Down to the Sea in Ships (18 page)

There is nowhere to go, only narrow corridors, workspaces and cramped messes where eyes are constantly on you. The ship house, the accommodation block, is all angles and nooks and tight corners where you are easily trapped. In the narrow passages bodies must squeeze by each other, and a cabin is a dreadful place for someone in despair. As small as a cell, shifting and never silent, never allowing the illusion that you are not where you are, and not safe, either: there is always a copy of your key somewhere. If you were being stalked by a senior officer there really would be no escape.

Croatia's Adriatic coast in mid-June is a sparkling littoral of wooded islands and clear waters. It must have seemed an alien and fearful place to Akhona. Her captain said she had agreed to leave the ship in Trieste, which was only two days away. The captain and the employer, Safmarine, are satisfied that rather than wait two days she chose to climb over the rail and jump, knowing that she was no strong swimmer. The chief officer involved was briefly suspended from duty. He has never been named, much less charged.

We sail in a benign environment, comparatively. In the workshop is a traditional calendar, familiar from the car repair garages of the 1980s, from which a young blonde woman, unencumbered by clothing, beams enthusiasm and felicity. At meals and on the bridge we do not talk of women; perhaps, like alcohol, they are better out of mind because out of sight. What takes place in the privacy of our cabins only we can know, but certainly Facebook and emails play their part. Flirting is wonderful, of course, but a conversation with N, a friend in the crew, reveals where it can lead.

N is in a terrible mess. He has a girl in Hong Kong who wants to marry him, and two girls in the Philippines, as well a wife. He is torn four ways. It is obvious what they see in him: N is amused and amusing, open-souled and energetic, with a shout of a laugh. Our conversation about his love life descends into complete confusion. N is beset by wistfulness and longing on every side; it is difficult to keep up with which woman he is talking about

‘So what is the first thing you are going to do when you get home?'

‘My car!'

‘Your car?'

‘Ahhh, my car, and my gun.'

‘Your gun?'

‘I have gun. I am police some time.'

‘And what will you do with your money?'

‘Money soon go! Go go go. Everybody comes, family, friends, one-day millionaire!'

‘And this business with your wife, and the other women . . .'

‘Ahhh don't know. You know is because internet. Meet on internet. And because I am seafarer you know.'

‘You're popular.'

‘Too popular!'

All afternoon we sail up the Japanese coast, which is high, high mountains along the skyline. The last sights of land are the peaks and ridges in the dimming air and a red sun sinking behind them.

It is another beautiful, confusing day on the fringe of the western North Pacific, a hundred nautical miles off Japan, bright blue again, after a peachy dawn. We eat a good breakfast because at 10 a.m. all the clocks go forward to 1 p.m., the same time zone as Vladivostok.

‘We will have pancakes today!' says the Captain.

‘Why's that, Captain?'

‘Why not?'

So we eat pancakes mid-morning, which is now early afternoon. The wind is freshening; a strong north-westerly, thirty-four knots, blows over a sea hard blue, ridden by foaming horses. In the engine room they are cleaning a piston and changing some oil but we still make twenty-one knots. The Captain is dealing with the long arm of Homeland Security, which wants to know my visa number. There are mutterings about the kind of reception we can expect.

In the afternoon I walk up to the fo'c'sle to see the bulbous bow buried deep in the water and listen to the blade of the forefoot cutting fast through the waves. The only sounds here are the sliced slush of the ocean splitting open and the curled rush of the bow wave. The sea is scattered with the broken remains of pine trees, logs, twigs, branches, what might have been a barn door, a smashed container – and plastic. There are plastic bottles, a bucket, broken yellow shards, plastic boxes, crates, bags and crisp packets. The North Pacific gyre is a purgatory of waste. We are carrying a thousand tonnes of ‘plastic articles, new and used' and a further four thousand tonnes of ‘miscellaneous manufactured articles' from China. A percentage of them will end up in the Pacific, in a rubbish patch said to be the size of Texas. We are only skimming its fringe: the main body is to the south of us, circling in the centre of the gyre, the convergence zone.

Two white birds, egret-like, approach but do not land. Bronze-backed cormorants hunt flying fish off the bow.

We surge on, accompanied by one ship,
Ever Charming
, which has the same destination and date as us but is on a different course, peeling away to the south. Our ship's heartbeat never stops. I have never known a machine do so much mighty work so unceasingly; machines have always been something you switch on and off.

At midnight Shubd says, ‘You are starting your first Great Circle navigation!'

He shows me the course, sixty degrees: we are going up one side of the globe's greatest ocean and down the other. We have entered the North Pacific proper, having crossed the Japan Trench.

‘It's 6,431.75 nautical miles to our berth in Long Beach,' Chris says.

It is a warm night, twenty-two degrees, and the sea is calm with occasional breakers. There are few clouds and a waxing moon. Earlier we had strong wind on the port quarter so Chris trimmed the ship, shifting water ballast to that side to correct the heel. In the evening a light roll becomes a gentle surging motion. At 3 a.m. the rolls become sharper and the two-thirds moon turns heavy gold and sinks, leaving a ruddy aura. The wind seems to come from the stars.

Reflections on
Titanic
at breakfast; I watched the film last night. Sorin says I was wrong to mock the helmsman for turning the wheel to port when the command was clearly starboard: when rudders were controlled by ropes you did indeed spin the wheel the opposite way from your intended direction, he says. The Captain says SOLAS, the society for saving lives at sea, originates from the disaster. This thought is interrupted by Sorin's discovery that our orange juice is good until 2212. We will be 150 years in our graves but the juice will still be fine.

‘We carry tonnes of the syrup in stainless steel tanks,' says the Captain. He does not drink the juice.

We watch two of our smoke-jumpers being ‘killed' during the fire drill as they simulate opening the engine room hatch, behind which is the ‘fire'.

‘They stood on the wrong side,' Chris says, ‘the hinge side, so when they touch the pins the pressure differential blows it open – bang!' He smacks his fist into his palm.

The officers say there is a problem with the fire hoses. They are too heavy, wide and hard to handle under pressure. Even getting them around corners is tricky. There is a narrower gauge with a better – adjustable – spray available, which is used by the Danish fire brigade, but they cost more. The lifeboat still gives me the creeps.

Another high-skied day, with the wind now cooler than the sun is hot. In the afternoon we all assemble to watch a corporate safety video. It is a classic of the genre. You can almost hear every eyeball in the room swivelling to the only woman in it. Sadly the actress is playing a bozo sitting at a table of bozos in a ghastly office while an irritating Scottish bozo asks rhetorical questions. We all struggle to stay tuned until we come to horrifying footage of a cargo ship on fire. The irritating Scot identifies something he calls OAD syndrome – only a drill – but insists we should drill until procedures become second nature. Then he admits that, were we faced with the real thing, everything would change constantly. Great emphasis is placed on the Captain going to the bridge and staying there, and ensuring that the fire plan is followed. The chief would be his eyes, the crew would fight the flames and do barrier cooling. The Scot says fires at sea are very rare. The Captain grunts and says he has had many small fires in his career. They must have been small, considering he was on supertankers.

‘Horace! Come to bridge.'

There's a bird, one of the red-footed boobies, doing a stiff-winged albatross impression over the bow.

‘It will stay with us all the way and catch another ship back,' Sorin says. I am doubtful but he says he has seen this many times.

The visibility was thirty miles at least this evening and tonight it is not much less; the sea heaving, alive everywhere and moonlit.

‘I saw a fishing boat earlier,' Shubd says, ‘on AIS. Going back to Japan.' He studies charts which are only white depths, but for a shred of Kamchatka and the tail of the Aleutian Islands, at the very top.

Pancakes and time-jump again. America says I have the wrong visa, though I went to Naples to get the one specified by the company.

‘Welcome to our life!' says Andreas.

‘Problems,' says the Captain. We send a volley of documents to the Americans. When they come aboard they will take over the library and process us. Smart dress and best behaviour is the plan. The dining table becomes a trumping match of horror stories. The Captain recalls a Danish master who started his ship without permission after an inspection.

‘The coastguard come back and arrest him and put him in jail. Six months!'

Sorin and his entire crew were lined up on deck in Seattle, hands on the rail.

‘Meatheads,' he says. ‘With guns, on steroids.'

‘In special tight trousers,' adds the Captain.

Sorin's ship was raided by a team armed with machine guns. One of them, his finger on the trigger, slipped – and emptied half a magazine into the walls and floor of the bridge.

‘Just because we are seafarers why do they treat us like criminals?' asks Andreas, plaintively. ‘They asked one Filipino if he was married. Yes. And kids? Yes. So how many girlfriends do you have here in the US? This is an outrageous question!'

The discussion closes with a seafarer's maxim: ‘Better a sister in the whorehouse than a brother in the US Coastguard,' says someone, to sniggers.

Outside there are vast horizons, thirty-mile views in all directions, low squadrons of white cloud, no ship on any screen and invigoratingly clean air. Later our bird reappears, riding the updraught at the bow. It has companions with black backs, white fronts and a black band on their tails. They look like albatrosses. They slice away and plunge on the weather side, chasing flying fish. Sorin saw a dolphin family in a sea the colour of rain. The sunlight is cold; an eerie calm. Our Great Circle takes us across the North Pacific Basin, five to six kilometres deep, to the Emperor Seamount chain, which are south-running mountains, some with peaks rising to nine hundred metres below the surface. We will cross them and steam over the Emperor Trough, seven kilometres deep in places, then out towards the Chinook Trough. Sunset is cold and we are still bearing northerly.

I draw the curtains and there is a whale outside, a humpback. It seems extraordinary to come across him – how much life there must be below us, from krill to submarines. Later there are two more whales, one surfacing in the only streak of sun, a splash of gold in hundreds of square miles of hard grey sea.

Breakfast news is a bleak and typical selection of the doings of the sea. Eleven Chinese sailors have been killed in the Mekong delta, near Burma, over heroin, it is thought. A Costamare vessel has run aground on a reef in the Bay of Plenty, New Zealand, and spilled much oil. The crew are safe. She was doing seventeen knots in clear weather and the reef is well charted. In Gioia Tauro, Calabria, one of Europe's larger container ports, a hundred and thirty-five million euros' worth of cocaine has been confiscated from the'Ndrangheta, the Calabrian Mafia, who plunder the docks at will.

We are travelling in the middle of a high pressure and the sea is very strange today, grey dark and slippy-sloppy, like a great frying pan full of water, unstable in its own mass. There are no waves. We are still seeing scraps and fragments of plastic.

‘Ten years ago we throw everything over the side,' Sorin says. ‘Paper, card and metal still.' But he is proud that Maersk is a signatory to the ISO convention against pollution.

‘The Indian Ocean can be calm like this in the north-east monsoon season,' Shubd says. ‘Like a lake.'

There are some small birds on the containers behind the bridge. In defiance of regulations I throw them some cake, but I fear they did not eat it. The US Coastguard would be very angry: food anywhere on the ship earns you serious trouble. Sorin found some small birds dead. He says the big oceangoers are perching around the bow: ‘They like to hide up there.'

‘We are on the far side of the world,' says Chris. I spend the morning in the engine room and the bilges, the lowest accessible part of the ship, joining the day shift at 0530. We drink coffee and say nothing. The expressions of the crew are like those of farmers, that same shyness and a phlegmatic blend of resolve and resignation at the start of work. Who am I to understand their world? I have posted a blog address in the lift and some have read it. Joel and Noel are particularly enthusiastic about someone telling their story; the others are not sure. I do not speak Tagalog and most of them have seafaring English at best. One, G, is extremely cautious around me because he had his computer seized at Felixstowe by the Black Gang – UK Customs inspectors. Whatever they found on his hard drive rated as ‘explicit material' and was confiscated. I would like to know if this was just pornography, or appalling evil, but can find no way to ask. At six o'clock we go down, boilersuited, to the engine room. G clearly does not want to talk about it. Hermanath, Rohan's replacement, is wide awake, assigning men to the day's tasks. Hermanath is an energetic young man from New Delhi, bright and alert as a light. ‘We have an oil leak in the motor for the port stabiliser,' he announces with enthusiasm. ‘Let's go!'