Down to the Sea in Ships

by Horatio Clare

  There are two new passengers. First comes a white egret with a short yellow bill and black legs; it stalks about, gripping the containers with long toes. And now there is a bird like a small goshawk, with an olive back and a creamy chest, barred brown. It catches something and feeds on it with savage leisure, having stuffed the bulk of its victim into the locking dock on the corner of a container.

  ‘Yes, yes, once we had four oles in Korea.’

  ‘Four owls, Captain?’

  ‘Yes, yes the crew give them food. They disembark in Singapore.’

  Writing in the afternoon I glance out of the window to see a small blue boat heading out of the wastes straight for us. There have been pirates in these waters for as long as there have been voyages. I charge up to the bridge.

  ‘Fishing boat,’ says Chris, patiently, as it ducks astern of us. An empty tanker that happens to be passing takes terrific fright, hauling ninety degrees off course and plunging away to the north.

  We spend the next day and night steaming to Vietnam. Just before 3 a.m. I wake, exclaim at the view from my porthole and scramble to the bridge. We are 6 degrees North, 106 degrees East, south of the Scawfell and Charlotte banks. The dark sea is aflame with gold lights, they encircle us in floating bonfires.

  ‘Amazing!’

  ‘Yeah. Well. You think everything is amazing,’ says the darkness, heavily.

  ‘Evening, Chris!’

  ‘Good evening.’

  ‘What are they fishing for?’

  ‘Squids. These are Vietnamese. There’s going to be a whole lot more of them, and Chinese, and Japanese. The whole sea . . .’

  I estimate there are eighty vessels in the gold armada. As we draw closer the lights change to pink-orange and glaring white blazes. The night is warm as smoke, with cloud clearing to reveal Orion and the Pleiades.

  ‘How do you avoid the fishing boats?’

  ‘You aim to miss them, then if they move, that’s their problem.’

  ‘Ouch.’

  ‘Yeah, well. Haven’t hit anyone so far. I don’t think.’

  Someone has, though. A barge has gone down in the bay of Vung Tau, our destination. The message reads:

  Barge was collided and sunk 05 persons on board 02 persons rescued 03 persons missing vessels in vicinity requested to keep a sharp lookout and assist immediately please report directly any related information.

  The message repeats, unchanged, for the next two days.

  On the night of our arrival in Vietnam we are due to take Vung Tau pilots aboard at 0100, but the action starts around 2300. Up until this point the Captain dozes on the sofa on the bridge, more like a bear than ever, curled up in the darkness, listening to Shubd working us in towards the coast. More lights appear, and more: some fishing boats are anchored, some have nets down, others will set off from stationary to full ahead in a moment. Shubd threads our course between the fishermen to the tune of multiple alarms – every time she is taken away from her voyage plan Gerd squeals.

  It is as though an admiral has set out a defence of Vietnam in layers of pickets: first fishing fleets, then oil rigs, tankers, anchored and moving ships, then invisible mudbanks, uncertain channels and scattered buoys. The Grete, our sister ship, made this approach recently with Vung Tao pilots aboard. They confused two sets of buoys and ran aground just off the town’s waterfront.

  ‘With pilots aboard!’ the Captain repeats, horrified.

  Dodgy pilots are a master’s curse. Overrule them and you double your culpability in the event of mishap; fail to overrule them in time and you might as well have rammed the ship ashore yourself.

  Sailors have made this approach for thousands of years: Chinese traders, Portuguese navigators, Malay pirates, French colonists and American and Australian warships have all done it, but by the staring and the tension on the darkened bridge we might be forging a new route, pushing back the chart.

  ‘Actually the charts are very old,’ Chris confides. ‘They keep promising we’ll get new ones.’

  Somewhere in the utter obscurity to the west of us are the many mouths of the Mekong. Now, in the time of the south-east monsoon, the wet season, these mouths are pouring flotsam and current miles out to sea. We are bearing north into the outfall of the Song Saigon – the name of the river being the only remnant of former times left on our old chart. (Ho Chi Minh City is only a hundred kilometres upriver.) At the mouth of the Song Saigon is the little port city of Vung Tau. Its hills, peninsula and beach comprise the first landing place in hundreds of miles of mangrove deltas and estuaries. For the Portuguese it was a trading post, for the Malays a pirate base, for the French a stronghold and for the Americans and Australians a rest and recreation area during the Vietnam War. The bay of Vung Tau then was strewn with anchored vessels, aircraft carriers, supply and hospital ships. The Song Saigon in this season gave American and Australian naval captains nightmares. The monsoon flotsam provided perfect cover for Viet Cong saboteurs, like those who mined Clifton’s tanker.

  Vung Tau is three humps of black against a faintly street-lit sky. The Mekong delta is a great darkness to the west. The night is hot, clouds squat low and heavy on the hills. There is an eeriness here, in the unknowable immensity of littoral, in the silent coast, a mangroved intermingling which refuses to be land or water, in the sound of our horn, lowing a long deep boom like the moans of a mourning giant, in the thought of ‘03 persons missing’ whose bodies, turning and tattering, are somewhere in the water below us; there is eerieness in all the slab-black sea and in the heavy air. They are wrong who say the sea has no memory. The sea is all memory, and every captain who ever brought his vessel in here could feel it, almost read it.

  We draw up-channel past the town, where people in dark bedrooms, their dreams disturbed by our lowing, must be drifting back to sleep. We angle in towards our berth.

  ‘We need that tug now!’ barks the Captain, as the stern crew struggle to make it fast. The pilot is talking to the tug, the tug is squawking back over the radio, there is some problem with the line and the Captain takes the thrusters, ignores everything else and brings his ship alongside himself. Cranes roll, stevedores board. It is half past two in the morning when work begins.

  Vietnam is exporting rubber goods to Colombia and Venezuela, furniture to Trinidad and tinned vegetables to Mexico. Refrigerated containers full of frozen fish, four for America and one of each for Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico come booming down on the hatch covers. Another two hundred and fifty tonnes of frozen fish fillets join us, mostly for America, which is also importing forty tonnes of Vietnamese sticky tape, fifteen tonnes of carpets and textiles, fifteen tonnes of hats and caps, ten tonnes of luggage to put them in, fifty tonnes of sports equipment to play with, seventy tonnes of candles (seven forty-foot containers full of candles for lovers, diners and powercuts!), three containers of ceramics and stoneware, twenty tonnes of aluminium and almost three hundred tonnes of coffee, neither roasted nor frozen. There is half a container’s worth of copper for Panama and four more carrying car and bicycle parts for Canada.

  Funnels and superstructures hover through the morning rain as tankers and container carriers slide upriver, cut off below their bridges by the mangrove forest. The dock displays the usual stacks of containers, here surrounded by mud, puddled water and oil tanks. Behind the optimistic scrapes and semi-structures of expansion the green realm of the mangroves rolls back to a white horizon. The Can Gio forest is a biosphere reserve now, with UN designation. Its two millennia of growth was stunted relatively recently, when American aircraft sprayed it with defoliant. Along with tigers and crocodiles the mangroves sheltered Vietnamese fighters, giving them cover all the way to the centre of Saigon. The mangroves are being ‘rehabilitated’, in the UN’s pleasing phrase.

  A mix-up with the crew list means no going ashore. This will be a seafarer’s visit to Vietnam. I feel I need to stand on it, at least. Shubd, guarding the gangway, is exhausted – everyone is exhausted.

  Little t
rading boats approach us, offering fresh vegetables, potted plants and soft drinks. There are no takers. It is not clear how we would deal if we wanted to, from forty metres up. The craft are shaped like upturned bird skulls, with eyes painted on their beaks. The water is the colour of French mustard. Sorin sees blue and yellow fish in it. By lunchtime we are turning out of our berth.

  ‘Did anyone actually see a Vietnamese woman?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I can see a woman. She is with a child,’ the Captain announces, studying Vung Tau’s statue of the Virgin Mary through his binoculars.

  The weather breaks open behind us, high washed blue over hills, and the mangroves are vivid now. The French called the town Cap St Jacques; behind the hills, in the distance, tiny figures are spotted over a beach. At this distance they could easily be Australians, or young Americans, running mad along the sand, having their R & R. No one else is gazing backwards now: they are craning forward, hungry to be off.

  ‘The Captain is bored,’ Sorin chuckles, as the pilot calls the course changes and we head down-channel. The boat comes to take the pilot away, and dithers. ‘Let’s hit the fucking road,’ Sorin growls. He wants to turn the ocean under the hull and winch on the day and haul in the night and arrive at the next port so we can leave it and arrive and leave and sail and sail until he is home again. This is a man who says he has salt water in his veins, and he can tell you to the hour how long it will be before he is flying home. He escorts the pilot down to his boat and returns, grinning.

  ‘This guy asks for cigarettes for his boss, his brother, his uncle, his mother . . .’

  Conversation turns to preparations we will need to make for China. They are very strict about bilge and ballast water, and, Sorin adds, wooden pallets. China fears pests and alien insects from the West.

  ‘Wooden pallets?’ the Captain frowns.

  ‘Yes. Because they may contain keratin.’

  ‘But the whole country is infested with everything shit!’ The Captain roars.

  Our mirth does not mollify him. He is still livid about an incident in which the details of a crew list did not quite tally with the numbers on the passports: one or two were smudged and hard to read.

  ‘They stop loading for two hours!’

  (I have been wondering what would happen if impossible things which cannot be allowed to happen were to happen. Now I know. The Captain looks like an outraged owl, mantling over a grievance he will never forget.)

  ‘They stop loading for two hours! And I had to write an apology to the authorities! And if it happened again I would be banned from Chinese ports . . .?’

  He tells this story twice, with increasing incredulity.

  The notion of China being infested with everything shit leads to infestation issues in general. The cockroaches in Mexico are the biggest cockroaches there are, according to the Captain. Savannah, Georgia, is infested with alligators, he notes. Sorin and Andreas nod agreement: very big alligators.

  ‘Don’t take your dog for a walk there, or your girlfriend, they are bigger every time,’ says the Captain. ‘And they are angry, like crocodiles. And sharks also. Sharks are born angry. Once we have a shark in the pool, I don’t know how, someone catch him in. This shark was a baby but it was angry! It was very angry.’

  We head into the deep water with light hearts. China is three days distant and there is a typhoon called Nesat in the way. Nesat is generating seventy-five-knot winds – over a hundred miles an hour – and fourteen-metre waves. It is composed of a hurricane sixty nautical miles wide, a storm surrounding it with ten-metre waves, and gales around the pair of them covering an area 360 nautical miles across where waves are over six metres. The whole heaving fried egg of low pressure is moving at a stately eleven knots.

  ‘Let’s run over a buoy and smash it up with the propeller, just to complete the party,’ says the Captain, in holiday mood.

  Day retreats quickly but the light rekindles in the same quarter: the west is lit by a huge flare of burning gas, a billowing, wallowing inferno in the sky which paints the sea flickering orange and ruddys the lower clouds. At its base is a tiny city lit up: the rig. It is an unearthly sight, an alien normality. Who knew this was here? What world is this, where they burn the night above the water?

  We navigate north-west then north into four-metre waves, barely big enough to put a sway on us. There are squalls of rain; hot, dark and quick. Our usual course to China would take us up between the Macclesfield Bank to the east and the Paracel Islands to the west; in certain seasons, Chris says, the currents favour a more westerly course between Vietnam and the Paracels. But because of the typhoon we are swinging far out to the east, east of the Macclesfield Bank. The Captain plans to go around behind Typhoon Nesat and chase it up to China.

  Although almost a third of all cargo shipping passes through the South China Sea the radar shows nothing but wave-echoes. We carry many birds; we still have a signature egret and there was a flight of nine, earlier, which seemed undecided, and went away. On the deck there is a wagtail, and a russet sort of wheatear. There was a falcon too, I think a peregrine, which paused for a perch, then flew, and there is our most endearing figure, a squat sort of heron with a broad bill which hunches on a container and endures and endures the wind and the rain. The wind is thirty-four knots now, almost seventy kilometres an hour, and the sea is the colour of a shark’s back under the short and purplish dusk.

  Under dim navigation bulbs on the bridge the charts are palimpsests of pasts and futures. The South China Sea is the shape of a dinosaur’s head, craning over the top of the Philippines to graze on the coast of Borneo. British navigators marked its neck with Scarborough reef and Truro shoal – though the British were latecomers to these waters, Admiralty charts still map the seas for much of the world’s fleet. Flora Temple reef – part of the Spratly Islands group which speck the dinosaur’s jaws – was named by tragedy. Flora Temple was a famous American racehorse. Her namesake ship was a clipper carrying coolies, Chinese slave labourers, from Macao to Havana in 1859. She struck the reef and began to break up. The forty-nine crew escaped, explaining to the subsequent inquiry that they had not sufficient lifeboats for the coolies. The crew also said the coolies had terrified them the day before the wreck in an attempted mutiny during which one of the crew was killed. The inquiry heard that the Chinese were locked below decks while the ship foundered. All 850 died.

  Their grave, the Spratly Islands, is a constellation of reefs, sandbanks and islets claimed by Taiwan, Malaysia, Brunei, Vietnam, the Philippines (which they are closest to) and, most firmly, by China, from which they are furthest away. These little curves of sand and chips of reef offer nothing but access to the fossil layers at the bottom of the South China Sea. Over two hundred trillion cubic feet of natural gas and a billion barrels of oil are believed to lie beneath us, which may be why China recently included the Spratlys on maps in Chinese passports. Meanwhile the Philippines builds a pier on one forlorn sandbank with American help and other claimants say it will be a US base. Vietnam sends monks to an islet, to minister to the spiritual needs of a military garrison. China ‘detains’ Vietnamese fishermen and asserts its title to the entire chain, as well as the Paracel Islands, around the dinosaur’s eye. If you did not know humans for an equitable, rational race, and nations for just and trusting collectives, you would predict a bloody future for the Surging Sea, the Boiling Sea, as Chinese navigators called it. The US Secretary of State referred to part of it off our starboard bow as the West Philippine Sea recently, which brought growls and rattles from all around its rim.

  Around one in the morning we hit bigger waves; at two they are bigger still. By five, off the Macclesfield, we are rolling and yawing in the tail of the storm. We sail through the colours of a typhoon dawn. The vapours thicken so that daybreak seems to hesitate and retreat before coming on. Swirls of mist darken to bruised magenta, then thin claws of light appear and the sea turns from grey-black to black-green.

 
; The conversation at breakfast is all about the barbecue. There have been rumours about it for days.

  ‘Coming to the barbecue?’ we ask one another, almost anxiously.

  The ship’s motion is the reach, turn and pull of a giant scoop, as though we are raking the scum of some elixir from the surface of a boiling tub. Typhoon-sent swells are marching down out of the north-west, six-metre monsters in fat ranks, arrogant with power. We lurch across them until we hit one square: the bow slides aside in a thump of spray and bucks upward in a tottering rise. At the same time wind-driven waves chase up behind us from the south-west. The swells and waves intersect in lumpen water sculptures of alps and pyramids, periodically exploding. In among them the boobies and albatrosses fight over flying fish. The fish fire out of the water in silver volleys and twist out of trajectory suddenly, skewing away between the wave tops as the birds come hurtling down. The boobies in particular are ferocious fliers. They are scruffy gannets skiing inches above the turmoil of the waters, screwing and skidding in pursuit. A snatch brings faster, unburdened hunters; as often as not a pirate steals the catcher’s fish.

  Every few minutes our headlong pitch brings the propeller out of the water. The governor reins it in, then, as the bow rises and the propeller submerges, the governor releases the power again and the deck judders as if the engine has just started. A great shake runs through the ship.

  ‘So. We are rolling ten degrees. I know ten because my glasses fall off the table,’ the Captain smiles. Ten degrees off vertical means we are yawing through twenty with each roll. The Captain is enjoying himself.

  ‘The day you got your first command, Captain –’

  He breaks in with a bark of pleasure.

  ‘You need to be old to get it! Chief officers are always hungry! Of course it is a life’s ambition. But you need to be calm. You need to have sharp eyes which know when to blind. You can’t be like Captain Bligh, no no!’