The Sea Inside

this double tide has been a boon to marine traffic, making Southampton ‘a seaport without the sea’s terrors, an ocean approach within the threshold of the land’, according to one nineteenth-century account. Its downside is what it leaves behind, an intractable stretch of mud, scattered with debris.
    This is a place with its own rules. Its performers enter and leave the stage left and right, from wading birds pecking at the mud to slow-moving tankers pulling into the refinery to be suckled dry of their tarry cargo, and flat barges bearing turbine blades on their backs like sleek grey cetaceans. But they’re all dwarfed by the estuary’s most evident yet oddly ignored actors: container ships and car carriers.
    Registered in Kobe, Panama or Monrovia, their names aspire to a Western status –
Lake Michigan
,
Austria
,
Heritage Leader
– while their sides are proprietarily stamped Maersk, Hapag-Lloyd, Wallenius Wilhelmsen, or with the anonymous initials – nyk, eucc, cma–cga – of commercial states. Apart from the fact that they float, there’s little to associate these giants with the romantic notion of a vessel. Rather than roaming the seas, they’re locked into rigid routes. They accomplish in days journeys that James Cook took years to traverse. They’re standardised to the width of the Panama Canal: ships made to fit a world made to fit them. They might as well have been chopped off the production line. Their cantilevered prows look down on everything else, but their square sterns appear wrinkled, as if they were papered-over hardboard.
    No one rhapsodises over these maritime pantechnicons as they come and go on their migrations. No one celebrates their arrival after heroic journeys to and from the other side of the world. They are filled. They are emptied. They move in between. No one stands on the quayside to wave them off. There are no Royal Marine bands to see them on their way. No bunting, no ceremony, no joy or sadness, just a slipping away. They embody a shrinking world. Half as big again as
Titanic
, they sail down the same waterway with bland indifference, lateral tower blocks so huge that, as one waterside inhabitant tells me, they cut off all electronic signals as they pass by. Their sides dribble with rust; the sea will get them in the end. They are ghost ships, devoid of life, save for shadowy figures seen through letterbox slots let into their flanks.
    A life at sea? Their ill-paid crews might as well have signed up to a sweatshop. Since the decks are too dangerous to walk, the men remain within the metal hulks, themselves contained. Yet these ships carry almost everything we consume. Top-heavy, stacked with blocks like toy bricks, fifteen thousand tonnes of steel, four hundred metres long, sixty metres above the surface and another ten below, they ride high in times of unequal exchange. As one captain says, ‘We take air to the East.’ In better circumstances they sit lower in the sea, a plimsoll line of the global economy. At the end of their journey they will be unloaded by bestriding cranes onto railway trucks. In turn, others take on shiny new vehicles shelved in multi-storey stacks like factory-farmed chickens, from which they are driven into the bellies of the floating car parks and out the other side to Singapore.
    But then, this is a city of the sea, built on reclaimed land; even its railway station platform is composed of cement and shingle embedded with shells. Meanwhile those same ships bring back invasive species on befouled hulls or in their ballast, Japanese seaweeds and Manila clams; to marine biologists, this is probably the most ‘alien’ estuary in Britain, with new organisms arriving every year.
    In the nearby National Oceanographic Centre – an oddly industrial-looking complex itself, mounted with telecommunication masts, and flanked by long refrigerated sheds that contain sample cores of the earth’s archival depths, every three metres representing one hundred million years – I study the Admiralty Navigation Charts of these commercial waters. Pulling great plasticised sheets from chest-high cabinets, I pore over maps that have turned the world around to show the importance of the sea to the land, rather than the other way about. Atlases display the waters around our coast as blank blue expanses, but here all the contours and depths are laid out, along with their utility to men and women at sea.
    The shore from which I swim, for instance, is labelled,