A logbook is written for the man keeping it. It assumes you know what L.E.F.O. means, and that a ship might sail without yet knowing where she is going. This page is for everyone who came after.
Everything shown on a cream panel, in italics, is David’s own wording, transcribed from the page exactly as he set it down — spelling, abbreviations and all. Everything else is the family’s reading of it.
The dates are the hardest part. Of 790 dated entries, only three write the year out — at sea he had no need to. Every other year here has been worked out from the run of the pages, and then checked against history: no ship in this logbook passes through the Suez Canal while it was blocked.
Distances are not straight lines. Every passage is routed across a network of sea lanes and choke points — Gibraltar, Suez, Panama, Malacca, the Cape — so a track goes the way a ship goes, and the 912,444 miles are close to what he really steamed. A check runs over every passage in the book and fails if any of it crosses land.
Background written by the family from published history. It is not from the logbook, but it explains a great deal of what is in it.
1954–1957
When David first signed on in 1954, food rationing in Britain had only just ended — the last of it, on meat, finished that July. The ships he joined carried the raw material of recovery: iron ore from Algeria, Brazil and Sierra Leone into the steelworks of South Wales and Tees-side.
In the log: The Hollypark and the Gleddoch run almost nothing but ore, between Bône, Narvik, Pepel, Vitoria and Port Talbot.
1956–1957
Egypt nationalised the Suez Canal Company in July 1956. Britain and France invaded that autumn, and by November the Canal was blocked with scuttled ships. It stayed shut until April 1957. Tankers bound for the Gulf had to go round Africa instead, and Britain brought back petrol rationing that December.
In the log: In October 1956 the Norscot went through Suez to Kuwait as usual. She never went that way again that year — her 1957 pages are all Venezuela, Curaçao and the Atlantic. In July 1957 she sailed for Kuwait and was re-routed to the Caribbean off Cape St Vincent.
1954–1971
There was no way to call home. Letters were sent ahead to the agent at the next port, and if the ship was diverted the mail chased her round the world for months. A man could sail knowing his wife was expecting, and learn he had a child from a telegram handed up a gangway in another hemisphere.
1954–1971
Foreign-going Articles could run for up to two years, and often did. David's longest unbroken spell in this logbook runs seventeen months, from June 1960 to November 1961 aboard the Scotstoun. Leave came at the end of it, not during.
1960–1971
In the 1950s a large tanker carried around 16,000 tons. By the mid-1960s the new turbine tankers carried three and four times that, and they were built too big for the Suez Canal to take them fully laden. Ports had to be rebuilt to match: Europoort was dug out of the sea off Rotterdam, and Kharg Island and Khor al Amaya were built out into deep water offshore.
In the log: David moves from the 1956 Norscot to the Naess ships, and the ports change with them — Europoort, Kharg, Khor al Amaya and Ras Tanura take over the log.
1964–1965
A very large tanker could pass through Suez empty but not full. So she would load in the Gulf, steam all the way round the Cape of Good Hope to discharge in Europe or the Caribbean, and then come back light through the Canal. It added around 4,000 miles and three weeks to every laden passage.
In the log: In 1964 the Naess Spirit twice passes through Suez in ballast, then makes her three long hauls between the Gulf, Trinidad and Rotterdam the other way, round the Cape.
1967–1971
The Six-Day War in June 1967 closed the Suez Canal once more. Fifteen ships were trapped in the Great Bitter Lake and stayed there until 1975. Every tanker between the Gulf and Europe now went round Africa as a matter of course, and the Cape Verde Islands and South Africa became refuelling stops for a whole generation of ships.
In the log: David's last passage through the Canal in this logbook is on 18 February 1967, four months before it shut. That August the Naess Endeavour is bunkering at St Vincent in the Cape Verde Islands instead — out in the Atlantic, on the long way round Africa.
1967–1968
Aden had been British since 1839 and was one of the busiest bunkering ports on earth, largely because of the Canal traffic. When the Canal shut in 1967 that trade collapsed, and in November 1967 the British left and the People's Republic of South Yemen was declared.
1954–1971
The place names in this log are the ones David used, and many of them have since changed. Bombay is Mumbai, Madras is Chennai, Bône is Annaba, Bougie is Béjaïa, Ceylon is Sri Lanka. He sailed through the end of one world map and into another.
Some things the pages cannot settle on their own. These are worth asking him about while he is here to tell us — and worth writing down when he does.
“COLONCHA” — named 2 times
A loading port reached from Rotterdam in October 1961 and one day's steaming from Curaçao, so almost certainly on the Venezuelan coast. The spelling in the log is not one we can match.
A man can only be in one ship at a time, so where two spells overlap a year somewhere is a year out. These are the ones we know of.
T.T. Naess Champion October 1970 – February 1971
T.T. Naess Endeavour April 1970 – February 1971
T.T. Naess Spirit April – November 1964
T.T. Naess Endeavour March – December 1964
The entries come from a family spreadsheet transcribed from the twenty-four scanned pages of David’s logbook. This site reads that spreadsheet directly, so anything corrected there appears here within a few minutes — including new pages, if more are ever found.
The chart is drawn from scratch rather than borrowed from a mapping service, and every position on it was matched by hand to the names as he wrote them. Some are exact; a few, where the log names a berth or an oilfield rather than a town, are our best reading. Each port page says which it is.
If you spot something wrong — and there will be things — the spreadsheet is the place to fix it.