by Voyage East- A stirring tale of the last great days of the Merchant Navy (retail) (epub)
* * *
It was Company policy to ‘double’ the watches until its ships were clear of Ushant. This meant that the Second and Third Mates stood a watch together, while the Mate and I took the next. It was the old routine of four hours on and four off which smacked of sailing ships and hard times, but in the crowded waters of north west Europe with the high incidence of fog, strong winds and fierce tides, two officers on watch were an undoubted advantage. In company with the Mate I was recalled to the bridge at midnight, after a couple of hours below, to relieve the Third Mate.
‘Father’s still up here,’ he nodded at the dark shapes of Captain Richards and the pilot huddled at the rail behind the shelter of the dodger. The ship slammed into a heavy sea, throwing us together, our legs still unaccustomed to the motion.
‘Not this dance, sweetie,’ the Third Mate lisped. We exchanged the information of course and speed. ‘It’s getting worse… be bloody lovely when we round the Skerries.’
We both stared out on the port bow where, beyond the necklace of sparse lights dotting the low coast of Anglesey, the Skerries lighthouse pierced the darkness.
‘Yes,’ I replied, insufficient sleep still stale in my mouth.
‘Pot of tea in the chartroom. Buenas noches…’
‘Night.’
He drifted off with the Second Mate and I skidded across the port bridge wing to take the first bearing fix of the middle watch. Emerging into the wheelhouse again where only the binnacle lights relieved the blackness I found the Mate standing beside the man at the wheel.
‘Black as the Earl of Hell’s riding boots,’ he remarked. I agreed. ‘Only whores, thieves and sailors work on nights like this.’ It was a gross over-simplification, but I knew what he meant. I had a premonition of philosophical discussion by the time we had traversed the Indian Ocean.
As we approached the Skerries, a granite reef of broken, sea-scarred rocks that lay off the very corner of Wales, we lost the protection of the land. The south-westerly gale was gusting strongly, approaching storm force, some fifty knots of wind. Around Carmel Head and the Skerries the ebb-tide at its full strength reached several knots in velocity and, in opposing the wind, threw up a heavy, breaking sea. The Mate stood quietly in the wheelhouse, watching the helmsman and drinking his tea while I dodged in and out of the chart-room, plotting the ship’s position and calling the diminishing distance to the ‘alter-course’ to the Master and Pilot. We had met no opposing traffic in the run from the Bar, but the radar and brief glimpses of her navigation lights showed the Clan Ranald ploughing in our wake. As we cleared the lee of Anglesey we saw three inward ships, corkscrewing up from the South Stack towards the Skerries, brief flashes of deck lights on glistening water as the seas tumbled alongside their scending hulls.
Antigone lifted her bow then dropped abruptly into the trough of a hollow sea. The impact shuddered throughout her massive hull as the stern kicked into the aerated and less-dense water of the passing crest. Her propellor raced as her bow crashed, foaming into the approach of the next wall of water and her solid forecastle vanished under a pall that seemed to glow in the darkness.
‘Stand-by engines!’ snapped Captain Richards, a statue suddenly quickened.
‘Stand-by engines, sir!’ The Mate swung the telegraph handles and the jangling answer came from below, after which the roar of the diesel in the funnel just abaft the bridge changed its note as the revolutions of the shaft dropped.
‘One mile to the alter-course, sir.’
China Dick grunted acknowledgement and we heard the Pilot remark on the difficulties of disembarking.
‘Want to come to Gib with us, do you?’ Richards’s rich mellifluous voice jibed at his fellow countryman.
‘Not ploddy likely, Captain.’
‘Closing the alter-course, sir…’
‘Carry on, Mister.’ This to the Mate who acknowledged it and turned to me.
‘Okay, La?’ he mimicked the Scouse accent, an obligatory accomplishment for every Blue Funnel officer. At this early moment in the voyage I avoided a facetious rejoinder. The Pilot had long ago relinquished responsibility for the ship’s safe navigation and, since the Bar, coastal pilotage, ‘cabotage’, had been carried out by the officers under the watchful eye of China Dick. Now, as we altered direction off the Skerries, critical scrutiny was being directed at my competence. I was, after all, the least experienced of his officers, the weakest link in the chain of his responsibility.
In windswept isolation I bent over the azimuth mirror atop the port bridge-wing gyro-compass repeater. In the prism I could see the reflection of the softly illuminated notation of the compass card, above the notch of its mounting the glow of the Skerries light intensified twice every ten seconds as the beam swung round towards us. The bearing altered slowly, the compass clicked as the ship yawed in her track, pitching and slamming into the heavy seas that marched downwind towards us in lines regular and bold enough to show as serried ranks on the radar screen. Loose hair flogged my scalp.
‘Bearing coming on!’ I bawled the intelligence over my shoulder and heard the Mate’s soft-spoken order to the helmsman.
‘Port easy.’
‘Port easy…’ The ship began to swing, the bow lifted as its angle to the advancing waves changed, the ship climbed then swooped into a dark hole in the ocean that, for a splinter of time, seemed bottomless. I swung the azimuth mirror and collected my tally of bearings: the Skerries lighthouse, the light on the breakwater at Holyhead and the distant single flash of the South Stack; then raced across the bridge for a distance-off by radar, and plotted the information on the chart. The neat intersection of pencilled lines was satisfactorily upon the alter-course position and the ship steadied on her southerly course towards the waiting pilot boat tucked just inside the breakwater at Holyhead. A few minutes later I left the bridge to prepare the rope-ladder for disembarking the Pilot. I made a brief stop in my cabin to scribble a final sentence to a letter, sealed it and stuffed it into the pocket of my duffle coat.
From my new position on the centre-castle immediately below the bridge I could hear China Dick conning the ship himself as he slowed her down. The stand-by seaman of the watch was inexpertly helped by the Junior Midshipman, still blinded by sleep. I wondered if he had ever been up at this hour of the night before; perhaps, as an infant with colic.
We hoisted a cargo-lamp over the side to illuminate the dangling ladder and its light threw the surge and suck of the sea into sudden intimacy. Antigone rolled and dipped. There was an abrupt pause in the wind-howl, then the sibilant hiss of spray as the icy-cold bite of spindrift struck our cheeks.
‘Fuck this!’ snapped the seaman, and I recognised him as the complainant of the Birkenhead Shipping Office. His name was Embleton.
The breakwater wall loomed suddenly close, outlined by heaps of white water thundering along it and exploding over its rampart. Antigone swung to make a lee for the pilot boat which had appeared out of nowhere and wallowed after us in the comparative calm of our wake. She slammed alongside, her deck-hand staring up at us. The Pilot arrived from the bridge.
‘Good-pye, Mister Mate,’ he said, grinning cordially and holding out his hand.
‘Would you mind, Pilot?’ I held out the letter. He turned it to see the stamp and noticed the addressee’s unmarried status.
‘Certainly not.’
He swung himself over the rail and descended, timing his blind, backwards leap perfectly, and landing on the launch’s foredeck to be grabbed round the waist by the waiting deckie. For a second he stood illuminated by the cargo-lamp, raising a valedictory hand to China Dick far above.
‘Gweld i di!’
Then the two men dived for the shelter of the cabin and the boat turned away.
‘Hard a-starboard! Full ahead!’ Above us as we hauled up the dripping ladder, China Dick relished his independence at last.
‘Lucky bastard,’ remarked the seaman as the pilot boat disappeared behind the breakwater, ‘he’ll be anchored in
the lee of Bum Island in half-an-hour.’
‘Bum Island…?’ frowned the Junior Midshipman, his eyes hollow with sea-sickness and fatigue.
‘Get those bloody men off the upper deck, Four-O!’ bawled China Dick, curtailing any explanation.
Men like China Dick, victims of boredom during much of their voyages, were in their element in such circumstances as we now found ourselves. Holt’s uninsured ships had the rules for their passing from one port to another strictly set out in the Company’s Standing Instructions. China Dick himself had put up a premium on attaining command, upon which the Company paid him interest unless he committed some adjudged error, when this sum could be docked or trimmed according to the seriousness of the offence. Men’s pockets were readier reins upon their conduct than their consciences, but many were well aware of Captain Marryat’s advice, that a man who could not write a log-book to his own advantage was not fit to command a ship.
From the Holyhead breakwater the Company’s injunction to proceed due west had been faithfully followed by the Second Mate, whose duty it was to lay off all the courses for a passage. This would take the ship well off the land before she turned south-south-westward for St George’s Channel and the Atlantic beyond. There was good reason for this. Off the North and South Stacks overfalls occurred, steeper, hollower seas within whose breaking mass serious damage could be sustained, even to ships as sturdy as the Antigone. These dangerous seas were a product of the combined forces of wind and tide meeting off protruding headlands. Promontories accelerate the speed of both wind and tide, making a rough turbulence of these ‘overfalls’ as they fight to resolve their differences. This reaches a crescendo of elemental violence when a spring tide opposes a storm force wind, as was now the case.
But the Stacks, steep-humped islands separated from the buttresses of Holy Mountain by thin, gurgling guts of white water, were steep-to, and could, if a man had nerve enough, be approached within feet. Running close inshore avoided the overfalls, the water smoothing somewhat as it thundered against the cliffs and then fell in a backwash of confused crests. These warred with each other, reducing the incoming violence, and were nothing to the white fury a few cables further to seaward. Ignoring the pencilled line to the west, it was via such a route that China Dick took us seaward that wild night.
Free of uxorious constraint, free of the need to kiss the fundament of the Company’s hierarchy, and free of a man he suspected of amiable espionage, China Dick was determined to destroy at birth any doubts as to his style of command. We passed the North Stack a few cables from the surge of breakers at its vertical extreme. We clawed out from its brief shelter clear of the thunder of the overfalls roaring and ripping the night apart, into the teeth of the unrelenting gale. Captain Richards followed me into the chart-room while I plotted the ship’s position. Finishing, I snapped the chart-pencil securely between the twin sides of the parallel rules. His stubby forefinger appeared suddenly on the chart.
‘Rub that lot out, Four-O. Courses to be logged ‘Various to Master’s Orders’. We’ll set course here.’ He shifted his finger to a spot well clear of all dangers and met my stare with the slightest of twinkles in his deep-set eyes. I was clearly to be trusted.
‘Aye, aye, sir.’
According to Marryat’s dictum, Captain Richards was eminently fitted to command.
* * *
China Dick’s bluff was called by the weather.
His order for full speed had to be modified when we finally hauled off the land and set our course for Gibraltar. The moon reappeared from behind the clouds to throw a baleful light on the great streamers of stratus that welled up over the weather coast of Wales and rolled to leeward of the summits of distant Snowdonia. Beneath its cold light the sea churned and spumed, its surface streaked with spindrift, torn away by the violent friction of the wind. Wave-form phased with wave-form to generate huge, coincident seas that came to leeward in distinctive ranks, and we faced the coming day with haggard faces, unseamanlike innards and unsteady legs. As we contemplated what Yeats called ‘the murderous innocence of the sea’, there was not one of us that night who did not wish he had chosen some alternative profession; except, perhaps, China Dick.
Yet we had not quite finished with our home coast; one last ritual waited to be performed, and it was left to me when the Mate and I next resumed the duties of watch-keeping on a bleak, grey morning with heavy rain clouds massing on the horizon.
This was the matter of Departure, Departure with a capital ‘D’. As I stared eastwards, once more bent over the azimuth mirror of the port gyro-repeater, I took a final bearing of the red and white banded column of the Smalls lighthouse, now diminished with distance, to fix the ship’s position from ‘terrestrial bearings’ for the last time. From here we would calculate our dead-reckoning by traverse tables, work our sights with the aid of sextant and chronometer until we sighted the Iberian coast with its recognisable landmarks marked upon our charts. This carefully plotted position was our ‘Departure… distinctly a ceremony of navigation… the technical as distinguished from the sentimental “Goodbye”.’ Who could put it better than Conrad?
The land faded astern; Pembrokeshire rolled itself over the rim of the world and left us alone on the ocean. Out on the port bow a skein of gannets flew west in line astern, two fully mature, the rest wearing the dark plumage of juvenile birds. Sabre-winged fulmars quartered our wake above the tiny, dark, feet-dabbling petrels that eluded all but the sharp-eyed.
China Dick had gone below at last and the helmsman had relinquished the rudder to the Arkas auto-pilot. The Mate came smiling across the bridge and nodded to starboard. The school of bottle-nosed dolphins sliced across our bow at an acute angle, leaping and thrusting themselves through the grey seas at speeds in excess of twenty knots.
‘Well, Laddie,’ he said in his quiet burr, removing the top bar of formality, ‘are you wondering why the bloody hell you ever came to sea?’
Outward Bound
It was a rhetorical question, not to be answered at that moment by anything more than a grin. I sensed he asked it as a consolation for his present unhappiness and that, like those well-rehearsed crudities of the previous night, it betrayed the shy man he really was. Leaving home was especially painful for the older men, those with wives and families, whose children grew by leaps and bounds during their absence. But the Mate was, untypically, not married. My first instincts proved accurate, for he revealed himself as an incurable romantic and I watched the disease consume him during the coming months. Those snatches of coarseness, the versicles and responses of a ritual catechism, were followed by flashes of greater wisdom, culled from wide reading and a deep intelligence that was constrained by reticence and the romantic’s inevitable loneliness. But during that bleak forenoon of Departure we established the footing for our professional relationship. A mutual respect had already sprung up between us, for I kept the Mate’s watch once we passed Ushant: his part in the matter would be titular, his presence on the bridge regulated by the navigational formalities and the customary genuflexion to Company policy. He had many other duties to attend to, and I was not without experience; my Second Mate’s certificate had grown dog-eared as I accrued sufficient sea-time to sit my examination for the next grade, that of first mate. With luck, this voyage should be enough.
He leaned beside me at the rail and I realised, with a shock, that he was much younger than I had supposed. His features had a prematurely aged look about them; he had not bronzed well, like so many of us did, and his complexion was coarse. He reminded me of a boy I had once known, the child of elderly parents. He had dark hair and shaggy eyebrows that added to this impression of age and, unknowingly, I had touched on the root of his unhappiness. As though he disliked my thoughts, he suddenly straightened, slapping the palm of his hand upon the caprail.
‘Ah, well…’ he said, and drifted away into the chart-room to write up the log-book from the slates we mere watch-keepers were allowed to fill in with the details of our four-
hourly vigils on the bridge.
‘It’s part of the Welsh Naval conspiracy,’ it had once been explained to me, ‘a guaranteed market for the export of Cambrian slate combined with the opportunity to modify the true record in time of cock-ups.’
I began to pace the bridge wing, keeping my lookout as the exhausts roared in the funnel behind and above me and Antigone pitched and rolled her way south.
The Mate’s disappearance left me with his question. The short answer was that I had never seriously considered any occupation other than sea-going. I supposed myself a sufficiently practical fellow, with just enough brain to assimilate the principles of navigation and the theory of ship stability. I felt, too, that I had a sense of responsibility that would not utterly disgrace my parents. Certainly the urge was not hereditary, nor born of a desire to travel; travelling was merely a bonus. Of course, at its start I had no way of gauging the disappointments the life entailed. There was, one quickly learned, a crushing social stigma – best epitomised by the plea of Lady Astor’s, that merchant seamen should wear yellow armbands when on home leave to identify them as potential carriers of venereal disease. It was a vile calumny, for though merchant seamen were no better than other men, they learned early that prophylaxis was better than cure.
A child of the suburbs of north London, I knew little about the sea but possessed an insatiable appetite for messing about in boats. The opportunities to do this in post-war, austerity London were negligible. Expeditions in ‘ships’ were limited to a circumnavigation of the Isle of Wight in an excursion paddle-steamer, which left an indelible impression upon my mind. It had been blustery weather, the rolling decks were wet with spray, the white-capped sea alternately bright with sunlight and shadowed by cloud. In the distance the beaches of Sandown and Shanklin were still barred by their anti-invasion chevaux-des-frises. We rounded St Catherine’s Point with its crenellated lighthouse to starboard and a school of porpoises gambolling to port. Along the white buttresses of the Needles the seas crashed and foamed with a terrifying majesty and from our spraying bow-wave, little rainbows curved in the patches of sunshine. The memory lodged, to stir the imagination in my journeys to and from a good grammar school where I proved a bad pupil.
