A life on the ocean wave

THE angry Atlantic swell was beating at the door of the Tagus River, Lisbon's muddy estuary, and the wind and tide were testing each other in a battleground of jumbled, breaking waves. We were approaching from the south, with the seas violent on our side, and the pilot had already flatly refused to come out to us.

The skipper was a small, bearded Norwegian and almost certainly slightly mad. He had never negotiated the entrance to Lisbon before, but he knew Vasco da Gama had left from there and he was not about to let the reluctance of a lily-livered guide hinder his passage.

He took us crashing and lurching towards the entrance buoy where, just as I waited for his command to throw the wheel to starboard, a submarine of the Portuguese Navy appeared out of the spume, cutting greyly towards us.

``Clark,'' he growled as he peered through the misted wheelhouse screen, ``steer as if your life depends upon it.......because it does.''

Ah, moment of joy. After many dull, responsible years, I can still taste its dangerous sweetness. This was Melville, this was Conrad, this was Forester, this was the sea.

IT WAS the hypnotic metre of that old romantic Masefield who first infected me with a curiosity about ships. It may have been the thousandth time that the teacher had sent the dirty British coaster butting through the Channel in the mad March days, but it was the first time for me and I was, immediately and irretrievably, up there with the skipper watching the weather lash the salt-caked smokestack.

I wasn't interested in the quinquereme of Nineveh from distant Ophir - a glorified rowing boat, really. I had no time for yachts, these perfumed playthings of the rich. Square-rigged sailing ships I could understand, the clever way they played the elements at their own game, but ultimately they were impotent when the weather fought dirty, or didn't blow at all.

No, the only craft for me were the big merchant ships, the powerful traders which sailed out of harbour fearlessly, jaws jutting proudly into whatever the oceans had waiting for them.

My Uncle Joe was the first real merchant seaman I can remember. He was a big, angular man, with a bony face and eyebrows like small furry animals. When he rolled into his mother's close in Helen Street, wearing the insignia of a chief engineer, he brought with him a waft of spice islands, of jungle rivers, and of frozen seas littered with ice.

He sailed on the big, three-castle ships, general traders with dark hulls and white superstructures, festooned with powerful derricks and throbbing to the tune of engines hewn out of iron and brass by Kincaid's of Greenock. They were ships born on the Clyde and they tramped the wildest seas as if they were cruising off the Cloch.

His brother Hugh sailed as a Marconi radio operator on year-long voyages round the rim of the Pacific. He too brought home tales of China. My father-in-law to be was a chief on British Tankers and lived in some style in a suite of rooms serving a phalanx of stewards. The Gulf and the Red Sea were his stamping grounds.

So, when I went to sea, I knew what I wanted. Brass. Polished teak. Scrubbed white decking. Skill and confidence. A share in that feeling of dominion over the most savage element. In the event, I wasn't even close.......

I FIRST saw the Ramaida in the commercial harbour at Gibraltar. Her mooring ropes were too tightly secured and she gave the impression of an old lady lying tiredly against the quay wall. She had been cleanly painted once, a long time ago. Now the ratty brown of caked rust pockmarked her hull.

I was offering my services as a deckhand in this dowdy corner of empire because, for a number of unlikely reasons, I was stranded without the means to return to the UK. I had originally planned to work a passage across the Atlantic on one of the harbour's many ocean-going motor yachts but, after being chased off more than once at gunpoint, I made for the merchant ships moored further down towards the Gulf of Algeciras.

My companion argued that we needed some small inkling of what we were about before we went to deep sea, but I though not. After all, I had listened to my uncles and I had read the books. Enthusiasm, I insisted, is such a fine substitute for knowledge.

The Ramaida was registered in Panama and was a fair representative of that country's armada of hulks. She had been pensioned off by British owners after - as I discovered many years later - carrying radioactive waste from Italy to Canada, and had been snatched from the breaker's yard to become the only vessel of The Ramajan Shipping Company. The agent signed us with alacrity and said we sailed the next day, as soon as the skipper arrived. Meantime, the crew consisted of a giant of a Yorkshire engineer who never emerged from below, a seriously disturbed Moroccan who lurked round corners and avoided all contact, and an East German first mate who looked like Jon Voight and dressed like Marlon Brando in The Wild One.

Nothing worked on this ship. The main derrick lay dismantled in the companionway. The lifeboat davits were seized by rust. Hatch covers were tied with wire, winches refused to turn and my cabin was built round a huge steel stanchion which had supported a Bofors gun during the ship's wartime service.

The skipper rolled in from Norway the following morning and signed on the rest of the crew. This done, he retired to his cabin with a bottle of whisky - ``a precaution against recurrent malaria'' - and left preparation for sea to the mate. He reappeared as darkness fell, unsteady but determined, and ordered us to cast off into a growling Force Eight which was corrugating the Straits outside and bewigging the Rock with grey swirls of cloud.

NOTHING could have prepared me for that first night. The narrow door to the Mediterranean, between the Pillars of Hercules, is one of the world's busiest stretches of water. We sailed into the maritime equivalent of Argyle Street in the rush hour with tankers, coasters, warships, barges, and fishing boats jostling for precedence in the confines of the sea lanes.

The blackness of the night made the Earl of Hell's waistcoat seem gaudy and the huge combers loomed out of the Atlantic like a marching army. I hadn't a clue what was going on as spray crashed against the wheelhouse and the red and green navigation lights of other ships appeared out of nowhere and disappeared again with the next wave.

After several hours of juddering confusion, it became clear that we were making no headway. The Ramaida's engines did not have enough power to batter through the increasing westerly and the skipper took the decision to turn and run for the lee of Ceuta. We were travelling in ballast, so the holds were empty and the ship was light. When, after watching the seas for what seemed an eternity, the skipper gave the order to throw the wheel hard to port, she was laid over so far by the swell that her lee rails were kissing the water and everything which was not lashed down clattered to the deck.

I have never known fear like that moment. But, as she straightened, shook herself and settled down into the following sea, I glanced at my captain. Nonchalance is the wrong word, as it suggests an element of cockiness. Rather his attitude, in the face of what I considered to be mortal danger, was one of complete unconcern. He had stared down death before and he knew that he certainly would again.

In the months that followed, I learned that he had been born into a family steeped in Norwegian naval tradition and had become a bosun at 17 and a skipper of a fast torpedo boat at 21. He had an instinct for daring and adventure, which was always going to spell trouble in such a strict service. In the event, he was asked to resign his commission after an incident on Nato exercises when he was handed suicidal orders, disobeyed them comprehensively and proceeded to ``sink'' several American warships.

He left his home in Bergen in disgrace and was never to return. Instead he made his life in the ports of the world, picking up rustbuckets like the Ramaida and nursing them into shipshape and profitable enterprises.

This wiry, bright-eyed, bearded man had no reason to treat me differently from any of his countless crews but perhaps he sensed an interest and, over the course of long tramps across the Med and up and down the Atlantic seaboard, he taught me how to throw a heaving line, how to make sense of the green clutter on the radar, how to plot a course through wind and tide, and how to cut loose a deck cargo in a gale without following it over the side.

I sailed with him under the glow of Mount Etna, past Scylla and Charybdis in the Straits of Messina, into the honey-coloured haven of Valetta and the clamour of Casablanca. He taught me how to face down Levantine traders who argued over the cargo, how to drink in the dockside bars, how to stay out of a fight unless I had to and, most importantly, how to remain calm as the ship buried her head again and again in the unforgiving waves.

``When blue water turns to green'' is the metaphor for homecoming in Maddy Prior's song The Grey Funnel Line. I had to make my way back eventually and I returned for a while to my land-based trade. Subsequently, I signed up with coastal ships and made a living for a few years working out of the Clyde and around the west coast of Scotland before stepping ashore for good. I never went back to deep- sea ships.

I saw the visits of the big ships become ever more infrequent and I saw the shape of craft change too, with the Clyde yards putting out tankers so big they had to be launched in two halves and welded together later - and still they were dwarfed by the enterprise of Korea and Japan.

But the huge new bulk carriers, with their computerised systems and electronics officers and their scrubbed, overalled crews had none of the hard-edged romance of the general traders, which had sailed up the river and kept docks like Glasgow's bustling with activity.

In later years, I talked to my sons about ships I had seen and men I had sailed with but they still wonder, when we go on a family cruise to Arran, or on a ferry over to Ireland, why I gravitate to the forward windows to see the mooring lines snake ashore, or watch the seamen coil four-inch hawsers effortlessly round the running winches.

I tried to explain this to them when they were young, when I took them on trips to the marine section of Glasgow's Transport Museum and stood them in front of those wonderful scaled-down versions of the Empress liners, the Clan Line ships and Hungry Hogarth's Baron Line.

After a while, I would feel their tug on my sleeve and realise that I had been standing there staring at the models for far too long.