Grey seas, icebergs, wrecks and whales.
A voyage to the St Lawrence, 50 years ago
A voyage to the St Lawrence, 50 years ago
One of the odder
things about aging is that one may enter a room, forget why, and
suddenly recall what one was doing 50 years ago to the day instead.
It happened to me this morning. I noticed that it was August 21 and a
series of images came unbidden into my head; then I started playing
one of those mental newsreels of a past time that are always
incomplete. It flickered into life with the image of a train. I was
in the dining car with my parents and sister. A flat stretch of
late-summer countryside was flashing by, black-and-white cows in a
field; a white-jacketed waiter emerged through a swing door with oval
windows, a large silver tray at shoulder-height. I wondered why we
had been in the dining-car; my parents were the sort who found
sandwiches quite adequate. But perhaps it was all part of our ticket,
for this was a boat train.
*
The Empress of Canada in her original livery (Canadian Pacific postcard) |
The boat train was
once a quite usual feature of international travel, speeding you from
Euston or Waterloo and taking you, not to the main station for the
port, but straight into the docks, where one climbed down and entered
the terminal building or shed to surrender your baggage. This would
be labelled as needed, to be taken to your cabin or stickered “Not
Wanted on Voyage” and swung into the hold in nets that hung from
cranes or derricks. In this shed, too, one would undergo passport
formalities before striding up the gangway and into the doors let
into the side of the vessel. On one’s return to Britain one went
through the same process in reverse, assuming one got through customs
in time.
On one occasion some
years earlier, my mother had missed the boat train. Disembarking from
the Holland America Line’s much-loved Nieuw Amsterdam at
Southampton with a two-year-old (me) and my seven-year-old sister,
she made the mistake of giving me an orange as we waited in the
queue, enraging a customs officer who lectured her about the
phytosanitary dangers of American oranges and proceeded to examine
our luggage in minute detail. The boat train left without us.
“He was very
small. A pipsqueak,” she remembered years later, thought for a
moment and added, outraged: “He was Welsh”, as if this somehow
explained the man’s behaviour. I remember someone – I believe it
was John Treasure Jones, the last captain of the mighty Queen Mary
(and himself Welsh) – telling a magazine interviewer how to avoid
trouble at customs. Look for a chap with a loosely-knotted tie, he
said;
a tight, small knot indicates a small, tight mind. It is advice I
have carried through life ever since.
*
But
back to the late summer of 1968.
The
train rolled into the docks at Liverpool and came to rest outside a
cavernous
shed. We entered it, and through the open doors at the other side I
saw a huge wall of white steel, punctuated by row upon row of
portholes. It seemed a
leviathan.
The Queen Elizabeth at New York (date and photographer unknown) |
In
fact, at about 27,000 GRT, the Empress of Canada
was dwarfed by the Queen Mary
and Queen Elizabeth,
which at over 81,000 GRT were for a long time the largest man-made
moving objects on earth. I
had sailed on the Queen
Elizabeth, too. In
what I believe to be my earliest memory, I am in the children’s
playroom on board,
pushing a toy car along the art-deco ventilation grilles at the edge
of the room and annoying a little girl trying to play with one of the
doll’s houses set against them. Then I look up to see my mother
standing above me in a Dior-like New Look skirt. If I am correct, it
was August 1958, and I was just 15 months old, so it does not seem
possible – surely it must have been another ship, probably the
Nieuw Amsterdam –
but old black-and-white pictures of the Cunarder’s playroom seem to
match my memory.
If
the Empress of Canada
could not compare to the
Queens, it was still
very large, and was one of the most modern liners
on the North Atlantic run,
launched on the Tyne in 1960. Designed for the Liverpool to Montreal
route,
she could carry about a thousand passengers. In the 1960s there was
still demand for cabins. Atlantic flights had been offered since
the 1940s,
and were having an impact on
shipping. Jets
had offered a transatlantic
service since October 1958, a
British-built
airliner beating
the Americans by a matter of days. But
jet travel was still for the very well-heeled; older
planes often had to refuel at
Gander, and the journey to New York could take 12 or 14 hours. And
all air travel was still very
expensive. All this would change with the arrival of wide-bodied jets
in 1970. But
for now,
ships remained the best choice for
many, for Australia as well
as North America (many of the British emigrants who went to Australia
as part of the assisted passage scheme in the 1960s made the six-week
voyage by sea).
We
walked up the gangway and into the entrance in the ship’s side. The
first thing one noticed was the flooring; often in this ship, it was
a light blue rubberised surface with raised buttons, from which water
would drain, and on which one would not slip in
rough seas. The first place
one called was one’s cabin, where hopefully one’s luggage would
arrive too. The cabins were small but not cramped and had their own
bathrooms and toilets. I took the upper bunk above my sister. I was
sleeping right by a porthole and could sit up in bed and look out at
the sea.
I
was 11, and old enough to wander around the ship alone; in fact I had
just been given my first watch especially
for the voyage, so that I would know when to turn up for meals. On
this first day I went on deck and looked over the side at the docks.
I was in a crush of other passengers, many waving goodbye to friends
and relatives on the docks far below; some held coloured paper
streamers that ran over the
side, with the other end held by those below. As the ship pulled away
the streamers would break or fall. In those days many passengers on a
ship to Canada would have been emigrants, and I suppose the streamer
represented the ties that were being broken in a rather poignant way.
In fact I remember that everyone was in quite a cheerful mood,
despite the greyness of the English summer sky. One passenger may not
have been so happy – the
owner of a large steamer
trunk (yes, we had them) that was bobbing up and down between the
ship and the water. A pair of stevedores tried half-heartedly to
retrieve it with grappling hooks. “I say, I hear the poor chap’s
PhD thesis is inside,” said someone. There was general chortling.
And then the hawsers were unwound and we began, ever so slowly, to
inch away from England.
*
At Greenock (date and photographer unknown) |
In
the morning all had changed. The
ship had steamed up the Irish
Sea in the night and had entered the Clyde estuary, and was
standing off Greenock, waiting for the tender that would bring the
last mail and passengers for Canada. We
went on deck. It was a quite
brilliant, still summer’s morning, the mountains to the north
standing out green against the wonderful cloudless
sky; the water was flat calm
and the ship lay on a mirror
in a room of deep blue. I have travelled widely in the half-century
since, but I do not think I have seen many scenes to rival that
strange and beautiful morning.
We
did not stay long. In due course the tender nosed out to meet us, a
small motorboat with a dozen or so passengers and some mailsacks. I
suppose the sheer white walls of the ship must have reared hundreds
of feet above them. They came up a ladder and the tender went about
its business; we pulled away. I wonder what became of passengers who
had booked their passage from Greenock to find that the weather had
been too bad for them to transfer to the ship in this way – as must
surely sometimes have happened.
As
we left the Clyde behind, the weather dulled. The coast of Ulster was
a low grey-green smudge in the distance. We settled into the ship
that would be our home for the next week.
Shipboard
life acquires a rhythm. Dinner was taken in a large airy dining-room
below, at a shared table, served by a waiter in evening clothes, a
very small red-headed man from the Shetland Islands; he was quiet but
friendly and every night he handed us a new elaborate menu, great
white creations of heavy card, with embossed letters and each night
a different picture of a sailing ship’s stern on the front. The
menus delighted me and the Shetland waiter, noticing that I liked
them, kindly brought me a large white envelope marked “A Souvenir
of a White Empress”, with a sample of each menu used on the voyage.
I had it for many years and believe it may still be among my papers
somewhere.
A 1950 poster by Roger Couillard |
Between
meals there was not that much to do. One could shop at the duty-free.
One could play deck games, weather permitting. One could visit the
cinema (we did, once; the film was the latest hit, The
Cincinatti Kid. It
bored us and
we walked out). There were lounges and, of course, bars. My parents
made little use of these and did not mingle much with the other
passengers; my father, though not unfriendly, was not a clubbable man
and was rather self-contained. In
those days English people were more reserved than they are now and
were cautious with strangers until they could place them, or identify
a common relative or acquaintance. I made one friend on board, but
apart from that I can remember few friendships being forged. We
did meet a young woman who
was travelling with two unfeasibly slender
borzoi dogs. I had a plastic box-brownie camera (I have it still) and
she posed for a picture with the dogs, which sat on a bench beside
her; her legs were crossed and her skirt quite short and her leather
raincoat unbuttoned, and in the picture there is an elegant expanse
of thigh.
And
of course one looked at the sea.
If
one stood at the stern one could see the wake of the ship, a huge
white maelstrom, fading at its edges to green and then grey. Seabirds
wheeled and screamed above it. The volume of water displaced must
have been enormous as the 27,000-ton ship ploughed through the water
at 23 knots. One wonders what the wake of the Queen
Elizabeth was like; three times
the size, and rather faster – she made well over 30 knots, about 33
MPH.
When
one tired of looking at the wake, there was the vast seascape around
us. As anyone who lives by the sea can tell you, it has many moods.
There was none of the glassy tranquility that we had seen at
Greenock. Further out the fresh wind whipped up whitecaps. As it was
summer, we followed the Great Circle route some way to the north; it
grew cold, and the sky was a dirty light grey and the sea gunmetal
with crests of white. One day an announcement on the PA told us that
we were near what was thought to be the last position of the Titanic
(it had yet to be found). Late that afternoon we saw icebergs in the
distance.
At
that time, no British person could cross that stretch of ocean
without remembering that it was also a graveyard. The U-boat battles
of the second war had reached their climax in 1943, just 25 years
earlier; plenty of people on board would have remembered them, and
perhaps some of the crew had sailed through them – in fact I am
sure they had, for the ship was crewed in Liverpool. My father was
quiet and mildly irritable throughout the voyage and I know he
disliked the sea. I did not understand why, but now I realize that he
must have spent weeks on a troopship to what was then the Gold Coast
in 1941, a tense voyage; the vessel would have swung much of the way
out towards Brazil to avoid U-boats. Many were sunk off West Africa,
including a previous Empress of Canada; she was torpedoed by
an Italian submarine, but by a twist of fate the ship was carrying
Italian prisoners, nearly 200 of whom died.
A
few years ago I wrote about crossing the Atlantic, then and now – a
piece I later included in my 2014 book The Nine Horizons. It
included this passage:
A convoy in 1942 (US Navy picture) |
Some
journeys on this ocean always have ended badly. You are in your
cabin; it was a five-day voyage before, but now it's three weeks as
you limp along at the pace of the slowest ship, and you zigzag and
dogleg, and destroyers and corvettes fuss around like smoky
sheepdogs. It's early morning and you're still in your bunk when
there is a soft thud and a jolt and the ship falters and seems to
have come to a stop. There is an odd silence. The lights flicker but
stay on. You can hear the footsteps of a steward clanging on the
steel floor of the passage outside so you open the door. No,
probably nothing to worry about, but perhaps you wouldn't mind going
topside, sir, do you have warm clothing? – good, sir, if you can
get it on quickly. On
deck everything's quite calm, but the other ships have moved on
ahead, leaving a black smoke stain on the horizon; and you're alone
in the early morning between a still, solid grey sea and a gunmetal
sky, and there's a cool breeze. It's very calm and it must be only
your imagination that the ship is settling slowly to starboard. In
fact everything is so calm that you cannot envisage the jagged hole
below and the cold water streaming in across the hot boilers and the
lascars and stokers screaming in agony from the superheated
steam.
When I was young, many older people hated the sea.
When I was young, many older people hated the sea.
*
On
the fifth day it was still dull and cold. In the early afternoon I
was standing on the deck when someone pointed in the distance. A
school of whales was passing us a mile or so away, their bodies
breaking the water, huge, but very small in the distance. I went up
again at dusk, which came late (we were a long way north, and it was
still summer). On the far horizon in front of the ship was a long,
low shadow, and it was not a cloud. I wonder if it looked the same to
Leif Ericson a thousand years ago, or to the first of the Breton
and Iberian cod-fishermen not long afterwards. Or maybe to St
Brendan, 500 years earlier. Many believe he made it. Should we be so
sure he didn’t? The American explorer Robert Marx once claimed to
have found amphorae from a Roman shipwreck in Guanabara Bay, off Rio
de Janeiro. Who knows who first saw that shore from the sea?
That night, there wasn’t much to see. But the next morning we had passed Belle Isle and into the mouth of the St Lawrence.
The
sheer size of this river is hard to comprehend. It drains the Great
Lakes into the Atlantic and, if one counts the estuary, is not much
less than 2,000 miles long. To make landfall at Belle Isle and then
spend two days steaming to one’s destination is to comprehend its
size and that of Canada itself. Of course, there was now other
shipping. Before long that morning a bulk carrier of Manchester Lines
slipped past on its way to the ocean, and as the ship ploughed on
towards Quebec, the traffic became more frequent. We were some way
out in mid-stream; as the day wore on, however, we started to see
small white houses nestled in the wooded shoreline. Bit by bit we
sailed back into the human world.
The Empress of Ireland (Bibliothèque et Archives Canada) |
The
St Lawrence had
its own harsh history for Canadian Pacific. On
the night of May 29 1914, near Rimouski in Quebec, just inside the
river proper, the Norwegian collier Storstad
hit the Empress of Ireland
in fog. The Storstad
remained afloat, despite a damaged bow. The 14,000 GRT Empress
of Ireland did
not, sinking in just 14 minutes with the loss of just over a thousand
lives – a disaster quite comparable to that of the Titanic,
yet hardly known; perhaps the outbreak of the Great War two months
later overlaid it in memory. The rapid sinking was attributed to the
use of longtitudinal watertight compartments, which allowed one side
of the ship to fill very quickly with water while the other did not,
causing it to capsize rapidly. Many of those who did escape the ship
died in the water, which at that time of year was still very cold.
The exact circumstances of
the collision were disputed
at the enquiry, and remain so now. (The
Storstad was repaired
and returned to service, but seized by Canadian Pacific after a civil
suit. She was torpedoed southwest of Fastnet Rock three years later.)
I did not know it
then, but we must have passed the wreck site in the St Lawrence
during the sixth day.
In
the evening we tied up at Quebec City. It was not yet time to leave
the ship, but we went ashore to stretch our legs, striding along the
dock below the towering mass of the Château
Frontenac, built by Canadian
Pacific themselves in 1893. It was there that Churchill had met
Mackenzie King and Roosevelt in 1943 to discuss strategy. On this
evening in late August 25 years later, there was little activity on
the dock – it seemed empty – and even the other passengers seemed
to have stayed aboard. At length we returned to the ship. But we had
stood on North American soil. Well, concrete.
The
next morning I pulled back the curtains above my bunk and saw an odd
view. We had come to a halt at Montreal and were tied up near Man and
His World – what had been Expo 67, the
very successful
World’s Fair the previous year. It was over
but one could still visit the
site, now called Man and His World.
I was looking at Habitat 67, the strange cuboid flat complex that had
been part of the exhibition and was
still lived
in, and is to
this day.
We
were chivvied off the ship by our parents and a Montreal metro train
with big rubber wheels took us to an American-style train that took
us to Ottawa. We rode upstairs in the observation car. The train
rattled slowly along, seemingly
right through people’s backyards. We left the Empress of
Canada and its great white walls
behind us at Montreal. I never saw her
again.
*
From the 1930s |
A
year later, my father’s work in Canada was done. This
time he flew. The
rest of us returned the way
we had come, in almost the same week. But
this time we sailed on
a sister ship of about the same size – the Empress of
England, also built on the Tyne.
The weather was markedly worse and the ship, although only slightly
older, was less modern in design. It pitched and rolled. I had been
ill before we went aboard and for the first and, so far, last time in
my life, I was seasick. After two days for which I had vomited
uncontrollably, my mother summoned a nurse from the dispensary in the
bowels of the ship. The nurse
unsheathed a very large needle that looked as if it was used to
tranquilize
horses. “Turn over,” she barked, and thrust it into my rump; I
could not see but I think she was holding it aloft with both hands,
as if sacrificing a goat. It did make me better, but not well enough
to go to dinner. Instead, while my mother and sister went to eat, a
friendly
Belfast steward brought me some rather nice sandwiches and stayed
with me until they returned, telling me all about the Mini-Coopers
that he rallied in the winter season. It was a cheerful
act of kindness that I still remember after nearly half a century. I
recall
little else about that voyage, except that we tied up at Liverpool’s
Gladstone Dock on a cold and drizzly afternoon, I think the first day
of September. I looked over the rail at the rows of cars parked on
bombsites near the dock, their windows streaked with rain, and felt a
strange sense of being grounded, of being dragged home to England
against my will. I would feel it later, as an adult, many times.
The
Empress of England would
not make people vomit for much longer. In two years she was off the
route; in five she was scrapped. But
the Empress of Canada
would work on. Her own life
as a transatlantic liner was nearly over; 18 months later the first
of the wide-bodied jets entered service. A very few vessels staggered
on for two or three years, but soon the QE2 was
the only liner left on the route. The others found new lives as
cruise liners. For the Canada,
this was nothing new; although her sister-ships stayed on the
Atlantic route the year round, she herself had always spent the
winters cruising.
Twenty
years later, as a volunteer in Sudan, I met a man who had been one of
the crew in the ship’s heyday, and had been aboard when we made
that crossing. He had fond memories of the cruise season. Every woman
loves a sailor, he said, and recalled a Hollywood star who had liked
to go ashore with them and have sex with them, one by one, against a
palm tree. “Funny, she was always sort of unfriendly once you’d
done her,” he mused, nursing a glass of the local firewater. He
then identified her as someone who was, in the 1960s, a household
name. She has long passed away, but I shall take that name to the
grave.
The
ship was sold in the early 1970s, becoming the first of the Carnival
line’s cruise ships. As the years went by, the North Atlantic
survivors were replaced by purpose-built cruise ships, vast, slow,
soulless floating malls
that meander slowly through the water, pausing now and then to
unleash thousands of
holidaymakers on some
defenceless Caribbean island; were our Hollywood
star still living, she would
find it hard to find a palm tree to herself. But the Empress
of Canada somehow survived into
the new century, latterly on
gambling cruises in the Gulf of Mexico.
Final fate: The Empress of Canada broken at Along, 2003 |
In
2003 she was finally sold for
scrap and was run ashore at the great shipbreakers at Alang Beach,
Gujurat – one of those places where men swarm across a huge ship in
their hundreds and break it with axes and saws and the sweat of their
brows. In a few months, there was nothing left of a great ship that
had been
home to thousands for days or even weeks at a time, on which some men
and women would serve for years.
But
that is the fate of the things we use, isn’t it? The year I sailed
on the
Empress of
Canada,
British Rail finally abandoned steam, and thousands of engines were
left in long lines at a huge yard in Barry, South Glamorgan. One
moment they were living, breathing monuments to human ingenuity. The
next they were rotting hulks in the drizzle. And the same happened to
typewriters, to record players, to valve wirelesses, to cathode-tube
TVs and to the car that once picked you up from school; and one day
it will happen to your phone and to your tablet and your microwave
and the laptop on which I am typing this. Later,
someone will look at one in a book or online or in a museum and
wonder, yes, but what did it do?
And
few
will know what it was to forge through a vast grey sea, peopled by
ghosts of Vikings, Breton fishermen, men o’war and
submarines,
to see icebergs pass astern or whales in the distance, or see a low
grey line on the horizon at dusk and wonder
if
it was a
low cloud, or the
New World.
Follow
Mike Robbins on Twitter (mikerobbins19),
on Facebook or
on Goodreads
Mike
Robbins's collection of travel writing, The
Nine Horizons, was published in 2014 and is available as a
paperback, as a Kindle download and in other eBook formats.