Many, many years ago, in the 80’s, I was a kid with the dream of sailing a ship.
In Portugal, fresh out of decommissioning from the famous Portuguese White Fleet, the fishing schooner Creola was handed over to the Portuguese navy in order to bring the young generation back into the sea. The plan, and the dream, was to sail as part of the crew.
The plan, due to the inescapable grind of life, never came to fruition; the dream, however, never died.
I followed her from afar, seeing how she travelled with crews of youngsters, participated in festivals and races of all kinds. I still occasionally saw her moored and always admired her beautiful lines and white hull. At the time the Creola was built, during the brink of World War II, the fishing industry was also bracing for a huge transformation as sails were quickly becoming a thing of the past and new fishing fleets were now being powered by noisy engines. Shapes and curves, once graciously adapted for speed under sail, were abandoned.
It was also at this time that Vasco Albuquerque d'Orey was looking to build three new fishing ships. Instead of following the way the world was moving, he decided that they would still be sailing ships.
Not happy with that, the owner demanded that the two people in charge of the project, naval architect Rogério d'Oliveira and the most renowned and skilled captain of the fishing fleet, Captain Francisco Marques, would design the ships so they would follow the shapes of the dreamy schooners of Nova Scotia, that sailed the seas where the new builds were supposed to fish, the grand Banks of the North Atlantic.
The Creola and the Santa Maria Manuela were then built in Lisbon, not far from downtown, at a shipyard that still exists. Legend and documents say that the steel used was sold to Portugal by Hitler’s Germany to allow Portugal to build war ships but instead was used for these ships and made for extra thick hulls. Both were assembled in record time and went to fish the Grand Banks the same year in which they were built. The Santa Maria Manuela and the Creola were born pretty much twins, having been built side by side.
The third sister was the Argus, built in the Netherlands, arguably the most famous one due to the book written by Williem de Wiliers and the coverage from National Geographic. It holds two main differences: the size is slightly different, and although still retaining beauty in its design, there were concessions in the dimensions to store more fish. The steel used was also different, as it was "regular" steel, commonly used for shipbuilding.
In 2006 the Santa Maria Manuela, that had up until that point been fishing, was dismasted and converted into a motor trawler (still a pretty one), at the end of a very long fishing life. The ship that was built and designed slightly out of time could no longer compete with modern ships. The hull was still in pretty good shape, having survived first the harsh campaigns up north and, later in life, the warm and hot conditions from the seas of West Africa, deadly for steel hulls. She was to be scrapped until a cod fishing company decided that her journey could not end there and decided to recover and commission her in 2010, as a cruise sailing ship.
At this point, the dream, that always refused to die, came back to life.
Would this still be possible?
Many years would pass, life and work would stand in the way until last July, when I finally stepped aboard the Santa Maria Manuela. The trip was an ocean passage to the Azores, 7 days of blue seas.
I only met the SMM a few days before setting sail, her smooth contours, pencil-straight masts and meticulously maintained condition hiding the hardships once endured aboard. Her hull, however, still bears scars of a life spent in harsh conditions, fishing some of the toughest seas in the world, a reminder of what life aboard was like. When scores of men would leave her comfort and jump to the open sea in small dorys to fish cod individually, by hand, no matter the waves or cold. Months on end with hardly any contact with their families, living in close contact with the very real possibility of death, these men were - as described by one of those fishermen, who wrote a book about it and that I had the good fortune of meeting - “men without a heart”. This was not because of a lack of camaraderie but due to the fact that you could not have a heart aboard; if you did, you would start to think about what you were leaving behind and that would consume you.
The ship that I stepped aboard on that warm afternoon is very different from the fishing one; she was rebuilt from the hull up to be a passenger ship - and an excellent one at that - but it is, at the same time, one that has a history, of many battles and forgotten stories over the years.
The fellow travellers with whom I shared my passage to the Azores came from many countries, different backgrounds, young and old, and provided amazing conversations. They, together with the crew, made for a happy ambiance aboard, and even the ship herself seemed happy with this new life, taking people around the oceans for leisure and participating every now and then on scientific expeditions aimed at protecting the seas in which she has sailed through for close to a century.
The passage itself was uneventful, with fair weather and not much wind. This allowed us to climb the masts and swim in the open seas. I thrived on the early morning, just before sunrise, when I would get a mug of coffee and, camera in hand, join the officers on shift for a chat, take some photographs and be fully in the moment. I met, and got to know, all the crew, each with their own story at sea, from different backgrounds, but all doing justice to the vessel they were part of. They made me feel as if, even for a brief moment, I was one of them.
One common activity, that all passengers shared, was to spend hours on end looking at the horizon in what seemed a meditative status. It had never crossed my mind that one could do that for so long and, in the end, it seemed to go by so quick.
During an ocean passage, unlike on a cruise, the ship becomes its own world and, as was the case for most of the guests, without outside connection to the online world, it feels as if you stepped into a bubble, isolated from everyone and everything else. The rhythm slows down and every choice becomes more deliberate. In those days the colours, the smells and the air felt like a dream; as the ship slowly moved along, I faced a problem - how does one photograph dreams?
The thought chased me for a while.
For most of the passage, the blue sky melted into an even bluer sea, and the memories of land melted with the waves and the hull. You don’t capture dreams with a lens, you wait for them in the quiet spaces between the balance of sea and the horizon. You photograph dreams by feeling the salty air and watching the light dance on the water. This passage was a moment between a dream, reality and a memory that was taking shape.
Like a breeze the 7-day passage came to an end in Ponta Delgada, São Miguel Island. I quickly said goodbye to the crew and fellow travellers, jumped ashore and took a plane to join my family on another nearby island.
For many days, weeks even, I dreamt that I was back in the Santa Maria Manuela. It was as if the dream gained strength and was saying that, although it materialized, this was just the beginning.
Photos & Writing by Pedro Maria
Editing by Mei Seva
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Enjoyed that, Pedro. Nice work!
"Men without a heart". What a sentence.