To his admirers, Captain Apostolos Mangouras is a hero, a courageous old sea-dog and the last of a disappearing species of European merchant marine captains who have spent their entire adult lives on the high seas. To his enemies, the Greek captain is, as master of the Prestige oil-tanker that went down off the Spanish coast 15 months ago, an ocean-going crook, one of those responsible for the worst-ever oil spill in Europe's maritime history.
And yet tomorrow night Mangouras will be the absent guest at what are known as the "sea-faring Oscars", the annual award-ceremony organised by Lloyds List newspaper in the art deco surroundings of the Park Lane Hotel when the great and good of the international shipping world gather to honour their best. Mangouras, whose cargo of thick, noxious fuel oil painted the beaches and cliffs of north-west Spain a treacly black, is a candidate for the sailor's equivalent of a best actor Oscar, the Nautical Institute's shipmaster of the year award.
In Spain, Mangouras is a suspected criminal, out of jail on €3m (£2.02m) bail, banned from leaving the country, forced to report to police daily and facing charges of both disobeying authorities and provoking an ecological disaster when his ship went down in November 2002. But on internet sites and in seafarer's magazines, the grumbling that started when Mangouras was first arrested has become a roar of indignation. He behaved, they say, like a model captain, saving his crew, staying with his sinking ship, and risking his life trying to save it when he could have left it to the mercy of a fierce Atlantic gale. "He was nominated by several different groups," a Nautical Institute spokesman confirmed yesterday.
"He is an old sea-wolf, part of what ought to be declared a protected species of men, the kind of sea captain that used to exist, but no longer does, in Britain or Spain," says Joan Zamora, a Spanish sea captain turned university lecturer who has become one of his public defenders.
"He is a scapegoat, a man who is paying for the ridiculous mistakes of the Spanish authorities. They claim he is a sort of sea bandit, a pirate. He kept a cool head and the decisions he took were correct. Many of us would never have had his courage or shown such cool."
"We will have to wait until Wednesday," the captain said in his thick Greek accent when the Guardian tracked him down at the Barcelona police station where he must report daily. "Apart from that, I'm not saying anything."
Mangouras has refused to comment in public on what happened to the Prestige and its 77,000-tonne cargo of fuel oil. But in a statement sent to a European parliament enquiry, and obtained by the Guardian, his anger is obvious. "Given that I chose to remain on board, putting my own life at risk and saved the lives of my crew, I find it extraordinary that I should be treated this way," he said.
The judges at the Nautical Institute will base their decision on Mangouras's behaviour in the 50 hours after the terrified crew of the Prestige, mostly Filipinos, heard the grating, groaning noise of buckling metal reverberate through the 26-year-old single-hulled vessel. It was every sailor's nightmare, as the ageing tanker received a mortal pounding from 25ft waves during a force 10 gale off Cape Finisterre.
"In the midst of the panic, with the tanker listing at a speed that would sink it, and in a fierce storm, Mangouras kept a cool head," says Zamora. "Some officers were paralysed with fear, other crew members were weeping. But Mangouras never lost his calm, and his example meant that the chief engineer and a few crew members were able to follow his orders and organise the evacuation."
Mangouras managed two crucial feats in those first hours, according to his supporters. He was able, though the lifeboats had been crippled by the waves, to arrange for the crew to be lifted off by helicopters and, by opening ballast tanks, prevented the vessel from listing further and sinking just a few miles off the Spanish coast.
Ordering two of the port ballast tanks to be opened and filled with seawater, with the vessel already listing by more than 25 degrees, was one of two potentially life-threatening manoeuvres carried out by Mangouras and the crew members who stayed on board.
Television pictures shot from a helicopter show one crew member disappearing under a massive wave as he tried to open one valve on the exposed deck. Fortunately, as the wave washed back across the deck, he could be seen still hanging onto the ship's structure.
Later, at night, Mangouras and his chief engineer, guided only by torchlight, picked their way along a damaged catwalk to the forecastle to try to secure a line from the Ria de Vigo, a salvage tug that had been sent to help them. It took them 20 minutes to make their way along the rolling vessel, feeling at each step to see whether the catwalk would give way under them.
But the Spanish government, popularly blamed for reacting too late and badly to the Prestige disaster, continues to point the finger at Mangouras. It claims he obstructed rescue efforts and attempts to drag the vessel away from the coast, heeding radio messages from the Prestige's Greek managers rather than Spanish instructions. Transport minister Francisco Alvarez-Cascos has called him a "criminal". Public prosecutors appear to agree.
Their claims are based on the evidence of Serafin Diaz, a Spanish official who came on board with orders to make sure the Prestige was taken as far from the coast as possible. For Mangouras, and the Smit salvage company that eventually took charge of the rescue attempts, that was madness. The boat would inevitably sink if exposed to the fierce waves of the Bay of Biscay. They wanted the vessel taken into a protected bay so it could be unloaded and, if possible, repaired. "Had the Spanish authorities allowed the Prestige into a port of refuge she would have survived and minimal pollution would have occurred," Mangouras told the European parliament.
Diaz, now decorated and promoted to a job in charge of the port at La Coruna, claims Mangouras and his crew obstructed attempts to restart the engines. He refuses to talk in public about the Prestige but has been reported in the Spanish press as telling friends that, "Mangouras wanted to commit suicide and take me down with him. May he rot in jail."
But the engines were started and the Prestige did sail out into the gale. It also broke up and sank, as many, if not most, sailors involved in the operation had predicted, five days after Captain Mangouras had launched his mayday and three days after he was taken off the boat by helicopter. For 50 hours he had gone without sleep and lived on coffee, water and cigarettes.
"If Mangouras had left with the rest of the crew, as the helicopter crews had urged him to do, he would have saved himself from this calvary in the courts," Zamora explains.
Mangouras was arrested as soon as he stepped on dry land. "I pleaded repeatedly to be allowed to rest as I had been awake for almost two days. The police insisted that I be interviewed immediately," he said. "My treatment in the police station was harsh."
He spent the next two-and-a-half months in the prison at Teixeiro, northern Spain, before being released on bail and to a flat rented for him in Barcelona.
The city's small community of ships' captains have since taken him to their bosom. Last month they organised a 69th birthday dinner for him in the Gothic quarter's Nostromo club, where owner Cecilio Pineda, a former ship's captain himself, gives lessons on nautical theory and organises an annual literary award for writing about the sea.
Here, overlooked by paintings of the Bounty and of literary sea heroes such as Ulysses and Captain Nemo, he was showered with presents. "We gave him a telescope and a painting," said Pineda. "We sailors have to look after him."
Mangouras, hardly the world's most loquacious man, finally shed a few tears. In scratchy Spanish, he resorted to a sailor's language to express his gratitude. "Thank you, fucking Catalan seamen," local papers reported him as saying the next morning.
Mangouras will not have much use for the telescope, unless he can look out to sea from the apartment where he and his wife expect to spend the next two years of their lives while he awaits a trial, though he has yet to be formally charged. His grown-up children, both afraid of flying, have not been to visit.
It cannot be an easy life for a man more used to staring out to sea than looking at his wife over the breakfast table. She, too, must share his punishment. But if Mangouras denies being a villain, he seems an equally unwilling hero. He went to exaggerated lengths to avoid the Guardian's photographer when he visited police last week, even getting police to sneak him out of the station.
Zamora says Mangouras's years at sea have made him a solitary, if tough, soul. "Being an old sea-wolf like him means you are not very sociable. It is tough and lonely being a captain, because you can't even make friends with your crew. But it gives you an inner strength," he explains. "He is fed up, tired and outraged. He, and all sailors, know that he is not to blame."
And yet tomorrow night Mangouras will be the absent guest at what are known as the "sea-faring Oscars", the annual award-ceremony organised by Lloyds List newspaper in the art deco surroundings of the Park Lane Hotel when the great and good of the international shipping world gather to honour their best. Mangouras, whose cargo of thick, noxious fuel oil painted the beaches and cliffs of north-west Spain a treacly black, is a candidate for the sailor's equivalent of a best actor Oscar, the Nautical Institute's shipmaster of the year award.
In Spain, Mangouras is a suspected criminal, out of jail on €3m (£2.02m) bail, banned from leaving the country, forced to report to police daily and facing charges of both disobeying authorities and provoking an ecological disaster when his ship went down in November 2002. But on internet sites and in seafarer's magazines, the grumbling that started when Mangouras was first arrested has become a roar of indignation. He behaved, they say, like a model captain, saving his crew, staying with his sinking ship, and risking his life trying to save it when he could have left it to the mercy of a fierce Atlantic gale. "He was nominated by several different groups," a Nautical Institute spokesman confirmed yesterday.
"He is an old sea-wolf, part of what ought to be declared a protected species of men, the kind of sea captain that used to exist, but no longer does, in Britain or Spain," says Joan Zamora, a Spanish sea captain turned university lecturer who has become one of his public defenders.
"He is a scapegoat, a man who is paying for the ridiculous mistakes of the Spanish authorities. They claim he is a sort of sea bandit, a pirate. He kept a cool head and the decisions he took were correct. Many of us would never have had his courage or shown such cool."
"We will have to wait until Wednesday," the captain said in his thick Greek accent when the Guardian tracked him down at the Barcelona police station where he must report daily. "Apart from that, I'm not saying anything."
Mangouras has refused to comment in public on what happened to the Prestige and its 77,000-tonne cargo of fuel oil. But in a statement sent to a European parliament enquiry, and obtained by the Guardian, his anger is obvious. "Given that I chose to remain on board, putting my own life at risk and saved the lives of my crew, I find it extraordinary that I should be treated this way," he said.
The judges at the Nautical Institute will base their decision on Mangouras's behaviour in the 50 hours after the terrified crew of the Prestige, mostly Filipinos, heard the grating, groaning noise of buckling metal reverberate through the 26-year-old single-hulled vessel. It was every sailor's nightmare, as the ageing tanker received a mortal pounding from 25ft waves during a force 10 gale off Cape Finisterre.
"In the midst of the panic, with the tanker listing at a speed that would sink it, and in a fierce storm, Mangouras kept a cool head," says Zamora. "Some officers were paralysed with fear, other crew members were weeping. But Mangouras never lost his calm, and his example meant that the chief engineer and a few crew members were able to follow his orders and organise the evacuation."
Mangouras managed two crucial feats in those first hours, according to his supporters. He was able, though the lifeboats had been crippled by the waves, to arrange for the crew to be lifted off by helicopters and, by opening ballast tanks, prevented the vessel from listing further and sinking just a few miles off the Spanish coast.
Ordering two of the port ballast tanks to be opened and filled with seawater, with the vessel already listing by more than 25 degrees, was one of two potentially life-threatening manoeuvres carried out by Mangouras and the crew members who stayed on board.
Television pictures shot from a helicopter show one crew member disappearing under a massive wave as he tried to open one valve on the exposed deck. Fortunately, as the wave washed back across the deck, he could be seen still hanging onto the ship's structure.
Later, at night, Mangouras and his chief engineer, guided only by torchlight, picked their way along a damaged catwalk to the forecastle to try to secure a line from the Ria de Vigo, a salvage tug that had been sent to help them. It took them 20 minutes to make their way along the rolling vessel, feeling at each step to see whether the catwalk would give way under them.
But the Spanish government, popularly blamed for reacting too late and badly to the Prestige disaster, continues to point the finger at Mangouras. It claims he obstructed rescue efforts and attempts to drag the vessel away from the coast, heeding radio messages from the Prestige's Greek managers rather than Spanish instructions. Transport minister Francisco Alvarez-Cascos has called him a "criminal". Public prosecutors appear to agree.
Their claims are based on the evidence of Serafin Diaz, a Spanish official who came on board with orders to make sure the Prestige was taken as far from the coast as possible. For Mangouras, and the Smit salvage company that eventually took charge of the rescue attempts, that was madness. The boat would inevitably sink if exposed to the fierce waves of the Bay of Biscay. They wanted the vessel taken into a protected bay so it could be unloaded and, if possible, repaired. "Had the Spanish authorities allowed the Prestige into a port of refuge she would have survived and minimal pollution would have occurred," Mangouras told the European parliament.
Diaz, now decorated and promoted to a job in charge of the port at La Coruna, claims Mangouras and his crew obstructed attempts to restart the engines. He refuses to talk in public about the Prestige but has been reported in the Spanish press as telling friends that, "Mangouras wanted to commit suicide and take me down with him. May he rot in jail."
But the engines were started and the Prestige did sail out into the gale. It also broke up and sank, as many, if not most, sailors involved in the operation had predicted, five days after Captain Mangouras had launched his mayday and three days after he was taken off the boat by helicopter. For 50 hours he had gone without sleep and lived on coffee, water and cigarettes.
"If Mangouras had left with the rest of the crew, as the helicopter crews had urged him to do, he would have saved himself from this calvary in the courts," Zamora explains.
Mangouras was arrested as soon as he stepped on dry land. "I pleaded repeatedly to be allowed to rest as I had been awake for almost two days. The police insisted that I be interviewed immediately," he said. "My treatment in the police station was harsh."
He spent the next two-and-a-half months in the prison at Teixeiro, northern Spain, before being released on bail and to a flat rented for him in Barcelona.
The city's small community of ships' captains have since taken him to their bosom. Last month they organised a 69th birthday dinner for him in the Gothic quarter's Nostromo club, where owner Cecilio Pineda, a former ship's captain himself, gives lessons on nautical theory and organises an annual literary award for writing about the sea.
Here, overlooked by paintings of the Bounty and of literary sea heroes such as Ulysses and Captain Nemo, he was showered with presents. "We gave him a telescope and a painting," said Pineda. "We sailors have to look after him."
Mangouras, hardly the world's most loquacious man, finally shed a few tears. In scratchy Spanish, he resorted to a sailor's language to express his gratitude. "Thank you, fucking Catalan seamen," local papers reported him as saying the next morning.
Mangouras will not have much use for the telescope, unless he can look out to sea from the apartment where he and his wife expect to spend the next two years of their lives while he awaits a trial, though he has yet to be formally charged. His grown-up children, both afraid of flying, have not been to visit.
It cannot be an easy life for a man more used to staring out to sea than looking at his wife over the breakfast table. She, too, must share his punishment. But if Mangouras denies being a villain, he seems an equally unwilling hero. He went to exaggerated lengths to avoid the Guardian's photographer when he visited police last week, even getting police to sneak him out of the station.
Zamora says Mangouras's years at sea have made him a solitary, if tough, soul. "Being an old sea-wolf like him means you are not very sociable. It is tough and lonely being a captain, because you can't even make friends with your crew. But it gives you an inner strength," he explains. "He is fed up, tired and outraged. He, and all sailors, know that he is not to blame."
