The whales were on holiday in North Carolina for the winter, and nobody could account for the absence of the seals. So when the Canmar Pride sailed past Newfoundland into the Gulf of St. Lawrence, there was no-one to greet us but the ice.
I’d waited days for this moment. Eight days in fact, ever since the ship left Thamesport for Montreal, and I began a voyage that my family thought I was crazy to make. A lone woman on a container ship with a crew of 22 Indians, crossing the Atlantic in midwinter. Even assuming I wouldn’t be assaulted by cut-throats, what, they said, was I going to DO for ten days? There was a VCR, but no cable TV; an exercise bike but no pool. This being winter, there weren’t even any other passengers. On the face of it, perhaps Samuel Johnson was right to scoff that “being in a ship is like being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned…A man in jail has more room, better food, and commonly better company.”
But I had travel sickness pills and thermals, the Oxford Companion to Ships and the Sea and St. Augustine’s Confessions. I didn’t like bingo and I didn’t like cruise crowds: Ten days of watery isolation was perfect. And my ship gave no cause for concern. She was brand new and the length of two football pitches, with a bow stronger than an icebreaker, and an engine that could storm through force 10 gales. If I was to sail into treacherous seas at a treacherous time of year, at least my ship was in her element.
And the men who were giving my mother nightmares could have charmed Samuel Johnson. I don’t see the crew much - it’s a busy ship - but Captain Iranpur, a genial Parsi from Bombay, welcomes me on his bridge, where two sofas have been installed for passengers. As we pull away from our berth on the Medway river, I’m standing next to him, surrounded by machines spitting out weather reports and warnings of “ice-infested waters”, and wondering where else I would be granted such a privilege.
The river pilot points out landmarks; the marshes where Dickens set Great Expectations, a sunken Liberty ship ten metres away. Anchored over there is Radio Caroline, and far to the right, an eccentric living on an ammunition tower who shoots at anyone who comes near. He teaches me to read navigation lights and radar dots, before Stanley the steward brings his dinner. Canmar ships provide a mean curry, he tells me, Chinese ships serve bits of pig and watery soup, and Russian vessels supply vodka but measly sandwiches. He spots a fellow pilot bringing in a Russian ship and gets on the radio. “Alan, I’ve got chicken.” A pause, then a gloomy crackle. “I haven’t.”
My cabin is big and the bed luxurious, and the first evening, the humming engines send me to sleep early. I wake up in Antwerp, where it’s snowing hard, so I forsake the medieval squares for the warm bridge, standing for hours mesmerized by the loading of containers. A friend had told me that cargo ships were less intriguing now that everything was hidden in metal boxes, and there were no more tarantulas. I don’t mind: These huge, spidery-like cranes are bugs enough. Even the captain doesn’t know what’s in the boxes (it’s a security measure, says the shipping company), so I have to picture mounds of peaches and perfume, Hyundais and hydrogen chloride while he tells tales. Once in West Africa he watched armed pirates steal containers (”I wasn’t going to argue with an Uzi”). In East Africa, the deck list is removed from the stairwell, so thieves can’t find what they want. In Canada, another gang once hijacked an unremarkable container that held millions of dollars in gold coins. It may not be Conrad, but container shipping has its intrigues.
Late in the evening, the Pride glides into the Channel. The last landmark is Bishop’s Rock, which floats past next morning, and the sea is now officially an ocean. The sun’s out, so I sit outside, facing an awful lot of water, and think romantic thoughts. These are the western seas that lay beyond the pillars of Hercules, where the ancients’ sacred resting places were. This is where the Greeks had their Isle of the Blest, and the Welsh their Avalon. It’s the site of Atlantis, and Atlantic sailors still swear they see the mythical island of Hy Brasil although, like the rest of the sacred isles, its existence was ruled out in the mid-nineteenth century. Still, though the Atlantic is now officially relatively island-free, it’s not a blank, and the charts are full of exotic locations like Charlie Gibbs Fracture Zone, which sounds like it’s named after a boy band member, the Porcupine Abyssal Plain, the King’s Trough and the Olympus Knoll.
The next day we hit the Atlantic Ridge, and leave Europe for America. We’re now in the fast lane of the M1 of European immigration, following millions of hopefuls to the new world. There are other ghosts, too; Taking a southerly route to avoid several Complex Storms, the Canmar Pride is steaming along the same latitude as the Titanic.
The captain has never seen the film, but on the fourth day he escorts me to the bow, and I attempt my Kate Winslet impression. There’s a platform on the forecastle that holds the floodlight ships need to transit the Suez canal. That’ll do: I step up and prepare to recreate the ship’s most famous scene. Of course, when Kate was flying over the ocean, she was delicately perched on the rails in her evening dress. I’m wearing a hard hat and thermals, and when I spread my arms wide, the wind knocks me off my feet. When I do lean over to watch the ship slicing through the deep, it’s with both hands firmly on the rail.
The seas turn nasty the next day, and I wake at 4am when my cabin starts throwing things. On the bridge, the captain is intent on the nine-meter swell, and this massive ship is rolling 35 degrees each way, like a fifteen-storey wobbling Weeble. In the officers’ mess, the chairs have been chained to the floor, and the tablecloth is wet so the plates don’t slide. Everything’s pitching and rolling, but Stanley is sure-footed, and the bowls of vegetable curry arrive safely. Surprisingly, I’m the only vegetarian on a ship full of Indians. Most of the crew are Catholic, explained the captain one lunch-time, and the rest are practical. The Hindu Chief Engineer helped himself to another leg of chicken. “Oh yes, we do believe the cow is sacred,” he says with a glint. “But it’s also very tasty.”
The crew’s willingness to accommodate me goes beyond food. One day I asked when the moon would be up. “The lady wants the sun and now she wants the moon!” roared the captain, and he sent third mate Anurag scurrying to the chart room to collect tables and calculator. Maybe at 18.00, says Anurag, and he looks at me strangely. Don’t I know that the sun and moon always rise and set behind clouds in winter?
Never mind. Every evening, after whisky with the captain, dinner and a video in the passengers’ lounge, I head for the bridge. It’s pitch black. Shadowy figures move in and out of the chart room, and the only sound is an occasional crackle from the radio. The containers gleam dully in the dark, and the smog-free sky is dripping with stars. It’s more than enough celestial activity. In fact, it’s magic.
On the ninth day, there’s a ship on the horizon, Newfoundland to our right, and then we hit ice. I can’t see a thing at first for the fog. “Ten minutes,” says the captain, sagely, and ten minutes later the heavens open, the sun bursts through and Anurag and I run up to the monkey deck to gape at a stunning polar landscape. The ice stretches from bank to bank. It’s a gorgeous, deafeningly quiet white-out, with only the muffled swish of the bow cutting a blue swathe through the frozen river.
Inside, everyone’s wearing sunglasses, and the two Quebecois pilots are chattering away in sing-song sixteenth century French. I scour the banks with binoculars, but the houses seem deserted. Floating down a frozen river feels spooky, and I imagine the inhabitants in their attics, glued to binoculars. Maybe this is how Jacques Cartier felt four hundred years ago, when he was the first European to sail down the Saint Lawrence, and the banks were watching.
As we pass Quebec City, sitting prettily on its clifftop, the captain tells me about the French defeat in 1759, when the British climbed the cliffs overnight, met the French army at the Plains of Abraham and routed them in less than fifteen minutes. He’s laughing, and a minute later, he whispers the same story to the chief officer, out of earshot of the prickly Quebecois. (I don’t think he likes French Canadians very much.) Farther on, at Cape Charles, we pass the home of a man who blasts each ship’s national anthem from enormous loudspeakers as it sails by. The crew love this, especially since the man realized this Bermuda flagged ship wasn’t crewed by Brits, and began playing the Indian national anthem instead.
Finally, after 1000 miles of river, we reach Montreal. I don’t want to leave the ship, and the crew think I’m mad — some of them have been on there for seven months and can’t wait to get off. I get a lift into the city, stopping at the customs office at Sugar Quay, where Canada’s sugar is deposited. From here, I can just see the Canmar Pride sitting passively, a steel Gulliver crawling with Lilliputian cranes. She’s magnificent, and remembering Samuel Johnson, I think of jails I’ve been to, and ships I’ve been in, and I’d rather be afloat any day.
Published in the Daily Telegraph