More of the sea and sea voyages

There's been a lot of notice taken lately of what is happening in the seas that cover about four fifths of the world's surface. The huge oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico off the mouth of the Mississippi has hardly been out of the headlines since April when it happened. Today there is worrying news about the work of another oil company, Chevron, in very deep water in the stormy North Atlantic, where the deepest oil well ever, more than 2 Km below the sea's surface, is being drilled. Years ago when I was writing my memoirs I wrote several pieces that eventually ended on the cutting-room floor. One of these was about the sea and my travels on and over it.


Sea Voyages


In the early 1950s, the word ‘overseas’ had real meaning. It was the only way to get into or out of Australia – intercontinental air travel was little used and very expensive. I am happy that I was able to go overseas as a young man. In those days it was literally that. I sailed over the seas that separated my birthplace from British and European culture.

MV Adelaide Star


In 1951, the ship that took me from my home in Adelaide steamed across the Great Australian Bight into the Indian Ocean, the Red Sea, through the Suez Canal into the Mediterranean, past the Straits of Gibraltar, across the Bay of Biscay, to the English Channel and the Thames Estuary, to Tilbury Docks. Our ports of call were Fremantle, Columbo, Aden, Port Said, and Algiers, a glamorous, exotic city of excitement and mystery. Three years later I left again from Tilbury Docks to go back to Australia, hitching a ride as ship's doctor on the Adelaide Star, a freighter that carried twelve passengers. We refuelled at Tenerife in the Canary Islands, then cruised nonstop around the bulge of West Africa, across the tropical doldrums, the oily calm steel-blue surface broken only by schools of flying-fish on the day I had no shadow at noon; on south around the Cape of Good Hope for the long haul with following seas and winds, across the southern fringes of the Indian Ocean all the way to Adelaide.

That voyage from Tenerife to Adelaide, one of the highlights of my life, took four weeks without a stop at any port, although we sailed across the mouth of Table Bay on a sunny August afternoon, close enough to see the cables of the funicular that went to the top of Table Mountain, the colours of the dresses the girls ashore were wearing. I was with a little band of professional sailors and a few passengers all sharing the same wanderlust and love of the sea. A long sea voyage in company like that is a splendid way to study human nature, and to get to know and understand the sea in all of its moods.

On voyages later with my wife and children, I went back and forth on passenger-carrying freighters between Australia and England. On the way to England in 1961 we stopped in Fremantle, Aden, Port Said, and disembarked in Liverpool. Going back to Australia in 1962, we joined our ship in Rotterdam, sailed to Antwerp, then Marseilles, Genoa, Livorno (with time to visit Pisa and Florence), through the narrow seas between Sicily and the toe of Italy, with spectacular views of the island volcano of Stromboli spewing red-hot molten lava, and then Iskanderun in the angle at the North-Eastern corner of the Mediterranean between Turkey and Lebanon, through the Suez Canal, down the Red Sea, and across the Indian Ocean to Fremantle and Adelaide. In early 1964, all the family had a 7-week voyage across the Pacific Ocean from Australia through the Panama Canal into the Caribbean and the Atlantic Ocean. We travelled on a refrigerator ship carrying about 20,000 tons of frozen meat. We unloaded several thousand tons each in Kingston, Jamaica; Vera Cruz, Mexico; Charleston, South Carolina; Norfolk, Virginia; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where I disembarked to fly to Burlington, Vermont; and Boston, Massachusetts where the rest of the family left the ship. We were moving from Australia to the USA where I had a new academic position at the University of Vermont, and that voyage early in 1964 was our last. After that, air travel replaced ships on all my own and the family's journeys across the world. Our only sea voyages since have been on ferries that took us and our car across the North Sea or the English Channel on European holidays when we lived in Edinburgh, Scotland in the 1960s, and a couple of brief cruises in the Mediterranean. I look back fondly on those vanished days of sea travel. Comely freighters have been replaced by ungainly container ships that don't have wide decks for adults to walk and children to play, and from what I’ve seen of them at sea, they appear to pitch and roll much more than the old style freighters, so they’d be uncomfortable for many seafarers.

A great oak tree's branches must bend before the wind, or they would break. So too, a ship's timbers or steel frame must yield before the force of the sea, or the ship would break up and sink. Every vessel I was ever on: yachts, a Greek caique, an Arab dhow, fake Chinese junks in Hong Kong Harbour, large ocean liners, little coastal steamers around South Australia in my childhood, and all those wonderful passenger-carrying freighters, all moved in the water like living creatures. You can hear, sometimes feel, them seemingly breathing as they move with the sea. They are living, they are breathing. Is that why we call a ship ‘she?’

On all these ships I've been most aware of the movements of the ship's protective skin in my bunk before drifting off to sleep. Behind the never-ending heartbeats of the engines that drive the ship forward through the sea are other sounds, comforting sounds of the ship bending and stretching as she moves with the interplaying forces of the sea. Perhaps the sea is getting heavier, the gently swelling rhythm of the waves is evolving into a storm, the pitch and roll are increasing. With every wave the steel spine and ribs and the steel skin of the ship are moving, quietly at first then more, as the waves gather force. The creaking of the shifting plates and rivets gets louder until it becomes a complaining sound closer to a shriek than a creak, too loud to be pleasurable. There are other noises then, the crash of the waves against the deck that make the whole ship shiver - the old sailor's oath, ‘shiver my timbers’ means what it says. There is a rushing sound of water along the hull, the shuddering roar of the propellers biting at the air instead of the sea as the stern lifts momentarily while the bows dig deeply into the next wave. There is a bang from time to time as a hatch not properly fastened slams shut, or the sound of a glass breaking as it falls from where it had been carelessly stowed to shatter on the deck. At times like that I enjoy more the sight of the ship battling against the sea than the sounds I hear in my bunk.

From the safety of the shore, a storm at sea is a grand spectacle. It looks as if the waves are mounting a charge. The breaking waves are aptly named white horses with their foaming manes. Each is a warrior that will attack and destroy a little piece of the shoreline. Turner's seascapes capture the flavour. In the early 1940s when I was a schoolboy one such storm was so violent that even in the sheltered waters of the gulf where the city of Adelaide nestles, the jetties along the foreshore were destroyed, and a warship on patrol was driven ashore. Seaside homes and hotels were badly damaged, the wide sandy beach scoured away, leaving a rubble of rocks. Shorelines were not recognized for what they are - dynamic, negotiable territory that changes hands between land and sea. In their pride and boundless faith in their infallibility the elders of my childhood had built great sea walls to mark the boundary between land and sea. But the boundary moved. The sea proved to be stronger than they believed. Everybody who knows Cape Cod knows this. In 1973 I saw a reinforced concrete house tipped on its end near Provincetown because somebody had not learnt the lesson about building on shifting sands. By now, I dare say, what was once somebody's comfortable home has disappeared beneath the sea, not like Port Royal in Jamaica because of a violent earthquake, but because the sea and the sandy shore are forever moving about, and in the end the sea almost always wins.

Like the worthy captain of the Pinafore, I'm hardly ever sick at sea. Two or three times is all, and never in a really severe storm. The first time was in the Mediterranean out of Port Said. A hot dry wind off the Sahara, laden with dust and grit, whipped the waves into choppy breakers that hit us beam on so we rolled, a shorter sharper roll than we had become accustomed to in the Indian Ocean. All my shipmates looked as I felt, white-faced, sweating, nauseated. Too much beer the previous night into a youthful stomach might have had something to do with it. A couple of other times on other ships it was the same, an unfamiliar motion that the organs of balance weren't expecting and couldn't handle, combined with eating or drinking not wisely but too well.

A storm at sea is an exhilarating experience as observed from a sturdy freighter with a well balanced and securely stowed cargo. Crossing the southern fringes of the Indian Ocean in the Roaring Forties (forty degrees south latitude) we ran for days before gale force winds, and for two or three days, the wind strengthened to Force 10, a full gale (over 62 mph). The dining saloon on that ship was below the bridge, facing forward. It had sturdy armoured glass windows, not portholes. I shared a table with the first officer. We had the fiddles up, movable slats at the edge of the dining table to stop our plates sliding off as the ship pitched and rolled. We had to sit spreadeagled, legs braced wide to keep from sliding with our heavy, splay-legged chairs to the far side of the saloon, and the steward had to place our food carefully in front of us a little at a time. Soup was off the menu. I loved those mealtimes. I had a perfect view of the ship burying her bows in deep green seas, shaking herself free of each wave as it broke over the forepeak, surged back across the hatch covers and ventilators to slam into the superstructure of the bridge, sometimes high enough to cover our windows momentarily. One moment we are in a deep valley of the ocean, the approaching wave is a mountain higher than the cross-trees of the foremast, closing in to port and starboard; the next moment we struggle to the summit of the mountain, and for a few seconds we see beyond the next great wave to a whole mountain range of waves. All have white caps like snow. The spray is flying away from us - we have a following sea in the Roaring Forties, a gale blowing us towards Australia. Those waves really looked like snow-capped mountains. Many times since I have flown high over the Swiss Alps, the Rockies, other snow-clad mountains. They are mundane and boring compared to the close-up view of the mountains and valleys of a storm at sea. On one of those days in that gale in 1954, the ship's log recorded the greatest distance she had ever travelled in a single 24-hour period, thanks to that powerful following wind and sea.

Even in the strongest winds and wildest seas of that storm the albatross never left us. Two or three of them picked us up after we rounded the Cape of Good Hope and came with us all the way to Investigator Strait, the narrow sea between Kangaroo Island and the South Australian mainland, before deserting us to follow another ship. They could hover for hours at a time, hardly moving a muscle or a feather, poised in the slipstream above the stern, their beady eyes darting everywhere, alert for any titbit. When the slops from the galley were tossed overboard, they would bank steeply, glide down and snap a mouthful from the bubbling, boiling wake, then soar up again to resume their place as sentinels over the stern. They must be able to stay aloft for weeks at a time without sleep, because far from land and in stormy seas there is nowhere for them to rest. When I looked out over the stern late at night, they were still there, on guard, alert and wide awake.

Fifty years ago in the 1950s those southern seas were rich with life of all kinds. We saw huge jellyfish, great translucent brownish or green creatures up to two meters across, shaped like the smaller Portuguese man-of-war, the poisonous stinging jellyfish of tropical waters. We saw killer whales, sharks, hammerhead sharks, huge schools of tuna chasing smaller fish that leapt in panic and in vain above the waves trying to escape their fate but were gobbled up anyway. We saw not only the albatross who followed us all the way, but gannets, terns, mutton birds, sheerwaters, far from land – though we knew there were islands, and one day we saw land, shadows rising from the mist to what looked like a high volcanic peak in the distance. This was St Paul Island, confirming if we needed confirmation, that we were deep in the Roaring Forties about halfway across on the great circle route from the Cape of Good Hope towards landfall off Kangaroo Island, South Australia.

In 1964 crossing the Pacific from Brisbane to the Panama Canal we ran head-on into a powerful storm, almost a hurricane, and for three days battered our way into the teeth of fierce winds and huge seas. This was a much stronger storm than the one I had experienced in the Southern Ocean, enough to clear the dining saloon of all but three or four of us when it was at its height. The dining saloon faced aft on that ship; the best vantage point was the bridge, to which I had access as a member of the crew, the ship's doctor. I spent many hours on the bridge discretely out of the way aft of the wheel and the instruments that told us how this storm was slowing our way through the ocean, at times almost bringing us to a stop. It was fascinating to see huge waves breaking over the bows and surging back, with the wind helping them gather force before they crashed into the superstructure, making the ship, sometimes those watching too, tremble. The open decks were dangerous, and if I ventured out the spray hit my face with the force of shots from a gun. I felt then the full power of the sea when it is angry. The dining saloon for officers and passengers thinned out during those days, the table cloths were dampened to stop plates sliding about, the fiddles were raised and our heavy chairs firmly fixed to the deck.

When the storm passed and the sea was calm again, we could see the ocean all around us ablaze with ghostly light on moonless nights from myriads of tiny phosphorescent plants and animals. If you flush a ship's toilet in the dark at such a time, it’s a dramatic sight - ship's toilets use sea water so the luminescent little creatures can be seen there too as well as in the wake and all around the ship.

On that Pacific crossing, thousands of miles out from Panama, we also saw long rows of brightly coloured buoys stretching into the distance, sometimes over the horizon. They marked drift nets, and twice we saw the trawlers that had set these terrible traps for the indiscriminate capture of fish, dolphins and seabirds. Those trawlers flew no flag identifying their nation. One we saw close enough to focus on with binoculars had oriental letters on her stern – a port in Taiwan, perhaps, or Japan or Korea. The rape of the ocean was well under way in 1964.

Once in the late 1990s flying at night back to North America from Tokyo, far out over the Pacific I looked down through the blackest night to what looked like a large scattered settlement – it was the lights of a huge fleet of fishing trawlers, using lights to attract their prey. The pillage continued at night as well as by day. Soon there will be nothing left alive in the sea. Since 1965 my views of the seas and oceans of the world have mostly been from high above, from airplanes. I’ve seen calving icebergs breaking off the Greenland glaciers and scattering in what looked from 10,000 meters above to be calm blue sunny seas; I’ve seen breakers and spray on the rocky cliffs of the Western Isles of Scotland. I’ve seen the brilliant green of coral atolls and volcanic islands in the Pacific. I’ve seen the scattered remnants of rocks and islands which are all that remains of what was once a large island in the Eastern Mediterranean until a massive volcanic explosion blew it to pieces about 3500 years ago, destroying the Minoan civilization of Crete in the process. I’ve flown high above the Bosphorus (and seen it from sea level). On a bright sunny day the blue seas of the Black Sea and the Sea of Marmora are dark brown around the Bosphorus, as they are near outflows of all the rivers that empty into the Mediterranean. As well as being pillaged, the sea is being poisoned by raw sewage and industrial effluents. Where great rivers drain into the sea the runoff contains not only industrial toxics and raw sewage but large quantities of fertilizer that collectively disrupt marine ecosystems and ultimately create huge ‘dead zones’ devoid of all life except pallid jellyfish. I am glad to have seen so much of the seas of our blue planet before they had been so damaged by stupid humans that there is a real risk of irreparable harm.