Down to the Sea in Ships

by Horatio Clare

  Le Havre resolves through binoculars into towers, quays, steeples and cranes. Chris unclips the radio handset.

  ‘Le Havre pilot, Le Havre pilot, this is Gerd Maersk, Gerd Maersk over . . .’

  There is an answering crackle and a woman’s voice, French-accented:

  ‘Gerd Maersk, Le Havre pilot, good evening Captain, what is your ETA, over?’

  ‘Le Havre pilot Gerd Maersk, good evening ma’am. Our ETA at the pilot station is 1915, repeat 1915 over . . .’

  The language of the sea is English and its mode of address is a charming courtesy. Men on the radio are ‘sir’; women are ‘ma’am’. When shores speak to ships they often pay the officer of the watch the compliment of calling him ‘Captain’. On board, as well as good morning, afternoon and evening, there is ‘Good watch!’ which you say when you leave the bridge, and no meal passess without multiple wishes of ‘Good appetite!’ bestowed on diners by those entering or leaving the saloon. These formalities are of a piece with the swept and mopped corridors, the washed decks and the laundered overalls. No feminine touch, patience or perseverance, no matriarch nor stooping maid could make this ship cleaner, tidier or better ordered; no female presence could make her crew more polite or more gallant. The rules, roles and customs of the sea seem to have erased half the stereotypes of our gender.

  A gannet dives for fish, its black wing-tips and lemon-coloured head emphasising its white plumage; the bird appears a plunge of luminous speed. We search the sky beyond it for our pilot. While most ports use pilot cutters, Le Havre uses a helicopter.

  ‘You will see him on the radar,’ the Captain says. ‘There!’

  In port after port he will be the first person to spot the buoy, the pilot boat, the hazard. He wears glasses but he always seems to know where to look. The helicopter is a smart green and silver thing which hurtles out to us, arcs round behind our funnel, stops dead above the bridge and lowers the harbour pilot. The pilot wears shades like a movie star. In moments he is off the roof, on to the bridge and shaking hands with the Captain. In we go.

  A great port, which Le Havre once was, shows its best face to the sea. The city looks calm and philosophical this evening, gazing westward. Our pace up the buoyed channel affords a scrolling view of the fishing fleet and the docks. The Captain brings us alongside under the cranes of the container port so gently that arrival is imperceptible.

  ‘The ship is so heavy you cannot bump at all or you will dent her. You cannot do that! No, no . . .’

  The Captain deals only in absolutes.

  The stasis of arrival generates a sort of panic, as though somehow you have fallen behind with work. The constant motion of the ship through every yard of sea, every nautical mile, is achievement; every wave shouldered aside is a victory. Now we are stopped everyone moves quickly as if to compensate. The first man up the gangway is the agent, tired-looking and carrying a black document case. Then come the stevedores, all swagger.

  ‘They are hard men,’ says the agent, ‘the reservoir of tradition.’

  The first two layers of containers are secured to the deck frames by steel lashing rods. The stevedores’ job is to take these off containers which are being moved and to secure them to containers which are loaded. They are equipped for a night’s work with food and cigarettes. They do not sign on or off the ship and they show little interest in the crew, barely nodding as they come aboard.

  Work will go on all night in the engine room. The casing of one of the cylinders is cracked, so we have been proceeding on eleven, not twelve, giving us a maximum speed of seventeen knots, rather than twenty-three.

  ‘We cannot leave Europe without full power,’ the Captain explains.

  The cylinder casing is an elongated steel funnel higher than a bungalow. It weighs nine tonnes. We carry two spares, stored in corners of the engine room.

  The chief engineer is Carl-Johann. He will run the operation from the background, unobtrusively. The second and third engineers will take turns at directing the job and working in tiny hot spaces, full of peril and complexity, leading their crews. Carl-Johann is a pacific man with deep mournful eyes, his moustache black against pale skin. He has a little bi-plane on his desk, scarlet and decked with black crosses. It is a Fokker, he says. He made it himself. Carl-Johann is passionate about model planes. The Captain is equally passionate about model trains. Late at night sometimes they get together in the Captain’s cabin and bid for rare engines or planes on the internet. When you know this it takes nothing to see them as they must have been as boys: standing in a corner of the playground – always the same, favoured corner, you feel, for young Henrik Larsen. A little tubby, peering up over the tops of his glasses at the interruptions of bigger children, he must have been as uncomprehending of their stark world, bizarrely bereft of any knowledge of the workings, colours, serial numbers and capacities of trains, as they were ignorant of his horizonless shunting yard of exactly known shapes and memorised numbers, his constellations of detail. Little boys are adorable for the endless accuracy of their devotions, the tables of goals and runs, the three hundred and twenty-fifth Star Wars figure known down to the calibre of its gun and the colour of its insignia. When certain of these boys grow up they are easily mocked for their undimmed passions, none more than the groups of anoraks at the ends of platforms or the solitaries huddled in hides, with their treasured notebooks, their lists of Deltic locomotives or megatick birds.

  But perhaps it is that little boy within each man at work on the Gerd tonight who shuffles one giant cylinder casing for another according to safe procedure, who will work through heat and fatigue and danger on hundreds of nuts, bolts and cables. It is that passionate precision which will be needed to disconnect a multitude of couplings in the correct sequence, and to reconnect and replace them in the right order. Perhaps it is the owlish engagement of little boys in love with certain and calculable things which builds machines as great as the Gerd, and greater.

  Le Havre’s container port is an unfinished jigsaw of fences, gates, towers of steel boxes and oil storage tanks. Along the quay yellow machines are levelling a hundred acres for new cranes and container yards, half for Maersk, half for China’s COSCO. The men on the quay wear hard hats and hi-vis jackets, the uniform of the human cog. But one of the cogs, at least, is loose: a van pulls over and a man with a raffish grin makes a smoking gesture – do we have any contraband? We shake our heads.

  The agent lifts shaggy Sam, his Shitsu, off the passenger seat. He accelerates around the container stacks, dodges the container lifters and stops at an office block. This is a flood-lit, mechanised and intensely masculine world of bare spaces, functionality, lights which go on and off by themselves, easy-clean surfaces, concrete and echoing acoustics. It is an architect’s model precisely realised, complete with little men who can be picked up and set down and who leave no trace. Is this what earth would be like if there were no women? The trip to normality is a fast drive along deserted roads, through high gates and the reek of petrol from the storage tanks, over swing bridges and black water.

  Not so long ago the quays of Le Havre would have been a jostle of sailors. They are gone but Le Havre has not forgotten its heritage, its oceanic cachet. It is there on the wall of the restaurant, Le Grignot: a grand poster advertising a liner of the thirties, Companie Générale Transatlantique – French line – Paris-Havre-New York. It is in the conversation at the bar where a couple shake their heads with the proprietor over the pacbos, the passenger boats, which come in the morning and only stay the day. It is there in Bar Belge, Le Trappist, in the enthusiasm of François, serving beer, who used to be at sea.

  ‘I was on oil tankers,’ he says proudly, with a shake of his head which seems to marvel that anyone should be so rash. He seems rueful, too. Perhaps he misses the order of seafaring, the routines which eat up the miles and months, and which are built around food. Breakfast is at eight, lunch at twelve and supper at five thirty.

  Breakfast is boiled eggs, cereal and fruit salad.
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  ‘Morning, Captain, morning, Chief.’

  ‘Good morning!’

  ‘Good appetite!’ says Sorin, cheerfully.

  He has just completed the dog watch, four in the morning to eight. He will sleep before he is on the bridge again at four this afternoon, but he is not done yet. At lunch and at supper he will load his plate with four raw carrots. He will eat each of them like this:

  ‘Crunch – crunch – crunch-crunch-crunch-crunch-crunch!’

  We will share Sorin’s pleasure of carrots twice a day for the next two months.

  At meals I solicit stories from the officers. Usually the Captain will bark ‘What?’ when I begin a question, and furrow his expression like a Zeus with toothache. You can see him wondering what detail has caught my eye, what corner of the continent of my ignorance he is being asked to illuminate this time. His manner is not intended to be intimidating, I decide. A man of little small talk, he regards questions as problems to be solved. Mine must sometimes seem arbitrary.

  ‘What’s this picture –’

  ‘What?’

  The Captain looks like Beatrix Potter’s owl, Old Brown, when the squirrel tickled him with a nettle.

  ‘I was just wondering about this picture, Captain? Is it an actual place?’

  On one wall of the dining saloon is a large blue and white fantasy of a rural, pre-industrial scene: a curving river, a church, a village, people on horseback.

  ‘Yes yes yes that is Svendborg. It is supposed to be the home port of the ship but our home port is Dragoer. There was a mix-up – another ship has our picture and we have theirs. I had a chief officer who wanted to change them. She asks me if she can arrange for us to swap them over. She said she will contact the other ship . . . I said are you sure you want to do it? Is it worth this trouble?’

  We laugh. The Captain does mystification well.

  ‘She says we will do it, we will leave ours in Algeciras and then they will leave theirs – but then she left the ship because she was pregnant. Maybe this is why she worries about these pictures . . .’

  Sometimes the Captain will talk to the chief engineer in Danish. Often we will comment on the food, which can be rich in the pleasures of fat and salt but is otherwise reasonably healthy. Occasionally we will laugh at something, like the pregnant mate attempting to nest-build across the oceans. But often, very often, we will eat in a silence that stretches from moments to minutes to interdeterminate longueurs, underscored with chewing and carrot-crunching. In these periods the Captain hums to himself and mutters half-whispered words and phrases, as though two tiny trolls are having a conversation not quite out of earshot. At such times I will dig away at my plate and think what strange men we are, in our companionship of self-consciousness, which we pretend we do not feel; and think about how gentle these big, tough figures are. Seafaring seems to attract more introverts than extroverts, for which we are grateful, in our shared shyness. And often I sit there, marvelling: women would never live like this! Then I miss them. We all do and we never say so.

  Several decks below us, in the devil’s cathedral of the engine room, Prashant is wedged into a tiny space, scalding hot steel surfaces all around him, working non-stop with a spanner. The cracked casing has been lifted off; it is now a question of preparing the way for the new one. A Filipino, Roy, is in an even more cramped space behind Prashant. Roy is the youngest member of the crew and he looks shattered. Tools, nuts, washers and cables are scattered around the walkway. The job would be impossible in a swell. Everyone has luminous green plugs jammed in their ears, though these barely curb the roar. Even at rest the engine is terrible. As a neophyte you feel yourself trembling below the monstrous threat of its shake and howl.

  The men down here do not know it is a bright day outside, the first of September. They only know that we are bunkering, taking on 6,400 cubic metres of heavy diesel fuel.

  ‘It’s a heavier grade than the stuff they use to make roads,’ Chris says. Chris is already a master of the laconic, along with most aspects of seafaring.

  The hazard-orange barge is alongside and everything smells of fumes: the lift, the corridors, the sky. Bunkering is danger, a perfectly ordinary thing in a world of ordinary danger. The merest mistake will cover decks with oil. If any were to escape into the water we would be responsible for an environmental crime. Fines would be levied, at the very least – captains are liable and have been jailed for spills.

  Before the job began the crew held a meeting to agree who would be responsible for what. A crucial role is the watchman’s: for hours he will do nothing but stare at the pipe and its fittings on the fuel barge and the ship. He is urged to eat properly first, to never take his eyes off the couplings and to shout for relief the moment he feels tired or his focus wanders. Everyone knows he will be tired, and his head will swim with the fumes, and he will have to force his concentration not to sway despite that, and he will almost certainly not call for help.

  CHAPTER 5

  Out with the Tide

  A STILL EVENING and satisfactory: bunkering is complete, the piston casing replaced. The crew have eaten supper and retired to their cabins, apart from two men in the bow and two in the stern who will handle the lines. Shipping is the only industry in which schedules are devised not according to hours of work but, rather, by mandatory hours of rest, otherwise there would be no rest time at all. The pilot is aboard, the tugs are alongside and we have clearance to depart.

  ‘Let go forward spring line,’ the Captain says.

  Chris echoes him on the walkie-talkie and the procedure rolls once more. Turning the ship to face the sea is a behemoth ballet. The breakwater south of us has a bulge in it, forming a semi-circular manoeuvring area. With one tug pulling the bow to port and the other tugging the stern to starboard, and the Captain’s hand on the bow-thruster controls, they spin her in this space like a compass needle in its setting, rotating her perfectly, as if she were twirled slowly by a titan’s fingertips. Dead slow ahead when she reaches her apex sets us in the channel and moving seaward. The mood on the bridge is both alert and easy, an atmosphere you begin to recognise, the professional calm of men who maintain the world, out of its sight.

  In the voyage to come pilots will sometimes mistake me for an officer, and sometimes hesitate, realising I am not one.

  ‘Writer,’ the Captain will say, sometimes, as casually as if announcing that he has been asked to transport a Martian, and someone’s got to do it. If I am recording he says ‘Journalist’, with the kind of nod which is one step away from a shrug. Sorin is entertained by my Rycote, the fluffy windshield which goes over the microphone. ‘Ah, the Chinchilla is back!’

  Joel is the first of the Filipinos to ask what I am up to. I explain and he seems delighted by the idea. ‘So you want to tell our story! Great! Come and spend time with us.’

  I do, I try to, but it is difficult. When the watches are working they are in no position to talk. When they finish they disappear into their cabins. As the voyage goes on I catch them in the gym or the library, on their laptops, and we watch films together. We often meet late at night, and exchange smiles and greetings, but then I stay out of the way, because they tend to be absorbed in messaging home.

  ‘Ships used to be much more social places,’ the chief engineer says, ‘but now everyone takes DVDs to their cabins.’

  Fishing boats come out with us on the falling tide. It is an hour to low water. Little sailing boats are all but becalmed, save one optimist with his spinnaker out. Our tugs, unleashed, escort us between the breakwaters into a mellow and sleepy sea. The helicopter comes and takes the pilot away, his sunglasses still in place. The Captain talks to Shubd. Eight to twelve, morning and evening is the third officer’s watch. He is the most junior of the navigators, with the most to learn, and therefore the most likely to need the Captain. His shifts are matched to times when the Captain is most likely to be awake.

  ‘It will be good to see this in future navigation,’ the Captain says, showing Shubd someth
ing on the electronic chart. ‘There’s no ships now.’

  The Captain rests his foot on the rail behind the bridge, briefly, as we leave Le Havre, and stares out. Cormorants in packs pass below us, heading in towards the estuary, and sailors in yachts stare up. Who knows what the Captain is thinking? Is leaving harbour always soul-stirring, on a great ship and the ebbing tide – even for the thousandth time?

  We are steering thirty degrees north of the sunset. The western sky is turquoise, feathered with few clouds. There is no wind, only our turbulence, as we pick up speed to fifteen knots, then eighteen, and the leading lights of Le Havre, two dazzling white glares, slip out of line astern. We will head north-north-west into mid-Channel until we are nearly equidistant from Dorset and Cape Ouessant, then turn south and west for the Bay of Biscay.

  ‘The Biscay can be a real pig,’ Chris said, heavily, this morning. He has a deeply stolid manner but there were traces of enthusiasm, even hope about him, then.

  The Captain goes below and a watchman comes up. Mike is from the Philippines. He will gaze at the darkness ahead of us for the four hours of the watch. Normally he and Shubd would have the bridge, the vista of the ship and the whole wide ocean to themselves. Radios chatter. Solent Coastguard and Jersey offer weather information and respond to vessels which have called them.

  There is a lurch underneath us, suddenly: current, the North Sea draining vastly right to left. Night comes on and the stars are tremendous; the planets bright as leading lights. The Plough hangs off the starboard bow and the Milky Way is a sparkling arch above. Every half hour Shubd marks our position, a little pencil cross on the ruled line of our course. The ship is steering herself now and she is vocal about it – every ten minutes a bridge alarm goes off, requiring that Shubd presss a button to silence it, proving that he is still alive and awake.