Read Down to the Sea in Ships for Free Online Page A

Now we are stopped everyone moves quickly as if to compensate. The first man up the gangway is the agent, tired-looking and carrying a black document case. Then come the stevedores, all swagger.
    â€˜They are hard men,’ says the agent, ‘the reservoir of tradition.’
    The first two layers of containers are secured to the deck frames by steel lashing rods. The stevedores’ job is to take these off containers which are being moved and to secure them to containers which are loaded. They are equipped for a night’s work with food and cigarettes. They do not sign on or off the ship and they show little interest in the crew, barely nodding as they come aboard.
    Work will go on all night in the engine room. The casing of one of the cylinders is cracked, so we have been proceeding on eleven, not twelve, giving us a maximum speed of seventeen knots, rather than twenty-three.
    â€˜We cannot leave Europe without full power,’ the Captain explains.
    The cylinder casing is an elongated steel funnel higher than a bungalow. It weighs nine tonnes. We carry two spares, stored in corners of the engine room.
    The chief engineer is Carl-Johann. He will run the operation from the background, unobtrusively. The second and third engineers will take turns at directing the job and working in tiny hot spaces, full of peril and complexity, leading their crews. Carl-Johann is a pacific man with deep mournful eyes, his moustache black against pale skin. He has a little bi-plane on his desk, scarlet and decked with black crosses. It is a Fokker, he says. He made it himself. Carl-Johann is passionate about model planes. The Captain is equally passionate about model trains. Late at night sometimes they get together in the Captain’s cabin and bid for rare engines or planes on the internet. When you know this it takes nothing to see them as they must have been as boys: standing in a corner of the playground – always the same, favoured corner, you feel, for young Henrik Larsen. A little tubby, peering up over the tops of his glasses at the interruptions of bigger children, he must have been as uncomprehending of their stark world, bizarrely bereft of any knowledge of the workings, colours, serial numbers and capacities of trains, as they were ignorant of his horizonless shunting yard of exactly known shapes and memorised numbers, his constellations of detail. Little boys are adorable for the endless accuracy of their devotions, the tables of goals and runs, the three hundred and twenty-fifth
Star Wars
figure known down to the calibre of its gun and the colour of its insignia. When certain of these boys grow up they are easily mocked for their undimmed passions, none more than the groups of anoraks at the ends of platforms or the solitaries huddled in hides, with their treasured notebooks, their lists of Deltic locomotives or megatick birds.
    But perhaps it is that little boy within each man at work on the
Gerd
tonight who shuffles one giant cylinder casing for another according to safe procedure, who will work through heat and fatigue and danger on hundreds of nuts, bolts and cables. It is that passionate precision which will be needed to disconnect a multitude of couplings in the correct sequence, and to reconnect and replace them in the right order. Perhaps it is the owlish engagement of little boys in love with certain and calculable things which builds machines as great as the
Gerd
, and greater.
    Le Havre’s container port is an unfinished jigsaw of fences, gates, towers of steel boxes and oil storage tanks. Along the quay yellow machines are levelling a hundred acres for new cranes and container yards, half for Maersk, half for China’s COSCO. The men on the quay wear hard hats and hi-vis jackets, the uniform of the human cog. But one of the cogs, at least, is loose: a van pulls over and a man with a raffish grin makes a smoking gesture – do we have any contraband? We shake our heads.
    The agent lifts