Welcome to the nineteenth edition of VoiceMap’s newsletter, Senses of Direction, where we share stories from around the world that spark curiosity and stimulate your senses.
This month, we join Paul Salopek aboard a container ship, where men spend their days on “watery caravans,” moving the contents of our material lives – including most of the world’s Christmas presents. We also hear an astonishing performance by a bridge-building musician who’s learned to find “different homes” with his cello. Lastly, there’s a moving Christmas story about a fir tree, told with Hans Christian Andersen’s archetypal flair.
And, if you’re looking for a last-minute gift to celebrate Christmas – or simply curiosity – allow me to suggest VoiceMap’s vouchers. They’re simple without being commonplace, plus you can schedule delivery by email with a personal message for friends and family that share your delight in discovery.
You can sign up to the Senses of Direction newsletter by entering your details below:
For your sense of proportion | Across the blue highway by container ship
It’s been thirteen years since journalist Paul Salopek set off from Ethiopia on foot to retrace our ancestors’ ancient migration route across the globe. Last month, he ran out of solid ground and boarded a container ship from Japan to North America.
In Blue Highway, Salopek invites us to be flies on the wall of the Maersk San Vicente. It’s a ship of “Willy Wonka hugeness” – as long as the Eiffel Tower is tall – where basketball courts and engine rooms as spacious as commercial aircraft hangars sprawl across the length of about four city blocks.
Hundreds of thousands of seafarers spend their waking hours skimming timezones in these peculiar, liminal spaces. Yet most of us know precious little about life on the “watery caravans” without which “our modern consumer culture would stall, shrink, simply collapse.” Salopek spent 10 days with the twenty-one men who operate the Maersk San Vicente, one of at least 57,000 merchant vessels plying the oceans today.
“‘Friends back home still ask if I see pirates,’ says John Cruz, the courtly chief officer aboard the Maersk San Vicente. Cruz cups a hand over one of his eyes, mimicking a buccaneer’s patch. ‘It’s crazy. Nobody understands our world.’
His shipmates range in age from early 20s to 50s.
Cruz is a romantic. Four days out of Yokohama, he takes me out onto the ship’s bridge wing, an exposed walkway high above the deck. Feet planted apart as on a mountain top, his hair yanked sideways by 30-knot winds, he grips an old-fashioned sextant rummaged from a drawer. He wants to demonstrate how in olden times sailors shot the sun for celestial navigation. It is a gesture of remembrance, a nod to a tradition of seamanship before Doppler weather radar, corporate management, GPS navigation, Facebook messaging, and a topnotch karaoke machine thumping in the crew’s recreation room.”
“Their passports reflect the industry’s postwar shift toward recruitment from geographies of cheap labor: the Philippines, India, Poland, China. The polyglot crew communicates at the mess table in Seaspeak, a clipped, nomadic version of English. (A drifter of questionable allegiances, I feel at home at their elbows.) They sign seafarer’s contracts that last from three to nine months. The shipboard environment they inhabit is less gritty man-camp than regimented space-station. They toil, sleep, and relax inside a massive factory—a warehouse—requiring constant attention and maintenance.”
Salopek’s eye for detail is matched only by his ability to help us locate another puzzle piece in the big picture of our world.
? Read his captivating article, Blue Highway, which includes short videos of the chef’s perpetually rolling rolling pin and other snippets of life. Listen to earlier dispatches from Salopek’s walk, and learn more about his journey on the Out of Eden Walk website.
For your sense of harmony | Abel Selaocoe’s search for home
Hearing cellist and singer Abel Selaocoe perform live is a full body experience. Between his electric stage presence, the deep, reverberant pitch of his throat singing, and his captivatingly unconventional cello playing, the South African musician gives an unforgettable performance.
But for me, the most joyful part of seeing him in concert earlier this week was becoming one of hundreds of surprised participants who he inspired to sing, in unison.
Take a look at the Reel that Selaocoe shared of this very moment. (If you zoom right in, you might spot me on the platform behind the orchestra.)
The musician grew up in a township near Johannesburg and, before his family found the means to buy the budding young musician a cello, the young Selaocoe drew the strings of the instrument on paper, and pasted it to his chest to practice the fingerings.
Today, he’s perhaps best-known for creating “alchemy out of blended Western and African traditions,” as NPR describes it. Speaking about the inspiration for his album, Hymns of Bantu, Selaocoe said:
“The template we knew was the music we sing at home, and of course, my teacher afterward kind of opened up the world of classical music, mostly starting with Bach,” Selaocoe recalled. “And I thought, ‘OK, there are two worlds now, but I have to make sure that they live in the same space.’ ”
His debut album Where Is Home explores themes like belonging.
“‘Home’ can mean so many things beyond the architectural or geographical space: it can be a spiritual place; it can be people; it can be solitude; it can be a routine. It can also be something you find along your travels. In all these senses of the word I’ve learned to find my different homes through the cello.”
? See Selaocoe performing with artists including Yo-Yo Ma in this video, watch his Tiny Desk Concert, and read the NPR article here.
For your sense of destiny | Hans Christian Andersen’s story of the fir tree
This time last year, we shared a story about New York City’s iconic Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree which, each year, is lifted into place by crane at night – before being wrapped with five miles of coloured lights. The holiday tradition of decorating trees is, perhaps surprisingly, hundreds of years old. The first Christmas tree reportedly appeared in the Cathedral of Strasbourg in 1539.
About 250 years later tree-decorating arrived in Denmark, when the beloved Danish author Hans Christian Andersen was just three years old. It would later become one of his most treasured Christmas traditions.
Pernille Schlander shares Andersen’s moving 1845 story about one particular fir tree’s aspirations in her VoiceMap, Copenhagen’s Storybook Christmas: A Hans Christian Andersen Tour. Like many of the literary fairy tales for which Andersen is best-known, this story has a simple but enduring moral which we’d all do well to remember.
? Listen to The Fir Tree, or browse through the tour here.
Until next time, thanks for travelling with us!
Best Wishes,
Claire van den Heever
Looking for a last-minute gift? VoiceMap’s digital gift cards are a thoughtful surprise for friends and family who delight in discovery. Just add a personal message and choose your delivery date.