Down to the Sea in Ships (19 page)

From the engine room you duck through a half-sized hatch into the engineers' passage, a grey and dim-lit corridor running the length of the ship. This is the refuge in the event of a pirate attack and the only means of going forward in bad weather. It would be a desperate place in which to hide from pirates: nothing to sit on, no daylight, no communications and no sense of the world at all, just an elongated cell stretched as long as the ship. You imagine the fear, the waiting and listening. A third of the way along it Hermanath opens a hatch in the floor.

‘Careful here. Go down only when the man below is out of the way.'

We descend five ladders, each room-high, to the bilges. Here is a riddled honeycomb of steel compartments and high sills, narrow spaces and pressing bulkheads which conspire to trip and bump you. We work our way backward to a point where the hull starts to curve in towards us, and here is Roy, on all fours, rags on his hands and knees, mopping up the oil spill by crawling in it. There is nothing else to see and Roy is in no position to be interviewed. Hermanath leads the climb back to the engine room. Here the deck shakes crazily under your feet, your teeth pretty well chatter and the noise is horrendous, even through earplugs. The heat washes over you off the engine in waves which seem to push you back. A shift lasts all day with breaks for breakfast at 7.30, coffee at ten, and lunch.

Hermanath continues on his rounds. He is twenty-nine and has been ten years at sea; he has the same bounce as Joel, the lightness of men who were born to it. He talks about the satisfaction of his work.

‘Yes, it's a real man's job!' he says. ‘I can't sleep without the noise of the engine. If it stops you get your shoes on.'

When he is on watch (three nights on, three nights off) he has an alarm in his cabin which sounds when any of the ship's thousand alarm points trips. Everyone says there are too many alarms.

‘It's because they can't have a monitoring point without an alarm,' says the chief, scornfully.

In the repair shop Prashant is wielding a sledgehammer, banging a bolt out of a scorched and pitted injection unit, which is a thing like a milled steel traffic cone. He jumps up on to the workbench to get a better swing. By lunch I am woozy with the noise and the scrambling up and down. I have been using the gym but I can see why most of the crew do not need it. We put the clocks forward again yesterday: the Captain says everyone is tired on the day after time change. But we agree it has been a good Tuesday, so we might as well have another one tomorrow. We cross the date line tonight.

Wakeful at 3 a.m. I go up to the bridge. There is a single puddle of full moonlight dead astern.

‘You never see the Pacific this calm,' says Chris, in the darkness. ‘I had one captain who was out here in a storm, a real bad one,' he says, quietly. ‘All you can do is turn the ship into it and ride it until you break out. That one lasted three days and at one point they had an engine shutdown. Within five minutes they were beam-on to the waves. They were rolling forty-five degrees but since the indicator only went to forty-five degrees it was probably further.'

‘What do you do then?'

‘Strap yourself in and pray.'

‘Sheesh.'

‘We don't want that,' Chris said, with feeling. Our GM – our centre of gravity – is currently so low that the graphs say we could roll fifty-eight degrees before the ship becomes ‘unstable'.

‘What does that mean?'

‘We capsize.'

Joel is in the mess at dawn. He is up early because he slept through his alarm yesterday. Sorin says he could not get out of his bunk either. Joel says that whenever they hear of a ship in trouble all their stomachs lurch. ‘First we want to know if the crew are OK, then we want to learn something from it.'

The sea is cold shades of blue. Rings of sun spotlight puddles of gold behind us. We are at latitude 45 degrees 31 minutes North and making southwards, so we have passed the zenith of our Great Circle. Our longitude is 167 degrees 25 minutes West, which puts us at the eastern end of the Chinook Trough, which is five and a half kilometres deep below our keel. We are rolling gently, placidly, about halfway between the Bay of Alaska and Hawaii.

The Aleutian Trench is off to the north of us and our next conquest will be the Surveyor Fracture Zone. We are a week from land in any direction and Conrad's peace of God is here with us. The wars of men will not be forgotten, however. We have received a warning about missile testing in Naval Air Warfare Center's sea range, just off the coast of California, in an area we will steam straight through. In the evening I subject Prashant and Hermanath to
The Ghost Writer
, in revenge for them putting me through
Thor
. They think it pretty terrible.

It is a strange night. I wake at quarter to two, convinced by body clock and lighted darkness outside that it must be nearly morning. The night is overcast and there has been rain; the air has the fresh cold smell of it. Chris is on the bridge. He says he likes the midnight to 4 a.m. watch.

‘Lots of chief officers say they miss it. You can do whatever you want!'

(As long as you do it in darkness, maintain your night vision, do not fall asleep, answer all your alarms, which bleat every ten minutes, keep a good watch and do not leave the bridge.)

The night becomes very beautiful, the moon full and bright, lighting silver splashes on the sea. Huge clouds glow low over waters of dark imperial blue. On the return trip they will circle north of the Aleutian Islands and sail down the east coast of Japan. It will be much colder and the ship will be covered with ice.

Chris will have five hours ashore in LA before the voyage to Shanghai, because he will have to unplug reefers and keep an eye on the stevedores. The engineers have more time off in port: Hermanath referred to the deck officers' job as ‘staring out of the window'. There does not seem to be much of that going on: Chris is plotting the next Great Circle and the course back to China.

I fall asleep listening to the engine beating its rhythm. She has a fine, gentle sway-roll on her: it is like being rocked in the arms of someone walking. With crews always male, or overwhelmingly so, the ship becomes a strange plait of feminine archetypes – wife, mother and mistress. They tend to her constantly and she holds them while they sleep.

The wind is cold and strong enough to blow you over on deck, and the sea is all colour: purple, green, black-brown and turquoise. There are bodies on the steel, a dead cockroach and a dead fledgling. How did the fledgling get here? A nest on a container? We have seen no birds for two days, only water, clouds, stars, moon and sun. There is no more rubbish on the surface, just the keen feeling of our speed, twenty-two knots. The roll is bigger and the waves seem to race past, jumping. Our starboard side is all salt-crystallised, though the wind comes from port: the ship's high sides make it eddy back strongly on the sheltered side, blowing the tops off the leeward waves so that their spray streams back towards us, white as a sea wizard's hair. The roll is particular. She has this one version whereby you lean to starboard, pause, and when you think she is going to roll back she rolls further.

We are over the Surveyor Fracture; next is the Medocino Fracture. The westward movement of the Pacific plate over the last seventy million years has created this stretched riddle of fissures and ridges, the mightiest of which is the seven-thousand-kilometre-long Emperor Seamount range. The tail of these mountains reaches all the way down to Hawaii.

Take a mental image of the younger volcanoes of Hawaii, of their striated and scarred sides rising thousands of feet, towering ridges and peaks, and submerge them in kilometres of water. No light from the surface penetrates down here; this a world of utmost black, an upthrust of mountains of monstrous height and depth. The creatures living on their sides and gliding like slow birds over their deeps are only vaguely known to science. Now and then nets are lowered down from the bluey-silver regions miles above, as remote from these depths as the upper atmosphere is from the surface of the earth. The nets are held open by steel plates, ‘canyonbusters', which weigh up to five tonnes. The cable at the net's mouth is threaded through chafing gear, steel balls or rollers which measure up to a metre in diameter. The whole assemblage is dragged through the canyons and over the ridges of the seamount.

Life grows slowly in the depths of the ocean, lives long and does not replace itself swiftly. The deep trawl scoops up whatever it happens upon and leaves rubble. Tons of corals are uprooted and destroyed – there are many more coral species in the deep seas than in shallow tropical waters. These corals support entire communities of specific, endemic species which are wiped out with them. The haul often contains new and ‘relic' species, previously known only from fossils. From the 1960s to the early 1990s the Emperor Seamounts were particularly targeted by Japanese and Russian trawlers in search of such deepwater fish as armorhead and alfonsino. Annual catches fell from 35,000 to 5000 tonnes before the practice was abandoned. The fisheries are not expected to recover. Fish caught and discarded as bycatch included two previously unknown species of dragonets (which look like they have stepped out of fossils – long, fan-finned, big-eyed beasts like miniature Chinese dragons) and the highfin dogfish, only twenty-one specimens of which have ever been recorded. The Jurassic period has not finished down here. Conservationists fear the effect of seamount trawling on small populations with a limited range and slow reproductive cycle is catastrophic. One study followed the course of a trawl in the Gulf of Alaska. Seven years after the dragnets were hauled up there was no sign of any young coral in place of what had been destroyed.

Seen from the perspective of the deep we are alien, a quasi-Martian species inhabiting a universe of almost entirely different physical and temporal conditions. As the
Gerd
pounds on far above it is as if she is a spacecraft, one of many in her vastly high orbit. Now and then one gropes down, blindly, with a net. Plunder and pollution are our only contributions to the worlds under the sea.

Early bed under glittering stars, then woke at 4.45, so got up. Others were up too. Joel said: ‘Thank God for the stabilisers! If they weren't out, in this weather, no sleep!'

Another dawn, another breakfast: conversation is fitful these days. The sea is growing off the port bow, where it has been all this time. Bands of clear follow bands of mist over water an astonishing colour, blue and purple-black and bustling with waves: it is strange and exciting to look out from the deck all the way to the horizon and see nothing still anywhere. Busy wraiths in squalls of rain hurry over us, coming and going, commuting to infinity.

Chris is in an excellent mood. Everyone is excited about LA – we're still more than two days out but it feels just over the horizon. You can feel the forces acting to bend the ship, and you feel her flexing against them.

‘You should see the atmosphere on a ship after three days of storms and no sleep,' Chris says, with grim relish.

‘Pretty bad?'

‘Poison.'

The forces are peculiar and intermittent, like hands pressing down on your shoulders and your neck. Sorin says you need to drink a lot of water in storms, ‘Because all the guys are sick.'

He is in a meditative mood during his watch. He is also flying home from LA.

‘What does it take to be a good officer, Sorin?'

He thinks for a moment. ‘You need to be able to feel the ship – like a body. Like a creature.'

‘Is this a good ship?'

He looks down her, all the way to the foremast and the Pacific.

‘Oh yeah, she is good ship.'

‘What else?'

‘To be good seafarer? I think you need to feel salt on your skin. Once a seaman always a seaman.'

‘And suppose your son says he wants to go to sea. What will you say?'

‘I would respect him, but I would warn him. About loneliness . . . isolation. About needing to be strong with yourself.'

It is dark and rainy now and very lively. Outside the cargo is singing and thumping in whines and bangs; loose things in the crates are booming. We have been boarded by pirate poltergeists. Showers flood, wardrobe doors fling themselves open, batteries and lighters fly off desks, a pencil crosses the chart table of its own accord, my lamp revolves on its base and the bed refuses sleep.

As I go up to the fo'c'sle at daybreak it is still dark under the containers. The prow is silent and the ocean streams towards us; weather here comes right down to the water as we drive into it and through it, through patches of light and towers of dim, through trunks of rain like a forest. We steam under low arches of cloud, through columns of vapour, the sea black beneath silver pillars. Now it is day, now it is night, the sea's surface unbroken and heaving like the flanks of a beast breathing. There are spirits of blue rain. You would not be astonished to see phantom ships, sea monsters or the edge of the world. How those old sailors needed their courage, even in morning warmth. The day then breaks into a vaulting blue with scars of white cloud high in the clearest air I have ever seen, and a patina of vapour like an eggshell glaze, translucent in one quadrant, and everywhere else screaming clear, sun scintillant on the waters, which are stilled.

The Captain disengages the autopilot and takes the helm. In order to approach America we must confirm that we have tested the steering gear. He turns his ship to port and to starboard. He slows her, stops her, goes astern and spins her on her axis. These feats accomplished, we resume our course towards Long Beach.

To take a vessel to the Land of the Free you must clean the entire ship. You must search end to end for moths, particularly the Asian Gypsy Moth, and destroy them, plunging any colonies of eggs you find in boiling alcohol. You must switch from burning heavy fuel to low-sulphur diesel. You must submit crew details and an effects list, to ensure that no one tries to sell a load of Hong Kong iPads on the sly. You must destroy or remove any spills, garbage or organic matter. You must lock all meat, fruit and veg in stores and seal them. You must convert the library into an interview room – we will stand a metre away from the table, with nothing in our pockets and our hands where they can see them. I have been repeatedly told that a Filipino on his first voyage to the US is not allowed to land. Presumably by not blowing up his ship in port, and by returning, he proves he is neither a terrorist nor immigration-inclined. Finally, when you have done all this you sail in across a firing range. The Captain is particularly concerned about the state of the bins in our cabins. ‘Not one apple core. Not one piece of orange peel or we will have all kinds of bullshit. We will be fined!'