August 8.
At dinner, Victor the mess hall steward pops a bottle of warm German sparkling wine.
“Tonight, we celebrate,” he smiles, filling our glasses to the rim. One of the Filipino sailors who works in the engine room got a promotion. I feel lucky to share the moment. It’s like the crew is a big family, and everyone is proud when a member of the family makes good.
Lina and I hang out at the table after dinner and finish the bottle of bubbly. The third officer comes by and we offer him a drink. He shakes his head.
“No, this is bullshit,” he grumbles. “That guy—” he means the guy who just got the promotion— “he’s so stupid. He’s uneducated.”
Right on cue, the chief engineer walks in. Pretty soon, both the engineering officers are ranting about how stupid the crew is, and how crappy this Chinese-built ship is. They’ve both been drinking, so there’s no shutting them up.
The conversation gradually drifts away from badmouthing the crew to other topics of interest to these sailors: how freight ships like this one can break apart in rough seas, for instance, and how long you can survive if you fall into the icy waters of the North Atlantic (3 to 5 minutes, according to the third officer). They talk about the dangers of navigating along the coast of Nigeria because of all the sunken ships; and the ping pong shows in Bangkok where women shoot ping pong balls out of their vaginas with incredible accuracy.
“When you’re just a tourist, you don’t see these things,” the chief engineer says to Lina and me smugly. Whatever buddy, I think to myself. But I get his point. The chief engineer has seen the world from the deck of a freight ship. For better or for worse, it’s not a view that everyone gets to share.
The conversation returns to the crew. The third officer hates the New Cadet. A cadet is a young sailor who’s training to be an officer. Now that he has finished his maritime studies, the cadet is on board to gain practical experience. The third officer tells us that a couple voyages ago, when the ship was loading cargo in Antwerp, the cadet was assigned to watch the gangway (the temporary walkway that connects the ship to the dock). The cadet didn’t notice that a loading crane on the pier was creeping dangerously close. Suddenly, the cadet screamed into his walkie-talkie.
“Argh!” the cadet screamed.
“What is it?” the third officer radioed back in a panic, thinking someone got hurt.
“The gangway just got crushed by a loading crane,” the cadet groaned.
When the ship got back to Philly, the cadet was again assigned to watch the gangway.
“Argh!” the cadet screamed into his walkie-talkie.
Not again, the third officer thought to himself. This time, the gangway somehow got crushed between the ship and the pier.
Given what I’ve learned about the officers on the Independent Pursuit, it’s kind of amazing they haven’t forced the New Cadet to walk the plank. Most nights, I find the kid all by himself in the crew lounge watching Bollywood dvd’s. Maybe it’s all part of his apprenticeship. The painful part. Learning how to be lonely and alone on a long voyage across the sea.