Down to the Sea in Ships (14 page)

‘Could you do me a favour, Second Mate?'

‘Yes?'

‘Call that girl and ask her if she would like to have a baby with the Captain?'

We gust the over-hearty laughter of breaking tension. There is something quietly wonderful happening here, as the Captain teaches Shubd. The young man is receiving a lesson not just in what to do but in how to be, how to lead. In seafaring is the evolution – not of man, for there is little or no essential evolution of character between those dogged, brilliant men who first doubled the capes of West Africa, and those who found new oceans beyond the tips of continents, and men like Captain Simpson, who brought the
Indian Empire
home after she had lain on her side in the Pacific, and men like Captain Larsen – but of manhood: of what it is assumed and expected and required to be. Archaeologists now suspect that seafaring had a hand in the creation of manhood. Robert Van der Noort of Exeter University argues that in the Early Bronze Age the men who voyaged in sewn-plank boats (stitched together, in the absence of nails, by roots and willow twigs), the first men to go to sea as we do now, as a crew, with a captain, formed the kernels of their societies. ‘The success of these journeys depended on a reliable crew, probably comprising a selected group of men, the retinue of the member of the elite who travelled to foreign soils. Through the shared experience a common identity of lasting importance would have been created,' Van der Noort writes, suggesting that crews offered their leaders something the land could not supply: ‘the long-term support of a select but closely knit group of followers for many years after the overseas journey had been accomplished'.

The idea of retinues forged at sea, Van der Noort claims, ‘has far-reaching implications for understanding the sources of social power and the reasons for rise to prominence of particular members of society in the Late Neolithic and Early Bronze age'.

Thus it may be that men who lived near the sea – who, like all men, imagine and create themselves according to role models, who naturally elevate and even deify certain among them – learned to measure themselves and their leaders against the most capricious, changeable and eternal element of all.

Outside the night is sweetly hot and utterly dark, a darkness like falling sleep, and the air is like a bathhouse, and the water far below is black, black and hissing.

On a Sunday morning where the Singapore Strait meets the South China Sea the waves are a metallic, lacquer-yellow and the sky a melancholy of greys. We hit current and you can feel the ship not quite check, and lurch a little, an effect as definite and sudden as stepping into a plash in a meadow. We are slow-steaming at eleven knots so as not to arrive in Vietnam too early. A wreath of swallows hunt around the containers. All day a stream of empty tankers comes down from the north-east, rushing west to refill with Gulf oil for China.

There are two new passengers. First comes a white egret with a short yellow bill and black legs; it stalks about, gripping the containers with long toes. And now there is a bird like a small goshawk, with an olive back and a creamy chest, barred brown. It catches something and feeds on it with savage leisure, having stuffed the bulk of its victim into the locking dock on the corner of a container.

‘Yes, yes, once we had four oles in Korea.'

‘Four owls, Captain?'

‘Yes, yes the crew give them food. They disembark in Singapore.'

Writing in the afternoon I glance out of the window to see a small blue boat heading out of the wastes straight for us. There have been pirates in these waters for as long as there have been voyages. I charge up to the bridge.

‘Fishing boat,' says Chris, patiently, as it ducks astern of us. An empty tanker that happens to be passing takes terrific fright, hauling ninety degrees off course and plunging away to the north.

We spend the next day and night steaming to Vietnam. Just before 3 a.m. I wake, exclaim at the view from my porthole and scramble to the bridge. We are 6 degrees North, 106 degrees East, south of the Scawfell and Charlotte banks. The dark sea is aflame with gold lights, they encircle us in floating bonfires.

‘Amazing!'

‘Yeah. Well. You think everything is amazing,' says the darkness, heavily.

‘Evening, Chris!'

‘Good evening.'

‘What are they fishing for?'

‘Squids. These are Vietnamese. There's going to be a whole lot more of them, and Chinese, and Japanese. The whole sea . . .'

I estimate there are eighty vessels in the gold armada. As we draw closer the lights change to pink-orange and glaring white blazes. The night is warm as smoke, with cloud clearing to reveal Orion and the Pleiades.

‘How do you avoid the fishing boats?'

‘You aim to miss them, then if they move, that's their problem.'

‘Ouch.'

‘Yeah, well. Haven't hit anyone so far. I don't think.'

Someone has, though. A barge has gone down in the bay of Vung Tau, our destination. The message reads:

Barge was collided and sunk 05 persons on board 02 persons rescued 03 persons missing vessels in vicinity requested to keep a sharp lookout and assist immediately please report directly any related information.

The message repeats, unchanged, for the next two days.

On the night of our arrival in Vietnam we are due to take Vung Tau pilots aboard at 0100, but the action starts around 2300. Up until this point the Captain dozes on the sofa on the bridge, more like a bear than ever, curled up in the darkness, listening to Shubd working us in towards the coast. More lights appear, and more: some fishing boats are anchored, some have nets down, others will set off from stationary to full ahead in a moment. Shubd threads our course between the fishermen to the tune of multiple alarms – every time she is taken away from her voyage plan
Gerd
squeals.

It is as though an admiral has set out a defence of Vietnam in layers of pickets: first fishing fleets, then oil rigs, tankers, anchored and moving ships, then invisible mudbanks, uncertain channels and scattered buoys. The
Grete
, our sister ship, made this approach recently with Vung Tao pilots aboard. They confused two sets of buoys and ran aground just off the town's waterfront.

‘With pilots aboard!' the Captain repeats, horrified.

Dodgy pilots are a master's curse. Overrule them and you double your culpability in the event of mishap; fail to overrule them in time and you might as well have rammed the ship ashore yourself.

Sailors have made this approach for thousands of years: Chinese traders, Portuguese navigators, Malay pirates, French colonists and American and Australian warships have all done it, but by the staring and the tension on the darkened bridge we might be forging a new route, pushing back the chart.

‘Actually the charts are very old,' Chris confides. ‘They keep promising we'll get new ones.'

Somewhere in the utter obscurity to the west of us are the many mouths of the Mekong. Now, in the time of the south-east monsoon, the wet season, these mouths are pouring flotsam and current miles out to sea. We are bearing north into the outfall of the Song Saigon – the name of the river being the only remnant of former times left on our old chart. (Ho Chi Minh City is only a hundred kilometres upriver.) At the mouth of the Song Saigon is the little port city of Vung Tau. Its hills, peninsula and beach comprise the first landing place in hundreds of miles of mangrove deltas and estuaries. For the Portuguese it was a trading post, for the Malays a pirate base, for the French a stronghold and for the Americans and Australians a rest and recreation area during the Vietnam War. The bay of Vung Tau then was strewn with anchored vessels, aircraft carriers, supply and hospital ships. The Song Saigon in this season gave American and Australian naval captains nightmares. The monsoon flotsam provided perfect cover for Viet Cong saboteurs, like those who mined Clifton's tanker.

Vung Tau is three humps of black against a faintly street-lit sky. The Mekong delta is a great darkness to the west. The night is hot, clouds squat low and heavy on the hills. There is an eeriness here, in the unknowable immensity of littoral, in the silent coast, a mangroved intermingling which refuses to be land or water, in the sound of our horn, lowing a long deep boom like the moans of a mourning giant, in the thought of ‘03 persons missing' whose bodies, turning and tattering, are somewhere in the water below us; there is eerieness in all the slab-black sea and in the heavy air. They are wrong who say the sea has no memory. The sea is all memory, and every captain who ever brought his vessel in here could feel it, almost read it.

We draw up-channel past the town, where people in dark bedrooms, their dreams disturbed by our lowing, must be drifting back to sleep. We angle in towards our berth.

‘We need that tug now!' barks the Captain, as the stern crew struggle to make it fast. The pilot is talking to the tug, the tug is squawking back over the radio, there is some problem with the line and the Captain takes the thrusters, ignores everything else and brings his ship alongside himself. Cranes roll, stevedores board. It is half past two in the morning when work begins.

Vietnam is exporting rubber goods to Colombia and Venezuela, furniture to Trinidad and tinned vegetables to Mexico. Refrigerated containers full of frozen fish, four for America and one of each for Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico come booming down on the hatch covers. Another two hundred and fifty tonnes of frozen fish fillets join us, mostly for America, which is also importing forty tonnes of Vietnamese sticky tape, fifteen tonnes of carpets and textiles, fifteen tonnes of hats and caps, ten tonnes of luggage to put them in, fifty tonnes of sports equipment to play with, seventy tonnes of candles (seven forty-foot containers full of candles for lovers, diners and powercuts!), three containers of ceramics and stoneware, twenty tonnes of aluminium and almost three hundred tonnes of coffee, neither roasted nor frozen. There is half a container's worth of copper for Panama and four more carrying car and bicycle parts for Canada.

Funnels and superstructures hover through the morning rain as tankers and container carriers slide upriver, cut off below their bridges by the mangrove forest. The dock displays the usual stacks of containers, here surrounded by mud, puddled water and oil tanks. Behind the optimistic scrapes and semi-structures of expansion the green realm of the mangroves rolls back to a white horizon. The Can Gio forest is a biosphere reserve now, with UN designation. Its two millennia of growth was stunted relatively recently, when American aircraft sprayed it with defoliant. Along with tigers and crocodiles the mangroves sheltered Vietnamese fighters, giving them cover all the way to the centre of Saigon. The mangroves are being ‘rehabilitated', in the UN's pleasing phrase.

A mix-up with the crew list means no going ashore. This will be a seafarer's visit to Vietnam. I feel I need to stand on it, at least. Shubd, guarding the gangway, is exhausted – everyone is exhausted.

Little trading boats approach us, offering fresh vegetables, potted plants and soft drinks. There are no takers. It is not clear how we would deal if we wanted to, from forty metres up. The craft are shaped like upturned bird skulls, with eyes painted on their beaks. The water is the colour of French mustard. Sorin sees blue and yellow fish in it. By lunchtime we are turning out of our berth.

‘Did anyone actually see a Vietnamese woman?'

‘No.'

‘No.'

‘I can see a woman. She is with a child,' the Captain announces, studying Vung Tau's statue of the Virgin Mary through his binoculars.

The weather breaks open behind us, high washed blue over hills, and the mangroves are vivid now. The French called the town Cap St Jacques; behind the hills, in the distance, tiny figures are spotted over a beach. At this distance they could easily be Australians, or young Americans, running mad along the sand, having their R & R. No one else is gazing backwards now: they are craning forward, hungry to be off.

‘The Captain is bored,' Sorin chuckles, as the pilot calls the course changes and we head down-channel. The boat comes to take the pilot away, and dithers. ‘Let's hit the fucking road,' Sorin growls. He wants to turn the ocean under the hull and winch on the day and haul in the night and arrive at the next port so we can leave it and arrive and leave and sail and sail until he is home again. This is a man who says he has salt water in his veins, and he can tell you to the hour how long it will be before he is flying home. He escorts the pilot down to his boat and returns, grinning.

‘This guy asks for cigarettes for his boss, his brother, his uncle, his mother . . .'

Conversation turns to preparations we will need to make for China. They are very strict about bilge and ballast water, and, Sorin adds, wooden pallets. China fears pests and alien insects from the West.

‘Wooden pallets?' the Captain frowns.

‘Yes. Because they may contain keratin.'

‘But the whole country is
infested with everything shit!
' The Captain roars.

Our mirth does not mollify him. He is still livid about an incident in which the details of a crew list did not quite tally with the numbers on the passports: one or two were smudged and hard to read.

‘They stop loading for two hours!'

(I have been wondering what would happen if impossible things which cannot be allowed to happen were to happen. Now I know. The Captain looks like an outraged owl, mantling over a grievance he will never forget.)

‘They stop loading for two hours! And I had to write an apology to the authorities! And if it happened again I would be banned from Chinese ports . . .?'

He tells this story twice, with increasing incredulity.

The notion of China being infested with everything shit leads to infestation issues in general. The cockroaches in Mexico are the biggest cockroaches there are, according to the Captain. Savannah, Georgia, is infested with alligators, he notes. Sorin and Andreas nod agreement: very big alligators.