We arrived on the South African coast in February, at the height of the southern summer. Our first port of call was Durban in Natal province, the busiest port in the country. We were due to be there for two weeks loading steel. In the event, we anchored for three weeks in the roads, waiting for our berth. The anchorage was chock full, there were over fifty ships waiting to go alongside. A long anchorage spell in fine weather allowed us to ensure all the outstanding work was carried out. The crew and cadets spent their days smartly painting all the scruffy areas. The second mate laid out all his Admiralty charts and brought them up to date with the latest corrections, new lights and wrecks and amended depths and changing shoals. I was assigned two cadets for a week, and used them to strip out all the lifeboats, wash and paint the woodwork, oil the oars, change any worn or rotting rope-work, rig and air the sails. We changed most of the stores, the cadets ate the old barley sugar to the point of being sick, we changed the fresh water, we dumped the out-of-date pyrotechnics. I had both lifeboats run out down to the water, then wound back up again, greasing the wires as this was done. The winding in by hand was backbreaking, and I had to help the cadets.

In the morning anchor watch from eight to twelve, there was little to do but idle. The Old Man was a stickler for uniform, so there was no chance of shedding my shirt to bronze myself on the bridge wing. I helped the second mate with some chart corrections, I corrected all the Admiralty Light Lists of the world. We checked the position to make sure we were not dragging anchor, although there was little point unless the wind was up, which it never was. At nights, I just paced the bridge and drank the brew of coffee and condensed milk made by the watchman. There were several other British ships in the anchorage and we would find a free channel on the VHF radio and exchange news. It was all the usual: where are you bound, where are you from, what beer do you have on board, where’s a good place to go in Durban and so on. Sometimes they wanted Morse code practice, and I would drag one of the cadets onto the bridge to get out the Aldis lamp and engage. I was aware that a large number of ships in the anchorage would only have a watchman on the bridge while the officer was in the bar or in bed. Some would have no one up at all. Not us on the Benlawers, though, we kept full duties, fully uniformed, for the whole duration. The days dragged, time slowed. I lay on the monkey island atop the bridge in the afternoons and read, roasting myself under the African sun, falling asleep and waking up burnt. We drank cold beer when we weren’t working and swapped tales and watched the time drag past.

When we finally went alongside in Durban, we were allocated a prime berth on the north side of the harbour, a short walking distance from the town. The southern side, along the Island View wharf, was known to be a bit dodgy at night. The black dockworkers, in those apartheid days, took the opportunity to rob and thrash any white sailor found returning alone to his ship in the dark. We stayed two weeks in Durban. The place was stark in its separation of blacks and whites. Being white, I was awarded the advantage, but it was alien to me and I found the rigid separation very disconcerting. My shipmates mostly felt the same, although we still made the most of the place, hypocrites that we were.

My last visit to Durban had been as a cadet when I was involved in a late-night drunken car crash as we were driven by a South African who fell asleep while we sped along West Street. It was with a sense of déjà vu that I hired a car, the intention being to use it to see the wideopen spaces of Africa. Once I had the car, though, I did little more than use it as a ferry to take us to and from the bars along Smith Street and West Street and to the Millionaire’s Mile by North Beach. At the witching hour one night, following a hectic session in the Millionaire’s Mile, a carload of us were heading for the Smugglers, a dark cave of a place, loud and vibrant and boozy. I lost control and spun the car and whacked into a shop window. The car was damaged but drivable, we were shaken but unhurt, glass was strewn across the pavement. It seemed best to back up and roar off, which we did. The next day the car hire company announced the insurance was invalid because we’d had a crash. We laughed. We asked the car hire rep what was the point of insurance if it became invalid when it was needed. He laughed back, but he had my credit card imprint. He said: ‘Get a lawyer.’ We hired a lawyer and he charged a lot, we lost anyway. It cost me half a month’s pay. I was furious. The others sympathised. I didn’t have to buy a drink for weeks, it was their way of chipping in.

Cargo work only took place during the day and was easy. Cheap, compliant labour and lots of it meant that things went smoothly. The nights in Durban passed in a haze of partying. We enticed a host of nurses on board for a formal do one evening, dressing smartly for the occasion in half-and-halves, blue trousers and tropical uniform shirts. The event started in a controlled manner, all of us strutting and posing and eyeing up the girls and acting like gentlemen, while they posed and eyed us up in turn. As the evening progressed our standards slipped. Angus started slurring and leering, a group of engineers turned inwards and gathered in a clump to tell loud stories of debauchery to each other, we told inappropriate jokes to the girls. The nicer ones became repelled and left, those who stayed were as bad as any of us. I became hitched to a chubby marble- white girl called Bella. I asked her how she managed to stay so bleached in a sunny place like South Africa. She replied, unpleasantly, ‘I hate the sun and why would I want to turn myself into a brown person anyway?’ Bella became more offensive and more shrewish as the hours went by and I started to dislike her. But I fended off the other officers anyway, as they lurked nearby in predatory fashion waiting for me to slip, and kept her for myself, as men do if they have something that other men want.

We found a pair of stowaways on board after we left Durban. I was on the bridge wing at about one o’clock in the morning, it was a clear moonless night and traffic was light and we were about ten miles off the coast, near Port Edward. I sensed some movement behind me and looked round to see two burly figures in the gloom coming out from behind the funnel. I couldn’t make out who they were and assumed that it was a couple of engineers checking something in the funnel housing. It niggled at me, though, only because normal manners meant the engineers would usually have come onto the bridge for a chat or just to say hello. I sent the watch sailor down to have a look around. He came back up after a few minutes to say that he had found two Africans scoffing food in the crew pantry. I told him to wake the bosun, the standby watch man and a couple of others, then find an empty cabin and lock them in with some food and drink until the morning. This was done. The stowaways complied with good humour and no resistance.

The next morning they were quizzed by the chief mate. As the discoverer, I was roused from my bunk to be in attendance. The two Africans were crestfallen when they found the ship was only bound for East London, just a day’s run down the coast. They’d thought we were headed for some rich country where they would have a better life. They were young men, Zulus, broad and strong-looking although grubby and shabbily clothed, and they cringed when spoken to, as if we might start beating them. I suppose their dirty and unkempt appearance was because they had spent half a day in the funnel housing, although their cowed manner was most likely because of the apartheid regime of the day, which instilled wariness towards white authority. In the event we had them as our guests for three days because our berth in East London wasn’t ready and we had to anchor in the roads until it was clear. The mate put the pair of them to work with the crew to earn their keep and they were content enough. The crew had no prejudice, which surprised and delighted the Africans. In the evening they would sit happily in the crew bar, being bought drinks and joining in the conversations. Perhaps they had a couple of days of the good life they craved after all. They looked defeated when removed by port officials after we docked. Several of the crew lined up to wave them off, and they turned at the bottom of the gangway to wave back, giving quick smiles before trudging off.

We tramped round the South African coast, from East London to Port Elizabeth, before arriving at Cape Town during the celebrations for the Van Riebeeck’s Day, or Founder’s Day. Jan Van Riebeeck was a Dutchman celebrated as the founder of Cape Town in 1652. He built a fort, and the Dutch retained control until eventually being hoofed out by the British in 1805. Cape Town people were engaged in eccentric antics to commemorate the anniversary. There was theatre and street parties, students were carrying the first underwater man up Table Mountain, a student submerged in a bath and breathing through a snorkel. We lay at anchor again for several days, seals and dolphins flopped in the water around the ship. We caught fat fish to barbecue. Cape Town was cooler than Durban, thick fog dropped on us in the night, the ringing of the ship’s bells on the fo’c’sle travelled eerily through the wet air. We picked up half a dozen passengers, older retired types with time on their hands who wanted to visit a few offbeat places. They had their own bar up on the passenger deck, although a couple kept coming into the officers’ bar to enhance their experience. We were civil enough but didn’t want them there. Ashore in Cape Town, I made the obligatory trip on the cable car up Table Mountain with a couple of others, although we found it unenlightening and went back down to drink Castle Beer and eat monkey gland steaks. Like most people I thought that monkey gland steak involved monkey glands and was disappointed to find it was only a sort of barbecue sauce, which didn’t have the same élan.

On leaving Cape Town, we set off north up the bleak south-west coast. The Admiralty Pilot No. 2 – Africa, Volume II, gave an appropriate description of the place:-

Nothing is more uninviting that the appearance of the coast between Walvis Bay and the mouth of the Orange River … The whole of the country which extends from Cabo Negro to beyond Itshabo Island is a desert region and almost rainless … There is no landing place between Cabo Frio and Rocky Point; and the nearest known water holes are at least ten miles inland and very rare… Great caution is necessary when navigating in the vicinity.

The northern part of South West Africa, now modern-day Namibia, is known as the Skeleton Coast, named after the hundreds of shipwrecks that littered the area after having struck offshore rocks in the fog. The name is also thought to have come from the whale skeletons that were scattered along the coast in the nineteenth century, when whaling was in full swing. We tracked up this notorious land, keeping well offshore, calling first at Luderitz for a day, to offload mining equipment. Luderitz had the feel of a frontier town, the place was fenced in to stop people walking into the diamond-rich areas in the Namib desert, where precious stones were said to lie on the desert floor. The government and the diamond mining companies were keen to protect the market price, and were rumoured to have issued shoot on sight instructions for anyone found inside the restricted zones. Luderitz was named after a German tobacco trader, Franz Luderitz. In 1882 he had bought the area from a local chief for £100 and 200 rifles. Further north, Walvis Bay was slightly larger, but still had the wood-built appearance of a place that had been put up a few years ago and could be returned to the Namib Desert next year. A spit of land protected the harbour, I could stand in Walvis Bay and see the endless sea to the west, then turn my head and see the desert rolling away to the east. This part of Africa had been known as German South West Africa, although it had been taken away from the Germans as a penance for losing the First World War and had since been run by a South African administration. A lot of the Germans were deported in 1918, although many more kept a low profile and remained. I went into a bar in town with Ian to escape the blistering heat and it was like going back a century. We squinted into the dark until our eyes became accustomed to the cool gloom. Bottles stood on crude wooden shelving behind a battered and stained bar-top, rough-looking men stood in a line along the bar drinking from bottles, spittoons lined the floor, mismatched tables and chairs were scattered around, a piano stood against one wall, the walls were splashed with whitewash. The customers stared at us with borderline hostility as we entered, then turned away. We ordered beer and sat at a table and talked quietly among ourselves. I felt as if I was in an old Western film and was about to be challenged by the local gunfighter.

We called briefly at Durban again before returning to the East, dropping off some transhipped cargo from Walvis Bay and picking up a full complement of passengers. The stewards were mightily pleased, anticipating big tips when they left. I leant over the rails and watched as the passengers filed up the gangway. They were universally ancient to my twentyone- year-old eyes. The youngest of them must have been in their fifties. 

Continued next month …

This is an extract taken from Simon’s book “Chasing Conrad”