Down to the Sea in Ships

by Horatio Clare

  ‘The pirate came up behind so the Captain increase speed – twenty-seven knots. The pirate can’t keep up. He come on the radio and say “Fuck you fuck you!”’

  ‘You see many in the Gulf of Aden,’ says the Captain. ‘Sometimes they are fishing but they are towing skiffs. They have a dual role.’

  Chris says the skiffs are no good, unstable in swell and frail beside our great mass moving at speed:

  ‘The lowest part of the ship is the poop but the hull curves inward so they wouldn’t be able to come alongside.’

  ‘But what if they come over the rail?’

  ‘We would put the hoses on them and bash them,’ he says, confidently. ‘A Russian ship caught some pirates. He put them in a zodiac and cast them off. Without a motor.’

  You can imagine that Chris, Sorin or the Captain bashing anyone would leave that person insensible, but it is hard to see what use sea-water hoses would be against Kalashnikovs. Besides, my tough shipmates are not fighters in the conventional sense. It is much easier to fight someone else than it is to combat your own desires, whether you crave booze, sex, recognition or advancement. The ship offers none of these. For the duration of the voyage all you have is your job and your bunk – battlegrounds a monk would recognise.

  We ride swells from astern all day as we run south round Finisterre and parallel the Portuguese coast. It is Saturday so there is ‘Special Tea’: a tradition on merchant ships. At the head of the table are the King and Queen of Denmark. They look slightly pained, perhaps at the necessity of wearing traditional ornamentation over contemporary evening dress. The awkward and dutiful air emanating from the portraits is echoed along the table they survey. At Special Tea everyone eats together: officers and cadets at the Captain’s table, and crew at the other, normally unused, table in the same room. There is much less life and noise than when they are in their own mess, round the corner. Avocado and prawns are followed by steak and chips. Everyone plugs away at the food with enthusiasm but there is a definite feeling that many of us would rather be next door, jammed in, forced to accommodate elbows and meet requests for the salt.

  We do our best.

  ‘Steak, chips, green beans!’

  (For all that I am the company’s official writer in residence, taking no money from them, and working industriously with notebook and microphone, I am a beneficiary of these men’s work, and feel at mealtimes like a guest in an extremely unusual hotel, and find myself praising the meal as one would at a host’s table.)

  Rohan raises an eyebrow, grins.

  ‘All we need is a good glass of red . . .’

  There is a deal of feeling in the faces responding to this. The Captain was not joking about his plan to go out for a ‘nice fish and a glass of water’ in Algeciras. For the duration of your voyage you cannot even drink on shore.

  ‘When they brought in the no-alcohol policy they had to put some of the captains and mates through rehab,’ Chris says. ‘They couldn’t afford to lose them but they had to dry them out.’

  We see whales after supper. The Captain hums and says, suddenly: ‘I want to get that whale and take him home to my wife.’

  He offers no further explanation.

  CAPTAIN IS SLEEPING says the sign on his door, the following afternoon. We are arrowing across a glittering paradise of sea. Our wake is the only flaw on its flashing surfaces, our smoke the only stain in the air’s pavilions above. A sailing ship, now that would be the thing! But it is such a day, such a hot afternoon, with the sun bright beyond every doorway, that you imagine we might just be forgiven our pounding diesel. You can believe it as long as you do not look at the long banner, like a burned belch, stretching away behind our funnel.

  Carl-Johann is sleeping too. He is leaving us tomorrow; perhaps he is dreaming of his first meal at home, which he has already planned: crab. His wife will prepare it and they will sit down with their two daughters.

  ‘One wants to be a navigator,’ he says, proudly. ‘And the other a journalist.’ Because officers may have wives or family on board for up to two months of the year, given a certain length of service, Carl-Johann reckons his daughters have had twenty-four months of sea time.

  ‘More than most first officers!’ the Captain puts in.

  Cadiz passes somewhere to the north of us; we should see land in an hour and a half if it stays clear. Noon to four is Chris’s watch. I suggest we take a right and go down to Casablanca for some fun.

  ‘I don’t think I have quite enough credit in the company for that,’ he says.

  Chris is as round as a buoy and he does a fine line in deadpan. He has a not-quite-concealed love of the life. His baggy shorts reveal a tattoo on his calf. In red, green and blue it shows a ship in sail, an anchor, a telescope and the legend ‘Sailors Grave’. The sailing ship means he has crossed the Atlantic, he explains. He could have a red dragon, denoting a stop in a Chinese port, ‘But that’s not so cool any more.’

  He has also earned many gold dragons, for crossing the date line.

  ‘You could read an old sailor’s whole life in his tattoos. A leatherback turtle for crossing the equator, a blue star for going round the Cape of Good Hope. A swallow is five thousand miles at sea.’

  ‘I could get one when we reach LA,’ I speculate.

  ‘I’m thinking about a piece of work,’ he admits.

  ‘How will your mother feel about that, Chris?’

  ‘Ahh, my mum doesn’t mind, she’s cool about it. My dad won’t be too impressed.’

  Visibility is twenty-five nautical miles – fifty kilometres – to the horizon, which is notched by the smoke of a ship. It is about the limit of vision on the water, from the bridge of a ship this size (we are forty metres up) though you might see land further off.

  ‘But we don’t see land too often,’ says Chris.

  We saw the lights of Capo St Vincente last night and this morning at dawn the low hills of Capo di Faro. Day broke ethereal, the hills sandy against a lemon sky. The light began in a rainbow across the dark horizon, a carmine band against the sea. It was Sorin’s watch and he was using the time to study, listening to a training CD about stowaways.

  ‘Stowaways will use great ingenuity to trick you. They will lie to you and deceive you. Stowaways will attempt to befriend you and manipulate your emotions. Stay professional, stay detached. Stowaways cost the company money. Be on your guard. Prevention is better than cure.’

  This is all recited by an American woman with a voice a shade more humane than the speaking clock. It is quite chilling to picture the world’s law enforcement authorities being programmed with this stuff.

  ‘I had stowaways,’ Sorin said. ‘In Hong Kong. Seventeen Chinese guys. They come aboard dressed as stevedores – they had help from a crew member. Hid in the bo’sun’s hatch. Hong Kong police came on, dogs and guns, took them all off. But they miss four guys – so many places to hide in a ship. But we were going to China next, so they got them there. Took them away for . . . interrogation. They had jackets with food and water in pockets. Not much, they knew they would be looked after.’

  He remarks that stowaways who choose the wrong ship are thrown overboard.

  ‘It happens, sure. In northern latitudes you’re dead in ten minutes and no one will ever find the body.’

  No one ever did find the bodies of three Romanian stowaways, Petre Sangeorzan, Radu Danciu and Gheorghe Mihoc, who were discovered on a ship in these waters in 1996. The vessel, the Maersk Dubai, was owned by the Taiwanese Yang Ming company: ship and crew were on charter to Maersk. On 12 March 1996 they were approximately where we are now, fifty miles off Cape Trafalgar, on their regular run from Algeciras to Halifax, Nova Scotia, when the three stowaways were discovered. The men’s pleas for their lives seem to have had no effect on the Taiwanese officers of the Maersk Dubai, Captain Cheng-Shiou, First Officer Wu Chung-Chih, Second Officer Kuo Chin-Chiu, Radio Operator Jang Che-Min, Chief Cook Wang Ko-Lung and Chief Engineer Ni Yung-Lai.

  The ship was heading north-west
into the deep ocean when Sangeorzan and Danciu were found. They had crept aboard in Algeciras in the hope of a passage to Canada. A third would-be stowaway who failed to board had watched the ship leave with the two men on it. One of the ship’s Filipino crew, Rudolfo Miguel, told CBC Radio in Canada what happened when the stowaways were caught.

  ‘They have a passport, and picture for their family and children. The master, he said, “throw overboard”. And now these people: “No, no, no – please, please, please, please captain, no, no, please.” Crying. They understand that they will throw overboard . . .’

  Another Filipino member of the crew, Juanito Ilagan, said, ‘One of them are kneeling on the floor, I think begging for somebody to spare their lives. And he’s kissing one of the boots of the crew.’

  Ilagan said the captain had ‘devil’s eyes, fuming mad’.

  Captain Cheng-Shiou was adamant that the two Romanians should be thrown off the ship. The Filipinos asked to be allowed to construct a raft for them. The first they made broke up on hitting the water; a second held together. Taiwanese officers then forced the two men down the pilot ladder. When Sangeorzan and Danciu were last seen, one had climbed on to the raft and the other was in the sea. They had no means of propulsion, no food or water, and no one was looking for them.

  Extraordinarily, the same ship, carrying the same crew and controlled by the same officers, was making the same run two months later when the same thing happened. On 18 May the Maersk Dubai was a night and a morning’s journey out of Algeciras, well into the eastern Atlantic, when Gheorghe Mihoc was discovered. Rudolfo Miguel told CBC: ‘I saw the captain, the chief officer, the second mate, chief engineer, the chief cook holding knife grab this person.’

  ‘The second cook, who is a Filipino, knocked on my door when I was having a nap,’ Juanito Ilagan recalled, ‘and he said they’re gonna get rid of him. I said I don’t think they’ll kill him. He said they were carrying knives. I said who – who was carrying knives. Well, them, the Taiwanese officers.’

  Miguel heard screaming – ‘No, he said, no’ – and watched from a hatchway as Mihoc was forced over the side at knife point. When the crew discovered a fourth stowaway, Nicolae Pasca, they hid him and fed him. In Halifax the ship was stormed by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, alerted by a letter the crew had sent to a port chaplain in Houston, Texas, in which they detailed the first incident. Arrests and court cases followed.

  The upshot, years later, says much about the lawlessness of the sea. Four Filipinos, including Ilagan and Miguel, agreed to remain in Canada to testify. They were accused by the officers’ defence lawyers of inventing the whole story in order to emigrate to Canada. Their families in the Philippines were threatened. It took two years before they were allowed to work minimum wage jobs in Canada, the sea forever closed to them. (Manning agencies and shipowners continue to deny the existence of blacklists, but the the men had no illusions about their chances of new contracts.)

  The court ruled that Canada could not extradite the accused for trial. They were returned to Taiwan. Captain Cheng-Shiou was tried there for negligence, but his case was dismissed for lack of evidence that the victims were dead. His motive for the murders seems to lie in Canadian regulations which fine ships seven thousand dollars for every stowaway who arrives in Canada, and Yang Ming company policy which punishes captains of ships where stowaways are found ‘according to their degree of fault’. Yang Ming paid off the families of the deceased in an out-of-court settlement. The Maersk Dubai now sails in the livery of her owners, renamed the YM Fortune.

  Entering the Strait of Gibraltar the seaways are flecked with fishing boats, ferries and freighters. As we track between the Pillars of Hercules I dash around the bridge with binoculars, gazing hungrily in all directions. The atmosphere of the Strait is charged, as if by an approaching storm, with the tense proximity of two mightily distinct cultures, as though planets have swum too close together. The weathers here change with squally speed. Below us are at least seven major currents, dominated on the surface by the Atlantic inflow, and near the seabed by the saline Mediterranean outflow. When Coleridge first saw the two continents simultaneously he recorded his exhilaration in his notebook, and the sense that must strike every traveller through the Strait, that man has made a lunatic division of existences out of a small gap of water.

  I [am] sitting at the rudder case, my desk on the duck coop, my seat, have Spain, the Coast of Cadiz to wit, on my left hand, & Africa, the Barbary Coast, on my right. I am right abreast of a high bank, black brown heath with interspaces & large & small scarifications of light red clay – beyond this mountain islands, alongside & in file resembling canoes and boats with their keels upward. We have a breeze that promises to let us laugh at Privateers & Corsairs that in a calm will run out, as a fox will a fowl when the wolf dog that guards the poultry yard can only bark at him from his chain. This is Spain! – That is Africa! Now, then, I have seen Africa! Power of names to give interest! When I first sate down, with Europe on my left and Africa on my right, both distinctly visible, I felt a quickening of the movements in the Blood . . . This is Africa! That is Europe! – There is division, sharp boundary, abrupt Change! – and what are they in Nature – two Mountain Banks, they make a noble river of the interfluent sea, existing & acting with distinctness and manifoldness indeed, but at once & as one – no division, no change, no antithesis!

  Tangier reclines on its hillside, all temptation, like a magus leaning on a bar. Jebel Musa in Morocco wears a magnificent hat of cloud while the sun shines on the Rock of Gibraltar. We slide into Algeciras towards evening. Dolphins play between us and the pilot boat as it comes alongside. The Captain pretty well guides us into the harbour; the pilot has little to do. Some communication problem with Chris on the fo’c’sle provokes a deep blast from the horn. The Captain tells a story of an infamous Algeciras brothel, Los Lagos, which was closed down because of drugs, crime and fighting.

  ‘Then the authorities in Gibraltar begged them to reopen it because all the crime went there. So they reopen. New beds and clean sheets! The seaman’s priest told me this so I know it is true.’

  Everyone likes Algeciras because the port is at the foot of the town. The containers, fishing boats, quays, lorry-slalom and the Spanish evening you expect, but you walk through a Moroccan village first.

  There is that smell, halfway between meat and spice, and women in djellabas, men smoking, teleboutiques, mosques and Allah Akbar is chanted softly from a window. Two obese prostitutes in bad moods mark the fringe of the settlement. The upper town is cervezas and pigs’ legs, people eating tapas and seafood. There are ships and cranes at the end of the streets. On the basis that tomorrow is my birthday – and though I am in solidarity with the crew I am not actually an employee – I have a gin and tonic at a swanky bar, conscious that my hi-vis jacket sends a confusing signal. Slightly lost and slightly thirsty, I console myself that I must look a bit like a seafarer. On the way back to the ship Rohan and Prashant disabuse me of this illusion.

  The first time I have seen them out of uniform, and they are strolling along the calle in their t-shirts and shorts like the cooler sort of tourist. They look well off, alert, as ever, healthy and contented: strikingly different from the old image of the merchant seaman, raddled with drink and vice. They want to know if I know where the action is. I wish I could tell them. It is the first time we have met in my environment, or at least one where I am not awed and innocent. Rohan and Prashant look at me eagerly, hoping for the inside take on Algeciras. These wonderful, terrifying young Indians! They are so kind and encouraging on the ship that I could hug them: they seem almost to sympathise with a plight you did not know you were in before you met them. When we talk I cannot help feeling that their civilisation knows mine for a foppish, effete and idle abstraction which cannot even look up its own train timetables without Indian help. There must be twenty-five-year-old Britons who could match Rohan’s knowledge of one of the most sophisticated machines on earth, who are alrea
dy married, who have children and a series of ten-year plans which are actually going to be realised, but I suspect there are very few.

  ‘So do you know where is good to go?’ Prashant asks. Spanish girls, tapas, flamenco and a roiling atmosphere of sensuous vivacity would evidently be welcome.

  ‘Things tend to start very late in Spain . . . I found a nice cocktail bar,’ I say, lamely, ‘where you could have some – lemonade?’

  They go on their way, laughing. The route back to the ship is lined with fishing boats, some of whose crews have not finished, and queues of silent lorries, their curtains drawn: another strange, still glimpse of the numberless tribe of men far from home, from company, from family, working to the regulations of a concrete world.

  All night, in clunks and booms, we take on cargo: we are now lower in the water by a metre and it takes 120 tonnes to sink us an inch. Stevedores and deliveries come and go, two technicians fiddle with one of the radars, calibrating it, and fail to work out what is wrong with the other. Carl-Johann has gone; the new chief engineer, Andreas, looks stoically resigned. Like captains, senior officers work ‘back to back’ – three months on, three off, handing over to their relief quickly, because they know each other and the ships they maintain. But many officers hide from their phones on leave, especially over Christmas. If they can be reached they can be asked to work, which means being flown anywhere in the world at no notice.

  We depart in thudding sun. In the bow two crew work the lines, feeding them on to the drums of six huge winches. Chris is at the winch controls, on a raised walkway which runs around the gunwales above the deck space where the two men work, separated from the peril by railings. Something goes wrong.

  ‘Captain, the ship is moving forward!’ Chris yelps, and dives for the controls. The winches pay out. They are still on automatic, so nothing snaps.

  ‘The lines are designed to break backwards,’ Chris says. ‘But in some ports you still find steel – they whiplash. Cut you in half.’