And so it turned out. For the men up on the bridge, Voyage No. 115 was basically just another routine crossing. For me, a rank newcomer to the ocean, the crossing was at first memorable simply for being a crossing of this great ocean. We had what for me were some nail-biting moments of great spectacle and storm; we spent our time almost entirely alone on the sea - encountering just one other vessel en route, despite being on a recognised shipping lane - and that sense of pressing solitude I found more than a little intimidating; and when we passed over the Virgin Rocks we did so in darkness and I never got to see the codfish. But there was nothing desperately unusual - until the single interruption, the one small moment that I remember more vividly than perhaps it deserves, and which took place while we were lying stopped in the shallow Atlantic waters off Flemish Cap.
• • •
It was just after dawn, and bitterly cold. The season still being early spring, this being Titanic waters and with the Arctic ice fields perilously close by, our crewmen were on alert for icebergs and growlers and other similar hazards. None had yet been seen: the voyage, so far as the navigating officers were concerned, had been entirely plain sailing. Nor were there any of the fogs for which this stretch of ocean is notorious: the Labrador Current and the Gulf Stream collide softly and unseen near here, and the sudden blending of tropical and Arctic waters can thicken the air above into grey pea soup for days at a time. Not this day, however, for which many had reason to be thankful.
I had risen early and, muffled to the ears, was out before breakfast, strolling the length of the boat deck. All was normal: we were hissing along nicely, dawn behind us, darkness ahead. Suddenly, however, bells started to clang, crewmen started running up and down the companionways and the decks, the ship’s engines unexpectedly stopped churning, the vessel lost way, and then it swiftly fell silent. We drifted steadily to a halt, our smooth westbound progress replaced by a heavy and ungainly rolling. The gale of the previous night had now all but blown itself out, but a stiff westerly breeze was still whistling through the aerials and gantries up above. Before long, I thought, we would be blown backwards.
The ocean here, on the very outer edge of the American continental shelf, appeared quite empty, with not a bird or any marine life in sight. It was quite rough, and though the ship herself had become smothered by an overwhelming deadness, the sea was evidently very much alive, the waves and the swell slapping ferociously against the hull.
After a few moments, though, there came an unexpected sound, from directly ahead. At first it was just a low-frequency sigh, then a hum — then recognisable as the faint sound of a motor. An aeroplane engine. Up on the bridgewings, I could see the officers of the watch, acting as one, training their binoculars to westward, towards the direction of the sound, and peering anxiously into a still half-dark sky. Soon there came a cry — the aircraft had been spotted. A few minutes later we all saw it: first a single pinprick of light, then two, and finally the outline of a propeller plane, its nose glinting in the weak sun. As it approached us it came in low and fast, a large, two-engined machine that roared and smoked as it turned above us and dipped its wings, the roundels of the Royal Canadian Air Force clearly visible on the fuselage.
Events then began to happen fast. From near the stern of the boat deck came a clank of pivots and rusty levers, and then a hard splash as the ship’s motorboat was launched. It sped out onto the ocean and came to a stop a mile or so away from us. Once it was holding position the aircraft swooped and turned, opened its cargo doors, and slowed to pass directly over the tiny craft, as it did so dropping something that floated down onto the sea on a small orange parachute. A sailor from the boat’s crew swept-it up with a billhook and the steersman, giving a thumbs-up, headed the launch back home. The aircraft rose back up into the sky, dipped its wings again in farewell, and headed to its faraway base, becoming a smoke-trailed speck, then vanishing within moments.
The motorboat was winched up, the package - which turned out to be emergency medicine for an elderly woman passenger in distress in our liner’s hospital — was duly delivered, and within the hour our engines had throbbed back into life and we were heading back onto our original course once again.
A trivial maritime incident, occasioning no more than a negligible delay in our arrival in Montreal two days later. But it was an event that has remained with me ever since. There was something uncanny about the sudden silence, the emptiness, the realisation of the enormous depths below us and the limitless heights above, the universal greyness of the scene, the very evident and potentially terrifying power of the rough seas and the wind, and the fact that despite our puny human powerless-ness and insignificance, invisible radio beams and Morse code signals had summoned readily offered help from somewhere far away. It was an augury of sorts, I have come to think in the years since, that this entire small drama had taken place on the first voyage that I ever took across the seas.
The captain’s log for the closing moment of Voyage No. 115 is entirely laconic, almost dismissive: “Pilots exchanged at Three Rivers. Fine weather continued all the way up St. Lawrence. Clock tower passed at 1813hrs. Canted into berth with aid two tugs. All fast No. 8 shed at 1853hrs. Finished With Engines.” We had crossed the ocean in seven days, six hours, and seven minutes, and despite our mid-ocean rendezvous were just fifty-four minutes late. British railway trains of the day seldom did much better.
• • •
Unknown to all of us aboard that week, and quite by coincidence, forces unseen and unseemly were hard at work. They were the dark forces of economics. As it turned out the Empress of Britain was to make only eight more scheduled crossings of the Atlantic in her life. Just six months later, in October, a peremptory announcement was made that the barely seven-year-old flagship, launched with great fanfare by the Queen in 1955, had been withdrawn from Atlantic service and would be sold. Her new owners, Greeks from Piraeus, would instead steam holidaymakers gently around the Caribbean, in a hurry no more.
The economics of large passenger liners suddenly made no sense. BOAC and Pan American had both begun air service between London’s Heathrow and New York’s Idlewild (later JFK) airports five years before, in 1958. The first flights were obliged to make refuelling stops at Gander, in Newfoundland, but then as the planes became more powerful, both airlines began to cross the ocean non-stop, and scores of other carriers soon began to do the same. One by one the great passenger liners vanished from the ocean trade, and such ships as survived began to cruise instead, helping to inaugurate what would become an entirely different maritime industry.2
So it was tellingly symbolic that I came back from America six months later by air, and did so in what turned out to be the very same week that the stunned crew of the Empress was making its final voyage with the much-loved liner. Had I known of the droll coincidence I daresay I might have looked down and seen her ploughing her last white eastbound furrow home. But my flight had its distracting moments anyway: it was aboard a Lockheed Constellation, a four-engine, triple-tailed machine designed first as a long-range bomber and then a troop transport, and operated in this case by a somewhat dubious charter company known as Capitol Airways of Nashville, Tennessee. We took off from New York, landed four hours later at Gander, then (by the skin of our teeth, the pilot later confessed, as the fuel was alarmingly low) made Shannon in the west of Ireland, but proceeded to discover that for some technical and legal reason we had no permission to land in London and were diverted to Brussels instead. Eventually, and testily, I found a flight to Manchester and made the rest of my way home by rail.
• • •
Almost half a century has passed since I made those two crossings — fifty-odd years during which I must have traversed this particular body of water five hundred times, at least. And though I have ventured out from a variety of other ports in both the North and South Atlantic, to cross in other directions, by rhumb lines or diagonally or along the lines of longitude or in huge looping curves, or to make expeditions out to the various