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Waiting for us on the dock as we arrived was a delegation of P&O and Shell
executives. They quickly boarded and disappeared to Basil’s cabin, never to be
seen again until they departed en masse, less one of their number. Basil was not
seen again; one suspects that he said farewell to the senior officers and departed
on the next available plane to London. Left aboard was a new, and very different
personality; Captain Cowan.

*********

There was a sequel to this sorry tale.

In 1976 I came across Supership, a book by Noel Mostert, a journalist who
gravitated from South Africa to Canada and became something of a specialist
in maritime matters. The book, published in 1974, appeared at a crucial time
in the bulk-oil transportation business. The Suez Canal had again been closed
because of Arab-Israeli conflict, an event which gave greater urgency, if any
were needed, towards the modernisation of tankers and their ability to transport
ever-larger quantities of oil products from the Gulf to the ever-expanding of
needs of the industrial world.
The author had joined Ardshiel in Rotterdam. This vessel was a 214,085-
ton super tanker owned by P&O, and, need I say, commanded by Captain Basil
Thomson. It transpired that Basil had, as Mostert said, “…been found at fault in
an accident and had left P&O…” and, I learned, subsequently joined Zim Israel
Shipping as a master. Later, when in New York, he had been contacted by P&O
to determine whether he would be prepared to re-join his old company. This
was doubtless because the seagoing career was becoming increasingly unpopular
among senior officers, and it was probably thought that the incident on Mantua,
for which he had been fired, would not be repeated. In his book, Mostert indicated
that Basil had thoroughly enjoyed working with ‘the Israelites’, as he termed
them, because they had the high standards in personnel and ship maintenance
that he had liked, though not unreservedly, with P&O. Mostert’s voyage, from
Europe to the Gulf, was of great interest to seamen, though the voyage itself was
essentially without incident. Something of a Cassandra, the author feared that
the world’s insatiable oil demand would result in many more and greater marine
catastrophes. He was right respecting the growth in size (there are today Ultra
Large Crude Carriers that exceed 300,000 tons), but the limitations imposed by
the depth of the oceans, and particularly the continental shelves, resulted in the
practical size of these ships having probably reached a natural limit.

Mostert obviously believed that Basil had returned to his natural home (P&O)
because that was the life to which he had over the years become accustomed; he
was a stranger when at home in Brighton but knew a life on a ship to be thoroughly
in accord with a life well-lived. The culmination of the writer’s view was that;

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