Monday, June 15, 2009

Around the world - parting thoughts - 2

You now know that, while no longer a boy, I am still fascinated by ships. A hint of superstructure on the horizon summons the same questions a distant sail did in the days of galleons and East Indiamen. ‘What ship? Where bound?’ There may be little romance at sea nowadays – or ever – but there is still food for the imagination.

Ship terminals – especially for containers - can be depressingly automated and anonymous. But many ports still offer interest, even tantalizing hints of the bawdy ‘sailortowns’ of old. And stepping onto another continent from a plane does not come close to approaching one of the world’s fabled harbours after weeks at sea.

From my diary:

‘Just before sunrise, on the nineteenth day out from London, I was welcomed on the early morning deck by one of the crew. He gestured theatrically and proclaimed, “Africa!” It was our first sight of land since the Canaries. We had followed in the vanished wakes of those lovely, lavender-hulled, Union-Castle passenger ships that sailed one of the most important of the imperial maritime routes. And, like them, we paused under Table Mountain, took on supplies and mail, and a few hours later had the Cape of Good Hope, the ‘Cape of Storms’, astern.’

Here we are coming into Cape Town. Table Mountain is the flat ridge more or less in the centre of the picture.


Not from a cargo ship, but a tall ship having crossed much of the Pacific, this is our approach to Tahiti. I include the picture for it seems to illustrate the weary sailor’s age-old longing for the land.


In 1839, Charles Darwin wrote:

'At daylight, Tahiti, an island which must for ever [sic] remain classical to the voyager in the South Sea, was in view… the wildest and most precipitous peaks showed themselves towards the centre of the island.’

The view hasn’t changed. Well, bar the buildings, it hasn't changed.

Manaus, Brazil, a thousand miles up the Amazon. I shot these riverboats from an ocean-going ship that had come all the way from the Atlantic.




This is an isolated port on the Philippines island of Leyte.

I found an inter-island chicken roost. Click for a better view of the poultry.


One of the dockers was taking a break.

Cargo ships provide opportunities no passenger vessel could offer. One young engineer officer invited me to join him on his watch and fitted me out with a boiler suit, work gloves, safety boots and ear protectors. We descended by ladders into the depths of a gigantic, clangorous, metal cavern. While I may have little understanding of things technical, even I can appreciate a piston as tall as a man.


Bent double, we entered tunnels where the two shafts vanished beyond the hull and, just beyond, joined the propellers driving us around the world at ninety-two revolutions per minute.

We then squeezed down a narrow shaft.

At the base, faint lights vanished into the distance. This was the duct tunnel, just above the keel. We knelt on a little trolley. Like prisoners of war in The Great Escape, we pulled ourselves by hand virtually the length of the ship, at times through clouds of steam.


On land most of us are constantly seeing new faces. A walk to the supermarket or stop at a coffee shop mean interacting, sometimes with familiar people, often with strangers. If only in passing, there is usually something new. On a ship for weeks, even months, the boundaries and those you with whom you share those boundaries are always the same. The work is the same, too, and done seven days a week. The confined setting, people, routine, are the same.

Sailors adjust to this and there is a camaraderie. There is friction, but, sailors mostly learn how to get along. They have to. When possible, the routine is broken.

Barbecues are popular, too.



The next picture was taken at a party in the Palliser Bay officers’ lounge. The captain and chief engineer were preparing a whiskey bottle with a message.

The next day in the Great Southern Ocean, I threw the bottle from the stern. We were close to what is said to be the remotest spot from land on the planet – 1502 nautical miles from (take your pick) Pitcairn, Easter Island and Peter the First Island.

So far, no answer.

On returning, I hope to have a story worth telling and one that you will find worth reading.

Thursday, June 11, 2009

Around the world - parting thoughts - 1


My postings so far have been by way of an introduction. Before putting this blog on hold, I’ll leave you with a few more thoughts.

In part, I was motivated to write this because of a splendidly informative book. Historian Philip de Souza in Seafaring and Civilization (Profile Books Ltd., London, 2001, p. 30) makes a key point:
‘[T]he proportion of the world’s population who have regular contact with the seafarers who service their trading needs has … declined, even in countries like the United Kingdom which depend heavily upon seaborne commerce.’
We often see trucks and freight trains, but, as briefly mentioned in an earlier posting, are largely unaware of the ships carrying the bulk of international commerce. More than that, we have no sense of their crews. Few young people in the West are now attracted to a career at sea. Globalization means that Western nations have left transport of the goods that sustain them to ships increasingly registered in – and with officers and crews from – Third World states.

Admittedly, foreigners on, for instance, British ships, are nothing new. In Gipsy of the Horn (Longmans, Green and Co. Ltd., London, 1951, p.9), Rex Clements wrote of the crew he sailed with in 1903:
“A motley crowd they were, of all shapes, sizes, colours and nationalities …”
What is changing is the overall decline of Western-registered ships and officers. We are losing honourable traditions and important skills. As with the erosion of of our manufacturing base, we may come to regret the loss. I want to make it clear that this is not a criticism of non-Western countries or people. Sailors from the developing world are among the hardest workers I know. They are also doing one of the more dangerous jobs.

Recently I was reading my diary from my first circumnavigation:

‘One of the crew, ‘Big Al,’ is painting deck fixtures – almost delicately given the industrial quality of the setting. Al seems to take an artist’s interest in his work and painstakingly avoids putting green paint where white should be. This may be because the captain is watching from the bridge or simply that Al is a good workman. As I wander down to the stern, I pass a party of cheerful Filipinos carrying more paint cans and heading for a break. “We got the money, sir,” one smiles.’

The freighters I’ve been on have had British or German lead officers and, at least in two cases, have been registered in major West European countries. But an era is passing or, in fact, has already passed. Britain once truly ‘ruled the waves’, both with the power of its navy and size of its merchant marine. Even Canada had a substantial deep-sea merchant fleet. Now, the bulk of the world’s ships are registered in countries such as Panama, Liberia and, of all places, the Marshall Islands. If you’re looking for the Marshall Islands on a map, you better have a magnifying glass.

The United States is 15th on the list of registered large ships and the United Kingdom 19th. Canada doesn’t make the top twenty-five, but, I was surprised to find, is the 21st biggest shipowning country. That means there are Canadian-owned ships sailing under foreign flags. Safety on those ships and conditions for crews may not meet standards that would be required for Canadian-flagged vessels. (By the way, the U.S. Department of Transport’s Maritime Administration is the source of my statistics.)


Nationalities of ships and crews may change; what doesn’t change is the sea’s immensity. Or that the sea is in control. It’s one thing to look at an ocean in an atlas; quite another to cross it. Technology may improve, but ships still vanish. Most are lost because of weather. I live over the subway (underground) in the sheltered centre of a large city and am less affected than many by the weather. At sea weather is everything. A ship looks big when she’s docked, but at sea feels much smaller. And even smaller in a storm.

That’s the serious stuff for now. The last in the current series of postings will expand on what takes me to sea for months at a time.

Monday, June 1, 2009

Around the world - preparations

Thinking about boarding a freighter? Check your pulse.

I’ve seen two medical evacuations at sea, both on ships with doctors. One was on a tall ship sailing between Central America and Tahiti. A seriously ill crewman had to wait days until we were close enough to an island where an air ambulance could land. The unconscious patient was lowered into a Zodiac and transferred to shore. Paula Westbrook took one of the pictures below. Sorry, but I can’t remember which one.


The patient was flown to Papeete on Tahiti and survived. Had we been further out to sea or had there been no doctor there might have been a less fortunate outcome.

Cargo ships don’t have doctors, so if something goes wrong in the middle of the ocean, you better hope it’s not serious. Officers rely on a venerable publication - The Ship Captain’s Medical Guide – first published in 1868. It covers everything from birth to death. According to the British Maritime and Coastguard Agency,

“The recommended measures for prevention and treatment can be safely carried out by an intelligent layman.”

If you’re particularly anxious to demonstrate your intelligence, go to page 143. It tells you how to tackle appendicitis:

http://www.mcga.gov.uk/c4mca/mcga07-home/workingatsea/mcga-medicalcertandadvice/mcga-dqs_st_shs_ships_capt_medical_guide.htm

What to take other than good health? It’s a freighter, not a posh cruise ship, so no jacket and tie or the female equivalent. And, unlike many cruise ships, there’s either a laundry room for passengers or you share with the officers. Since cleaning is easy, clothing can be kept to essentials.

On a world voyage, ‘essentials’ equal clothes that can handle a variety of conditions. You want garments that will keep you warm and dry in stormy, cold waters, but which you can peel off – layer by layer – to the minimum for tropical seas. Here I am in a Gortex jacket (which also went to Everest, but not, I hasten to add, to the top) a few kilometres from Cape Horn.

Below is a self-portrait a lot closer to the Equator. I had folded the jacket into a pillow and changed my convertible pants into shorts. And if it's a rainy day in the tropics, I can remove the jacket’s cold weather lining and keep dry.

What’s needed is ‘all-seasons’ camping gear. Multi-purpose, comfortable, hard-wearing and easy to clean. Pack less hot weather apparel than you think you’ll need because, at least in tropical ports, it’s usually easy to find cheap clothes. At the end of the voyage, you can give worn – but decent – clothes to members of the deck crew who’ve become friends. They’ll find your castoffs useful for messy work.

It’s relatively simple to pare down clothes and even electronics. Let’s start with laptops. I’ll do some writing for diary, blog and lectures. From my reporting days, I always carry a notepad for quick jottings. However, my portable typewriter, festooned with airline tags and stickers, has long since been replaced by a laptop. The typewriter was a faithful - if eccentric - servant. My computer shows signs of becoming a control freak.

I’ve sent many laptops to the recyclers, but still have my old typewriter sitting safely in a closet. Sometimes I take it out and type a few words just to hear the productive clack of the keys.

Laptops are heavy. To cut luggage weight, I’ve just bought a ‘netbook’, the downsized laptop you see above next to my typewriter. I’ve loaded it with ‘Word’ and my photo editing program, and will use a USB stick as backup. It cost $350 (CDN), so, if lost or damaged, I won’t slit my wrists. Unless I’ve also lost the USB stick …

A freighter, unlike a plane, provides plenty of time to research. After all, what's the point of going to a place, if you don't know what's happened there? I have a Sony eBook reader packed with useful (much of it free) travel writing, in part thanks to Google’s deal with Sony and also the wonderful Project Gutenberg. Here’s a link to Sony’s bookstore and Google books:

http://ebookstore.sony.com/

And here’s Project Gutenberg:

http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page

Sony claims its reader can hold the equivalent of 160 real books. That probably doesn’t mean 160 copies of War and Peace, but I now have a small library that can slip into a pocket. To give an idea, I put my reader next to a stack of books.

A quick check of some of the 80 or so titles on my eBook reader brings up:

Voyages Round The World; Also Late Discoveries Between The Years 1792 And 1832 (published in 1834)

The Travellers’ Oracle or Maxims for Locomotion (published 1827)

The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf and published in 1915

Inevitably there’s some Conrad. There’s a danger of over-dependence on Conrad, but his material is often so relevant.

As recently as the 19th Century, travellers beyond Europe were indeed visiting a ‘New World’, one few Westerners had seen; that shows in the originality of their writing. Before arriving, they’d not been subjected to the wave of books, films, travelogues, daily news, accounts from friends who’d already been and so on.

Take one popular destination: nowadays there’s a surfeit of ‘South Pacificana’. How much has just one book, James Michener’s Tales of the South Pacific, which became a hugely successful Broadway musical and then film, influenced people when they think of that vast swath of ocean and islands? Here we are, a couple of years ago, arriving under sail in French Polynesia. But oh dear! This spectacular bay is but one of a number said to be the inspiration for Michener’s 'Bali Hai'.


As for real – not electronic – books, I often take along my Handy Atlas of the British Empire, published in 1904 and prefaced by Kipling’s A Song of the English:

‘Fair is our Lot – O goodly is our heritage!’

This useful little tome, smaller than most modern paperbacks, has over the years allowed me to compare Empire’s high point with the present in cities from Cape Town to Singapore. Even Toronto. And on my next trip, I will be able follow at least part of our progress on maps titled the ‘Route to India’ and ‘British Islands in the Western Pacific’.

My iPod has given me far more enjoyment – home or abroad – than I would have ever thought possible. For the upcoming voyage, I’ve loaded it with traditional chants, singing and drum dances from Melanesia and Polynesia, plus Victory at Sea and South Pacific. Okay, so South Pacific’s a bit hokey, but some of the passages from Richard Rodgers' VictoryThe Song of the High Seas and Beneath the Southern Cross – are wonderful stuff.

If it’s a warm night, I like to listen on deck. The ship rolls gently in the tropics and, with few lights, the stars of the Southern Hemisphere are brilliant. Sometimes you can see meteors, even satellites. I find a deck chair, click on Rodgers’ music and look up at the sky.

Back to reality. I always take two cameras, both 'point-and-shoots'. I simply cannot bothered with the fuss of lenses. One camera is waterproof and serves as a backup. At sea, I can take the chance of being sprayed and on land am not concerned by a sudden downpour.

An inflatable globe lives in my carry-on luggage, has crossed a large part of the planet, given much pleasure and some education. Every morning after brushing my teeth, I pick up the globe and fix my position on the sphere. The rest of the time it bounces around the cabin, forcing me to find the world in odd places. Here it is, resting by a porthole.

On the road (or on the sea), I try - not always successfully - to take the good advice of Nellie Bly who, in 1889, beat the circumnavigation of Verne’s fictitious Phileas Fogg. Bly, a reporter for the New York World, did it in seventy-two days. In an era when people – especially women – took a huge amount of luggage, Bly managed with just a small bag.

'I bought one hand-bag with the determination to confine my baggage to its limit … It will be seen that if one is traveling simply for the sake of traveling and not for the purpose of impressing one's fellow passengers, the problem of baggage becomes a very simple one.'

And in the very same year, Jerome K. Jerome, in his immortal Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog), wrote:

'George said: “You know we are on the wrong track altogether. We must not think of the things we could do with, but only of the things that we can’t do without.”'