Worse Things Happen at Sea… a salty tale of dysentery, haemorrhoids, accidents, depression and death!
You might wonder about the title of this month’s guest blog, as Worse Things Happen at Sea is also the name of our monthly newsletter.
But this month, we’re delighted to introduce Andrew Edwards as our Guest Blogger, and we felt his amazing story about life at sea really deserved a dramatic headline…Dysentery...In the summer of 1966, I was a cadet on a cargo ship that loaded in the UK for 9 ports in West, South and East Africa. Our first port of call was Luanda, the capital of Angola – which was then a colony of Portugal.
Next, 300 miles down the coast we called in to Lobito – also in Angola. In Lobito two of the ship's company contracted dysentery; myself and a big Irishman called Reg. The shoreside Doctor we saw simply diagnosed the condition (amoebic dysentery) and said, ‘sorry but I have no antibiotics for this!’. Thankfully the ship’s purser stood our corner and demanded that the Doctor find some.
The following day the antibioticswere flown in from the Belgian Congo.
The Doctor gave us no advice as to how to deal with the condition, not a word about how contagious it was, not a word as to the importance of thoroughly washing our hands and maintaining scrupulous personal hygiene. Thankfully both Reg and I were quartered just a short sprint from the heads, and we were left to get on with it by our shipmates. It took about a week to get over the dysentery, by which time I had lost several stone in weight and was as weak as a kitten. By the time we arrived in Walvis Bay, South West Africa (now known as Namibia), a further 1000 miles south, I was just about fit enough to play football for the ship against a local team. Their football ground had a main road going right through the middle of it which made for some challenging moments, but they still beat us comfortably and they were playing in bare feet!
Haemorhoids...In 1967 I spent 7 months on a wartime built refrigerated cargo ship. Our trade was centred around loading fruit – mainly oranges, grapes and avocados, in various ports of South Africa from Cape Town to Durban, and bringing it up to Europe. We never knew where we were due to unload until we got up level with the Canary Islands – our directions were always ‘to the Canary Islands for orders’.This old ship was nearing the end of her days, and our job as deck cadets involved turning to at 0600 every single morning and refilling ALL the fire extinguishers used to put out the numerous fires in the engine room over the previous 24 hours. This situation worsened as the months and miles went by, and our last port of call in the UK was Swansea and we were heading there from Bremerhaven.
It all came to a head in the North Sea some 20 miles off Great Yarmouth. One of the turbo blowers caught fire and this time our fire extinguishers were not man enough for the job.We did lower the lifeboats with a view to abandoning ship but unfortunately, they sank as fast as they were being lowered.
Clinker built boats that had spent almost all their life in the tropics meant that the planks had shrunk a tad! We did have life rafts, but at this stage a firefighting tug arrived from Rotterdam, so we all collected on the bridge and let them do their thing. A day later we resumed our journey with one engine (on a twin screw ship) going at half speed. Five days later we arrived in Swansea. It was mid- February and very cold.In Swansea, one of the Seacunnies (a Helmsman - we had what was then known as a Lascar crew) came to me to tell me that he had a pain in his bottom. I took him to the Chief Officer who decided that he should visit the doctor and that I should take him as I knew a few words of Hindi.
With considerable help from me and the doctor we finally persuaded him to take off his 7 layers of clothing in order that the doctor could investigate. Within 10 seconds he diagnosed haemorrhoids. We then went through the elaborate pantomime of showing him how a suppository worked, how often it was to be administered and, most importantly, where it was to be placed. The doctor kindly inserted the first one for our man and we went to great lengths to ensure that he understood what, why, when and how. We returned to the ship.The following day our patient, let’s call him Abdul, knocked on the chief officer's door holding up the empty suppository box.
“All finished sahib” he said! “How… what… eh…?” said the chief officer. “All eaten sahib”. He never came back to us and his work was unaffected. We did wonder whether his tonsils might now be the size of a pea!ButtonA bump to the elbow...A year later I was on another general cargo ship heading to Australia. We had Zulu deck crew with Natal Indian catering crew. We arrived at our first port of call in Albany, Western Australia.