Down to the Sea in Ships (36 page)

‘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.

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 Maersk 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.

In the galley Annabelle, Mark, Richard and I pose and take photographs of each other. Richard gives me a complicated handshake. There is a turmoil of seafarers in the crew mess, where David from the Seaman's Mission is helping Alberto fill in forms to send money home.

‘It used to be really simple,' David sighs. He is a tall, neat man in respectable clothes which suggest a tiny salary. ‘But since the whole security thing it's much more complicated. They're worried about money-laundering. Like anyone's going to launder two hundred dollars . . .'

Chicoy comes in, sporting an extraordinary vertical haircut.

‘Who cuts it?'

‘We do!'

‘Is there someone aboard who is particularly good at it?'

‘Not on this ship – some ships yes . . .'

This explains the second engineer's busby, the number of close-crops, and Book's bullet-look. When Cabot made his second, successful voyage he had a barber with him. (He turned back the first time, having found nothing but sea and bad weather.) Scholars assume this gentleman was aboard as a surgeon, but who is to say that Cabot, a Venetian after all, did not believe that seafaring should be done with style?

On deck Ordinary Seamen Bobby Sitones and Wallace Yambao are on watch. No one knows what they are guarding, as the containers continue their cascade. German aircraft, spacecraft and parts thereof fly by unsuspected. The Captain was right about the cheese: we have brought twenty tonnes from Norway. Four tonnes of flower bulbs from Holland we might have predicted, but only an eccentric would have guessed twenty-seven tonnes of Dutch cocoa powder for Chile, or five tonnes of Polish grass and moss, or three hundred and fifty tonnes of Tanzanian seaweed, fertiliser for the prairies. Fifty tonnes of Czech candy have reached their destination, but twelve tonnes of Iranian dates are going on to Colombia.

To survive the winter Canada requires Indian spices, twenty-five tonnes of Greek wine, Danish yeast, British malt, Latvian clothing, six hundred tonnes of Belgian beer, a hundred tonnes of Irish alcohol, Estonian chemicals, German tools, thirty-four tonnes of Belgian chocolate, twenty-four tonnes of Sri Lankan tea bags, Indian seeds, Polish glue, Hungarian tyres, tinned vegetables from Spain, Russian plywood, British sanitary towels, Dutch medicine, Swedish paper – you can see why these things are shipped across the Atlantic in the cold mid-winter. But why ninety tonnes of Argentinian milk, and why send it via Europe? Who plans to do what with two tonnes of used machinery from Congo? What is the second-hand vehicle, weighing almost two tonnes, from Sierra Leone – a diamond dealer's Mercedes? What is so desirable, in this land of forests, about the three hundred tonnes of sawn timber from Germany, and the eighty more from Russia? (The wood in three containers from the Ivory Coast will not grow in Canada, presumably.)

In Chile someone is waiting for eighteen tonnes of Saudi Arabian carpets. Four tonnes of Polish ‘personal care products' are on their way to Cuba. The Dominican Republic has been producing tobacco for five hundred years but it needs seventeen tonnes of tobacco accessories from Holland, where a Scandinavian firm owns a factory producing Dominican cigars. British industry is not quite dead, exporting plastic and machinery to Chile, one container of manufactured articles to El Salvador and twenty-eight tonnes of synthetic resin to Colombia, though this triumph is rather overshadowed by the three thousand tonnes of similar resins that Saudi is sending to South America. As we sat in the dry museum of our bar we had no idea we carried almost two thousand tonnes of booze, half of it Dutch and German beer. Britain's contribution, one container for Panama, is listed as ‘alcoholic beverage': surely Scotch. The mystery tractor is going to Peru.

‘Got to be strong,' says Wallace. It is achingly cold out here, and all he and Bobby are doing is watching the gangway. Another container off, and another, and another. Another voyage gone, another to come; another month gone; another to come, and another, and another . . . We say goodbye and Bobby and Wallace wave me off, Wallace offering a brave thumbs-up.

The way back to the other world is patrolled by container trucks, roaring and snorting smoke and impatience. A Haitian taxi driver takes me to the metro. The last I see of the
Pembroke–Sydney
is her bridge, and dirty flags flying bravely above the smoke stack, just another grimy ship in a bleak container yard somewhere far away.

She will be on her way to Halifax now. With a bit of help from the current, despite the speed limit, she will be well into the semi-wilds of Quebec. They will have been lashing all this morning, in this hard cold. I hope Jannie's back is OK – it was hurting him after unlashing. Twenty past four: Captain Koop will be on his bridge, Pieter in the engine control room and John will be listening to the music of his youth. Annabelle and Mark will be resting, counting down to their next shift. Many of the crew will be on or in their beds, watching DVDs, sleeping or trying to get an internet connection. And the ship will be doing what she does, what she has always done and what she will do until the day comes when someone who has never seen her, and never heard her storm songs, and certainly never smelled her, decides she has done enough. All my clothes, even those just washed, stink of her. I woke this morning without a thick and throbbing head for the first time in a fortnight. I barely knew her. But I saw her darkness; I felt her loneliness and her obscurity. I will always be able to hear the moans and whistles of her stairwell, her ghost music, the muted and ceaseless piano of her theme tune, and the enduring, resisting stoicism of the men who sing and hum her on.

THAT NIGHT THE
sights of Montreal, the live music in bars, the presence of women, the choice of food and wine and beer were surprisingly scant compensation for the comradeship of the seafarers. I felt like an odd ghost, something like Coleridge's Ancient Mariner: I wanted to take someone by the arm and say, listen, there is a ship at sea tonight, and this is who is on board, and this is what their lives are like, and without them none of this world you call normal could exist . . . The months afterwards were strange. I missed my ships and my friends. One image from Montreal kept coming back. As we hurried back on board that night, with supper to cook, we saw Mark making his way through the containers, striding to his few hours of shore leave. He looked tremendously neat and preoccupied. Perhaps he was going to buy cheap razors and other goods to sell at home. The others laughed, for there was always something slightly off-centre about Mark, about his near-obsequious friendliness and his eagerness to please. You did not have to know his story of punching himself in desperation to divine that he is a man who suffers isolation; he is a nation of one. But I remember him with great admiration. He has as much strength, playing the cheery servant fadelessly, as any man I have known.

Inner strength is the secret of seafaring. Men like Pieter, Jannie, Sorin, Joel, Rohan and the Captains Koop and Larsen must make almost ideal husbands and fathers, though they are so often absent from their families. I did not see them with their wives and children, but I saw them. Their stories have one thing in common: they all begin with wishes. But a wish is not a cautious thing, certainly not when a young man makes it. All these men made the same one, when they were too young to know better. They wished to go to sea. They came to know the imperturbable embrace of the oceans, and the relentless and perilous demands of ships. The life changed and changes under them; in most cases it became and continues to become harder and more demanding; its cushions – in leisure, comforts and pay – all continue to shrink. Their greatness – and it is a greatness – is that they have all fulfilled the demands of another old saw: you made your bed, now you must lie on it. And they do, with great grace – even when it is rocking, reeling and trying to throw them off. On the ships I began to understand that lying on the bed you made is perhaps the condition of adult life.