Creeping Up on Auckland by Courtenay Latimer

Author:Courtenay Latimer
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781461744282
Publisher: Sheridan House

As always, as soon as we had left the land behind us, we seemed to become the only ship in the world, moving through this strange and mildly sinister gulf. The emptiness of the oceans of the world always struck me. I can recall seeing only one ship during our entire time crossing the Atlantic and Pacific. Where had all the ships we had seen going through the Canal disappeared to? One of them, headed for the Caribbean, had been the French Messageries Maritimes liner, the Mélanésien. I had stared into her first-class accommodation as she moved slowly past, seeing the comfortable, indeed luxurious arrangements made for her fortunate passengers, and I rather wished that I could change places, for a couple of days at any rate, with one of them. I have never been a liner passenger but have always longed to be, and now it is too late – cruise ships are not at all the same thing. The shipping companies’ advertisements which I pored over on the front page of The Times of those days called up wonderful voyages in the lap of luxury dressing for dinner on the Rangitani, for example, or cocktails on the boat deck of the Southern Cross. I was an expert in ocean voyaging without ever actually buying a ticket. Nor did I spurn the humbler passenger cargo boats, having a particular affection for the Ellerman Line steamers, City of This and That. Some of them would do very nicely for carrying me around the world, possibly better than a large passenger liner, more intimate and friendly, but the food just as good. My favourite was the New Zealand Shipping Company, though I had never actually seen any of their ships. Their names sounded like heaven to me – Rangitoto, Rangitani, Rangitiki, Ruahine – these names had stolen my wits away just as Chimborazo and Cotopaxi had stolen the poet Turner’s soul away. There is a great power of suggestion in names – no one with any imagination can be indifferent to the coast of Coromandel, where the early pumpkins blow. It was largely because of ships’ names that I had become the world’s leading expert on ocean travel.

Anyway, we didn’t see any ships, but we did see something interesting when I was at the wheel early one morning. It was a baulk of timber about 30 feet long, covered in a thick blanket of weed, floating in the water. By the length and density of the weed I judged that it had been in the water for many months, possibly years, slowly circulating with the ocean currents. It looked innocent enough, bobbing in the sunlight, but if a wooden yacht at speed had struck it end on, it could have stove in her planking. For a moment I thought we should take it in tow, but then thought to hell with it. I am reminded of one of Shalimar’s best and most frightening stories, Beatrice Lee: Derelict. The Yankee clipper Beatrice

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