Down to the Sea in Ships
Read Down to the Sea in Ships Online
Authors: Horatio Clare
Contents
Part One: To the East and West
Chapter 6: Bay Life in the Biscay
Chapter 7: Madness, Superstition and Death
Chapter 8: Bitter Water, Bloody Sand
Chapter 9: Pirates, Soldiers, Thieves
Chapter 14: The Hard-driven Ship
Chapter 16: The Western Approaches
Chapter 17: When Something Snaps
For millennia, the seaways have carried our goods, cultures and ideas, the terrors of war and the bounties of peace â and they have never been busier than they are today. But though our normality depends on shipping, it is a world which passes largely unconsidered, unseen and unrecorded. Out of sight, in every lonely corner of every sea, through every night, every day, and every imaginable weather, tiny crews of seafarers work the giant ships which keep landed life afloat. These ordinary men (and they are mostly men) live extraordinary lives, subject to pressures we know â families, relationships, dreams and fears â and to dangers and difficulties we can only imagine, from hurricanes and pirates to years of confinement in hazardous, if not hellish, environments.
Horatio Clare joins two container ships, travelling in the company of their crews and captains. Together they experience unforgettable journeys: the first, from East to West (Felixstowe to Los Angeles, via Suez) is rich with Mediterranean history, torn with typhoon nights and gilded with an unearthly Pacific peace; the second northerly passage, from Antwerp to Montreal, reeks of diesel, wuthers with gales and goes to frozen regions of the North Atlantic, in deep winter, where the sea itself seems haunted.
In Clare's vibrant prose a modern industry does battle with implacable forces, as the ships cross seas of history and incident, while seafarers unfold the stories of their lives, telling their tales and yarns. A beautiful and terrifying portrait of the oceans and their human subjects, and a fascinating study of big business afloat,
Down to the Sea in Ships
is a moving tribute to those who live and work on the great waters, far from land.
Horatio Clare is the bestselling author of two memoirs,
Running for the Hills
(Somerset Maugham Award) and
Truant
; the travel book
A Single Swallow
â which follows the birds' migration from South Africa to the UK â and a novella,
The Prince's Pen
, the retelling of a Mabinogion tale. An award-winning journalist, occasional teacher, former radio producer, sporadic broadcaster and Fellow in creative writing at the University of Liverpool, Horatio writes regularly on nature for the
Daily Telegraph
and on travel for various international publications. He and his family are currently migrating from Northern Italy to the West Pennines. For the weather.
Non-fiction
Running for the Hills
Truant: Notes from the Slippery Slope
Sicily: Through Writers' Eyes
A Single Swallow
The Prince's Pen
For Rebecca, Robin
and Aubrey (the
First Sea Lord) â with love.
Of Ageless Oceans and Modern Men
Horatio Clare
Â
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The rain continued to hammer the bridge. From time to time the thunder cracked, still violent. The storm united them. At sea storms weld the crew together. No sailor ever tells his family about times like that. Not in letters, not when he reaches home. So as not to worry them. Because they are indescribable, too. Storms don't exist. No more than sailors do, once they are at sea. Humanity's only reality is the land. So one does not know sailors, will never know them, even ashore. Unless one day you set sail aboard a cargo ship . . .
Jean-Claude Izzo,
The Lost Sailors
The true peace of God begins at any spot a thousand miles from the nearest land.
Joseph Conrad
âCALL ME ISH . . .'
â but Melville's third line is even better than the famous first. âWhenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off â then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.'
It happened to be a drizzly November when I picked up
Moby Dick
and began to read. I soon found myself walking by the river through a winter evening and vowing I too would go to sea. It was a vow born from a desire without a beginning (when does a boy first think of taking ship with pirates, or pirate hunters?) and, to this day, without an end. To leave the land, to know ships and sailors and their stories, to see the oceans in their vastness, to discover countries from their wharves inwards â what a dream!
I contacted a giant Danish shipping company, a mega-corporation which owns ports, aircraft, freight companies and oil rigs as well as ships, offering to be their writer-in-residence. The company accepted and foreswore censorship: that would make it pointless, said Michael Storgaard, the head of Maersk's public relations â write what you like. And so, with my partner's blessing and her son wishing me well and issuing me with selected pieces of Lego for my company on the voyages, I went to sea.
Many people, from children to the insane, from the devout to the philosophical, have supposed that the world is a charade. They imagine it a God game, an illusion that is extremely but not quite convincing. They speculate our existence is a shadow or speck in some great scheme which is far larger, more organised, more magnificent and perhaps more terrible than the life we know. They are right.
Just beyond the horizon there is another world. It runs in parallel with ours but it obeys different laws, accords with a different time and is populated by a people who are like us, but whose lives are not like ours. Without them, what we call normality would not exist. Were it not for the labours of this race we could not work, rest, eat, dress, communicate, learn, play, live or even die as we do. For a little while, for some months over two years, it has been my privilege to explore the sea in the company of its people.
Where the land ends certainty diminishes, modernity recedes and antique ways regather their power. Were we able to see the whole history of seafaring its accumulated impression might be akin to a borderless painting, a Turner worked over by Ernst, Pollock and Bosch. Flying wind and water are swirled about with breaking ropes. Here ships fight, founder and death-dive; here they are broken-backed. The scene flickers, incarnadine with fire and blood. Here it is dark as shoals and pale as corpses; here it recedes into the far distance, to a not-nothingness of wave-wastes and inconceivable weather. Around its corners there is longing love, people cheering and faces laughing, exhilarated. Here and there are flashes of passionate drinking, sex and Dionysian parties. In this picture's heights are drifting visions of wonder and unearthly beauty, empyrean skies and gulfs of paradise. Storms of money in ducats and dollars blow across this picture, and avalanches of cargo, jewelled tempests of every commodity and artefact humans ever needed or sought. The canvas is shot through with fear and endurance, and shaded, all over, in loneliness. It is not only that the nature of sea stories draws them to and from the dramatic. This picture is the consequence of a collision of two temperaments: the nature of men, and nature of the sea.
This book is an account of places beyond the coasts. It is partly the report of an observer and partly the story of a participant. You are designated, officially, a âsupernumerary', an addition who is part of the ship's company but not one of the crew. My deeper motives for going only became clear to me when I returned. I was fascinated by the idea of men at sea: shipping is still a man's world; quicker and more thoroughly than anywhere except perhaps a battlefield, the sea finds men out. I wanted to see men, their characters and their stories as if on a bare stage, away from women, children and the world. I was in love with the wonder, the rough romance and the potential horror of great ships: none of man's machines have more awe and character than they do. And I wanted, more than anything, to know something of the vastness of the oceans.
âThey that go down to the sea in ships and do business in great waters, they see the workings of the Lord and his wonders in the deep.' The potency of the lines springs from the toppling inequality of the forces Psalm 107 describes. The human determination to be, to thrive, to âdo business' never seemed more puny or more admirable than in opposition to great waters â by far the most miraculous and dreadful of nature's manifestations. You may or may not see the workings of the Lord in a beetle climbing a blade of grass, but if you are going to see His wonders at all you will surely find them on the face of the deep.
To the East and West
CHAPTER 1
Spirits of Ships
THE CAPTAIN IS
fierce with bulk like a small bear. His skin is pallid, his beard grizzled, his teeth are tinged with alloys and gold. We pay great attention to whatever he says; we watch him as if he were famous. He feels our scrutiny as he hums and mutters. He talks to himself in company but not when he is alone. The crew have not known him long but they are already fond of him. You can hear it in the way they relish his title:
âYes, Captain!'
âGood evening, Captain . . .'
We never say his name.
Crew and captain are in a relationship with the vessel, a total entwinement that exists only on ships. It is something like a bee marriage, in which there are only two states, work and rest, and only one place, the workplace, and where there are almost no choices. In this sleepless hive the crew are the steel queen's workers, cleaning and tending to her, labouring in all her grim and dangerous places. High on the bridge above them, where the officers are suitors in order of rank, the Captain, the master, is the ship's betrothed. She is a hard mistress, interminably demanding. When she baulks, fusses, fails or sounds an alarm they call the Captain: he will know what to do. If there is a problem with the engine they call the chief engineer, but the engine is not the ship.
The engine is like a gigantic mad animal, howling in a cathedral of its own. Its decibels are dangerous. In certain latitudes the engine room is 80 per cent humidity, plus tropical heat, plus the fifty degrees radiating from the machinery. In swells this Hades pitches, rolls and rocks. There is no daylight, only constant vibration and the endless, terrifying roar. Four ladders up and two doors away from the noise you find the engine control room, a sickly yellow bunker lined with machines in cabinets and computer screens. Here are the chief engineer and his officers, coming and going on their sorties into the howling interior.
