The Black Tide

I got to my feet then. I couldn’t force him to talk. But at least I knew he wasn’t part of what had already happened. ‘On the dhow,’ I said, ‘when we were coming up from Ras al Khaimah—’ I hesitated, wondering how to put it. Since I didn’t know what the operation was I couldn’t be sure he was opposed to it. But I wanted him to know that, if there was any question of pollution, and he was opposing it, he could count on me. ‘When you knew who I was, you talked about my wife. You said Karen should have been more political, that she should have threatened the authorities, demanded a law of the sea to control pollution. Those were your words. You meant them, didn’t you?’

‘Ja. Of course. But the Petros Jupiter, that was only a ten thousand ton spillage.’

‘But is that the reason you’re here, on this ship?’

‘What reason?’

‘Pollution,’ I said. ‘The same reason you risked your life in that tanker on the Niger.’

‘Ah, you know about that.’ He sat down and waved me back to my seat. ‘I risked my job, too. After that nobody want to employ me, not even as an ordinary seaman.’ He laughed. ‘Then I got this job.’

‘Through Baldwick?’

He shook his head. ‘I was in Dubai and I hear’ some talk…’ He reached into a locker beside the table. ‘You like a whisky?’ He poured it neat, not waiting for me to answer. ‘You know, the first bad slick I ever see, the first real pollution? It was in South Africa. I had just taken my mate’s certificate and was on leave…’ His mother was apparently from Cape Town and he had been staying with relatives, some people called Waterman, who were English South African, not Afrikaner, and very involved in the environment. ‘Victor was a marine biologist. Connie, too, but she had a baby to look after. You remember the Wafra?’

I shook my head.

‘And before that the Kazintah?’

He drank some of his whisky and sat, looking down at the glass in his hand, his mind back in the past. It was the Wafra he talked about first. That was in 1969, he said, and he had been between ships, enjoying himself, wanting to see as much as he could

of the country. He had arrived there in November, just two days before the Kazimah got herself impaled on the Robben rocks. ‘Robben is an island out in Table Bay about seven miles from Cape Town.’ He paused, still looking down at his glass, and when I asked him the cause of the stranding, he shrugged and said, ‘The engine. Ja, it is always the engine. Almost every tanker gets into difficulties—’ And then he was talking about the organization for the conservation of coastal birds that had been formed the previous year and how he had spent the best part of a month helping his cousin, Connie, who was a member of the organization, collect oil-soaked penguins and take them to the cleansing centre. There had been a lot of people working desperately hard at penguin recovery, but even so her husband reckoned around 10,000 died.

And, earlier that same year, the whole penguin population of Dyer Island, over to the west near Cape Agulhas, had been wiped out by another oil slick. ‘Everything, every bloody tanker, all the oil for Europe and the West goes round the Cape. And I come back from two months wandering through the Kalahari, and over to the Skeleton Coast and Namibia, to find Connie Waterman exhausted with the effort of dealing with the Wafra disaster. It was the breeding season and they were literally evacuating the birds from Dyer Island to prevent them being hit again.’ He paused then, lifting his head and looking directly at me. ‘That is how I have become involved in environment.’ And he added, a little smile moving the hairs-of his beard, ‘Per’aps it is true what my mother says, that I am half

in love with Connie.’ She had been only a few years older and he’d been tramping, no fixed abode, no attachment, seeing the world, taking life as it came. It was working with her, he said, handling the poor pitiful wrecks of birds, and all the time the terrible sense of inadequacy felt by Connie and the other men and women working so hard to save what they could, knowing that whatever they did, nothing would alter the fact that tomorrow or the next day, or the next, there would be another tanker in trouble, another oil slick, more pollution, more birds to treat — on and on and on till ‘the bloody bastards who own and run the sheeps are made to realize what it means when oil is vented, either intentionally or accidentally. And—’ He was very tense now, very worked up, the words spilling out of him with great force — ‘it is not only the Cape. It is the coasts of Europe. My own country — the Nederlands, that is very vulnerable, also the UK, France, the whole of the English Channel…’