Down to the Sea in Ships (25 page)

‘
Maersk Pembroke
,
Maersk Pembroke
, Dover Coastguard, Dover Coastguard over.'

Once contact has been established the questions come.

‘
Maersk Pembroke
, what is your last port of call, over?'

Chicoy tells him.

‘And your next destination, over?'

‘Montreal,' Chicoy says.

‘How many persons on board, please?'

‘Twenty-four, figures two four, over.'

‘Thank you – and are you carrying any dangerous cargo, over?'

Chicoy replies in the affirmative and reads a list of number and letter codes, corresponding to the contents of our dangerous, lethal and pollutant-carrying tanks and containers.

‘And do you have any dangers or deficiencies to report, over?'

‘Negative, Dover,' Chicoy says.

‘
Maersk Pembroke
, Dover Coastguard, thank you. Have a good watch and a safe passage to your next destination.'

He wishes everyone the same thing. Each time the benediction sounds sincere.

‘Thank you, sir, same to you,' says a Russian officer. He is going to Vigo with a long list of dangerous cargo. A Swede is going to Shoreham with a cargo of timber; a Brit is planning to ‘steam up and down and kill time' until the tide is right at Rochester. An Indian is going to Santa Marta, Colombia, arriving on 1 March. What an exotic and curious place is the Channel! Add the stories of the hundreds on the ferries, and the ghosts of night-fighters and bombers in the air above us, not to mention the late long-haul flights and the last of the day's low-cost flocks, and the plans and tales of the seafarers, and the gripes and scores of the fishermen, and the missions, hopes and love-longings of those in the last trains in the tunnel below the seabed, and the English Channel is a universe, a dizzying nebula of life and history, all around us in the night.

When William of Orange dispatched four hundred ships through here in November 1688, on the way to Torbay, the landing site for his invasion of England, his fleet was so large it was able to salute Dover and Calais simultaneously. On our right lie the Goodwin Sands, ‘a very dangerous flat and fatal, where the carcasses of many a tall ship lie buried, as they say', Salarino describes them in
The Merchant of Venice
. The chronicles of the crossings of this narrow sea begin with human history almost as far back as we can measure it. The first identifiable individual who made the journey did so around 2300
BC
, in the very early Bronze Age. Known as ‘the Archer' because of the sixteen arrowheads interred with him, he was buried with great wealth and ceremony at Amesbury, near Stonehenge, but oxygen isotopes in his teeth reveal he grew up in Switzerland or the Tyrol. He is likely to have made the voyage on a very calm day in a sewn-plank boat. The oldest example of a sea-going craft of this kind, dating to 1550
BC
, was discovered beneath the streets of Dover in 1992. Before the invention of nails their planks were stitched together with roots and flexible wooden fibres. The enterprise and courage of the Archer notwithstanding, more than two millennia after his crossing, in 55
BC
, Julius Caesar's legionaries protested that his expedition to Britain would require them to fight on the other side of what Romans called ‘the green sea of darkness'. The Emperor Claudius had the same problem in
AD
43. On being ordered to board their transports some of his soldiers sat on their spears and objected to fighting ‘beyond the inhabited earth'.

John's alarm clock rings for a full minute before he is awake enough to silence it. He comes up to the bridge, acknowledging Chicoy's handover in gentle grunts, sleepy but interested. John produces his BlackBerry and mourns the absence of signal. He shows me some more pictures of smiling Theresa. He scrolls down to find some ‘which show her figure'.

They are going to marry this year.

‘She misses me terribly when I go to sea.'

When they have been together for two years the company will let him bring her aboard for a trip. As we pass over power lines and the Channel Tunnel, John recounts his education at a ‘terrible school'. ‘No English O-level, but I did get Chemistry, Physics and Maths. Went to sea with BP – four years on VLCCs – you know? Very Large Crude Carriers. You get a purge pipe spouting thirty foot of petrol, straight up. You're soaked in it. And you're in the Gulf, it's hot there and you're breathing petrol the whole time – you're high.'

Next he was on bulk carriers, which was much better, and then a multi-purpose carrier, which was the best.

‘Party every night! The Captain was great, yeah. He let us do cargo-watch from the bar. Went Rio a lot, girls and dancing, you know . . .'

All our lives are in John's hands until 4 a.m.; within moments this sleepy-looking man spots a crucial mistake. Chicoy has missed a way-point, a course change, and plotted our progress straight into the south cardinal buoy at the tip of Varne Bank. John fiddles with the computer, lower lip stuck out, until we are safe. The threatened gale is beginning as a fresh wind from the English side. We have passed Boulogne and Dungeness now, Orion has ridden westwards and the sea ahead is so dark you cannot believe that there is anything there at all. John wants to talk on, about photography, but I must, must sleep.

WE SAIL THROUGH
an exhilaration of white horses and rainbowed spray, into a clear morning with gannets diving. The temperature is six degrees but the wind is teary cold. Portland is just visible to the north and the Cherbourg peninsula of France is a low line to the south: it is a surprise to be able to see both at once, this far west. From a beach in Dorset you feel France might be out there somewhere, but to paddle for it you would have to be either mad or expert. By 750
BC
there was a busy trade between the two; Britons exchanged metals for wine and pottery from Amorica. This morning all the trade is passing through the Channel rather than across it. There are ships in lanes around us, mostly small coasters, and two large carriers out ahead, one off each side of the bow.

Erwin is on the bridge, a young man with a real thrust to his jaw, such as you would need if you were to be a chief officer at the age of twenty-eight. His last run was the Gulf to Somalia and back, over and over again, carrying containers. He puts his success down to luck and learning. He and Chicoy are the same height, barely five and a half feet, but Erwin is a lesson in accrued authority, lightly worn.

The chart says we are heading into the Western Approaches. To preceding generations, and to anyone reared on the novels of Nicholas Monsarrat, Alistair MacLean or Geoffrey Jenkins, the phrase means more than the sea area it describes. The Western Approaches were the first of the killing grounds of the struggle at sea in the Great War, and, even more terribly, during the Battle of the Atlantic, 1939–45. That conflict took the lives of more than 100,000 seamen and sent more than fourteen and a half million tonnes of merchant ships to the bottom, along with 175 of the Allied warships that tried to protect them and 783 German submarines sent out to destroy. As we surge three abreast with two coasters, on this gannets' morning, with the sun bright behind us and England falling back into Lyme Bay, we are setting out across a monstrous graveyard.

On the seabed directly ahead of us, upside down in sixty metres of water, is the wreck of HMS
Formidable
, a British battleship torpedoed in the small hours of New Year's Day 1915. As dusk fell on the first year of the Great War,
Formidable
was returning from gunnery exercises with her full complement of 780 men. She had been launched in 1898; for all her Krupp armour and fifty-tonne guns she was obsolete when war broke out. A submarine had been reported in the area but the weather was so rough it was thought that no U-boat could attack. The
U-24
, under the command of Rudolf Schneider, struck at twenty past two in the morning, torpedoing the ship's starboard side.
Formidable
's Captain, Noel Loxley, thought at first that he might make land, but the battleship listed rapidly. In gale-force winds, rain and hail, with swells running to nine metres high, Loxley gave the order to abandon ship. To lower a boat in such conditions would be a desperate business even from a modern vessel in perfect working order. As
Formidable
leaned twenty degrees to starboard the crew struggled to get their boats away. Some hit the water upside down, some were smashed as they fell, others were swamped. Schneider's second torpedo struck the ship's port side. It was reported by survivors that in her final moments, when the ship gave a tremendous lurch, Captain Loxley cried, ‘Lads, this is the last, all hands for themselves, and may God bless you and guide you to safety.' He is then said to have lit a cigarette and walked to the forebridge. The battleship capsized, rolling over men in the water as she sank. Five hundred and forty seven died, including the Captain.

Most of the dead have no headstone. ‘Auf einem Seemannsgrab, da blühen keine Rosen' ran a German folksong of the era: ‘On a sailor's grave no roses bloom'. Among those whose bodies were washed or carried ashore were twins, John and Henri Villiers-Russell, aged twenty-nine, who are buried in the churchyard of St Michael's Coppenhall in Cheshire. Employed at the Crewe Railway Works, they were also members of the St John Ambulance Brigade and the Royal Navy Sick Berth Reserve. During their summer holiday of 1914 they joined
Formidable
for a week's training. War broke out when they were aboard and they volunteered to stay on. Like those of many of their shipmates, the twins' names are recorded on a memorial to the dead in the parish where they grew up; many more of the names of the ship's dead are inscribed on panels around the bases of the Naval Memorial obelisks at Chatham, Portsmouth and Plymouth. The body of Captain Loxley's fox terrier, Bruce, was washed ashore. As a war dog, his grave is kept at Abbotsbury Gardens in Dorset.

The volunteering twins, the scattered memorials to the crew, Loxley's perfect fulfilment of naval archetype and the grave of his dog seem to cut a cross section across the grain of the Great War, and of the spirit of the dying Empire: class, rank, heroic tradition and reverence for animals, all undone by the assumption that new weapons would not work in foul weather. HMS
Formidable
was the first British battleship to be sunk by enemy attack in the First World War, her fate a sign of the terrible efficacy of the U-boat campaigns. By mid-1916 Britain's food stocks were perilously low; at the end of the year the Admiralty was reporting to David Lloyd George, the new Prime Minister, that the war at sea was all but lost, and advising him to negotiate a peace with Germany. Lloyd George refused, and ordered the inauguration of the convoy system. The idea of grouping merchant ships together under naval escort faced great resistance, not least from shipowners and speculators, war profiteers, who were making huge sums out of insurance on ships that were sunk, as well as government subsidies and dividends paid to investors in shipping. The contrast between the situation of these figures and that of the men who crewed their ships could scarcely be more savage. A merchant seaman's pay was stopped from the moment he took to his lifeboat. If he survived he could not expect to be paid again until he joined another ship in one of the convoys which saw the country through the end of the first war and sustained it throughout the second. Some men were torpedoed and rescued three times: 100,000 of them were less lucky. It is the heaving grave-waters of the convoys' crews and the sailors who fought to protect them that we will travel through. Most of the iron carcasses we will pass over will not be warships, but merchant vessels, the ancestors of our own.

Breakfast is mango yoghurt, hard fried eggs and something like catfood with potatoes. Annabelle is making beautiful cinnamon and apple tarts. She gives me to understand that 8.15 is rather late. Mark, the steward, says his admirable figure is thanks to his use of dumb-bells. ‘I quit smoking!' he cries triumphantly, then confides, ‘I saw all these actors with good bodies and I wanted to have one too.'

Now there are heather-coloured cloud shadows on the green water.

‘Warship
Dragon
, Warship
Dragon
, Warship
Dragon
,' announces the radio. ‘Live firing, Lyme Bay. Go to channel eight, out.'

Tune in or get shot, runs the apparent subtext.

Someone ignores him magnificently. Warship
Dragon
– one of Britain's new Type 45 destroyers, carrying one of the world's most sophisticated radar systems and enough weaponry, it is reported, to down all the warplanes in South America pretty well simultaneously – calls repeatedly, imploring the renegade to respond. Warship
Dragon
gives his antagonist's course (220 degrees), position (seven miles south-west of Portland) and speed, thirteen knots, and receives no reply. The mystery vessel lets him sweat for a while (there is no way they cannot hear
Dragon
), until at last a laid-back Indian-sounding voice acknowledges.

‘We are about to commence gunnery firing,' says
Dragon
, sounding more conciliatory now. ‘Could you alter your course southwards, so that we can proceed with our serial, over?'

The Indian lets him sweat again. By the time he agrees to go to Channel 8 to discuss the matter Warship
Dragon
is calling him ‘sir'.

Now a French fishing vessel,
Flaneur
, crosses our wake coming up from the south and heading into Lyme Bay. He immediately attracts
Dragon
's attention. The fisherman calls
Dragon
‘sir' in the most delightful French accent but fails to change his course by a single degree. I wish I could see
Dragon
; she must be lying to the north-east where there is a warship-coloured haze against the land. The rest of the horizon is a sharp cut line, slightly bowed.