Down to the Sea in Ships
Horatio Clare
Contents
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Horatio Clare
Dedication
Title Page
Epigraph
Author’s Note
Part One: To the East and West
Chapter 1: Spirits of Ships
Chapter 2: Signing On
Chapter 3: Storms
Chapter 4: World of Men
Chapter 5: Out with the Tide
Chapter 6: Bay Life in the Biscay
Chapter 7: Madness, Superstition and Death
Chapter 8: Bitter Water, Bloody Sand
Chapter 9: Pirates, Soldiers, Thieves
Chapter 10: East
Chapter 11: China
Chapter 12: Pacific Diary
Part Two: North
Chapter 13: The Zeemanshuis
Chapter 14: The Hard-driven Ship
Chapter 15: Down-Channel
Chapter 16: The Western Approaches
Chapter 17: When Something Snaps
Chapter 18: The Eye
Chapter 19: Storm
Chapter 20: The Hold
Chapter 21: Ice
Chapter 22: Landfall
Chapter 23: Signing Off
A Note on Sources
Acknowledgements
Copyright
About the Book
For millennia, the seaways have carried our goods, cultures and ideas, the terrors of war and the bounties of peace – and they have never been busier than they are today. But though our normality depends on shipping, it is a world which passes largely unconsidered, unseen and unrecorded. Out of sight, in every lonely corner of every sea, through every night, every day, and every imaginable weather, tiny crews of seafarers work the giant ships which keep landed life afloat. These ordinary men (and they are mostly men) live extraordinary lives, subject to pressures we know – families, relationships, dreams and fears – and to dangers and difficulties we can only imagine, from hurricanes and pirates to years of confinement in hazardous, if not hellish, environments.
Horatio Clare joins two container ships, travelling in the company of their crews and captains. Together they experience unforgettable journeys: the first, from East to West (Felixstowe to Los Angeles, via Suez) is rich with Mediterranean history, torn with typhoon nights and gilded with an unearthly Pacific peace; the second northerly passage, from Antwerp to Montreal, reeks of diesel, wuthers with gales and goes to frozen regions of the North Atlantic, in deep winter, where the sea itself seems haunted.
In Clare’s vibrant prose a modern industry does battle with implacable forces, as the ships cross seas of history and incident, while seafarers unfold the stories of their lives, telling their tales and yarns. A beautiful and terrifying portrait of the oceans and their human subjects, and a fascinating study of big business afloat, Down to the Sea in Ships is a moving tribute to those who live and work on the great waters, far from land.
About the Author
Horatio Clare is the bestselling author of two memoirs, Running for the Hills (Somerset Maugham Award) and Truant; the travel book A Single Swallow – which follows the birds’ migration from South Africa to the UK – and a novella, The Prince’s Pen, the retelling of a Mabinogion tale. An award-winning journalist, occasional teacher, former radio producer, sporadic broadcaster and Fellow in creative writing at the University of Liverpool, Horatio writes regularly on nature for the Daily Telegraph and on travel for various international publications. He and his family are currently migrating from Northern Italy to the West Pennines. For the weather.
Also by Horatio Clare
Non-fiction
Running for the Hills
Truant: Notes from the Slippery Slope
Sicily: Through Writers’ Eyes
A Single Swallow
Fiction
The Prince’s Pen
For Rebecca, Robin
and Aubrey (the
First Sea Lord) – with love.
Down to the Sea in Ships
Of Ageless Oceans and Modern Men
Horatio Clare
The rain continued to hammer the bridge. From time to time the thunder cracked, still violent. The storm united them. At sea storms weld the crew together. No sailor ever tells his family about times like that. Not in letters, not when he reaches home. So as not to worry them. Because they are indescribable, too. Storms don’t exist. No more than sailors do, once they are at sea. Humanity’s only reality is the land. So one does not know sailors, will never know them, even ashore. Unless one day you set sail aboard a cargo ship . . .
Jean-Claude Izzo, The Lost Sailors
The true peace of God begins at any spot a thousand miles from the nearest land.
Joseph Conrad
Author’s Note
‘CALL ME ISH . . .’ – but Melville’s third line is even better than the famous first. ‘Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off – then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.’
It happened to be a drizzly November when I picked up Moby Dick and began to read. I soon found myself walking by the river through a winter evening and vowing I too would go to sea. It was a vow born from a desire without a beginning (when does a boy first think of taking ship with pirates, or pirate hunters?) and, to this day, without an end. To leave the land, to know ships and sailors and their stories, to see the oceans in their vastness, to discover countries from their wharves inwards – what a dream!
I contacted a giant Danish shipping company, a mega-corporation which owns ports, aircraft, freight companies and oil rigs as well as ships, offering to be their writer-in-residence. The company accepted and foreswore censorship: that would make it pointless, said Michael Storgaard, the head of Maersk’s public relations – write what you like. And so, with my partner’s blessing and her son wishing me well and issuing me with selected pieces of Lego for my company on the voyages, I went to sea.
Many people, from children to the insane, from the devout to the philosophical, have supposed that the world is a charade. They imagine it a God game, an illusion that is extremely but not quite convincing. They speculate our existence is a shadow or speck in some great scheme which is far larger, more organised, more magnificent and perhaps more terrible than the life we know. They are right.
Just beyond the horizon there is another world. It runs in parallel with ours but it obeys different laws, accords with a different time and is populated by a people who are like us, but whose lives are not like ours. Without them, what we call normality would not exist. Were it not for the labours of this race we could not work, rest, eat, dress, communicate, learn, play, live or even die as we do. For a little while, for some months over two years, it has been my privilege to explore the sea in the company of its people.
Where the land ends certainty diminishes, modernity recedes and antique ways regather their power. Were we able to see the whole history of seafaring its accumulated impression might be akin to a borderless painting, a Turner worked over by Ernst, Pollock and Bosch. Flying wind and water are swirled about with breaking ropes. Here ships fight, founder and death-dive; here they are broken-backed. The scene flickers, incarnadine with fire and blood. Here it is dark as shoals and pale as corpses; here it recedes into the far distance, to a not-nothingness of wave-wastes and inconceivable weather. Around its corners there is longing love, peopl
e cheering and faces laughing, exhilarated. Here and there are flashes of passionate drinking, sex and Dionysian parties. In this picture’s heights are drifting visions of wonder and unearthly beauty, empyrean skies and gulfs of paradise. Storms of money in ducats and dollars blow across this picture, and avalanches of cargo, jewelled tempests of every commodity and artefact humans ever needed or sought. The canvas is shot through with fear and endurance, and shaded, all over, in loneliness. It is not only that the nature of sea stories draws them to and from the dramatic. This picture is the consequence of a collision of two temperaments: the nature of men, and nature of the sea.
This book is an account of places beyond the coasts. It is partly the report of an observer and partly the story of a participant. You are designated, officially, a ‘supernumerary’, an addition who is part of the ship’s company but not one of the crew. My deeper motives for going only became clear to me when I returned. I was fascinated by the idea of men at sea: shipping is still a man’s world; quicker and more thoroughly than anywhere except perhaps a battlefield, the sea finds men out. I wanted to see men, their characters and their stories as if on a bare stage, away from women, children and the world. I was in love with the wonder, the rough romance and the potential horror of great ships: none of man’s machines have more awe and character than they do. And I wanted, more than anything, to know something of the vastness of the oceans.
‘They that go down to the sea in ships and do business in great waters, they see the workings of the Lord and his wonders in the deep.’ The potency of the lines springs from the toppling inequality of the forces Psalm 107 describes. The human determination to be, to thrive, to ‘do business’ never seemed more puny or more admirable than in opposition to great waters – by far the most miraculous and dreadful of nature’s manifestations. You may or may not see the workings of the Lord in a beetle climbing a blade of grass, but if you are going to see His wonders at all you will surely find them on the face of the deep.
PART ONE
To the East and West
CHAPTER 1
Spirits of Ships
THE CAPTAIN IS fierce with bulk like a small bear. His skin is pallid, his beard grizzled, his teeth are tinged with alloys and gold. We pay great attention to whatever he says; we watch him as if he were famous. He feels our scrutiny as he hums and mutters. He talks to himself in company but not when he is alone. The crew have not known him long but they are already fond of him. You can hear it in the way they relish his title:
‘Yes, Captain!’
‘Good evening, Captain . . .’
We never say his name.
Crew and captain are in a relationship with the vessel, a total entwinement that exists only on ships. It is something like a bee marriage, in which there are only two states, work and rest, and only one place, the workplace, and where there are almost no choices. In this sleepless hive the crew are the steel queen’s workers, cleaning and tending to her, labouring in all her grim and dangerous places. High on the bridge above them, where the officers are suitors in order of rank, the Captain, the master, is the ship’s betrothed. She is a hard mistress, interminably demanding. When she baulks, fusses, fails or sounds an alarm they call the Captain: he will know what to do. If there is a problem with the engine they call the chief engineer, but the engine is not the ship.
The engine is like a gigantic mad animal, howling in a cathedral of its own. Its decibels are dangerous. In certain latitudes the engine room is 80 per cent humidity, plus tropical heat, plus the fifty degrees radiating from the machinery. In swells this Hades pitches, rolls and rocks. There is no daylight, only constant vibration and the endless, terrifying roar. Four ladders up and two doors away from the noise you find the engine control room, a sickly yellow bunker lined with machines in cabinets and computer screens. Here are the chief engineer and his officers, coming and going on their sorties into the howling interior.
‘I like the engine room!’ Joel says, eyes shining.
Joel is the fourth engineer. He is small with a boy’s smile, quick as a Thai boxer.
‘I do – because I really like the engine.’
The ship is the limit of Joel’s world for months on end. It is his hardest taskmaster, a job which is never finished, a danger, in great and small ways, his safety (you take to the lifeboats only in drills and nightmares) and, strangely, because it is ruthless in taking the shortest routes, and arriving and leaving on schedule, the ship is something to him beyond life and work combined.
‘It’s freedom!’ Joel insists. ‘Yes. It is freedom. It is!’
Joel is unusual, even by the standards of unusual men.
We are out far in the blue when another ship prepares to cut across our course. She ought to pass behind us because we are on her starboard side, but though there are conventions at sea, traditions and international agreements, and there is good seamanship and poor, really there are only three determinants in this world: how the weather changes, what ships can manage and what captains decide to do. This is why the sea is still the place where strange and worse things happen. The radar tells us what is going to happen now and the chief officer mutters:
‘Where is she going?’
She is going to Long Beach, says the computer. Now she comes too close, too fast.
‘What is he doing?’ cries the chief, and curses, his irritation switching from the ship to her captain. Though there is little to choose between them – men and vessels being almost one out here – seafarers are quicker to blame men than ships. Bad captains, lousy helms and poor pilots are all facts of life. A bad ship, on the other hand, is a nightmare.
Bad ships might be old and slow, or run by crooks, or cantankerous to handle, or battered by thrift, poor maintenance and hard driving. There are truly terrible ships out there, ships abandoned by their owners, their crews unpaid, rotting at anchor off shores where the authorities want nothing to do with them. There are ships at sea which have seen stowaways thrown overboard, cadets raped, ships which have known murders and hijacks. There are once-powerful ships out there now, being flogged too hard, their machinery straining and deteriorating; there are ships being beaten through endless nights by harsh captains and miserable, desperate crews. Seafarers believe there are cursed ships, too.
In 1895 Walter Macarthur produced ‘The Red Record’, a list of cruelties and abuses on American Cape Horners. Cape Horners worked between the West Coast, principally San Francisco, and ports on the Atlantic. These were the dusk days of sail and wood, the dawn of the iron and steam. Perhaps the worst reputation in the Cape Horn fleet belonged to a full-rigged sailer known as ‘the bloody Gatherer’:
‘On one passage round the Horn to San Francisco two of her men were driven to suicide and a third was shot by the mate. This was too much even for San Francisco and the master, Sparks, had to relinquish the command while the mate, Watts, went to prison. The “bloody Gatherer” arrived in San Francisco after another of these hell-ship voyages and the mate had to be smuggled ashore to escape the consequences of having killed one of the crew . . .’
It is as though ships have spirits, good or ill, which are not merely the sum of their histories and the personalities of their crews. You feel that spirit late at night, when the corridors and the stairwell are silent but for the strum of the engine. You feel it in the deserted spaces of the poop, the low deck at the stern where the wake boils up below you, thrashed to white fury by the propeller. You feel it on the fo’c’sle, the foremost point, the quietest part of the ship, where the bow is a spear driven on and on into the hissing sea. You are quite alone in these places. The ship is alive to the swells and the wind and the beat of its diesel heart. The refrigerated containers, the reefers, moan and whirr. Steel boxes grate together, screaming and wincing. There are bangings and knockings from places in the stacks, as though ghosts or stowaways are imprisoned in the towering boxes. High above it all the bridge screens gaze forward, unblinking eyes staring down at the sea roads of the world, at the thousands o
f nautical miles and storms and calms to come.
CHAPTER 2
Signing On
FELIXSTOWE ON A late August day offers fish and chips and a beach hut called Larfalot. In a mini amusement park a tiny train goes round a tiny track. A pub caters for Events, Weddings and Funerals. Thirty-five pounds buys a room with a sea view at the Grafton B&B, and being a seafarer knocks a fiver off, since you will be gone by nightfall.
‘Moving on, I at last came to a dim sort of out-hanging light not far from the docks, and heard a forlorn creaking in the air; and looking up, saw a swinging sign over the door with a white painting upon it, faintly representing a tall straight jet of misty spray, and these words underneath – “The Spouter-Inn: – Peter Coffin”.’
Ishmael met Queequeg in the Spouter-Inn; Queequeg with his unearthly tattooings, lofty bearing, ‘simple honest heart’ and tall harpoon. There is no Queequeg in the Grafton, only the proprietor, his wife and a low-voiced couple who might be having an affair. There is a picture of the frigate HMS Grafton in the hall. The proprietor wrote to her captain, asking him if he would like to visit.
‘He wrote back saying he couldn’t, but he sent us the picture and his condolences.’
You can see why the captain of such a fine fighting ship might send condolences to his land-stranded namesake but perhaps they were premature. The frigate now belongs to the Chilean navy, according to the proprietor, along with twenty-five million pounds’ worth of sonar gear.
‘They’d only just fitted her with it!’ he says, aggrieved.
The day you sign on to your first ship is special, one way or another. ‘Signing on’, British slang for receiving unemployment benefit, means the opposite at sea. The phrase descends from the beginning of the age of sail, through merchant ships, pirates, privateers and whalers, whose crews all signed contracts with their captains, known as the Ship’s Articles, which specified shares of the profits of the voyage. Seafarers now enter into agreements with companies rather than captains, but when you sign on you still have your life in a bag and no idea of the friends or enemies you will make, no idea of the worlds you will see nor the adventures, and the boredoms, you will share. In Melville’s time a whaling voyage could take three or four years, assuming you lived. Today the sentence is two or three months for a senior officer, who works half the year, and much longer as you go down the scale. For the poorest paid, often the youngest, signing on means nine months minimum, commonly a year and more. In all those months a man might reasonably expect to be off the ship a few times, for a few hours, but it may also be that he is not able to disembark at all. There is a tension between underpaid crewmen who beg for their contracts to be extended to thirteen months and beyond, and shipowners, who worry about the psychological costs of such endeavour, because of their effects on the men’s efficiency.
