Collision Course Page 3
Enestrom, a tall, slender Swede thirty years old with closely cropped blond hair, had become a friend of the young third officer. He often remained on the bridge for an hour or so beyond 8:30 to keep company with Carstens on the night watch. But this evening, the first night out, Enestrom was fatigued from the long work hours in port in preparation for sailing that morning. He excused himself politely, saying he was going straight to bed.
The day of departure is always a long, hard day for the officers and most of the crew of every passenger ship. Carstens, up since 6 A.M., had supervised the securing of passengers’ automobiles aboard before sailing. But now, seven hours out of New York, he felt cleansed of the city’s humid mugginess. He had had a hearty dinner, followed by a steam bath and shower in the ship’s aquasanium and an hour’s rest in his cabin before coming up for duty.
With Enestrom gone and the captain in his cabin, Carstens was in sole command of the Stockholm as it surged on toward the Nantucket Lightship. Three seamen constituted his watch. They divided the four-hour watch into equal 80-minute periods, taking turns as helmsman, lookout in the crow’s-nest and standby-lookout. A feeling of confidence and well-being pervaded the young officer as he went through the routine of his watch.
“Every ship has its own long splice” is a saying familiar in many forms to men of the sea. It means in effect that each ship is a reflection of the “old man” or each ship is operated differently, according to the working philosophy and habits of the captain.
Captain Nordenson at sixty-three years of age, with almost forty-six years of sea life behind him, was a hard taskmaster. And the Stockholm, the oldest and smallest ship of the White Viking Fleet of the Swedish Line, was a compact, tightly run vessel. Like virtually all other passenger ships, the Stockholm had developed a personality and a character that reflected her eight years of life, her captain and crew, her owners, and above all, Sweden.
She was actually the fourth of the Swedish Line to bear her name. The first Stockholm, 565 feet long and almost 13,000 tons, was launched in 1904 and served a full and useful life until the 1930’s. The second and third Stockholms had been ill-fated. The second ship, a luxury vessel of 28,000 tons, was launched at the Cantiere Riuniti Shipyards in Trieste in May, 1938. Scheduled for delivery to Sweden by the Italian shipyard the following April, the ship was mysteriously destroyed by fire at her shipyard pier. Nine months later the Swedish Line contracted with the same yard to build a third Stockholm, using the same design, keel and motors of the destroyed ship. This ship was launched in March, 1940, but then World War II prevented delivery. The third Stockholm was sold the following year to the Italian Line for $8,000,000. But she was never to leave the shipyard. When Italy surrendered to the Allies in 1943, the Germans, in control of Trieste, seized and stripped her and towed her out to the shallow waters of San Sabba where she was sunk by Allied bombing.
The Swedish Line by this time had had enough. Their technical staff began drawing plans for a smaller ship, one which could be built safely in one of Sweden’s own shipyards. The plans for the second and third Stockholms went back into the file. Gone were the ideas for a luxury ship with three swimming pools (one for the crew), ten decks, wide corridors, large windows, an outdoor dancing area and de luxe cabins with private verandas.
Instead of a 28,000-ton luxury ship, the fourth and present Stockholm was planned during the war years as a 12,165-ton ship, with seven decks, one indoor swimming pool, and the necessary public rooms and accommodations for 395 passengers instead of 1,300.
The Stockholm, launched early in 1948, was the first new passenger ship to cross the North Atlantic after the second World War. She was the largest ship ever built in Sweden but at the same time she also was the smallest passenger liner in the North Atlantic trade. Those were the days when all steamship companies were building small vessels. The thinking was that air travel would replace sea voyages in the postwar tourist traffic to Europe. No one foresaw the tremendous postwar surge in tourism that was to boost transatlantic shipboard travel to more than a million passengers a year despite and in addition to air transportation.
Seeing the error of its ways, the Swedish-American Line in 1953 had the Stockholm’s superstructure enlarged to increase its passenger capacity from 395 to 548. The ship still retained the sleek appearance of a racing yacht. She was 525 feet long, 69 feet at the beam, with a long forecastle, severely raked destroyer bow and gracefully rounded cruiser stern.
As her owners pointed out, the Stockholm was a ship built for comfort rather than luxury. The personal comfort resulted from the unexcelled service of her crew, the practical but not luxurious accommodations, and the engineering ingenuity of providing an outboard cabin for everyone, passengers and crew alike. From the senior officer down to the lowest and newest pantry boy, each crewman reflected the Scandinavian concept of rigid devotion to duty and work. The company cared for the welfare of the crew as well as the passengers. No more than two crewmen were assigned to any one cabin, and each crew cabin was the equal if not better than the passenger accommodations.
The Swedish Line expected and received a full day of work from every crewman. The ships of the line were among the very few which assigned only one officer to each watch. While most ships assigned two officers to the bridge, so that one could remain lookout while the other tended to radar or navigational aids in the chartroom, Scandinavian liners believed one hard-working officer could discharge the necessary duties with no undue strain. The Stockholm had only three officers to stand regular watches around the clock. The captain and chief officer, who stood no regular watches, shared command of the bridge in times of need, such as reduced visibility, major changes of course, or approaches to landmarks, navigational aids and harbors.
In the wheelhouse, the nerve center and brain of the ship, Carstens felt in familiar, friendly surroundings as he went about the routine duties of the watch. The three seamen had their prescribed, limited duties and, in effect, Carstens was alone on the bridge. There was no smoking or coffee drinking permitted on the bridge of the Stockholm. Officers were not to fraternize with the seamen lest familiarity break down the chain of command rigidly adhered to on the ship. Conversation was limited strictly to matters in the line of duty.
There was nothing at all unusual about this night. All was routine. The ship was cutting through a calm sea on the first leg of the eastbound journey. After Ambrose, the next point of departure would be the Nantucket Lightship, located some 200 miles east of New York. The engine telegraphs, one on each wing of the bridge, were on FULL SPEED AHEAD. They had been set on leaving New York Harbor and would remain at full speed until the breakwaters of Copenhagen Harbor.
Pacing the breadth of the wheelhouse, Carstens glanced into the scope of the radar set near the right door. The illuminated sweep hand, rotating like a second hand on a watch, showed all clear, no ships within the 15-mile range of the radar beacon. The helmsman, Ingemar G. Bjorkman, a twenty-year-old lad with three years of sea duty behind him, kept both hands clasped on the spokes of the ribbed steering wheel, his eyes concentrated on the gyrocompass to his left. He stood on a raised wooden platform leaning his back against the rear wall. Ahead of him was the curved forward wall of the room, with its large square windows stretching across the 20-foot breadth of the room. Directly below the center window was the course box which held three oversized wooden dice, with the numbers 090 so that the helmsman would never be in any doubt as to the course to steer. The helmsman’s only duty was to turn the wheel from side to side, compensating for the movement of the ship, keeping the vessel on the desired course. Carstens from time to time in his pacing of the wheelhouse stopped to glance at the compass. The purpose was to check the steering of the helmsman and also to remind him that the officer was keeping tabs on him.
The sky was cloudy and overcast when Carstens had come on watch. With the ship’s clocks still set at New York’s Eastern Daylight Time, at 8:30, it was not yet night. But the light of day was fading fast and the sea s
eemed a deep gray, turning to a dull black. Although it is extremely difficult to judge distances with any degree of accuracy in the open sea with no landmarks to guide the eye, Carstens vaguely estimated that the horizon was some five or six miles distant.
At about 9 P.M., Captain Nordenson came up to the bridge for his postprandial look around. The captain, as was his custom on the first night out, had dined in his cabin one deck directly below the wheelhouse. Captain Nordenson, who had commanded at one time or another every one of the Swedish-American Line ships, was a strict disciplinarian who spared few words in casual conversation with either his officers or crew lest that relax the discipline of his ship. Carstens, engrossed in his duties, was unaware of the captain’s arrival until he noticed the skipper pacing the starboard wing of the bridge.
Captain Nordenson, a man grown portly but not soft with age, walked with his head down, back and forth along the narrow passageway on the aft part of the bridge wing. He responded to Carstens’ greeting and then continued his pacing.
Carstens would have liked to talk. He was a gregarious, outward-going young man who enjoyed chitchat, bull sessions into the night, parties and general good times. His nature was open and ingenuous and his life at sea agreed with him, for it imposed a discipline upon his working hours and left him fully free to do as he wished during his off-duty hours. Carstens, at this time of his life, felt about as close as a man can be to the ideal of being without worry or heavy care. He had had a turbulent childhood as the youngest child in a respected upper-class family of Lund, a cultural center of southern Sweden, where his father, a physician, was the medical director of the province. He had followed his older brother and sister in the best private schools of Lund, but where his brother went on to become a lawyer and legal counsel to the Bishop of Linkoping and his sister had become a dentist and was seeking a medical degree, Carstens had had trouble adjusting himself to one school after another. He had “found himself” only when he had gone to work on the herring fishing boats of the Baltic Sea during summer school vacations when he had been fifteen and sixteen years of age. When he had completed his compulsory schooling, the equivalent of a high school education in the United States, he had shipped out to sea with a boyhood friend.
Two years later, in 1949, both he and his friend were hired by the Brostrom Concern, the largest shipowning company in Sweden, and they soon learned the value of education even at sea. After three years as an apprentice seaman, Carstens qualified for Sweden’s Nautical College and there he worked hard and sweated to pass his examinations for an officer’s license in 1953. Later that year he passed his Master’s examination, completing all the studies necessary for a Master’s license. He needed only time and sea experience to earn the right to command any size ship in the Swedish merchant marine. After nautical school, Carstens served fifteen months in the Royal Swedish Navy’s mine-sweeping operations in the North and Baltic seas and in 1955 he returned to the Brostrom company which gave him varied experience on three cargo ships, a full-sail training ship and the passenger liner Kungsholm before he was assigned to the Stockholm on May 19, 1956.
On the night of July 25, this young man had every reason to be satisfied with himself. He had made the grade in his chosen field, for he knew that only the better men were assigned to the passenger liners of the Brostrom company. He had, he felt, the confidence of his captain, his fellow officers and his company. His private life also had found some direction. On Little Christmas Eve of the previous year he had married a slim, dark-haired, pretty Alsatian girl, Liliane Martel, and she was waiting for him in a new apartment she had found in Gothenburg, the home port of his ship. They were expecting their first child in five more months.
Carstens went about his duties on the bridge without undue concern. He was not the worrying type. He gazed out at the sea and he glanced at the radar screen at frequent intervals for any sign of another ship, aware of the likelihood of meeting westbound ships head-on en route to the Nantucket Lightship. There would also be ships crossing the Stockholm bow from time to time in these heavily trafficked waters. But this was part of the routine and there were rules of the road for ships on the open sea. Carstens had no worries. He checked the navigation lights of the Stockholm each time he went out on a bridge wing. The Stockholm, like all ships, carried two white masthead lights—one on the tall mast behind the wheelhouse and a forward, lower light—which were required to be visible for five miles. The Stockholm also had a green side light below the bridge on starboard side and a red light on her port side, each visible for two miles.
He checked the engine telegraphs, one on each of the bridge wings, whose handles were in the forward position for FULL SPEED AHEAD. Below, in the Engine Room, two huge diesel engines were pounding out 14,600 horsepower to drive the ship’s twin propellers 110 times a minute.
Carstens checked his helmsman and his lookouts as well to see that none of them were slipping on their duties. As watch officer he was responsible for everything on the bridge. His watch was young in years. At twenty-six, Carstens was the oldest man on the bridge. Peder Larsen, a Danish seaman, was the next oldest, a few months younger than Carstens, but he was new to the Stockholm. The other two seamen, twenty-year-old Bjorkman and Sten Johansson, who was eighteen, were young men with the training and discipline of apprentices who hoped to go to nautical college and become officers in the future.
At 9:20 P.M., one-third of the watch was over and the three seamen changed positions. Johansson, who had been on standby, relieved Bjorkman at the helm. Bjorkman climbed a ladder to the roof of the wheelhouse and motioned for Larsen to climb down from the crow’s-nest. Larsen scampered down the mast ladder to become standby and Bjorkman went up for the next eighty minutes to the small enclosure near the top of the mast. It was the best vantage point in clear weather to maintain a lookout, for the higher the distance from sea level the greater the visibility.
Ten minutes later, having checked the navigation chart, Captain Nordenson told Carstens to change course from 90 to 87 degrees. The officer immediately relayed the order to helmsman Johansson, flipped the wooden numerals in the course box to 087 and then went into the chartroom to lay out the new course. Carstens surmised that the captain wished to draw closer to the Nantucket Lightship, although the laconic captain saw no need to explain his actions to the young officer.
As the helmsman eased the wheel to the new course, Carstens in the chartroom calculated the ship’s position as of 9:40 P.M. by dead reckoning. He did this by reading off the last two numbers on the ship’s SAL log, an instrument which records the mileage of the ship by means of a brass tube projecting from the bottom of the ship, and marking on the course line the number of miles traveled since the last position, which had been taken at 8 P.M. The two dead reckoning positions indicated the ship had traveled thirty miles in the past hour and forty minutes.
Carstens thus found the approximate position of the ship at 9:40 P.M. and from that position drew a new course line of 87 degrees true. He erased the 90-degree line, which had passed eight miles south of the Nantucket Lightship. The 87-degree line passed the lightship at about three miles, but this too was an approximation. The officer knew that northerly currents would set the ship within the desired one or two miles distance from the lightship when passing abeam. Not less than one nor more than two miles was the usual passing distance from the lightship the captain desired before setting a new course for Sable Island and a clear untrafficked route to the north of Scotland.
With Nantucket Lightship still too far away for accurate bearing measurements by radio or radar, dead reckoning was the only means of navigation at that point. Any error in calculation could be corrected, Carstens knew, when the lightship was sighted within the 15-mile range of radar. Dead reckoning, so misunderstood by so many laymen, should properly be written d’ed reckoning, an abbreviation for deduced reckoning. Despite all modern innovations it is still the prevalent method of navigating across a trackless ocean in a small or large ship.
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p; When Carstens returned to the wheelhouse, having noted the change of course on the navigation map and in the logbook, the end of the day was complete. Night had fallen and the sea and sky assumed a different, more luxuriant mood. The gray of day had turned to black with the bright yellow light of an almost full moon glimmering on a calm ocean. The waves appeared long and irregular. The ship rode easily, rolling slowly from side to side, through the undulating water. It seemed, indeed, a beautiful night to Carstens. Little did he realize then that he would never be able to forget afterwards this impression of the moon, full but for a sliver on top, as it cast a spotlight beam of yellow on the right side of his ship. Occasionally the moon ducked behind a cloud but soon reappeared some 20 degrees off to the right of the ship.
The night remained almost as warm as the day, about 70 degrees, and both doors of the wheelhouse leading to the wings of the bridge were left open. Ordinarily the windward door was kept closed to prevent the cross breeze from whipping through the pilothouse. But this night there was only the slightest breeze from the southwest.
Carstens, of course, was not alone in admiring the beauty of the night at sea. Several passengers before retiring enjoyed the unique pleasure of the salty sea air of summer. Miss Colleen E. Bruner, of Des Moines, Iowa, not only remarked on the moon but also pointed out the Big Dipper to her sister.
For Carstens, this watch seemed not only routine but somewhat dull. On each four-hour watch from New York to the Nantucket Light, the Stockholm usually encountered one, two or three ships which required the watch officer to take some action. But on this night, Carstens had not sighted a single ship. To pass the time, he switched the radar set range from 15 to 50 miles. The wider range brought on the radar screen the east coast of the United States and Carstens enjoyed trying to identify points along the coast. Martha’s Vineyard, an island off the coast of Massachusetts, was easy for Carstens to identify on the radar screen. It showed up as a large blob of yellow. Further ahead, although it was not yet on the radar screen, Carstens knew he would see Nantucket Island and the lightship. On the 50-mile range, ships were too small to show up on the radar screen and the young officer soon turned the radar set back to the 15-mile range so that it served as a lookout for ships beyond man’s normal vision.