This evening, Edouard takes us for a tour of the galleys. It is stainless steel and aluminium all around. Among his equipment are six gas ovens, a deep fryer, few grills, enormous blenders, and two microwave ovens. Edouard changes the menu every day. He takes us to the refrigerated chambers, one for fruits and vegetables, one for dairy, juices, wines, and other liquid food, and the third for meat and fish. It is a strange feeling when I enter the refrigerated chamber for fruits and vegetables. My teeth clatters in the uninhabitable sub-arctic temperature of sixteen degrees below zero, and yet in front of my eyes is this paradisiacal garden of bounty, juicy tomatoes, lettuce, pumpkin and capsicum. At the meat chamber, Edouard shows us a boulder sized chunk of meat, “This is for barbecue party.” There is also a dry chamber for storing grains, cornflakes, sugar and other processed food. The ship had stocked up in South Africa and will restock when it reaches Busan in South Korea. There is enough food to feed the crew for one month. I am more interested in the number of eggs. Edouard comforts me by saying, “Don’t worry, I have seven thousand of them.”

Edouard cooks all day, preparing every meal except for breakfast which is more self-service in nature. He also prepares titbits for the recess breaks for the ABs. He works on the ship for sixteen weeks and then stays at home for another sixteen. I ask him if he cooks once he is at home. “No,” he smiles, “Only once in a while for my wife.”

Edouard passes the blame on to others when we ask him why the meal menus are always printed along with pictures of scantily clad women, “It’s not me. I just scribble down the menu every morning and give to a cadet. It’s they who play these pranks.” Pictures of naked and semi-naked women are everywhere in the ship, inside cabin rooms, the elevator, engine room. There are stories of sailors relaying audio from their favourite porn over channel 16, the emergency VHF radio channel. Sailor’s living quarters are in that way not too different from male dormitories in colleges; clothes are forgotten inside the laundry for days, skipping breakfast is common practice. When we first arrived on the ship, the menu placed on our table used to have sterilized images, sharks, Donald Duck, lilies, group photo of the crew in Rio de Janeiro. When we asked about this segregation to the master, he said with a big grin, “We try to be nice with our guests.” But one day, Lobo stole one of the crew’s menu, made a sketch of the naked girl pasted on it and gifted it to the ship. The master was delighted, “We will laminate this and put it up somewhere.” Vasilescu, the cadet, said, “Maybe someday it will be worth a million dollars.” Next day onwards, we begin getting the same menu card as the rest of the crew, unsterilized.

Sailors and sex have never gone out of fashion. To meet the demand from sailors, Jean O’Hara, the legendary prostitute invented the ‘bull pen’ system for running brothels during the 1940s wherein one sex worker would work in three rooms at the same time; having sex with a sailor in the middle room, the previous customer dressing up in the next room, the next customer undressing in the adjacent room, three minutes per person to release, three dollars per release. In Makassar, even today, the red light area runs parallel to the port. Orchard Towers, also known as Singapore’s ‘Four Floors of Whores’ has a status of a place of pilgrimage among sailors; incidentally, it also houses the embassy of Romania. Filipino sailors, since the days of Magellan till today, are renowned for their ‘bolitas’, plastic and metal titbits sewn inside their penises to charm the Brazilian prostitutes.ⁱⁱⁱ

That evening, we decide to explore Channel 16 further. It is notorious for everything it speaks out, racist slurs from one group of sailors to others, horrible attempts to sing Chinese ballads, as well as the occasional distress calls. Since it has to be kept on all the time, there is no escape for the sailors from this loud mouthed granny. Dragoslav, the navigation officer, shares with us his frustration with Channel 16, “The radio is OK till you reach Asia. People here treat it differently, not like an emergency channel. The Chinese fishermen talk to each other for hours. The noise becomes tolerable only after you reach Japan. We have a joke that the Chinese buy cheap VHF radio with only one channel to save money and they tune it to Channel 16. I used to find it culturally interesting at first. Now the radio makes me go crazy at times. But what can I do? If you are a ship, you have to go to China. It’s the centre of the world.”

Lobo makes an announcement on channel 16, “Good evening everyone.” Snap comes the reply over the radio from somewhere, “Good evening, my darling.” Then there is stark silence. A female voice in this almost exclusively male industry! Ismail helps bring normalcy back on channel 16 by announcing on the radio, “That was a mermaid.”

Shipping has forever been a male-dominated industry. There have been famous female pirates such as Anne Bonny, Sadie the Goat, and Ching Shih, but until recently, a woman on a ship was considered to be bad luck. Even today, only one to two percent of seafarers are women, working mainly as stewards and cooks.^iv

Omelette meal number four! Today, we visit the beating heart of a container ship, the engine room. Marius has volunteered to take us around. The engine room’s office is a windowless version of Starship Enterprise, bar for the calendar of the semi-naked girl on the door. Inside is a room full of engineers with Micky Mouse noise-blocking headphones, keenly observing all the monitors, buttons and levers. When Marius opens the door out of this office into the engine chambers, a sudden burst of hotness welcomes us. Marius says, “This would be rather pleasant in arctic climates but it feels like a furnace in the tropics.” Marius struggles to contain his enthusiasm as he shows us the monstrous machines at work, the engines, the generators, the sludge separators, the desalination plant. Despite the headphones we are wearing, the sound is near deafening; machines chatting among themselves the things that machines want to hear from each other; and if anything deviates from normal, the piercing noise of the alarms signal instant grief. “There are 14,000 possible alarms,” says Marius. He shows me the ominous sounding dead man alarm, “This is nothing, that’s only a precautionary alarm, activated when someone is working alone in the engine room. The most severe is the CO² alarm which is for fire in the engine room. Imagine what could happen with all the fuel around. Only the master has the authority to react in that situation.”

The pinnacle of the whole system is the giant cyclotron looking area where the propeller shaft keeps moving and moving and moving, the core of this universe, this giant black eternal force. Marius screams into my ears, “This is why I love this job. It is complicated and has this engineering aspect about it that I like. And I need to know everything about this engine because an emergency situation can develop in any system here while I am on watch alone.” Indeed, after years of hearing corporate jargon like competitive advantage, blue-ocean strategy, or razor-sharp focus; the words that I was hearing here, dead-weight tonnage, buoyance, sludge, they almost had a certain musical quality.

All this 101,640 horse power from the engine is only used to propel the ship at an average of fifteen knots an hour, a lot slower than most clippers^v of the nineteenth century such as the Champion of the Seas and the Sovereign of the Seas, which reached speeds exceeding twenty knots. If the ports are congested and too near to each other, like Singapore and Port Klang, it might actually be faster to walk the three hundred and seventy five kilometres that separate the two places than to take a container ship that, in order to save fuel and reduce emissions, are being forced to participate in the ‘Go Slow’ movement.

We move to the workshop where machines and tools of all sorts are available to build a world of nuts and bolts. Some have been used to weld and forge makeshift dumb-bells for the gymnasium. ABs and engineers drenched in sweat move around with their heavy costumes, giving us high-fives. We are fully covered in sweat as well and once Marius leads us out into the open, I am much relieved. We ask Marius who works the hardest, “Of course, the ABs. Perhaps the safety engineer or the Chief Officer, who at times, doesn’t sleep for thirty hours at a stretch.” About those who work the least, he says, “Some would say that it’s the cadets like me. But I would say we cadets do all the work.”