Down to the Sea in Ships (37 page)

In recent months Chris has been promoted to chief officer and acquired two fine swallow tattoos, one colourful bird on each shoulder. The old sailors believed that wearing them meant swallows would carry their souls home if they were to die at sea. Joel is now a third engineer and the company is keen he sit the exams for second. He writes from the
Gjertrud Maersk
, which he calls an ‘old turtle', saying he is in a warship-and-pirate-infested area known to the crew as the Hardship Pay Area. He signs off his all emails with ‘It's me!! Joel'.

As for the ships, you can sometimes find them on a website which tracks their AIS transponder signals, but its coverage only extends a few nautical miles from land. Searching for
Gerd Maersk
and
Maersk Pembroke
returns the same message: ‘Out of Range'. They are working their way across waters far from the world we know. Their futures are more uncertain now than at any time since they were launched. Stringent EU financial regulations (demanding banks hold cash, rather than other people's debt) mean ship funding is withering: Commerzbank, the world's second biggest provider of ship finance, has shut down its twenty billion euro shipping fund and now owns a fleet of foreclosed vessels. Cutting costs, the industry increasingly employs riding gangs, non-seafarers whose pay and situation are covered by no agreements, who provide cheap labour, cargo handling and maintenance. In their pursuit of declining profits many shipowners are shameless in rolling back whatever progress has been made in the working and living conditions of sailors. Recent reports by inspectors who detain vessels in the United Kingdom's ports could have been written fifty or a hundred years ago.

‘The crew accommodation was no longer provided with heating; there were insufficient fruit and vegetables on board . . . There were insufficient life rafts, the sanitary water system was inoperative and there was no fresh-running water. There were no nautical publications and charts were incomplete for the operational area . . . The ship was dangerously unsafe as the engine room bilge wells were full of thick black oil . . . There was insufficient diesel fuel on board for the voyage . . .'

None of this improves the likelihood of fair pay for Filipino seafarers, though the discrimination with which the shipping world treats them is a moral disgrace, but it does explain why the men I met did not complain. A company like Maersk may be content to run ships not covered by international labour agreements, but their conditions are not like those described above.

‘Have you seen a great freighter slide by in the bay on a dreamy afternoon and as you stretch your eyes along the iron serpentine length in search of people, seamen, ghosts who must be operating this dreaming vessel so softly parting harbor waters off its steel-shin bow with snout pointed to the Four Winds of the World you see nothing, not one soul?'

So asks Jack Kerouac in his essay ‘Slobs of the Kitchen Sea'. And so had I looked, and so not seen. I looked at the long tankers hiding from Celtic storms in St Bride's Bay, at the horizon-bound ships making for the Atlantic out of the Severn Sea, at low slim rectangles on the skyline off the shores of Africa, at the giant and dirty sky-shrinking bulkers streaming up the Bosphorus past the Golden Horn. I see them now more keenly, sometimes from the air, towing their arrowhead wakes, or anchored in the bays of Trieste and Naples, on misty seas evaporating in salt hazes, where great blocks are freighters waiting – their wipers, oilers, engineers, electricians, stewards, officers, chiefs and captains invisible. But when I think of the freighters now I see their swept corridors and the red-lit decks at night. I smell the cooking and the diesel, and up on the bridge I picture the watchman, and the officer making tiny pencil marks on a square metre denoting thousands of miles of sea.

I thought I went to sea to find out about ships and oceans, but though I saw something of these I saw much more of men. The sea gathers congregations of men, from the oldest, the Archer, glimpsed across five millennia, to the youngest, Richard, born barely twenty years ago. It lights up men in terror like Humphrey Knight at his anti-aircraft gun, and Captain Rugiati, hiding under his bed, and men in extremity like the oiled survivor. The ocean offers up heroes of their time like Captain Loxley, going down with his ship on a blessing and a cigarette, and puts the passenger in the hands of the ordinary, enduring, extraordinary men who worked and sailed the ships I travelled on, as I looked at them and marvelled.

Their lives are not like ours. While what it means to be a man and what is asked of a man evolves on land, the sea asks only one question, the same it has always asked. Can you face yourself – and me?

The
Maersk Luz
sails from Singapore, across the southern Indian Ocean, around the Cape of Good Hope and up through the South Atlantic to ports on the eastern seaboard of South America. With slow steaming – extremely slow steaming sometimes – to save fuel and cut losses, she can be out of sight of land for two months at a stretch. Erwin and Chicoy talked about what can happen to a man on a ship if another takes a dislike to him; about weeks or months or a year of bullying; quarrels relating to feuds at home; trouble with women ashore; men ganging up on a victim, and taking it and taking it until you can take no more. They do not talk about facing yourself, in your cabin, at work, over the meal, in your cabin, at work, over the meal, again and again and again, facing yourself as you lose faith in yourself, and the messages from home get worse. The painter with the knife could not take it. No one knows how many, like him, snap.

The seafarers taught me a great deal, and though I will no doubt forget much of their practical knowledge, I came to feel that the lesson of the sea is that this earth is a ship, and all of us are sailors – wipers, oilers, engineers and captains all at once. I will not forget the ways in which the good ones are gentle with each other and mighty with themselves. I am writing this in the days just before my partner gives birth to our first child: crossing oceans suddenly seems an uncomplicated business, the sea a straightforward place, and being responsible for yourself alone a wonderfully clear task. I know I am not a good sailor in many ways. I am more excited and scared now than at the approach of any storm, and more apprehensive about my inner strength than I have ever been. But I find myself recalling something Captain Koop said, one evening in the Atlantic. He was talking about teaching junior officers to cope with the fishing fleets of the eastern seas, as they guided the
Sydney
through the darkness towards squadrons of bobbing fire: ‘I always said don't panic, don't try to see them all at once. Bring the radar in close. Deal with what is in front of the ship. Let the fishing boats come to you.'

THIS BOOK IS
informed by a variety of writings but it is is particularly indebted for its accounts of the Atlantic war to Richard Woodman's
The Real Cruel Sea: The Merchant Navy in the Battle of the Atlantic 1939-43
published by John Murray, London 2004

Any reader wishing to know the fullest available account of that conflict will find Mr Woodman's superb history as engrossing as the story it tells is extraordinary.

Among many volumes and websites consulted in the course of the research I would recommend the following especially, and would like to acknowledge the debt I owe their authors' scholarship – in every case greater than my own, to which any errors in the text are wholly attributable.

Joseph Conrad: The Major Phase
, Jacques Berthoud, Cambridge University Press 1978

Four Captains
, Captain George Clark, Brown, Son and Ferguson, Glasgow 1975

The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus': A Tale of the Sea
, Joseph Conrad, Doubleday Page and Co, London 1897

The principall navigations, voiages, and discoveries of the English nation,
Richard Hakluyt, London 1589; published for the Hakluyt Society and the Peabody Museum of Salem at the University Press, 1965

The Perfect Storm – A True Story of Men Against the Sea
, Sebastian Junger, Norton, New York 1997

A Book of Sea Journeys
, Ludovic Kennedy, Collins, London 1981

Lonesome Traveler
, Jack Kerouac, McGraw Hill, New York 1960

The Golden Book of the Dutch Navigators
, Hendrik Willem Van Loon, The Century Co, New York 1916

The Cruel Sea
, Nicholas Monserrat, Penguin, 1951

The Hairy Ape
, Eugene O'Neill, New York 1922

Argonauts of the North Sea – a Social Maritime Archaeology for the 2nd Millennium BC
, Robert Van de Noort, Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 72, 2006, pp. 267-287

Coleridge's Notebooks: A Selection
, edited by Seamus Perry, OUP Oxford 2002

Before the Bells Have Faded
:
The Sinking of HMS Formidable,
Mark Potts and Tony Marks, Naval and Military Press, 2009

The War At Sea, 1939-1945: An Anthology of Personal Experience,
selected and edited by John Winton, Hutchinson, London 1967

My first requests went to Michael Christian Storgaard at Maersk Lines in Copenhagen and were then handled with infinite patience by Claire Sneddon in the company's London office. I am entirely indebted to these two for all their kindness and trouble, and would like to thank the company for its hospitality and cooperation.

To Captains Henrik Larsen and Petrus Koop, and to their officers and crews, particularly Sorin Simonov, Chris Nielsen, Joel Embuscado, Shubd Prashant, John Holmshaw, Pieter Mulder, Erwin Callarman, Johannes Edelman, Anabelle Salazar, Mark Gigremosa and Richard Duller, as well as to those who preferred not to be named (and to those whose frankness led me to disguise them) I can only offer my deepest thanks and these pages, in gratitude and admiration.

Without the encouragement and support of Zoe Waldie at Rogers, Coleridge and White and Clara Farmer of Chatto & Windus this book would not have been written or published. Thank you both for your blessing, backing and quite wonderful empowerment. Special thanks to Mohsen Shah, Lexie Hamblin, Richard Collins, Lisa Gooding and Susannah Otter, for your great kindness and pains.

John Clare gave the manuscript a going-over at a crucial stage, and saved it from multiple failings. Thank you, Dad.

Mohit Bakaya, Meghan Best, Peter Browne, Candace Cade, Cynthia Clare, Roy Clare, Richard Coles, Roger Couhig, Rupert Crisswell, Suella Darkins, Sarah Dunant, Alison ‘Tig' Finch, Stephen Fleming, Caroline Flinders, Anne Garwood, Anna Gavalda, Jeremy Grange, Niall Griffiths, Ben Hardiman, Richard Davidson-Houston, Henry Howard, Graham da Gama Howells, Merlin Hughes, Anna Rose Hughes, Robin Jenkins, Chris Kenyon, Rob Ketteridge, Toby Lynas, Elizabeth and James Mann, Gail Marsh, Jane Matthews, Julian May, Michael Molino, Elizabeth Passey, Lawrence Pollard, Laurina Savattieri, Victoria Shepherd, Jenny Shooter, Robin Tetlow-Shooter, Scott Tetlow, Jody Trick, Sian Walker, Mike White and Diarmaid Gallagher contributed especially (and in some cases unwittingly) to the life of this book and the sustaining of its author. Truly kind friends, I cannot thank you enough.

Thank you Sally, Alexander and John Clare, for your wonderful care and unstinting encouragement, and for the inspiration to write and travel. And thank you, dearest Rebecca, for your love and company on this most strange and wondrous voyage.

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Epub ISBN: 9781409027652

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Copyright © Horatio Clare 2014

Horatio Clare has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work

This book is a work of non-fiction based on the experiences and recollections of the author. In some limited cases names have been changed solely to protect the privacy of others.

First published in Great Britain in 2014 by

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ISBN 9780701183103