Free Down to the Sea in Ships by Horatio Clare Page A

but his case was dismissed for lack of evidence that the victims were dead. His motive for the murders seems to lie in Canadian regulations which fine ships seven thousand dollars for every stowaway who arrives in Canada, and Yang Ming company policy which punishes captains of ships where stowaways are found ‘according to their degree of fault’. Yang Ming paid off the families of the deceased in an out-of-court settlement. The
Maersk Dubai
now sails in the livery of her owners, renamed the
YM Fortune
.
    Entering the Strait of Gibraltar the seaways are flecked with fishing boats, ferries and freighters. As we track between the Pillars of Hercules I dash around the bridge with binoculars, gazing hungrily in all directions. The atmosphere of the Strait is charged, as if by an approaching storm, with the tense proximity of two mightily distinct cultures, as though planets have swum too close together. The weathers here change with squally speed. Below us are at least seven major currents, dominated on the surface by the Atlantic inflow, and near the seabed by the saline Mediterranean outflow. When Coleridge first saw the two continents simultaneously he recorded his exhilaration in his notebook, and the sense that must strike every traveller through the Strait, that man has made a lunatic division of existences out of a small gap of water.
    I [am] sitting at the rudder case, my desk on the duck coop, my seat, have Spain, the Coast of Cadiz to wit, on my left hand, & Africa, the Barbary Coast, on my right. I am right abreast of a high bank, black brown heath with interspaces & large & small scarifications of light red clay – beyond this mountain islands, alongside & in file resembling canoes and boats with their keels upward. We have a breeze that promises to let us laugh at Privateers & Corsairs that in a calm will run out, as a fox will a fowl when the wolf dog that guards the poultry yard can only bark at him from his chain. This is Spain! – That is Africa! Now, then, I have seen Africa! Power of names to give interest! When I first sate down, with Europe on my left and Africa on my right, both distinctly visible, I felt a quickening of the movements in the Blood . . . This is Africa! That is Europe! – There is division, sharp boundary, abrupt Change! – and what are they in Nature – two Mountain Banks, they make a noble river of the interfluent sea, existing & acting with distinctness and manifoldness indeed, but at once & as one – no division, no change, no antithesis!
    Tangier reclines on its hillside, all temptation, like a magus leaning on a bar. Jebel Musa in Morocco wears a magnificent hat of cloud while the sun shines on the Rock of Gibraltar. We slide into Algeciras towards evening. Dolphins play between us and the pilot boat as it comes alongside. The Captain pretty well guides us into the harbour; the pilot has little to do. Some communication problem with Chris on the fo’c’sle provokes a deep blast from the horn. The Captain tells a story of an infamous Algeciras brothel, Los Lagos, which was closed down because of drugs, crime and fighting.
    â€˜Then the authorities in Gibraltar begged them to reopen it because all the crime went there. So they reopen. New beds and clean sheets! The seaman’s priest told me this so I know it is true.’
    Everyone likes Algeciras because the port is at the foot of the town. The containers, fishing boats, quays, lorry-slalom and the Spanish evening you expect, but you walk through a Moroccan village first.
    There is that smell, halfway between meat and spice, and women in djellabas, men smoking, teleboutiques, mosques and Allah Akbar is chanted softly from a window. Two obese prostitutes in bad moods mark the fringe of the settlement. The upper town is
cervezas
and pigs’ legs, people eating tapas and seafood. There are ships and cranes at the end of the streets. On the basis that tomorrow is my birthday – and