The rites of passage for a sailor

Join the sea and see the world is an old adage. But what is true is that service in the Indian merchant navy ships does afford a chance to see the wonderful world around us.

Advertisement

On one ship where I was the chief engineer, my wife joined me for a voyage leaving behind our children with my parents in Amritsar. We made a much sought-after voyage to the Great Lakes which covers North American ports of the US and Canada near the lakes of Ontario, Erie, Michigan and the freshwater Lake Superior. By the time the ship reaches this last lake, we are nearly 600 ft higher than sea level. This is an engineering marvel when a ship is lifted in steps through different level of ‘locks’, where water levels are maintained by gravity from the next higher level for raising the ship and by pumps while lowering the ship returning back to sea level.

There is a lot of reading material on board. Even these were not very helpful in mitigating my wife’s longing to be home with the children. In one of the old National Geographic magazines lying on the ship, she had read an article in which geologists postulated that due to the continuous, though imperceptible, drift of the African continent towards Eurasia, the passage at Gibraltar between these two continents was getting narrower. And this would, one day, result in making our present-day Mediterranean Sea land-locked and a dry valley once the passage at Gibraltar closed completely, as had happened many times in the past billion years or so.

After a long passage from the Montreal port across the Atlantic Ocean, braving one storm after another, we were in sight of Gibraltar, the gateway to the east Mediterranean Sea and farther on to the Suez Canal. The entry through Gibraltar, when returning from the west, is always a relief as it gives the feeling of being almost on land. You see land on both sides, Europe on the north and Africa in the south, when your ship is transiting through the Mediterranean Sea.

When our ship was approaching the passage to Gibraltar, my wife came on the boat deck and asked me to increase the speed of the ship. A request for increasing the speed is not unusual, but I was exasperated till she added with mock concern, ‘Let us get through faster before the gate at Gibraltar closes in our face, and delays us for many days in case we have to go via the Cape of Good Hope, a much longer and stormy passage to India.’ It was quite a compliment to the chief engineer of the ship on the performance and speed of his ship, coming especially from his better half, not the usual source of encomiums in the normal course of things.