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- Herausgeber: Eland Publishing
- Kategorie: Lebensstil
- Sprache: Englisch
Following in the footsteps of countless emigrants, Jonathan Raban takes ship for New York from Liverpool, to explore how succeeding generations of newcomers have fared in America. He finds a country of massive contrasts, between the 'Street People' and the 'Air People' in New York, between small town and big city, between thrusting immigrants and down-at-heel Native Americans.Having outgrown his minute, rented, New York apartment, he heads for Guntersville, Alabama, where he settles for a few months as a good ol' boy in a cabin on the lake with an elderly 'rented' labrador. From there he flies to the promise of Seattle, talking with its thrusting but alienated Asian community, and thence to the watery lowlife of Key West. The result is a breathtaking observation of the States – a travelogue, a social history and a love letter in one.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018
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In an era of jet tourism, he remains a traveller-adventurer in the tradition of his countrymen George Borrow, Charles Doughty and Robert Louis Stevenson. He has a gift for vivid observation, description, anecdote and personal encounter.
New York Times
A mordantly funny book that presents itself as a work of reportage but proves to be a work of literature in disguise. It is literary not only in the tightrope acrobatics of its style; its exhilarating verbal inventiveness manages to transform the familiar images and vocabulary of American life into startling novelties.
Edward Mendelson, Daily Telegraph
Raban delivers himself of some of the most memorable prose ever written about urban America.
Henry Kisor, Chicago Sun-Times
When Raban describes America and Americans, he is unfailingly witty and entertaining.
Salman Rushdie
Raban notices things that the rest of us miss … This is a very funny book, as well as an illuminating one. I’m envious. I have spent longer in America than Raban, and wish I had seen as much.
Simon Hoggart, Literary Review
Those who require inspiration for their dreams could do little better than pick up Hunting Mr Heartbreak … Read it if you fancy emigration by armchair.
Daily Mail
Hunting Mr Heartbreak
JONATHAN RABAN
Mr Heartbreak, the New Man, come to farm a crazy land …
John Berryman,Dream Songs
What, then, is the American, this new man? … He is an American, who, leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the new government he obeys, and the new rank he holds. He becomes an American by being received in the broad lap of our great Alma Mater.
J. Hector St John de Crèvecoeur,Letters from an American Farmer
Contents
One
THE ATLANTIC PASSAGE
THERE IS A SENTENCE that has stirred the imagination of Europe as powerfully as any call to arms. I’ve seen it written a hundred times, and have always felt a pang of envy for its lucky author. It is so jaunty, so unreasonably larger than life. It promises to deliver the unexpected – some fantastic reversal of fortune, some miraculous transfiguration in the character of the writer. It deserves a paragraph to itself, and should be printed in ceremonious italics.
Having arrived in Liverpool, I took ship for the New World.
Behind the sentence crowd the emigrants themselves – a crew of people dingy enough to take a little of the shine out of the words. They stand in line: the long-out-of-work, the illiterate, the chronically drunk, the hapless optimists, the draft-dodgers, the bankrupt adventurers. Some, like the Jews escaping the Pale of the Tsars, are dignified by the involuntary heroism that attaches itself to any persecuted people; but most of the single men and families on the dock are not – were not – refugees. If they were on the run, they were more likely to be fleeing tallymen and creditors than cruel kings and despots. Very few of them could seriously claim to earn the sentimental welcome which would meet them on the far side of the ocean as their ship passed the Statue of Liberty on its way into the dock at Ellis Island. Few of them would be able to read (or understand) the words of Emma Lazarus’s poem on Liberty’s plinth, that grandiloquent advance advertising of America as the sanctuary of freedom and democracy. To most of the immigrants America was simply a tantalising rumour of easy money – of jobs, clothes, food.
In Letters from an American Farmer (1782), J. Hector St John de Crèvecoeur (Mr Heartbreak, in John Berryman’s happy literal translation of his name) wrote:
What attachment can a poor European emigrant have for a country where he had nothing? The knowledge of the language, the love of a few kindred as poor as himself, were the only cords that tied him; his country is now that which gives him his land, bread, protection and consequence; Ubi panis ibi patria is the motto of all emigrants.
What turned the Atlantic passage into the great European adventure was not so much the character of America as the character of the ocean. It was simply a space too big for you to be able to imagine your way across it. It was as deep as the highest mountain you’d ever seen. It was a place of terrible winds and weather, with waves as big as crashing churches. That gigantic desolation of angry water was a source of terrible stories of shipwreck, sickness and death. The moment you stepped on to the gangplank, you committed yourself – not to America, but to a strange and frightening sea ritual, which would ineluctably transform you from the person you had been on the dock into the person you would eventually become when, and if, you reached the far shore. Over there, after the ocean had done its job, you’d have a different identity, and very probably a different name. You would not be you, at least not as you had known yourself to be up to this extraordinary moment.
A Yiddish memoirist – who in New York became ‘George Price’ – wrote a booklet called Yidn in amerika, in which he warned his fellow emigrants that the Atlantic crossing was ‘a kind of hell that cleanses a man of his sins before coming to the land of Columbus’. The journey to Ellis Island from Rotterdam, Bremerhaven, Genoa, Le Havre, Glasgow, Liverpool was a grim and protracted rite de passage. Before the invention of the steam turbine (which shortened the trip to nine days, in fair weather), it lasted for two weeks. For thirty-four dollars, you were treated to a symbolic death, in a stinking wooden coffin, with the promise of an uncertain and hazardous resurrection.
Before it was anything else, America was the voyage itself. Few of the emigrants (and very few of those who travelled in steerage) could think sensibly beyond their coming trial-by-water. Many of them, from landlocked villages and towns in central Europe, had never even seen the sea before this day. The United States was a sketchy, if glittering, fiction, its unreality sustained by the ungraspable breadth of the ocean.
It was a country they had read about in pamphlets and in letters home that sounded more like fables than descriptions of any recognisable reality. In America, the houses were as high as the sky. Everyone had enough to eat. Everyone had an alarm clock to wake them in the mornings. You could buy ‘several kinds of food, ready to eat, without cooking, from little tin cans that had printing on them’. The poor people dressed in exactly the same finery as the rich … Who could seriously believe tall tales like these?
Yet they’d seen evidence of miracles. Returning emigrants, in American hats and American coats, brought souvenirs home – razors, penholders, music boxes. These tangible authentications of the tale were like the gold that Hansel and Gretel brought back to their father from the gingerbread house. To reach the land from which these treasures came, you had to trespass on forbidden territory. In German fairy-tales, the forbidden territory was the Forest, a realm of solitude and danger, with its evil woodcutters, wolves and bears. In nineteenth-century European history, it was the Ocean, the fierce North Atlantic with its fogs and sudden storms.
For most emigrants, it was sufficient transformation to become an alrightnik– to eat, dress and talk like an American. But an impressive minority of the steerage passengers achieved success on a scale that would have been unimaginable to their old, forsaken selves. It was as if the voyage had robbed them of all their European sense of deference and proportion. In Isaac Bashevis Singer’s story ‘The American Son’, a pair of elderly peasants living in Poland are frightened half out of their wits one morning by the arrival of a gorgeous cuckoo, a ‘nobleman’, their son. Emigrants turned themselves into lords of the New York garment industry, millionaire realtors, Hollywood magnates. Their children became senators and congressmen, Pentagon strategists, CIA officers, Secretaries of State. In the twentieth century, America’s foreign policy has been haunted by the ancestral memories and nightmares of the transatlantic emigrants, just as its domestic political rhetoric has been coloured by their sense of the magical melodrama involved in becoming – and remaining – an American.
For many years now, the modern emigrant has been more likely to fly the Pacific in the cramped vinyl pod of a 747, cross the Rio Grande, or sneak ashore among the mangroves on a Florida key, than to make the journey to New York by ship. Yet the long Atlantic crossing is still the one on which America feeds in its sleep. Again and again it turns to the Atlantic for its sustaining memories, and to those sepia images of ragged troops of Europeans disembarking at Ellis Island. So I took ship at Liverpool.
The Old World was in bad shape. It was coming down around my ears as I drove north out of the city through the Victorian docks that line the Mersey. At least they had been docks. Now they were smoking heaps of brickdust. I drove through an orange fog of dust. Dust caked the windshield of the car. Even from behind closed windows, one could taste the dust, its mouldy sweetness, like stale cooked liver. Ball-swinging cranes stood idle in the muggy afternoon heat. Raised over the dustheaps were the yellow Portakabins of the demolition contractors, on tall stilts of scaffolding.
‘The last of England …’ I said.
My wife said nothing. She’d imagined a more romantic maritime setting to say goodbye in, and I could see it too … worn paving stones, old iron bollards, trapdoor warehouses with cantilevered blocks and tackles. The swinging balls had demolished everything, including our goodbyes.
Every so often there was a gap between the ruins and the improbable glimpse of a ship. I saw the listless flags of Japan, Liberia and Greece, but no British ensign. Most of the British mercantile fleet had been either scrapped or ‘reflagged’ – registered in Liberia, or the Isle of Man, or some other country where taxes were low and shipping regulations easygoing. In the last ten years the ‘red duster’ had turned into a nostaligic rarity, and there was none on view among the dustheaps, where a duster of any colour would have been welcome.
In the middle of the waste land, the demolition men had left behind a sailors’ pub whose scrolled Edwardian stuccowork lent an ironic touch of mouldering finery to this devastated place. I parked the car on a patch of cinders and we crossed the dual carriageway to the pub. Inside, the flavour of brickdust was seasoned wih the eye-watering tang of Old Holborn cigarette tobacco. We sat side by side on a wooden bench holding glasses of Spanish brandy.
‘Cheers,’ my wife said cheerlessly.
After ten silent minutes of pretending an exaggerated interest in the sluggish movement of the coloured balls around the pool table, I said, ‘I suppose we’d better find my ship.’ The Old Holborn in the air seemed to have got the better of my wife’s eyes.
The ship was easy to find. At what had once been Seaforth it towered over the dustheaps, in wedding-cake tiers, topped by a spinney of radar scanners. Its name, ATLANTIC CONVEYOR, was clear from half a mile away, and it was flying a Red Ensign the size of an embroidered wall-hanging. Between us and it lay a shantytown of steel containers with mobile gantries and forklift trucks plying in the streets, a mile or so of twenty-foot-high chainlink fencing and a Portakabin guardhouse in which a bored attendant was staring at the Sun.
My wife and I embraced wanly. I lugged my bags from the boot of the car to the guardhouse, and watched the car lumber and sway over the potholes in the tarmac and disappear into the orange fog of the Waterloo Road. It was not the dockside farewell that either of us had planned. Proper farewells need a suitable architecture on which to stage them. Kissing was not an activity that was catered for by the bald amenities of the Seaforth Container Terminal.
At first sight the ship was bigger than the dock in which it floated, a whale sprawled in a hip-bath. For although the North Atlantic seaway was almost completely closed to passengers in the 1960s, it is still one of the most important freight routes in the world, and giant container ships like the Atlantic Conveyor maintain a continuous trucking service between the ports of Europe and those on the eastern seaboard of Canada and the United States.
Nine-hundred-and-something feet long, fifty-six thousand tons gross, the Conveyor was a custom-built marine pantechnicon. It had a toppling Hilton hotel mounted at its back end, with a long city block of slotted containers stretching out ahead of it. For the last ten days it had gone tramping round the small seas of Europe, picking up cargo from Le Havre, Antwerp, Rotterdam, Bremen and Gothenburg, and it was now gorged with exports. The car decks, on the waterline and below, were a luxury traffic jam of unplated Jaguars, Porsches and Mercedes. The containers were packed with many thousands of tons of bizarre odds and ends: Swedish matches, French brandy, frozen seal meat, Dutch tulip bulbs, paint, perfume, laughing gas, helium … Two containers were bound for Macy’s store on Herald Square in Manhattan: one, loaded at Le Havre, was billed on the manifest as ‘French wearing apparel’; the other, which had come on at Liverpool, was billed as ‘English bric-á-brac’. A Robinson Crusoe, salvaging stores from the wreckage of a container ship, could drive round his island in an XJS, clad in Dior, reeking of Joy, blind drunk on Courvoisier and armed with enough high explosive to blow an unsightly mountain to smithereens. No wonder that so much chainlink fencing and so many rolls of barbed wire were needed to keep the locals out: every container ship that was locked into this ruined Liverpool suburb was a treasure chest of expensive toys and frills. By this measure, Europe itself had turned into a giant gift shop supplying America with high-fashion trinkets. I wonder what the afternoon drinkers in the pub, with their whippet-like bones and wretched teeth, thought of the trade; did they ever picture the Long Island mansions and Palm Beach ranches in whose garages those cars would soon be stabled, and did they ever try to guess at the real distance between Seaforth and the world the ships were servicing?
The accommodation for the crew of the Atlantic Conveyor matched the grandeur of its cargo. I was travelling as a guest of the owners, Cunard Ellerman, and was assigned the cabin of Officer B, on the tenth floor of the wedding cake. Officer B lived well. His cabin was a roomy studio apartment furnished with bookcases, a refrigerator, a kingsize bed, a comfortable sofa, a long desk of varnished pine, a cabinet for drinks and glasses, a coffee table and his own lavatory and shower. Just down the hall, Officer B could swim in the heated pool, put in a sweaty half-hour on the squash court, work out in the gym and open his pores in the sauna, before showing up in the Officers’ Bar and Lounge, where the bonded Scotch was 10p a measure, and where a new film was shown on the video at 8.15 each night.
I spread myself in Officer B’s fine quarters, and loaded his bookshelves with the accounts of the nineteenth-century visitors and emigrants whose company I meant to keep during the voyage. I’d brought Irving Howe’s World of Our Fathers and Moses Rischin’s The Promised City, for their descriptions of Jewish peasants in steerage; Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep, for the arrival in New York Harbor; Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Amateur Emigrant; Charles Dickens’s American Notes for General Circulation. Officer B’s cabin compared well with the stuffy dormitory-cum-canteen in which Stevenson made his crossing, or Dickens’s ‘stateroom’ on the steam-packet Britannia, which turned out to be an ‘utterly impracticable, thoroughly hopeless, and profoundly preposterous box … no bigger than one of those hackney cabriolets which have the door behind, and shoot their fares out, like sacks of coals, upon the pavement’. Lounging in Officer B’s swivel chair and looking out over the smoking dustheaps through Officer B’s picture window, wondering whether to pick up Officer B’s telephone and ask the purser if he could bring me a bottle of Famous Grouse, I felt a tide of resentful envy coming my way from the voyagers on the bookshelf. Ian Jamieson, the purser, said that he’d be around with the whisky in five minutes. I got Stevenson down from the shelf.
… the second cabin is a modified oasis in the very heart of the steerages. Through the thin partition you can hear the steerage passengers being sick, the rattle of tin dishes as they sit at meals, the varied accents in which they converse, the crying of their children terrified by this new experience, or the clean flat smack of the parental hand in chastisement …
Come to think of it, I had some complaints of my own on this score. The air conditioning was annoyingly loud. It sounded as if a large dog was stationed overhead and was growling through the vent at me. Turning the milled screw, marked Lo and Hi, red and blue, resulted in no change in either the noise or the temperature. I rolled up a dirty shirt and tried stuffing the vent with it. The growling dog backed off into the distance for a while, then the shirt took wing, flapped across the cabin and made an ungraceful landing on the sofa; the dog returned, sounding, if anything, bolder and growlier than before.
When the purser showed with the Famous Grouse, together with an electric kettle, a jar of coffee, a carton of milk and a pair of rather pretty cups and saucers, I decided to put a stoic face on the hardships inflicted by the air conditioning. Sailing, he said, had been delayed till tomorrow noon. There would be drinks in the Officers’ Bar at half past five, followed by dinner, then a film on the video … The emigrants booed and whistled from behind their covers.
The next morning a steady drizzle softened the hard edges of the demolition work and turned the surrounding landscape to the even colour and texture of grey porridge. There was a humming, banging, swaggering cheerfulness aboard the ship as people woke to the imminent prospect of Liverpool bobbing soddenly in our wake. At breakfast, there was already talk of Halifax, Nova Scotia, the first stop. I had imagined Halifax to be a fishy nowhere, and was set upon for my prejudices by the captain, the chief engineer, the first officer and the purser, working in chorus, as if they’d been commissioned by the Halifax Chamber of Commerce to sing an advertising jingle on the town’s behalf. The bars! The discos! The amiability and comeliness of the people! The safety of the streets, where never a police horn sounded! The excellence of the restaurants! The Split Crow! The Palace! The Red Fox! The Misty Moon!
‘It’s the little town that has everything,’ said Captain Erin Jackson.
‘Lobster lunches …’ said Ian Jamieson.
‘Ladies – for those who have need of ladies,’ said the chief engineer, David Meek, whose wife, Helen, and daughter, Wee Helen, were travelling with him on this trip.
‘It’s the social centre of Nova Scotia,’ said First Officer John Brocklehurst.
‘Everyone likes Halifax,’ said Captain Jackson.
I nodded politely and kept my disbelief to myself. I suspected that this paradise was a peculiarly Liverpudlian fantasy. If your ship’s home port was Liverpool, or, rather, an empty un-urb of that depressed and beaten-about city, then anywhere on the far side of the ocean would take on the glow of a Samarkand, especially if you happened to be sitting in Liverpool, eating your breakfast by electric light, a day late in sailing, watching the rain fall on a range of low hills of brickdust and cinders.
When the ship at last began to move, it did so with the ponderous delicacy of an elephant sidestepping the tea things in a drawing-room. I was on the bridge, a hundred feet above sea-level and ceremoniously remote from the operations that were going on down in the bows and the stern and on the dock. The silence was churchy. A hushed voice over the radio announced that the stern line was off; another came in to say that the bow was now clear. We were so many storeys up that the only way to tell that the main engine was running was to put one’s palm on the bridge-console and feel the metal surface tremble, with an even beat, like the skin of a breathing creature. The Sunday-suited pilot stood by the captain’s elbow as the enormous ship eased itself, inch by steady inch, away from the wharf. To reach the open estuary, it had to move forward, turn on its axis in a space apparently shorter than its own length, then feed itself into a long double lock that was apparently half as wide as the ship’s beam. It was a camel-through-the-eye-of-a-needle job, and I stood holding a rail, waiting for the million-pound crunch.
No one raised his voice. Wives and children were enquired after, the weather was grumbled over, Liverpool’s draw at Anfield on Saturday was derided, while the Atlantic Conveyor squeezed itself in, spun itself round and shrank itself into the lock.
‘How much clearance do we have on either side?’
‘Oh – a good eighteen inches.’
While the lock filled to bring the ship level with the open water outside, we enjoyed a view of a ragged alp of rusty junk. The first officer said, ‘Liverpool’s chief export. Scrap.’
‘Who’s the lucky recipient?’
‘The Japs. It all comes back to Liverpool eventually … as Toyotas and Hondas.’
We slid gingerly forward, feeling for the cross-tide at the entrance with our bows, made a slow turn to starboard, and began threading our way north through the sand- and mud-banks of the Crosby Channel. The water was camouflage-brown, flecked with the spittle of small, triangular breakers raised by the stiff southwesterly wind. From up on the bridge, the waves looked like ripples; though a fishing boat, a hundred yards or so away from the Conveyor, was jouncing about in them as if they were a serious running sea.
The captain and the pilot were conducting their professional business in a continuous gentle murmur around the wheel. Gossip and navigational instruction were laid on each other like the strands of a two-ply rope. ‘Old Rowntree – port ten – bought a bungalow up there recently – steady as she goes – cost him an arm and a leg, by the sound of it – starboard five – seventy thousand someone, I think it was Jack Elstree, told me – three four zero – two bathrooms, three bedrooms – steady as she goes – he’s got a champion view, of course, south-facing – three three five – you heard his daughter got married in August? – steady on three three five – yes, Heswall man …’
The coast of Lancashire faded into a dim smear in the rain. The breakers, bigger now, were beginning to drool, with a sandy-yellow foam as thick as candyfloss. I’d never been on a ship as big as the Conveyor, and found it hard to adjust to its silence, its absence of palpable motion. It was as if we were at anchor while the Mersey estuary and Liverpool Bay were being slowly dragged away from under our hull. I was used to seeing the sea at close quarters, to treating each wave with respectful deference, but from the patrician height of the Conveyor’s bridge I saw the Irish Sea (which I knew to be a bully easily roused) humbly licking our boots.
We passed a coaster of about a thousand tons which was dipping its bows into the swell like a long spoon. Every time she came up, a cascade of ice-green water poured from her scuppers. The crew in her wheelhouse must have been like so many dice being shaken about in a cup.
‘Only a little fellow … We could tuck him into a spare corner of Three Deck,’ said one of the second officers.
The Conveyor lorded it over the small fry of struggling trawlers and tinpot freighters. We were the biggest ship in the sea, we were America-bound. There was a splendid arrogance about the way we drove our cargo of coloured containers far ahead of us into the murk while the mountains of Snowdonia, dramatically and perversely sunlit, closed with us, fine on our port bow.
The pilot was dropped in the lee off Anglesey, where he was borne away in a tumbling orange walnutshell. With a very faint churning sound, somewhere deep down in her lower intestinal arrangements, the ship moved to Full Ahead. Seventeen and a half knots. Six days to the Elysium of Halifax.
Captain Jackson came over to where I was standing. ‘Well, what do you think of the ship so far?’ He was a squarely built, deliberative Welshman, who counted out his words like coins and whose voice had a dry, North Walian creak to it.
I said, ‘It feels like going to sea in a block of flats, it’s so motionless. Does she never roll?’
‘Oh‚ yes. She rolls.’
He checked the glowing bronze screen of one of the several radar sets on the bridge, targeted a white blip on the six-mile ring, glanced up at the digital read-out of our speed, and studied the anemometer, which showed forty-five knots of apparent wind on our port bow. The Conveyor was moving at full speed, perfectly upright, through a near-gale.
‘It takes a lot to make her move, but when she moves, she moves.’
In the winter of 1986, Captain Jackson said, the Conveyor, bound, as now, for Halifax, ran into a violent storm three hundred miles east of Newfoundland. The tops of the waves were higher than the level of the bridge. The needle of the anemometer was glued solid to eighty-five knots, its highest reading. The actual speed of the west wind was a hundred knots, perhaps more.
‘She was making forty-degree rolls.’
‘You mean rolling twenty degrees each way?’
‘No. Forty degrees to port. Forty degrees to starboard.’
I couldn’t see it. In my view, if you cant a floating block of flats over at forty degrees, it falls into the sea with an enormous splash, and doesn’t come up again. Somehow the Conveyor had managed to retain her footing and return to the vertical, despite her shallow draft and the towering, top-heavy weight of her superstructure.
For two days the crew had fought to keep her facing up into the wind and sea. As she hit the face of each new wave, her bows had ‘fallen off’, and the ship had done her best to slew sideways. The screw kept on coming out of the water and at one stage the engine failed. For a time, while the engineers worked to get the main engine back on line (with errant tractors threatening to fall in on their heads), Captain Jackson had kept the ship’s head up to the wind with the bow-thrusters – ancillary propellers in the front of the ship, normally used only for manoeuvring in harbour.
‘And if she had been caught broadside?’
‘God only knows what would have happened.’ He checked his instruments again, and made a slow, dry, Welsh inventory of that voyage. ‘We had a lot of cargo damage. One man was injured. He still has the scar. The accommodation was in a terrible state. After thirty hours up here, I went down to my cabin; it was unrecognisable.’
Leaning forward, hands planted on the console, his meaty fingers spread wide, he was reading the sea. He searched the horizon from end to end, and nodded. ‘Yes. She rolls. When we get round the corner of Ireland and meet the swell … she’ll roll a bit then.’
Only a few years before, a cargo ship the size of the Conveyor would have been a large and multilingual floating village, with Cape Verdian deckhands and Chinese laundrymen; now it was a tiny hamlet of ten officers and eleven crew-members. On the French and Swedish sister ships of the Conveyor everyone ate and drank together; but we were British, and both officers and men had chosen to recreate on board that ritually stratified and segregated life of a Cerne Abbas or a Chipping Campden in miniature.
The crew bar, a deck below the officers’ quarters, was a cheery pub, with a dartboard, a jukebox and posters on the bulkheads. Upstairs, on the gin-and-tonic level, we signed our chits in a setting of consciously refined gentility. Framed colour portraits of the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh regarded us with a somewhat chilly marital gaze. We perched on sofas of imitation leather. An embroidered sampler showed the Conveyor floating on a stitched blue sea above the words of John Masefield’s ‘Sea Fever’. A letter from Prince Andrew to Captain Jackson thanked the captain and crew for their felicitations for the prince’s forthcoming wedding. Guppies and angelfish swam decorously through the greenery of a tropical aquarium.
For dinner, you changed into uniform – at least into a white uniform shirt worn with epaulettes and a tie. You had to help yourself from the galley, but sat down to a table laid with rolled linen napkins in silver rings, and seating was by rank, with the first officer, the chief engineer and the purser at the captain’s table by the window, while the junior officers had a table to themselves.
Most of the officers and many of the crewmen had been aboard the Conveyor since her launching in 1985. Some, including the purser, the first officer and the assistant cook, had been on the original Atlantic Conveyor when she was sunk by an Argentinian exocet missile twenty miles north of Teal Inlet during the Falklands War in 1982, with the loss of her captain, Ian North, and several of her crew. So the community of the ship was tight and memorious. The Conveyor, though she might appear to the outsider to have the character of a new glass-and-steel office block, was a creature of fixed habits and customs.
In the ballroom-sized officers’ dining room, the two small knots of diners had all known each other for so long, and had sat down with each other to eat so often, that conversation had been reduced to a sort of gruff Morse. If you were in on the code, a single word could do the job of an entire story.
‘Meatloaf,’ said Donald, one of the second officers.
The second engineer, the electrical officer and Donald’s colleague, Vince, chuckled clubbishly, as at the end of some elaborate tale of malarkey, while the radio officer touched his mouth with his napkin and went self-deprecatingly pink. It was a tough world for a stranger to horn in on: my own stories sounded impossibly long-winded by comparison, and I was wary of using words like gorgonzola or telex, in case they enshrined stories either so hackneyed or so blue that I’d condemn myself to social ostracism even before we left the Irish Sea.
Dinner over, we withdrew formally to the bar for coffee and stickies. Stickies were liqueurs – tots of Tia Maria, Cointreau and Drambuie – and these ladylike, sugary concoctions signalled an abrupt change in the tenor of the talk. We were in the drawing-room now, and could gossip cosily about life ashore; about wives, children, girlfriends, mortgages, cars, house improvements. Helen, the chief’s wife, and Wee Helen, his daughter, a schoolgirl of sixteen, were now the focal centre of our circle – the official representatives of the families we’d left at home. We talked curtains, in-laws, CSE exams and summer holidays, while the sea began to heap outside the window and the wind made lonely fluting sounds down the ship’s empty corridors. Craning my head round and peering through the glass, I saw lights on the Irish coast and recognised them as old acquaintances. There was Wicklow, to the northwest, making its triple wink every fifteen seconds – and, up ahead of us, the Arklow Lanby buoy, flashing twice every twelve seconds. Before, I’d always fought anxiously to identify them as they disappeared behind the tops of waves, and had been worried sick about getting too close to the line of offshore sandbanks that they marked. Up here, nursing a sticky and chatting to Wee Helen about her set passages in Hamlet, I saw them as pretty twinkles in the night.
I climbed up to the darkened bridge. The sea was looking more like a real sea now. The wind had started to cry in the rigging and in the tall stalks of the radar antennae. The anemometer showed fifty-five knots, dead on the nose – or about forty knots of true wind, a full gale. Far ahead of us – so far ahead that they looked as if they belonged to another ship – there were sudden, explosive gouts of flash powder white as our bows hit the building swell. Yet the ship continued to plough uprightly ahead, with no more than the occasional bump and rattle that one might expect from a well-bred tram.
I made myself a mug of coffee in the chartroom at the back of the bridge. A fax machine was stuttering out a silver weather map of the Atlantic. On another day, in another vessel, this brittle, smudgy document would have reduced me to panic and a desperate run for a safe harbour. I’d never seen so many isobars so closely packed. The map showed half a dozen different weather systems, each one like a giant whorled thumbprint; cyclone hurrying on the heels of cyclone, in too many directions and speeds to follow. Our gale was taking place in one of the few areas of the map that looked relatively isobar-free.
Captain Jackson came in, scanned the map, and said, ‘Yes, looks as if we might be in for a bit of a blow in a day or two … This hurricane here …’ – he pointed somewhere down in the region of Bermuda – ‘Helene … seems to be changing direction now. See, she was going along this track, westwards; now she’s started to head north. We’ll be keeping an eye on her over the next few days.’ He spoke of the hurricane as indulgently as a teacher might have spoken of a mildly naughty child in their class. I didn’t at all like the look of Helene; she was not so much a thumbprint as a dense black stain, with her isobars coiled as tightly as the loops of a watch-spring.
‘Very probably she’ll peter out long before she gets to us. She’ll just be another low, like the one we’re in.’
I thought, forty degrees to port, forty degrees to starboard, wave tops higher than the bridge, engine failure, caught broadside … and saw the quick, dit-dit flash of Tuskar Rock ahead of us. Rosslare, a few miles short of it, was a good deepwater port, and County Wexford is a genial and beautiful place to find oneself stormbound. Captain Jackson, though, had abandoned the alarming weather map for the bridge, where his attention appeared to be wholly engaged with the question of the unloading schedule in Halifax.
By six the next morning, the Conveyor was beginning, in the captain’s word for it, to ‘move’. I lay in Officer B’s comfortable double bed, figuring out the ship’s peculiar style of motion. First, there was the sound of a bomb going off far up front – nearly a fifth of a mile away – as she rammed an advancing sea; then the impact came shunting, trainlike, through the frames … whump, whump, whump, whump… until it disappeared with a valedictory wallop under the stern counter, by which time a new shockwave was already shunting its jerky way down the ship’s length. It was not remotely like being rocked on the bosom of the ocean deep.
After some intimate slapstick with socks and trousers, I drew the curtains on a morning of brilliant early sunshine and a sea of low, ribbed hills, loosely crocheted with foam. The North Atlantic was in sparkling form, looking every bit as angry, cold and blue as the books had cracked it up to be. I jammed a woolly hat low over my ears and tackled the passageway leading to the afterdeck with a drunkard’s concentration on the difficult motor skill of planting one’s feet squarely and in good order. Outside, I was knocked sideways by the stinging, salty wind, and took shelter in the lee of a fire-box, where I wedged myself tight, just in time to see Ireland fall astern.
The Fastnet Rock was lying on our starboard quarter like a large blackened molar. Some miles behind it, Cape Clear and its attendant headlands showed as jagged atolls of moss-green and granite-purple. High over the Fastnet, the wind was whirling the gulls away like so many tumbling smuts in a chimney. It was a view so obvious, so piercingly vivid, so laden, that it sent a shiver down my spine to see it – and, by seeing it, to see the quiet crowds at the stern rails, watching and waiting until these last few crumbs of Europe were swallowed by the sea.
My ghostly fellow-travellers were emigrants: they were not, or at least they were not yet, immigrants. At 10°W, America was still an empty hypothesis; it was the land, the family, the village or city they were leaving that must have occupied their thoughts at this stage of the voyage. They were making their exit – a phrase which, in Roget’s Thesaurus, leads straight on to ‘resign, depart this life, die’.
Too little has been made of this resignation and deathliness. Most American historians have preferred to stress the glorious resurrection that awaited the immigrants on the far side of the ocean, just as they’ve preferred to stress the vitality of spirit that the emigrants brought with them to the New World. I find it odd that Stevenson’s The Amateur Emigrant (which is by far the most graphic and searching first-hand account of nineteenth-century emigration) is so rarely referred to in general histories of the United States. It may be because what Stevenson has to say about the matter is unpalatable to the point of being un-American. His emigrants are not the hardy and red-blooded ancestors of whom politicians like to boast when on the stump at Ellis Island. They are pathetic creatures, much too listless and moody to be seriously stirred by the American Dream.
One says that he is going to America because he’s heard that ‘you get pies and puddings’ there; and his horizon is noticeably more extended, and more optimistically set, than that of most of his companions in steerage. In Stevenson’s words:
Those around me were for the most part quiet, orderly, obedient citizens, family men broken by adversity, elderly youths who had failed to place themselves in life, and people who had seen better days. Mildness was the prevailing character; mild mirth and mild endurance.
And again:
We were a company of the rejected; the drunken, the incompetent, the weak, the prodigal, all who had been unable to prevail against circumstances in the one land, were now fleeing pitifully to another; and though one or two might still succeed, all had already failed. We were a shipful of failures, the broken men of England …
And again:
As far as I saw, drink, idleness and incompetency were the three great causes of emigration, and for all of them, and drink first and foremost, this trick of getting transported overseas appears to me the silliest means of cure …
As the ship at last drew clear of the known world, few of the passengers at the stern rail can have harboured many tangible hopes of the unknown one. They had amounted to nothing much in Europe. Some had already been bankrupted by America, like those Swedish farmworkers whose small fields of acid and stony soil had been made valueless by the colossal success of the Midwestern grain belt. It’s hard to imagine that the garment district of New York could have meant much to the Jewish tailor from some muddy shtetl in Poland, trusting himself to his luck and his already-settled landsmen. Many of the passengers must have been carrying precious addresses whose place-names gave away the fundamental unreality of America. Could anyone really live in a town called Fertile? Eureka? Promise City? Eden? Harmony? Eldorado? Cosmos? Hopeville? Arcadia? Was Defiance, Iowa, a farming community, or was it just your friend’s idea of a rather-too-hearty joke? The map of the United States was dotted all over with fantasies and fictions. These ludic names belonged to the landscape of allegory, not real life. They inspired scepticism.
So you stood and watched the ship’s wake trailing back in the direction of your own failure, which was your only established reality, while the ship’s head was pointed at an enormous blue emptiness. Maybe you checked that doubtful address again, to give the world beyond the blue a touch of reassuring substance.
Paradise? Kansas?
Better, perhaps, to go on gazing at the wake, unspooling from the stern like the thread of gum on which the abseiling spider hangs on its pioneer descent into the unknown.
At lunch that day, both Helen and Wee Helen were white-faced and queasy. Wee Helen was staring into her plate of oxtail soup as if she’d just noticed a hatch of mosquito larvae wriggling about in it. The captain was trying to introduce a more cheerful note.
‘It looks as if we’ll have a lovely day tomorrow – there’s a nice ridge of high pressure coming up. We’ll have lost this wind by the evening, and after that we should have a flat calm for a day at least. Lots of sunshine. You’ll be able to take those folding loungers out on to the afterdeck and put in some sunbathing time …’
Water slopped in the jug. A spoon slid across the table under its own steam. Wee Helen headed for her cabin, making swimming motions as she floundered up the slope of the dining-room floor.
‘It’s not the rolling I mind,’ Helen said. ‘It’s this pitching I can’t stand. Anyway, like I always say on every voyage, this is definitely the last time.’
‘Is that a threat or a promise?’ said her husband, tucking, with unkind gusto, into his plate of bangers and mash.
‘What about the other Helen?’ I asked the captain.
‘Oh – Helene, you mean? They demoted her this morning. They’ve got her down to a tropical storm now. I don’t think she’s going to be any serious problem.’ But there was a note in his voice which suggested that he might be putting a comforting gloss on the facts for Mrs Meek’s benefit. After lunch I sneaked a look at the latest print-out from the fax machine.
TROPICAL STORM ‘HELENE’ 37.5N 47.OW EXPECTED 47.5N 37.OW BY 30/0600 GMT. THEN BECOMING EXTRA-TROPICAL BUT REMAINING A VERY INTENSE STORM, EXPECTED 58N 26W,950 BY 0100 GMT, 63N 19W UNCHANGED BY 0200 GMT, 67N 07W 960 BY 03/0000 GMT. BRACKNELL W’FAX.
At nine hundred and fifty millibars, the atmospheric pressure of Helene’s heart was very low indeed – a hungry vacuum trying to fill itself by sucking in the surrounding air and making it spin, counter-clockwise, like a plug-hole draining water from a bath. This whirling mass of unstable air, with winds of seventy-five to ninety knots at its centre, was moving northeast up the Atlantic at about twenty-five miles an hour. The Conveyor, on her Great Circle course to Nova Scotia, was heading west-by-north on what looked to me like a probable collision-course with angry Helene, whose temper, according to the forecast, was declining from hysterical to just plain furious. Before hurricanes achieved sexual equality (Helene had been preceded, a fortnight before, by Gilbert, who had wrecked a few of the West Indies and torn a broad swathe through northern Mexico), they used to be called ‘whirlygirls’. The more closely I looked at the chart, spreading the points of a pair of dividers between where we were, at 51.30N 11.07W, and where Helene was going, at 58N 26W, the more suspicious I became that we had a firm date with a whirlygirl. I also noticed that the title of the main North Atlantic chart, FROM THE AZORES TO FLEMISH CAP, had been amended, in the shaky pencil hand of some past officer-of-the-watch, to read FROM HERE TO ETERNITY.
Still, there was the captain’s ridge of high pressure to look forward to. It bulged fatly out over the Porcupine Abyssal Plain, while our rendezvous with Helene looked set to take place somewhere around the Faraday Fracture Zone. The names of these bits of ocean were so much more solid, more likely, than the names of America – and the names were reminders that the Atlantic was a place with a geography just as particular as that of a continent. The sea floor was shelving steeply away from under our keel – one thousand five hundred metres … two thousand … two thousand five hundred … three thousand … Since mid-morning, the sea’s character had altered, from being superficial to being seriously profound.
Meanwhile, the inked track of the barograph was climbing as fast as the sea floor was falling. It had risen fifteen millibars in eight hours and was passing the 1010 mark. Crossing the Atlantic from east to west, you meet far more weather than if you go from west to east. For, as the ship steams westwards, it races through the advancing weather systems with their eastward drift. Going the other way, you can, apparently, ride a single bubble of weather from New York to Europe: if you time it right and leave the American coast in the southern quadrant of a vigorous depression, you can carry the same tailwind with you for the duration of the voyage. So, on the westward passage, the barograph needle tends to sweep up and down, leaving a pattern of exaggerated loops, where on the eastward route it can remain motionless for days on end.
Out in front, the containers stretched ahead in railway-line perspective, almost to vanishing-point. The rectangles of ochre, green, rust-red, grey and blue looked like a third-rate Mondrian as they shovelled their way through the breaking swell. I needed a pair of binoculars to see what was happening to the front of the ship. I got the stubby foremast in focus and watched it twisting stiffly from side to side as the whole structure of the Conveyor groaned and flexed, trying to fit itself to the uncomfortable sea.
The wind was blowing from west-northwest at Gale Force 8 and gusting to Severe Gale 9. Vince, the officer-of-the-watch, put the swell at thirty feet, though from the bridge it looked less.
‘That’s the danger of a ship this size. Up here, you’re so far removed from the elements, you get blasé. If you were down on Three Deck now, that sea would look bloody terrifying. High as houses … and in this sort of weather you have to know exactly what you’re asking the ship to do. Otherwise you’ll overstretch her.’
I didn’t care for the sound of ‘overstretch’. Studied through binoculars, the torque looked painful. There was a distinct bow in the line of containers, while the bridge and the foremast were rolling in opposite directions.
‘That’s good. It shows she’s got some give in her.’
Down in the cabin, it was hard to concentrate on reading. Dickens was drowned out by the drumroll noise of the swells as they came jolting through the hull. Rivets, I thought, and instantly heard them popping like buttons all over the ship. Metal fatigue, I thought, and lost myself in a maze of empty-headed speculations about molecules growing fatally sleepy under stress. At dinner, I felt aggrieved when someone, at last acknowledging that we were eventually going to meet up with Helene, or at least tangle with her skirts, talked of ‘this blow that’s coming up’. To live in a world where Force-8-gusting-9 didn’t even count as ‘a blow’ struck me as dangerously unnatural.
After the ritual dispensation of stickies, a group of officers sat down round the table in the bar to play Colditz, shaking dice and drawing cards to break their way out of a prison camp; as well they might, I thought. Wee Helen was sufficiently recovered to join them. I looked in two hours later and they were still at it, with Wee Helen trapped, in fiction as in fact, in the Officers’ Quarters, while Dave, the radio officer, was making a break for the Perimeter Wire, as the ship slammed and shuddered her way through the dark.
By dawn the sea was swollen and hillocky, but smooth. Slopping lazily about over the Porcupine Abyssal Plain, it looked as thick as treacle. Out on deck, the air was slack and dead. Up on the bridge, the main steering compass was showing a new course. We were now heading southwest on 210°, aimed not for Halifax but for the Bahamas.
The original plan had been to scoot north over the top of Helene and be safely west of her by the time she reached our latitude. But the latest fax print-outs showed that she’d been picking up speed overnight, and the winds at her centre had been accelerating too. So the captain was now trying to dodge her by running down her eastern flank and ducking south of her.
For the time being, though, we had the barograph needle perched high on one thousand and twenty-seven millibars, a rising sun in a cloudless sky; an ocean-cruising day in perfect keeping with our new Bahamian heading. At ten a.m., the two Helens were gently grilling on sun-loungers on the afterdeck, while the revolving spoke of light on the radar screen combed through a forty-mile radius of ocean and found not a blip or a speck to interest it.
We were shrinking. We seemed to be a lot shorter and a lot closer to the water than before. With nothing to measure itself against now except the open Atlantic, the ship, so enormous in Liverpool, so lordly in the Irish Sea, was dwindling into a dot, a cell of dry little British jokes, fine little British caste distinctions and surprisingly formal British manners. I had once spent three weeks aboard a coaster whose crew had behaved like a rollicking gang as they nipped and tucked between the ports of Cornwall, France, the Netherlands, Northumberland and Lincolnshire. On the Conveyor, things were very different, and it was as if the bigness of the sea itself had subdued us, made us more polite and respectful of the terms of the social code that goes with sailing under a Red Ensign. We talked in lowered voices. We spent hours just staring at water, watching it change colour as it bulged and contracted, bulged and contracted, or went sifting lacily past the side of the hull. We didn’t seem to be going anywhere; we were merely going, intransitively, like the movement of a clock.
‘At times like this,’ said the officer-of-the-watch, ‘the captain’s job is to be like a fire-extinguisher in a box, with a sign on the front saying “Break Glass Only In Emergency”.’
We’d reached the stage where not only was it impossible properly to imagine the land we were headed for, it was impossible properly to remember the land we’d left. There was simply too much sea around to think of anything else but sea. It sopped up every other thought in one’s head. It must have been at this stage that the emigrants began to shed their emi prefix, and turned into pure migrants, as oblivious as birds to anything except the engrossing mechanics of their passage.
‘Anything happening?’ asked Vince, relieving Donald of his watch.
‘Nothing. Nothing at all.’
‘The pressure’s starting to drop,’ Vince said; and it was – the barograph needle was sliding from one thousand and twenty-five down to one thousand and twenty-six.
‘When will we meet Helene, do you think?’
‘Not for hours yet. Not till well into tomorrow morning, and then she should be a good three hundred miles or so off.’
At lunch, both Helens had turned to a bright shrimp-pink in the sun.
‘This weather will do us very nicely, thank you, captain. You’ll be arranging for it to stay like this?’
‘I’m sorry to say that I can’t make that guarantee, Mrs Meek.
I’m afraid it’s going to be a bit … on the blowy side tomorrow.’
‘As bad as yesterday?’
‘Yes,’ said Captain Jackson. ‘Much like yesterday. Perhaps a little worse, even. But not much. No, not much.’
The barograph needle was trudging downhill and, as the pressure-gradient steepened, the wind began to blow. First it was a summery breeze out of the south, which sprinkled the water with dancing highlights and cleared the afterdeck of the lingering smell of Ambre Solaire. It took an hour or two to build into a wind with any serious weight in it; a further hour to pile the sea into lumpy, blocklike waves with collapsing crests of foam. The sky turned overcast and I sat by the window in Officer B’s cabin watching the Atlantic make its final preparations for the storm to come.
I was surprised to see so many birds so far away from land; and armed with the captain’s bird book I set to naming them. The little black-and-white ones that skated and pattered in our wake were storm petrels; the bulky brown high-fliers were skuas; the gull-like birds, riding the wind at cabin level and matching themselves, canvas by canvas, against the speed of the ship, were fulmars. But the really fanciable birds, the aeronautical aces, were the Manx shearwaters. They hugged the waves on wings as stiff as those of model aeroplanes, gliding, banking, swivelling, diving, as they followed the continuously changing contour of the water at a distance so close that you couldn’t tell where the face of the wave ended and the wingtip of the bird began. They seemed to be courting death by drowning, and as the waves grew steeper and whiter, the exploits of the shearwaters grew more audaciously cavalier. Tilted in perfect parallel with the toppling front of a breaker, the shearwater was wedded in a daredevil union to the ocean. I was thrilled by these birds, with their air of having been constructed out of balsa wood, tissue paper and dope: they made the sullen North Atlantic look fun.
Late in the afternoon we ‘spoke’ two ships. The first was a Russian weather-surveillance vessel, usually on permanent station in mid-ocean. It was running to Greenland for shelter. The second was a Greek freighter, only a little smaller than the Conveyor. Her captain wanted to know if we had a Weatherfax machine on board. The latest silver map, a worms’ nest of isobars, was described to him in flat, matter-of-fact terms. For ten minutes, the Greek ship kept on its westerly course, then made a wide U-turn and steamed back in the general direction of Europe.
There was now a bilious tinge to the rim of sky ahead of us; a streaky, greenery-yallery look, as if Helene had been lightly currying it in turmeric, saffron and coriander.
‘That’s a classic storm sunset,’ Donald said, as if it was exactly what he’d been hoping for. The Conveyor stood on course. She was just beginning to shunt again. I felt a pang of envy for the retreating Russians and the lily-livered Greeks, and wondered whether we weren’t all being a shade too British about Helene.
At midnight, the barograph was drawing a fair outline of a tufty precipice. It had fallen nearly three millibars in the last hour, and was skidding down towards the 990s. The wind yodelled round the bridge. I tried putting my shoulder to the door on the lee-side which gave access to the bridge deck, but it felt as if a burly club bouncer was leaning hard on the far side. From the inch or two of space that I managed to gain against the bouncer, there came a blast of unseasonably hot air – vagrant African air that had travelled a long way from home.
Hurricanes, or tropical cyclones, are hatched in the Cape Verde Basin, ten degrees or more north of the Equator, off the coasts of Senegal, Guinea, Sierra Leone. They feed on moisture from the sea, charging themselves with water that has been warmed over the tropical summer. As this water vapour condenses in the air it releases energy in the form of heat, and the infant hurricane begins to spin. Moving like a top across the surface of the Atlantic, it crosses the Fifteen Twenty Fracture Zone and the Barracuda Ridge, gaining speed and confidence as it goes. By the time it hits the Puerto Rican Trench, it is a mature storm with a name of its own (given to it by NOAA, the happy acronym of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration of the United States). Here, it either keeps on going west into the Caribbean or, like Helene, swerves north and east up the middle of the ocean, where the coldness of the sea usually reduces it to a tame Atlantic Depression.
Helene had more stamina than most of her kind. She was now past the fortieth parallel, but the Weatherfax machine was still reporting winds of seventy-five knots at her centre (a hurricane-force wind starts at sixty-four knots). We were more than three hundred miles away from her now, but inching closer, our speed reduced by half. The Conveyor’s anemometer was showing fifty to fifty-five knots of true wind, as the ship bullied her tonnage through the sea.
Trying to sleep, I was unpleasantly teased by the image of the Conveyor as a giant Italian breadstick. She was so long, so slender, so brittle – why couldn’t the waves simply snap her between their fingers? Then she turned into a shunting train. For some reason best known to himself, the driver was ramming the buffers, again and again and again. Then she became my own boat, a cork on a billow, and the slow recollection of her actual tonnage, her huge and ponderous stability at sea, worked on me like a shot of Valium. I woke only when I found myself sliding, half in, half out of the bed.
It was still dark. The ship was leaning over to starboard, pinned there by the steady brunt of the wind. A cautious uphill walk to Officer B’s picture window turned out to be an unrewarding exercise. It was impossible to see out for the gluey rime of wet salt which had accumulated on the pane overnight.
Up on the bridge, I found that someone had broken the captain out of his glass box, for he was standing by the wheel in slippers, pyjamas and dressing gown.
‘Morning.’ He treated me to a polite nod. ‘Bit of a windy morning we’ve got today.’ Slow-smiling, slow-moving, swaddled in paisley, Captain Jackson had the knack of conjuring around himself a broad ambit of suburban calm and snugness. Far from piloting his ship through the remains of a hurricane on the North Atlantic, he might have been pottering among the geraniums in his greenhouse on the morning of the local flower show.
‘Didn’t you sleep well?’
‘Fine,’ I said, doing my best to match his tone. ‘I just wanted to see what was going on up here.’
‘There’s nothing much to see. We’re down to five knots at present. The wind’s come up to about sixty. It’s looking as if we won’t make Halifax until first thing Tuesday morning now.’
I had quite forgotten about Halifax.
‘…which is rather a nuisance, I’m afraid,’ the captain said, as the Conveyor’s stern crunched on a big one, making the whole bridge-and-accommodation section of the ship boom like a struck gong.
‘… because that’s going to put us three days, possibly four, late in Baltimore. I’m afraid I’ll have to telex Liverpool –’
The howl somewhere behind and below us was the ship’s screw, taking a brief airing out of the water.
I tried to divert the captain from his preoccupation with dates and schedules and interest him in the drama of the storm. I told him of Dickens’s passage in January 1842, when the Britannia steamship had met weather so bad that Thackeray had suspected Dickens of making it up for literary effect. On his own Atlantic crossing, Thackeray had put his doubts to the captain of his ship and been told that the Britannia had indeed been lucky to have survived one of the most famously awful storms on record. I quoted Dickens’s magnificent description of being tumbled about in a small ship on a wild sea:
The water-jug is plunging and leaping like a lively dolphin; all the smaller articles are afloat, except my shoes, which are stranded on a carpet-bag, high and dry, like a couple of coal-barges. Suddenly I see them spring into the air, and behold the looking-glass, which is nailed to the wall, sticking fast upon the ceiling. At the same time the door entirely disappears, and a new one is opened in the floor. Then I begin to comprehend that the state-room is standing on its head.
Before it is possible to make any arrangements at all compatible with this novel state of things, the ship rights. Before one can say ‘Thank Heaven!’ she wrongs again …
‘Yes,’ Captain Jackson said. ‘It’s good. It’s … vivid. But when he says wrongs, that’s not a nautical term he’s using there.
