Down to the Sea in Ships Read Online Free PDF Page B

America, they continued, and eventually encountered a German ship bound for Portland, Oregon. The Captain of this ship advised them to abandon the
Indian Empire
, ‘but when Captain Johnson put it to the crew not a man would leave’.
    The German gave them charts and navigational equipment.
    â€˜Three days later Easter Island was sighted and anyone who wished to do so was given permission to leave the ship there. But again not a man chose to go.’
    The
Indian Empire
was on her side in the Pacific for twenty-two days, and it took another sixty days’ sailing to make Callao, Peru. Only one man had been lost. Crews of other ships in the port made a collection of clothes for the gaunt, long-haired and ragged men who had brought her back from the sea.
    The story of the
Indian Empire
is echoed in Joseph Conrad’s novel
The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’
. The ship is blown on her side in the southern Indian Ocean, near the Cape. Chaos and destruction roar down on her, all but fracturing the sanity and discipline of the terrorised crew, as they dangle from her perpendicular deck. But Captain Allistoun is inflexible – the shrouds and stays will not be cut, he decrees; they will wait out the storm. Mr Baker, the mate, bullies, chides and enforces the order. The cook saves the company’s morale with a miraculous brew of hot coffee, and a credo: ‘As long as she swims I will cook!’ The wind changes, the seas abate and the
Narcissus
rises again. Conrad’s narrator says of the cook: ‘His saying – the saying of his life – became proverbial in the mouth of men as are the sayings of conquerors or sages. Later, whenever one of us was puzzled by a task and advised to relinquish it, he would express his determination to persevere and to succeed by the words: – “As long as she swims I will cook!”’
    Somewhere between the true story of the
Indian Empire
, whose men twice refused to abandon her wrecked shell, and the fable of the
Narcissus
, saved by her iron Captain, redoubtable cook and long-suffering crew, lies a tumultous, evasive but palpable spirit, some essence of the relationship between sailors and their craft. In these early days in which I begin to know the
Gerd
I cannot measure or explain this spirit, but I can feel it, even in the bare corridors. There is no superfluity in the ship, either in her construction, her atmosphere or the bearing of her men. She is so huge and they are so few (there are twenty-one of us aboard) that any emergency would put each character to the sternest test. It is as though the briskness and unsentimentality of the way the least thing is done, right down to making tea, leaving no drop, stain or spoon out of place, is a constant rehearsal for some not-quite-unthinkable disaster.

CHAPTER 4
World of Men
    THE DAY LIGHTENS as the English coast diminishes over our shoulder and the Channel turns holiday blue. It is highest summer; the wind whips light off the sea and whirls it round the funnel. There are vessels at every point of the compass. A lifeboat passes behind us, shepherding a yacht with a faulty engine towards Rye harbour, beyond the power station at Dungeness which is a tiny nub. The coast of Normandy solidifies as England fades. It is a seascape from a children’s book, bereft of threat, and, almost, of children. The young now begin their travels at airports and stations, while many of their parents and most of their grandparents first left the country by ship. Mine was perhaps the last generation for whom Dover’s cliffs were the end of Britain and Calais the beginning of the world. I first felt swells on a ferry from Portsmouth to St Malo. It was a night crossing, the moon made a lane on the water and the ship swayed as my brother and I tried to sleep, stretched out on seats. We were worried about the rolling, troubled with that uncertain, low-level fear like a pulse in the chest – the landlubber’s