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19º 30' N, 42º 36' W,
Atlantic Ocean -- To stand on the top deck in the shadowed life of
cat-black midnight is to escape the 148,528 tons below: the champagne and
aged cheese, the cutlery engraved "Gainsborough, England," the staircases
covered in leopard-print carpet, the walls hung with swirling acrylic
paintings entitled "The Theatre" and "The Circus."
Because the temptation, of course, is to indulge, to dive into this city
of some 2,600 vacationers and the 1,200 more who serve them, to roam from
lecture hall to the world's first shipboard planetarium, from plush
theater seat to straight-backed barstool, to linger amid conversations
about Saudi royal family weddings or about the fact that "Pomp and
Circumstance" is not known to the British by that name.
This temptation begins before the Queen Mary 2 leaves its Southampton
dock, as if it is a voucher for the months of publicity in glossy
magazines and during network broadcasts heralding the two-week maiden
voyage of this, the world's largest passenger ship, the first
trans-Atlantic liner built in more than three decades, a marriage of
corporate branding, modern technology, and good old-fashioned nostalgia.
A man from Brazil stands on deck seven, the promenade deck, before the
orchestra on the dock strikes a tune, or the fireworks charge from the
barge below, or the ship's whistle sounds its staggering goodbye, and
says, "I've been on 91 cruises."
"Not so many for me," says his wife. "Only 58."
It happens so quickly, this world of insiders and newcomers conspiring a
daily schedule of pursuits and leisures. The padded lounge chairs will
line deck seven throughout the sun-stretched day. The techniques of
watercolor will be the subject of a class at 10 a.m. A Marc Chagall goes
for auction at 11. Midafternoon, there will be a discussion of the grner
veltliner grape. Then, of course, the black-tie dinners and Dame Shirley
Bassey, or the Ascot Ball, or the one-armed bandits that dance all hours
in the casino.
One begins to feel as though this is the only point, as if it is all.
But not on the top deck,
where wind dulls the hum of diesel engines churning beneath the
star-specked, boundless sky, moving this ship, black-hulled and
red-stacked, toward Barbados. On a fall day three years ago, another
craft, a 23-foot plywood rowboat, set on the same course, from the Canary
Islands to the Caribbean. That crossing took not four days, but 58,
layered with sea spray and sores from the oars and the sheepskin-padded
seats. Meals came with names like Ramen and Pringles and sleep in
four-hour shifts.
Of the memories that linger with
Tom Mailhot
of Ipswich, one of a two-man crew that
made that crossing, many are notable for their intimacy: the smell of
flying fish jumping upwind; the sounds of waves hitting the hull; the
cloak of 100-degree heat pushing doldrums upon the sea; voices.
The voices came about a dozen times, Mailhot says, visiting more often
during the approach to Barbados. Each sound, of a man, or a woman, rose
alone. It formed words, almost, but spoke no clear language, told no
story.
"I am not one to hallucinate, or get delirious, even in the heat," Mailhot
recalled recently during a conversation outside his home in Ipswich. "We
were right on the slave route. We were rowing right over them, their
shackles were still beneath us. They'd disposed of bodies all the way
across. And I just thought it was these souls coming up from beneath us.
Tortured souls." .......
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