Captain Salvatore Sarno has sailed the high seas and the ups and downs of the global shipping industry for the past 51 years, living his childhood dream.“I was born in a very little town surrounded by mountains with no sea. The sea was on the other side of the mountain, but from when I was very young, maybe four or five years old, my brother used to buy a comic...and there was Captain Eagle, the captain of a sailing ship who travelled all around the world on adventures,” he recalls.“I could not even read at that time. I was attracted by the captain in the pictures, and I started to say, ‘I will be a ship’s captain’. In the summer holidays at the age of eight or nine I would walk to the top of the mountain to look on the other side to see the sea and dream about tropical islands, palm trees and golden beaches.” Sarno excelled at art in school and his teacher encouraged him to go to a fine art academy in Naples, but he refused, and instead joined the naval academy and went on to join the It a lia n Nav y.“I started at the bottom of the hierarchy and found I liked to be on board a ship but after two years I realised the navy was not what I wanted. I joined the merchant navy on a tanker as a cadet, and again, I had to start at the bottom,” he says.“I did my job with passion, using logic and being clever and never refusing to work overtime, and always doing more than my job. The captain noticed I was good, different, so still being a cadet, I was promoted to third mate.”“In order to widen my knowledge, I decided then that my next vessel would be a general cargo container vessel,” Sarno says.“When I got a call to work on a tanker I said ‘no, I want a general cargo vessel’ and then Mr Gianluigi Aponte (the founder of MSC) phoned me and said, ‘I have a nice vessel, a general cargo vessel,’ and off I went to Bremerhaven in Germany,” he recalls.It was 1971. Just six months earlier Aponte had purchased his first secondhand ship to start the business. “I arrived at midnight. I was 24 years old when I joined MSC, and Aponte was 30. We met in the hallway and he immediately won me over because he was a dreamer and I am a dreamer, and today we are still there,” he says, grinning.“We left Marseille in 1971 for a périple (voyage) around Africa. Our agent had forgotten to buy the nautical charts. “We only had charts to get to Dakar and there were no couriers at that time to send them.”Sarno says he then happened to notice a pocket atlas in the operator room with a map of Africa, on which he had been mapping out the expected ports of call.“I thought, oh my gosh, we can go to Dar es Salaam using this because Vasco da Gama went all around Africa with no maps at all to navigate. If he could do it, then so could we. And we did. It’s a true story,” he says.“That first time we arrived in Durban in June after stopping at Lourenco Marques (Maputo) to load granite for Italy and from then we have always called at Durban with imports from Italy to Durban,” he says.He says MSC’s business grew to a weekly service between To page 31
