Down to the Sea in Ships

by Horatio Clare

  It turns out a throttle on one of the slave stations, a sub-control on the bridge wing, was not quite at ‘Stop’. When power was switched to it our monster moved.

  ‘I always like this bay. I like that mountain,’ the Captain says, as we turn out across the afternoon glare. He and Sorin mock Tarifa Traffic Control when it fails to ask the standard question.

  ‘How many persons on board?’ Sorin prompts the radio, not transmitting.

  ‘Nineteen point three!’ jokes the Captain. ‘My first mate is pregnant.’

  The pilot soon departs; the gangway and ladder are raised and secured.

  ‘We are free!’ says the Captain. ‘Free as a bird!’

  He and Sorin are in high spirits, as excited to be leaving as they were to arrive. Deep water comes quickly and dolphins with it – a large pod, including babies, flinging themselves at our bow waves. We progress past tankers, container ships, ferries, a cruise liner, fishing boats, the Guardia Civil in a rib, yachts under sail and catamarans. Gibraltar is a fortress-fist, watching us go.

  Afternoon gives way to rose-orange evening, the coasts of Europe and Africa darken. Slow falling stars are planes descending into Malaga. Two strange beasts appear at sunset as we enter the Alboran Sea. They are very big with no blow, their dorsal and tail fins show as they surf in our wake – are they basking sharks? A Kraken’s kittens?

  Another sleep, another breakfast, another shimmering day, another Captain-humming, Sorin-carrot-crunching lunch. It is like being in a rolling dream, conscious but unable to wake until the next promised event, Suez, days away. It is as though we are in a benign daze as we cross this slumbering blue, but the sea turns time into distance in a way that could make you insane. Imagine seeing the months and years of your life surging from horizon to horizon as you age, and everything on land changes, while the sea remains exactly the same. We converse about anything to pass the time. The Captain talks about two passions: golfing holidays with his wife, and model trains. He has just landed a beauty, a particularly special locomotive, a rare thing.

  ‘Twice the size of a normal engine! I remember seeing him when I was young . . .’

  The model did not come cheap. The Captain takes precautions against over-indulgence. ‘My wife looks after it for me when it arrives,’ he says, before confiding, ‘when I buy another one I send it to my friend’s house.’

  In mid-afternoon the bridge telephone rings. Chris turns the ship into a light sea from the north-west and pulls the telegraph back. All stop.

  ‘What’s happening, Chris?’

  ‘Exhaust gas leak.’

  We drift, our transponder sending the signal ‘NOC’ to passing ships: ‘Not Under Command’.

  Forty-five minutes later the phone rings again.

  ‘OK, we are fixed,’ Chris says. ‘The Captain is letting me start her up, which is cool. Most captains like to do this themselves.’

  He looks pleased. He nudges the control centimetre by centimetre, as gently as if he were afraid to break it, as if the telegraph were linked to some intricacy of glassware, rather than the steel citadels of the engine. He carefully plays the rudder control.

  ‘If you turn the rudder too early it is like having a house blocking the water off the propeller – no thrust.’

  It is touching how delicately a big man directs such a big ship. They all have this capacity for gentleness, for precision. It reminds me of my father repairing a bicycle or overseeing the assembly of a toy – ‘Don’t force it,’ he always said. ‘Gently, gently . . .’ You can see someone like Chris being very good with children. The men’s conversations about the solid world are not unlike those of boys at boarding school, minus the sex. They touch on food (food a lot), families sometimes, films now and again, airlines, airports and escape routes, often. With no audience, little praise, little status and almost no public understanding of what they do, these men achieve something that land life frequently fails to supply. You notice it in all of them, however junior; a kind of quiet self-possession. Paradoxically, the isolation of seafarers from the fullness of the world, and the confines of the mould they must fill, seem to make of them men in full.

  This fullness was attained by previous generations through a tradition stretching back centuries. Many of today’s older captains began their sea lives with a year’s separation from all they knew. Of all the practical, technological and theoretical understanding a cadet acquired in that time, perhaps the most fundamental was philosophical: you are no longer what you were. You are not of the land. You are not of your family; you are barely of your nation: you belong to your ship, your crew.

  With only an echo of the hierarchies of naval discipline, merchant shipping relies on precedent, routine and procedure. There are so many ways to do a thing wrong, and so few to do it right, and generally one which is the way it is expected to be done. Improvisation and resourcefulness are principally reserved for the captain and the chief engineer, extending occasionally to the senior officers. These qualities make good sailors but they are only required from the crew in exceptional circumstances. The history of professional seafaring is a story of man’s attempts to minimise exceptional circumstances, in the environment most likely to produce them.

  A cadet learns that his place on ships and the fate of his career, perhaps his life, will depend on fixed and unified purpose: the extent to which he can close the gap between his sense of himself and the nature of his role. The rank, the work and the ship must pre-empt the self, its feelings and desires. This is what Sorin means when he says he looks for someone who is ‘strong with himself’. Joseph Conrad explores the point in The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ through the characters of Singleton, the old sailor, and the rebel, Donkin. Singleton sees no distinction between himself and his work. Thrashed to exhaustion by the storm, Singleton perceives ‘an immensity tormented and blind, moaning and furious, that claimed all the days of his tenacious life, and, when life was over, would claim the worn-out body of its slave . . .’

  Singleton contemplates this prospect with equanimity: he understands and does not baulk at his fate. Dorkin, failing to incite a revolt, and being thwarted in an inarticulate attempt to assert ego over rank and role, becomes submerged in himself and is ostracised, a petty thief who steals from a dying man.

  Captains, crews and the life itself are ruthless in scouring out those who do not fit or are not ready for the sea.

  ‘If I find out someone has a problem at home,’ a captain said, ‘I want him off. If a man’s father dies I want him off the ship – he can’t work and he infects the others. But supposing you are married, so your father is not your next of kin, then you pay for your own flight. You think, where is the compassion?’

  That captain winced but he shrugged, too. You do not look for much mercy at sea.

  We pass the island of Pantelleria at sunset, known to seafarers as ‘Telephone Island’: though we are nearer Tunisia than Italy, Pantelleria is Italian and grants a European-tariff phone signal. Mussolini called Pantelleria ‘the only unsinkable aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean’. Its airfield and radar station threatened their planned invasion of Sicily, so in June 1943 the Allies dropped over four thousand tonnes of bombs on Pantelleria’s garrison, which surrendered as the invaders’ landing craft drew near. Churchill claims in his memoirs that the only British casualty was a man bitten by a mule.

  This one-sided affair is of a piece with the island’s first entry into English letters, and British propaganda, in 1589, with ‘The true report of a worthy fight, performed in the voyage from Turkey by five ships of London, against eleven galleys and two frigates of the King of Spain’s, at Pantalarea, within the straight, anno 1586’. The writer was Philip Jones, the publisher Richard Hakluyt, evangelist of North American colonisation, confidant of Raleigh and collector of Elizabethan voyage accounts, who included it in his Principall Navigations, Voiages, and Discoveries of the English Nation. The ‘worthy fight’ Philip Jones describes is a striking piece of Elizabethan derring-do in whi
ch honourable English merchant-adventurers are waylaid by the squadron of one Don Pedro di Lieva, who bids them yield and show obedience to the King of Spain. Naturally the English refuse.

  ‘The Spaniards hewed off the noses of the galleys, that nothing might hinder the level of the shot; and the English, on the other side, courageously prepared themselves to the combat, every man, according to his room, bent to perform his office with alacrity and diligence. In the meantime a cannon was discharged from out the Admiral of the galleys, which, being the onset of the fight, was presently answered by the English Admiral with a culverin; so the skirmish began, and grew hot and terrible.’

  Though greatly outnumbered and very busy with the battle, the English, so Jones says, ‘ceased not in the midst of their business to make prayer to Almighty God, the revenger of all evils and the giver of victories, that it would please Him to assist them in this good quarrel of theirs, in defending themselves against so proud a tyrant. Contrarily, the foolish Spaniards, they cried out, according to their manner, not to God, but to our Lady . . .’

  After a five-hour fight ‘furious and sharp’, three of the galleys drew away, ‘ready by the force of English shot they had received to perish in the seas’. The victors could not tell how many Spaniards they had slaughtered, and conjectured that their opponents had lost so many men that they lacked hands to reload their guns. On the English side Jones reports ‘the loss of only two men slain amongst them all, and another hurt in his arm, whom Master Wilkinson, with his good words and friendly promises, did so comfort that he nothing esteemed the smart of his wound, in respect of the honour of the victory and the shameful repulse of the enemy’.

  The interventions of an English-leaning God notwithstanding, the encounter records the death of an old technology, the Mediterranean galley, at the hands of a new one, the English full-rigged sailing ship, which was far more manoeuvrable and able to discharge broadsides of cannon fire. The poor Spanish, desperately sawing off the prows of their galleys so that their few, forward-facing cannons might have a better field of fire, clearly knew what was coming to them.

  ‘You will see a lighthouse,’ the Captain says, as darkness falls.

  ‘Yes! There! How did you navigate before GPS when you could not see lights or stars?’

  He makes an eel-like wriggling motion with his hands.

  ‘We feel our way.’

  CHAPTER 7

  Madness, Superstition and Death

  AT DAWN ON 8 September we are south of Sicily’s Capo Passero, ‘Sparrow Cape’; the island is a yellow-blue line on the horizon, rumpled up at the eastern end where the volcano, Etna, is a smoking egg. An antique-looking oil rig works the Vega field, spindly with legs and flares. There is a bee aboard today, and a swallow. The Captain has a piece of advice regarding sea lions.

  ‘You don’t want to swim with them – they are in their element. And you will see why they are called lions!’

  Shubd says he saw them in Chile. Shubd is keener on sport than wildlife, and particularly partial to table tennis. We agree to a competition.

  ‘My last captain loved TT,’ Shubd says, leading the way down the stairs. ‘Every day, four o’clock, he was down here. He is dead now. It is very sad.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘They were in port, the agent was aboard and he died. His head went on his desk – like that. It was a heart attack.’

  ‘How old was he?’

  ‘He was very young. This was a good guy you know, a really good guy.’

  Until recently the diet, the danger and the sedentary routine shortened the life expectancy of seafarers by up to six years, compared to men living on land. The diet has improved and many ships are equipped with gymnasiums, though it tends to be the same few who use them. It is also common for the weights and exercise bikes to be eschewed altogether because the noise of using them disturbs sleepers in adjacent cabins. There is almost always someone asleep on a ship.

  The Gerd has two void decks, one of which is equipped for sport. They are eerie places, windowless steel ghost-spaces, added into the ship’s design only to give the bridge more height, so that two more layers of containers could be accommodated on deck without obscuring the view forward. The echoing, grey-painted rooms do not lend themselves to the gaiety of leisure but we do our best. We use the rowing machine and the table football, but Shubd is not so good at the football so we return to table tennis. Shubd smashes the ball like a champion. He is a very gracious and patient winner.

  Sorin fills the swimming pool, a container-sized cavity behind the superstructure. It is warm, salty and thick-spotted with paint flakes and black matter from the funnel. Our Captain loves his pool.

  ‘This is another world,’ he says, gravely. ‘It is the best place to clear your head.’

  ‘There was a ship in the Pacific, the Captain went mad,’ Shubd confides. ‘He had to be kept in his room, guarded by two cadets.’

  ‘This must be alcohol,’ snorts the Captain.

  Sorin drains the pool at night because on another ship a sailor sleepwalked in and drowned.

  ‘What do we do if someone goes mad or gets hurt, Chris?’

  ‘We have a number for a hospital in Denmark where there is always a consultant standing by,’ he says. ‘If we can’t handle it then we will get help.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘There was one ship in the Pacific, somebody got hurt and they needed to evacuate him, so they got orders to go to a certain position. They got there and there was nothing. Then a submarine comes up right alongside them. Pretty cool.’

  We are contemplating this when the alert box spits out a message: an empty five-metre white lifeboat is adrift in the Sicilian Channel. There is no other information.

  We are in the Eastern Mediterranean Basin, heading for the Ionian Abyssal Plain. Last night, after leaving Pantelleria and Cape Bon to the south of us, we passed Terrible Bank to the north.

  In Italy I spoke to a man who should have died on Terrible Bank. Originally from Benin City in Nigeria, Charles was working in a garage in Tripoli until the war came. He bought a place on a boat which aimed to make the run to Italy, fully loaded with refugees. The first boat turned over in the harbour. Sixty passengers were drowned. Charles, on the upper deck, survived to try again with the second boat. Its engine stopped in the vicinity of Terrible Bank. The captain was able to broadcast one call for help before his radio battery died.

  ‘The sea was very strange,’ Charles said. ‘It was a white sea, all white, the waves were big. Everybody was sick. I was sick a lot, so sick, and there was no water. One boy said his spirit had drunk all the diesel for the engine. He was crying. Everyone started to pray to their own gods.’

  An Italian Coastguard cutter found them. The first Europeans Charles spoke with were two Italian navy divers. ‘They were very tired. They said the place where we were found is somewhere no one survives. They call it the dead zone. I will never forget all that white, the white sea . . .’

  As all seas, this one is a soup of bodies. The Strait of Gibraltar alone is believed to swallow a thousand would-be human migrants every year; no one knows how many perish attempting to cross the wider Mediterranean. It is migration season in the natural world, now: a billion birds are adding their mortality rates to the waves. Two warblers rest on the containers astern. The seafarers are doleful about their chances – any non-seabird seen on board is reported, once my enthusiasm is known, with a regretful shrug.

  ‘These small ones die,’ says Sorin, but it is not necessarily so. Ornithologists believe that birds like warblers migrate via memory maps, making regular stops at the same places. Why would a ship not count? There is not a day of the year when many ships our size do not pass this way. We carry a small population of insects, and sometimes rainwater. The Gerd might well be a link in a chain of predictable, accommodating stopovers.

  A yellow wagtail appears next, and a ragged line towing itself through the morning resolves into a flight of fifteen purple herons, followed by
a yellow-billed stork and more swallows, all going south.

  In these waters Coleridge’s ship also attracted migrating birds: he travelled through the spring, nature’s other season of changeover. His ship, the Speedwell, was one of a convoy escorted by men-of-war, as a defence against French privateers and Barbary pirates:

  Hawk with ruffled feathers resting on the Bowsprit – now shot at, & yet did not move – how fatigued – a third time it made a gyre, a short circuit, & returned again. Five times it was shot at, left the vessel, flew to another & I heard firing, now here now there & nobody shot it but probably it perished from fatigue, & the attempt to rest upon the wave! Poor Hawk! O Strange Lust of Murder in Man! – It is not cruelty it is mere non-feeling from non-thinking.

  Quarters of the blue world still host populations of pirates: the Arabian Sea, the Strait of Malacca, the South China Sea and in the Bight of Benin particularly. Their combined activities cost around seven billion dollars a year, most of it spent on prevention measures and patrols, rather than ransoms. But the sum is a mere mote compared to the spectacular economic and geo-political changes effected by Aruj, Ishak and Khizr, the Barbarossa brothers, born in the 1470s on Lesbos, then under control of the Ottomans. Their father was a warrior-turned-potter who had a small boat which he used to trade his goods; his sons must have become proficient sailors when still very young. They rapidly graduated to privateering: early reversals saw Ishak killed, their boat seized and Aruj imprisoned for three years. Khizr sprung his brother from captivity and the two began an astonishing campaign. In the early sixteenth century, when the Mediterranean was the Barbarossas’ hunting ground, the ships of their prey – Spanish, French, Genoese and Venetian merchantmen – were rowed by slaves, often Turkish or other Muslim captives. When the Barbarossas boarded the Muslims were freed and Christians took their places, shackled to the rowing benches. They were not unchained for any reason. The downwind stench of galleys was infamous.