| British India Steam Navigation Company Ltd. |
By Captain John de Barr
Reproduced by kind permission of Sea Breezes.
September 1996 Issue
Itinda
The late 1950s marked the beginning of the end for the traditional form of apprenticeship. A training that developed character building by imitation, slowly diluted by new ideas from a far distant head office. What follows is a story typical of the times.
The chill of that Gothenburg January night in 1958 caused the accommodation bulkheads to contract so much that the many layers of paint applied in the tropics had fallen off in sheets. This warpaint (for it included an honourable layer of camouflage) was peeling from the British India's `Itinda', a classic general cargo steamship of the `three island' type.
Her centre island was high enough to accommodate the elephants, which had been occasionally stabled over her now redundant `tween deck coalbunker hatches'. According to an anachronistic post war company's manual, shippers were allowed to send one mahout free of charge with every three of those Burma teak forest elephants transported. However, I could find no company directive to deck officers should a couple of these beasts turn up unattended.
I think the management at Leadenhall Street brought the `Itinda' back from the Far East to personally confirm their suspicions that this old fashioned tropical lady had little future in the post independence Indian shipping scene.
At that time I was still a chota sahib, this being the ship's Hindi (Coast Bat) word for an apprentice. After a brief lapse into "youthful exuberance" whilst serving in the cadetship `Chindwara' (of which now, as a sober senior shipmaster I cringe at the mere memory) Then that same paternal management must have decided that I might be good Coast material – in BI the Coast referred to the Coast of India!
That part of the company whose ships ran to and from Europe was known as the Home Line. Their officers were paid in sterling and released for leave by relief crews on arrival at London, as was the norm for the British deep sea Merchant Navy at that time. Until joining the `Itinda', I had experienced no other mode of employment but the preponderance of the BI sea-going staff were of a different breed entirely, these were the Coast Men.
Coast Men were stationed at Bombay, Calcutta, Singapore or Mombasa. Here their families resided for the spell of two and a half years, earning five months home leave at the end of this period. Bachelors were permitted an additional one months flying leave in the middle of a spell to anywhere in the world. All were paid in the local currency of their station.
If there were any typical traits amongst Coast Men then they would have to be the ability to ingest astonishing quantities of export-proof spirits, after sunset; a lack of vindictiveness, due in part to promotion being strictly on seniority; probably a liking for the works of Kipling and also the tendency to have life membership of the League of Empire Loyalists.
So, I had become a Coast Man by default, and in Sweden too, of all places!
When laden, we sailed out of the Kattegat. Our officers not entirely at their ease until Suez had been transited, whereupon the /tint/a began to exude that ineffable "happy ship atmosphere" so essential for men living in a close proximity for years at a time.
The Itinda seemed to want to put the European winter behind her as much as her crew of 65 British officers and Indian seamen. She began the voyage at an unaccustomed 11 knots, due to the cold North Sea increasing the usual efficiency of her condensers.
Having been sub-consciously conditioned only, until then, to the gentle thump of a mighty Doxford diesel, I was delighted by the "feel" of propulsion by a triple expansion engine. Very soothing, very different. I found that steam engineers were different too.
Our Scottish chief was known around the coasts of Asia as "Scientific Sid". An unwavering believer in the immortality of the marine steam engine, Sid dismissed all fuel efficiency claims for diesel engines as ill founded propaganda. Anyone being entertained by him, in his cabin, would be sworn to secrecy as he pulled out his latest design of a triple, quadruple, sextupal or whatever expansion engine of astounding efficiency. Another of his innovations was to keep whisky in the teas-maid, by his bunk.
Sid's engine-room was intriguing. On descending the long steel staircase to the "plates" an evocative smell of all things steam recalled an earlier era of seafaring. I remember that lubricating oil was stored within the sturdy legs that rose from the crankcase to support the cylinders above. A brass tap inserted at the bottom allowed the Indian tael wallahs (oilers) to top up their cans. At the extreme after end of Sid's domain was another brass tap. This was left dripping into the tunnel bilges, allowing the cooling seawater to pass through the wooden bearings (lignum vitae) of the tail shaft.
The forward main engine bearing was considered to run too hot when the ship was loaded, though all right when ballasted. The offending white metal was often swathed in sacking and kept wet by a slow running hose. There was a normal operational requirement for seawater into the engine room too, as the crosshead guides were water cooled by design. On tropical voyages these guides would have green algae hanging off them; plant-life presumably being nourished by the sougie (emulsified oil) which reciprocating steam engines inevitably produce.
Masters in the BI were referred to as Commanders. Legend had it that this was decreed by an Order-in-Council after some ancient misunderstanding about the status of the rank captain among the army personnel in one of the company's many troopships. Imagine a major of the Rajputani Rifles laying down the law to a puce-faced shipmaster and you will probably grasp the essence of the problem.
The Commander, which we three boys were then bound apprentice to, was genial enough. He allowed us far more freedom than we had been accustomed to under the necessarily harsh discipline of the BI cadet ships, that metamorphic system designed to allow schoolboys to develop first into seamen then finally emerge into the world hopefully, as gentlemanly officers.
Whilst undergoing my training in the `Chindwara', I had lived in her mid upper `tween decks', in the close proximity of the thirty-seven other cadets. Due to the Suez Crisis closing the canal for most of those three years, our voyages between Europe and Australia were particularly protracted. Boredom caused frequent, spontaneous raids between the occupants of the fourteen berth dormitories of the two watches, to the extent that by the time I left her, I really craved privacy.
In the Itinda I was allotted the luxury of a cabin to myself. My coveted private space was probably the pilot cabin, situated aft of the Commander's accommodation. Enough room for a bunk and wardrobe, though I had to sit on the edge of the bed to be able to write at the folding card table provided. The wash basin boasted only a cold tap but the boy (a Goanese steward old enough to be my grandfather) brought jugs of hot water each morning, drawn from a winch cylinder drain cock. Number three winches which were left "on steam" at sea just for this purpose. Though air-conditioning was yet an era away, tropical living in this type of ship was pleasant. All cabins were in the shade of an overhanging deck-head. Windows and doors, which usually opened directly onto deck, were fitted with fly-screens and louvres.
The bridge too was mostly in the open-air. Awnings, varnished hardwoods, polished brass and holystoned teak abounded. Water in eight wooden buckets with their rope handles secured by double Mathew-Walker knots, supplied the first line of fire-fighting equipment. In one corner of the chartroom stood an early Marconi radar, with steel drawers of valves aglow. In cold weather the ship's cat would inevitably doze in the warmth of the control panel. Apart from this radar set, the instrumentation was pre-war. Should the officer-of-the-watch require to use radar, he had to call the Commander via the voice pipe on the premise that if radar was needed then it was time for the "old man" to be on the bridge!
Dry card magnetic compasses were the prime instruments. (The Itinda had no gyro!) By company custom, deck officers used their own sextants. The Bl provided several chronometers; the rest was down to the art of celestial measurement and the science of spherical trigonometry.
Headlands were passed at 10 miles off, if practicable. Navigational chances were never taken, a policy of "Log, Lead and Latitude" prevailed.
Indeed, it was easy to trace this legacy among the ship's array of somewhat historic instruments. Installed in the chartroom was a clockwork (yes, clockwork!) Marconi echo-sounder. The time-base of this machine consisted of a precision wind-up gramophone motor. This rotated a neon bulb around a fathoms scale. As the bulb flashed one read off the depth. All Bl ships "manned the chains" when arriving in port. As the secunni (Indian quartermaster) called out the soundings in Hindi it was customary for the bridge cadet to listen to these and chant them in English, to the wheelhouse. It sounded like; "Sarri duss barm. Sahib" - "Ten and a half fathoms, Sir."
The bane of the cadets was any need to use the Kelvin deep-sea sounding machine. In this instrument of torture, Lord Kelvin had exploited Boyle's Law of compressed gases by allowing sea pressure to leave its unique mark up a narrow glass tube which was pre-coated with salt sensitive, silver nitrate. This tube was carefully kept vertical, after resurfacing and then presented to the 0.0.W. who, like some high priest in starched whites, performing a rite in honour of the 19th century Royal Society, read off the depth from a boxwood scale. Meanwhile back on the boat deck, a sweaty heap of exhausted apprentices would pray that they did not again have to wind in several hundred feet of wire with a 14lb lead on the end of it. The nearest we got to classic science was arming the lead with the ubiquitous tallow, to bring up a sample of the sea-bed.
A little tallow was also essential to allow the pin to disengage in our much prized chip log, which we cadets unearthed, complete with its sand-glass, when piling the forepeak stores onto number one hatch for the Canal transit. (To qualify with our Suez tonnage measurement, the forepeak had to be empty). We discovered that we could easily interpolate the speed to within a decimal place, using this ancient system of knots tied in length of line.
Normally, speed was measured by the Walker log, whereby a small propeller attached to a length of line would be streamed astern. The rotations of the inboard end of this line were read off from a meter attached to the taff-rail. At Suez my education in the use of pre-war marine hardware was broadened by the arrival of a barge carrying a large, stout box. This being the steam-driven search-light!
The canal-light box, containing a steam generator and arc light was hoisted to the breast plate, using the forecastle-head anchor davit. Once in place it was connected into our windless steam line so that at night, the pilot could see the canal banks and the ship ahead. Albeit through wisps of steam.
Whilst waiting for our southbound convoy to congregate at Suez, the mate gave me the task of restowing some barrels of wine that had been loaded at Marseille, into the `tween deck' bunker hatches for security. These hatches had been largely unused since her conversion from coal to oil-burning in 1949.
Under my "leadership" we cadets quickly whipped this cargo out of number four hold then rolled the casks into the centre castle. Due to deck-head height, our handy-billy became "chock-a-block before the barrels could be quite raised to the level of the bunker-hatch coaming. All old seamanship manuals teach how to sling barrels but do not mention the effects of tilting them, which is what we had to do.
On the tilt, two barrels slipped out of their slings, crashing into the side-bunkers with enough impact to dislodge some of the boiler room light bulbs. Half an inch of wine soon spread over the hot deck whereupon the alcohol evaporated into our confined space. After a while, the world seemed to be one big joke and I vaguely remember being helped to my bunk. Next morning the cadets had huge hangovers. I can now only speculate on the reason why there were no recriminations from "up top".
After Suez we made the inevitable bunkering stop at Aden before returning to the Western Indian Coast. An easy going pace of life ensued; loading out of lateen rigged sailing barges at the anchorages of Mangalore, Calicut and Alleppy; playing cricket with agents and tea planters on the emerald sward kept shorn by sacred cattle, in Cochin; watching the snake-boat races on the inland waterways of Ernakulum, where huge crews paddled, synchronised by base drummers raised in the stern sheets of enormous canoes; buying the catch of vast counter balanced longshore nets before they were raised, alive with prawns. A sahib's life of the maritime Raj, reprieved.
Stopovers at these ports tended to be prolonged, even by general cargo standards. Little night working was undertaken which was probably just as well, as trying to sleep with an open steam winch bolted to the deck close to ones bunk, was nigh on impossible. Clark Chapman's clattering mass of idling cogs and dog-clutches soon made me appreciate the advances they made by the time they produced their superb final steam winch design, the Splash Type Silent.
The `Itinda's' rigging was particularly archaic. In order to top a derrick to the required angle, two seamen would have to go aloft to shackle the appropriate link of a chain to the mast-table or Samson post head. This chain being attached to a ploughshare-steel wire span. (A flexible wire topping lift descended to the deck via a head- block.) As a result, one had to allow an hour in order to reset a pair of union-purchase derricks.
By the time the `Itinda' had wended her leisurely way to Bombay, I had accumulated enough sea-time to allow me to sit for my second mate's. I paid off, hitching a ride home in the `Chinkoa'. The management had been right, I was Coast material. With the ink still wet on my new "ticket" I applied to return to the BI Eastern Fleet. My request granted, I remained a Coast Man until it was "school time" for my master’s certificate. By that time the BI's days were numbered.