Fog and it seems to have been days - it has been days - since last spotting another ship. We're alone in a rolling, liquid Sahara.
Amber's electronic chart shows us in the middle of the Pacific. You can see the Kamchatka Peninsula and Aleutians at the top.
The BBC - blessings upon the Beeb! - has occasionally been audible, although cutbacks mean the shortwave World Service hasn't its former imperial reach. In the Pacific, the signal seems beyond the capabilities of my little radio. CMA CGM provides a 'newspaper', much like ones on cruise ships. Potted coverage and not daily, but enough to indicate life beyond the horizon; that's if you can see the horizon.
Page by precious page, I eke out the August 31 New York Times - not just coverage of Hurricane Irene, but food reviews, television listings, lottery numbers - I read it all. Not for lack of books, just to hold a paper and pretend it's current.
My iPad is invaluable, not only for writing and photo editing, but for atlas and world reference material (Oxford, CIA and U.S. State Department). And for the ninety-three books - not all read - downloaded before leaving home.
Early travellers’ descriptions are, in a curious way, quite fresh and valuable for their originality. These pioneers were indeed visiting ‘New Worlds’, ones few Westerners had seen, and, although they have their prejudices, they avoid many of our preconceptions.
W. Hastings Macaulay's two-and-a-half years away from home (January, 1850, to June, 1852) are a useful source. He sailed on a U.S. Navy ship to the Far East. On the lack of news, Macaulay puts things in perspective for readers in 2011:
"Only a person who has been accustomed to [newspapers], as we are in the United States, can appreciate the deprivation of this mental food, when placed beyond its reach, on a foreign station like this, where a paper some three months after its publication is seized upon with the greatest delight; and news, which at home has long lost its name, is devoured with avidity ... " (Kathay: A Cruise in the China Seas 1852)
In the early 1900s, H.M. Tomlinson journeyed from Wales to South America aboard a small tramp steamer. His book, The Sea and the Jungle (1912), is a minor classic:
“ … the concerns of our little world strangely occupied our minds ... and the large affairs of that great world we had left, of which we heard now no sound nor rumour, had lessened in the mind, faded and vanished …”
Although much more recent, I can't resist a quote from the 1960s. By then, the release from news seems to have been a blessing:
“The isolation from home news which worried me at first began to have a singular effect. They could steal a Goya from the National Gallery, increase the purchase-tax and the railway fares without my being perturbed. I was spared the gush and mush about the Royal Family which saturates the British Press.” (The Grand Cruise Cecil Roberts 1963)
English – with varying degrees of fluency – is the ship’s language. But the Amber is a floating United – occasionally disunited – Nations of Filipinos, Croatians and a Serb who, in Dubai, replaced a Montenegrin officer. 'Motley crew' did not enter the language for nothing. A glance at crew lists for 19th Century merchant and warships shows their multinational nature.
Long ocean crossings make small differences major. Tensions can be exacerbated by solitude, absence from families and different native languages. Cultural differences are often the cause.
While I was aboard a freighter in October, 2001, there was a report of an officer stabbed on a Norwegian flagged tanker in the North Indian Ocean. Assistance was needed. Sighed the British chief officer on my ship, “You have to be a politician.”
However, let's not overstate matters. As with any kind of work, people on Amber get used to the occasional minor flareup. Mostly, everyone gets along. A Filipino captain certainly helps. Captain 'Boni' is the only Filipino master of a large CMA CGM ship. One Croatian officer said he'd never served under a Filipino and the crew is clearly buoyed by a countryman in command.
