Down to the Sea in Ships

by Horatio Clare

  The second officer ‘had twenty-two men on a ten-man raft, most had to hang over the side . . . We lost six of these fairly quickly; you would see them getting cold, a certain look came into their eyes and then they just gave up.’ An army officer who had watched his wife and child flung into the water when another of the boats capsized ‘was the first to go’. In these circumstances it was perhaps not surprising that one chief engineer cast off a motor lifeboat and steered clear of his sinking ship, leaving many of his shipmates with no option but to jump. Eighteen of them died of hypothermia, three after they had been pulled from the sea. The chief told a Board of Inquiry, months later, that he had been in a state of terror. No action was taken against him.

  The effects of acute tension, fear and worry are related with a coolness typical of the time, by a British submarine commander, William King, DSO, DSC, who captained HM Submarine Snapper in the North Atlantic. ‘Stress’ is the vocabulary of the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of those who fought the war, who seem to have preferred ‘strain’, but King makes no mention of either.

  ‘I was sitting in the mess waiting for patrol orders when our doctor asked casually, “Let’s have a look at your fingernails.” Each one showed a series of concentric half-moon ridges from base to tip. “Interesting stigmata,” he said. “If you break off patrols for a refit you’ll find a gap corresponding to the time spent in harbour. Each ridge is a patrol. They occur in all commanding officers of submarines, in most of their subordinate officers and in a small proportion of responsible ratings – purely psychological.”’

  The wind blows force nine now, severe gale, and in the sun the waves glow gem-like sapphire and green. It strengthens by the minute, now force ten, storm, and as the waves deepen the sea seems to move with a different rhythm, as if with inclinations and intention. The bright luminescence in the heart of the white when a crest shatters is dazzling, a wild scatter of Poseidon’s turquoise hurled into the air. We hold our course on 274 degrees with the sea still building to the north-west: we have to turn across it at some point. Each wave – they are truly mighty now – seems to demand its own description. When we hit them full-on the whole ship shudders, as if winded, and we lose a couple of knots of speed. Because the streaming white lines on the water point back towards the wind, while the waves move forward towards us, the sea seems to travel in two directions at once.

  ‘We are the only assholes out here,’ says the Captain.

  ‘What a way to make a living,’ John marvels, as we slide into another trough.

  At a quarter to four we round Flemish Cap and begin to turn west-south-west to 245 degrees. We are over the Labrador Basin, three kilometres deep. The starboard bow is taking a ferocious pounding as we bear down the world slowly towards Orphan Knoll, which rises to a depth of a kilometre and a half. The Captain calls the chief and they agree to bring the revs down. She lurches heavily, labouring on, pummelled on the windward side where the waves have the measure of the main deck. Vivid blue explosions of foam and solid water come hurling over the rail. Ahead, legs of sunlight break through like searchlights on the roaring sea. When we cross under one it is so bright that your eyes water and the sea turns obsidian-black.

  From the wing I look back at the Captain, alone on his bridge, staring forward. Because he stands his watch in the hours of daylight he has no lookout. And so, alone, he gazes forward, always forward, a solitary figure overseeing his old machine and the violent desolation he has sent her into, watching every blow she deals the sea and every one she takes, lurching down with her, staggering back with her, lurching down, and there is a solitude about him which is emphasised rather than dispersed by his openness in company, and an endurance and absolute toughness about him which is entirely at one with his vessel, though you sense he is tougher than her. He is married but he mentions his wife only once on the voyage. In everything but the sea he is private and held in.

  It is too cold to stay long outside.

  ‘This is where they were,’ the Captain says, quietly. ‘That fishing boat –?’ (The fate of the Andrea Gail is told in a wonderful book, The Perfect Storm, by Sebastian Junger, and a terrible film.) ‘They were far out, eh? Very far . . .’

  We look at the sea. It is a prospect unutterably bleak and desperate as we move away from the sun patches: grey death everywhere.

  ‘God, Captain. This is the loneliest place I’ve ever been.’

  ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘A bad place for anything to happen.’

  Captain Koop now sits in his chair, as his ship fights her way through the relentless gale, and talks.

  ‘Have you ever been frightened at sea, Captain?’

  ‘Only once. We were in the Channel. A smoker left his butt in the bin in the harbour control room and went to answer an alarm in the engine room, and went to bed. It was about twelve thirty at night, I woke up and smelt something burning. The alarms went off. I thought this is bullshit, this is not good. I went to the bridge. All the walkie-talkies were on charge in the harbour control room so we had no comms. A crewman appeared, he said the whole main deck is full of smoke, the harbour control room is completely on fire, the computers, everything. The chief officer made an attempt to get an extinguisher on it but he went without breathing apparatus and came back choking. The smoke was full of plastic, poisonous. Now, the Captain has to stay on bridge, and you think, how are the crew going to react? Can they handle this? And they were good. They did the right things and got it under control. It was good. Fire at sea is the worst, in my opinion it is the worst. We put it out and we had a few beers on it afterwards. I didn’t call Dover, because if you do that you have all kinds of investigations, troubles – I steered towards shore so if they have to come out or something it’s easier. But first you think can we handle this? Apart from that I have never been frightened on this ship.’

  ‘What about storms?’

  ‘Ah! Well, we were fully loaded on one of our first North Atlantic winter crossings and the bow – with thirty thousand tonnes behind it – she crashed into a wave so hard a winch jumped back two feet. We were drydocked and the bow was reinforced, but still – you have to watch her!’

  ‘What do you worry about when you go to bed?’

  ‘The judgement of the officer on watch. You worry he won’t pull back the throttle if she’s driving too hard. I sleep very lightly and when I feel it I call the bridge when she’s slamming and I say can’t you tell this is too hard? Pull back.

  ‘I used to love it,’ he says, ‘but I love it less now. Everyone of my generation says the same. You arrive and they say the ship is dirty – it’s the North Atlantic! If there’s damage they say did you take routing from a weather centre? Pfff . . . they have the same information I have but they don’t know my ship! I know my ship.

  ‘And you know a sailor is always a second-class person – in the Caribbean we used to say we were students on exchange. Even now you say you are a sailor – “oh, a girl in every port”, these old phrases . . . Only the Mission to Seafarers understands or cares about us. Nobody else. There used to be seafarers in management but not so much now. My supervisors are in Mumbai and theirs are in Singapore. There have been thousands of redundancies in Copenhagen. So you’re emailing people and you don’t know if you can trust them. Do they understand, or is it only money to them?’

  He has a huge admiration for the Filipinos.

  ‘They are so pennywise, eh? These guys really know the score. They are always talking to each other on email, even on radio if we pass a ship close, saying how much are they paying you? If it’s more they’re gone. You should see them going through airports. So much stuff! You say how are you going to manage? They say, “Don’t worry, we’ll help each other.” They come on board with nothing. Some of them don’t trust banks so they carry their wages home as cash. This can be very dangerous but they know the risks.’

  Captain Koop thought for a moment, then he said, ‘You know these guys are heroes. It’s not just the family they support, it’s th
e whole clan.’

  The sea darkened, Erwin came up and it was time for us to go down. ‘We’re through the worst,’ the Captain said. ‘And that anti-cyclone, I used it, eh? Used it to give me a good push this morning.’

  It was a sanguine day on the ship, considering the storm. A severe gale, occasional storm force ten and twenty-foot waves, had the following effects: Annabelle produced her best supper yet, soup to start, a fillet of fish in cheese sauce with almonds, and avocado milkshake for dessert. Work continued in the engine room, Pieter commenting that he had to go outside to close a hatch, because it was very cold. Jannie said he did the same as every day. The bo’sun and his gang checked lashings and returned safely. John was moved to get his camera and take a couple of shots of the storm, with the Captain encouraging him and helping him with the door, which was a battle with the wind – ‘Yeah, you can take pictures in this!’ You only just could, though.

  I wake to enraging head-thickness. How is it still happening? I have reinforced the stuffed boiler suit with paper wedges but still the diesel fumes flow. Clock says 0700 so I jump up. Annabelle is frying spam in the galley and Eugene is mopping the bridge. Light on the sea, and the water a colour that makes you feel cold. Erwin talked about his first voyage, on a bulk carrier travelling from Indonesia to New York.

  ‘There was a typhoon in the Indian Ocean. Oh! The waves were sweeping over the deck, the ship was flexing and diving, the hatch covers were under water. I never been on a bulk carrier before – this was normal but I don’t know! I was very scared and very sick . . .’

  Erwin comes from a rice farming family. He has no love of the city and he plans to get out of seafaring. ‘Many Filipinos do a few years at sea and then find jobs on land.’ He says 90 per cent of his compatriots are Catholic. ‘Some people pray in their cabins, sometimes with a friend, but we do not pray all together.’

  Pieter the chief, the second engineer, the Captain and Erwin hold a conference on the bridge.

  ‘You’re early!’ Pieter laughs. ‘Time difference messing you up?’

  We retarded another hour last night, so while I am still in Grytviken’s time zone, in line with South Georgia, where we were yesterday, everyone else is in Nuuk’s time zone, in line with Greenland.

  Outside it snows horizontally and hail spatters against the screens. The gale is supposed to be slackening but it is not. Northern fulmars and shearwaters ride along with us on the windward side, balancing the powers of the gale, the four-metre waves and the smash-back from the ship’s side, skiing along a wind tunnel between chaos and death with perfect, nonchalant control. There must be an ideal air current between the ship and the wind because they stick as closely to us as they dare. We are doing fifteen and a half knots and when they fire themselves ahead of us and curve around the bow they must be adding five knots to that easily. They twist away for their lives as the rebounding waves erupt and claw after them; sometimes they fly under the very grasp of the falling water, like surfers shooting out of a tube.

  We are now at the same latitude as Cape Bonavista, Newfoundland, and definitely feeling the beginnings of the swell on the Grand Banks. We hit a thunderous wave and the ship shakes from side to side as well as lengthways. Chicoy clicks and hums away his frustration. He and John are at daggers drawn. Chicoy is not yet adept and John is unforgiving. The latest spat revolves around an updated radio signals book which John admits they do not use in any case. When should they send the reminder email? Chicoy had not noticed they had received the wrong updates, John spotted it, and now Chicoy is anxious to send the reminder, which John thinks unnecessary. John checks the log.

  ‘South-west nine! That’s never south-west nine!’

  ‘It was stronger earlier,’ I protest.

  ‘Twelve o’clock it says here – I’ve just come up. He writes a load of shit. I give up. I give up . . .’

  Chicoy goes down to the galley where he restores his humour and standing by telling jokes to Annabelle and Richard. The galley is a crucial place, the Captain says. ‘If something is going on I rely on the cook to tell me. The cook is the conduit between the Captain and the crew; the cook always knows everything.’

  Annabelle has a calm smile and a workmanlike sense of purpose. She is never idle: a seafarer like any other, her demeanour says, and a good one. She speaks little but the men talk more easily around her, bouncing jokes off her, seeking her approval in glances, making her laugh and using the atmosphere she creates as an opportunity to be ‘themselves’ – the selves we are in the presence of women being distinct from the mantle we assume with men. Annabelle seems to have mastered a sisterly aura which makes us relax around her. Men’s shoulders drop and they allow themselves to moan about things, you can tell, though the conversations are in Tagalog. Most of the laughter on the ship comes from the galley when Annabelle is working.

  Mark, the steward, is talkative, as ever. I am warming to him: I think my suspicions of his friendliness were mean-spirited. He is halfway through a nine-month contract and hoping to add a one-month extension. He will cross and recross this ocean throughout. His last job was a car carrier sailing between Japan and South America: twenty-eight days each way.

  ‘I have two children with two women!’ he says, laughing with more self-consciousness than mirth. ‘Sometimes I gave money to the first one but that is all in the past now.’

  I look at him again. He used to send money to the mother of his first child but he no longer does? Why not? What does that mean? I want to ask but it would be presumptuous. (‘Who is looking after your family?’ Never. I am not a judge.) But I speculate. ‘That’s all in the past now . . .’ Something happened, clearly, and whoever she is no longer has a claim on him, he feels. I wonder if whatever it was has some bearing on his eagerness to please; he seems to carry a wound somehow, whether done to him or inflicted by him I cannot tell.

  He serves me bacon, eggs and salt soup. ‘White people only stay for three months,’ he says. ‘Is there news about the weather?’

  ‘The Captain says the whole North Atlantic is eight-metre waves.’

  ‘Oh no!’

  During a visit to the engine room an alarm sounds. Orange warning lights flash. You wonder if the CO2 suppressors are about to go off and kill you. Pieter comes flying by and ghosts up five ladders in two blinks. It turns out to be a boiler problem – for some reason it is not heating the fuel sufficiently. The electrician is on the case with a spanner, his teeth clenched. Pieter says the second engineer switched the steam off before he cut in the other boiler. The second engineer looks embarrassed while black smoke-like steam wreaths the electrician. Pieter mulls on the perpetual motion of the engine. ‘That’s the thing with engineering, you can start again. It is not like man, or nature. Everything can be replaced.’

  In the bo’sun’s passage, running the length of the ship, Bobby Sitones, an ordinary seaman, leans on his mop and grins. His working environment today is a concertina of iron loopholes, between which are drums of toxins, all echoing with the moan, clash and wail of the containers above.

  In the early afternoon the waves diminish and the fog closes in. To the south of us the warm Gulf Stream is meeting the frigid Labrador Current, running down from the north, their confluence producing a vapour that hides everything beyond the foremast. Through it the swells come again; long, low beasts, purple-faced and swollen with age, driving up from the south. We see a whale that way, blowing and swimming north towards us.

  ‘Well, he’s not a northern right whale, I can tell you that,’ the Captain asserts. ‘They’re not here now.’ The whale disappears astern and the Captain lectures on navigation before GPS.

  ‘We shot the sun at nine, at noon and at three, and we shot the stars when they came out. We called it nautical twilight, when the sun has gone but while there is still enough light to see the horizon. You need the horizon and the first stars. In perfect conditions you shoot a star ahead, to the flank and behind. Then you get the logarithms from the almanac. If you were good you coul
d get a position in twenty minutes.’

  He breaks out the almanac and displays the ranks of tiny numbers which fill every millimetre of the A4 pages.

  ‘When we got calculators with log buttons it was easier. We had an old Decca Navigator, radio direction finder, but we didn’t trust it. It was more wrong than right. Then we got a radar but the Captain didn’t trust that. We were shooting the stars even in the English Channel! When we couldn’t see anything it was down to dead reckoning. When we went to South America we steered for the Azores. When we saw Mount Pico we said, Yes! Now we know where we are – OK!’