Fire on board – and the miracle

 

Capt. Abdus Salam Khan

Master m.v. Mainamati

(Published in The Pakistan Times, August 12, 1988)

 

President Yahya Khan was livid with anger that July morning in 1971. “The language he was using on the phone while talking to the head of the PNSC, was unprintable,” confided his erstwhile ADC, Capt. Zarief Khan Babur, recently.

               He had reason to be angry, for the PNSC cargo ship “Mainamati” was reported on fire at Las Palmas (Canary Islands). The President was especially concerned as the ship was carrying a big load of ammunition for the Pakistan Army. Military action had started in East Pakistan and this consignment was of strategic importance. He was angry for he had received reports that the PNSC management had manned the ship with Bengali crew, and sabotage could not be ruled out.

The “Mainamati” a cargo ship of about 11000 tones, had been purchased second-hand from HAPAG, a German shipping company, in 1970.

HAPAG had loaned us two of their young chief engineers to remain on board and train and help our engineers in the use of German machinery.(I would recall them Karl and Peter. Karl also had his wife on board).

I had joined the “Mainamati” as Master in  Falmouth, England in September 1970. I had spent  the previous nine months in Chalna Port, East Pakistan, as a Senior Pilot, but certain terrifying signs that my  wife and I saw made us decide to abandon that career and return to Karachi and to seafaring. Luckily, I immediately landed a job as a Master in PNSC and was immediately told to proceed to East Pakistan to join the “Madhumati” at Chittagong. As I was getting ready to fly back to East Pakistan the next day, the “Mainamati” was reported in trouble in the Bay of Biscay and had to return to Falmouth to carry out repairs.

My orders were changed, luckily, during the night and I was asked to fly to Falmouth and join the “Mainamati” instead (I say “luckily” because the poor chap who was sent to join the “Madhumati” in my  place  had to spend a couple of years in an Indian POW camp, for the ship was caught lying in Calcutta during the 1971 war).

The fateful voyage of the “Mainamati” started from Karachi in early 1971 and after loading Chrome ore in Mozambique, we proceeded  to the east coast of the U.S. via the Cape of Good Hope. When we were lying in the port of Baltimore, military action started in East Pakistan and the Western media were full of stories of atrocities committed by the “Punjabi” army. I found the propaganda campaign so nauseating that I wrote a very strong letter to the `Sun` of Baltimore  giving the Pakistani point of view. To the charge, commonly being bandied about in the Western media, that there was no love lost between East and West Pakistan. I replied that my ship had Bengali crew and West Pakistani officers; and that the Bengali crew, I was sure, would lay down their life for me, if the need arose.

The letter created quite an uproar. The journalists came on board to verify my statement. My crew stood by my claim and their devotion was duly reported in the Press. The anti-Pakistan elements also came into action and there were many speeches on the radio and letters  in the Press refuting me. The upshot was that the anti-Pakistan lobby tried to persuade the Bengali crew to desert. All they could succeed in doing was to persuade a Bengali third officer  and a cadet to desert. The crew stood firm like a rock. In fact, we held a `Mehfil-a-Milad` which was handsomely conducted by our Bengali carpenter (who had been an Imam of his village mosque), and prayers were offered for the safety and integrity of Pakistan.

The two officers who deserted the “Mainamati” in Baltimore, were so swayed by the poisonous propaganda that they went on the air and made speeches against me. But the infatuation with the Sheikh Mujib´s golden promises did not last long. The same officers, a year later, visited my ship in New York and, with tears in their eyes, apologised to me for their rash step.

The “Mainamati” sailed from the U.S. In April/May 1971 and went to Yugoslavia loaded with full cargo of soybean meal. After discharging that we went to the Romanian ports in the Black Sea, loaded some general cargo there, then came back to Istanbul to load twenty railway coaches on deck and some more general cargo and then headed back to Europe for taking the most important part of our load i.e. a huge consignment of explosives. After loading this consignment and having airmailed the cargo manifest to our agents at the next port of call (Las Palmas) where the vessel was to take on bunkers, we sailed for home.

We arrived in Las Palmas at around 1 p.m. in the first week of July 1971. No mention had been made of the explosives in our arrival wireless message to the agents at Las Palmas in view of the possibility of sabotage. No red light was shown to indicate the presence of dangerous cargo. When the Las Palmas pilot boarded, he was told verbally of the explosives on board. The bunkering operation started soon after berthing. The vessel was to take maximum of fuel and diesel oil so as to enable it to reach Karachi directly via the Cape.

At around 3:50 a.m., I was aroused by a panicky duty officer who said that there was fire in the engine room. As it transpired in the subsequent  enquiry, the fire was caused by a lapse on the part of the bunkering crew on duty. The hose supplying diesel direct from the shore was coupled to a bunkering connection on the port side (left side) and the oil was being taken in a double-bottom tank underneath the engine room. An engineer was stationed near the bunkering connection on deck and another was taking soundings of the double-bottom tank. The latter was to be very alert and had to shout to the engineer on the deck to “stop the oil” as soon as the tank was nearly full. The engineer on deck would then signal to the oil company man ashore who would immediately shut off the supply of oil. The engineer in the engine room taking the soundings was not alert and allowed the tank to become full. As a result the pressure of the in-coming oil forced some of the oil in the tank out of an air-vent pipe in the engine room and the overflowing diesel oil came out as a forceful squirt under pressure and  fell all over. Some of it fell on the hot casing of a running turbine and thus caught fire. The engineer lost his nerve and instead of raising an alarm tried to fight the fire locally. The fire went on to spread to the entire engine room; by the time I was informed the engine room was full of smoke and fire, and all personnel on duty had abandoned it.

               There was a steam-injection firefighting system for injection of steam into the engine room after closing all openings. But because of the fire the boilers had to be shut down and hence no steam was available. In fact, as I rushed to the bridge and sounded a series of blasts on the whistle to raise an alarm, the whistle also went dead because of the shutting off steam from the boilers. The radio officer, in the meantime, sent out a distress call and it was also broadcast on the channel 16 of VHF.

The harbour trucks and the shore firefighting  trucks started arriving and their water-jets directed into the engine room soon brought  the level of water in the engine room to the halfway mark. The site of the original fire was submerged in water but the loose oil in the engine room, which was now floating on top of the water, was still on fire. This fire then spread to the high lubricating oil tanks in the engine room. These tanks were situated in the tween-deck level, so the fire had now entered  the most dangerous stage, because just across the bulkhead (the steel wall) was stowed the consignment of TNT. Unfortunately, in spite of flooding hold No.4 by water jets, the fire found its way into tween deck No.4 through a shelter deck opening. (It had a steel cover bolted on but some of the bolts were missing, thus leaving some holes for the fire to finds its way into tween-deck No.4)

There was not one chance in a million now to save the ship, its crew or the port of Las Palmas. I thought very hard. There had to be a way. As a last resort, I decided to use our “secret weapon” – the powerful weapon of prayer.

I summoned all the officers and the crew. Out of nearly sixty people, only six remained: chief engineer, Ajaib Khan, second engineer Mohammad Sarwar, third officer Rustam Khan, the Bengali carpenter and a couple of other crew members. The rest had deserted the ship and found their way to the Las Palmas town. The Spanish police tried to stop some, but they jumped into the sea and swam to the shore. None of them was prepared to face certain death. Meanwhile, I had sent ashore my three minor children, who were travelling as passengers on board, with German chief engineer Karl´s wife and they were taken to a hotel. I also allowed Karl and Peter, the two guest engineers of the HAPAG line, to leave the ship, since they were not members of the crew and were travelling on board as passenger only to advise our engineers. But I was astonished by their reply. Faced with almost certain death, they declined to leave the ship, saying emphatically: “Ach, Captain, we think we should stay with you:”

As the seven of us formed a circle on deck in the semi darkness of early dawn, six haggard figures, soaked wet and covered in dirt, grime and grease. I requested Bengali carpenter, our erstwhile Imam who had conducted the Milad in Baltimore, to lead the prayer:

 

قُلْنَا يَا نَارُ كُونِي بَرْدًا وَسَلَامًا عَلَىٰ إِبْرَاهِيمَ

 

     “O fire! Be cool and safe for Abraham!”

     (Al-Quran Surah 21. Al-Anbiyaa, Ayah 69)

 

As the Imam kept intoning the prayer, we all kept saying “Amen”. With death staring us in the face, we were no longer Punjabis, Bengalis or Pathans… We were just seven human beings pleading for our lives before our Creator. The black smoke from the TNT boxes on fire kept reminding us that our rendezvous with death was not far off. We were praying and hoping for a miracle – just as the Almighty had once intervened in the case of His friend Abraham.

“Please Lord, can  you do it for us sinners also?” I kept repeating.

And suddenly and miraculously help arrived. I found a tall well-built European standing next to me. He said he was the captain of the German ship  “Oceanic,” the world´s latest and most powerful firefighting tug that was on its maiden voyage  and had entered the port of Las Palmas only a few minutes earlier.

“ Do you want us to undertake the firefighting operational under the Lloyds Salvage Agreement,” he asked.

“Yes! Certainly I do!” I shouted with joy, for I knew in my heart that our prayer had been answered. God, who had sent the latest firefighting vessel in the nick of time, I was sure, would not let us be blown to bits.

As we were towed out of port by a port tug under orders of the Spanish Admiral, the Governor of the Canary Isles, the black smoke was still coming out of hold No.4 showing that the TNT boxes were on fire and could explode any time.

The “Oceanic” stood by all the time and kept dousing the heated portion of the hull with jets of water.

As soon as we dropped anchor  outside Las Palmas harbour, the Spanish tugs left us and lay off at a respectable distance. The captain and crew of the Oceanic then went ahead with the coolness and courage I had rarely seen, with steps to fight the fire in hold No.4. They lowered a rubber dinghy with a portable pump, went on board the “Mainamati” by means of pilot ladder, started the pump and put the hose into the ventilator of hold  No.4. They then fired the battery of carbon dioxide cylinders which were stowed on board the “Mainamati” for fire-fighting into hold No.4. The freezing cold gas immediately put out the fire, much to the relief of all of us.

It took us seven days to put out the fire in the engine room.  First, all the openings were sealed with adhesive tape after closing their covers and then carbon dioxide was fired into the room. The “Oceanic” captain handed back  the Mainamati to us after the fire was completely put out and then immediately filed a suit in court for the arrest of the ship till the PNSC could give bank guarantee in London to the owners of the “Oceanic”. The PNSC had to give a bank guarantee to the tune of about a million pounds sterling.

Though the fire was extinguished, we were faced with another dilemma. The entire engine room had been burnt, though the ship and her cargo were safe. The Spanish authorities insisted that we leave Las Palmas waters at the earlies, for the fire-effected explosives on board were no longer safe. No port in Europe or Africa was willing to accept us. Luckily King Hassan of Morocco, who had a soft corner for Pakistan in view of Pakistan´s untiring efforts in the U.N. in securing the independence of Morocco, was prevailed upon by our Ambassador in Rabat to allow “Mainamati” into  Casablanca. There the entire cargo of Mainamati was transferred to two other vessels of the PNSC. She was then towed to the  port of Bremen by a small tug. We nearly lost Mainamati in a gale in the English Channel for the tiny tug lost control of the ship and we started drifting towards the rocky French coast. Luckily, the water was not very deep, and we were able to ride out the gale by dropping the ship`s anchor. We lay in Bremen harbour for couple of months awaiting the fate of the ship to be decided by the owners. We watched sad fall of East Pakistan on German TV.

Finally, it was decided in January 1972 that it would cost too much to repair the vessel. She was sold to Spanish shipbreakers and we flew back to Karachi. We found the things completely changed. My old managing director who had made up his mind to sack me on arrival in Karachi for my responsibility in this incident, had been removed by the new government and the new MD., on seeing my file, thought that I ought to be decorated for fighting the fire and saving the ship and the valuable cargo.

I still remember the remarks made by the British explosive expert who flew into Las Palmas from London to survey the fire-damaged TNT boxes. “I don´t know what God you believe in  Captain, but he had certainly been kind to you,” he remained as he looked at the blackened and charred TNT boxes that had not exploded and shook his head unbelievingly.

“Well, I believe in the same God who made the fire cool for Abraham,” I mused thankfully “ who says miracles don´t happen these days?”

 

Ayub khan

(Perth, Australia)

Very few on-board ill-fated Mainamati showed the bravery and courage like my father had done in the face of imminent death and destruction.I stood on the wharf by the burning ship along with my two younger brothers when father came to me and said:

“Look after your brothers in case I don´t return” – he said. “I love you all and Allah is your Hafiz, be brave and remember your family needs you!”

All the ship´s crew were running away from the burning ship. Someone shouted at me: “Run! this ship is going to explode any time”. At that time I was scared for my father and began thinking that he might not return.

We were all lucky, the ship didn´t explode and he came back and hugged us all and said: “I told you Allah is with us”. It was his way of showing how much his family meant for him.