Voyage East
Page 10
‘Aye, aye, sir.’
I took myself back to the bridge-wing, exiled the Midshipman to the other side and sulked. China Dick had no time for the unorthodoxy of others.
‘That cyclone,’ said Sparks as we enjoyed a beer in my cabin after midnight, ‘passed over Trincomalee.’
‘Is that fucking so,’ I said unkindly.
When I relieved Mike at 0800 the following morning he was singing, a trifle obviously, I thought.
‘I’ve got a ticket to ride – I’ve got a ticket to ride – and I’m okaaay…’
The misquotation and the coarse pun advertised his triumph.
‘You bastard,’ I said. ‘The Old Man thinks it’s me.’
He handed over the watch and went laughing to his breakfast. It was a glorious day, the breeze light and only a low swell rolling ominously out of the north-west where the cyclone had beaten upon the beautiful coast of Ceylon. The sea’s population seemed to revel in the passing of the great storm, for myriads of flying fish rose around us, extending their gliding flight by beating the elongated lower halves of their fail-fins against the surface of the ocean. The action left expanding chains of concentric rings on the smooth water.
On deck the splashes of red-lead had disappeared under successive layers of under-coat and gloss, while a second task supervised by the Mate, had resulted in the after deck being covered with loose coils of derrick wires, drawn off the winch barrels for greasing. From the heads and heels of the steel derricks the blocks had been unshackled, the pins knocked out and their sheaves removed for greasing and an inspection of the bushes. Much sloshing of grease had been evident and each block on reassembly, had the date of the examination stamped into its steel cheek, the numerals picked out in white lead. Such were the preparations that occupied the Crowd, hatch by hatch, in preparation for the ports we were about to visit. Most were without cranes and many were devoid of wharves. We would work our cargo in and out of our holds by means of these derricks and their complex rigging.
That evening I showed the Midshipman a simpler mystery of navigation, the taking of an azimuth. It was a much easier procedure than a sight, merely a compass bearing of a prominent star taken through a prismatic instrument mounted on the compasses. This azimuth was compared to the calculated bearing of the star worked from our dead-reckoning position. The infinite distances of the stars and the comparatively crude calibration of a compass made the accuracy of our position less critical than might be supposed, and our dead-reckoning was rarely far out. The result showed the small instrumental error in the gyro-compass, but it was the comparison with the standard magnetic compass that was important, for one never knew when a power failure would throw one back on this primitive instrument. The total error of a magnetic compass was compounded by the earth’s ‘variation’, that is the influence of the planet’s magnetic field (which varied from place to place), and the ship’s local influence, known as ‘deviation’. Deviation was complicated by being almost infinitely variable, depending upon the ship’s heading, upon her cargo and the amount of soft iron or steel therein, even on whether the derricks were topped up or stowed for an ocean passage. A close record of all its values was therefore desirable and at least one of these ‘compass errors’ was expected for every course steered and during every watch, unless other demands (such as fog or dense traffic) prevented the officer-of-the-watch from attending to the matter.
Next morning was Christmas Eve and as I sipped my coffee at four-bells, China Dick arrived with a surprise.
‘Emergency boat-drill, Mister. Sound the alarms and stop engines. I’m going to lower the motor boat.’
I did as I was bid, mustering on the boat-deck as Antigone slowed in the pellucid blue water. The Mate told me off to command the boat and I sensed victimisation, scowling at Mike who grinned infuriatingly back. Scrambling into the boat as it was swung out on the tall arms of the luffing davits, I shipped the rudder, aware of the ocean fifty feet below. Others were joining the boat as it lay griped in, level with the boat deck: a pair of Midshipmen, three seamen and the Lamptrimmer, the Fourth Engineer, two Chinese greasers and three Chinese stewards. Sparks came too, crouching proprietorially over the emergency radio.
I checked the plug was in the boat’s bottom as the Mate ordered the gripes slipped and the winch-brake lifted. The boat began its long descent, swinging with increasing oscillations on the ever-lengthening span of the wire falls and bumping Antigone’s side as the ship rolled with an easy motion, striking sparks from the metal skids that wrapped the bilge in an effort to protect the boat’s planking and facilitate a launch against an adverse list. We struck the water with a thumping splash. The boat rose, the suddenly slack falls looping dangerously inboard then jerking tight again, snapping together as Antigone rolled away from us.
‘Unhook! Ship crutches and toss oars!’
Mindful of their fingers, two seamen cast off the heavy blocks and pushed them over the boat’s gunwhale. I put the tiller over, allowing the residual way of the ship to ease us off Antigone’s unforgiving plating as we towed alongside.
‘Leggo the painter… Down oars!’
We were on our own, crabbing awkwardly off the black cliff in a shambles of missed strokes, of curses as oar-looms struck the back of the next man, a tangle of blades and knocking of crutches. High above us the passengers stared down from the promenade-deck and I saw Mrs Saddler laughing beside her husband. Above them, hands on hips in disbelief, the Mate shook his head over us, while from the bridge a stream of advice, or perhaps it was abuse, came from China Dick.
Clear of the ship we got our oars inboard, the men gasping as they watched the Fourth Engineer bend over the engine. At the tenth despairing swing of the handle it fired amid a cloud of black smoke and we chugged shamefacedly away from the ship.
‘Right fucking game this is,’ muttered the Lamptrimmer, while the Chinese chatted amongst themselves, unconcerned by western preoccupations with smartness and efficiency. The intimacy with the surface of the sea was pleasant, the true magnitude and power of the swells that rolled the diminishing ship now obvious to us as our grab-lines trailed in the white foam that rolled back from our bluff wooden hull. A dozen flying fish lifted from the sea and we saw them clearly, the sunlight glancing from their armoured sides, their eyes wide with the terror of our strange intrusion. Borne on the huge undulating surface of the sea we opened our distance from the ship to a mile, so that only her upper-works, masts and funnel were visible in the troughs, then eased to a stop.
In the stern Sparks had been preparing the emergency radio, a hand-cranked apparatus with a small aerial. He bent over his key and, after some experimental twiddling, announced he had contacted the Purser on the ship. After a little he raised his head smiling.
‘Message reads: “Come back to mother”.’
‘Okay. Acknowledge it.’ I nodded to the Fourth. ‘Give her full ahead, Billy.’
Half a mile from the ship the engine faded and died. Eighteen swings of the handle and Billy collapsed, swearing it was moribund: ‘The fucking fucker’s fucked.’
‘Shit…’
The groan went up and down the boat. Leung Yat, the Number Two Greaser swore a rich, descriptive Cantonese oath.
‘Out oars.’
I determined to make a better show of our return. ‘Come on. When I say “Pull!” put your backs into it.’
I stood in the stern and urged them on. To their everlasting credit, we made a show of it, backwatering neatly in under the falls and hooking on without mishap. A little flutter of applause came from above and I saw Mrs Saddler clapping. We rose dripping past the row of curious faces on the promenade deck.
‘Not bad – for beginners,’ I heard one of the men remark facetiously.
‘Bollocks,’ came the reply from one of the seamen bent over the plug, and then we were drawing level with the boat-deck and scrambling out of the boat.
‘Practice makes perfect,’ Mike said, grinning as he supervised the swing inboard and onto
the chocks.
‘Bastard,’ I replied, grinning back.
‘Two of your men had their fingers on the gun whale as you came alongside,’ admonished China Dick when I reported to the bridge, pricking my bubble of pride.
‘Bastard,’ I mouthed at his stocky back as he left me to my watch. Antigone gathered speed and along the boat-deck a group of engineers gathered round the recalcitrant boat-engine.
‘Hit the fucking thing with a hammer,’ advised the Bosun as he saw the last of the seamen below.
* * *
It was not much of a Christmas. The cyclone thrashed itself to death on the Coromandel coast and night fell in a downpour of torrential rain. After the days of clear weather and empty sea, we ran into traffic and, blinded by the rain, were driven to the tedious expedient of avoiding collisions by radar plotting. In such conditions we passed the northern tip of Sumatra. The rain continued intermittently all day and we passed the lonely, bird-limed islet of Pulo Rondo as we assembled for pre-lunch drinks. It proved a mirthless occasion, as was the more-than-ample Christmas dinner in the saloon, eaten with the passengers under a cloud of forced bonhomie from China Dick, causing brittle laughter from the ladies and insincere guffaws from his officers. To be absent from home at Christmas was bad enough, but to be at sea, under way, was terrible. At least in port the yoke of duty could be eased, but at sea the ship’s routine went remorselessly on, though those on day-work knocked-off. The ship’s company fragmented, drinking schools assembled in hidden places, dominated by maudlin sentiment and occasionally deteriorating into a scrap. On the whole it was better to be on watch and pretend the whole thing was a normal day. Perhaps Sparks was the most fortunate, kept busy with a stream of incoming and outgoing telegrams. I wondered if Mike had either sent or received one. He did not say, merely wore the stupid grin of gluttony and lust.
By 2000 the ship had sunk into inertia, only the watch-keepers awake. For us on the eight-to-twelve there was a spectacular consolation; a massive, soundless electric storm illuminating huge cumulo-nimbus clouds that rose over the distant mountains of Sumatra.
Dawn showed the dark, jungle-clad shoulders of Pulo Penang ahead. Before breakfast the Crowd were out, topping the derricks, while Chippy and his mate worked along the hatch-coamings, knocking loose the wedges in preparation for opening up. As we rounded Muka Head and picked up our Chinese-Malay pilot, the pool was coming down; half an hour later we were edging alongside the wharf, under the ramparts of Fort Cornwallis. The halcyon, flying fish days were over; it was this for which Antigone was called into being.
The Smell of Many Mornings
Alongside at Penang in Malaya Antigone underwent a transformation. The spot where Mrs Saddler had with outstretched arm pointed out the leaping dolphins and aroused our lust, was unrecognisable. The decks were no longer neat but littered with the tarpaulins, hatch-boards and beams that had kept the sea out of our vast and vulnerable holds, removed by the swarming gangs of labourers who seemed to have taken the ship over and were busy erecting sun-shades of dunnage and coconut matting over the winch-control positions. Under the jutting derricks, these odd excrescences gave us the appearance of a native kampong. Malays and Kling Tamils moved about the ship with familiar ease, shouting and gesticulating, crouching around the dangerously yawning holds in the simian squat that allowed a man to keep cool. In shirts and sarongs, their dark hair neatly plastered above their impish faces, they began the business of discharge. Tally clerks of Chinese blood, many wearing pith helmets and the concerned expressions of responsible men, began to check out the consignments of cargo as the derrick wires started to sing over the metal rims of the coamings and the first slings rose from our ’tween-decks.
Beyond the stucco-white walls and tiled roofs of the town, lush green jungle rose up to the island’s peak. The scent of peepul, tamarind and banana came down from the groves of trees that covered the hillside, taunting us as we laboured in the heat, for we came not as tourists but as men with work to do. Across the strait dividing Penang from the old sultanate of Kedah, junks and sailing barges moved among anchored ships with a ponderous, wind-driven beauty. There too the green of the jungle seduced our eyes, too long starved of its colour. Beyond, sensed more than seen through the steaming cumulus that hung over the rain-forest, rose the blue foothills of the Cameron Highlands where the rubber plantations lay, and from which ran the tin-laden rivers that enriched this hinterland.
But our true horizon was more circumscribed, bounded by the quay to starboard and the waiting lighters to port. We had exchanged the whites of parade for the khaki of battle and, amid a bedlam of noise, sought to supervise the discharge of the cargo, to avoid accidents and breakages, to deter pilferage and to oil the complex works with our presence. Already the decks were no longer white. Gobbets of spittle reddened with betel-juice disfigured the teak, and chipped paint flew from the superstructure where hatch-beams from the lower ’tween-decks struck it, unheedful of the crew’s careful maintenance.
‘Oh, fucking hell,’ growled the Bosun despairingly, ‘you’d think they’d just try a bit harder not to be so fucking careless, wouldn’t you, eh?’
‘You’ll have to paint it again before we get back to Liverpool, Bose,’ I offered philosophically.
‘Du, that’s a fine lot of encouragement. Bloody Company cut my allowance of white gloss and the Mate still wants us to look like our-kid’s yacht…’ he went off grumbling.
‘Third Office, Third Office.’ The foreman wore a worried frown beneath his helmet.
‘I belong Fourth Officer…’
‘Okay. Please you lower foreside derricks, Number Two hatch.’
‘Okay. Bose!’ I arrested the Bosun’s retreat. ‘Get the derrick gang along to Number Two and lower the forrard derricks.’
‘Aye, aye.’ He waddled off and I went forward with the foreman.
Our derricks were rigged ‘yard-and-stay’, terminology left over from the days of sail. Arranged in pairs, their wires joined, one derrick plumbed the hatch, the other the wharf or an overside lighter. The married wires, known as a ‘union-purchase’, were controlled by one man, sitting beneath his coconut matting and driving two winches, deftly using one to lift out of the hold, then transferring the weight to the other, veering on the first and allowing the sling of cargo to slide horizontally and then down into the waiting lighter or onto the dusty wharf.
Movement on the decks, already impeded by the piles of hatchboards and beams, was now further endangered by traversing loads, swiftly followed by the slack wires which draped innocently across an unsuspecting back and could, just as easily, draw suddenly tight, rising across one’s path like a trip-wire. All this activity was accompanied by shouts and chatter so that the movement, the heat and the noise fused in one stultifying oppressiveness.
Cars lifted over the rail, revealing a floor of Guinness cases which were swiftly followed by cartons of Brand’s Essence of Chicken, held, I was assured, in high esteem as a potent breeder of children.
‘I thought Guinness was good for that,’ I said to the foreman. ‘They speak one son in every bottle.’
‘Aiee-ya, Guinness plenty good for man… Essence of Chicken more better for woman.’
We were to revert to our normal watches at noon, which only gave me four hours respite from this bedlam, so I wrote letters and heard on the radio that Trincomalee had been reduced to a ghost-town by the Christmas cyclone. At 1600 I returned to the continuing chaos of the deck until 2000 when, standing in the shower, I was disturbed by the Fourth Engineer.
‘Coming ashore?’
Night had fallen, the seductive night of the tropics. The invitation was irresistible.
‘Yes. Five minutes.’
At the dock gates we piled into waiting trishas, a cross between a tricycle and a pushchair, with the simple command: ‘Bar!’
There were six of us, the Senior Midshipman, the Third and Fourth Engineers, the Sparks, a Junior Engineer and myself.
‘How’s it going, th
en?’ I found myself in a trisha with Billy, the Fourth, a North-Country lad from Preston, whose humiliation in the recent boat-drill had turned into friendship.
‘Bloody hot.’ I was already sticky, despite my shower.
‘You should have been down the engine room. Over a hundred this afternoon. The bloody Chief had us stripping down a genny… the bastard’s talking about doing a unit in Singapore. It’s going to be a bloody work-out.’
‘I expect he thinks he’s done his bit in Aden.’
‘Yeah. I heard he thought that manual labour was a Spaniard…’
We piled out at the bar. It was on a corner, the wide monsoon ditch where a European gutter would have been. The raised sidewalk was arcaded, stucco pillars rising to the jutting first storey where jalousies stood open against the faintest whisper of a breeze, the ceaseless hum of oriental life spilling out into the warm night. The open bar was bright and cool under a revolving punkah.
‘Six beers, please…’
A couple of Chinese smoked and drank in one corner, but otherwise the place was empty. We sat noisily around a central table and thirstily drank our San Miguel beers. Drunkenness is part alcoholic intake, part state of mind and we were in high spirits, released from the artificial confinements of the ship. It was not long before someone called for a woman. It was a half-hearted joke, bravado prompted by that quickening of impulse provoked by several swift drinks. The Chinese proprietor came over and gave us a distasteful look. ‘You want woman?’
‘Yes! Yes! We want woman.’
The man shuffled off. Rather shamefacedly we continued drinking and gossiping. ‘Hey, is Mike really knocking off that passie? Mrs Saddler?’
‘I don’t know,’ I answered evasively.