The Sulu archipelago is a good example of a place which must be reached by boat if it is ever to be seen. Only a boat, as opposed to an aircraft, will put the traveller within its coordinates. There is always some risk of attack by pirates or of going down in a vessel like the Doña Marilyn, and it is important to court that risk. Besides, the cramped, hot, vomity approach through a sea sprinkled to the horizon with small islands is the correct one. It is necessary to wake at dawn on a folding canvas deck bed jammed between its neighbours like a stretcher in a busy field hospital, face clammy with salt and dew and whipped by strands of a stranger’s hair. Out of that fitful, blurred sleep, an island has emerged on a turquoise sea and those whose destination it is begin to stir, waking their children, pulling their belongings together. This slow, oneiric approach must be observed. No place ever quite survives the wrong landfall.
If one wished to formulate a First Law of Travel, it might be that the mode of travel determines the place reached. To take an example: the Korea one reaches by cycling from Hamburg (which could be done without ever once glimpsing the sea) is altogether a different place from the Korea reached by flying from Heathrow or Kennedy. The people are different, they speak a different language and have a far greater knowledge of bicycles. This principle holds good for Sulu, too, and is likewise dependent on adopting the right pace. All those passenger ships, more or less unseaworthy, which still ply the networks of archipelagic routes, are simply ferries, shuttling people around within a country. They make one lament the passing of international sea travel. The sundry boredoms and discomforts of passenger liners were as nothing compared to those of the aircraft which have replaced them. There is a new generation of cruise liners, it is true, but they scarcely touch the argument. Cruise liners are not going anywhere, so they function more or less as hotels, with the novelty that they float and move. They are as aimless as the pleasure they pursue, that classic wild-goose chase. As was memorably said in a radio programme about the hijacked Achille Lauro, however luxurious a modern cruise liner, ‘it’s really no more than a velvet-lined prison hulk.’
Just as modes of travel affect destinations, so do they change our farewells and the very nature of separation. Airport terminals swallow up friends and lovers in a way docks never did. The drabness of quays is not to be compared with the squalor of concourses. Even if we bother to wave foolishly from the terminal roof as an anonymous metal toy half a mile away disappears within seconds into grey overcast, we can never be sure it was the right one. In any case, part of the dispassion of these aerial bus journeys lies in their being so swift. It now takes effort and care for two people to be distant from one another by much more than twenty-four hours.
Ships, on the other hand, carry with them the solemnity of long separations, perhaps of lifetimes. Stately valedictions echoed through people’s lives until forty or so years ago. Ships are individual as one of a fleet of Boeings never could be, even though an aircraft may carry a name (often more or less geared to the tourist age: Loch Ness, Val d’Aosta, etc.). A ship is her name, right to the bottom and beyond, connoting a moment of history as much as a vague locus on the seabed (Titanic, Lusitania, Andrea Doria). Aircraft, when they crash, shed their names along with their wings. They become ‘ill-fated Flight 307’; or else Pan Am Flight 103 becomes ‘Lockerbie’, an entire nexus of loss reduced to a point of impact.
The departure of a ship is slow, celebratory, mournful. It gives time to think and the proper space in which to let fall one’s lesser salt into the greater below. Something of moment is happening, part of whose subtext is a fear or resentment of the sea as the agent of long absences, slow letters and terrible news. Whoever they are, down at the docks one windy afternoon – friends, lovers, siblings – they are already separated. There are those on the quay and those already on board, though both are watching. The ship is about to sail. Gangways are lowered, ropes cast off. Heavy nooses splash into the slot of oily scum between lorry-tyre fenders and iron cliff. Cries go up. The siren’s blare, of such low frequency it shakes the stomach and jars loose fresh tears, sounds once, twice. Yet an illusion of unparting is preserved by the streamers, cheerful strips of paper sagging and twirling between the thousand pairs of widely separated hands.
Over the whole scene hovers loss looking for somewhere to settle. Is it in the already spoken goodbye? In the last touch of bodies? In the cries of the gulls? Or does it now pulse along that thin paper nerve? It parts; they part. Yet still they remain visible to each other while loss fills up the space opening between them, stretching out between ship and shore, between hull and headland, dot and smudge, before spreading across the face of the globe. But of course it had been there in the train on the way to the port. And before, in the careful packing of suitcases. And before that.
And after? Here again, air travel offers no comfort because its speed runs departure into arrival, leaching out their difference, blurring them into a hectic placelessness. We cannot tell what to think. It is too brutal, facing the ordeal of a dawn landing on a strange continent with the scents of leavetaking still in our clothes. We have walked the streets of an Asian city with the fresh scratches of a cat in Oxfordshire on our hands. Such confusions make unreal both cat and city and leave us feeling we can never properly come to grips with anything.
Travelling long distances by sea, on the other hand, gives us time. Travel is like death in that it requires mourning. The light melancholy of watching a coastline recede is a necessary observance. We join in with shipboard life just as soon as we wish, and not before. Otherwise we write in our cabin or spend hours watching the wake of our own passage. The caves sucked into the water’s surface by the turning of invisible propellers – each subtly different, each marbling a dissipating track which stretches back, an elastic streamer – become hypnotic. They set us adrift on inward voyages where we barely have enough sarcastic energy left to stop ourselves seeing our frail barks upon the vasty deep as paradigmatic. Such time, such long hovering on the edge of banality, is powerfully restorative. By the time approaching land is announced we are free to be excited. Later, it seems to us that only by having breathed the salt air of loss for long enough are we able to make a properly carefree disembarkation. We have adjusted. Our biological clocks are reset, our homoiothermal balance has altered with the latitude, our internal maps – whose every nautical mile has been felt as travelled – make sense. Behind us the ocean is criss-crossed with thousands upon thousands of multicoloured streamers, a planet festooned with farewells.