Vancouver's Invisible Sailors

On this sunny day at CenTerm -- Vancouver's Centennial Terminal, at the foot of Hastings -- the bright orange dock cranes, the bright red Canadian Fishing Company warehouse with its white silos in front of it (the silos making the warehouse look like a grain elevator), the stacks of brightly coloured Hyundai cargo containers and the gleaming tractor-trailors that fill the parking lot all seem like a stage set for the small, elegant, blue-painted Mission for Seafarers house, on whose wide porch this afternoon male and female Russian sailors are drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes.
 
Inside, sitting in a row of old telephone booths under old round clocks that showed the time in a number of cities, including London and Vancouver, other Russian men and women are using phone cards to call home. "The cards cost five dollars," Josephine Enriquez, the Filipino-born receptionist, says. "They can have local calls for free."
 
One man waiting to make a call has gold fillings all along his upper teeth, a black beard, a Russian face with narrow cat's eyes and Slavic cheekbones. He grins at me. He's been watching Josephine and me talk; now he wants to tell me how poor they are, he and his fellow seafarers. Using hand gestures, he explains how four or five people will use one phone card. "Just talk, wife." He makes a gesture, indicating the next person. "Talk, husband." Signalling quick, quick. "Talk, wife."
 
He laughs and leans forward to touch my shoulder. I can smell beer on his breath. "No money." He smiles, shows me the money in the pocket of his black jeans. A loonie, a dime, some pennies.
 
Another man comes into the small office to talk to him, a shorter man wearing freshly laundered blue jeans and a white tee-shirt tucked into the jeans. Clean-shaven, with large alert eyes, this younger man looks steadily at his tough-looking companion. Soon they're arguing in Russian. The older sailor, talking loudly, demonstratively shows the younger man the same loonie, dime and pennies that he showed me. It's clear he was supposed to help pay for something. The younger man looks at him quietly for a moment then walks away into the big, comfortable common room.
 
Their ship is a fishing boat, Josephine says. She tells me about another Russian fishing boat that docked last year in North Vancouver. The owner left the ship. "The seamen didn't have any money: no salary. They were deported back to Russian. You see, they didn't have visas."
 
The sailor with the gold teeth listens to us, smiling. He wants to tell us something but doesn't have the words for it, so he talks quickly in Russian. Trying to get me to understand him he hugs me, then hugs me again.
 
Glancing at the man to include him in the conversation, I ask Josephine about the female Russians. Are they wives?
 
"No. They are crew. They do cleaning, housekeeping. For the fishing boat."
 
I ask her how many are in the crew. She doesn't know. "Maybe fifty?"
 
This the sailor understands. He says, "No. Hundred twenty-five. Two crew." Using hand gestures again, he sketches two shifts. One sleeping: he puts his head sideways on his hands. One up: he moves his body up.
 
He hugs me again; he doesn't want to go. He's happy to be talking to someone besides the usual gang. And I think, looking into the common room where on this beautiful afternoon other Russians are watching a music video on TV and flipping through old copies of Time magazine: Why are they hanging around?
 
‘They wear uniforms’
 
"This is a bum area," I had been told, earlier, by a woman I met crossing over the pedestrian bridge at the bottom of Main Street that led to Waterfront Road. She was going to Crab Park to drink. "I quit last spring. But then I started again." I asked her if she ever saw sailors in the neighbourhood. "No, never. Oh, sometimes young Chinese or Japanese, they might be, in their white sailor suits. That's all."

"That's the Japanese students - the ones going to shipping school," Josephine says later. "They come in on the something Maru. What is it called? I can't remember.  They wear uniforms. You see them downtown. That's the only ones left that wear uniforms. There's no military sailors. So the seaman don't stand out."
 
Later I ask Reverend William Pike, the senior port chaplain, about this. "No, the sailors aren't visible any more. Given the cosmopolitan, international nature of Vancouver they just fit in. They just disappear into the crowd. And of course they don't wear uniforms. The old merchant navy used to, but nobody does any more."
 
And the clothes the sailors wear - like the clothes in the thrift shop the Mission runs, each item selling for a dollar - these are the standard clothes seen everywhere in the world now: jeans, tee shirts, sweaters, windbreakers, running shoes.
 
How many ships, I ask Reverend Pike, does the Mission for Seafarers - a mildly religious organization funded by individual donations, contributions from the port of Vancouver and fund-raising events - how many ships does it service? " About 3000 ships per year, including the ones at Roberts Bank, which we also serve. The Mission deals with thousands of sailors a year. Roughly 20 to 25 sailors a day."
 
Things have changed. "There used to be regular dances, two or three times a week. Entertainment was provided. Hostesses came in. They were under strict supervision of course and the sailors couldn't leave with them. Back then the sailors had time. Now they're in and out, sometimes in less than a day. Their time off is very limited. That's made a great difference." He pauses for a moment. "And there's something else too. The nationalities of the seafarers have changed. There used to be Scandinavian, European sailors. Now, with the global economy, the owners of the ships hire the cheapest labourers, the seafarers they can pay least to. And that usually means Asian and Filipino."
 
‘Because they are strangers’
 
"They can check their email," Josephine says of the Mission’s sailor clients. "Use the phones. Attend mass. We have a pool table, ping pong. A clothing store and general store. We have coffee. And a place to sit and relax. But if they want to go to a mall, we show them how to get to Pacific Centre. And usually they want to go to a restaurant."
 
Conrado Ambido - a Filipino like Josephine, a relaxed, articulate man who has been at the Mission thirty years and who works now as a driver, picking up the sailors - Conrado  tells me his seafaring rides might go to girlie shows at the Drake, or at No 5 Orange Street. "Mind you, they can buy beer here. They have to drink it here. They can't drink up to their eyeballs. Two, maybe three beers."
 
I ask about money. "They don't earn much. The Russians - if you convert the Russian rubles - they make maybe 300, 400 a month. That won't go very far in Vancouver." I think: But it might go far in Russia.
 
"So the sailors -"
 
Conrado gently corrects me. "No. Seamen. Sailors are more like uniformed people. You hardly ever have them. They're seamen. They don't wear uniforms. It's all civilian dress now."
 
"Why do the Russians hang around the Mission?"
 
"Because they are strangers. They don't know where to go. If they were a Greek crew, they might go up to West Broadway, where the restaurants are. The Chinese go to Chinatown, Same with Koreans. They learn where the Korean hangouts are. The Filipino, they speak pretty well English. They can find their way around. The difficulty comes with the Russians. They can hardly speak English. I would imagine they would have difficulty taking, say, a bus."
 
"What do the seamen think about Vancouver?"
 
He makes a little shrug. "Filipinos find it expensive. Cigarettes. Seventy dollars a carton!"

Bright cranes
 
Bum area or not, I found the fringe of working waterfront near Crab Park evocative: a quarter century earlier I had lived nearby. And I was impressed by the extraordinary economic dynamism that was transforming the area around the docks. With its mixture of ocean light, seagulls, bright cranes, container cargos, railroad tracks, brick buildings that were being renovated and new buildings that catered to the young, it seemed to me the most interesting, maybe even the most beautiful part of Vancouver.
 
I wasn't alone in this judgment. Walking toward the Mission, I passed a young man with a bright light and a metal reflector photographing a young woman in a dress like a tutu, folds and folds of white chiffon going to mid-thigh; she wore black, high-topped shoes. A little further along I passed another group taking photos, young people dressed in dark clothes and narrow fashionable glasses. (But then - almost as if to keep my judgments in check - a woman ran past me, a drug addict with stick legs, stick arms, wearing floppy shorts and a floppy tee shirt, running with her arms jerking oddly, the entire skull of her face visible so that she looked like an Auschwitz survivor.)
 
The area was changing. Global capitalism had transformed it and was continuing to transform it. But did the sailors notice?
 
Floating cages
 
"The city usually doesn't make too much of an impression on them," Conrado says. "They can't get an impression. They're shopping - for necessities, jeans, soap. The amenities, the beauty of the place - they hardly notice. At most they see it when they come into the harbour. They are more interested in calling home, using the phones."
 
A number of factors contribute to this. One is the ever-growing need for security at the world's ports: security because of threats of terrorism and because of illegal immigration. "It's not really affecting the sailors getting ashore," Reverend Pike says. "They get to go downtown. But they do have to be back on the ship at night. There are security issues." And so strangers can't get into the secure areas on Vancouver's docks; and you can only get on a ship if you really have reason to get on it. He smiles at me. "If you applied for a pass, they'd likely say no."
 
He pauses. "I've heard - I'm not sure - but I've heard that there can be up to a ten-thousand-dollar fine for the captain if a sailor doesn't return to the ship. Some captains, I believe, make their sailors keep their passports on the ship. So they won't run away. This makes it difficult to go to a bank. Of course, they will have other ID." He pauses again, choosing his words. "You see, before the ship leaves, the captain has to get clearance from customs, immigration, which means all the sailors have to be on board."
 
Was this a change?
 
"In the past there may have been more lapses." Again he pauses. "In some countries a sailor has to put down a bond. A sum of money. They'll lose that if they jump ship. Mind you, when they're in port, when it's their time to be off, they're fairly free to go where they want."
 
Do they get to spend the night in the city?
 
"No. They have to be back by eleven pm. They all sleep on board ship. Usually they leave the ship in shifts, each shift for a specific number of hours. I suppose things have changed. For instance, there are no sailors' hostels anymore. So sailors can't just leave one ship and sign on to another. You can't go from one ship to another anymore. So that sailor's life on the streets that perhaps you used to find, it no longer exists."
 
Reverend Pike tells me about the expanding port, the speed at which things are now loaded and unloaded. "An extraordinary amount of cargo comes through here. People really have no idea." And CenTerm was going to expand in the next year or so by at least fifty percent. "Things have changed; and they're going to change faster. You know, years ago the cruise ships used this place. Isn't that interesting? Now the cruise ships have a thousand people on the crew," even more tightly regimented than the Russians. "We couldn't possibly serve them." 
 
Port of call
 
The bureaucracy that has sprung up to control the world's migrations, and the newer bureaucracy that has sprung up to avert terrorists: these help explain why Vancouver's sailors have become invisible. But the larger reason is the ever-increasing regimentation and industrialization of sailing. One night years before, when I was a teenager, I came into Vancouver on an old Black Ball ferry, one that docked downtown around where Canada Place is now. I saw the city that night as if in a dream: the lit-up buildings, and the reflection of their lights on the water, seemed strange and beautiful. For the modern sailor, no doubt, that strangeness and beauty remain. But they are surface things only, mere physical facts. Beyond that the city means little: it is a place to shop, a place to make urgent phone calls and to check for emails. Then back to the ship.
 
Vancouver no longer sees the seafarers who visit it: they have disappeared. But equally, Vancouver has disappeared for the sailors. They come to it, but the city itself they no longer see. They have neither the time nor the inclination. It has become for them just another stop in a worldwide industrial corridor, just another service station along the way.

Vancouver writer Bruce Serafin’s highly acclaimed book Colin’s Big Thing: A Sequence is published by Ekstasis Editions, Victoria, B.C. and Banff.

Betrayed: The Story of Canadian Merchant Seamen  premieres Wednesday, November 16 at the Pacific Cinemateque in Vancouver. Read Serafin’s interview with director Elaine Briere here.