Haemorhoids...

In 1967 I spent 7 months on a wartime built refrigerated cargo ship. Our trade was centred around loading fruit – mainly oranges, grapes and avocados, in various ports of South Africa from Cape Town to Durban, and bringing it up to Europe. We never knew where we were due to unload until we got up level with the Canary Islands – our directions were always ‘to the Canary Islands for orders’.

This old ship was nearing the end of her days, and our job as deck cadets involved turning to at 0600 every single morning and refilling ALL the fire extinguishers used to put out the numerous fires in the engine room over the previous 24 hours. This situation worsened as the months and miles went by, and our last port of call in the UK was Swansea and we were heading there from Bremerhaven. It all came to a head in the North Sea some 20 miles off Great Yarmouth. One of the turbo blowers caught fire and this time our fire extinguishers were not man enough for the job. 

We did lower the lifeboats with a view to abandoning ship but unfortunately, they sank as fast as they were being lowered. Clinker built boats that had spent almost all their life in the tropics meant that the planks had shrunk a tad! We did have life rafts, but at this stage a firefighting tug arrived from Rotterdam, so we all collected on the bridge and let them do their thing. A day later we resumed our journey with one engine (on a twin screw ship) going at half speed. Five days later we arrived in Swansea. It was mid- February and very cold.

In Swansea, one of the Seacunnies (a Helmsman - we had what was then known as a Lascar crew) came to me to tell me that he had a pain in his bottom. I took him to the Chief Officer who decided that he should visit the doctor and that I should take him as I knew a few words of Hindi. With considerable help from me and the doctor we finally persuaded him to take off his 7 layers of clothing in order that the doctor could investigate. Within 10 seconds he diagnosed haemorrhoids. We then went through the elaborate pantomime of showing him how a suppository worked, how often it was to be administered and, most importantly, where it was to be placed. The doctor kindly inserted the first one for our man and we went to great lengths to ensure that he understood what, why, when and how. We returned to the ship.

The following day our patient, let’s call him Abdul, knocked on the chief officer's door holding up the empty suppository box.  “All finished sahib” he said! “How… what… eh…?” said the chief officer.  “All eaten sahib”. He never came back to us and his work was unaffected. We did wonder whether his tonsils might now be the size of a pea!

A bump to the elbow...

A year later I was on another general cargo ship heading to Australia. We had Zulu deck crew with Natal Indian catering crew. We arrived at our first port of call in Albany, Western Australia. Local protocol demanded that before we could obtain quarantine clearance a doctor was ferried out to the ship on the pilot’s boat to inspect the ‘member’ of every single person on board. Accordingly, we lined up on the boat deck in order of rank with the Captain at one end and the youngest junior ordinary seaman at the other. The doctor solemnly walked down the row of men, black, white and brown and inspected the bared member of everyone.

He nodded approval and left. We had now passed quarantine.

In Melbourne, which worked 24/7 on discharge, we maintained sea watch patterns. Although the chief officer pulled rank and ordered me and the 2nd mate to work 12 on 12 off. Our duties now were cargo watch. In order to get reasonable time ashore, we would agree between ourselves an arrangement such that the mate who wanted a full day ashore worked 2 x 12 hour shifts which would give him a full day off when the roles were reversed. It seemed like a great plan!

I was well into my 2nd stint of 12 hours, up and down the 5 holds, into the small hours. I was dog tired. Climbing the vertical ladder from No 3 hold, I accidentally banged my elbow really hard against the iron hatch coaming. Within an hour I had a soft spongy lump on my elbow the size of an orange. The purser (who held the first aid kit) sent me ashore to see the doctor who produced an enormous needle the size of a knitting needle, pushed it into the lump and attempted to draw the fluid from the spongy lump. He failed. I was advised to return to the ship and take aspirin; “It will go down of its own accord in a few days”. 

I was more concerned about the intense pain that I was in – not from the bang on the elbow, from the bodged attempt to drain the fluid off! The pain would not go away, and really was excruciating pain. Aspirin wasn’t touching it. So, some 6 hours later I went to see the purser who happened to be in the chief officer’s cabin enjoying an end of day cold beer. I asked him if there was anything he could give me for this pain. He discussed it with the chief officer who mentioned ‘morphine’. The purser said “Well I do have morphine but the forms I must fill in, and the interrogation they give me if I dispense it… It’s just such a pain that I would rather not administer the stuff. If you had cut a finger off or been crushed by a wayward derrick I would happily dispense it but a bang on the elbow? No!”

The chief officer then reached behind him and brought out a full bottle of Bells whiskey, and advised “drink that”.  I asked “Is that an order sir?” “Yes, drink as much of it as you can and then go to your cabin and sleep, that is an order”. Well, it worked; the hangover headache was a lot easier to manage than the elbow pain!

Depression....

I did a couple of years on three different refrigerated cargo ships and several times did what was known as a ‘double header’, and once a ‘triple header’ The double header would involve leaving a UK port sailing to South Africa, load fruit in any one of 4 different ports, and then return to Europe (via the ‘Canary Islands for orders!’). We would then discharge our cargo in one of four or five European countries, and then return to South Africa and do it all over again. A triple header involved doing it three times. 

The toughest part of these voyages was sailing the 6,000 miles from Cape Town up to UK waters; through the English Channel, up the North Sea, into the Baltic and then all the way back but not actually stopping in the UK. We could see and almost touch the white cliffs of Dover and the green rolling hills of the South Downs: tune into Tony Blackburn on Radio 1. But we couldn’t speak to our family (this was years before mobile phones or the internet), step ashore in the UK, or call in at an English pub and drink an English beer. I think we all found it hard, but some found it very hard and went into a deep depression which could last for a week. Heavy consumption of alcohol often accompanied this depression. 

Doing a triple header was exponentially worse. There was no help available to help you deal with this, it was a case of ‘pull yourself together and get on with it’. Personally the worst one I did was a triple header on another wartime built refrigerated ship that really had seen better days. 

We had just completed our second visit to the Baltic, and on leaving Helsinki having discharged the last of our cargo, were given 47 days to get to Durban – a journey of some 8,500 nautical miles – which we would normally cover in 22 days. The 47 days was our ‘fruit date’. That’s the date when the port expected our fruit to arrive from the Transkei. We set off at three-quarter revs, and very slowly crossed the entire Baltic and then down the North sea, through the English channel.   

Somewhere down off the coast of Senegal, West Africa, one engine broke. We then wandered around in huge circles on one engine at half speed and the rudder set at a permanent 30 degrees for 4 days. Having repaired the second engine, we arrived in Durban bang on the 47th day to be informed that we were to anchor as the fruit had not yet arrived. 

Two weeks later we finally tied up in Durban and that was really hard to deal with. It was not a happy ship with us deck officers, bored with wandering around the south Atlantic, seemingly aimlessly; and the engineers seriously overstretched in trying to deal with everyday maintenance on a very tired old pair of engines, as well as repairing a major breakdown. As far as I’m aware, when the ship did finally return to the UK, not one of the officers returned to the ship.

Some distinguished medical guests...

A couple of years later I was a fully qualified watch keeping officer and was 3rd Officer on a cruise ship based in Cape Town, cruising to Rio de Janeiro, Montevideo, Santos and Buenos Aires. Midway through this season of cruises the ship was chartered lock stock and barrel by none other than Dr. Christian Barnard. In order to avoid the apartheid regime’s rules he chartered the ship and invited several hundred distinguished doctors, surgeons and consultants of all colours and creeds, from all 4 corners of the globe, for a ‘cruise in the blue’.

We duly sailed straight out into international waters and wandered up into the Indian ocean for five days whilst the distinguished guests exchanged knowledge, views, expertise and opinions. As an officer of the watch twice a day from 8-12, I then had to ‘do rounds’ with the master of arms when I came off watch just after midnight. We patrolled every deck of the ship just to check all was well. We noticed that many of our guests were to be seen visiting or leaving cabins that were not their own – and this in the early hours of the morning!

For what it is worth, the Surgeon on the Union Castle cruise ship enjoyed the second highest income on board, beaten only by the chief barman! In the case of the chief barman the arrangements with the company were that he personally bought all the drinks from the company, and then sold them on to the passengers and the crew. In contrast, the surgeon paid rent for the medical facilities and simply charged the passengers for his services. The crew were not required to pay. He did have two nursing sisters at his disposal who were full time employees of the company – but they were rarely busy. 

Despite being only the second highest paid onboard, the Surgeon generously took ten of us ashore in Barbados for a meal. It was 1970 and the bill was £130. The equivalent today would be £2,019!

Ran out of Union Jacks...

In 1972/3, I moved from Union Castle to P&O. I was now a watch keeper on another cruise ship, this time based in Sydney doing two week cruises around the South Pacific. Over the next few months, we carried out many burials at sea and sometimes wondered amongst ourselves whether some of our passengers (we carried 1,100 per cruise) actually came on the cruise with the express purpose of dying. It certainly made for a very cheap funeral for them! 

The practice back then was that the bodies were sewn into a large bag, with a large stitch through the canvas, through the deceased person's nose and back through the canvas, and with several iron shackles placed in the bag. Then a Union Jack was sewn onto the bag, and placed on a long timber board. The actual burial happened at 0530 hrs to avoid crowds of onlookers, and at the given moment the Captain would give the nod, one of us would radio to the engine room and they would drop the revs right off so that all the vibration stopped and it appeared that we had stopped the engines. The board with body on would be lifted on to the side rails and tipped up so that the body would dive into the sea and disappear. 

Sometime into our eighth cruise we ran out of Union Jacks. On this particular occasion we omitted to stitch the Union Jack onto the bag and when the moment came to lift one end of the board the Captain’s last words were “and so we commit his/her body to the deep”… and then in just above a whisper, “and for Christ’s sake hang onto the flag”!

We hope you’ve enjoyed Andrew’s very amusing and entertaining recount of his days at sea – we certainly did! It also amazed us to hear how things used to be, compared with the slick medical services found on cruise ships in this day and age.