SHIPWRECKS



Fifty years ago last month, on July 25, 1956, two large passenger liners off Massachusetts were steaming toward each other through the night at a combined speed of 40 knots. In spite of ample room to maneuver, in spite of the radar that let them spot each other from a distance, and in spite of clear rules intended to avoid collisions, the Stockholm crashed into the Andrea Doria and ripped the luxurious ship open amidships. It was to be the last great drama of the age of transatlantic passenger liners.

The reason for the accident 50 miles south of Nantucket would be debated down the years. For the time being, a much more pressing issue loomed. The Andrea Doria was listing alarmingly to starboard, and seawater was pouring in. The enormous ship was in danger of sinking. Its 1,660 passengers and crew were in imminent peril.

The Andrea Doria had put to sea in 1951 from Genoa to accommodate the booming postwar demand for ocean travel. Almost 700 feet long, she ship could cruise at a brisk 23 knots and was noted for her luxurious appointments. The Italian Line had spent a million dollars on art and decoration, the food and service were superb, and even third-class passengers enjoyed an on-deck swimming pool. Many observers considered the Doria the most beautiful ocean liner ever launched.

The Stockholm, which had left New York that afternoon, was a more modest ship, 525 feet long and capable of carrying 570 passengers. She was fitted with a reinforced icebreaker prow to handle northern winter waters.

Several factors contributed to the collision. The International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea stipulated that ships in fog “go at a moderate speed.” The Andrea Doria’s captain, Piero Calamai, was steaming ahead at nearly 22 knots through dense fog in order to keep to his schedule. At that speed, it would take the vessel three miles to stop. Those same rules dictated that when ships were meeting nearly head-on “each shall alter her course to starboard” to avoid a collision—keep to the right. But the rule did not apply to ships that were likely to “pass clear of each other.”

Assuming the ships had plenty of room to pass on the left, Calamai veered slightly to port to allow more clearance. Johan-Ernst Carstens, the Stockholm third mate who was commanding the bridge, turned his ship to the right for the same reason, putting the two vessels on a collision course. When the Andrea Doria emerged from the fog, the crew saw the oncoming lights of the Stockholm. Carstens ordered a turn 20 degrees farther to the right, but failed to signal the maneuver with his ship’s whistle.

Aboard the Doria, Captain Calamai had seconds to make a decision. He chose wrong, sending his ship into a hard left turn. The 29,000-ton vessel skidded across the path of the Stockholm and received her ice-cutter bow at almost a 90-degree angle.

The ships rammed together just after 11:00 p.m. to the sound of sirens and bending steel. The Stockholm’s prow crashed 40 feet into the side of the Andrea Doria, through cabins filled with sleeping passengers. Forty-six of them were killed in the collision, along with five Swedish crewmen who slept in cabins in the bow of the Stockholm.

The ships hung together for a few seconds, then parted. Though her bow had been sheared off, the Stockholm was in no danger of sinking. But the Andrea Doria, with 500 tons of seawater rushing into her empty starboard fuel tanks, listed 20 degrees. Because she was leaning over so badly, her crew could not lower the port lifeboats. The Doria, like the Titanic 44 years earlier, now had lifeboats for only half its passengers.

Crewmen from the Stockholm began to ferry passengers from the stricken ship in their own motorized lifeboats. It was a slow process; Andrea Doria passengers were forced to negotiate steeply sloping decks and clamber down ropes or netting to reach the floating lifeboats. Some panicked and jumped. One man tossed his young daughter into a boat, fracturing her skull. She later died.

On board the Stockholm, a sailor discovered 14-year-old Linda Morgan entangled in the wreckage near the bow. He could not find her name on the ship’s passenger list. He was startled when she revealed that she was a passenger on the Andrea Doria. Linda, who became known at the “miracle girl,” had been thrown from her bed onto the other ship during the collision, which had killed her half-sister and stepfather.

A distress signal announcing “need of immediate assistance” quickly brought help, including the freighter Cape Ann and a Navy transport vessel. But by two o’clock almost a thousand people were still awaiting rescue on the Andrea Doria, which was listing even more steeply. At that point the passenger liner Ile de France arrived, having turned back from its own crossing to Europe. Its blazing lights produced “incredible joy” among those on the Andrea Doria and created a surreal scene reminiscent of a movie set.

By dawn all of the passengers and crew had abandoned the Andrea Doria. Captain Calamai had held out hope she could be towed to shallow water and saved, but he now knew that was impossible.

“There were exclamations of surprise and awe,” one survivor remembered, “as the Andrea Doria trembled and lurched to one side.” The great vessel rolled over and went down in 225 feet of water. Her captain telegraphed a terse message to his employers: “Doria sank 10:09—Calamai.”

A $30-million ship had been lost and 51 persons had died, but seamen had also pulled off the greatest peacetime rescue in history, saving more than 1,600 lives.

No final adjudication was ever made of who was to blame for the accident; the numerous lawsuits were settled out of court. New rules were put into place afterward, dictating certification of radar operators and requiring approaching ships to establish radio contact.

The Andrea Doria still rests on the sea floor. Because the ship lies well below the maximum safe scuba-diving depth, she has taken on the role of the Everest of diving. Hundreds of souvenir hunters have explored her wreck; a dozen have died trying.

The sinking of the Andrea Doria did not mark the end of the ocean liner. It simply sounded a melancholy note in the dirge of an industry already doomed. In 1958, two years after the collision, airlines began offering nonstop jet travel between the United States and Europe. The leisurely five-day crossing on a well-appointed passenger ship became a relic of a bygone era.

MISCELLLLLLLLLLLLLANEOUS

Check out excellent new Beck songs.

That title, How to Win Friends and Influence People, is just a tad creepy. But Dale Carnegie’s book still speaks to us today...

Heat 336pp,
by Bill Buford

Every amateur cook who's had their food praised by fond friends fantasises at some point about working in a restaurant, or worse, owning one. ("Nothing grand, small neighbourhood place, limited menu, just cooking the things I like to eat myself ...") Mercifully, they hardly ever do. But Bill Buford, in an act of quixotic folly, actually did make the leap, and in Heat gives a dazzling and funny account of two magnificently mad years. He gives up his job as an editor at the New Yorker and persuades Mario Batali, one of New York's most famous chefs, to take him on as an unpaid kitchen slave in his three-star Manhattan restaurant, Babbo. Imagine Falstaff multiplied by 10 and this still can't encompass the superabundance of Batali (motto: "Wretched excess is just barely enough").

Buford's apparent reason is that he "wanted the know-how of people who ran restaurants", but his passionate prose belies this: it's a love affair. This is a man obsessed. He is totally enthralled by the people working in the kitchen; he wants to absorb them through his pores.
"Slave" is not an exaggeration. ("I came to regard the prep kitchen as Culinary Boot Camp.") He works 18-hour shifts, learning how to skin and slice hundreds of lambs' tongues, zest lemons and dice carrots into exact one-millimetre cubes just to see them tossed away ("These are wrong!"). He constantly slices bits off his fingers, gets burned, slips farcically on greasy floors and drops pans of food into other pans. ("For the rest of the night, Mark had to retrieve random clams off the plates just as they were being carried out.") He even sets himself on fire. "I never got through an evening without one profoundly humiliating experience."

What's amazing, considering the hectic pace and the fact that he's just an enthusiastic amateur trying to work alongside top professionals, is the fascinating detail in which he records the rigours of life in the kitchen. How did he manage to notice so much? This is wonderful writing - long, rolling sentences that build and build until your pulse races. I doubt there's a more vivid account of what it is really like to work in a professional kitchen. By the end you've "endured the sort of trials that only a god would devise".

His self-deprecating tone lays bare all his humiliations. Months into his slavery, he's promoted to the grill station. ("So this is what Dante had in mind.") It coincides with Batali's return after a trip promoting his TV show. "Your rabbit is overcooked" is the first thing he says. "Unacceptable." And Buford is fired. The description that follows of him standing forlornly for an hour pressed in a tiny space against a very hot oven trying to decide if he has to go home will be uncomfortably familiar to anyone briefly ostracised in the school playground. "I was trying to be small. Actually, I was trying to take up no space ... The kitchen had grown quiet. No one made eye contact with me. It was a long hour." He knows that if he leaves, it will be admitting that he can't take it and that he'll never be able to return. Finally, Batali reappears, cooks a pizza, stuffs it "quickly and with force" into Buford's mouth and makes him repeat: "This is the taste America is waiting for." And he's allowed back "on the team".

It's this longing to be part of the team that drives him at the start: "I hadn't worked in a professional kitchen and had always respected those who did. They knew something I didn't. Now I was amongst them. I was a member of a team of cooks, closed away in this back room: no natural light, no connection to the outside world; no idea, even, what the weather might be; only one phone, the number unlisted; unreachable - a great comfort, surrounded by these intense associations of festive meals."

He could be describing a closed monastic order if it weren't for the other seam that throbs under everything like a bass line. Sex. Everyone seems to get an enormous erotic charge from working with food. The chefs are constantly putting food into each other's mouths. In Batali's case, it's usually raw pig fat. ("The best song in the key of pig.") The pasta chef confesses he has "a constant hard-on while he's making ragu." Fresh pasta cooked in butter "swells like a woman aroused". The exchanges in the kitchen are raw and sexual; testosterone is the dominant ingredient, though it's a woman chef who makes the link between food and sex explicit: "What else do you put in someone else's body?"

Buford, who is, according to his long-suffering wife, now showing signs of obsessive mania, uproots them to Italy. Not once, but three times. ("It was a testing moment in the marriage.") He begins with a crusade to make perfect pasta and ends apprenticing himself to Dario Ceccini, the greatest butcher in Italy.

Buford has already learned that "chefs are some of the world's nuttiest people" but Ceccini, with a robust "line in genitalia metaphors" is more than a match in wildness, excess and showmanship - a night's slashing-and-burning with the Barbarians would be relaxing compared to time spent in his company. After one 16-hour day, Buford and his wife are taken by Ceccini for a meal at the best local restaurant. It's like a scene from The Taming of the Shrew: the chef is abused, the food is thrown on the floor, many bottles of wine are consumed, there is much shouting. When Buford is finally allowed to leave, barely five hours before he is due to start unloading the meat, Ceccini instructs him that a proper butcher "works in meat during the day and plays in flesh at night. For the rest of the night, you must enact the dark acts of carnality." Buford is doubtful he has the stamina for making "butcher love" to his wife. "But, you know, I did the best I could. I didn't want to let the guild down."

Back in New York, still on his quest, he buys a whole pig (dead) and, in what would be one of the best scenes in the film, he, his wife and the pig (which weighs more than Buford) sit together on his scooter and drive through the crowded Saturday streets of Manhattan. The three of them share the lift in their apartment block with a startled neighbour before Buford butchers the pig on his kitchen table. This takes seven days. Probably another testing moment in the marriage.

At the end of the book, after a meal at which he and Batali share 10 bottles of wine and eat 43 plates of food "before the main courses arrive", Batali asks him if he'd like to be set up in his own restaurant. But Buford has a piece of unfinished business. "I learned how much I had to learn." His next food crusade is to France. And this time, he doesn't record his wife's reaction.