The *"Three Canal World Voyage"*
There was one voyage that I passed through three major canals of the world and went round the globe too. It was a memorable voyage I made on the Jalayamini. The year was probably 1973, my last voyage as a Second Engineer before my promotion to Chief Engineer.
(From ShipSpotting.com)
My Chief was Sipahimalani, a tall, huge man whose girth exceeded his height. He was the captain of the Scindia cricket team and brother of the Indian test captain GS Ramchand. He was also from the filmy Sippy family who had shortened their name. All said and done, he was an insufferable character.
The voyage began quite normally and without fanfare from Bombay in the liner trade to Europe and back. I expected to be back in India within 4 months. But that was not to be.
The first stop was at Port Suez at the southern end of the Suez Canal. The passage through the Suez was quite uneventful except for the failure of the Suez Canal Light which was a monstrosity that was placed on board at Port Suez and meant to be used during darkness during the roughly 15 hour passage through the Suez Canal. The switch of this monstrous lamp was a mercury switch which failed. I refused to have anything to do with it and advised the captain not to pay for its rental. Anyhow, we did manage to make it through without the use of this horrible looking lamp.
Then we were in the Mediterranean and sailed past Alexandria where the Collosus of Rhodes once stood guarding the entry into River Nile. After sailing the length of the Mediterranean, we entered the Straits of Gibralter. The two ports guarding the entry to the straits was Gibraltar to the north on the Iberian peninsula and Ceuta of Spain to the south in Africa.
We hugged the north coast as per the traffic regulations and passed into the Bay of Biscay. Through tumultuous seas we went past the English Channel to the lively port city of Rotterdam.
Rotterdam was a lovely city with windmills, old houses and rivers all around. I also took the opportunity to visit Amsterdam, 100 miles away (an hour's train ride) and admired this gothic city. I could not go to the Rijksmuseum to see Rembrandt's *Night Watch* and sorely regretted it.
(Rijksmuseum)
Our next port was Hamburg (in W Germany those days) and for that we had to go through River Elbe. Hamburg is a sailor's port. Terrific night life, pubs, bars and restaurants galore. Our next port was Gdansk (old Danzig) and the adjacent port of Gdynia in Poland.
To reach Gdansk, we had to go through the Kiel Canal. Nothing spectacular but something mysterious happened. I was in the Engine Room when I got a call from the Captain on the bridge that the ship was suddenly listing to port (left of the ship) slightly. I looked at the Clinometer and sure enough it showed a small list.
I assured the captain I had not transferred any oil or altered the water ballast configurations. He sounded worried and requested me to transfer some oil to correct the list which I did. But surprise of surprises, within half hour, the ship was suddenly listing to starboard (right) and I called the captain and he requested me to transfer the oil back, which I did and the ship righted and stayed so.
That evening, at the dinner table, the captain explained the mystery. We were passing a nudist colony on the port side and the entire ship's staff had collected on that side to wave at the nudists thus listing the ship!
We then went to Gdansk and we had to anchor for a few days in the stormy Baltic Sea before we got a berth. Though I had never been seasick throughout my sea career, the monotonous roll and pitch of the ship made me want to throw up; which I, fortunately did not.
But there we got the message that we have to now go to the East coast of USA instead of back to India.
I will spare you the details of the Atlantic crossing but we did the usual round going to New York, Philadelphia, Charleston, Wilmington, Houston and New Orleans.
We were then told that there was no cargo available and we had to go to the West Coast of USA to pick up cargo. This was my first encounter with recession in shipping which had turned our liner into a tramp. This meant we would have to go through the Panama Canal. We stopped at Veracruz in Mexico and anchored off Colon to await our turn. But a bit about the Panama Canal first.
(Panama Canal, from Britannica)
The Panama Canal was not as easy to build as the Suez Canal. The main difference was that whereas the Suez cut through a flat desert landscape, the Panama Canal had to pass through hills and forests. However, the French approached this problem like a pushy bull in 1881. After a couple of years they were defeated by the landscape and the anopheles mosquito (malarial) and they abandoned the project. Their scheme was untenable financially as well because it entailed making a channel through the hills that meant removing thousands of millions of cubic metres of earth to get a straight channel through like the Suez from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Also the Pacific Ocean was higher than the Atlantic Ocean off both the coasts of Panama. That meant that the sea would create tidal waves within the channel which is quite unacceptable.
The project therefore was taken up by the Americans. They came up with a feasible engineering plan and the finances to back their project. Where there were hills, the American plan was to have locks which would raise the complete ship up the hill on one side and down on the other side. There are twelve such ship locks most of them being northeast of Panama City on the Pacific Coast. The ship's would be pulled through by locomotive engines at these locks. In echoes that would also reverberate 33 years later in India, the Panama Canal was inaugurated on 15 August 1914.
(Author note: The Panama Canal was expanded in 2007-2016)
(Panama Canal Schematics, Wikipedia)
So back to the Jalayamini. At one stage we were passing the locks at night and I went up from the Engine room to the deck to take advantage of the stopped engines while we were being hauled up by locomotives. In the darkness of the dim lights I saw a team of men hauling and transferring our ship's ropes. I saw that one of them was wearing a hat which I took to be a somberero. But when he was closer to me I thought it looked more like a turban. I took a chance and shouted "Ki gal hai, paaji".
"Changa" came the reply. I was stunned. Here we were half way across the earth and I was conversing with a Sardarji in the middle of the night in the wilderness in a distant land! Anyway, we moved on and this man disappeared into the darkness.
On the west coast, we went to Long Beach, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Vancouver and Port Alberni. It was then across the Pacific which became a bit of a nightmare.
(Author Note: The Pacific Ocean is immense. In flat maps, it’s relegated to the outer edges, and that’s the image most of us hold in our minds. But in reality, it spans an entire side of the globe!)
Almost everyday, the ship would start going round in circles in the middle of the Pacific. Sipahimalani and I tried our best to resolve the problem but nothing worked. Our next port was Manila and the guys from Siemens (who provided the controls for the rudder) came over and did something and everything seemed ok. But again a day after leaving and on our way to Hong Kong it happened again. This time I decided to go to our Radio Officer, as he was the only guy who knew about Electronics (it was early seventies, remember). But again there was no solution. At one moment, I saw a book by Taraporewala and while leafing through it I came across a picture of an electronic card with a hammer shown next to it. I went to bed and thought about it and decided to try one more time next morning.
I had told the Mate who was the Officer on Watch that I would be fiddling with the steering gear.
I tried a lot of things but nothing seemed to work. We sailed on with the steering on emergency. Suddenly the vision of the page with the printed card and a hammer came back and I took each card out of its socket, tapped it (gingerly) on the bulkhead and put it back. It seemed to work. Although we took tug assistance to enter Hong Kong (just to be safe) the steering worked fine. Thereafter, we went on to Singapore and then to Bombay and there was no hint of trouble. Sipahimalani asked me many times what I did and I replied "Nothing". I had not learnt to like him enough to tell him what had solved the problem.
In Bombay, the round the world trip was over and I went to meet Mr. Sathe, our director. He said, Sipahimalani tells me, “you were in the steering flat and you did something that solved the problem on which we have already wasted thousands of dollars. Don't tell me you did nothing". So I sheepishly told him that I had done nothing more than tapping each card on the bulkhead. He smiled and nodded. He told me to go on a few days leave to Delhi.
A few days later I got a telegram to join the Jaladhruv as Chief Engineer. *I had got promoted!*
(From ShipSpotting.com)Postscript by Monisha Choudhury:
I think Dada had written letters to me about this trip. I have vague recollections that in 1975 all my friends were going to give USMLE either in Lahore by train via Attari or Colombo or Manila, and Dada promised to fund my trip, if I cleared, to New York, USA at a princely sum of Rs 4000/-. But that was not to be as Daddy had heart failure with pulmonary oedema in 1975 followed by Ma with a subendocardial infarction during my Internship in 1976 and I completely gave up the idea of going abroad for further studies as Dada was still at sea.
Author Note: Life may have had other plans, but she would go on to pave her own way to realising her dreams. 16 years later, in 1992, she went to London to pursue an 18-month fellowship at St.Mary’s Hospital. The US dream became a reality as well, with subsequent stints in Chicago and Boston (Brighams Women Hospital, Harvard Medical College).
Subsequently, he (Biswajit Basu) left Scindias and joined SCI and got married. It was around that time in Summer when we had a huge theft in our house where Boudi (Swati Basu) lost a lot of her marriage jewellery and we managed to catch one guy. Daddy made it his lifetime mission after that to bring the culprits to book and even met the then Prime Minister Morarji Desai! Not much effect though as the guy many years later was caught for some other theft!
