Monday, May 25, 2009

Around the world - Pitcairn and icebergs

Twenty years forward to 1999. After returning to Canada, I was fortunate to stop work when relatively young. I decided to go to sea. Why on freighters? One reason was the joy of avoiding airports and aircraft. Another the prospect of arriving on the other side of the world with no jetlag. Still another the unusual places you could visit on a cargo ship.

Melbourne Star (also see this month's second posting – ‘Some background’), which I sailed from the States to New Zealand, was the occasional supply ship for Pitcairn. It is one of the most remote inhabited islands on the planet. So isolated that it made an ideal hiding place for some of the Bounty mutineers.

Here I am with Pitcairn as a backdrop. Every few months, modern life’s necessities would be dropped off and then Pitcairn would be left behind, like Robinson Crusoe, but with a short-wave radio.


My first freighter voyage was a great success, so, a couple of years later, I decided to go the whole hog. I sailed on one of the last ships to regularly circle the world, not by Panama and Suez, but under the Cape of Good Hope and Cape Horn. This was roughly the course of the 19th Century clipper ships, which appealed to my sense of history. Just as well I did it as nowadays no ships – passenger or cargo – regularly circumnavigate via the Great Southern Ocean.

Palliser Bay was a British vessel with ties to the historic Peninsular & Oriental Steam Navigation Company. Here she is in Napier, New Zealand.


Palliser Bay’s route is now history and so are she and the company that owned her. The route became uneconomical, the ship too old and the company was bought out, as venerable lines were snapped up by huge international shipping firms in the early 21st Century. These are some of the issues I hope explore further in my upcoming blog.

For now, we will leave Palliser Bay deep in the Great Southern Ocean between New Zealand and the tip of South America. We are spending weeks at sea while heading back to Europe; the ship is rolling heavily and the second officer has just emerged from the galley claiming he was “chased by a sack of potatoes!”


In 2006, I decided to combine a trip down the St. Lawrence from Montreal and a return to England. This was aboard the Eilbek, which regularly sailed to Liverpool and Antwerp. Her outbound track was north of Newfoundland and into iceberg country.

I rather like this picture of two Eilbek crewmembers working their way aft.

Here we are squeezing into the container terminal at Liverpool.

In Antwerp, tractors are loaded for export to Canada. Canada once was one of the world’s major suppliers of farm equipment. Such is the impact of globalization.

And finally from the Eilbek, the captain and chief engineer after dinner one night. It is, as you can see, a pleasant evening. However, we are just a couple of days away from an disagreeable spell of weather, which you can take a look at in my second posting.

I’ve admired the senior officers with whom I’ve sailed. They are calm. I am not. They are highly professional and competent. I’m a dilettante. In a hurricane, they’re the ones I’d want in control. I’d be cowering in my cabin, experiencing a sudden bout of religious mania.

Next – what preparations do you make for months at sea?

Saturday, May 23, 2009

Around the world - at sea with the navy

It was in Liverpool that I first really went to sea, as a reporter not a sailor. It was aboard the Royal Navy’s Leander class frigate HMS Scylla. A navy photographer shot the picture below as we headed through the Irish Sea.

And here’s a picture of mine from Scylla showing HMS Jupiter astern.

Not only was this a splendid introduction to a life on the ocean wave, it was a practical lesson in ‘sea power’, the need for protecting those sea lanes along which the bulk of the world’s commerce moves. No imports, no exports, and a country can quickly collapse as the British realized in two world wars. Without convoys, the bravery of merchant seamen and the strength of the Allied navies, both wars might have turned out much differently.

By the way, twenty years after my voyage on her, Scylla was sunk off Cornwall to create Europe’s first artificial reef. The old Falklands War veteran now hosts a variety of fish and occasional recreational scuba divers.

My time as a young reporter was also the time of the Cold War and I did a lot of stories on defence, some with the British Army and Royal Air Force, but most with the Royal Navy. Among my early television stories were the annual NATO exercises – ‘Northern Wedding’ – in the North Atlantic. With my cameraman and soundman, we would act as the ‘pool crew’, shooting on behalf of British and foreign networks.

I loved covering the exercises. We were beyond the reach of my – by then – London newsroom; the pictures were great and, in the evenings, hospitality in the officers' wardroom was generous. I was introduced to an old Royal Navy drink, ‘pink gin' (gin and Angostura bitters).

Here’s another shot by a navy cameraman. It shows the British aircraft carrier Hermes, being shadowed by a Soviet warship.

And here am I with soundman Jim Wall getting ready to be transferred from the warship we were on to Hermes in the background.

Next shot shows Jim and cameraman Leo Waller shooting refueling at sea. Note the 16-mm film camera!

And lastly from ‘Northern Wedding’, here’s one of the Warsaw Pact’s spy trawlers. I think she was Polish.

My experiences with the Royal Navy (and later with the Canadian navy) satisfied some of my childhood hankering for a taste of the sea, with the Eastern Bloc substituting for pirates. There was lots of action. Unlike sedate cruise ships with stabilizers, the warships crashed splendidly (and photogenically) through the waves and rolled most enjoyably. Soviet warplanes, tailed by RAF fighters, flew overhead. The ever-changing expanses of open ocean were as romantic as the Russian steppes (an improbable comparison which came to me at the time as I’d just had my first assignment in the USSR).

Next, the only way to Pitcairn.

Around the world - why do ships appeal?

I am not person with a great understanding of matters technical and ships are very technical. Would I know how to navigate one? No. Do I know how an engine works? No. But, like many boys of my generation, raised on stories of pirates and war at sea, ships were enormously attractive and I had plenty of opportunity to see them. I was born in Vancouver, home to one of the world’s most magnificent harbours.

From a family photo album, here is a shot from the late 1940’s or early 50’s. It shows an American battleship arriving in Vancouver under Lions Gate Bridge.

This would have been about the time my godmother gave me a copy of The Wind in the Willows. Perhaps its most famous line is Ratty’s comment that,

“ … there is nothing – absolutely nothing – half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.”

Granted, Ratty was talking about sculling on an idyllic English river, but the line stuck; more than half a century later, it still does. Anyway, here I am, eight years old or so, with the Vancouver fireboat.


One of my first full-time jobs was in Liverpool, in its day the so-called ‘Second Port of the Empire’ in terms of the value of goods handled. I occasionally took a ‘ferry ‘cross the Mersey’ to work, watching ships moving up and down the river. The lower building in the centre of the picture is the onetime head office of Cunard.

On days off, I would explore the docks.

This is a traditional ship, the California Star, painted by Cec Jackson, captain of the container ship Melbourne Star, which took me to New Zealand. California Star was built in 1945 at Harland & Wolff in Belfast, just across the Irish Sea from Liverpool.

Click on the picture and look at all the activity. Look at all the different cargoes. Standardized they are not. There are barrels and pallets and crates. It took a lot of men and a lot of time to empty a ship and refill its holds. Consequently, a vessel could spend nearly as much time in port as at sea. And at dockside a ship doesn’t earn money.

By the early 1970s, containerization had arrived. The simple, standardized steel boxes, which could be unloaded and loaded so quickly, needed fewer dockers or, in North America, longshoremen. In Liverpool, hundreds, if not thousands, of dockers were laid off. The older docks were empty and ships were changing.

Next, my time on the ships that protect merchant shipping.

Around the world - some background

My first long sea journey by container ship was from Philadelphia in the States to Auckland, New Zealand. The pictures below are of the Melbourne Star, a vessel owned by the Blue Star Line, a storied British shipping company. However, by the time I was aboard, the Melbourne Star’s home port was Nassau, not Liverpool. She was no longer registered in the United Kingdom, but sailing under a ‘flag of convenience’, saving money for her owners.


The voyage was something of a discovery. I live in Toronto, one of the largest cities in North America and far from the Atlantic. Although once a major port on the St. Lawrence Seaway, those times are long gone. It had been years since I'd considered the role of the shipping industry and how it affects our lives.

Even in the United Kingdom, an island, most people only see a freighter or tanker when taking a ferry to the Continent. How much less do those who live in North America. We are largely oblivious of our dependence on ships, although roughly 90% of international trade moves, at some point, by water.

Containerization means that, as I type these words, virtually everything I see – my computer, desk, lamp, chair I’m occupying, clothes I’m wearing – was probably transported in a container.

Whether we live in developed, developing or under-developed countries, shipping – container ships, bulk carriers transporting materials such as grain or iron ore, or tankers – is at the heart of globalization.

Here are some containers being loaded on Melbourne Star. This is a forty-foot container – or box – belonging to P&O, a British company now owned by Carnival Cruise Lines.

I don’t want to bore you with too many statistics and facts. With as little text as I can manage and, I hope, interesting pictures from my travels, I want to create a sense of life at sea. This is a life, not on elegant passenger ships (and I’ve been on those, too, including the old QE2), but on the workaday vessels bringing us the goods we need to survive.

My next shot is of a sailor aboard the Melbourne Star. Like a large proportion of the world’s seamen – and they are still mostly men – he is Filipino. He spends up to nine months continuously on his ship before going home at the end of his contract. Quite often, when the ship is in port, there is not enough time for him to get off or security restrictions prevent him from going ashore. So he can pass, quite literally, months without setting foot on land. He is one of the undervalued, underpaid, vital cogs of global trade.

He is covering his face, not because he’s shy or a criminal, but because he has been doing one of the nastiest, most boring, but most essential, tasks on a vessel – chipping rust. It is noisy and exhausting and has to be done, because a ship exists in conditions that conspire to destroy it – salt water, sea air, storms, constant movement, heat and cold, and human fatigue leading to error.

Here is another view from another ship; this time it’s the Eilbek, a German vessel halfway across the Atlantic between Antwerp in Belgium and Montreal, Canada. We have endured days of constant pounding and even the ship’s officers and crew, used to conditions of this sort, are looking tired and fed up.

Coming up, some more background. And a reminder - if you want to skip straight to my next voyage come back late next winter.

Around the world - a warning

Later this year, I hope to be on an old British freighter going around the world, but first a ‘warning to the reader’, something I’ve borrowed from Peter Fleming, an English writer of the mid-20th Century. One's Company, his fascinating book about travels in 1930’s China was prefaced by a caution, advising that he was not a specialist on the country. In fact, as he disarmingly admitted, he had only spent a few months there and didn’t speak Chinese. My caution is that I’ve only spent a few months on freighters and am no expert on ships or international shipping. I am interested in the topic, but make no claim to being an authority.

My next few postings will have some background, however if you want to skip straight to my voyage come back in the late winter of 2010.