But standing here in the noise and industry, looking up almost two hundred feet-higher than Niagara Falls- to the top of Kendal, I feel the giddiness of a Christmas morning child. I swim, although not in terrifying oceans.
I am an islander who has never been maritime. I’m about to leave on a freighter, I said, but a ship. On one train, where no seats were to be had, I swayed in the vestibule with two men wearing the uniform of a rail freight company. It took me three train journeys to reach Felixstowe from my northern English home. This is a Terminator terminal, a place where humans are hidden in crane or truck cabs, where everything is clamorous machines.
When the journalist Henry Mayhew visited London’s docks in 1849, he found “decayed and bankrupt master butchers, master bakers, publicans, grocers, old soldiers, old sailors, Polish refugees, broken-down gentlemen, discharged lawyers’ clerks, suspended Government clerks, almsmen, pensioners, servants, thieves.” They have long since gone. Kendal, of course, but also the thundering trucks, the giant boxes in many colors, the massive gantry cranes that straddle the quay, reaching up ten stories and over to ships that stretch three football pitches in length. Everything in a modern container port is enormous, overwhelming, crushing. I stop at the bottom of the ship’s gangway, waiting for an escort and stilled and awed by the immensity of this thing, much of her the color of a summer-day sky, so blue her bottom is painted dull red, her name- Maersk Kendal-written large on her side. So here I am on a Friday in June, looking up at a giant ship that will carry me from this southern English port of Felixstowe to Singapore, for five weeks and 9,288 nautical miles through the pillars of Hercules, pirate waters, and weather.
No sensible sailor goes to sea on the day of the Crucifixion or the journey will be followed by ill-will and malice. Our thanks to the author for sharing it with the Longreads community.įriday. The following is the opening chapter of Rose George’s new book, Ninety Percent of Everything. Rose George | Metropolitan Books | August 2013 | 17 minutes (4,213 words)
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