The Legend of the S.S. Mendi

Aboard the South African warship Amatola, everyone has a role and a pair of words to describe it. The buffers make sure the vessel is “spick and span,” the engineers keep it “up and running,” and the communications team is its “eyes and ears.” On a bright summer morning in January, a few days before the Amatola was to set sail from Simon’s Town Navy Base, south of Cape Town, the ship was bustling. In the officer’s mess, men in their dress whites served themselves an early lunch from platters piled high with baloney and egg-salad sandwiches; for dessert, there were cheerful little scones, halved and topped with jam and whipped cream. Outside, in a passageway, young men and women carried crates of beer, Coca-Cola, and cider to a man with a clipboard, who ticked the supplies off a list, whistling. On the other side of the far passageway wall, Lieutenant Commander Sipho Ngema, an engineer, sat in his quarters. Behind him, on the bottom bunk of the bed he would sleep in for the next three months, a floral duvet waited to be unrolled. Ngema, a nine-year veteran of the South African Navy, recalled the day he came down from Pretoria for basic training. It was the first time he had ever seen the ocean. “It was a very scary thing,” he said. “You always get stories about the sea being dangerous—that it can take you away.”