Down to the Sea in Ships Read Free

line. One in, one out all day, along a dog-leg channel which takes them to the north-east before they turn away. The sea is a mulling brown and the light changes towards teatime, grey showing it has as many shades as any other colour: black-grey, silver, blue-grey, white.
    The
Gerd
comes in towards the beginning of evening. She moves quickly, her bow wave the only foam on all the sea. She is light: there are a couple of towers of containers but most of the deck bays are low or empty, revealing her lines. The
Gerd
looks like a ship that Hergé might have drawn for Captain Haddock, bonny in her red, yellow and blue, and a bit dirty, and very big. She does not seem to slow for the pilot boat which goes out to meet her. She turns in towards the cranes and the port, withdrawing around the corner behind the beach huts.
    Graham, the agent, appears in a van. He wears an orange tabard and hard hat. We might be on our way to a building site.
    â€˜All right? It’s been mad today. Hectic.’ The agent is the ship’s link to the port. He or she arranges crew accommodation, transfers, medical attention if necessary, the ship’s mail and all the paperwork involved in arrival, departure, tugs and cargo. Graham casts an unimpressed eye over Felixstowe. ‘It’s all about the port,’ he says. The port is divided into city blocks of containers. The cranes are gigantic; the new ones at the far end are the biggest in the world, ready for ever-larger Danish and Chinese ships. Seafarers say China owns Felixstowe. Hutchison Whampoa Limited owns it, along with forty other ports. HWL is controlled by Cheung Kong Holdings, a Hong Kong property developer, and you can see the connection. Felixstowe’s Trinity Terminal is a little piece of Hong Kong on the Suffolk coast.
    Along the quays the giant machines are moored, higher than castles, longer than villages. This close to them you cannot see any entire. Vast hulls loom like steel walls at the end of the world, their bows the axe-heads of titans. Mooring lines are tight and hard as beams. I crane my neck back to try to take them in, but there is no reducing ships like this to any kind of scale. No photographer could frame them. Way above, severe and straight-browed against the sky, are their bridges. The
Gerd Maersk
is just tying up. The ship is not officially here until her gangway touches the quay. The gangway is a sloping ladder running up, up – four – five storeys? My sense of scale is hopelessly overrun. The ladder bobs under me as I climb. Filipinos in hard hats and dark overalls smile uncertain welcome.
    â€˜Not scared of heights, are you?’ Graham asks, at the top.
    At first the ship is a cliff-edge of dark red steel. We hurry past stanchions, rails, up steel ladders, pass below a tremendous roaring from the engine air-intakes, step over sills through doors which wince behind us, sealing tight. Inside the passages are warm, yellowed by strip lighting. There is a smell of institutional cooking and diesel. Now we are in a steel lift. We rise eight floors to the Captain’s deck, and prepare ourselves to meet the Old Man, as Graham calls him, ‘But never to his face!’
    What is the aura about a ship’s captain? The word comes from the Latin
caput
, head. Though it is the highest rank and title on a merchant ship, it is still a title; the real prize is master, from the Latin
magister
, ‘chief’ or ‘teacher’. This signifies a Master Mariner, a term dating from the 1200s in Britain, meaning someone as qualified and as expert as a seafarer can be. All captains must hold a ‘master’s ticket’. Should you receive a message from one, as I did, giving you permission to join his ship (no company, however large, can compel a captain to do this) he will not sign himself off ‘Captain’, but, in my case, ‘Brgds/master/ Henrik Larsen’. (I had not seen the ‘Brgds’ before, either, and knew I