"Ninety Percent of Everything"

[fiefoe]

Rose George's stay on a container ship was uneventful in itself, which is a good thing.

• * Definitely the fruit, so frequently shipped in refrigerated containers that it has been given its own temperature. Two degrees Celsius is “chill” but 13 degrees is “banana.”
• Trade carried by sea has grown fourfold since 1970 and is still growing... Only six thousand are container vessels like Kendal, but they make up for this small proportion by their dizzying capacity. The biggest container ship can carry fifteen thousand boxes. It can hold 746 million bananas, one for every European on one ship. If the containers of Maersk alone were lined up, they would stretch eleven thousand miles or nearly halfway around the planet.
• Ships are bigger now and need deeper harbors, so they call at Newark or Tilbury or Felixstowe, not Liverpool or South Street. Security concerns have hidden ports further, behind barbed wire and badge wearing and KEEP OUT signs... radiation-detecting gates often triggered by naturally radioactive cargo such as cat litter and broccoli.
• In 1965, shipping was so central to daily life in London that when Winston Churchill’s funeral barge left Tower Pier to travel up the Thames, it embarked in front of dock cranes that dipped their jibs, movingly, with respect.
• I find Maersk fascinating. It is the Coca-Cola of freight with none of the fame. Its parent company A. P. Møller–Maersk is Denmark’s largest company; its sales equal to 20 percent of Denmark’s GDP; ... Its revenues in 2011 were $60.2 billion, only slightly less than Microsoft’s.
• For much of recent history the company was run by Arnold Maersk Mc-Kinney Møller, son of the founder.. for being one of only three commoners to receive Denmark’s Order of the Elephant;
• There are few industries as defiantly opaque as shipping. Even offshore bankers have not developed a system as intricately elusive as the flag of convenience, under which ships can fly the flag of a state that has nothing to do with its owner, cargo, crew, or route... the sanitized “open registries”
• When the academic Erol Kahveci surveyed British prison literature while researching conditions at sea, he found that “the provision of leisure, recreation, religious service and communication facilities are better in U.K. prisons than … on many ships our respondents worked aboard.”
• * Shipping is so cheap that it makes more financial sense for Scottish cod to be sent ten thousand miles to China to be filleted, then sent back to Scottish shops and restaurants, than to pay Scottish filleters.
• the BBC’s Shipping Forecast, a nightly broadcast of weather and worse in South Utsire, Dogger, Rockall, Hebrides, of storms rising and boats falling, dispensed in tones so soothing you feel lulled by other people’s danger and a sharp, guilty delight at being safe abed.
• The rush to seafaring began in the Philippines in 1974, with encouragement from President Ferdinand Marcos. By now, there are ninety maritime academies pushing out forty thousand seafarers a year... All the crew are here for the money. They say this with no embarrassment or preamble. They call their job “dollar for homesick.”
• * time moves differently here. We set our own, for a start. ... The alerts are required because sometimes the shift in time is commanded by the captain, not Greenwich. It confuses humans and computer clocks but it is done out of kindness. Executed properly, this time manipulation avoids the worst of jet lag, no brutal loss or gain of hours by a bewildered body, just a gentle push from a voice on the tannoy.
• There seems nothing poetic about Rotterdam, but someone has tried to leaven the ferocious necessity of its industry by naming its quays after great rivers.
• * Shipping can be poetic despite itself. There is the singing of its winds, for one: the katabatics that roll down off Scottish glens to knock over unsuspecting boats in the lochs, or the chocolate gale, a northwest wind of the West Indies and Spanish Main. On mechanized, inhuman docks, people in hard hats look at a ship, estimate how many boxes are going on it, and say, “a thousand moves.” They talk of containers left in yards building up “dwell time” (and charge for it). In maritime offices in London, Hong Kong, and New York, they talk of “wet law,” applying to grounding and casualties and such, and its “dry tail,” the follow-up negotiations with charterers and insurers.
• in his four decades, life at sea has changed dramatically. His first ship was a tramp steamer, a freelance vessel that picks up trade where it can, not a liner with a scheduled route like Kendal. A taxi, not a bus. It was iron, had derrick cranes on deck to heft cargo about, and was held together by rivets.
• He thinks they have destroyed the soul of a ship and of shipping. This is an old lament, too. In the middle of the shift from sail to steam, Joseph Conrad complained that “the loading of ships was once a matter or skill, judgment, and knowledge.” With the modern steamship, cargo was “dumped into her through six hatchways,
• Darkness vision is also important: this is why F deck, where the captain and the chief engineer live and work, is lit at night with red lights only, in the way of a submarine, so that the eyes of senior officers can adjust to the darkness of the bridge more quickly in an emergency.
• But the rewards of containerization were too great for the dockers to defeat change. Before containers, transport costs ate up to 25 percent of the value of whatever was being shipped. With the extreme efficiencies that intermodality brought, costs were reduced to a pittance. A sweater can now travel three thousand miles for 2.5 cents;
• It was also a rare opportunity to compare what was declared on container manifests with actual contents. In 20 percent of the containers, the contents and weights were wrong.
• Perhaps this pilot-officer rivalry is required, just as ship life needs tribes or hierarchies to provide boundaries in limited space and endless time. So there is oil and water here, too, though the rivalry is not vicious as it was in the days of black gangs, when the coal stokers called sailors kulaks or drones and the sailors called them moles or bats.
• Seafarer fatalities are still ten times those of land-based occupations.
• * London dockers demanded an “embarrassment tax” for having to unload toilet pans. It was a penny a pan. They got it.
• Telling sea stories is known as swinging the lantern, and the captain’s memories of trips ashore swing a wide arc. He supplies every story I expect and hope for: being arrested and shot at in West Africa; throwing soap bars at maidens in the northern Philippines so they would dive down to fetch them under the gaze of dazed English lads;
• A headwind? That sounds benign. _Imagine a human face upon the vessel’s prow, with fifteen thousand Sampsons in one bent upon driving her back, and hitting her precisely between the eyes whenever she attempts to advance an inch.
• In 2009, Lloyd’s List reported that Maersk had sent a memo headed “Zero Recruitment in Europe.” The columnist was scathing. “Famously, there are already more blue whales than there are British seafarers on British ships.
• Marius had three hours’ sleep last night, four the night before, and three the night before that. Through Suez or Panama, there is no sleep. It is too risky; there is too much to watch out for. The captain can be awake for thirty-six hours. Staying awake for twenty-four hours increases the chances of being involved in an accident by seven times.
• Not long ago, Maersk’s container fleet was free to fix its own food budget. Captains were trusted to be careful. Now the money per head is seven dollars a day, and the food goes from adequate to worse.
• Ships have godmothers? What for? “It’s a Danish thing. I’d never heard of it until I came to Maersk.
• * No one knew then what would happen to ships that were laid up for so long. There is more knowledge now, gained from long-term parking of pirated ships anchored off Somalia. Several have sunk, though whether through failure or for insurance purposes is unclear. Some have steamed into Mombasa or Djibouti followed by sharks attracted to the crustaceans and sea life that had moved to this new, strange artificial reef and liked it enough to stay.
• * the Norwegian academic Gunnar Lamvik revealed the alarming practice among Filipino seafarers of slicing open their penis with a razor and implanting ball bearings or coffee beans. The implants are called bolitas, and the logic behind them is flexible. They keep wives from straying by enhancing their sexual pleasure, and they are useful to attract Brazilian prostitutes.
• The usual cleaning method is to tip the ship slightly and hose the muck into the sea. But all weight on ships, whether ballast water, cargo, or animals, must be carefully distributed to maintain stability.
• * Sinking of Danny F II: later he learned that when you are wearing a life jacket it is easier to swim on your back. There were cattle in the water. Pounding waves, darkness, people screaming, howling and thrashing beasts everywhere: it sounds like a section of hell that Dante forgot to include. Nicolás saw a Pakistani crewmate holding on to the tail of a heifer as a flotation device.
• By then the bodies washing up had increased threefold. A week or so earlier, Ethiopian Airlines flight 409, flying to Addis Ababa from Beirut, had crashed into the sea after takeoff, twelve miles south of the airport. Ninety passengers and crew died. More bodies washing ashore, more confusion... the Lebanese transport minister immediately began an investigation. Why didn’t he do that for Danny F II? Because he couldn’t. It sank in international waters. Its flag linked the tragedy to Panama, even though the ship carried Lebanese crew.
• * Most engineers double-plug their ears with foam inserts, then ear defenders because the engines are three decks high and produce more noise than I have ever heard... Sometimes the engine room temperature reaches 120 degrees, yet the men still work in boiler suits. The maximum temperature in which engineers are allowed to work, according to Mike, is “until they keel over.”
• Shipping is not benign because there is so much of it. It emits a billion tons of carbon a year and nearly 4 percent of greenhouse gases (although rival sides have different figures). That is more than all aviation and road transport. A giant ship can emit as much pollution into the atmosphere as a coal-fired power station.
• * Residual Fuel Oil, to give bunker its real name, is dirty but cheap. Even now that fuel is ruinously costly—$600 a ton—bunker is still the cheapest. But it is horrible stuff. It is so unrefined that you could walk on it at room temperature... calls it “crud,” and “one step up from asphalt.”
• excessive nutrients—present in sewage and agricultural runoff—have sucked oxygen from the sea, creating anoxic zones where fish and other life can no longer live. In 2003, there were 146 dead zones in the oceans; by 2008, there were more than 400.
• Jasprit Chawla: became half of the Hebei Two and the cause of an unusually coherent and powerful lobbying campaign by shipping industry associations on their behalf. It worked, eventually, despite the fact that the barge was owned by someone with intimate connections to the South Korean government. A court found that Samsung was responsible for 10 percent of the pollution... Concern at the increasing and immediate criminalization of seafarers in environmental cases is growing.
• shipping emissions of particulate matter (what lay people call “soot”) are responsible for approximately sixty thousand cardiopulmonary and lung cancer deaths annually. Seventy percent of the pollution occurs within 250 miles of land, near coastlines linked to busy shipping lanes in Europe, East Asia, and South Asia. In Los Angeles, half of all smog from sulfur dioxide comes in from ships.
• People are excited about wind power again, with either sails or kites. Why not? Even during the Second World War, windjammers such as the Joseph Conrad crossed the Atlantic carrying supplies,.. Perhaps the answer is different fuels: Maersk Kalmar set sail in 2010 powered by two containers full of Soladiesel made from microscopic algae. Or cold ironing, meaning that ships don’t keep their engines running while they are in port, as they do now, but are powered by shoreside electricity.
• Instead they find masses of fishing boats with their candles or torches. You can’t see them until you’re almost upon them; they light a candle or flash a torch at you; and you must get out of their way, with your ship that needs at least a mile to stop. Also, fishing crews believe that passing in front of the bow of a big ship brings good luck. The closer they get, the better the fishing.
• Otherwise, amid all that nothing, bored watch officers like to cause mischief with the radio handset. These are the seas of name-calling.
• For a while, after piracy started up again in 2004 on routes to and from the Gulf, pirates played music over Channel 16 just before they attacked, both to unsettle seafarers and to block the channel so ships could not seek help.
• * Suez: shortened by ten days the usual twenty-four-day journey that ships had to make around Africa and up again to Europe. The canal takes fourteen hours to transit and has existed in some form since Pharaoh Senusret III, ruler in 1874 BC, chopped through the landmass to make a passage through open seas.
• Ships go through Suez in convoy. The channel is only two hundred meters wide and so can hold only one-way traffic. Our entry will be timed and staggered:
• * They have their own cabin—the Suez Crew Room—that is used for only eighteen hours a month, but well used, because the crew hardly leaves it, doing nothing but eating, drinking, listening to tinny pop music, and trying to sell souvenirs... The Suez crew is something of a scam: they are supposed to board every ship in case the vessel has to tie up. Apparently they have particular rope skills. There is also a special Suez electrician whose job is to tend to the searchlight that is also obligatory and placed on my fo’c’sle perch. The captain has never had to use either the electrician or the rope-skilled crew in forty-two years
• Apart from that, he sleeps: on the sofa, on the captain’s chair, on the watch officer’s chair. He is like a uniformed bridge cat, moving around in search of sun. Marius has to keep waking him up for instructions. Still, he is cheap, because he asks for food but not much else. Suez is known as the Marlboro Canal because for smooth passage, every ship’s captain has to have a ready stock of Marlboros to dispense.
• Other artificial reefs, such as two million tires scattered across the ocean floor off Florida, have been disastrous. The tires attracted hardly any sea life and drifted off to cause pollution in gyres, on beaches, wherever they ended up.
• the Pride lost containers that were “stuffed” with automotive parts. I like this word, sneaked in among the dry legal language like a pomegranate seed in dust. (It is actually a common freight term.)
• * pirates are already affecting our passage. Stowage has to be calculated to accommodate the risk, so some boxes shouldn’t be stored aft where pirates can fire at them. Imagine an RPG meeting that metal, those self-heating chemicals: what a prospect.
• it ends up as a grand theory about how we haven’t bothered to update our language for these modern ships; the bigger they have become, the farther they have traveled from our vocabulary.
• There are good and bad panic rooms. Decent citadels are supplied with food and water to last for days, allow the ship to be steered from within, and cannot be penetrated by oxycetylene torches, dynamite, or other violence. If the crew are secured inside a citadel, a ship can be safely boarded by a naval patrol even when pirates are aboard. A poorly designed one can become a tomb.
• * Blackbeard: His flag featured a skeleton stabbing a heart while toasting the devil. He wore his black beard in pigtails and somehow managed to set off sparklers around his face when he boarded ships. Pirates knew the importance of spreading stories of their brutality, but also of their bravado and rage against authority.
• Somali pirate origin story: “The violation of Somali waters by foreign trawlers expectedly triggered a reaction of armed resistance by Somali fishermen [who] linked themselves with local warlords for protection, placing armed militiamen onboard the trawlers.” He calls this new breed of fishers “fishermen turned pirates.”
• They were hampered by distance, fuel, and weather: the rougher waves of monsoon meant even launching from a beach was difficult, never mind approaching a large ship at speed and throwing a grappling ladder at it. They had no GPS or charts. In the words of Major General Howes, a man with a silky turn of phrase, “they navigated by guess and by God.” In this genesis story of piracy, these were “subsistence pirates.”
• What is clear is that 2005–10 was another golden age of piracy, just as 1716–22 was the golden age for Blackbeard, Bartholomew Roberts, and colleagues.
• Navy ship: From the safety walkaround I remember little except the amount of Velcro sticking everything to every wall everywhere. “If we throw the ship against a wall,” my escort tells me, “it will stick.” The logistics walkaround is a shock after merchant shipping parsimony.
• He says, as everyone says, that the solution is onshore. There are no Kenyan, Tanzanian, Mozambican pirates because those countries have coast guards and law. Somalia must be rebuilt.
• They are still suspects two years on because trials in Kenya are slow, and because midway through this one, Kenya’s supreme court decided it didn’t want to try the world’s pirates after all, and that there was no domestic law to justify trying foreign pirates who attack foreign ships and are detained by foreign navies. This caused some international panic. If Kenya wouldn’t try them, who would? After diplomatic bargaining, a Memorandum of Understanding with the EU was signed, and now Kenya will try pirates on a case-by-case basis.
• * They decide that it operates best in a stable environment, not anarchy, which is why many pirates come from the less chaotic areas of Somalia, such as Puntland. Stability is needed to get supplies. I read that the average profit margin for piracy in 2010 was 25–30 percent, that pirates are “the very essence of rational, profit-maximizing entrepreneurs described in classical economics.” In 2010, Harvard Business School chose Somali piracy as the best business model of the year.
• Pirates, Paddy O’Kennedy of EU-NAVFOR told me, live on khat and milk. They are high when they attack ships, because that dulls the fear. Navies that apprehend pirate groups often find clutches of fifteen-year-old boys in their number, small boys protected by weapons that reach their thighs, and an armor of intoxication.
• I ask him where the RPGs hit. No, he says, you don’t understand. They deliberately miss because they don’t want to harm the ship. It is just for the scare.
• $1 million ransoms were freely paid and captivity times were in months, not years. Now charter rates have been decimated by the recession. When it’s only $10,000 a day to charter a tanker, companies can afford to let negotiations drag on.
• crisis team: He really does mean 24/7. Frequently the team members are sleeping under the boardroom table for a month. They are rotated out every thirty days: that is considered the maximum time before mental and physical exhaustion begins. I think of Chirag and his crewmates, confined in a small space, dependent on other men confined in a small space.
• Chirag's story: The pirates didn’t follow him down there. They didn’t like the dark or the noise. Once the engineers understood this, they deliberately set off engine alarms any time a pirate came near. Also, for the first weeks, they hid beer in the dark spaces of the engine room. A small triumph.
• Colin Freeman, held hostage in a cave by his Somali armed guards: “You realize that your mind, already tired and stressed, is not the limitless sanctuary you might expect. Rather than passing the time with intellectual, life-affirming insights, I increasingly found I could only manage things like listing old pubs I’d visited in my youth,
• On September 9, the pirates came to the engine room. They saw the intercom phones as if for the first time and said, those are satellite phones. (On another ship they thought a coffeemaker was a sat phone.)
• * He also resupplied other hijacked vessels and “needy fishing trawlers.” Marguerite was the pirate water fountain, supplying three hundred tons in all to other ships. Chirag describes a strange community of frozen ships and boats, anchored in limbo just off Somalia. Asian Glory, Samho Dream, Al Nasir, Iceberg, all captive, all nearby. The artist Allan Sekula, in his book Fish Story, writes about Michel Foucault’s definition of a heterotopia, a displacement habitat, a place that exists between places. Cemeteries, fairgrounds, retirement homes, psychiatric hospitals. But the best heterotopia, he writes, is the ship, “a floating piece of space, a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to the infinity of the sea.” Foucault is wrong. There is a better heterotopia: a ship lying at anchor off Somalia, crippled and crewed by crippled people, visible but untouchable.
• The ransom is sometimes not the biggest cost in freeing a ship. John Chase’s team charges $3,000 a day for negotiation, a fee regulated by the insurance industry. But then there is the drop... When the crude tanker Irene was released for $13 million, the cash weighed as much as a gorilla.
• Sailors in a strange port were easy marks for exploitation. Dockland touts known as crimps or landsharks abounded. These were colorful names for unscrupulous people... The crimps—they had names such as Timmy, Dutch Charley, or Flash Tom—were making the godless world of seafaring worse than it need be
• floating boats of worship: The Floating Church of Our Savior for Seamen was, wrote Leah Robinson Rousmaniere in SCI’s official biography, a “pinnacle, Gothic-style church with a seventy-foot steeple.” It was a stunning example of “ecclesiastical maritime architecture,” possibly not an overcrowded branch of architecture studies these days.
• * The SCI’s most famous employee was Mrs. Janet Roper, known to all as Mother Roper, famous for her efforts to match families with their lost seafarer relatives. Seamen often went missing, but Mother Roper located two hundred a year on average.
• a noticeboard filled with modern prayers, including one asking God to help “with the smooth processing of my son’s dependent visa and also pray for my wife’s blood transfusions that she will have a Christian blood donor.”
• It was right after the 2004 tsunami, and the Thai crew was distraught when they watched the TV news and saw “doors and bits of houses floating through their villages.” It was his first exposure to the modern seafarer’s predicament of quick information and eternal impotence.
• The priest was not flummoxed. He put them in the center’s van and drove them to a churchyard near Hull airport. “And they all took off their shoes and walked barefoot on the grass for an hour, then they went back to the ship.”.. His is a ministry of small gestures with great impact.
• There is no international instrument to stop shipowners doing the equivalent of a night flight, although there is hope of setting up a global fund to pay seafarers at least enough to get home.
• Colum says, “People get outraged about sweatshops, but they don’t realize that once the stuff is loaded on a ship, that can be another sweatshop.” The position of the Fairtrade Foundation is one of defeat.
• baleen, the keratin fringes and fronds that span its huge mouth and filter seawater, and that were, confusingly, sold as “whalebone,” a substance so essential and ubiquitous it was the nineteenth-century plastic. A Mr. J. A. Sevey of Essex Street, Boston, sold fifty-three varieties of whalebone items, including divining rods, tongue scrapers, plait raisers, and policeman’s clubs.
• The Basques were the first to hunt the true whale of ice, a thousand years ago.
• “Enormous Carnivores, Microscopic Food, and a Restaurant That’s Hard to Find.” In it, Mark F. Baumgartner writes that right whales “are among the Earth’s largest animals, but they feed on creatures that are the size of fleas.” The ratio of a right whale to a copepod is 50 billion to one. It is like humans choosing to eat only bacteria.
• There are the mother and calf, Kleenex and Snot. There is Van Halen, named after a callosity shaped like a guitar. There is Yawn and Etch-a-Sketch and Rat, named for a scar on her side that really does look like a rat chasing a ball. Some whales are named for their deeds, such as Shackleton,
• He thinks they are tethered and handicapped by themselves. “They’re feeding, they’ve allowed the boat to get close because they’re oblivious, they’re moving slowly, and then at the last moment when they could apply huge power to diving out, their mouths are full of tons of water and they’re anchored just like a sea anchor on a ship.” A sea anchor that reduces their speed to about 2 knots, too slow to escape a ship.
• * How do we pollute the ocean? With plastic and chemicals and sewage, but also with noise. We lay cables across its bed and drive piles into its floor. We fire air guns that have the force of dynamite to carry out seismic surveys. Our fishermen send out constant pings—echolocation—to find fish. Our militaries deploy sonar that induces the bends in dolphins, porpoises, and whales, so that they arrive in mass strandings on beaches with blood on their brains and coming from their ears; with air bubbles in their lungs; with all the signs that unfortunate divers display when they rise too soon through water. All this is acoustic smog.
• The movement of propellers in water produces something known as cavitation: a constant creation of tiny bubbles that constantly pop. Aquatic bubble wrap. The cavitation of a freighter leaving Cape Cod Canal can be heard all over the bay. A supertanker can be heard in the sea a day before its arrival... Ambient noise in the deep ocean was increasing by 3 decibels every decade. Every ten years, noise from commercial shipping had doubled.
• Animals excrete whether on land or in water, and like the excreta of land mammals, whale poop, or scat, is filled with bacteria, hormones, and debris that can yield data about stress levels, food intake, and toxic burden. Even better, right whale scat is pungent enough to be detected by human olfactory systems. It also floats, but only briefly... This made for a scanty research harvest, until Rolland thought of dogs.
• the worst pets often make the best sniffer dogs: they are rambunctious and lively and have a strong desire to play. These are good qualities for a reward-based training system.
• 9/11: For the whales, it was even more remarkable—they were swimming in a preindustrial ocean. Rolland was on an ocean quieter than it had been for over a century. It stayed that way for most of the week.
• once it was understood that a ship traveling at 17 knots would have a 90 percent chance of killing a whale, but 10 knots gave it a fifty-fifty survival rate. And, incredibly and impressively, shipping lanes in the Bay of Fundy were moved. It was a matter of only miles, but the implications were wider than that: the Canadian Hydrographic Service had to change seven nautical charts at the cost of $30,000 per chart.
• Already, the acoustic habitat of the right whale—the range it needs to hear around—has been reduced by 90 percent. Humpback whales now have 10 percent of the acoustic range they used to have,
• * Kendal performing a rescue: The captain and his first officer needed to calculate where survivors might be, using charts, math, physics, and brains. This was what the captain was good at (Henry the Navigator). But it was the first mate who drew his attention to IAMSAR, the International Aeronautical and Maritime Search and Rescue manual, which contained a series of tables showing the drift rates for life rafts.
• And the crew in the rescue boat headed toward the site of that orange smoke, careful to stay as long as possible in the lee of the ship, inside an area that the ship’s mass turned into a shelter, because the captain was constantly positioning her to protect the rescue boat from wind. He doesn’t say this, but that must have required great skill. He had promised the crew that he would always be between them and the sea.
• its combination of glamour and tragedy. But so should the stories of the merchant seamen who fought in World War II, although they were classed as neither veterans nor fighters, despite losing more men, proportionately, than any branch of the armed services
• It is dated 1942, comes from the Daily Mail, and in headline and content is brief. “GIRL TENDED 51 MEN IN BOAT OF DEATH. A 21-year-old English girl, a bride of a few months, played Florence Nightingale to 51 men and two women drifting in an open boat after their ship had been torpedoed in the South.” <> This Florence Nightingale was Diana Jarman.
• If only sensible practice had accompanied his rhetoric: even by the spring of 1942, defenses on the U.S. East Coast caused U-boat commander Peter Cremer to think the Americans “asleep, to put it mildly.” Europe was blacked-out for war, but the U.S. coast was ablaze as if in peacetime, guiding friend and foe alike. Of course, the watching U-boats took advantage of the helpful illumination and American and Allied merchant seamen were killed before even leaving territorial waters.
• Their attacks were so ferocious and so successful, Germans called this period “The Happy Time.” Casualty statistics vary but by the end of 1942 more than a thousand ships had been sunk, and ten thousand British merchant seamen were killed.
• Diana's lifeboat: There were some tablets of Horlicks, a malt extract. There was no fishing tackle: this was not thought vital until after the war. Nor were there barley sugar sweets, which were later understood to provide energy but also saliva. Countless lifeboat survivors found it impossible to masticate hard biscuits when their mouths had been dry for weeks.
• Curiously, the people who did not help others died first. Then it was death by domino: Miss Taggart and Mr. Watkins-Ball entwined together one morning, both dead. A few more lascars.
• * For Chief Officer C. B. Denny, in charge of the survivors until then, it was enough. He was going overboard and asked if anyone would come with him. Third Engineer Hawkes said yes. I don’t know what is more extraordinary about this: that they carefully shook hands and jumped into the sea, where Hawkes’s blond head could be seen above water for an uncomfortably long time after; or that they first took a short sleep. What can that sleep have been like? What did they dream? Wilbert Widdicombe, one of two Anglo-Saxon crew who survived, took over the recording of the boat log, written on sailcloth. He didn’t waste time with unnecessary words. “Chief engineer and third mate go overboard. No water.”
• When Jack Oakie, Jack Litte, and a Zanzibar fireman died, it took the others a whole day to find the strength to lift the three bodies into the ocean.