Down to the Sea in Ships Read Free Page B

of the ship is a space station under a sky like a wet blue cloth, through which containers swing and float and fly. The cranes’ claws, the ‘spreaders’, are yellow, the ship’s holds red and the vista is lit by orange-pink floodlights, studded with white lamps in the hold. You can pick out ladders made miniature by the scale of the ship. The cranes are four-legged monsters, their necks thrust over us. Far up in the crown of each is a tiny human in his dark cabin. The dipping and winching is nearly silent. Sometimes a container booms hollow as it settles. The holds are deep, deep, dropping ten storeys down beneath hatch covers the size of barn ends. The hold looks like three demolished city blocks partitioned by giant circuit boards, gaunt and monumentally skeletal. When the holds are filled cargo is stacked another eight storeys high atop the hatches.
    We are accustomed to miniaturised technology; to devices in the hand that talk to satellites. Seeing technology on this scale is hypnotic, awe-striking. This is how we will explore space and colonise planets, you realise, with giant machines operated by men made near-invisibly small by comparison. The eight winches stern and aft are three times the size of a car. They adjust automatically, tightening lines you would struggle to encircle with two hands. Every fifty seconds a container is deposited or removed by each of the four cranes working on the
Gerd
. A tug is pulling a huge COSCO ship out of her berth ahead of us. It seems impossible the little boat has any influence on the leviathan. Their relative sizes make it a match between a hedgehog and a horse.
    Every passenger must have a tour. Prashant will conduct this one. He is a Dual Cadet, upright and alert in his immaculate overall. (The crew wear dark-blue overalls with reflective seams and MAERSK across the back; the officers have Sorin’s light blue version with braid on the epaulettes and the Captain has an immaculate white shirt with full gold insignia on the shoulders, which he produces on entry into ports, complete with fold lines.) ‘Dual’ means Prashant is being trained both as an engineering officer and a deck officer, one of the elite. He is from New Delhi, twenty-two years old. He has done ten months at sea: in another year, when he has passed his exams, he will be a junior officer.
    â€˜My instructors are real sea dogs,’ he grins. His friends were becoming seafarers, and making good money, so he did it.
    â€˜The engine is something else,’ he says.
    The Captain says it has a problem that we are going to address in Le Havre. He waves a finger at Prashant.
    â€˜Give him the tour!’ he says. ‘Not less than one and a half hours.’
    Prashant did not know the Captain before the Old Man took over the ship in Bremerhaven, but rank and procedure seem to simplify all relations. The Captain is the boss and uncle, Prashant the eager nephew.
    We set off at a lick down the main deck, more than 360 metres of it. The
Gerd
is longer than the biggest US aircraft carrier. You cannot quite see the end of the deck, which is painted dark red and is almost flawless, with barely two spots of rust. Prashant points out hydrants for sea water and fresh water, ticks off their pressures (eight bar), lengths of containers (forty and twenty foot), the ship’s capacity (she can carry the equivalent of nine thousand twenty-foot containers), and her deadweight tonnage, which is the total weight she can safely bear, including cargo, fuel, water, food and us: 115, 700 tonnes. He points out bay numbers (twenty-footers in the odd bays), lashing rods (adjustable iron stays which are fixed criss-cross to the ends of the first two layers of containers), hatch covers, winches and anchor chains, lifeboats and life rafts.
    When we are done I sign something and Prashant returns the paper to the Captain. Correctly signed papers, piles of them at every stage of every journey, are the price of the