The Colombo Bay

Richard Pollak

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781439141793
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Marine Transportation
• Index: Technology & Engineering

In the face of killer storms, fires, piracy, and terrorism, container ships the length of city blocks and more than a dozen stories high carry 90 percent of the worlds trade. This is an account of one ship's voyage and of the sailors who daily risk their lives to deliver six million containers a year to United States ports alone. Inside these twenty-foot and forty-foot steel boxes are the thousands of imports -- from chinos and Game Boys to garlic and frozen shrimp -- without which North America's consumer society would collapse.To explore this little-known and dangerous universe of modern seafaring, Richard Pollak joined the Colombo Bay in Hong Kong and over the next five weeks sailed with her and her 3, 500 containers across the South China Sea, the Indian Ocean, the Mediterranean, and the Atlantic. En route, this mammoth vessel called at Singapore and Colombo, passed through the Suez Canal (toll: $250, 000), then put in at Malta and Halifax before tangling with Hurricane Karen on the two-day run to New York. Here is the story of the ship's unheralded twenty-four-man company; of the unflappable British captain, Peter Davies, a veteran of four decades at sea; of Federico Castrojas, who like the rest of the hard-working Filipino crew must daily confront the loneliness of being away from his family for nine months at a stretch; of Simon Westall, the twenty-one-year-old third mate, who reveals what it is like to be gay in the broad-shouldered world of the merchant service.It is a world where pirates in the Malacca Strait sneak up behind ships at night in fast power boats, then clamber aboard and either rob the unarmed sailors at gunpoint and escape into the dark or throw the crew into the sea and hijack the ship, plundering her cargo and sometimes repainting her and setting out to do business under another name and flag. It is a world where families desperate to get to the United States or Europe pay thousands of dollars to the Chinese Snakeheads and other criminal gangs, who secrete these wretched migrants in stifling containers; after a week or more at sea these stowaways arrive in the Promised Land either starving or dead.Pollak sailed on September 13, 2001, into a changed world, on one of 7, 000 container ships whose millions of uninspected boxes suddenly had become potential Trojan horses in which terrorists could transport weapons of mass destruction into the heart of the United States.Throughout his riveting narrative, Pollak interweaves the insights of Herman Melville and Joseph Conrad, whose masterful portrayals of seafaring make the voyage of the Colombo Bay a dramatic reminder of what a hard and rarely reported life merchant seamen have always led out on the "unhooped oceans of this planet."

CHAPTER ONE

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A labyrinth of roads and roundabouts leads to Hong Kong’s Stonecutters terminal, where thousands of containers rise up to seven high in a vast canyon land of international commerce. The Colombo Bay has just arrived at this sprawling port from Kao-hsiung, Taiwan, after a twelve-day crossing of the Pacific from Seattle. Three giant gantry cranes loom above, yanking boxes from the ship with noisy clanks, pulling them up and across her deck, and dropping them with an echoing clatter onto idling trucks queued up on the quay. From the waterline, the jet-black hull and gleaming white accommodation superstructure near the stern rise fifteen stories to the bridge and monkey island above. She is some 105 feet wide and more than 900 feet long. Writers forever measure such lengths by noting that three football fields could be laid out on the deck. I prefer the less brutal pastime, so imagine Barry Bonds nailing one of Roger Clemens’s heaters in Yankee Stadium; the baseball would have to travel over the centerfield scoreboard and well into the Bronx to match the Colombo Bay’s length. She weighs 60,000 deadweight tons and can carry a maximum of 4,200 TEUs stacked below and above deck, the boxes on top turning her into an elongated Rubik’s Cube. There are larger container ships, and much bigger supertankers; still, moving up the wobbly gangway, I feel like a Lilliputian clambering onto Gulliver.

Matt Mullins, the first officer, greets me at the top, reports that the captain is ashore, and takes me up in the elevator to my quarters on C deck. Speculation about conditions onboard had proved irresistible for several fellow terrestrials, who cheerfully predicted seasickness, rations of hardtack, bouts of scurvy, and that I would be sharing a shoe box with half a dozen snoring seamen, all of us tossing in spine-bending double-decker bunks, if not hammocks. A French friend wondered with some alarme if there would be flush toilets. I was not sure what to expect but assumed that the Colombo Bay was not the Love Boat and was prepared to share quarters and make do with a concavity of springs. What I found was a firm double bed neatly made up with a sheet and pillowcases of pale yellow and a matching duvet. The cabin is mine alone, about sixteen by eighteen feet, with cream-colored walls and beige carpeting. Across from the bed is a desk on which rests an intraship telephone and, to my surprise, a small television set. The desk is of wood covered with a Swedish modern grainy laminate, as is the cabinet above it, a closet to its left, the couch and table to its right, and the night tables flanking the bed, on one of which rest two fresh towels and two bars of Lux soap. A desk chair and an armchair with Stickley pretensions complete the furnishings. Four double-bulb fluorescent ceiling lights and a single fluorescent bulb over the bed promise ample illumination.

All is shipshape clean, including the bathroom, which comes complete with a flowered shower curtain. I might be in a commodious, utilitarian motel room were it not for the seat that hinges down in the shower and the chains hanging beneath the table and chairs ready to be hooked to latches in the floor, hedges against stormy weather. Two large, rectangular portholes look forward, the view blocked by the containers stacked only a few feet away. As consolation, the wall by the bed offers Veduta del Pantheon di Agrippa oggi Chiesa di S. Maria dei Martiri, a somber engraving by one Luigi Rossini.

On the desk are three pages about the Colombo Bay, one of them listing the names and ranks of the ship’s company of eight officers and thirteen crew, which seems a remarkably small number for such a large vessel. I am surprised, too, to see my name at the bottom of the column, along with that of a Mrs. E. Davies, both of us identified as supernumeraries, a term I associate with opera walk-ons; in my case at least, it may mean, as the dictionary puts it, “someone exceeding what is necessary, required or desired.” The other sheets advise that the Colombo Bay is seven years old, is registered in London, and was built by Ishikawajima-Harima Heavy Industries Co., Ltd., in Aichi, Japan; that the ship’s diesel fuel weighs almost 6,000 tons when all bunkers are full; that breakfast is from 0730 to 0755 and from 0830 to 0855, lunch from 1200 to 1230, dinner from 1800 to 1830, and tea and snacks are available in the officers’ pantry, presumably at any hour; that the officers’ laundry is just down the corridor from my cabin. The emergency signal is at least seven short ring-blasts followed by one prolonged ring-blast. At sea my emergency station is on the lee-side bridge wing, and my lifeboat station is Number 1. “We hope you have an enjoyable voyage,” one page concludes. “If you require anything—please ask!” I make a note to ask about the location of lifeboat station Number 1.

If I needed any evidence that containers play a central role in my own life, it now spills into the cabin. One blue Brooks Brothers button-down shirt, made in Thailand; gray dress slacks, from India; blue Helly Hansen rain slicker, Sri Lanka; blue rubber rain pants, Taiwan; red baseball cap, China; Panasonic CD player, Japan; CD pouch, China, Korea, Philippines, or Indonesia, take your choice; Bell and Sony tape recorders, China; Panasonic tapes, Japan; Olympus Infinity 5 camera, assembled in Hong Kong from parts made in Japan; Casio quartz travel clock, assembled in Thailand; Sanford Uni-Ball Onyx micro pens, Japan; IBM ThinkPad AC adapter, China; laptop carrying case, Indonesia; shoulder bag, Korea; garment bag, Taiwan. The red bathing suit, knit gloves, watch cap, Samsonite toilet kit, socks, yellow highlighter pens, and swimming goggles bear no indication of their provenance, but odds are that at least half these items were made in Asia, too. “What most North Americans don’t understand,” Jeremy had said in one of our first talks about this voyage, “is how reliant they have become on Asian products.” And on imports from elsewhere: ThinkPad and its power cord and mouse, and Gillette razors, Mexico; khaki shorts, El Salvador; gray shorts, Guatemala; Van Heusen button-down shirt and Jockey shorts, Costa Rica; blue dress jacket and blue denim shirt, Canada; Sanita clogs, Denmark; blue woolen Lands’ End sweater, Scotland. I made no effort to categorize items I didn’t bring with me, but for the record the aforementioned Lux soap was made in Indonesia and the Colombo Bay herself, as noted, was made in Japan. Full disclosure: my Kodak film, Duracell batteries, Lands’ End warm-up jacket, New Balance running shoes, black sweatpants, two belts, large brown suitcase, and Penguin paperback of Moby-Dick were Made in the USA.

I have brought along the book in part as penance. When Miss Drell assigned it at Hyde Park High School in 1951, its bulk seemed bigger and meaning more elusive than Ahab’s quarry itself, leading me to harpoon the Classics Illustrated version to haul in the gist. I managed to get through college without taking another crack at the novel, though the 1956 film version gave a boost to my fledgling journalistic career. I was tapped to be the movie reviewer of the Amherst Student when my predecessor lost the post after praising Gregory Peck’s performance in the title role. Now I am discovering this literary marvel for the first time, mesmerized by the yarn, yes, but more by Melville’s astonishing ambition, his depth of insight, and his muscular prose, which famously reaches biblical and Shakespearean heights. “Merchant ships are but extension bridges,” he writes, amplifying this scorn when Ishmael tries to impress one of the two principal owners of the Pequod, the good Quaker Captain Peleg.

Dost know nothing at all about whaling, I dare say—eh?

Nothing, Sir; but I have no doubt I shall soon learn. I’ve been several voyages in the merchant service, and I think that—

Marchant service be damned. Talk not that lingo to me. Dost see that leg?—I’ll take that leg away from thy stern, if ever thou talkest of the marchant service to me again. Marchant service indeed!

The other vade mecum I have unpacked is an edition of A Personal Record and The Mirror of the Sea, which brim with the clear-eyed affection for the merchant service of Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, who ran away from the Polish Ukraine at seventeen and served on merchant ships for two decades before settling in London to become Joseph Conrad. Unlike Heart of Darkness and his other fiction, which dwell on man in extreme situations struggling between good and evil, these memoirs are full of wry charm and a contagious enthusiasm for the seafarer’s life. He writes of “the magic ring of the horizon,” the “white fillet of tumbling foam under the bow,” the tall masts that support the balanced planes that, “motionless and silent, catch from the air the ship’s motive power, as if it were a gift from Heaven vouchsafed to the audacity of man.” Sailing is an art, ships courageous before the wind gods that would do them in. Not so the infernal steamship, which he views with disdain. “The machinery, the steel, the fire, the steam have stepped in between the man and the sea. A modern fleet of ships does not so much make use of the sea as exploit a highway.” So, Melville dismisses the Colombo Bay’s merchant calling, Conrad the vessel herself; still, I welcome these crusty cabinmates.

I have just placed the two books on the night table when Shakeel Azim knocks on the door and offers a quick tour. He is the second officer, boyish looking despite his forty-eight years and thick, black mustache, and smart in his summer uniform of black trousers and short-sleeved, open-necked white shirt with the two gold bars of his rank on the epaulets. He asks where I am from, and when I say New York he shakes his head and asks if my family is all right. “Terrible, terrible, these people are madmen.” His dismay seems genuine, but with some embarrassment I find myself wondering just where he is from, whether he is a Muslim, and what his sympathies really are. He explains that the decks descend from the bridge in alphabetical order, that the British officers and Filipino crew all have their own quarters, and that he and four other junior officers are my neighbors on C deck. Most of the crew bunks on D; the ship’s laundry, hospital, and book and video library are on E; a spacious galley is on F, flanked by almost identical dining rooms, each with the same imposing, official color photograph of Queen Elizabeth looking properly solemn and regal in a floor-length white satin dress, blue sash, and bejeweled necklace and crown. “We call F the food deck and E the entertainment deck,” Shakeel says, adding with a shy smile that while I am onboard C will stand for club class.

Down one more flight is the upper deck, the ship’s first continuous watertight deck; it houses the engine control room, the ship’s office, and the refrigeration lockers for stores. Shakeel decides that the machinery spaces below can wait, and we ascend in the elevator to A deck, where we run into the captain, Peter Davies, just returned from shore with my fellow supernumerary, his wife, Elizabeth, who has flown to Hong Kong from their home near Newcastle to join the ship. After cordial introductions (he pronounces his name “Davis”), he asks for my passport; I hand it over wondering when I will see it again and realize that for the first time since my army days in the late fifties I am under someone’s command.

We sail just before 1900 hours, on September 13, gently pulled away from the berth by a tug that nudges us into the harbor, her laboring engine churning up a ferocious foam until, after about fifteen minutes, she slips away and leaves us to our own power. The evening is hot and sticky, the air thick with pollution; “fragrant harbor,” the Cantonese meaning of Hong Kong, has not applied for some years now. We are under the temporary guidance of a harbor pilot, whose forerunners have been navigating the channels, shoals, tides, and currents in and near ports since at least 500 BC, when The Periplous of Scylax of Caryanda, a comprehensive pilot guide for the Mediterranean starting at the mouth of the Nile, was written. Unlike Captain Davies, formal in his summer whites, the young Chinese pilot looks, in his sandals, wrinkled shorts, and soiled shirt, as if he had just rushed to work after an afternoon of gardening. His competence is plain, though, as he surveys our path and gives periodic orders to the Filipino able seaman at the helm, which at about a foot in diameter looks like the steering wheels at game arcades rather than a mechanism for prompting the Colombo Bay’s rudder, a thirty-foot-high steel fin that weighs seventy tons. Captain Davies, also known as master, remains in the background while the pilot makes marginal course and speed adjustments as we inch through the harbor, threading among other container ships and tankers, ferries and barges, as smaller craft scoot around us like models on the Central Park boat pond operated by remote control from the shore.

The pilot departs after about an hour, riding down in the elevator to the upper deck and descending the sloping gangway, now suspended many feet above the water like an unfinished stairway. At the bottom he swings onto a rope ladder and lowers himself onto the deck of the pilot boat keeping pace beside us. Pilots leave and board ships this way thousands of times each day and night in ports throughout the world, moving up and down the swaying rungs like circus aerialists, the foul and treacherous waters their only net.

We are pushing out of the Pearl River Delta, the main sluice for China’s flood of exports, a region roughly the size of Connecticut that stretches east to west across the estuary from Macau to Hong Kong and some eighty miles upriver into Guangdong Province. It was here in what is now Dongguan city that the imperial commissioner Lin Zexu ordered the destruction of more than 2 million pounds of opium in 1839, initiating the opium wars that forced China to open its doors to foreign trade and investment. Now Dongguan is just one of the many manufacturing hives that dot the province, where scores of factories daily ship hundreds of containers by truck and barge to Stonecutters’ and half a dozen other terminals only a few hours away.

In 2001 these docks handled some 25 million TEUs, about the same number processed by all U.S. ports combined. The Pearl River quays account for some 40 percent of China’s exports, and more than a third of the goods flowing out of the delta—6,000 containers a day—are bound, like those on the Colombo Bay, for the U.S. market, contributing to a persistent trade deficit with China that in 2002 totaled more than $100 billion. China’s exports to the United States grew by 20 percent during the year, and the country is soon expected to surpass Mexico for the number-two export spot, behind only Canada, as the roar of the sluice increases with each passing month. There is talk of constructing a fifteen-mile bridge-tunnel between Macau and Hong Kong’s Lantau Island, with a new deepwater terminal near the Macau end to accommodate manufacturers on the southwest side of the delta, which over the years has lagged well behind the northeast bank in output. The delta’s commercial engine is evident in the water traffic all around us, but as night falls the running lights of these vessels string the outer harbor with a glimmering serenity.

A crewman pulls a floor-to-ceiling curtain across the width of the bridge, blotting out the illumination around the communications area, weather chart table, and small galley at the rear, and creating a darkened stage on which Captain Davies now stars, delivering his lines in polite, uninflected tones.

“One-hundred and forty-nine degrees, Helmsman.”

“One-hundred and forty-nine degrees, Captain.”

“Thank you.”

Insistent radio voices impinge on this colloquy, a vexed Greek chorus whose message sounds urgent but is made unintelligible (to me at least) by the crackle of static. With its two radar screens and other glowing panels, the bridge is the center of a galaxy that extends out to the lights of passing ships, the glitter of Hong Kong, and the canopy of moon and stars. For a better look, I go onto the starboard wing, one of the two outdoor porches that flank the wheelhouse, and am mugged by the clammy night, smacked with the realization that the land is falling away, that I am heading into the South China Sea at this awful moment in my city halfway around the world. I lean on the rail and try to take comfort in the surrounding shimmer, but the television pictures keep intruding, along with a certainty that the terrorists will strike New York again at any moment.

This is crazy. I never should have sailed. I belong with Diane and Amanda. We’ll be in Singapore in less then a week. I’ll fly home from there.

Get a grip, Pollak. This trip was your idea. See it through like a big boy. Diane and Amanda are strong; they’ll be fine.

But . . .

No buts, just do it!

I whisper this exchange into the wind, like an actor rehearsing dialogue sotto voce on the Broadway bus, then look around, relieved to see that everyone is inside the bridge’s air-conditioned cocoon. It is almost 2300, and I’m exhausted. I step back into the chill, say good night to Captain Davies, and en route to the stairs check out the closet-size galley behind the curtain. On the counter is a bubbling electric kettle and a selection of Yellow Label Lipton Tea, Nescafé, Cadbury’s cocoa, Taster’s Choice instant decaf, and a round tin, above which a sign reads: “Please Reseal the Cookies After You Open As They Go Soft. Ta, The Cookie Monster.” I take a cookie, close the tin, and slip down to C deck like a guilty six-year-old.

After breakfast the next morning, the crew gathers in the lounge across from their dining room so Captain Davies can introduce me. I tell them I am writing a book about this voyage because I think the work they do is important and too little known. They nod and smile. Any questions? They shake their heads and smile, looking eager to get on with their duties. “Call me Dick,” I urge, clumsily. As they file out, two or three say, “Welcome aboard, Dick,” stressing the name as if it were my rank. At 1730 the captain and other officers gather in their lounge with Elizabeth for predinner drinks. They seem a little more curious about my mission than the crew, but not much, perhaps distracted by P&O Nedlloyd’s request that its ships join the rest of the world this day in mourning the terrorists’ victims. At 1800 Captain Davies asks for three minutes of silence. Shakeel and two or three other officers seem to be praying, and their subsequent commiseration leaves me fighting back tears, not the persona I had hoped to present at my first meal among these seamen. I make a minimum of small talk, quick work of the roast beef, skip the “sweet,” and am in bed shortly after 1900.

I awake to a travel alarm clock that reads 0220 and a wall clock frozen at 0200. I get up and climb the stairs to the bridge, where Shakeel is standing the midnight to 0400 watch. He makes me a cup of tea and explains that the ship’s clock is being “retarded” an hour so we’ll be in phase with the time at our next port, Laem Chabang, in Thailand. The sea is calm, as it has been since we left Hong Kong; the vibrations of the engine provide a far greater sensation than the feel of the ocean, which is virtually nil as the Colombo Bay cuts through the South China Sea at twenty-three knots. This is her maximum speed, and the huge ship seems to race through the dark water, though a fit cyclist could pedal at this rate of twenty-six miles per hour. Shakeel turns up the BBC World Service on the shortwave radio, the British voices reporting, with a welcome lack of histrionics, on the rising death toll in New York and Washington, and the speculation about retaliation against the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. He sees that I am worried and draws my ...