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Down to the Sea in Ships: Of Ageless Oceans and Modern Men

by Horatio Clare

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965279,999 (3.84)13
'Magnificent' Robert Macfarlane Winner of the Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year Our lives depend on shipping but it is a world which is largely hidden from us. In every lonely corner of every sea, through every night, every day, and every imaginable weather, tiny crews of seafarers work the giant ships which keep landed life afloat. These ordinary men live extraordinary lives, subject to dangers and difficulties we can only imagine, from hurricanes and pirates to years of confinement in hazardous, if not hellish, environments. Horatio Clare joins two container ships on their epic voyages across the globe and experiences unforgettable journeys. As the ships cross seas of history and incident, seafarers unfold the stories of their lives, and a beautiful and terrifying portrait of the oceans and their human subjects emerges. 'Tremendous' The Times… (more)
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If you take a look around you at some of the things that you own, almost all of the have arrived in the country in a box. A container box that is. These containers are shipped in their millions back and forth oceans and round the world every year.

Clare was invited to be the writer on board for the Maersk Group, to see how these veins of the capitalist world work and operate. He joins the first ship at Felixstowe, the UK largest port, on its journey from there to Los Angles via Suez and Hong Kong. On the ship he is allowed free access anywhere, and to meet and speak with the crew and officers with the aim of finding out just what makes these vast vessels tick.

His second journey takes him from Antwerp to Montreal. It is an older ship, that reeks of diesel, and they are travelling into a huge storm in the atlantic. On this journey he finds out just how dangerous this journeys can be for the crews.

It is a fascinating book to read as Clare gets to the heart of the shipping industry and the people that run these ships. The size of some of these ports is huge, I know I have seen the Hong Kong port, and everything is organised down to the last detail, so much so that on his first journey they dock to the minute have travelled three quarters around the world. Clare manages to convey well the feelings and the pressure that the crews feel, as well as recounting some of the stories from other ships some of which are terrifying. Did drag a bit at times, but otherwise worth reading. ( )
  PDCRead | Apr 6, 2020 |
One of the most important things that make modern life possible (for better or worse!) is the way we can ship practically anything around the globe quickly, reliably and inexpensively. And astonishingly invisibly: A few generations ago, our schoolbooks (especially in Britain) would have been full of pictures of ports and merchant ships and the miracle of world trade, major novelists like Conrad, Kipling and Melville turned naturally to the sea for their subject-matter, and most people would have had some sort of family connection with seafaring, but nowadays shipping is largely out of sight, in remote terminals on the edge of town, no-one we know works at sea, and most of us know far less about life on container ships than we do about the sailors of Nelson's time.

Clare tries to correct this a little by spending a year as writer-in-residence with one of the handful of big shipping companies that control the world's container trade. He sails on two of their ships: from Felixstowe to Los Angeles via Suez and China on the new and efficient Gerd Maersk and for the sake of contrast, on the rather less prestigious North Atlantic route from Antwerp to Montreal on the Maersk Pembroke, a ship that clearly wasn't in a very good state when he travelled on it and has since been decommissioned after a fire in 2017.

Clare evidently set off on his voyages with the idea of writing about his own confrontation with the elemental power of the oceans, but soon finds himself more interested in the people who work on ships and in the peculiar kind of community that a ship's company becomes. Crew members might spend anything from three to nine months working together in a small group of 20 or so people, largely isolated from the rest of the world and with little or no time to go on shore during the ship's short spells in harbour, but then be shuffled around arbitrarily by the manning agencies who employ them to sail with another group of complete strangers on their next contract. And, although it looks as though it's hedged about with all sorts of regulations, shipping seems in practice to be an area where labour law has little real impact: companies pay their employees what the market will bear, meaning (for instance) that Europeans, Indians and Filipinos get widely different rates for doing the same job on the same ship. And that companies and individuals rarely have to take responsibility when things go wrong out of sight of the authorities. Clare describes some truly horrible accidents and cases of abuse that he's been told about, most of which have led - at most - to a token compensation payment to the family and to the renaming of the ship concerned...

Clare puts the work of modern seafarers into the context of the history of the profession, telling us about the hazards that faced earlier generations (during the North Atlantic crossing there's a lot about U-boats and the Battle of the Atlantic, for instance) and also about the things that haven't changed. He does seem to have a rather odd fascination for the "masculinity" of seafaring, something he perhaps doesn't investigate as much as he might have - there are passing mentions of women at sea, and a suggestion that the breaking-down of the gender barrier in seafaring has been a failed experiment, but the only woman crew member he actually meets during his travels is the cook of the Pembroke, so he doesn't have much in the way of direct testimony from women to report. (The Gerd apparently previously had a woman officer, but she left some time before he comes on board, so he can only speculate about her.)

Clare also tells us quite a bit in passing about the (astonishingly tight) economics of shipping, and doesn't try to conceal the negative effects that the ships themselves and our reliance on moving stuff about are having on the planet. In port after port he gives us a synopsis of the manifest of the containers loaded and makes us ask ourselves why on earth that particular product or commodity should have to be shipped such long distances (three hundred tons of cocoa powder shipped from the Netherlands to Chile...).

This is a very interesting insight into a largely closed world and a lively travel book, spoilt occasionally by a bit of over-heavy writing (tip: don't immerse yourself in Conrad and Melville before writing a book about the sea). ( )
1 vote thorold | Jul 19, 2019 |
I was lured into this one by the gorgeous cover (credit: Pietari Posti). Well, that and the subject matter -- I do like a good book about ships and the life of the crew on board. In this book, Clare gains access to two container ships and travels around as a writer in residence, recording his impressions and interviewing the crew.

The book got my back up in the introduction or first chapter when he said something about how the world of container shipping is one of the last areas where men are away from women and children, and he was looking forward to seeing what they were like under those conditions. Excuse me? Like it's A GOOD THING that it's a predominantly masculine environment? Way to encourage women to take up that kind of profession. And never mind that the first mate on the first ship he is on is a woman, and a pregnant woman at that!

The writing was also too leisurely and contemplative for my taste. Nothing really happens, so we get lots of description of the water and the wildlife and the interior life of the crew. If that's the sort of thing you like, you might really enjoy this. It just wasn't what I'd been expecting, and I was constantly putting it down to read something else. ( )
  rabbitprincess | Jul 23, 2016 |
Horatio Clare is a gifted travel writer who specialises in never taking the easy option. This is an engrossing and sympathetic account of the trade of mercantile seamanship. Regular diversions to history, warfare and the episodic acts of courage and horror occasioned by mortals or the fickle indifference of nature's greatest and all too often malevolent force pepper the narrative. You can almost smell the salt of it. I've now ordered his earlier book:- A Single Swallow. ( )
2 vote summonedbyfells | Mar 7, 2014 |
Mentioned in FT article 28Dec13 in relation to taking berth on a cargo ships
  decore | Dec 29, 2013 |
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'Magnificent' Robert Macfarlane Winner of the Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year Our lives depend on shipping but it is a world which is largely hidden from us. In every lonely corner of every sea, through every night, every day, and every imaginable weather, tiny crews of seafarers work the giant ships which keep landed life afloat. These ordinary men live extraordinary lives, subject to dangers and difficulties we can only imagine, from hurricanes and pirates to years of confinement in hazardous, if not hellish, environments. Horatio Clare joins two container ships on their epic voyages across the globe and experiences unforgettable journeys. As the ships cross seas of history and incident, seafarers unfold the stories of their lives, and a beautiful and terrifying portrait of the oceans and their human subjects emerges. 'Tremendous' The Times

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