Down to the Sea in Ships (32 page)

‘There was a typhoon in the Indian Ocean. Oh! The waves were sweeping over the deck, the ship was flexing and diving, the hatch covers were under water. I never been on a bulk carrier before – this was normal but I don't know! I was very scared and very sick . . .'

Erwin comes from a rice farming family. He has no love of the city and he plans to get out of seafaring. ‘Many Filipinos do a few years at sea and then find jobs on land.' He says 90 per cent of his compatriots are Catholic. ‘Some people pray in their cabins, sometimes with a friend, but we do not pray all together.'

Pieter the chief, the second engineer, the Captain and Erwin hold a conference on the bridge.

‘You're early!' Pieter laughs. ‘Time difference messing you up?'

We retarded another hour last night, so while I am still in Grytviken's time zone, in line with South Georgia, where we were yesterday, everyone else is in Nuuk's time zone, in line with Greenland.

Outside it snows horizontally and hail spatters against the screens. The gale is supposed to be slackening but it is not. Northern fulmars and shearwaters ride along with us on the windward side, balancing the powers of the gale, the four-metre waves and the smash-back from the ship's side, skiing along a wind tunnel between chaos and death with perfect, nonchalant control. There must be an ideal air current between the ship and the wind because they stick as closely to us as they dare. We are doing fifteen and a half knots and when they fire themselves ahead of us and curve around the bow they must be adding five knots to that easily. They twist away for their lives as the rebounding waves erupt and claw after them; sometimes they fly under the very grasp of the falling water, like surfers shooting out of a tube.

We are now at the same latitude as Cape Bonavista, Newfoundland, and definitely feeling the beginnings of the swell on the Grand Banks. We hit a thunderous wave and the ship shakes from side to side as well as lengthways. Chicoy clicks and hums away his frustration. He and John are at daggers drawn. Chicoy is not yet adept and John is unforgiving. The latest spat revolves around an updated radio signals book which John admits they do not use in any case. When should they send the reminder email? Chicoy had not noticed they had received the wrong updates, John spotted it, and now Chicoy is anxious to send the reminder, which John thinks unnecessary. John checks the log.

‘South-west nine! That's never south-west nine!'

‘It was stronger earlier,' I protest.

‘Twelve o'clock it says here – I've just come up. He writes a load of shit. I give up. I
give
up . . .'

Chicoy goes down to the galley where he restores his humour and standing by telling jokes to Annabelle and Richard. The galley is a crucial place, the Captain says. ‘If something is going on I rely on the cook to tell me. The cook is the conduit between the Captain and the crew; the cook always knows everything.'

Annabelle has a calm smile and a workmanlike sense of purpose. She is never idle: a seafarer like any other, her demeanour says, and a good one. She speaks little but the men talk more easily around her, bouncing jokes off her, seeking her approval in glances, making her laugh and using the atmosphere she creates as an opportunity to be ‘themselves' – the selves we are in the presence of women being distinct from the mantle we assume with men. Annabelle seems to have mastered a sisterly aura which makes us relax around her. Men's shoulders drop and they allow themselves to moan about things, you can tell, though the conversations are in Tagalog. Most of the laughter on the ship comes from the galley when Annabelle is working.

Mark, the steward, is talkative, as ever. I am warming to him: I think my suspicions of his friendliness were mean-spirited. He is halfway through a nine-month contract and hoping to add a one-month extension. He will cross and recross this ocean throughout. His last job was a car carrier sailing between Japan and South America: twenty-eight days each way.

‘I have two children with two women!' he says, laughing with more self-consciousness than mirth. ‘Sometimes I gave money to the first one but that is all in the past now.'

I look at him again. He used to send money to the mother of his first child but he no longer does? Why not? What does that mean? I want to ask but it would be presumptuous. (‘Who is looking after your family?' Never. I am not a judge.) But I speculate. ‘That's all in the past now . . .' Something happened, clearly, and whoever she is no longer has a claim on him, he feels. I wonder if whatever it was has some bearing on his eagerness to please; he seems to carry a wound somehow, whether done to him or inflicted by him I cannot tell.

He serves me bacon, eggs and salt soup. ‘White people only stay for three months,' he says. ‘Is there news about the weather?'

‘The Captain says the whole North Atlantic is eight-metre waves.'

‘Oh no!'

During a visit to the engine room an alarm sounds. Orange warning lights flash. You wonder if the CO2 suppressors are about to go off and kill you. Pieter comes flying by and ghosts up five ladders in two blinks. It turns out to be a boiler problem – for some reason it is not heating the fuel sufficiently. The electrician is on the case with a spanner, his teeth clenched. Pieter says the second engineer switched the steam off before he cut in the other boiler. The second engineer looks embarrassed while black smoke-like steam wreaths the electrician. Pieter mulls on the perpetual motion of the engine. ‘That's the thing with engineering, you can start again. It is not like man, or nature. Everything can be replaced.'

In the bo'sun's passage, running the length of the ship, Bobby Sitones, an ordinary seaman, leans on his mop and grins. His working environment today is a concertina of iron loopholes, between which are drums of toxins, all echoing with the moan, clash and wail of the containers above.

In the early afternoon the waves diminish and the fog closes in. To the south of us the warm Gulf Stream is meeting the frigid Labrador Current, running down from the north, their confluence producing a vapour that hides everything beyond the foremast. Through it the swells come again; long, low beasts, purple-faced and swollen with age, driving up from the south. We see a whale that way, blowing and swimming north towards us.

‘Well, he's not a northern right whale, I can tell you that,' the Captain asserts. ‘They're not here now.' The whale disappears astern and the Captain lectures on navigation before GPS.

‘We shot the sun at nine, at noon and at three, and we shot the stars when they came out. We called it nautical twilight, when the sun has gone but while there is still enough light to see the horizon. You need the horizon and the first stars. In perfect conditions you shoot a star ahead, to the flank and behind. Then you get the logarithms from the almanac. If you were good you could get a position in twenty minutes.'

He breaks out the almanac and displays the ranks of tiny numbers which fill every millimetre of the A4 pages.

‘When we got calculators with log buttons it was easier. We had an old Decca Navigator, radio direction finder, but we didn't trust it. It was more wrong than right. Then we got a radar but the Captain didn't trust that. We were shooting the stars even in the English Channel! When we couldn't see anything it was down to dead reckoning. When we went to South America we steered for the Azores. When we saw Mount Pico we said, Yes! Now we know where we are – OK!'

A ship appears on the AIS: the
Anvil
is somewhere to the south of us, near the Terre Nova oil and gas field.

‘This is a terrible place,' the Captain says. ‘Always waves and storms. Truly terrible. You need a psychologist if you stay there.'

The wind drops to the point that we can go outside. The sea temperature is minus one and the air is two degrees. Towards dusk there is a lightening, a single gold bar on the horizon, pale and dead ahead, as though we steered for the end of the ocean. The Captain produces the chart of a formidably desolate and fractured coast.

‘You must be mad to live here,' he says. Sable Island to the south of us is known for its currents, sandbars, cross-seas and multiple wrecks as ‘the graveyard of the Atlantic'. Its thin grin of dunes, marram grass and pounding surf supports a population of wild horses descended from shipwrecked Shetland ponies. In 1598 a French marquis, Troilus de Mesgouez, had sixty convicts transported there. Within five years forty-nine were dead. The plight of the surviving eleven so impressed King Henri IV that he pardoned their crimes and paid compensation for their suffering. Miquelon Island, to our north, was assigned to France by the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 and is still marked French on the chart. French fishermen no longer exercise the right to land and cure their catch there, but they did in the eighteenth century, when it was said that the cod ran so thick in these waters that they slowed the passage of ships.

The wind drops as we cross the one hundred-fathom line, for a short while the wuthering relents. The constant, echoing rushes and whistling growls are the hallmark of this strange voyage, along with the ghostly piano, the diesel, the pitching and slamming and the Eternal Salad.

WAKE AT FIVE
– our clocks have moved again – to dolphin cloud, a wind bitter to listen to and a shuddering sea. In these waters the North Atlantic convoys formed for the easterly run to Britain, while arriving ships dispersed to St John's, Halifax and New York. Leif Ericson came here around 1001, according to the sagas, followed nearly five hundred years later by the Venetian Giovanni Caboto, known in England as John Cabot, who sailed from Bristol in 1497. No one knows where Cabot landed (the Canadian and UK governments have settled on Cape Bonavista, where there is a plaque) but there are four accounts of what he saw, three written by people Cabot talked to when he returned. The most vivid comes from a letter apparently by a Bristolian who signed himself ‘John Day', which scholars now believe was a nom de plume for a London merchant named Hugh Say, writing, it is near certain, to Christopher Columbus. The thrill of first contact, or almost first contact, is palpable. The ‘he' of Say's letter is Cabot, the ‘master' Columbus, and the events take place in a very different season, midsummer, 24 June.

He landed at only one spot of the mainland, near the place where land was first sighted, and they disembarked there with a crucifix and raised banners with the arms of the Holy Father and those of the King of England, my master; and they found tall trees of the kind masts are made, and other smaller trees, and the country is very rich in grass. In that particular spot, as I told your Lordship, they found a trail that went inland, they saw a site where a fire had been made, they saw manure of animals which they thought to be farm animals, and they saw a stick half a yard long pierced at both ends, carved and painted with brazil, and by such signs they believe the land to be inhabited. Since he was with just a few people, he did not dare advance inland beyond the shooting distance of a cross-bow, and after taking in fresh water he returned to his ship. All along the coast they found many fish like those which in Iceland are dried in the open and sold in England and other countries, and these fish are called in English ‘stockfish'; and thus following the shore they saw two forms running on land one after the other, but they could not tell if they were human beings or animals; and it seemed to them that there were fields where they thought might also be villages, and they saw a forest whose foliage looked beautiful . . .

Through a mottled sky of mauve and grey comes our first contact, a Canadian accent over the radio, a coastguard, brusque in static. We are south of the Avalon Peninsula, surely ironically named, below Placentia Bay. In the night we cut inside the Virgin Rocks, turning with the elbow of the wide channel into the Gulf of St Lawrence. South of us are the Grand Banks, and their former bounty is everywhere on the chart: Halibut Channel, Haddock Channel, Whale Bank, St Pierre Bank. These were once the richest fishing grounds in the world, before the stocks collapsed around 1990. There are no birds, no signs of life.

‘Another day in paradise,' Erwin smiles.

You hope to smell something in the wind, now we are closing with the land, ozone or salt or something, but the wind smells like cold steel. A fire alarm goes off but it is nothing special, though you look at the freshening gale and the indifference of the sea with fresh eyes, for a few minutes, while it rings.

At coffee the Captain reveals the ice route we have been sent – rather further north than he was hoping. Afterwards I destroy my careful lagging of the air vent, extract my boiler suit and follow the deck crew forward to the cargo hold. You have to be nippy to catch them as they move quickly along the filthy deck, doused with spray and within the waves' grasp, even on the leeward side. We climb a short ladder to a passage between the containers. We pick our way between whining reefers, greasy iron protrusions and bundles of lashing rods. A hatch cover stands open, a ladder below descends vertically into the gloom – or as vertically as the rolling allows.

First we descend three storeys, changing ladders carefully, stepping around a hole in the floor. Behind you, as you climb, is nothing – empty gaps dropping to darkness. The rungs of the ladders are diamond-shaped in cross-section, flaky and stinking acidly, like leaking batteries. We climb down two more ladders and move sideways, then two more down. I must be the only idiot to have done this without gloves. You hang on grimly as the rolls pull you away from the ladder. The smells are an evil concoction of metallic, rusty and chemical-fishy.

At the bottom a doorway leads into a cavern four containers wide, three long and seven high, but we are not surrounded by containers. On either side, before, behind and in the gloom high above, are container-sized tanks of sodium-methylate solution, liquid acid and toxic organo-phosphates. Everything is marked with hazard and pollutant symbols. You have to shut your imagination away. If anything leaks, falls or bursts here, anything at all . . .