Down to the Sea in Ships

by Horatio Clare

  The barbecue takes place on D-deck, in a rectangle of space near the base of the accommodation block, on the leeward side. A disco light is hung above two picnic tables. Two braziers char chops, steaks, mussels and squid. The music is lovers’ elevator rock, a Filipino speciality. Everyone smiles at everyone else but conversation is stilted to stillborn. We grill our own suppers. Everyone enjoys that bit. Then we rush our food: we hurry partly out of shyness, partly because the music is too loud and partly because here, relatively near the water, the speed of the ship is keenly felt. The waves rush by as we plunge tilting on. Being on deck is not relaxing. It is vital and stimulating: you feel yourself alert and you breathe deeply, but the pace of the water passing is infectious. We cut and chew, everyone thinking of other braziers, shared with family and women, when there was beer to drink and friends to tease and grass or sand to sit on.

  ‘You can’t have a conversation because of the music!’ shouts Andreas, the chief engineer, with a mournful satisfaction.

  It is not his music or his stereo, nor is this the place for an officer to impose his taste on the crew. Someone has turned the volume up to encourage a party feeling and no one dares turn it down. Perhaps we fear that no bubble of conversation will rise to fill the sudden quiet. We load the grill again and concentrate on the spitting flesh, turning our choices over and over. We are not fooling ourselves now. There is no drowned-out laughter; there are no conversations waiting to erupt. This is a sad scene, brave and pointless as the disco light. We swap smiles, the grills smoke in the hot grey air and everything is wet with spray.

  Night comes in under grim veils. The waves increase with the darkness; Shubd logs them at seven metres before the weather shifts and the swells realign, from fifteen degrees off the port bow at midnight to beam-on in the small hours. The cargo bangs and creaks as if steel beasts have woken up in the containers. By two in the morning I know we are rolling through more than twenty degrees because my curtains are opening and closing by themselves. There is no hope of sleeping. Now there is a snapping crack from the cargo, then a long screech, now a resounding boom. There may be a pattern to the sounds, as there may be a pattern to the rolls, but it hovers just beyond the rhythm of prediction. Some subconscious part of you has feelings for which way the deck will tilt: your balance compensates for the churn, tug and shove of changing forces. But outside, in the rushing dark, every crash from the container stacks is sudden and angry, an unpredictable violence. I cower my way round the deck, heart beating like a bird’s.

  CHAPTER 11

  China

  THE NEW WORLD appears first as shallowing water, green under clouds like towering sea horses. Then it is a string of sandy islets, each bigger than the last, forming a chain we must pass through. There are thirty degrees of heat on deck and the sun has a yellow-grey bruise around its throbbing eye. More islands rise in small pointed mountains as we come upon a line of junks. It is like seeing New York’s skyscrapers and yellow cabs for the first time, the same dizzy exultation at watching the legends resolve to truths in front of you.

  The junks have formed a line abreast and are carrying out a sweeping trawl, their stern castles arranged in a neat curve. On the nearest deck ten men are bringing in miles of net, hauling by hand, a rhythmic tug-of-war with a tolerant sea. They wear blue boiler suits and conical straw hats. It is something about the overlap between what you have heard, what you have seen, the assumption you make that things are not quite like that and the discovery that the world really is like that which makes the sight of fishermen in conical hats so pleasing. Chinese junks and Chinese hats – what cliché next? A pilot whose exquisite manners will make us all feel like gauche yobs, perhaps. As we pass Zha Zhou Island the containers flicker with passengers stirring. Birds flap and flit-hop between crates; others take flight. The swallows have made it, and a pied wagtail, and a dove. The squat enduring heron has survived, too.

  We are running through Guangzhou Large Vessels Typhoon Shelter, according to the chart, and it is well stocked. The great ships lie on the water, a clutch of blunt knives on a rucking green cloth, bows to the sea.

  ‘You see he is rolling more than we are,’ says the Captain, pointing at a black bulk carrier. ‘I was leaving Cape Town in a tanker going to the Caribbean and where those currents meet, the Benguela and the Agullas current, even in a flat sea with no wind at all you will roll so waves break over the ship. This is current.’

  ‘Crikey!’

  ‘Oh yes. You see how they are anchored? The angle of the anchor chain tells you the strength of the current. You must reckon with it, passing these islands. You need plenty of speed here. At least twelve knots. At least. We cannot slow down here, no no no we cannot do it. Not with all these anchored ships.’

  We are heading for the Lantau Channel as the pilot comes aboard. He will be our first contact with the world’s next superpower, the hungry heir presumptive to the global throne.

  The pilot takes a long time to entrust himself to our ladder. He gestures up at Chris vigorously but the same tactic the Suez crew employed has no more effect now. Flanking the pilot are two men who grab and tug at the ladder, pointlessly, while the pilot prowls and gestures and gives up and comes back, becoming entangled with his men’s harnesses. Finally he makes his leap. He appears on the bridge soon afterwards.

  ‘How do you do, Mr Pilot? Hello hello . . .’ booms the Captain, in standard greeting.

  ‘Why you no answer me?’ shouts the pilot. He is trembling. ‘I call you on thirty-seven, on twenty-four, on twelve, on thirty-seven . . . why you no answer?’

  ‘We have only one radio,’ the Captain says, taken aback, indicating the VHF. (Actually we have two, but one of them listens to Channel 16.)

  ‘Why you no answer? You should answer!’

  ‘We couldn’t hear you because of all the talking on the radio,’ Chris says. Chris suddenly looks like a defiant fifteen-year-old. His defence seems to me to be more like an admission of guilt, though it is true the radio is rarely silent or intelligible at the moment.

  ‘Why you not answer when I call you you should answer me!’ yells the pilot.

  ‘You should not talk to me like this!’ the Captain bellows, roaring anger like an oven billowing heat, his finger pointing skywards, possibly calling on Thor, Odin and Wodin to agree with him – or perhaps to indicate the position of the nearest of the microphones linked to the voyage data recorder.

  Captain and pilot are now staring each other out.

  The telepathy for ‘Ignorant arrogant aggressive uncultured foreign megalomaniac . . .’ is identical in Danish and Chinese.

  ‘Would you like a cup of tea? Or coffee?’ I try, aiming at the pilot.

  ‘NO,’ boils the Captain, ‘I will do this.’

  Chris and I watch the duel in silence. The pilot’s blade-faced attack cannot match the Captain’s thundering-bear defence. At the end of a stretched pause we all feel the pilot blink.

  ‘What course and speed would you like, Mr Pilot?’ the Captain inquires, in an effortfully neutral tone.

  ‘Three fifty!’ snaps the pilot. ‘And not more than fifteen knots.’

  Chris makes him some coffee.

  Lantau Island is green, wet and gorsey: the wind comes straight off it and you can smell the vegetation. A stagger of promontories falls back, revealing the flashing lights and runways of Hong Kong’s new airport. The air is loud with jets, the sea sliced with ships, but there is no sign of where all this transport is going, no hint of whatever is drawing so much here. The sea slides from moss-green to silt-brown to a yellow in which vague islands appear like preparatory sketches in the haze.

  Now the mainland’s arms spread ahead of us and the water muddies to a swatch of sludges. This is the Zhujiang estuary, the delta of the Pearl River. To port are Macau and Xiangzhou, to starboard Shenzen and Bao’an. Ahead somewhere is the city of Guangzhou. Though we are in a waterway so wide you need binoculars to see its borders we are confined to a narrow channel pulsing with other ves
sels. Junks with buckets and grabs attest that dredging in the Pearl estuary never stops. The great width of these surrounding waters and the harnessed profusion of boats and ships – something between a conveyor belt and an invasion fleet – gives the feeling of entering a world of the superlative. Perhaps it struck every wide-eyed Western mariner thus since the first European sailors reached here, via Malacca, from Portugal. We pass the spot where it happened, Neilingding Dao, an island like a two-humped tortoise nosing into the deep-water channel. Jorge Alvares raised the flag of Portugal there in 1513. By 1821 it was the transhipment point for nine hundred annual tonnes of opium from Bangalore. When the Chinese cracked down on the trade the British launched the First Opium War, and began what the Chinese still refer to as their Century of Humiliation. Steaming up Zhujiang estuary, you feel humiliation has since changed sides.

  Taking the cities on the horizon together – nothing separates them but lines on maps – we are steaming into the middle of a megacity of forty million people, a conurbation second only to Greater Tokyo. The Pearl River delta has been turned into one of the earth’s most economically productive landscapes. Consequently, we are churning our way up the world’s most polluted waterway. Tankers, coasters, bulk carriers and container ships are pouring up with us or beating down past us, three abreast every few minutes. The city nearest us, Bao’an, is a line of white tower blocks. Identical in height and design, they look as though they were unwrapped and arranged along the shore just this morning. A brand new bulk carrier surges by, empty: whatever she had, cereal, coal or red bauxite, Guangzhou has swallowed it. Lumbering up with us are barges so loaded they have no freeboard, and junks and dredgers and small boats carrying three or four containers, as well as parades of giants our size, though all this renders our leviathan strangely small. We make lame jokes as though we are nervous. It is a common saying, and one of Chris’s favourites, that we are just bus drivers. For the first time it feels as though our enterprise is rather smaller than that, more like pizza delivery. We pass two small tankers, New Glory and Morning Breeze, both daubed with two of the sea’s most common signposts: ‘Safety First – No Smoking’.

  ‘Morning Breeze!’ Sorin exclaims, ‘You mean Smell-like-Shit poison chemicals . . .’

  Wistful Chinese music weeps from the radio. Bao’an is now clearly visible under the heavy, fume-grey sky. The city’s towers are dense as a quiver of arrows. Who lives there? Is the city waiting for a populace? We pass a red-flagged junk at anchor, riding the wake waves. Through binoculars I can see its master is smiling and his wife is heavily pregnant. I decide their baby will be a girl, and she will become the first female mayor of Bao’an.

  Our destination is a scaffold of cranes on the west bank: Nansha, recently reopened after typhoon closure. We are nearly there when, three days to the hour after we left Vung Tau, our heron leaves us. He is last seen holding a steady course for an area marked ‘Shellfish Farm’ on the chart. I applaud the bird, and soon recognise the extent of his perspicacity. It is not just that the shellfish farm looks like the first heron-friendly spot we have seen, it is Nansha. Nansha to us is a hardened mudflat, tarmac glistening under rain slick, and stacks of containers, all marked COSCO, and tugs churning up water the colour of dirty elastoplast. Through a tiny portion of exhausted sky an orange sunset gleams like a cracked scab. Bats scatter over the containers, and men rig the gangway, and the stevedores board and cranes beep and boxes boom all through another night of loading and unloading and there are no shore passes. The small birds that failed to leave us earlier are befuddled by soaring containers and blazing lights.

  ‘My kid could manoeuvre a ship better than that’ is Sorin’s verdict on the pilot who oversees our departure.

  ‘What’s he done?’

  ‘He doesn’t use the wind, he doesn’t control the tugs . . .’

  This is related with an air of absolute disgust. It is not as simple as a man being no good at his job. It is as though the pilot’s incompetence is a moral failing, and the indictment of a port, of a whole district, almost of a culture. Perhaps our bitterness is a function of our evident insignificance. Perhaps this morning’s pilot could not be bothered with us because he had heard about our clash with his colleague. Or perhaps the touchiness comes from our changed role. For these four days we are not in the business of intercontinental shipping, which is the Gerd’s cause and calling. Instead we are shuffling containers between Nansha, Yantian and Hong Kong. We are coasting, which is a different kind of work altogether.

  ‘Goodbye, Nansha!’

  ‘Good riddance,’ says Sorin. ‘Yantian is better – Yantian is nice.’

  We steam into an angled bay below a steep green mountain. A spit of land supporting the container port forms two Yantians: we moor opposite the Yantian of pleasure, denoted by a scatter of coloured lights. On the other side of the headland is Yantian the town. A Chinese agent grants a lift to the port gates, most of a mile from our berth. He does not smile, perhaps because his car has no springs in seats or suspension, or perhaps he takes against me, or perhaps he is shy. How lost to supposition and imaginings is a dumb-tongued foreigner. Beyond the gates is a long road linking the two Yantians. It is Sunday morning, early, but every passing bus is full to the doors. Where is everyone going? There are Lycra packs of serious cyclists. The buildings are charmless utilitarian blocks but the town has a pleasant feeling: the embracing damp of the bambooed hill above it fills the atmosphere. Twenty students are queuing at the cashpoint. No shopkeeper is having a day off. Shops have a uniform signage, red and yellow on brown. They sell all the goods with which China floods the world, cheap suitcases, blow-up toys, temporary umbrellas, every daily contortion of plastic. I had assumed that being clever enough to wash the rest of the planet in this stuff would imply the Chinese were clever enough to avoid it, but by the volume of shops offering dross they are, like a failing drug dealer, getting high on their own supply. Stalls sell yams and oranges. The town smells of plastic and imitation leather, cigarettes, mouldering cement and rotting fruit. Most of the people on the streets are young. Occasionally someone says ‘Hallo!’ and laughs – one radically coiffeured young hairdresser in particular.

  Down at the waterfront an old Soviet aircraft carrier is rusting. The Minsk is a major attraction; scores of families stream on and off. In front of it an extremely beautiful young bride is being photographed with her handsome man. He wears a full dress naval uniform, complete with more medals than he could possibly have earned. There is an unreality about them, as though they are models, rather than a happy couple. Wedding photos are serious business in China. If you can afford it the thing to do is rent a series of costumes and be photographed in several scenarios, a creation of memories reminiscent of Philip K. Dick. Perhaps the happy couple are pretending to be a happy couple for a website or brochure for prospective happy couples. The undertaking has a certain satire about it, visible in the smiles of the bride-to-be and groom, if they are. The day-off atmosphere at the front contrasts with the solemnity of the administrative district, where red-starred party offices are closed.

  The end of town is marked by the beginning of Chung Ying Street, once a dry riverbed lined on one bank with Hong Kongese shops, Chinese on the other. In 1979 the Chinese government allowed a cautious degree of free enterprise in Yantian, designating it a Special Economic Zone. Chung Ying Street became a place of encounter between Western capitalism and Chinese communism, and something of an attraction. There is now a museum commemorating this and you can walk down the memory of Chung Ying Street – but only if you have a special pass. I do not have a special pass, so walk three miles to the other end of town, arriving just in time for holiday luncheon.

  The road runs to the sea and subsides in vehicles, the fat 4×4s favoured by the rich and tasteless everywhere. In a series of two-hundred-seat restaurants families are eating seafood – more kinds of spiky, squirming shelled and gilled creatures than I knew existed. I point and hope. Charred and spiny corpses are served, along
with a pile of some sort of armoured crustacean. The latter avenge their deaths by lacerating my fingers. If only I knew the Mandarin for ‘hammer’.

  I am the sole Westerner in Yantian today. A construction worker in a hard hat is delighted by the appearance of this alien. He points and cries ‘Ha-lo!’ and shouts with laughter at the reply. Several children have the same reaction. Grumpy rain begins to fall but no spirits seem dampened. When a portable karaoke opportunity appears a hundred diners pause to see if I will make use of it. The proffered song is ‘Country Roads’ – which the song implores to take you home to the place you belong – and I am convinced this is satire, and find it very funny, until the karaoke master sings it for me with no evident understanding of the lyrics. Leaving a tip causes some confusion, at first, and then grave bows and smiles. It is a long walk back to the ship and there is no time for anything else. The way leads past bedraggled shack-like housing under the legs of a flyover. It’s a poor, workhouse world again: coming ashore from seafaring brings you up to the surface of a country as if through its basement. You begin to see nations as theatre sets. Backstage, in their curtained-off ports, the cranes and crates and stagehands supply the ever-multiplying audience, the limitless performance, the carnival without end or intermission we call the day-to-day.

  We have loaded volumes of Chinese cargo for the United States almost beyond imagining. Two thousand tonnes of knives, forks and other steel household goods will be laid and deployed in homestead America, while three thousand tonnes of tables and chairs are set and drawn up for the meal. In the kitchens ninety tonnes of Chinese albacore and cod will have been defrosted, with twenty tonnes of yellowfin tuna caught in the Philippines. On the patio will be twenty tonnes of new furniture, supporting twenty tonnes of dried fruit and nuts offered in two hundred tonnes of ceramics. The cook, using five hundred tonnes of kitchenware, will call the family away from three and a half thousand tonnes of phones, DVD players, televisions and stereos. The children will have to be separated from three thousand tonnes of toys. They will take their place looking smart in five hundred tonnes of Chinese clothes. Four hundred tonnes of lamps will light the meal, where discussion will cover today’s purchase of three thousand tonnes of manufactured goods and nine hundred tonnes of new shoes. (Seafarers say these are divided into containers of right feet and left feet, to stop us helping ourselves, but this may be apocryphal, based on the one time someone saw a container break.) After supper someone will undertake a little DIY with a hundred tonnes of hand tools and six tonnes of copper, mined in Zambia, converted to pipes and wires. Walking the dog, which is replete with its fourteen tonnes of pet food, forty-two tonnes of Chinese umbrellas will fend off American rain.