Down to the Sea in Ships (21 page)

The lone vessel is a fine sight: responding to the lightest touch of the tiller, a hippogriff or winged courser, obedient to the pilot's hand, like a horse under the hand of a rider. The elegance of the masts and rigging, the agility of the sailors as they scramble along the yards, the different aspects in which the ship presents itself, leaning into a hostile southerly, or fleeing swiftly before a favourable northerly, make this sentient structure one of the wonders of human ingenuity. Now the foaming wave strikes and spurts against the hull; now the peaceful waters divide, without resistance, before the prow. Flags, flames, sails complete the beauty of this palace of Neptune: the lowest sails, deployed to their full width, swell like vast cylinders; the topsails, reefed in the middle, resemble the breasts of a Siren. Animated by an impetuous breeze, the ship with its keel, as with the blade of a plough, cuts with a loud noise through the fields of the sea . . .

Only two aspects of this wonderful roll endure: ships are still sentient structures, and they still cut the fields of the sea. I am desperate to join mine, now, but she is eluding me. She may not be coming into Rotterdam after all. I await news, and study the workers of Europe's busiest container port.

Breakfast in the Zeemanshuis finishes at 0930. At 0928 a Filipino comes in, followed by another, followed by thirty more. People at the tables start to smile at the scale of the invasion. Placid and inexorable, a quiet wave of men breaks around the buffet, sweeping up eggs, bread, juice, tinned fruit and coffee: a breakfast such as they eat on their ships, if they are lucky, and much of it carried here by their ships, of course. Bags crowd the reception area, tagged Cathay Pacific. Their owners are far from feeble men but it takes two to lift some of the suitcases. They bulge with the hoards of those signing off, their goods gathered who knows where, and the provisions of those signing on.

Some of the men have just landed, others are checking out, and there is a whiff of diesel in the dining room now; some have just come ashore. All have timed their run on breakfast to perfection. The first finishers collect on the pavement in front of the hotel, smoking, wincing at the sun on the river and watching the passing barges. You can feel their jetlag. They are dressed alike in puffy bomber jackets and woolly hats.

Four doors down the quay from the Zeemanshuis are the offices of Marlow Navigation, a company based in what it calls ‘the favourable business climate of Cyprus'. Marlow is a manning agency, specialising in supplying crews to shipowners. You can almost smell the laundered shirts of the men inside, as they tap keyboards and make calls. They employ 13,000 seafarers, half Filipino, a third Ukrainian. Marlow recruits all levels, from master to able seamen, but the domination of Filipinos – and their traditional relegation to the lower decks – means that it is the supply of poor men desperate for work to rich men hungry for profit that makes the company money.

Marlow cannot be blamed for the way the globalised world works, but its operation is a feudal and racial pyramid, with the white and powerful at the top. This is clear in Marlow's first newsletter, published in 2007 on the occasion of the company's twenty-fifth birthday. The letter names men who have been with the company for more than seventeen years: each is to be given a watch. Of 111 Filipinos receiving watches, only three are captains. Of seventeen Germans, eleven are captains, the rest chief officers.

A third engineer leans against the railing outside the hotel, feet braced.

‘Reeper ship,' he says.

He's signing on to the
Nagato Reefer
, Japanese-owned, Panama-flagged. She's currently a few miles downriver, coming in. She will be leaving this evening. She began life travelling between New Zealand and Wilmington on the US East Coast, carrying apples, pears, kiwi fruit and meat.

‘Now Rotterdam Las Palmas Rotterdam . . . maybe Russia in May.'

He was on tankers for the last nine months; for the next nine he will live on
Nagato Reefer
. He is employed not by the shipowner, of course, but by a crewing agency like Marlow. (I do not ask which.) Sometimes it will be good, he says, sometimes hard. He is not complaining.

‘Life is sometimes, sometimes. Don't want waves, just plain seas – plain! These are good cigarettes from the Philippines – Blueseal. You take one?'

A Dutch girl jogs past.

‘All ports are good ports,' says the third engineer, watching her, ‘ex-ceb Nigeria.'

The third engineer may have a fair idea of the conditions which await him on the
Nagato Reefer
, which is only a month out of detention in Southampton, where she was inspected by Britain's Maritime and Coastguard Agency. The inspector's report may go some way to explaining the man's phlegmatism, as he draws on his cigarette. Although some of the deficiencies must have been remedied before she was released, in the event of an emergency the third engineer's next ship would have been little short of lethal to her crew.

‘The vessel was detained in Southampton because none of the lifeboats had drain plugs and the No. 1 battery was discharged in each lifeboat; the magnetic compass bowl contained a large bubble; the officer responsible for the radio operation was not familiar with the power supply arrangement; the chief engineer could not explain the operation of the CO² fire-fighting system; none of the engineers knew which steering gear was fed from the emergency power supply and the port life-raft painter was tied to the ship and not to the weak link. In addition the records of rest for the chief engineer were false on a number of days during November and there were no records of rest kept for December; two out of three deck-head lights were inoperative in the CO² room; and there was no record of the last annual survey on the International Oil Pollution Prevention (IOPP) certificate.'

Now the men group on the quayside. They have changed into hooded tops; some of the younger ones are in t-shirts, though it was snowing yesterday and there are slicks of ice in the river. The men photograph each other and set out for the sights.

‘The Filipinos are amazing,' said Chris, my Danish friend. ‘Put them in any port and in no time at all they find the cheapest shops, the best bars and the worst women . . .'

No man walks alone; two are briefly arm in arm. Whatever else you may think of their lives their comradeship seems enviable.

The Reverend Steve Axtell ministers to the Seaman's Mission in Rotterdam: he sees the solidarity and vulnerability of these men in a way others do not.

‘The last thing was a tanker, she was carrying edible oil. A man had died on the voyage, a Filipino, and the crew wanted a mass for him,' his voice softens. ‘And they wanted me to bless their ship. Worried about the bad vibes.'

The vibes in the Zeemanshuis vary. Two Filipinos are caught out: they have no room, no money for sightseeing, they are shattered and their pick-up is not until later. They sleep on a bench in the lobby. Not long after nightfall a Marlow minibus turns up.

No one would accuse Marlow of being a gangmaster of the sea. The company could point to its training facilities, its international certification and reputation, its pedigree and blue-chip clients. Is it Marlow's fault that the industry allows it to profit from absolving shipowners of responsibility for the men who do their dirtiest work? (The local Maersk office is an extravagant double skyscraper a mile up the quay. They can certainly see the port from up there, and the ships, but not the Zeemanshuis, which falls below their sightline.) Two miles from here, across the river, Glenn Cuevas, a thirty-six-year-old father of two from the Philippines, was crushed to death by an eight-tonne container. In the pre-dawn darkness of 21 January 2007, Mr Cuevas was placing twistlocks on top of a container when another was lowered down on top of him. An able seaman, he was employed by Marlow Navigation as a crewman on the coaster
Eucon Leader
. Marlow also managed the vessel. Cuevas should never have touched the steel boxes that killed him. International agreements forbid crews from handling containers: this is partly because the men are often drained, exhausted and overworked when they arrive in port, and partly because cargo handling is the union-protected province of dockers and stevedores, who are expert at it. It is possible for a master to ask a local union to waive their right to handle his cargo but no such agreement was reached. Mr Cuevas's captain was in the habit of ordering his crew to lash and unlash the containers despite having been warned about it – severally, according to the International Transport Workers' Federation. The
Eucon Leader
was covered by an ITF agreement which specifically forbade cargo handling by the crew.

Who put Glenn Cuevas in harm's way? Seven years after the incident a legal case to determine liability is still ongoing. The Captain had questions to answer: what happens on his ship is his responsibility. But captains act at the shipowner's behest, certainly where savings and expenditure are concerned. A family firm, Bernd Becker GmbH have been in the business for over a century. They either ordered or approved the practice, or had no knowledge of the regime on the vessel – in which case they must have wondered how the Captain was saving them so much on dockers' fees. Thanks to the efforts of the ITF and the Dutch FNV Bondgenoten union, Marlow and its insurers paid $200,000 compensation to the family of Mr Cuevas.

The lovely islands of Antigua and Barbuda are also implicated, since the Beckers flag their ships there. This means it is the Antiguan authorities' prerogative to investigate the incident. No such action was taken. Indeed, such an investigation would have made news throughout the shipping world. The reason so many owners flag their vessels in countries like Liberia, Panama and Antigua is precisely because shipowners know that in the event of incident or disaster the authorities of these places will not hold them to any significant account.

Are there outstanding questions for Marlow Navigation? The company employed Mr Cuevas: one can only speculate whose side it would have taken if Mr Cuevas had complained that the Captain was asking him to risk his life. Would Marlow have allied itself with a lowly seafarer? Would any manning agency make common cause with an aggrieved individual among the hundreds of thousands of men they supply to the market, and with him confront a shipowner, one of their prized clients? Perhaps it would indeed – which would make his death Mr Cuevas's own fault, for not complaining or refusing.

(Fortunately, blacklisting in the industry is universally denied, at least by shipowners and crewing agencies, so it cannot have been fear of losing his livelihood that made Mr Cuevas attempt a deadly job he was not qualified to do.)

It surely was not the ship's fault, anyway: the
Eucon Leader
is a smart blue and orange coastal feeder, engaged in shifting containers between Germany and the Low Countries. She was shiny new, barely two months out of her Romanian shipyard, when Mr Cuevas was killed. Strangely, she is the only element of this story which was verifiably changed by the death of Glenn Cuevas. The
Eucon Leader
has been renamed
Jork Ruler
and is now flagged in Cyprus. The Beckers welcome enquiries from paying passengers who might like to travel on her.

History may conclude that Glenn Cuevas died by his own decisions. Like many crewmen, he may well have been eager to do the unlashing work, despite the dangers, because it is paid cash in hand. If he made more than three hundred dollars on the day he died it would be surprising. But then the sea is a surprising place: perhaps his captain and the Beckers paid him far above the going rate.

It is not surprising that nothing of this makes that inaugural Marlow newsletter, which came out at the end of 2007. (Mr Cuevas had died that January.) You would not hurry to take the matter up with the butch Dutch skinhead who comes to collect the next batch of Filipinos from the Zeemanshuis. He rides shotgun next to the driver in the Marlow minibus. He sees his tired charges safely inside, slams the door on the small, pale brown men, and they are off to sea again.

You wonder, watching them go, if Marlow Navigation was named after Joseph Conrad's Marlow, seaman, navigator and the narrator of
Heart of Darkness
, that feverish indictment of colonialism.

THE PICK-UP
in Rotterdam is changed to Antwerp. Antwerp in February is funereal. The city's population of Orthodox Jews wear plastic bags over their black hats in defence against the scudding rain. There is a mile of diamond dealerships wrapped around the station, most of them closed. It is as if there was once a population here who ate diamonds, drank diamonds, read diamonds, smoked diamonds and died out, leaving the little white stones to gather dust behind steel grilles. A hotel near the port seems a good idea until you reach it. The Etap in Luithagen Haven is a frontier post surrounded by miles of spray and trucks, and containers, containers everywhere and not a ship to carry them. The pilots of Antwerp are on strike. Among the charging lorries the only life forms are two magpies speaking Flemish, and one fellow guest, a professional diver.

‘It's the third most dangerous job in the world,' he says.

‘After what?'

‘Astronaut, baby, diver – we all have lifelines.'

‘Good money?'

‘No, not really,' he laughs. ‘Not so much. Everyone thinks so . . .'

‘Why then?'

‘I was on dredgers. Building windmills in the North Sea. We lost an anchor and we had to send a diver down to get it. I wanted to get it!'

Chemical mist from the nearest refinery blows out of a sodium sky. There are five oil refineries around Antwerp's docks, attended by a cluster of petro-chemical works whose density is only surpassed by Houston, Texas. Their products taint the daybreak, fouling the wind and the February rain, which stings like blown grit.

The diver flicks his cigarette butt away. ‘I will be in the water in an hour,' he says, contentedly. ‘I love the water. Must have water. I live in Ostend, right by the sea.'