Down to the Sea in Ships

by Horatio Clare

  ‘Oh yes,’ says our pilot, his Quebecois accent growling through his beard, ‘you cannot complain. You’ave a stove and some wood, you drill an’ole . . .’

  I bet they do well for sustenance and refreshment, too. The huge space of the lake, making miniature the ships, is an uplift, a sudden welcome from the wild. As the afternoon unrolls at the pace of the speed limit, ten knots, we pass frozen marshes, deserted bird sanctuaries, snow and etchings of woods. There is beauty in the naked birches and pale bronze reeds, but it is a beauty of emptiness, of space, where the earth seems little more than a rind of frozen sky.

  As the channel squeezes in and the inhabited banks return, lights come on behind windows, timer-tripped residues of life. There is just enough breeze, this ghostly mid-winter, for the bridge to whistle its storm song softly. As the sun gutters orange a mountain rises over the frozen plains. This mountain has skyscrapers attendant, poking angular heads above the trees, some of them winking: Montreal.

  We nose in past oil refineries and power lines, pylons and warning lights, reds, greens and cities of sodium orange reminiscent of Antwerp, as though we have circled a world, not crossed one. It is Sunday night so I sit at the bar with Jannie and demolish a burger which is served with a paper Filipino flag flying from the bun. Jannie has sympathetic, pale blue eyes in a pallid and hard-lived face, tough and enduring; he is gentle and often amused. He married at twenty-four and his wife sailed with him for the first three years. They brought their son on board when he was three; when he turned fifteen Jannie added a week to the boy’s holidays and took him to the East.

  ‘There were lots of children on board in those days, and wives – it was great, great fun . . .’

  Jannie has an endearing way of collapsing his expression into hopeless despair at his past exploits: ‘Fifteen beers every night – achhh . . .’

  His grandfather sailed with the Dutch East India Company. ‘His first trip was a year and a half at sea.’ Jannie’s father did a few months at sea, but for the son: ‘One minute sitting in a classroom, next minute sitting on a ship. When you are falling forwards you must be working. When you are falling backwards you must be sleeping, and if you are not falling you are at home.’

  He is on the Pembroke until May. Each time he is in Rotterdam his wife will drive to see him. Their twenty-five-year-old son is still at home, too: Jannie makes shooing motions, laughing. In six years’ time, after thirty-eight years, Jannie’s sea days will be done.

  ‘And then what will you do?’

  ‘Retire. Don’t know. Take it easy. Make vodka, do the garden . . .’

  The Pembroke ends her voyage in the same haphazard style with which she arrived in Antwerp. Someone has disconnected the bow thruster for maintenance and forgotten to plug it in again: Pieter puts it right while the Captain tries not to fume on the bridge. The tug comes out on schedule but there is no Chicoy to receive it. There is a swearing pause and they make it fast. We come to a dead stop and the younger of our two pilots takes over.

  He issues orders to the tug, commands to Eugene at the helm for main engine and rudder (helming is the only part of his job that Eugene enjoys) and instructions to Erwin for the thruster. The young pilot balances the effect of the wind and the strength of the current, spinning us so that Pembroke rests facing her next port, bringing us alongside slowly and perfectly, making allowances for a gangway which is not quite where it should be (lowered too far down) and a general feeling that no one else is going to show any initiative. The Captain is not sure of our berth, between the two vans, he thinks, so that is where we go, and here we are, snow thick on the ground, the St Lawrence deadly black, the stevedores ambling like orange bears and downtown Montreal glittering upriver.

  ‘Do you have time for much maintenance, Captain?’ the young pilot asks, with great tact.

  ‘No, we are in the Atlantic, difficult for the crew. And supplies take months to get.’

  All the life of Montreal is just there but we cannot leave the ship because immigration is not working tonight. There will be no unloading until 8 a.m. and the internet is down. Jannie is disappointed to learn we lack clean linen. ‘Two weeks in my sheets already and there are no others,’ he frowns. Our families do not know we have arrived safely: perhaps it was ever the sailor’s condition to feel forgotten, but the men trading this ancient, semi-defunct route really do feel themselves beyond the world’s bother. At least we have arrived safely, though. Jannie recalls a trip across the Bay of Biscay last November.

  ‘At 3.30 in the morning the general alarm went. Think oh God, what’s this. I got out of bed, get in an overall, went up. Two ships had collided. Waves were six metres. We went to help but an American ship was closer. You couldn’t lower lifeboats it was too dangerous, so we put nets ready over the side. The Americans got everybody, everybody survived, but we saw the ship go down. There’s lots of traffic there, everyone in lanes – somebody must have fallen asleep . . .’

  Before bed I watch a crane operator, presumably training or practising, miss a box four times before giving up.

  CHAPTER 22

  Landfall

  I WAKE IN panic: why have we stopped? I stumble to the window: where are we? Holland? It looks like Holland, but is the river entirely frozen? Is that ship stuck in it?

  ‘I thought I was still dreaming.’

  ‘It’s because you are up early,’ Jannie says. The bridge is locked, the deck doors are locked, the internet is down, so no booking a hotel for tomorrow night. There is a telephone call.

  ‘Immigration you go now,’ says Chicoy’s voice. It is not entirely clear what this means but I descend hopefully to the harbour control room. The Captain is radiating charm at two enormous and heavily padded immigration officers. One has a wire in his ear; the other smiles and says little.

  ‘It is his fault we have storms,’ the Captain says, introducing me.

  ‘You said it was Annabelle’s fault before.’

  ‘Yes, maybe both of you.’

  The officers muster a laugh and issue a visa.

  Annabelle is in a smart leather jacket and pink baseball cap, Richard and Alberto, an ordinary seaman, are also nattily dressed in denim with accessories (Alberto uses a checked handkerchief to wipe snow out of his eyes), and I am letting us down in a dumpy green coat which is warm if not at all trendy. I am about to see a seafarer’s version of Canada: we are going shopping. A security van takes us through the container wilderness to a gate where guards call us a taxi and tell us where to find it. Richard shivers and Annabelle sets a rapid pace. Our Montreal, under a cement sky, is dismal suburbs, flyovers, banks of dirty snow and slushing traffic.

  We arrive at the Galeries d’Anjou, a retail park and mall. Richard investigates cameras in Best Buy. He wants an SLR, and declares these a hundred dollars cheaper than in the Philippines. ‘Maybe next time,’ he says, wistfully. At three hundred dollars they cost half his monthly salary. We go to Zeller through heavy snowfall. Two Filipinos from another ship pass us, nodding. Zeller is first a cut-rate clothes shop, then a mall, then a giant retail bunker with no obvious end. Annabelle says it is very small, compared to one at home, the Mall of Asia: ‘They have firework displays every week.’

  Richard, Annabelle and Alberto buy crisps, sweets and ice cream. We sit in a consumption space and gaze at the shops. Scarab, Subway, Chez La Famille Burger, Thai Express, Suki Yaki, Franx Supreme, Kojax Souflaki, Cultures and SAQ Wine. People sit at tables on red plastic chairs, eating and staring. I find it confusing and discombobulating. Where are we? Only the Banque de Montreal gives a hint.

  ‘So this is Canada!’

  Alberto laughs. Men like him carry most of the contents of most of the shops. Like their compatriots in LA, the first thing they do, given the brief freedom of the city, is to look for fragments of their cargo which they can afford. In Melville’s day the crew of a whaling ship would have shares, or fractions of shares, in the profit of the voyage. No crew agency would contemplate giving their contract labourers an
ything like a share in the great Maersk corporation: Alberto would laugh at the idea.

  Traffic and snow fill the horizon outside as a digger works over a torn patch of mud and ice. Annabelle leads us to a bus; twenty minutes later we arrive at a metro station where we discover we must make a huge horseshoe, from St Michel to Assomption, in order to return to the ship. Richard talks a little about his career.

  Richard could sit in any class of sixteen-year-olds and not be thought the eldest. When you have talked to him you would put his age at twenty-one or two – it seemed rude to ask him directly; he is so small. Richard is a steward: he washes up, cleans cabins and mops floors.

  ‘My last ship? Was Saudi Arabia.’

  ‘Did you like Saudi Arabia?’

  ‘Gulf. Cannot get off ship.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Offshore! Cannot leave ship one year.’

  ‘Richard, sorry, are you telling me you were on a ship for an entire year and you never set foot on land? You never got off?’

  ‘Never! Aramco. Offshore.’

  ‘But – for God’s sake . . .’

  ‘Ha ha!’

  ‘I don’t believe it! What was that like? What did you do?’

  ‘Very bad. Very hot there. Small crew – seventeen. Like prison. Watch TV. Like prison . . .’

  Far from being rendered insane or unstable by the sacrifice of a year of his life at its most expansive stage (he must have been eighteen or nineteen) for a wage a European waiter would sniff at, Richard meets your eyes with the steadiest gaze. Travelling on the metro, his hands deep in his pockets, his hat pulled down, Richard looks entirely insouciant, though he has never set foot in this country before. Posing for a photograph, his legs move a little way apart, his chin lifts, his elbows drift outwards, hands still in pockets, and he gazes at the camera with that precise calibration hip-hoppers deploy, at once mocking the camera’s interest and taking full advantage of it. His preparation for his year’s sentence in the Gulf was some weeks’ training in stewardship. But no training on earth could have produced this enduring, good-humoured young man: his character and his job did that, as he served for a year in a floating cell block reeking of petrol under the broiling sun, with other men who showed him, by example, what it takes.

  The metro is a kaleidoscope of aftershaves and perfumes; the faces, the voices and languages are beguiling and strange after the ship and the Atlantic air. We arrive at Assomption and wait for the bus. It is cold, bleak and miserable, though the evening paper trumpets Snow At Last! There is plenty. Alberto says his last ship went to Australia and various Asian ports.

  ‘Redback spiders in the hold. Poisonous. Lots of them, lots.’

  He mimes going through the holds shooting invisible spiders – around, above and below – with some sort of spider spray. With all the ladders and drips, the heat, the holes in the floor and the ‘many, many’ spiders he makes it seem like a kind of Call of Duty, fought with an aerosol instead of a gun.

  Shore leave for seafarers is a lot of waiting, confusion over public transport and rapid glimpses of the indelicate parts of town. We take the bus to a supermarket where Annabelle leads an exhilarating burst of shopping. The trolley rapidly fills to the top and beyond with carrots, spinach, cabbage, pasta, cleaning materials, fish and more vegetables. The budget was $120 Canadian and the bill is $125, and the cashier will not take US fifty-dollar bills (our only currency); furthermore, the cashier says, the US bill is $137. Richard and Alberto are worried about how the Captain will react to the overspend but Annabelle is unhesitating. We pool our money and make the target. In a hurry now, because it is 1810 and the Captain expects to eat at 1830, we grab a taxi.

  ‘Who are they?’ asks the driver, looking at his passengers in his mirror. ‘What do they do?’

  ‘They are seafarers,’ I say. ‘They’re off a cargo ship.’

  ‘But – but –’ he looks at me, ‘they are children!’

  We help the driver find the right entrance to the port, then sit, itching as the minutes pass, as an interminable goods train clanks from right to left, pauses, and clanks back from left to right. We abandon the taxi and charge over a footbridge, lugging the shopping. A friendly guard takes ages to verify our IDs: the others are extremely patient while I try not to jump up and down. The guard tells us not to attempt to walk through the containers to the ship because we will be fined if we are caught. The security van takes an age to arrive. We make it back; Annabelle hurls herself around the kitchen and I go up to stall the Captain, finding him in his cabin, putting on his shirt. I further delay him, Jannie and Pieter in the bar. We descend at ten to seven. Richard serves chicken soup, followed by tuna steaks (new) with crinkled chips (new), spinach (new) and carrots. Richard does not understand Jannie’s request for mayo, so ignores it, and he clangs two dishes together. The Captain jumps like a man with bad nerves, exaggerating, and turns an interrogative glare on the boy. Richard stills him with a cool glance. Semolina and cherry pudding finish the evening, Annabelle having produced a three-course meal in eighteen minutes.

  Pieter, the chief engineer, and I sit in the bar afterwards, not drinking the evening away. He lives in Thailand.

  ‘Oh really? Lucky you!’

  ‘Not really – it’s too hot, much too hot. And loud! It was worse a few years ago when all the motorbikes were two-stroke. Terrible. But now more of them are four-stroke so it’s a bit better, at least.’

  ‘How did you come to move there?’

  ‘I met someone,’ he shrugs. ‘And that’s it. When you meet the person, you know. And we have a son, so . . .’

  He flies between his family in Thailand, his mother in Holland and the ship. I feel a shock of recognition. I too met someone and knew I had ‘met the person’. I too divide my time between her, in one country, my family in another, and my work, frequently in other places. But I have not learned to smile at this strange, diffuse and too-travelled existence the way Pieter does. His grin has an extraordinary goodness in it, a slant of pure forgiveness such as you might hope to find in a truly holy man. Perhaps it comes from a long time ago, from forgiving himself and them, when the Dutch navy rejected a brilliant seaman and a natural engineer because he was ‘not assertive enough’. Neither of us are cynical and drunken, which one of Joni Mitchell’s characters claimed was the fate of men like us, but we are both romantics of the second stage. (Romantics take a long time to grow up; the lucky ones, perhaps, never do.) Instead of staring down bottles in a dark café, as Joni had it, we sit in the bare and cosy bar agreeing that in order to improve the lot of the world’s seafarers, without whom the world as we know it would end in hunger, mass shortage and general confusion, the Filipinos must be paid more, the crew should have the right to know what is in the containers (‘I risked my life to move a box to Montreal’ not being as good for status or self-worth as the reality), and they should bring back beer.

  ‘Then maybe people would want to go to sea again, and they could pay them even less!’ Pieter cries.

  Tuesday 28 February

  We are unloading for a second day. Only fifteen containers will stay on for Halifax; everything else is going. Box by box Pembroke–Sydney’s scarred grey decks emerge. Occasionally a container sticks and a stumpy figure trudges across the hatch covers and fishes for a toggle with a long hook. Bit by bit the deck clears, three hundred metres of it, then the hatch covers are lifted off and seven storeys of containers are plucked out of her guts. She rises and rises in the water, the gangway slopes steeper by the minute.

  The surveyor is aboard, a Newfoundlander called Dan. His boots, hard hat, jacket and head torch are immaculate. Everything looks like the perfect tool for the job and there is no excess about him. You know he has charmed seafarers many times when he shows us a photo on his phone of a sign for a town called Dildo. He works for a company called ABB which offers a ship inspection service.

  ‘It’s voluntary for the shipowners.’Course, if we pass the ship Maersk get lower insurance rates, but Maer
sk pays us – so no conflict of interest there at all!’

  ‘Can you stop a ship from sailing?’

  ‘Yes I can, but it’s bad for everyone. Bad for us, because someone would have inspected it a year before, so what did they miss? Bad for the crew, bad for the owner, bad for the captain . . . So it’s not a tool I use lightly. Do I ever? Sure.’

  ‘For what sort of things?’

  ‘A crack in the main deck! If a ship’s about to break in half it’s not going to sail. I had one, there was a problem with the life rafts, and I’m not sure if the guy was joking, that’s the scary thing, but I said to him there’s a problem with the life rafts and he said so what? It’s only fifteen Chinese! Loads more where they came from!’

  ‘How’s this ship?’

  ‘OK. Old, but OK. Built in Germany, eh? Well, at least it’s not Chinese!’

  ‘What’s wrong with them?’

  ‘The welding. The steel. The maintenance . . .’

  Pieter looks reflective. You can see he is enjoying going over his charge with an expert, but he regrets that she is no longer beautiful. And she smells – the stink of the hold is coming off our overalls. There is a fuel leak after coffee, and in early afternoon a fire alarm of mysterious provenance.

  After lunch I pack, feeling I can delay no longer. The fire alarm goes again as I am taking my leave with warm, quick handshakes. I find Pieter in the CO2 room, the safe room (in the event of North Atlantic pirates), and thank him for his kindness.

  ‘No, no,’ he protests. Then, ‘I’m afraid we are rather busy now, it’s not really a good time . . .’

  ‘I know, the ship’s on fire, right?’

  ‘Sort of,’ he laughs, and glides down the ladder to his engine room, his feet barely touching each step as he controls the slide with his hands. It is a trick I have watched him doing every evening on the way down to dinner. I bet he is an excellent dancer.