The success of the Barbarossas was partly due to man-management. Their preferred attack craft were galiots, small boats with two masts which could also be rowed by volunteer crews with a stake in the expedition. Part of the ferocity that achieved their victories came from the morale of these unchained men, who leapt from their oars to join the battle. Starting with two galiots, the Barbarossas fought, boarded, captured, raided and traded their way to extraordinary power, enslaving tens of thousands along the way. Aruj besieged and took Algiers, proclaiming himself Sultan, before shrewdly relinquishing the title and joining his domain to the Ottoman Empire. He was killed in a battle with 10,000 Spanish soldiers under Charles V. By the time Khizr died in 1546 the younger brother had become Hayreddin Barbarossa, master of the North African littoral and Grand Admiral of the fleet of the Turkish Sultan.
Two and a half centuries later, when Coleridge sailed this way in April 1804, the threat of the Corsairs was still not extinguished. Only two months before Coleridge watched the hawk a desperate action had been fought in the harbour of Tripoli by men of the nascent United States Navy and Marine Corps, who lost, retook and set fire to an American ship that was being used as a gun battery to repel American attacks on the Tripolitan fleet. It was the United States’ first foreign war. Another two centuries on, America has been again engaged in military action in Tripoli, assisting the overthrow of Colonel Gaddafi. Bizarrely, this part of the Mediterranean currently smells as dreadful as ever it did in the days of the Corsairs.
‘God’s teeth – that smell!’
(My rather BBC English amuses Shubd, who remarks ‘You speak very well!’ I am now experimenting with antique exclamations in place of the traditional Anglo-Saxon expressions with which my shipmates are well acquainted.)
You cannot but complain about the stink. You step out of the cool bridge into North African heat and a sickening reek issuing from Bay 26.
‘Animal skins in brine,’ Sorin says. ‘Not nice, eh?’
The stink falls halfway between rotting meat and rotting fish; it becomes stronger by the hour. ‘The brine overflows and washes around the decks,’ Sorin says, darkly relishing. So this is what you walk through if you are idle enough to be taking morning and evening strolls. As the voyage goes on and the stench increases, and more foul water sloshes about the decks, Sorin requests more information about these skins.
‘They are cow heads,’ he reveals.
‘What!’
‘Cattle heads in brine. From Algericas to Malaysia. We are going to need to hire some people to clean the bays . . .’
We make faces as we imagine every wave that rocks us setting all the cattle heads bobbing and nodding in their dark tank.
We pass the Archimedes Seamount and push out over the Abyssal Plain. The clouds at sunset are puffy flotillas and you feel you can see for ever – the sinking light effects a sudden widening and deepening of the space on the horizon. All at once what appeared fixed, the range of vision, is revealed to be an illusion. There is more distance there, now, much more, gulfs of coloured sky and burnished water diminish to a new limit of sight. For a few moments you seem to glimpse the impossible, some mythological West over the curve of the world.
Hotter, hotter, this must be an Egyptian heat. Sorin talked to his family last night, as he tries to every night, on Skype or Messenger. He shows me a photograph of his wife and son.
‘How beautiful they are!’
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Thank you very much.’
We talk about superstitions.
‘No whistling on the bridge.’
‘Why not?’
‘It brings storms. In fact no whistling anywhere.’
‘OK, anything else?’
‘Don’t turn your back on the sea. No harming any birds on the ship.’
‘Why not?’
‘This Turkish bo’sun told me about a guy who found a bird on the fo’c’sle, shitting everywhere – bird was sick. So he killed it – broke its neck – and throw it over the side. Within one week he lost his whole arm in an accident.’
‘Whoa!’
Sorin is not smiling. ‘If it had been a Russian, a Romanian or a Bulgarian I would not believe – but these Turkish guys don’t lie.’
Shubd holds the same belief, about birds rather than Turks.
In superstitious vein we discuss women on ships. It seems that this taboo – still held by the skippers of certain Scottish fishing vessels – left the merchant world a long time ago.
‘In the old days the agent in Bangkok couldn’t get on board the ship for all the girls on the gangway,’ says the Captain, and chuckles.
Boogie Street, he said, was the place to go. Singapore was also held to be special: ‘Beautiful girls,’ says the Captain.
‘South America,’ says Shubd, dreamily. ‘Brazil.’
As often, mention of the Old Days brings further reminiscence of their glories. When they broke down in the Old Days everyone started fishing off the boat. They don’t break down so much now, and the fish are harder to find. In South American ports, Shubd says, you can be besieged by fishermen offering catches, and also peddlers of very high grade marijuana, he hears.
It is very hard not to whistle. Nobody else does. Coming out of the crew mess with a cup of coffee, heading for the saloon where we eat, a few notes escape – barely notes, more like a pursed prelude to more tuneless humming (semi-tuneful humming is one of the commonest sounds of the ship). In the saloon the Captain, Andreas the chief engineer and Sorin all raise their gazes from their plates. Their faces are expressionless: alarm and disapproval is conveyed psychically, with considerable force. I hum and ‘sing’ louder, as if trying to drown out the memory. There is the smallest pause before Sorin chomps a chunk of melon. Breakfast continues.
Lifeboat, fire and man overboard drills are all publicised in advance. When the alarm goes at ten thirty I hurtle as carefully as possible down to the ship’s control room on the main deck to find everyone lounging around waiting for their name to be called. This achieved, Sorin informs the Captain, now alone on the bridge, that all are present.
‘Very good, carry on,’ says the radio.
We divide to our assigned lifeboat stations, port or starboard, where we don life jackets. I have seen more pathetic buoyancy aids but cannot remember where.
‘This is a piece of shit!’ I pronounce over the four blocks of foam held together by a scrap of orange plastic, pleased to be able to demonstrate something like expertise, having spent time on lifeboats.
‘Well,’ Shubd says, ‘it is very economical.’
We check that the lights switch on and that the whistles blow, then we file into the lifeboat. An orange capsule like a suppository with a little turret, the lifeboat is painted pistachio-green inside. No one can see out except for the helm, who would be Shubd or the Captain – Sorin and Chris are on the port boat. We strap in. Every face betrays the same feeling: this is ghastly.
‘The first thing that happens is we issue seasick pills,’ says Andreas, ‘otherwise someone will puke and then everyone will puke.’
There is no doubt about that. Strapped in, facing each other, blind to the sea, acting as a kind of meat ballast in the bottom of a capsule which would be upside down half the time, in any sort of storm, you would certainly puke.
Shubd starts the engine. It runs first time, the only piece of good news, as far as I can tell. The engine is capable of five knots – five! You would be lucky to keep the boat’s head to the wind.
We are all relieved to conclude lifeboat drill, but now the horn blasts and bells sound again: fire alarm. The ‘fire’ is in a container. Two of the crew, ‘smoke-jumpers’, pull on breathing apparatus and flame-retardant suits. They mime attacking the fire. Moving urgently, one holds a spike against the container while the other pretends to strike it with a sledgehammer. Others connect hoses and pretend to cool down nearby containers. A perforated nozzle is then held over the ‘hole’ in the burning container and a hose connected to it. It is easi
er to imagine the smoke-jumpers being horribly injured than it is to picture them suppressing the blaze, but everyone knows what they are supposed to do and everyone takes it seriously. The Captain would turn the ship so as to create a lee between the fire and the wind. Sorin would be his eyes, and to a great extent his judgement: the Captain remains on the bridge, the chief commands the fight. The Filipinos, led in this case by Ray and Mike, would do the fighting.
There are many more examples of conflagrations at sea which ate lives like air than there are stories of fires which were successfully fought. Wind to fan flames, toxic materials to poison smoke, distance and situation to cut off help and a demonic alternative of burning or drowning put fire first among the nightmares of the sea. Seafarers collect these stories almost in spite of themselves, horrors which do not bear close study, except perhaps by those whose business it is to prevent them.
One that might stand for many was the fate of the General Slocum, a paddle steamer which caught fire on an excursion up the East River of New York in 1904, approximately where the Triborough Bridge is now. In full view of hundreds on shore, over a thousand people perished – a disproportionate number of them women and children. New York was shaken with an agony of grief, a foreshadowing of September 11th 2001, the only tragedy in that city to surpass the General Slocum in loss of life. Newspaper headlines tell of mourning crowds at the water’s edge in the days following the disaster, of people so beset by anguish that they had to be prevented from throwing themselves into the river.
Captain H. Van Schaick remained at the helm, while the wheelhouse burned, until he got the General Slocum aground. He left the bridge, he said, only when his cap caught fire. Though he seems to have done everything possible to save lives he was criticised for spurning an opportunity to ground the ship earlier, at a wharf he believed was imperilled by warehouses and oil tanks. He spent three and a half years in jail and was not pardoned until eight years after the tragedy.
If ships are models of their times in miniature, the General Slocum’s was a shadowy era. Fire hoses burst. Life jackets were rotten: some were found to have been freighted with metal by the manufacturer to make them up to the required weight. Lifeboats could not be launched: there are reports that they had been wired and painted into place. Many of the passengers could not swim. A man in a white yacht is said to have stood off the scene, watched, and made no attempt to help.
The launching of rescue boats is next. Rohan gives the briefing. It is like listening to a young captain; Rohan has the gift of commanding attention.
‘The rescue boat is gravity-dropped and control is from the deck,’ he says. ‘The important thing is that the deck crew really drop it. You want a big splash. If not, the boat is hanging over the waves by the hook. I have been in this situation in training and it is very complicated and very dangerous.’
Noel, our cook, is picked on to talk us through launching the life rafts. He recites the procedure at top volume. Noel lacks Rohan’s ability to transmit solemnity but his words are followed closely.
If we are a model of our time in miniature then the Gerd is proof of progress. There are plans, there is adequate equipment (at least the life jackets are not weighted with metal) and the drills are practised. The last time this company was faced with the real thing, dangerous cargo in the forward holds of the Charlotte Maersk caught fire in the Strait of Malacca. The crew were on their way to attack the fire within seven minutes of the alarm. They fought the blaze for twenty-four hours before help reached them, saving the ship and themselves. It took a further ten days to kill the fire, which engulfed more than 150 containers and burned at over a thousand degrees. One man was treated for smoke inhalation.
The incident report is terrifying reading. Flames, detonations and palls of chemical fumes did not daunt the men cooling adjacent containers, retarding the spread of the blaze. (The intense heat of the fire meant they were prevented from a direct assault, at first.) This was brave enough on its own, but the report includes a reference to a tank of liquefied petroleum gas. The Charlotte’s captain, Dick Danielsen, decided that this tank would rule their efforts: if the flames came too close to it the ship would be abandoned. The men fought with the knowledge that the consequences an LPG explosion would surely be lethal for some of them.
What formidable courage it required of the smoke-jumpers: as they suited up for our drill and peered out through their visors I imagined Mike and Ray hurrying forward along the narrow deck, vision constricted by their masks, their breathing loud in their ears as they make their ungainly charge into danger, knowing that if anyone is going to die they will surely be the first.
There is a photograph of the crew of the Charlotte taken after their victory. They are an almost perfect analogy of the men of the Gerd: four Europeans and three Indians wear the insignia of officers; squatting at their feet is the Filipino crew. Every man is smiling. Captain Danielsen, in particular, looks euphoric.
It is not unusual for captains to serve their periods at sea knowing little of most of their men. The ship sails on an understanding of combined strength, not certainty. The expressions on the men of the Charlotte are triumphant not merely in achievement, but in unity: the fire put them to the question and they answered. The different scales of pay, the racial divisions in treatment and privilege, the difference between company-employed officers and voyage-contracted seafarers undermines the traditional language of the enterprise. ‘Crew’ in the Gerd’s case actually refers to a collection of entirely different classes, experiences, grades, cultures and sets of expectations which happen to be in the same boat. (It would not be strange or out of place for Captain Larsen to go halfway around the world without sharing anything but the briefest exchanges with Roy, the youngest of our crew.) But Captain Danielsen’s expression is alight with pride and relief. At the moment the shutter clicked there was no captain anywhere who knew his crew better, who had endured as much with them, who had worried about them more, or achieved more with them. Of all the thousands of photographs generated and published by the company, this photograph is the only one I have seen of a complete crew.
We approach Egypt as night falls, passing south of Crete and beating on through spectral waters. The moon’s broad path is cut with shadows like phantom ships. The air is milky and hot. The sea lies right down, darkest silver-blue and alive, flowing past us like a snake.
CHAPTER 8
Bitter Water, Bloody Sand
I WAKE EARLY and the sun is already up: our clocks remain on Central European Time but we have been steaming towards morning. As we pass Tobruk and El Alamein a helicopter comes over from the north and soon after twenty-one turtle doves descend out of the same sky, settle on a pink container and fall asleep. They have the air of having done this before. The noon horn test blasts them awake. Oil rigs appear like traffic cones, serviced by strange-shaped ships, their silhouettes stretched, crushed and platformed. Sun stars sparkle on the blue in an infinite, strobing shimmer.
At breakfast there is discussion of a ferry which turned over in the Zanzibar Channel last night. ‘And it is dark there then,’ says the Captain. The ferry was overloaded. ‘And there are many sharks there,’ the Captain adds, ‘great whites. Six metres. It was Christmas Eve for them.’
For hours we parallel the width of the Nile delta, which remains out of sight until an oil refinery rises over the southern horizon, the first sight of Egypt. Two flying fish skip out of a flat sea, bright silver. They change direction in the air, dipping and diving between waves, their wing-like fins extended. A pair of dolphins, bigger and jumping higher than the Biscay and western Mediterranean animals, rush up to take advantage of our wake. Huge and wild, they buck out of the water with such force that they fall head-first, their tails high in semi-somersault. Their play seems an assertion of joy or madness, the overexcitement of children disordered by wind, sugar or the moon.
It is still very hot at 5 p.m. At five thirty we eat the traditional Saturday steak and chips, with prawns in avocado halve
s to start. There is a general and contented chewing as we put these delicacies away, and a conversation about cars with Rohan. I despair: Nelson, Churchill, Clarkson? Can a professional irritant really be the blue world’s most famous Briton? It is between him and Beckham. Most of those present are less keen on football than cars, because cars translate well to DVD, but seafarers have little opportunity to watch football. In place of Nelson, the greatest naval tactician in history, a man of surpassing courage who loved duty and country above all, a pantomime TV bigot is now Britain’s foremost man at sea.
On the radar clots of vessels can be seen forming ahead of us, some anchoring, some exiting the canal. Container ships harlequinned with boxes follow car carriers in procession. It will cost us half a million dollars to transit to Suez, plus fees for the weight of our cargo, plus cigarettes.
‘Do you know what Egypt is called?’ Sorin asks.
‘Umm – Egypt?’
‘Marlboro Country!’
Displayed in the lift is the company corruption policy. If someone tries to corrupt us we are to have nothing to do with him or her; we must report the attempt immediately. Fortunately, no one regards the cigarette price of the Suez Canal (otherwise known as ‘the Marlboro channel’) as corruption. The giving of cigarettes is more like a traditional local custom.
If we arrive late at the assembly point we will forfeit half a million dollars. This eventuality falls in the Captain’s broad field of impossible things which will not be permitted to happen. We make the arrival line at 1830 precisely. We lower our twenty-tonne anchor and are assigned a convoy number. We will be third.
‘Do you worry about anchoring like this?’
Lights prickle the hulls of tethered giants around us.
‘No no no I have stopped her so many times. At four knots I know I can stop her in one ship’s length.’
The Captain is in a lively mood, humming to himself like a dynamo, circling the bridge, checking this and that, needling Shubd in the name of instruction.
Down to the Sea in Ships Page 8
