Soul Ship to Montreal

Watch It

She’s a real worker, scarred and battered, tear-streaked with rust; her bow is stripped of paint and her bridge wings, I note with incredulity, are open to the elements. The Maersk Pembroke, formerly the P&O Nedlloyd Sydney, earns her keep in the North Atlantic. She blows a raspberry at sceptics: a blast of smelly spray from a pipe makes the little crowd of stevedores on the quay curse and duck. It catches me squarely. From this moment on I like her. She is not quite what I was expecting – she’s even better.

Soul Ship

She’s all tight corridors, iron ladders and stairwells that whistle and moan. Sometimes she helps you open a door, sometimes she makes you put your shoulder into it. On the bridge the slightest wind sets her to chirrup or howl: “She does talk a lot,” grins her Master, Captain Koop. There is a wonderful bar, from the great days of sociable sea-going, which now serves water. She was built in eastern Germany in 1998. A mark, a guilder and a pound were laid under her keel for luck. The open bridge-wings made sense in those days, when she used to work in the warm. There are photographs of her in pomp: lovely lines, red and black hull, shining white superstructure. The Sydney Opera House, in the background, complements her nicely.

Lobster, cheese and poison please

Shipowners do not tell crews what the containers carry, but that does not mean they have no idea. “We take a lot of cheese to Canada – and we bring a lot of different cheese back!” says Captain Koop. “Same going east – you take Philips and you come back with Sony.” A world built on the exchange of brands. “At Halifax we get live shelfish. Lobster. Very expensive. The crew have to check the reefers every four hours to make sure they’re ok…” The dangerous cargo manifest is a poisoner’s fantasy.

Power

Driving rain swirls around the towers of the Deurganck nuclear power station as we curve out of our berth into the Schelde river, Antwerp. The map says the reactors stand just on the Belgian side of the border with Holland. Captain Koop, who is Dutch, finds this bleakly amusing. You rarely see a less inviting scene than the industrial reaches of the Schelde in a February dusk. The big ships come and go past chemical works, through water the colour of congealed fat which laps at bruise-green flats.

Speed

The tide is falling, the wind hard from the south west and the Schelde is serpentine with bends. The first is notorious for cargo ship groundings: we take it slow, then increase; by the time we reach Flushing Roads the dusky land slides rapidly. More speed, more steerage; it’s slalom for levithans. As the estuary gapes wide and dark we come down to dead slow, turn hard a port, then starboard with engine stopped, so the ship’s side covers the approach of the pilot boat. The river pilot departs and the sea pilot arrives. He has a five-star beard and he blows into it, vigourously: it’s a filthy night.

Company

Two hours later we’re out to sea, passing Zeebrugge and the Wandelaar anchorage. There’s a gaggle of ships at anchor there, delayed by the pilots’ strike. They light up the sea in orange and white as they swing on their chains. Stars appear and we head for the Dover Strait. Dover Coastguard is the voice of England. It sounds tired but the questions are well-informed, precise and polite. At the end of each exchange the voice wishes everyone good watch and safe passage to their next destination. “Thank you sir, same to you,” answer Russians, Indians, Swedes, Chinese…

Light paper and stand well back

Who knows what is at sea tonight, under Orion’s great bow? Recently there was a cargo labelled ‘fireworks’ which would have made quite a display: authorities in Kotka, Finland, discovered the Thor Liberty was actually carrying 69 Patriot surface-to-air missiles to South Korea, second-hand from Germany. Just a paperwork error arising from a confusion of the words ‘rocket’ and ‘missile’, it is now agreed. After two weeks the ship was allowed to proceed. We must assume’second-hand’ does not mean ‘used’.

Night and Day

By dawn we are south of St Catherine’s point on the Isle of Wight. A pale morning becomes a springy day, which becomes a blue Sunday afternoon. We pass fishing boats, some with red mizzen sails, and gannets circle the ship. We listen to a warship in Lyme Bay cordially asking people to alter their course, “As we are about to start gunnery firing.” A whole seafaring history of Britain unscrolls as we head west, passing Salcombe, Dartmouth, Falmouth, the Lizard and Land’s End.  At one point we have England clear on our right and the tip of the Brest Penisular, hazy, to the left.

Ghosts

As we tread towards the sunset there are ghost stories on the bridge. Men crushed, men stabbed, ships wrecked, ships foundering and broken. The charts sound dire warnings of bad seas; they are stippled with little doted circles denonting wrecks. The swells come up as the sun goes down. Piano music plays, ghostly, from the crew mess. A man sings in the stairwell. Captain Koop strides vigourously up and down the bridge, “Doing my exercise, you see.”

Stand Down

There is that ship-smell of heavy fuel below, mixing with sweet cooking. Our cook, Annabelle, is the first woman many of the crew have sailed with and the best chef, too. Sunday night is supper at the bar; miraculous how merely sitting on a stool and proping an elbow transforms an atmosphere. Out come the stories. There was this one captain who bought his crew a drum kit and a keyboard. The problem was… The electrician has two eyes tatooed on his bum because.. The strangest thing the second mate ever saw was… The Chief Engineer picked up 60 Vietnamese boat people back in the seventies, when he was a cadet. One of them, who was a child at the time, wrote to him recently asking if… Did you know Filipino Seafarers have the right to a karaoke machine? When we go up the St Lawrence you will hear a particularly eerie sound…

Jones Bank

Later the swells increas and we start a Great Circle to the north. Not the most direct route to Montreal, but there are two or three days of heavy weather to come and we are aiming to pick our way through. We must make all possible speed, as the pilot strike ate our buffer time. Time is playing its own tricks too: the clocks are going back an hour a day at the moment. There are fishing boats over Jones Banks, just two lights in an oil-black ocean. The last we saw of of Europe was the towering lighthouse on Wolf Rock, then the Scillies, hovering, heather-coloured behind us. Bishop Rock light blinked farewell.