Down to the Sea in Ships (31 page)

After lunch the gale still roars but the sky clears partially. It is a violent and lovely day now, the sea purple. There are many birds, northern fulmars, kittiwakes bright against the dark water, and I think a great skua. Now it is sunny and rainy with dark-bellied clouds, broken rainbows and ice-blue clears all at once. John stirring his tea with a spoon makes a strangely domestic counterpoint to the billow-bellow gale. Hail comes in rattle blasts and the white streaked foam down the backs of the waves joins with the scars on their faces, forming long straggled lines pointing into the wind's mouth.

You feel much more exhilaration than fear: I see why John likes storms. Fear is quite hard to find in true sea stories, though so many are fearful and fear-filled. Men are not quick to admit it or describe it: to do it justice is to feel it again, and who wants that? Much better to pass on to the happy ending, to the deprecating laugh, as Chicoy did: ‘Really I was scared but . . .' Admissions of fear in the Atlantic war are rare. Perhaps it was so ubiquitous it was not worth writing about, while ‘talking things through' was not necessarily the habit of the time. An extraordinary exception occurs in the writing of Humphrey Knight, who dramatised an encounter with a psychiatrist after one of the Arctic convoys to Murmansk. These convoys, from Scapa Flow via Norway's North Cape to Russia, matched and surpassed the Atlantic's horrors. The cold, the seas and the conditions aboard the ships were monstrous, and the convoys were within range of German aircraft most of the way there and back. The psychiatrist asks Knight's narrator how he feels. The narrator can make only non-committal answers, but he tells the reader the truth.

The bewilderment may keep you calm. Even when the fear runs into the joints like hot glue, delaying the reflexes, delaying all save one. The instinct to duck when the dive-bombers scream over the mastheads like express trains with wings. The instinct to plunge deep back into the darkness of your primeval self. The passionate desire to get down into a hole, into the earth (only there is no earth), to take cover. Here is no earth; here is liquid emerald twenty degrees below zero. The feet press into the deck, seeking resilience. Seeking earth which is known to you. No earth here, no earth . . .

You would tear the deck like a dog after a rat. You would throw yourself flat and hide your head in your hands. You would cry for a woman's breast where you could lay your head. You might even think of your mother, for you would cry where once you had sucked life. Life that has brought you here where life and death compare their hideous notes.

Only you don't. You just turn your head from the blast and keep on handing up the shells . . .

At the height of the Battle of the Atlantic, in 1943, more than sixty U-boats were concentrated here, in mid-ocean, ranged in four patrol groups. In March of that year forty of them were directed to attack two laden convoys, eighty ships all heading east, which had come into proximity across a vast area approaching the western end of the Black Hole, where we are now. In the melee of a battle which stretched across days and nights, pitching over hundreds of square miles of ocean, it was not unusual for an escort commander to receive contact reports of half a dozen submarines at a time. Three days of fog and gales ragged the convoys at the outset: what followed was as horror-ridden as any engagement of the Atlantic war. Reading Richard Woodman's accounts of the battle produces a kind of numbed awe, as the mind wonders at the montage of images. A tanker, the
Southern Princess
, blazing so fiercely the heat could be felt on the decks of passing ships, her oil leaving the sea burning where she sank. Men so thick in the water that the lights of their life jackets seemed to a witness ‘like a carpet of fireflies'. Torpedoed ships abandoned, their derelict hulks refusing to sink. A ship, the
Elin K
, going down so fast that neither the escort commander nor the rescue ship realised she had been hit. The surface of the sea scattered with the frozen carcasses of Argentinian cattle that washed out in hundreds from a huge hole blown in the side of the Royal Mail cargo liner
Nariva
. The
Coracero
carried the same cargo; one of the hands killed in her engine room was a trimmer named Robert Yates who had gone to sea under the alias J. J. Elder. He was fourteen years old. The
Canadian Star
, hit twice, poised vertically, her bow high in the air for five minutes before she sank. Most of her crew made the boats, but they were overloaded, and the water wild and terribly cold.

The second officer ‘had twenty-two men on a ten-man raft, most had to hang over the side . . . We lost six of these fairly quickly; you would see them getting cold, a certain look came into their eyes and then they just gave up.' An army officer who had watched his wife and child flung into the water when another of the boats capsized ‘was the first to go'. In these circumstances it was perhaps not surprising that one chief engineer cast off a motor lifeboat and steered clear of his sinking ship, leaving many of his shipmates with no option but to jump. Eighteen of them died of hypothermia, three after they had been pulled from the sea. The chief told a Board of Inquiry, months later, that he had been in a state of terror. No action was taken against him.

The effects of acute tension, fear and worry are related with a coolness typical of the time, by a British submarine commander, William King, DSO, DSC, who captained HM Submarine
Snapper
in the North Atlantic. ‘Stress' is the vocabulary of the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of those who fought the war, who seem to have preferred ‘strain', but King makes no mention of either.

‘I was sitting in the mess waiting for patrol orders when our doctor asked casually, “Let's have a look at your fingernails.” Each one showed a series of concentric half-moon ridges from base to tip. “Interesting stigmata,” he said. “If you break off patrols for a refit you'll find a gap corresponding to the time spent in harbour. Each ridge is a patrol. They occur in all commanding officers of submarines, in most of their subordinate officers and in a small proportion of responsible ratings – purely psychological.”'

The wind blows force nine now, severe gale, and in the sun the waves glow gem-like sapphire and green. It strengthens by the minute, now force ten, storm, and as the waves deepen the sea seems to move with a different rhythm, as if with inclinations and intention. The bright luminescence in the heart of the white when a crest shatters is dazzling, a wild scatter of Poseidon's turquoise hurled into the air. We hold our course on 274 degrees with the sea still building to the north-west: we have to turn across it at some point. Each wave – they are truly mighty now – seems to demand its own description. When we hit them full-on the whole ship shudders, as if winded, and we lose a couple of knots of speed. Because the streaming white lines on the water point back towards the wind, while the waves move forward towards us, the sea seems to travel in two directions at once.

‘We are the only assholes out here,' says the Captain.

‘What a way to make a living,' John marvels, as we slide into another trough.

At a quarter to four we round Flemish Cap and begin to turn west-south-west to 245 degrees. We are over the Labrador Basin, three kilometres deep. The starboard bow is taking a ferocious pounding as we bear down the world slowly towards Orphan Knoll, which rises to a depth of a kilometre and a half. The Captain calls the chief and they agree to bring the revs down. She lurches heavily, labouring on, pummelled on the windward side where the waves have the measure of the main deck. Vivid blue explosions of foam and solid water come hurling over the rail. Ahead, legs of sunlight break through like searchlights on the roaring sea. When we cross under one it is so bright that your eyes water and the sea turns obsidian-black.

From the wing I look back at the Captain, alone on his bridge, staring forward. Because he stands his watch in the hours of daylight he has no lookout. And so, alone, he gazes forward, always forward, a solitary figure overseeing his old machine and the violent desolation he has sent her into, watching every blow she deals the sea and every one she takes, lurching down with her, staggering back with her, lurching down, and there is a solitude about him which is emphasised rather than dispersed by his openness in company, and an endurance and absolute toughness about him which is entirely at one with his vessel, though you sense he is tougher than her. He is married but he mentions his wife only once on the voyage. In everything but the sea he is private and held in.

It is too cold to stay long outside.

‘This is where they were,' the Captain says, quietly. ‘That fishing boat –?' (The fate of the
Andrea Gail
is told in a wonderful book,
The Perfect Storm
, by Sebastian Junger, and a terrible film.) ‘They were far out, eh? Very far . . .'

We look at the sea. It is a prospect unutterably bleak and desperate as we move away from the sun patches: grey death everywhere.

‘God, Captain. This is the loneliest place I've ever been.'

‘Yes,' he says. ‘A bad place for anything to happen.'

Captain Koop now sits in his chair, as his ship fights her way through the relentless gale, and talks.

‘Have you ever been frightened at sea, Captain?'

‘Only once. We were in the Channel. A smoker left his butt in the bin in the harbour control room and went to answer an alarm in the engine room, and went to bed. It was about twelve thirty at night, I woke up and smelt something burning. The alarms went off. I thought this is bullshit, this is not good. I went to the bridge. All the walkie-talkies were on charge in the harbour control room so we had no comms. A crewman appeared, he said the whole main deck is full of smoke, the harbour control room is completely on fire, the computers, everything. The chief officer made an attempt to get an extinguisher on it but he went without breathing apparatus and came back choking. The smoke was full of plastic, poisonous. Now, the Captain has to stay on bridge, and you think, how are the crew going to react? Can they handle this? And they were good. They did the right things and got it under control. It was good. Fire at sea is the worst, in my opinion it is the worst. We put it out and we had a few beers on it afterwards. I didn't call Dover, because if you do that you have all kinds of investigations, troubles – I steered towards shore so if they have to come out or something it's easier. But first you think can we handle this? Apart from that I have never been frightened on this ship.'

‘What about storms?'

‘Ah! Well, we were fully loaded on one of our first North Atlantic winter crossings and the bow – with thirty thousand tonnes behind it – she crashed into a wave so hard a winch jumped back two feet. We were drydocked and the bow was reinforced, but still – you have to watch her!'

‘What do you worry about when you go to bed?'

‘The judgement of the officer on watch. You worry he won't pull back the throttle if she's driving too hard. I sleep very lightly and when I feel it I call the bridge when she's slamming and I say can't you tell this is too hard? Pull back.

‘I used to love it,' he says, ‘but I love it less now. Everyone of my generation says the same. You arrive and they say the ship is dirty – it's the North Atlantic! If there's damage they say did you take routing from a weather centre? Pfff . . . they have the same information I have but they don't know my ship! I know my ship.

‘And you know a sailor is always a second-class person – in the Caribbean we used to say we were students on exchange. Even now you say you are a sailor – “oh, a girl in every port”, these old phrases . . . Only the Mission to Seafarers understands or cares about us. Nobody else. There used to be seafarers in management but not so much now. My supervisors are in Mumbai and theirs are in Singapore. There have been thousands of redundancies in Copenhagen. So you're emailing people and you don't know if you can trust them. Do they understand, or is it only money to them?'

He has a huge admiration for the Filipinos.

‘They are so pennywise, eh? These guys really know the score. They are always talking to each other on email, even on radio if we pass a ship close, saying how much are they paying you? If it's more they're gone. You should see them going through airports. So much stuff! You say how are you going to manage? They say, “Don't worry, we'll help each other.” They come on board with nothing. Some of them don't trust banks so they carry their wages home as cash. This can be very dangerous but they know the risks.'

Captain Koop thought for a moment, then he said, ‘You know these guys are heroes. It's not just the family they support, it's the whole clan.'

The sea darkened, Erwin came up and it was time for us to go down. ‘We're through the worst,' the Captain said. ‘And that anti-cyclone, I used it, eh? Used it to give me a good push this morning.'

It was a sanguine day on the ship, considering the storm. A severe gale, occasional storm force ten and twenty-foot waves, had the following effects: Annabelle produced her best supper yet, soup to start, a fillet of fish in cheese sauce with almonds, and avocado milkshake for dessert. Work continued in the engine room, Pieter commenting that he had to go outside to close a hatch, because it was very cold. Jannie said he did the same as every day. The bo'sun and his gang checked lashings and returned safely. John was moved to get his camera and take a couple of shots of the storm, with the Captain encouraging him and helping him with the door, which was a battle with the wind – ‘Yeah, you can take pictures in this!' You only just could, though.

I wake to enraging head-thickness. How is it still happening? I have reinforced the stuffed boiler suit with paper wedges but still the diesel fumes flow. Clock says 0700 so I jump up. Annabelle is frying spam in the galley and Eugene is mopping the bridge. Light on the sea, and the water a colour that makes you feel cold. Erwin talked about his first voyage, on a bulk carrier travelling from Indonesia to New York.