Liner

by James Barlow

  One of Keith’s tasks was to look through the peepholes of the furnaces, inside which the temperature had to be 3,000 degrees F. But it did not need technical training to know that something was wrong. Any passenger on board could see the thick black smoke pouring out of the funnels. Female passengers complained to the chief purser (in vain) that their clothes or their bodies had been spotted with black smut when the ship’s siren blew every noon or for alarm practices or when the wind happened to blow the stack smoke downwards. Men in the bars said knowledgeably, ‘They’re using the wrong oil,’ or ‘They’re really thrashing her.’ But the thick smoke trailed around the world in all conditions and speeds. It could e seen from miles away and from aircraft and was a joke among other passenger liners. When Keith walked on mats saturated in oil he thought: One day there’ll be a stack fire and my God it’ll start something down here . . .

  Through the peepholes he could see that the flames were dark red or orange, which indicated dirty atomizers. With insufficient air the fuel oil was broken down into its constituents and the unburned carbon carried up the stack.

  The fuel oil used in the Areopagus was cheap. Distillation was incomplete and not carried out at high temperatures. The ‘uncracked’ fuel had a higher pouring point and had to be heated in the ship to 110 degrees F. When not working in the tropics there was difficulty in pumping it. The small percentage of ash had a salt content which, over the years, had caused a surface decomposition of the furnace brickwork. Water and sediment, still present in the oil, caused wear on pump valves and burners and tended to clog the burner orifices. It caused some emulsification and interfered with proper combustion. Because the oil had to be heated to facilitate pumping from storage tanks through pipelines and heaters, a little carbonization was unavoidable.

  The oil was, however, stable in storage and the movements of the ship caused no problems. It was difficult to ignite in bulk and not capable of spontaneous combustion. But the vapours which it gave off formed an explosive mixture with the oxygen in the atmosphere. This vapour, being heavier than air, tended to accumulate in low levels such as bilges and the bottom of tanks, where its presence might not be detected until it was ignited by a spark. There was a sailor (from the deck, not engine room) on patrol all the time. He had to go around the ship every forty minutes and turn keys in thirty-nine positions to prove he’d been to them. But if an oil fire ever got going even this patrol would be in vain . . .

  The metals in contact with seawater had been subject for a very long time to its galvanic and velocity effects. Stress corrosion, cracking, dezincification and graphitization were all at work on the Areopagus’ exterior.

  In addition the very paint which was slapped on whenever the vessel stayed still for a few days was giving no protection at all, as it should have been Here again, hurry and price consideration and possibly the prestige desire to have the hull always a bright white for the passengers to admire and photograph was corroding the old ship. Localized corrosion was removed, revealing pits in the steel and a rough surface profile for coating. The paint was applied with an apparent coating film thickness, but isolated high spots of corrosion protruded above the mean place of the profile and were immediate potential sources for future and worse corrosion. And the paint itself was not really protecting the steel hull, for sodium phosphates were deposited underneath it. The sodium came from the seawater and the phosphate from the phosphoric acid in the wash primer. The water-soluble phosphates were thus a built-in source of failure, promoting lack of adhesion due to an osmotic process.

  But all these faults were spread over a large ship which had a crew to keep an eye open for them. The Areopagus was like a luxury hotel, now gone a little seedy and catering to people of a different class than those who had dined and danced aboard thirty years ago. The new guests didn’t complain with so much arrogance as the old. They put up with the hotel because they’d never known it to be better. And the Greek staff were so cheerful and obliging, why bother to complain? The faults of the old liner were widely spread and, for the most part, the passengers were unaware of them. They were put right as quickly as they were encountered. It would need a disaster of unimaginable stresses to show up every weakness at one and the same time.

  For the passengers, the fact was that the Areopagus functioned smoothly and that now, after several cool uncomfortable days, they were on an ocean which was so calm the bows of the ship cut through it as if it was a beautiful blue pond. At last Miss Wearne could sit on a deck chair for soporific hours. Marion Burston couldn’t entirely maintain an attitude of despair. Dempsey had his first case of heatstroke – a man in the engine room, whose body had stopped adjusting itself to the temperature and wouldn’t sweat. Dempsey had him in the hospital and packed him in ice. The officers changed from their dark winter uniforms into the white for the tropics. Passengers strolled around in bathing costumes, shorts and faded Hawaiian shirts bought on other cruises. There were picnic lunches on the aft of the Parade Deck, interesting fish and pickles, salads and delicious Greek pastries. The news items printed each day in the ship’s paper began to seem absurd, not tragic.

  The Areopagus moved across the sea – that great surface of 141,000,000 square miles which occupies seven-tenths of the surface of the world but which has a comparatively slight depth despite its volume of 324,000,000 cubic miles. It was calm and the passengers were grateful. But they never thought of how incredible it was that a great mass of water like the Indian Ocean should be calm. For here the earth was rotating at nearly a thousand miles an hour. The moon pulled at the sea and so did the sun. The earth itself had an attraction millions of times greater than either. Yet there was a pull which was enough to cause a wave in the open ocean to follow beneath the revolving moon. The wave was twelve hours and twenty minutes long – just half the time the moon took to circle the earth. The height of this ‘tide’ was about three feet in the Indian Ocean and ‘travelled’ at about five hundred miles an hour.

  The sea looked calm and harmless, the waves small and without strength, the insignificant result of a slow breeze whose frictional drag created ripples. The breeze pushed against the sloping surface of the ripples but was not strong enough to thrash them even into wavelets. It would need a stronger wind to create a cumulative and increasing effect in the waves and even then it needed the big space of the ocean to get momentum.

  The waves of the Indian Ocean were irregular, of many small wave trains, from hundreds of different points of origin, many speeds, now merging, dying out, some surviving, others being overwhelmed. Each wave was formed by the movement of the millions of water particles which revolved in circles at and below the sea’s surface. It was possible now for a main in an office thousands of miles away, by consulting formulas and tables and making mathematical calculations, to tell the condition of the sea, providing he was told what the local wind and weather conditions had been for several hours. Or he could give reliable meteorological forecasts, predict what the sea would be like.

  This kind of information – about the sea itself – was not supplied to the Areopagus. But she did receive weather forecasts, which was almost the same thing. The weather around the world was watched by some eight thousand land stations, three thousand aircraft and four thousand merchant ships. There was, however, a deficiency inasmuch as the Southern Hemisphere, three-quarters of which covered by oceans, had an insufficient proportion of these observations. This was understandable as the land mass of the world – especially the civilized world which was crowded with movement and wanted to know about weather – was largely in the Northern Hemisphere. There were also delays in communication in the Southern Hemisphere and scant information regarding the upper atmosphere of the world. A recent development for shipping was the observation of ocean currents by virtue of the temperature difference recorded by infrared observations from satellites. Computers were now ready to handle data for the whole world.

  But the
Areopagus did not receive this sophisticated sort of information. She simply had weather forecasts from Perth, Singapore, Manila and elsewhere, and the most recent assured her officers that the Indian Ocean was bathed in sunshine and there was practically no wind. Not that the Areopagus would have changed course anyway. She was twenty-seven hours behind schedule.

  PART TWO

  Asia

  The 17th day wee were right under the line, which is the most fervent place of the burnt Zone: where in the midst of February wee susteined such heat, with often thunder and lightnings that wee did sweate for the most part continually, as though wee had bene in a stove or hote-house.

  John Winter

  Dancing and promenading on the poop from 7 till 9 P.M., when all passengers may enjoy themselves; but not abaft the mizen mast. The promenaders are not in any way to interrupt the dancers.

  Extract from

  Rules of the Ship

  Lightning, No. 11; 1855

  Chapter Eleven

  It had not occurred to Tornetta that there would be – have to be by virtue of sheer confined space – some kind of human relationships during this journey aboard the Areopagus. He was the one passenger who had come on the voyage neither for fun nor spectacle. In his mental stress and near panic the cruise had not made any impact on his imagination, which had leaped from Hobart and Sydney straight to San Francisco where Ignazio, his brother, waited. But there was in fact a ‘distance’ of about fifty days between the two. He was the only occupant of cabin A145 from Hobart to Sydney, and he stayed in the cabin for long, anxious hours while the other passengers went ashore. He ate no food nor went to any bar (they were not serving alcohol anyway), but sweated time away in the gloom of the cabin with curtains drawn.

  The excitement of departure was, for him, that of relief. He cursed angrily as darkness came and time for sailing, but still the Greek ship didn’t leave.

  He was startled and resentful when the steward – a small quiet man who, if he observed anything, made no comment – entered, loaded with two suitcases and preceding a man of about thirty-five who was himself carrying a cine camera, still camera, tripod and a smaller case.

  This man wore a heavy brown tweed suit and a cap and looked ridiculous. He blinked through powerful glasses and walked with a twisted gait: there was something the matter with his right leg.

  Tornetta was unsympathetic and wished him elsewhere.

  The man had ginger hair, thin on the top, and his green eyes were meaningless, those of a fool, Tornetta decided. Like many people with handicaps he was something of an extrovert; later he became known as ‘the Joker’ around the ship, but it was not a term of endearment. It was difficult to pity him, impossible to like him, because he was so offensively hearty. He was to receive many silent and some crushing snubs on this voyage – some people were frank enough to get out of their deck chairs and walk away if he sat down alongside them. It was impossible to know if he had a skin as thick as a rhinoceros or harboured under his heartiness a deep loathing of other humans.

  At any rate he never ceased to try contacts with them.

  He greeted the silent Tornetta, who exuded indifference, ‘How do? My name’s Ron. Ron Squibb. I go bang bang!’ He laughed, but Tornetta’s face did not crease in amusement. ‘We’re going to be together for quite a time, eh? So you’d better call me Ron. Shall we be eating at the same table? It’s nice to meet people, isn’t it? There’s a lot of things to learn, aren’t there? I see there’s a lecture on Greek traditions and history tomorrow. That should be interesting, eh?’

  When Tornetta replied to none of these questions, Squibb persisted, ‘What’s your name?’

  Tornetta admitted his name reluctantly. Having this fool in the cabin was about the same as putting in a public address system.

  Squibb said, ‘Italian, eh? Not fed up with Australia, are you? I’m a Pom myself, but I like it. This should be interesting, eh? See the world and you learn things, don’t you?’

  Still the condemnatory silence from Tornetta. Squibb tried a different approach. ‘A sea cruise will do us good. I’m a bachelor. What I need is a widow with a bad cough.’ He tittered, but Tornetta only yawned.

  ‘Tired, are you? Eh, which bunk do you have?’

  ‘The bottom one.’

  ‘Where are you from?’

  ‘Sydney,’ Tornetta told him, and could have bitten his tongue off. That kind of information in the possession of this garrulous clown –

  ‘But you were already on board,’ Squibb pointed out, too observant for Tornetta’s liking.

  ‘I have been in Hobart for a few months.’

  ‘I’ve been there,’ Squibb asserted. ‘Not the same as Sydney, but pretty. Hey, she’s sailing. I’m going to have a look. Come on!’

  ‘I shall stay here,’

  ‘What for?’ Squibb asked frankly.

  ‘I’ve got a lot on my mind.’

  ‘A lot on your mind!’

  Squibb laughed. Tornetta seethed with dislike; he was going to have a job avoiding trouble with this nosy idiot . . .

  ‘Forget that,’ instructed Squibb, who was obviously a man who had to be crushed or he would become unbearably dominant in a petty way. ‘You’re on holiday.’

  ‘Business,’ corrected Tornetta.

  ‘Forget business.’

  ‘In my business you don’t forget business.’

  ‘And what is your business?’

  ‘None of yours, crumb,’ snapped Tornetta.

  But Squibb was not offended; he laughed in admiration of the twisted dialogue, said, ‘I’m going to have a look’ and went out of the cabin.

  Tornetta avoided Squibb the next day as far as that was possible in a ship a few hundred feet long where there were only two decks to walk about on if one wanted fresh air. He saw Squibb from a distance, all noise and bonhomie, the life and soul of the cruise in his own estimation, stopping strangers – Asians, Greeks, old New Zealand couples, young seamen polishing the brass rail – and even from a hundred feet away Tornetta could see them recoil, whether from the sheer ugliness of Squibb or his noisy buoyancy. Sometimes they seemed to stand and talk with him because he was a partial cripple and they pitied him.

  Whenever Tornetta saw him from a sufficient distance he retreated, went to a different deck, or into a bar, or even, in frustration, back to the cabin.

  But inevitably he made an error and almost collided with him by the stern swimming pool.

  ‘Eh, watch this,’ Squibb requested, and there was no escape, for what could he pretend to be doing?

  Squibb was weighed down with the cine camera and tripod, but he also had a pair of binoculars.

  He looked out to sea, squinted and peered, and then took the binoculars out of the case. He focused them on the same spot for a whole minute.

  Tornetta sensed that people on chairs and standing about were beginning to look in the same direction.

  ‘What can you see?’ he asked.

  Squibb whispered, ‘Nothing, but you wait.’

  Sure enough, a middle-aged man inquired, ‘What is it? Flying fish?’

  ‘Can’t you see it?’ Squibb asked.

  ‘See what?’

  ‘The seaplane.’

  ‘No, it must be too far –’

  ‘Have a look,’ Squibb offered.

  The man said, ‘Oh, thank you,’ and took the binoculars from Squibb. He soon admitted, ‘I still can’t see . . . ’

  ‘A little to the left,’ Squibb prompted.

  ‘I’ve got her,’ the man said. ‘What’s she doing, I wonder?’

  He strolled on a woman reclining in a chair asked him, ‘What are they all looking at?’

  ‘A seaplane.’

  ‘Oh, I must have a look at that. Has it come down in the sea?’

&n
bsp; ‘Yes.’

  ‘I wonder why.’

  ‘Out of fuel perhaps.’

  Squibb overheard this with great satisfaction, and Tornetta realized that this was how he got his own back on the world for the snubs and stares of pity . . . He understood, too, that for him Squibb was a man with very dangerous potential.

  For this reason he suppressed his irritation when he found Squibb at the lunch table. Tornetta was eating his meals in a satisfactorily discreet corner of the large dining room. Columns and sheer distance limited the number of persons who could inspect him from twenty or thirty feet, and he could see that these few dozen were ‘harmless’ anyway. Likewise the two old ladies at his table, whose dialogue was about their health, the weather, the possibilities of seasickness and the behaviour of the stewards.

  It meant now that Squibb’s motives perhaps better than Squibb did himself. For Tornetta was answerable; he could not escape. Being in the same cabin he had to spend some hours of the day and night with Squibb. Others might evade Squibb, make a brief reply and move on, or, if cornered, snub him or crush him, but Tornetta was like a relation in the same house: one might go out to work, to the races with friends, but always one had to come back to the unloved: one was lumbered . . .

  Nevertheless, Tornetta developed something of a technique, and Squibb often fell into his own trap. For, when he asked, ‘Are you going to the deck games?’ Tornetta could counter, ‘Are you?’ And if Squibb said ‘Yes,’ he could say frankly, ‘I’m not.’ But he did it with greater subtlety. If Squibb said, ‘Are you entering the quoits competition?’ Tornetta would sneer, ‘What the hell for?’ and Squibb’s nature caused him to defend the competition: ‘I think they’re a very good way of passing the time and keeping us all fit.’ To which Tornetta would comment, ‘You go if you like that sort of thing.’ And Squibb did like ‘that sort of thing’ because it forced people to have contact with him. Part of his extrovert nature was an attempt to make other people live with him . . .