Recollections of an Unsuccessful Seaman. Dave Creamer
coming from all directions. Shells moan and whistle overhead, sending up columns of golden spray where they hit the searchlight-lit sea. It is said a German submarine is sneaking through the Straits. Gibraltar in action is a fine sight.
A 12-pounder gun is shipped and we take on two naval ratings as a gun crew. I believe we must consider ourselves fortunate, for there have been several cases of a naval gun being mounted on a merchant vessel and then the ship being sent out to sea with her mercantile marine crew having but the vaguest notion as to how to fire the gun. We are now a fighting unit and may, quite fairly, be sunk on sight by the enemy.
For some strange reason a civilian, usually the second officer, is in charge of the gun crew and directs the range of fire. Two or three of the ship’s seamen are instructed to act as ammunition passers. Should the ship be sunk, no matter how, the wages of all hands, except the naval ratings, will cease automatically as soon as the vessel goes under. In spite of these conditions, these practically-untrained merchant service crews have been involved in some very creditable scraps against enemy submarines in which the gun has played an important part.
New orders are received to proceed to Alexandria instead of the Dardanelles. There being no naval escorts and with the convoy system yet to be formed, the voyage from Gibraltar through the Mediterranean is made without showing our navigation lights and with our portholes darkened. We arrive off the low-lying coastline 16 days after sailing from Le Havre. The ship is conducted through the breakwaters and into the harbour by a pompous Egyptian pilot carrying a childish telescope and wearing yellow gloves and a red fez.
The teeming harbour is a picture of life, colour, and bustle, with launches rushing about, old sailing craft lying peacefully at anchor under the lee of the boulder breakwater, and huge troopships landing Australian soldiers. A large hospital ship, snow white except for the broad green band on her hull, glides smoothly through the harbour entrance on her way out to sea; at night she will be a blaze of green lights from stem to stern with a big red illuminated cross amidships.
The Mediterranean has never before seen such a variety of ships. There is a fleet of North Sea trawlers engaged in minesweeping; a continuous procession of giant liners, tramps, colliers and tugboats that have puffed up the Thames and the Clyde; and south coast pleasure steamers that will probably never again take sweethearts for a sixpenny trip in the moonlight to view the shipping in the Channel.
After our cargo of flour has been discharged, the ship is moved to the anchorage abreast of the famous old yacht the Sunbeami to await further orders. One of those sheik-like fellows, who ply the harbour by the score in their fast sailing craft, will put us ashore for a shilling, but the curse of Allah will be upon us should we choose to ignore his demands for more money. The customs gate at the landing pier is lined with money changers pestering for business; immediately outside in the street one is surrounded by a yelling hoard of loafers, hawkers of postcards decent and indecent, hotel runners, curio sellers, cabmen, guides, beggars, and touts for whatever takes your fancy. You must push through and walk on for they will not follow for more than a quarter of a mile, and by then their prices are coming down with every step you take.
One persistent old cabman refuses to give up:
“See Alexandria, Captain, Pompey’s Pillar,ii the Catacombs,iii Kiedive Gardens,iv very nice place, Captain.” His fare has now come down from ten shillings to three shillings each. “You no like Pompey’s Pillar, Captain? No Sir, alright Sir. Very good, Captain, I know a nice pub, Sir! Plenty girls, fine young girls, Captain, only fifteen years old, very nice, plenty dance, plenty . . . . . . that’s right gentlemen, get in Sir, Kiedive Gardens, alright Sir, I come from South Wales near London, Captain, very good family Sir.”
His persistence pays off and we take his cab.
The Arab horses are woefully treated, with impatient drivers working their whips unmercifully to make them trot or gallop faster. Often the cab is overloaded with seamen or soldiers with little or no thought ever given to the tired old horse. They keep going incessantly around the streets with little or no rest between customers.
On our trip we see the local life: country carts built from wooden frames on enormously high and wobbling wheels, little donkeys ridiculously overloaded, and herds of skinny goats apparently eating the sandy road. We pull up at a small country inn on the banks of the Nile; the sand has given us a thirst and the beer is cool. We watch the dhows drift by on the sluggish brown stream, much as they have done for 2,000 years. Our cabman says it takes five days to get from here to Cairo on the river but, like the rest of them, he probably knows nothing at all about it. Very little has changed here in the past 2,000 years except the introduction of licensing hours and the beer which, I believe, was that much better than it is today and could be drunk from proper glasses and not the bottle.
We continue with our tour, passing one of the forts built by Alexander the Great which now looks to be in need of builders. Suddenly, we are transplanted from the sandy waste of the desert to the Khedive Gardens – Kew Gardens in summertime – which are a blaze of colour and sweet with roses; here and there are miniature ponds and waterfalls, and some genuine green grass.
The catacombs smell as musty as a disused forepeak, so we drive back to the Boursev with its fine shops and crowds of Australian troops. Sitting for 20 minutes at an outside café table will give you every opportunity for inspecting the wares of as many hawkers; several of their goods are of a kind quite unobtainable in Woolworths. The hawkers are one of the main features of Alexandria; they even spread themselves out to the ships in the harbour from the moment the anchor goes down until she sails.
Jock McPherson is a full-blooded Arab who claims to have come from Greenock. He will sell you anything from a box of cigarettes, where only the top two layers can be smoked, to a bottle of whisky that proudly bears the label ‘as drunk by the Royal Family’. I have my doubts as to whether the royal family will have ever drunk methylated spirit of the poorest quality. There is nothing Jock will not do or sell if there is enough profit in it, from scaling the ship’s boilers to painting her complete hull. These people would have the skin from their mother’s corpse if it were saleable, but I should say their business methods are a little more above board than many of our London ‘financiers’ or shipowners. At least the Arab will not cheat his own employees quite so much.
We sail from Alexandria and return to Gibraltar to land the naval gun crew and the gun which, because of their scarcity, will be transferred to another eastbound ship. It is now the middle of January and we are heading west in ballast across the Atlantic, bound for the dreaded Canada once again. A winter’s passage in this class of tramp, or should I say government store ship, is never going to be pleasant.
It takes us 19 days to reach Saint John in New Brunswick. There is no heating in the cabins and our bunks lie close to the bare steel of the ship’s side. In the Bay of Fundy the actual temperature is not as low as in other parts of eastern Canada, although with it being very damp any temperature below zero feels that much colder. No one has been fitted out with any warm clothing for these Artic conditions.
The weather grows colder and colder as the vessel punches up the bay in the north-westerly gale and the blinding snowstorms. The seas are steep and high with the spray freezing instantly as it falls onto the deck and the open bridge. Life must be very hard on the timber schooners and small barques that are also beating their way up into the bay. With the temperature ten degrees below zero, the ship becomes a white mass of ice and snow. Before we can anchor, a stream of boiling water must be played onto the hawse pipe and windlass. Chunks of ice have to be broken out and passed through the manhole door of the frozen freshwater tanks in order to get some water. Just think, three weeks ago it was almost hot in the Mediterranean…
The captain faces being hauled over the coals for a ‘questionable expense’ – buying some cheap paraffin oil stoves, which smell exactly like cheap oil stoves often do. These expenses must be reduced if the shipowner is to pay his shareholders their 150% dividend, but at least we are that little bit warmer.
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