Verge Magazine
Spring 2008
“The only sea monster I’ve ever seen,” says the captain in answer to my question, “is the one I see in the mirror every morning when I brush my teeth.”
It’s a fair answer, I figure. I am on board the M.V. Flottbek, an English-registered, German-built container ship en route from Montreal to Antwerp, Belgium. Although this ship is small by global standards — in fact, it is a ‘feeder’ ship for bigger vessels — it is a monster all the same. The Flottbek (M.V. stands for Marine Vessel) was built in 2005 and can carry up to 800 truck containers, forty feet long. Our ship is 169 metres long and 14 decks high from the keel to the deck above the bridge; fully loaded the ship weighs 30,000 tonnes. By comparison the biggest creature ever to live in the sea, the Blue Whale, is rarely more than 30 metres long and 150 tonnes heavy. Today’s biggest container ships are virtual islands with five times the capacity of our vessel — so big some ports can’t accommodate them.
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The German captain Jan Block hails from a tiny North Sea island called Helgoland. His blonde pony-tail sprouts from the back of a crew-cut top and gives him a certain pirate-like look. Most of the crew is Phillipino except for a Latvian fitter and a German cadet. There are 15 ABs (able-bodied seamen) whose job it is to keep everything in order and in ship-shape. There are three passengers on this trip (with room for seven more), including one Canadian (me) and a British couple.
The ship isn’t just monstrous in size; it also has a tremendous appetite. The Flottbek gulps down two tonnes of bunker fuel every hour – over 500 tonnes of it for the twelve-day crossing (with a short stop in Liverpool, England). But if this ship has a big appetite, it isn’t a particularly discriminating one – meal time consists of the residues of the crude oil refining process which produces gasoline and diesel for smaller vehicles. The tar-like substance has to be heated before being fed down the ship’s gullet to power the huge diesel engines that turn a three-story high screw or propeller that moves us at 20 knots (40 kilometres per hour).
The passengers get to ask a lot of questions (even silly ones) of the captain, because we share a small dining room with him and the officers. Fortunately, our captain has a good sense of humour and doesn’t practice the severe sea-going hierarchy we might have anticipated; we are even allowed to visit the bridge any time. (Night-time is particularly fascinating because the bridge is kept in virtual darkness to increase visibility. The only light is from dimly-lit navigational equipment.) The captain routinely joins the crew in its recreation room for the type of entertainment they like best: karaoke singing. Not only does he join in but it’s clear that he practices, singing Bryan Adams and Louis Armstrong with flair and obvious skill.
The crew enjoys his company. They too don’t fit the stereotypes. They don’t sport tattoos and aren’t likely to get into any barroom brawls. Most of them have faces that smile easily and often, and an eagerness to engage the passengers. “The Filipinos are always laughing,” the port agent in Antwerp tells me (but, fortunately, not at my karaoke singing, which they encourage despite my voice).
If the crew is always laughing it’s not because the job is always enjoyable. Almost all of them have signed contracts with recruiting agencies that will keep them from their families for at least nine months. It’s clear that global commerce needs them; it’s not so clear that global commerce really cares about them. Already there is talk that Filipinos, although appreciated for their good work and easy manner, are being replaced by sailors from India and China willing to work for less money.
Modern container ships have made the transport of goods across the ocean more efficient and faster, but this hasn’t translated into more leisure time for the crew. In the old days loading and unloading ships was an awkward affair that could take up to two weeks. Today, with massive cranes that look like giant mechanical giraffes able to load or unload cargo quickly — about 60 seconds for a 30,000 kg. container — there often isn’t time for the crew to spend much time in port, let alone in the nearest town. Seventeen hours after the ship arrives in Antwerp it will head back for Montreal. Crew members will do the same return voyage almost a dozen times before they can fly home for a few months.
Jesus, the second engineer, is clearly one of the leaders of the crew: his wisdom is a source of solace for homesick comrades, his boisterous sense of humour brings plenty of laughs, and his excellent voice challenges the other crew members to improve their karaoke singing. (The steward Nestor, who is new to the ship, sneaks down to the recreation room during his break to practice his singing.) Jesus explains that its important to make the best of life on the ship instead of focusing on the hardships. He says the job has provided advantages to his family, including the opportunity for his siblings to get an education.
It is clear that this voyage is about the containers on the ship – and not the crew or passengers. The dedication to the cargo feels slightly odd when virtually no one has the faintest idea what is in the containers, with the exception of containers with hazardous goods, that have to be manifested, or with perishable goods, that have to be refrigerated.
Each morning the first thing I do is to look out my room’s porthole that overlooks the containers. Since I can really only see the containers and the ocean – the ship beneath is virtually invisible — it feels like it is the containers that are being herded across the vast ocean, as if we are shepherds making sure that none of our flock strays.
Every once in a while, however, a container does escape: falls overboard and sinks. This is, in fact, the fate of 25,000 such containers each year – a big number but for the fact that it is miniscule compared to the 25 million containers that travel across the planet’s oceans each year. The containers are attached to the ones below with little gadgets that slide into the corners, but not so tightly that containers can’t jump overboard during severe weather.
Two years ago the Flottbek had just climbed over a big wave and was pushing through a trough when a massive wave slammed onto the bow with such force that a steel beam on the bow is now in a permanent ‘S’ shape, a reminder perhaps that this ship may be a monster but the ocean is still its master. The massive diesel engine chugs over every wave and swell. There is a hard pounding that comes from the engine room ten decks below our cabins on the tenth floor. The noise is equally strong on the bridge which is on the 13th deck, just high enough to see over the top containers when the ship is fully loaded. The sound can best be described as driving at high speeds in the back of a pick up truck over a hard, ridged country road. A discussion of this constant banging provokes an interesting debate between the captain and one of the passengers about whether water is hard or soft. The captain insists it is hard.
Indeed, the only place on the ship to escape the constant din is at the bow of the ship, where we are allowed to wander with permission. The bow is a different world where the ship does appear to cut noiselessly and smoothly through the sea.
But whatever the ship’s priority, we passengers nonetheless feel distinctly pampered, even without the lavish buffets, chaotic casinos, and other extravagances of cruise ships. The food is more than adequate, the rooms are clean and comfortable with private baths, and while the paid personnel are keeping the ship on course, we are free to read, work on our computers, or sit on the back deck watching the big blue sea go by. Then again if our luxuries are fairly modest the price itself is not. I pay about $1600 CDN for a one-way voyage, plus $300 for insurance in case a serious illness requires the ship to deviate to the nearest port. The price is loosely based on a daily room and board rate in the range of $130. The ticket even specifies that if the voyage takes three days more than anticipated … the passenger must pay a supplement.
Some of the benefits of freighter travel actually cost nothing to provide. A freight ship is one of the few remaining refuges on earth from cell phones, BlackBerries, and the internet, although the officers do have access through the company. Indeed, the captain is nostalgic for the good old days when being at sea meant virtual freedom from people on shore; now he must spend a fair bit of time talking to distant bosses and owners or their agents.
The captain tells me that navigating a freight ship is much easier than sailing a boat, which another of his past-times. I am only convinced he may be serious when, with the help of a local ship’s pilot who has come aboard as we approach Antwerp, we speed through the darkness above the mirror-smooth but winding Schelbe River with such grace and ease (we even pass a few smaller ships!) that I can’t help but feel, as I watch from the bridge, that I am in a rather large canoe. And when we arrive in the port, the captain turns this monster completely around and parks in an available berth with such calmness that he could be parallel-parking a car.
Perhaps it is the captain’s name that motivates me to buy him a copy of Canadian author Yann Martel’s book, the Life of Pi, about a boy who spends over 200 days with a Bengali tiger in a lifeboat on the Pacific. Whatever may have been the challenges faced by Pi, the crew all agree that the North Atlantic is the world’s angriest body of water. This part of the ocean is so unpleasant in the winter that the company does not take on passengers after October. (A few years ago one passenger suffered a nasty fall — “an excellent take-off, but a poor landing,” as one crew member put it.)
Several weeks after leaving the Flottbek, I cross the English Channel on a passenger ferry. Even though the voyage is a mere one and a half hours long, the ship is equipped with myriad distractions for the passengers: restaurants, duty free shops, book stores, game rooms… I am not so easily bored and watch with some melancholy freight ships in the distance moving towards their far-off destinations. We may not think of the men and women who toil on these monsters when we buy goods from far-off lands, but that does not make them any less real.
