All at Sea? Well ... Yes! But
enjoying it!
There I was -
floating free - a carefree twenty-four year old, surfing the world aboard the great passenger liners that ploughed
across the seas between Europe and the Southern Hemisphere in the late 1950s.
Wonderful ships, such as the Orion (left: entering
Sydney Harbour)
Sydney Harbour)
- a bit old-fashioned looking now, but at 24,000 tons with seven decks, carrying
1,200 passengers and a crew of 500, the "Orion" had immense dining
rooms, lounge bars, dance halls, swimming pools, and deck tennis - an idyllic way to
travel to Australia - unless you were sweating in a galley, scrubbing decks,
waiting at table or working in the fierce heat and steam of a ship's laundry!
RIGHT: The young Mick O'Shea as Assistant Laundryman aboard
the Orient Line's "Otranto"
Tilbury to Sydney was a five week voyage at 400 miles a day, swaying through westerly
swells rolling into the Bay of Biscay, coasting through the Mediterranean, gliding
incongruously past stately palm trees and green fields fringing the immense sands on
either side of the Suez Canal (unreal - like a stage-set), sweating through the
blistering heat of the Indian Ocean, racing past the green, tropical Cocos Islands towards
the awesome, bare rock that is Australia.
This was my first impression of Australia, approached from
the west, in the lee of Freemantle and Perth - an immense, hard, ancient land
- a vast, bare, red-dust continent beyond tropical coastal
areas.
The memory of that time will live with me forever, of going through the
bat-wing doors of a bar in Freemantle (like something out of a Western movie, half
expecting Gary Cooper to emerge from the shadows) fielding a 'schooner' of ice-cold
beer - magically filled by a continuous stream of beer squirted from a thin hose at
heights varying between two and eighteen inches- and expertly slid along the bar-top to
rest precisely in front of me. Amazing skill! The barman enjoyed displaying it
- and then, aware that this was my first beer in Australia, waited with a smile for my
reaction! Cold enough to freeze teeth and gums! Did that bugger laugh! The
thought occurs to me that this is how a forebear, Richard O'Shea, actually died -
contrary to the family rumour that he was drowned or eaten by a shark in the River Swan,
around 1880. Cold Oz Draught certainly loosened my teeth, leading to their early demise.
The effect on the total person of Great Cousin Dick could have been similar - affecting a
heart weakened by hard Convict labour! Well! Why else would he have been there? 
This was the Mediterranean route to the Southern hemisphere.
Another, aboard the RMS Rangitoto - a dapper modern liner operated by
the New Zealand Shipping Company - was the Southern Atlantic passage to the clear waters
of Curaçao, in the Dutch Antilles (what wonderful waters for swimming - behind a
shark net) followed by a weird climb through the locks of the Panama
Canal, a sample of the pulsating night life of Panama City - and then, languorously, day
after day, a throbbing journey across the sparkling vastness of the Pacific Ocean, pausing
and dropping anchor for only an hour or two to deliver mail at the isolated rock that is
Pitcairn Island.
("Hi Fletcher Christian!" I remember hearing one bare-footed islander
calling to another as he padded round the decks of our ship, selling bananas. To me
an astounding moment, as the story of Cap'n Bligh and the "Bounty" suddenly
became real. I have a natural distrust of history!)
A Tragic Moment
On this voyage there was a tragic, dramatic moment as we
hove-to, quietly rocking on the ocean swell two hundred miles or so from the coast
of New Zealand.
An aircraft circled round, gradually becoming lower, until, roaring
just above funnel level, two large metal cylinders linked by a long rope were dropped into
the sea on each side of the "Rangitoto"s rising and falling bow, the
rope joining them neatly straddling the bow itself, to the cheers of passengers and
crew.
It was a desperate, life-saving effort, for each canister
contained parts of an iron-lung, vital to the survival of an extremely ill
passenger, a young doctor from my own native city of Belfast, who, it was
rumoured,
had contracted poliomyelitis in Panama. There was enormous relief as the canisters
were hauled aboard and rushed up to the surgery, while the ship's engines throbbed into
life and we gathered to full speed, racing towards Wellington. Then, just hours
before we arrived, it was announced that the the young doctor had died.
Even now, forty-three years later, I remember the hush that descended
on the ship.
But life must go on, and the dismay caused by this young doctor's death
was consumed by the bustle of arrival and docking.
What excitement - interrupted for a fleeting, poignant moment as the
coffin of the immigrant doctor was carried from the ship.......... and then we were back
to scrubbing decks and making all shipshape before we could head ashore to the flesh-pots,
the nearest pub or the Wellington City Mission to Seamen!
LEFT: - as a 'Winger' aboard the "Orion".
It was hard work at sea - sweating in the plate-house as a dishwasher, or serving two
sittings of ten people for three meals a day, or scrubbing decks, cleaning toilets (this
was my job aboard the "Rangitoto") or washing and ironing a thousand
sheets each day aboard the "Otranto".
It was great though - to be alive, to be free of the land, to be
bursting with health because of constant physical work, to see places like
Gibraltar, Naples, Port Said, Aden, Colombo, Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney - or
Panama City, Wellington and Dunedin - and, on other trips around Africa to stroll the
streets of Capetown, Dar es Salaam and Mombassa
........ and at sea in the constant heat it was an exquisite pleasure at the end of
each sweating day to quaff pints of cold draught Carlsberg in the slowly dying heat
of the 'Pig' - the crew bar in the foc'sle head.
They were magic, joyous days, as opposed to the controlled
sobriety of the confines (I almost wrote coffins) of an office in Belfast or
London. "What you need, my boy," my Mother used to say, "is a
while in the army!" The Merchant Navy was much more of an education.
As a memento I still have my Merchant Navy Seaman's Book (Below)
- with Very Good 'Ability' and 'Conduct' Discharges! - Amazing! [CLICK to enlarge]
