure steam chest, of the high- and low-pressure bleeds. He checks the temperatures of the bearings (around a hundred and forty-five degrees), the temperature of the desuperheater outlet (five hundred and ninety-five degrees), the temperature of the main steam at the throttle (eight hundred and forty). He and Knudsen change a couple of
burners, noticing certain inconsistencies in the fuel-How apertures, which make no sense to them, so they study the boiler manual. They read it standing together, as if they were sharing a hymnal.
They blow tubes, getting rid of carbon. Blowing tubes is chimney sweeping on a violent scale. Red lights blink on the flame scanners, yellow lights over the burners. Knudsen puts the burners in manual override, so they won't trip out. Otherwise steam could extinguish the flames. If the flames go out, the engine stops. You have lost the plant.
Over the bridge, a cloud of cinders leaves the stack, smudging, for the moment, the diamond colors of Sirius, the bright light of a full Venus. The air clears. The sword of Orion is studded with nebulas. The Pleiades hang like grapes. We have a big papaya on the bridge, and wedges of fresh lemon. This does not tempt Calvin. As an eater, he does not soar above all prejudices. Calvin, at the wheel, looks boneless and destroyed. He is again rest-broken, after another arduous day. Dawn arrives, and Mac, relieving Calvin, comes on angry. While still on the port watches that were set in Buenaventura, the ship sailed in late evening, and sea watches were not restored until midnight. This was a violation of a long nautical tradition: sea watches are set in the first minute of a day of departure, not the last. The core of Mac's complaint is not that he worked eighteen hours and then went on lookout after three hours' sleep. He is used to that. The core of his complaint is that no part of the effort was voluntary. “Your privilege has been taken away,” he explains, in a voice loud enough to go
through the steel deck. “Setting sea watches after you sail. Lord Nelson would roll over in his grave.” A slice of papaya helps Mac to calm down. Papaya is alkaline and very soothing. Papaya will pacify an incandescent stomach.
through the steel deck. “Setting sea watches after you sail. Lord Nelson would roll over in his grave.” A slice of papaya helps Mac to calm down. Papaya is alkaline and very soothing. Papaya will pacify an incandescent stomach.
After breakfast, Phil Begin, the chief engineer, stops by the captain's cabin. He is thinking of drawing fuel from the No. 1 After Deep Tank, which has not been used in some time. In Buenaventura, as containers went on and off, there was a net loss of weight in the stern. In one port the bow comes up, in another the stern comes upâa ballasting problem that in part can be corrected by the use of fuel. Because a sloshing tank can be dangerous to a ship, you must generally take all or nothing, and that complicates planning. The capacity of the No. 1 After Deep Tank is thirty-five hundred barrels, or six hundred tons, of fuel. The tank is below the No. 1 hold, at the forward end of the ship. The captain, agreeing, says to Phil Begin, “Thirty-five hundred barrels burned up front will lift the bow eighteen inches and put the stern down six inches.”
Within two hours, alarms and sirens are resounding all over the ship. The scent of bunker fuel rises through the house. The lights go out. The stairwells are dark. The rest of the house is in twilight. With a devastating surge, the emergency generator cuts in. It dies. It starts again. Cool, conditioned air rapidly warms. The three-centimetre radar is down, the gyro is nonfunctional, the SatNav is inventing bizarre facts. The steering system is out of control, the rudder irretrievably at hard left. The ship makes an arc in the water as she loses her momentum. The alarms are
strident, and they do not stop. What must the stowaways be thinking?
strident, and they do not stop. What must the stowaways be thinking?
The engineers of the idle watches get out of their bunks and go below. Between the fireroom and the control platform, they crowd the engineers' flat. Engineers famous for doing nothing stand to the side doing nothing. The rest are participants in an orchestrated frenzy, following the orders of the chief. As one and another break from the huddle, they go off running. Begin stays by the throttles. He dispatches his engineers to open valves, close valves, start pumps, stop pumps. They splash through water, ankle deep, that has spilled out of the evaporator. The temperature of the engine room steadily rises, in the absolute humidity of escaping steam.
Very evidently, the burners have gone out because water is in the fuel oil. It is Begin's surmise that a heating coil has sprung a leak. Bunker fuel is somewhat gelatinous and has to be heated to help it move. In various places, it is heated by steam in coilsâfirst in the original tank and then in settling tanks, which in this vessel are near the stern. From the No. 1 After Deep Tank the fuel has travelled five hundred feet to the settling tanks, then two hundred feet back to the burners. The water may be in it anywhere or everywhere. “You don't know you have water in fuel oil until it hits the boiler,” Begin says. So the length of his dilemma is seven hundred feet.
The fuel-oil pressure drops to nothing. The fires are out. The emergency diesel generator can supply only a low percentage of the ship's routine electrical demands, and of
the blowers that bring fresh air to the engine room only one is working. Every engineer is wetter and hotter than he would be under a shower. As the engineers move, they sway a little. They wonder if they are suffering heatstroke. In David Carter's words, “We are not exactly tense, we just don't want it to get worse. Our adrenaline is up, but Begin knows what he is doing.” The coolest places in the engine room now exceed a hundred and fifty degrees. What none of us know is that the rising heat in the No. 4 hold is cooking three stowaways and closing their adventure.
the blowers that bring fresh air to the engine room only one is working. Every engineer is wetter and hotter than he would be under a shower. As the engineers move, they sway a little. They wonder if they are suffering heatstroke. In David Carter's words, “We are not exactly tense, we just don't want it to get worse. Our adrenaline is up, but Begin knows what he is doing.” The coolest places in the engine room now exceed a hundred and fifty degrees. What none of us know is that the rising heat in the No. 4 hold is cooking three stowaways and closing their adventure.
On the bridge deck, in the all but unstirring tropical air, Bill, Beach says of the engineers, “This is' when they earn their money.” He tells of a Dutch ship some hundreds of miles off California at the end of December with no power. Her engine room was flooded. The ship that Beach was on circled the Dutch ship while she waited for an oceangoing tug. For forty-eight consecutive hours, Beach had no sleep as he kept messages passing between the two ships. Finally, he went to bed. While he slept, a message came from the Dutch. Beach was awakened to decipher it. They were saying “Happy New Year.”
In the wheelhouse, sitting in his swivel chair and staring forward into a stack of containers, Captain Washburn is talking to himself. “The problem is water,” he says. “It doesn't burn well.”
As he muses on, his preference for steamships (over the more recent generation of diesels) is not eroding. When a steamship is sinking, the last thing that happens is that seawater going down the stack explodes the boilers, he says.
Otherwise, safety devices are adequate, and boilers don't blow up. Yes, in the Red Sea in 1977 the main crossover from the high-level to the low-pressure turbine on the Waterman ship Robert E. Lee blew itself to pieces, severing lines and pipes and sending shrapnel all over the engine room. The ship had to be towed back to the United States. But, hey, while Washburn was the skipper of the diesel Cygnus the ship lost the plant nineteen times.
Otherwise, safety devices are adequate, and boilers don't blow up. Yes, in the Red Sea in 1977 the main crossover from the high-level to the low-pressure turbine on the Waterman ship Robert E. Lee blew itself to pieces, severing lines and pipes and sending shrapnel all over the engine room. The ship had to be towed back to the United States. But, hey, while Washburn was the skipper of the diesel Cygnus the ship lost the plant nineteen times.
What everyone seems to sense but no one specifically knows is that the predicament of the Stella Lykes is far more fundamental than a ruptured coil in a fuel line. As things will turn out, that is not where the water has come from. In Port Newark, an iridescent film afloat beside the ship will lead to an inspection that finds a break in the hull. Our trouble is not as trivial as leaking internal steam. The ship has cracked. And the No. 1 After Deep Tank has cracked with itâadmitting from the outside a steady flow of green sea. The captain has been running this old ship slowlyârarely exceeding eighteen knotsâto keep her alive, to keep her active, to save her from the breakers, to avoid straining the plant. In the aging atrophy of the Merchant Marine, there is nothing to replace her.
The metal railings on the stairway leading down into the engine room are now much too hot to grip. Gradually, Begin and the others clear the seven hundred feet of pipe. Then, after igniting one burner, they bring one boiler to pressure range. Then they start one turbine, and, in turn, one generator, to send electricity to the main switchboard. Begin describes this as a balancing act. Twice, he loses the
balance and has to start again. Hour after hour in the volcanic heat, the work continues.
balance and has to start again. Hour after hour in the volcanic heat, the work continues.
Meanwhile, from the halyards of the uppermost mast two black balls are flying. Andy calls them “Panamanian running lights.” They are six feet apart, and each is not less than two feet in diameter. From two miles away, they are meant to stand out. They look like death lanterns. They punctuate a message. To ships of the worldâLiberian, Haitian, Russian, or Creekâthey say “Not Under Command.”
An impatient albatross circles the bow. Sirens and alarms continue. From under the stern comes an occasional thump, presumably from the rudder. Maybe it's a fish. Duke the bosun has tied a white rag to a 5/0 fishhook and put it over the stern on an orange nylon line of quarter-ton test, hoping for a giant fish. The clouds are very dark off the starboard quarter. With our lemons and lollipops and terry-cloth towels, our three thousand cases of wine, with our ninety drums of passion-fruit juice, our onions, umbrellas, bone glue, and balsa wood, our kiln-dried radiata pine, with our glass Nativity scenes and our peach chips, we are dead in the water.
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