Down to the Sea in Ships

by Horatio Clare

  I fall asleep listening to the engine beating its rhythm. She has a fine, gentle sway-roll on her: it is like being rocked in the arms of someone walking. With crews always male, or overwhelmingly so, the ship becomes a strange plait of feminine archetypes – wife, mother and mistress. They tend to her constantly and she holds them while they sleep.

  13 October

  The wind is cold and strong enough to blow you over on deck, and the sea is all colour: purple, green, black-brown and turquoise. There are bodies on the steel, a dead cockroach and a dead fledgling. How did the fledgling get here? A nest on a container? We have seen no birds for two days, only water, clouds, stars, moon and sun. There is no more rubbish on the surface, just the keen feeling of our speed, twenty-two knots. The roll is bigger and the waves seem to race past, jumping. Our starboard side is all salt-crystallised, though the wind comes from port: the ship’s high sides make it eddy back strongly on the sheltered side, blowing the tops off the leeward waves so that their spray streams back towards us, white as a sea wizard’s hair. The roll is particular. She has this one version whereby you lean to starboard, pause, and when you think she is going to roll back she rolls further.

  We are over the Surveyor Fracture; next is the Medocino Fracture. The westward movement of the Pacific plate over the last seventy million years has created this stretched riddle of fissures and ridges, the mightiest of which is the seven-thousand-kilometre-long Emperor Seamount range. The tail of these mountains reaches all the way down to Hawaii.

  Take a mental image of the younger volcanoes of Hawaii, of their striated and scarred sides rising thousands of feet, towering ridges and peaks, and submerge them in kilometres of water. No light from the surface penetrates down here; this a world of utmost black, an upthrust of mountains of monstrous height and depth. The creatures living on their sides and gliding like slow birds over their deeps are only vaguely known to science. Now and then nets are lowered down from the bluey-silver regions miles above, as remote from these depths as the upper atmosphere is from the surface of the earth. The nets are held open by steel plates, ‘canyonbusters’, which weigh up to five tonnes. The cable at the net’s mouth is threaded through chafing gear, steel balls or rollers which measure up to a metre in diameter. The whole assemblage is dragged through the canyons and over the ridges of the seamount.

  Life grows slowly in the depths of the ocean, lives long and does not replace itself swiftly. The deep trawl scoops up whatever it happens upon and leaves rubble. Tons of corals are uprooted and destroyed – there are many more coral species in the deep seas than in shallow tropical waters. These corals support entire communities of specific, endemic species which are wiped out with them. The haul often contains new and ‘relic’ species, previously known only from fossils. From the 1960s to the early 1990s the Emperor Seamounts were particularly targeted by Japanese and Russian trawlers in search of such deepwater fish as armorhead and alfonsino. Annual catches fell from 35,000 to 5000 tonnes before the practice was abandoned. The fisheries are not expected to recover. Fish caught and discarded as bycatch included two previously unknown species of dragonets (which look like they have stepped out of fossils – long, fan-finned, big-eyed beasts like miniature Chinese dragons) and the highfin dogfish, only twenty-one specimens of which have ever been recorded. The Jurassic period has not finished down here. Conservationists fear the effect of seamount trawling on small populations with a limited range and slow reproductive cycle is catastrophic. One study followed the course of a trawl in the Gulf of Alaska. Seven years after the dragnets were hauled up there was no sign of any young coral in place of what had been destroyed.

  Seen from the perspective of the deep we are alien, a quasi-Martian species inhabiting a universe of almost entirely different physical and temporal conditions. As the Gerd pounds on far above it is as if she is a spacecraft, one of many in her vastly high orbit. Now and then one gropes down, blindly, with a net. Plunder and pollution are our only contributions to the worlds under the sea.

  14 October

  Early bed under glittering stars, then woke at 4.45, so got up. Others were up too. Joel said: ‘Thank God for the stabilisers! If they weren’t out, in this weather, no sleep!’

  Another dawn, another breakfast: conversation is fitful these days. The sea is growing off the port bow, where it has been all this time. Bands of clear follow bands of mist over water an astonishing colour, blue and purple-black and bustling with waves: it is strange and exciting to look out from the deck all the way to the horizon and see nothing still anywhere. Busy wraiths in squalls of rain hurry over us, coming and going, commuting to infinity.

  Chris is in an excellent mood. Everyone is excited about LA – we’re still more than two days out but it feels just over the horizon. You can feel the forces acting to bend the ship, and you feel her flexing against them.

  ‘You should see the atmosphere on a ship after three days of storms and no sleep,’ Chris says, with grim relish.

  ‘Pretty bad?’

  ‘Poison.’

  The forces are peculiar and intermittent, like hands pressing down on your shoulders and your neck. Sorin says you need to drink a lot of water in storms, ‘Because all the guys are sick.’

  He is in a meditative mood during his watch. He is also flying home from LA.

  ‘What does it take to be a good officer, Sorin?’

  He thinks for a moment. ‘You need to be able to feel the ship – like a body. Like a creature.’

  ‘Is this a good ship?’

  He looks down her, all the way to the foremast and the Pacific.

  ‘Oh yeah, she is good ship.’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘To be good seafarer? I think you need to feel salt on your skin. Once a seaman always a seaman.’

  ‘And suppose your son says he wants to go to sea. What will you say?’

  ‘I would respect him, but I would warn him. About loneliness . . . isolation. About needing to be strong with yourself.’

  It is dark and rainy now and very lively. Outside the cargo is singing and thumping in whines and bangs; loose things in the crates are booming. We have been boarded by pirate poltergeists. Showers flood, wardrobe doors fling themselves open, batteries and lighters fly off desks, a pencil crosses the chart table of its own accord, my lamp revolves on its base and the bed refuses sleep.

  15 October

  As I go up to the fo’c’sle at daybreak it is still dark under the containers. The prow is silent and the ocean streams towards us; weather here comes right down to the water as we drive into it and through it, through patches of light and towers of dim, through trunks of rain like a forest. We steam under low arches of cloud, through columns of vapour, the sea black beneath silver pillars. Now it is day, now it is night, the sea’s surface unbroken and heaving like the flanks of a beast breathing. There are spirits of blue rain. You would not be astonished to see phantom ships, sea monsters or the edge of the world. How those old sailors needed their courage, even in morning warmth. The day then breaks into a vaulting blue with scars of white cloud high in the clearest air I have ever seen, and a patina of vapour like an eggshell glaze, translucent in one quadrant, and everywhere else screaming clear, sun scintillant on the waters, which are stilled.

  The Captain disengages the autopilot and takes the helm. In order to approach America we must confirm that we have tested the steering gear. He turns his ship to port and to starboard. He slows her, stops her, goes astern and spins her on her axis. These feats accomplished, we resume our course towards Long Beach.

  To take a vessel to the Land of the Free you must clean the entire ship. You must search end to end for moths, particularly the Asian Gypsy Moth, and destroy them, plunging any colonies of eggs you find in boiling alcohol. You must switch from burning heavy fuel to low-sulphur diesel. You must submit crew details and an effects list, to ensure that no one tries to sell a load of Hong Kong iPads on the sly. You must destroy or remove any spills, garbage or organic matter. Yo
u must lock all meat, fruit and veg in stores and seal them. You must convert the library into an interview room – we will stand a metre away from the table, with nothing in our pockets and our hands where they can see them. I have been repeatedly told that a Filipino on his first voyage to the US is not allowed to land. Presumably by not blowing up his ship in port, and by returning, he proves he is neither a terrorist nor immigration-inclined. Finally, when you have done all this you sail in across a firing range. The Captain is particularly concerned about the state of the bins in our cabins. ‘Not one apple core. Not one piece of orange peel or we will have all kinds of bullshit. We will be fined!’

  ‘Someone always forgets this,’ Andreas confides.

  I go on the rounds with Joel and Prashant, completing a checklist. We climb up inside the funnel casing, a huge, hot and oily vertical chimney veined with a single ladder. The steel of the rungs and guard rails is hot. I have no idea of the temperature in here but it feels like forty degrees. Joel and Prashant test fire hatches and hydraulic systems with blasts of compressed air. Everything works, all the boxes are ticked. The men are bubbly at the prospect of land.

  Over lunch Andreas talks about bunkering, which we are due for in LA. ‘When you take on 3,450 tonnes of fuel the thing to worry about is the force of the air pressure. As it is expelled from the tanks you get static, so you can get static discharge and fire.’

  Somehow we get on to the Old Days again.

  ‘You used to get two beers, thirty-three centilitres, every day, one bottle of whisky a month, and some wine. Then you could get together and have a party. The old ships had bars and smoking saloons adjoining the mess, with a sliding partition between the officers and the men. But now no alcohol. No conversation either!’

  He laments that no concessions are made at Christmas.

  ‘Before 2008 we used to get buckets of no-alcohol beer on Sundays,’ Shubd says. ‘And much better contracts.’

  An entertaining conversation develops with Hermanath about the next generation of ships, the Triple Es. They have two engines.

  ‘How would you feel about two engines, Hermanath?’

  He looks rather shocked.

  ‘It would be like having two wives!’

  There is a lovely moment on the bridge towards sunset. The Captain is in his chair, arms crossed, leaning back, relaxed. Chris is looking at something on the computer and Andreas has joined us. The Captain and the chief talk quietly in Danish and then they fall silent. The sun makes bright bars as it sinks and the sea is an endless dream, as though it has forgotten it can be anything but kind. I look at the faces of the men as they look at the sea, with equanimity, with satisfaction and an unexpressed awareness of the temporary and the timeless, with acceptance and certainty that this was all and nothing at all, and that everything is always changeable, and that they are a crew whose completeness would only be proved tomorrow when it will be broken, and that they had brought their great ship to land again, almost, and that foul weather and hardship lay in her futures and in all their separate courses, and that there would be ports, hopefully, at the end of them. And I thought for a moment I understood a little of seafaring men.

  It was after this, in the lift, that the Captain said:

  ‘No one understands, when you are at home. They ask you about what it is like and maybe they have a few pictures. But all they think is sunsets and sunrises, clouds. They have no idea, actually, how vast the oceans are.’

  A dark calm night and the voices of America reach us across the water. The radio crackles for the first time for over a week. We hear two women, San Francisco and Los Angeles Coastguards. I cannot resist teasing Shubd.

  ‘I like the sound of this San Francisco girl, Shubd. She sounds like a natural woman.’

  ‘Oh yes, I think this is true.’

  ‘But this LA woman, she is a babe.’

  ‘Ha ha! You think she is beautiful?’

  ‘Don’t you? Listen to her!’

  ‘Yes. Perhaps she is.’

  ‘She’s incredibly beautiful. Blonde or brunette?’

  ‘Blonde maybe.’

  ‘Blonde for sure. I think she may have had breast enlargements and liposuction. If it’s a choice I’m going with San Francisco.’

  ‘You have a very good imagination.’

  He calls Plead control, the missile people, and pleads with them not to rocket us. The LA woman tells us to carry on.

  16 October

  A changed beat from the engine jolts me awake – what has happened? Then it comes back: this is the last morning of the voyage, we are slowing down. Day opens in dark low cloud and a brownish sea, with a line of fanned light streaming below the lid, and there off the port bow are promontories, the tumbled arms of America. They are mountainous, dark crumpled gold; a monumental wild land seems to hove over the horizon, as though it is resolving out of low cloud and spreading towards us over the sea. It seems amazing that the ocean has a limit, a shore, and we have reached it. We are somewhere north of Los Angeles; the coast is too distant to make out detail but it looks uninhabited and – peerless. What a landfall! No one knows who first crossed this ocean the way we have, from the Orient to America. When the old sailors spoke of the New World they referred to its east coast, but the shock of this grandeur, of these dark mountains which answer the ocean’s might and scale – this is a new world, now, here, forever. The Cantonese word for this coast is ‘gumshan’, gold mountain. Originally it referred to the gold rush, which inspired tens of thousands of Chinese to voyage this way in the late 1840s, but it is an accurate term this morning. The mountains are still giants of darkly glittering ore.

  The Captain is unusually loquacious. ‘We will berth near the Queen Mary. This is a beautiful ship – you will see her. She made over one thousand Atlantic crossings, during the war also. I have keyring made out of bronze from her propeller.’

  He also has a ‘magic priority pass’ for airports.

  ‘I have three hours in Amsterdam so I can get some breakfast. Some beer. Some more beer. Some cognac!’

  The islands of Santa Rosa and Santa Cruz roll by off our port side and we drive east towards Santa Catalina. Joel finds a minute to come up to the fo’c’sle.

  ‘Ah, I love it here! This is beautiful.’

  ‘Do you ever come here, normally?’

  ‘Ahhh no! Not really, no.’

  ‘Because you’re always in the engine room.’

  ‘I like the engine room.’

  ‘But how can you? It’s terrible!’

  ‘Nooo! I like it. It’s a puzzle. You have to think about it and – try things. And you are always learning, and I like that.’

  ‘You seem such a happy man, Joel – are you really?’

  ‘Yes. Yes I am. You have to be. This is very important. You have to do your job and not worry too much. You must be positive. Or – you cannot do your job.’

  ‘OK, but the thing is, I find it – extraordinary, that you can have two men, let’s say two engineers, doing exactly the same job, the same rank, but they are not paid the same because they have different passports. You told me the Filipinos are 25 per cent of the world’s seafarers, and yet you are paid far less because you are Filipino. How can that possibly be right?’

  ‘Mmm – but this is the market.’

  ‘But it’s not fair, is it?’

  ‘If you don’t like your contract you don’t sign it. If you don’t like the terms that are offered don’t take the job! But if you sign the contract and take the job you can’t complain.’

  ‘But – oh! Look!’

  As I am asking the question there is a splashing in the sea and a school of dolphin cut across our bow.

  ‘In Argentina we had to slow right down because there were so many whales. They were spouting! There are many whales there in September.’

  ‘Where do you like, in the world?’

  ‘I like Gioia Tauro. You can see the volcano – Etna. And the sunsets and the sunrises. The sky . . .’

 
Now Santa Catalina comes out of the haze, huge, pitted and mountainous with high cliffs. We see something tossing and splashing in the sea – killer whale? – and a head – a manatee? Probably a sea lion. The waters are full of life and mystery, including a sinister ship, CS Global Sentinel, which is laying fifty-two kilometres of cable from Monterey with an earthquake sensor on the end and low-light cameras. Why? What is there to see down there? The island of Santa Barbara passes, looking like a pirate HQ. I was sad when I woke but the approach to this other empire is full of beauty. And such colour! Californian sunshine beats Chinese tone and gloom. There is far more wildlife here; there are brown pelicans, dolphins, glossy gulls and a hummingbird, a moment ago, buzzing from Santa Catalina to the mainland. The Captain compares the port of LA by area to the goings-on in China. They have six kilometres of the biggest cranes in Shanghai, which is the world’s busiest port; apparently Los Angeles is the biggest by area. The train schedules in Los Angeles are the key to the whole thing, the Captain says.

  We approach the mainland from the north across the Gulf of Catalina. The Palos Verdes Hills are green, some ridges are built over but many not, because the hills are sand and cannot support structures. Through binoculars we study bluffs, and then a lighthouse like an old pepperpot. It is the Angels Gate Light, position 33 degrees 42 minutes 31 seconds North, 118 degrees 15 minutes 03 seconds West.

  Chinese coastal waters are thick with fishermen: here there are one or two trawlers and long-liners going out of San Pedro Bay but the sea is scattered with yachts and two-masted schooners and water skiers and fast ferries; the champion spends while the contender earns. It is evidently cheaper to catch all the fish in the East and bring them to the West Coast than it is to catch them in the West, or even to catch half of the fish in each place and leave the rest to swim.

  A low speed limit makes us sedate and there is very little container traffic compared to China: six or seven ships. There are bars of grey pollution above the land now and mountains in the far distance; Los Angeles lies below and between. Down the coast is Orange County, Laguna and La Jolla. The names and their associations contain America’s trick of preparing everything for you in a thousand ways, prophesying itself, upstaging your discoveries.