Down to the Sea in Ships (29 page)

Minus the slovenliness, and for the most part the bitterness and fear, every other element of this description is present on the
Pembroke
, applying in different degrees throughout the hierarchy, from the wipers and oilers to the captain. The men who fought the Battle of the Atlantic were my shipmates, in fact. Richard Woodman's assessment of the ships' crews has a particular resonance: ‘All classes of merchant ships employed large numbers of non-Europeans. They were all paid less than their white colleagues, lascars, for example, receiving around 30 rupees a month, about £2 5s., while their living conditions were abominable.'

John and I sit in the pilots' seats either side of the main controls, and watch the Atlantic well up, from blunt grey force five to choppy and whitened six, and back down to rumbling monotony, and we sail through rain into mist, through grey into sickly yellow cloud, with the visibility shortening and stretching, and the current eddying, sometimes a knot with us, sometimes a knot against.

‘Oh I love storms me, love'em, yeah. I've been through hurricanes and typhoons. Love'em! Why? Why not? Exciting. I was on a small ship, smaller than this, and she stood up like that!'

He points a flat hand at the ceiling.

‘We thought she was going to fall over backwards. The chief officer's wife was on board, poor woman . . . When you go to bed you have to lock your hands behind you, right? Like that? Lock them behind you under the mattress, or you fly off – she hits waves and stops dead. Everything's just smashed. In tankers the sea breaks over the ship. You can watch big ships bending because of the torsion, twisting like, so you steer one way and the bow goes the other.

‘Once I was blind for five minutes. We were coming into the Malacca Strait and a lightning bolt hit one wing of the bridge, came right through the bridge and hit the other wing. It went between me and the captain, just this incredibly bright white light. We had both doors open, it came in there and went out there. There was this smell of burning – rubber from the deck. It left a scorch mark the width of the bridge.

‘I've seen lightning hit a thirty-foot mast and leave nothing but a tiny stump. The Captain was right by it, he nearly had a heart attack. Same place, the Malacca Strait, I saw lightning cut a VLCC in half. Half a million tonnes, she was. We were going parallel to them, tank cleaning, and they were cleaning tanks too. We had an inert gas system for safety but they didn't. The lightning hits them, massive bang, and when I saw them again the whole ship was split down the middle, opened up like a sardine can. Her cranes were in the water. The people in the accommodation survived. But not the people on the deck.'

It is almost dark as we drive hard into the swells. The wind has been growing again, throwing spray high over the containers where it hangs in the air like rogue spells. We have had our heavy weather briefing and been told to lash everything down.

‘We should be prepared for pitching, rolling, corkscrewing and slamming,' the Captain says. Slamming is the one which interests me. At supper Pieter recalls a typhoon: ‘We still talk about it. It didn't last very long but you don't need a typhoon to last very long. We did our heavy weather preparation and there was a steel block in the engine room, it must have weighed two hundred kilogrammes. I checked and thought, yeah, it's not going anywhere. When I found it again it had jumped two five-inch sills, gone along the deck and fallen two decks down. It wasn't too good . . .'

Pieter has a sweetly patient grin, much used but not worn out.

By 2030 hours we are off the southern tip of the Isengaard Ridge with eight kilometres of water beneath the keel. The ship stumbles and rears. Our course is more northerly, 282 degrees; our speed a steady eighteen knots. There is utter, utter darkness outside and the radar is a green and yellow sunburst of wave-echoes. As we pitch and buck there is a feeling of madness, of dashing wildness on the bridge. The digital chart displays its customary caution: ‘This chart is not up to date – DO NOT USE FOR NAVIGATION.' Oh well . . .

We may be one of six hundred in the Maersk fleet but we feel like a lone tramp tonight, running blind. There has been a shadow aboard since the awful news about the
Maersk Luz
this morning. People still sing and whoop but you can hear the defiance in it.

Chicoy is very solemn. I fear he is prone to sulks. The bridge during his night watch is Filipino territory, you feel. There is a sense of division on this ship which is marked compared to the
Gerd
: white Dutch officers, brown Filipino crew, and no Indians, Russians or Romanians to bridge the gap or bring the two groups together in English. The Captain is quicker with ‘they' than ‘the crew'.

‘They sort out their problems themselves,' he said.

Procedure is different, too. There has been no tour of the ship, apart from my informal explorations. We have emergency drill once a month, John says, and I would not want to find out how the lifeboats perform if they are of a piece with the reeking, leaking diesel fumes, the broken lock on my cabin door and the chart we navigate by.

After midnight John takes the watch.

‘Have you ever seen something you couldn't explain, John?'

‘Oh aye, I saw a flying saucer in the Indian Ocean. The mate says have you seen this? There was this blue light in the sky. I thought it was a plane or something, but it came right at us, too fast for a plane, and it was leaving this neon blue trail, bright neon blue. As it came over we could see it was a cigar shape, blue, and leaving this neon blue trail which lasted for some time. I thought no plane can leave that, no rocket can do that . . . I've seen some rare weather conditions. Greece? No, Turkey, there was a spinning cloud in the sky, and the water was spinning, like a tornado, but there was nothing in between. Just the cloud spinning and the water spinning. I thought it was going to hit us but it went behind. Do you know about that lighthouse in Scotland? All the keepers disappeared. The table was set for a meal and they were all just – gone.'

It is terrifying on the bridge wing now, the sky angry and torn, the clouds ripped open to a few shards of stars. You feel your courage cowed out there, as you cling to the steel and the wind rips tears from your eyes while the ship dives into invisible troughs, thump-thunders and totters up, the forces pulling you backwards, and waves of God knows what size and intention, indistinguishable but palpable, are in motion everywhere, the darkness racingly alive.

To even consider a convoy on a night like this is to realise how ringed the seamen were with devil's alternatives. No sailor wants storms – apart from John – but here you did not want calms either, because storms kept the U-boats down. Peter-Erich Cremer commanded the
U-333
in the winter of 1942. ‘North Atlantic winter! In such weather waging war stops of its own accord because everyone has enough on his hands without it – even when we unexpectedly sighted a tanker about 3000 metres away. I tried to keep contact . . . it being impossible to attack straight away because of the high seas and colossal swell. Wind force 10. At one moment the tanker was on a mountainous wave, the next she had disappeared into the valley. Then I lost sight of her altogether.'
²

Cremer would have found us hard to hit tonight: at eighteen knots we are going at three times the speed of the slow convoys, which crept along at six. You shudder at the thought of trying to launch a lifeboat into the freezing, unstable immensity. Being in the water or on a raft is unimaginable. You wanted moonless darkness because the attacks generally came at night, and when the ships were silhouetted the hunters were more likely to be successful. But such a wild blackout as this made keeping station in the zig-zagging convoy harder, and the possibility of collision greater, along with the danger of falling out of sequence, and the light breaking to reveal that you had straggled outside the formation and were suddenly easy meat.

Perhaps it is the echo of the men who crossed it or died in the attempt that gives this ocean a loneliness and a chaos absent from the North Pacific. That was incomprehensibly vast, with horizons weeks beyond horizons, and the
Gerd
a speck between the Aleutians and Hawaii. This is different. The Atlantic tonight is like Hamlet's infinite space, bounded in the nutshell of its coasts, beset with bad dreams. The ancient Greeks believed it had no end in this life; what was beyond it, the afterlife, existed only in intuition and myth. The water below us now is too deep for the chart to show wrecks. Anything that went down here might as well have been erased from the planet. Flapping and screeching noises come from the stacks.

‘God bless,' says the watchman, as I go down around 3 a.m. I experiment with John's storm prescription, aiming to work my arms behind me under the mattress and link my hands together, but my arms are too short. We are due south of Iceland as I fall asleep thinking of the bow, battering the endless sea.

¹
David Simpson et al., Firemen,
Trimmers and Stokers: The Real Heroes of World War Two
, 2008. Available at
www.barrymerchantseamen.org.uk
.

²
Peter Cremer,
U-333: Story of a U-boat Ace
, Bodley Head, 1984.

THE WASTES HAVE
a watchful feeling about them. With wind and swells heavy off the port quarter I now know why John's drawers are taped shut. The sky is soft grey, beautiful in its freshness and clarity, the sea dark purple and iron-coloured. Swells flex their white-streaked shoulders and the horizon is a long emptiness, hypnotic in its totality. At 51 degrees, 2 minutes, 93 seconds North, and 26 degrees, 14 minutes 41 seconds West on a map of the Atlantic war we are in great danger here: too far west for planes flying cover from Britain, too far south for those based in Iceland, and a long way east of Newfoundland. This is the beginning of what was known as the Black Hole, or the Air Gap. This was also at the point where early in the war convoys dispersed, and where, later, naval escort ships from Iceland handed over to those from Britain: a region in which submarines could be sure of finding targets. These waters have consumed men by the thousand and ships in hundreds, and their freights – potash, wheat, cotton, beef, sulphur, butter, fruit, tinned foods, mails, timber and general cargoes totalling millions of tonness – and digested them all to nothingness. But millions more tonnes of zinc, manganese, iron ore, steel, copper and coal, enough to invigorate the descendant of the economy they were bound for, lie strewn in the deeps below us. Cargoes of metals, ores and coal were particularly frightening to transport. While munition ships blew apart and tankers blazed, those heavy bulk ships, once hit, broke and sank in moments.

Two fulmars accompany us as Chicoy clicks through the forecast on the computer. Twenty-five-knot winds at the moment (fifty kilometres an hour), forty knots tomorrow afternoon, and the waves will be six metres.

Over coffee at ten the Captain reveals the real treat.

‘Bad weather tonight, then real bad weather, then the bad weather. The low is deepening.' He points to a spot on the world map where two systems are coming together ahead of us. ‘There are ten-metre waves at the entrance to Cabot Strait,' he says.

As he says ‘the low is deepening,' Jannie adds, ‘widening . . .' and Pieter puts in ‘lengthening!' and we all laugh.

I had thought we would go into the Gulf of St Lawrence through the north channel, Belle Isle Strait, around the top of Newfoundland Island, but it is iced up: we will make for the mouth of the Cabot Strait, further south. We are not far off the L in ‘Mid-Atlantic Ridge' and aim to make our turn south not far short of the Hecate Seamount. That will bring us bow-on to the weather, which will be a relief. Blue nylon ropes have appeared around the chair backs, lashing them to the tables, and yellow cords loop around the bins. I walk the deck – the poop seems lower than the wave tops and the bow booms a warning as I approach. The plastic tarpaulins over the tractor near the fo'c'sle are being torn to bits. The ship reels and groans.

Fire in Bay 7, acetone. From the bridge we watch the stalwart little figures making their way up the starboard side to die. They drive a notional pin into the container and report things go well. Another team sprays the containers on either side, attacking a fantasy easy to imagine. Slamming into the storm some of the chemicals in the bow become unstable and ignite. With the weather the Captain must choose between turning to make a lee, a windbreak, in which case she rolls so wickedly the fire can barely be fought, or holding into the sea, allowing the wind to madden the flames.

Boat drill is more entertaining than frightening as we do not go near the boat. Mark has the best life jacket; I would give my journal to him. We stand under the boat and run through the list of who is responsible for bringing the blankets, who the provisions and who frees the life rafts. In this wind we would never see them again. Erwin says the whole lot was overhauled last year, so we know the lifeboat engines started then. No wonder some of the crew have faraway looks.

Around this meridian, to the north of us, lies the wreck of the
City of Benares
, a liner torpedoed in the early hours of 18 September 1940. She was carrying 231 children, evacuees from the Blitz and mostly working-class. They were to have been resettled in Canada at government expense in an initiative designed to redress the imbalance of children who had been sent to safety, the majority of whom were sons and daughters of the well-off. The Captain, the convoy's commodore and 120 of her sailors and officers went down with the ship. Over 150 of the children were saved, including six boys in the care of one Miss Mary Cornish, who were taken into a lifeboat commanded by the fourth officer, Ronald Cooper. In the North Atlantic in an open boat, through gale force winds and heavy squalls, with their meagre water supply running out, heartbroken by the sight of a ship that might have rescued them turning away oblivious, with their food ration running out, and despite cases of delirium, depression, hallucinations and trench foot among adult survivors, the quietly extraordinary Cornish and Cooper contrived to keep the children occupied and the little vessel afloat and running eastwards through six nights, seven days and nineteen hours.