Brisbane to Los Angeles - Grounded: A Down to Earth Journey Around the World - page 97

We're concerned the bad weather might slow us down and force us to miss our connection with the
cruise ship in Auckland. We're also not looking forward to severe seasickness. But the storms never come.
Instead, we just hang out on the bow with the Romanians and watch for whales. “Is most peaceful place
on ship,” says Andrei, a bearded engine-room technician. “Far from engines,” he notes, flicking a cigarette
butt over the rail. “You can think about lot of things here.”
Our vigil on the bow eventually pays off when we spot a pod of twenty or thirty humpbacks a few hun-
dred yards off the port side. Plumes sprout from their blowholes at percussive intervals. It's like a toneless
pipe organ.
Fleeting moments like this are one of the perks of a life at sea. Lucian gets positively poetic, for instance,
when he describes what it's like to pass through the world's major canals. “When you go through the locks
in Panama,” he says, “you can reach out and touch the walls. Maybe meter away. But Suez is my favorite.
If you get off and walk into the desert, and then look back, it looks like the ships are floating across the
sand.”
The sailors have also experienced less magical maritime moments. Lucian tells us that the Matisse got
pirated a few years back, not far from Singapore, as it crossed through the bandit-infested Strait of Malacca.
Due to some engine trouble the Matisse had slowed to half speed, and “this made ship very good for board-
ing,” as Lucian explains.
The pirates threw grappling hooks over the rails, scrambled aboard, and brandished knives. They went
straight for the captain's room and forced him to unlock the ship's safe. Once they'd stolen all the money
and valuables inside, they rappelled back down their ropes. “They are gone so fast,” says Lucian, “most of
the crew had no idea it happened. They thought it was joke when captain says we are pirated.”
Generally, the crew members are quiet at meals, wolfing down their food in silence. (Which could be a
coping strategy: The Matisse 's menu is heavy on indistinguishable, rubbery meats, served in gloopy stews.
Rebecca has decided it's the inevitable outcome of putting a Filipino cook—named “Cookie,” as the cook
is on every freighter—in the galley of a French-owned ship, and then asking him to cater to the taste buds
of Romanians. The result is a sort of watered-down, global hash.) At dinner one night, though, an engineer
named Doru introduces himself and starts chatting with us in perfect English. Doru is ruggedly handsome,
speaks five languages, and at all times carries around his neck a large, expensive-looking camera—which,
based on my observations, he uses solely to photograph port installations. Given all this, I think there's
about a 40 percent chance that he's a spy.
When I ask Doru to share any nightmarish tales of life at sea he might have, he recounts the time, seven
years ago, when he was working on a freighter in the Mediterranean. His first indication that something
might be amiss came when he realized that the ship had no working radio. Its only means of communic-
ation was to get close enough in to shore that the captain could use a cell phone. One night, shortly after
docking at a port in Italy and beginning to load cargo, the captain mysteriously left the ship, offering no
explanation. The next morning, customs agents raided.
The entire crew was handcuffed, arrested, and held for questioning. It seems they'd unknowingly loaded
aboard four tons of unlicensed cigarettes. Doru—along with several equally innocent Pakistani deck-
hands—got locked up in a jail in southern Italy. He was occasionally bused, wearing shackles, to hearings
at a local courthouse. He wasn't freed for thirty-two days.
THE Matisse is running behind schedule, due to long delays getting in and out of the crowded Australian
ports. There's not much we can do about the slow pace. My constant nagging of Lucian doesn't persuade
him to goose our speed.