This is a thought-provoking work, capturing the march of time which
overtook the maritime world in the last quarter of the 20th
century. The final crumbling of the British register caused
officers like Hall to find themselves in a strange new world,
sailing under flags of convenience with all the old certainties of
life at sea having vanished. There is both sadness and a rage at
seeing a way of life disappear forever under the wheels of
commerce, made more poignant by the author himself swallowing the
anchor and moving on. Expelled from Indonesia as an undesirable,
medically discharged in Honolulu, confined in Nigeria, Hall's
turbulent life takes him from West Africa to Japan, from Europe to
the Persian Gulf to the South Pacific. At last a Master Mariner, he
serves on one last break-bulk general cargo ship, before
transferring to the new maritime world. The prose is as elegantly
expressed as in his earlier works. Steaming along the Yemeni coast,
he writes: The bleakness of the South Yemen coastline made the
green sea seem sharper in contrast, almost emerald in colour.The
sun sat as a bright white orb in a blue white sky, the colours
scourged out by dust blown offshore from the desert interior. In a
typhoon near the Macclesfield Bank: Us; wild-eyed in the
wheelhouse, braced against the forward bulkhead, awaiting our fate,
helpless against a show of nature's fickle anger that could take us
down among the fishes before we could cry Noo-ooooo...Maturity and
marriage finally see off his tendency towards alcohol abuse: I
began to yearn to make myself a better person and abandon the
self-serving creature I had become. Wistful, unvarnished, droll, in
powerless rage against the changes, this is an important companion
to Hall's previous acclaimed books, a fine work that captures, in
arresting style, the life of men who go down to the sea in ships. .
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