by Voyage East- A stirring tale of the last great days of the Merchant Navy (retail) (epub)
My own cargo-watch was dominated by the discharge of a sixty-five-ton transformer out of Number Two lower hold. For this we used the ship’s heavy-lift, or ‘jumbo’ derrick, capable of handling seventy tons, and the ticklish business occupied the forenoon. It took an hour to rig the guys (the wires that slewed the heavy steel boom) through a series of lead-blocks onto adjacent winches, effectively paralysing discharge from Number One hatch. The Mate appeared at the critical moment and the ship’s crew, under the vociferous direction of the Bosun, who obviously enjoyed the occasion, played to an audience of temporarily idle Chinese labourers. My own role was tutelary, to be called on only if something went wrong. As the heavy transformer emerged from the hold and traversed the deck, Antigone heeled to its shifting weight, listing at an appreciable angle until the waiting lighter received its load and Antigone rolled back towards the wharf like a live thing.
As the jumbo-derrick swung inboard again to be resecured, the suspended work resumed and the Bosun’s audience melted away. Walking aft I bumped into Embleton.
‘Oh, aye, it’s you, eh?’ I could smell stale alcohol on his breath.
‘Excuse me…’
‘Don’t fuck me around, Mister… I know your fucking sort. You just let me catch you shore-side, you bastard, and I’ll fucking fix you…’
‘Get on with your bloody work, Wacker!’ The Bosun’s grunting bulk rescued me from the embarrassment of public confrontation. I was clearly not to be forgiven for discovering Embleton asleep on look-out.
‘Thanks Bose.’
‘I should keep you head down, Fourth,’ he advised with uncompromising toughness.
‘Good advice.’
‘He’ll come to a sticky end…’ he waddled off and I made my way aft.
‘You should have knocked him down with a belaying pin,’ remarked Mike with his usual cynicism when I told him of the incident.
‘Say one word out of line and you’re in the shit,’ remarked Bob, taking over the deck from me. ‘What a bloody life.’
‘White trash,’ said Mike dismissively, all his old self-possession back in place.
‘Class warfare,’ said the Purser, handing me a bundle of boat-notes for small parcels of coasting cargo to be loaded before our departure.
‘Here, Bob, you can have these’ I handed them to the Third Mate. ‘I’m off ashore.’
‘Keep your eye open for Embleton, then.’
‘You tell Embleton I’m going to Ah Seng’s… but don’t tell him I’m having chow with a Police Inspector…’
I visited and was entertained by friends during our remaining duty-free nights in Hong Kong. After the chaos of ship-board life and the banal pursuit of pleasure along the fringes of Nathan Road, these glimpses of regular colonial life were oases of rest.
Four days after taking it up we relinquished our berth at Holt’s Wharf to the Menelaus, reloaded our hydrogen peroxide at the Quarantine anchorage and headed for the Lei Yue Mun Pass. About the deck’s hoses blasted rubbish out of odd corners and the derricks were swung inboard and secured. Odd sticks of dunnage were hurled over the side, to the delight of a few sampans bobbing in our wake. Discharging our pilot, we headed for the Tathong Channel and the Taiwan Strait beyond.
Lotus Eating
We left Hong Kong prepared to enter the troubled waters of the Taiwan Strait on our way to Japan. The long civil war between the Nationalist Chinese and the Communists still smouldered across this stretch of water, where the Nationalists retained a lodgement on the islands of Quemoy and Amoy, though the seat of their government had long been transferred to Taipeh. Occasional sorties were flown by the warplanes of both sides and one Blue Funnel ship, the Anchises, had been caught in this cross-fire. To mark our neutrality we had stretched additional tarpaulins painted with large Union flags upon two of our hatches. Further painted canvas flags were stretched on wooden frames and displayed conspicuously along our promenade decks. Thus provided we headed east, past Pedro Blanco, a small island whose name reminded us of the first western penetration into these seas, that of the Portuguese early in the sixteenth century. Then came Mirs Bay, then Bias Bay, haunt of pirate fleets whose junks marauded all passing trade until well into the present century. Beyond the deep and island-dotted indentations of the coast the neat hachures of long-dead British cartographers on the Admiralty charts showed ranges of hills, plotted from the running surveys carried out by the officers of the Royal Navy in the 1800s. Here and there a neat polygon bore the legend walled town, and all along the coast there was a compromise mixture of Chinese and imposed names. It all attested to the view that the Royal Navy’s greatest achievement was the charting of the world’s seas and coastlines. It was a pity, therefore, that politics intruded: blocked out, in jet-black ink, was any reference to the strait into which we were heading, or the island from which it took its name, ever having been known as Formosa. The name was unacceptable to both factions of the Chinese, imposed during the brief ascendancy of Imperial Japan from which the Chinese had suffered so dreadfully. Refusal to black-out this imperial relic would result in our charts being confiscated by the Chinese authorities.
Off Swatow we swung into the strait and the weather became increasingly cold with every mile of northing we made. Despite the wintry weather the hardy Chinese fishermen were at sea in their junks, enlivening our watches as we dodged laboriously through them. It was bad enough in daylight, with sheets of driving rain through which they loomed like ghostly apparitions, but at night, with a rough sea throwing back echoes and ‘clutter’ on the radar screen, they were difficult to locate as they rose and fell in the troughs. Few carried lights, relying on their luck and our good judgement, though a few raised hastily lit hurricane lanterns that flickered on a seamed old face sixty feet below our bridge-wing as we plunged past.
As we cleared the northern end of the Taiwan Strait the fresh, bitingly cold northerly wind met the warm current to the Kuro Siwo, sweeping us north and eastwards across the Tung Hai, or Eastern Sea, to the north of Okinawa. Such a meeting of the elements produced rolling banks of mist that thickened, from time to time, to damp coiling banks of fog so that few of us, wrenched so recently from the tropics, now escaped the misery of running noses.
During the forenoon of our fourth morning out of Hong Kong the weather cleared. What we saw looming above the horizon on the port bow brought almost the entire ship’s company on deck. The holy volcano of Fuji-yama rose pink and glistening in the sunshine long before the coast of Honshu lifted above the horizon. The sense of excitement that ran through the ship was almost tangible. This was a curious reaction, for both the Chinese and British on board, if they had not actually experienced the evils of war at the hands of the Japanese, had inherited historical images of terrifying intensity. Perhaps the Chinese had better reason to hate the Japanese than ourselves, for the Sino-Japanese war of the 1930s had done immense damage to China’s Nationalist republic. Yet seamen are an easygoing race. The sharp contrasts to which they are subject, made them a tolerant breed. For them the nationalistic distinctions blurred: individually we might not love the Japanese, but there were mitigating factors that made them more than merely tolerable.
There was nowhere in those days quite like Japan on the eve of her economic explosion. She had not yet emerged as the world’s leading manufacturer; her industrial machinery still relied upon a degree of plagiarism; but there was a fierce energy in the activity of her ports, and an acceptance of the sailor ashore, that was wholly enjoyable. There was no stuffy neo-colonial segregation that graded men from the merchant ships as the ‘white trash’ of Mike’s cynicism or Hong Kong’s collective perception; nor were we the fan-kwei, the red-barbarians, to be shunned by the native Chinese. Here in Japan curiosity about the West was growing, despite the humiliation of American occupation. We could anticipate a welcome that would revive our romantic aspirations. There was a sparkle even in the Mate’s eyes as we swung into the Uraga Suido and the entrance to Yedo Bay. A spontaneous, unmercenary air attac
hed to the cool depravity of the bar-girls of the great ports of Japan, a simple, uncomplicated joy in the lusts of the flesh, brought a gleam of anticipation to every eye.
After a brief sojourn in the quarantine anchorage while the formalities of immigration and port health were attended to by the Purser and Captain Richards, we slid alongside to discharge. It was very cold, with snow on the roofs of the godowns turned to a filthy grey slush along the quays. As in every other port we visited, work started almost immediately. The labourers had an organised, military appearance, wearing black, jodhpur-like breeches that wound round the calves like puttees and terminated in cloth-topped and rubber-soled footwear that split between the large toe and the remainder. Many wore head-bands, and they wielded their cargo-handling hooks with short, staccato grunts of effort, hauling the cases and bales of our cargo onto the cargo nets with an energy that put our own countrymen to shame. Ruddy-faced, stocky and impressively robust, the wharfies of Yokohama were an intimidating race.
‘The Japanese,’ said Mike sententiously, ‘breed the ugliest men and the most beautiful women…’ and from this Olympian view we descended to talk of the overnight discharge of calcium napthenate from a cargo tank; this black, gooey substance would require tending and threatened any ideas of abandoned pleasure in the watering-holes off Isezaki Street, whither our fantasies were already straying.
In the end Sparks and I went in search of a bath. This almost innocent activity had in it sufficient salacious delight to titillate without leaving an unpleasant sense of bad faith; it was much enjoyed by the married men and, on a cold winter’s night, after a long day, had a sensuous pleasure all of its own. A taxi took us to the bathhouse and I calmed Sparks’s fears, for he was still agonising over his past behaviour and suspicious of a further trap set by those more experienced than himself. He kept muttering about trusting me, leaving threats half-hanging in the air to the effect that if I let him down… With Embleton’s outstanding promises in mind, I began to feel somewhat embattled.
We sat in the foyer of the bath-house, paid out 1500 Yen and sipped beers while we waited. Sparks looked curiously round at lounging Japanese men, and a couple of Europeans, off ships like ourselves. Then the girls came, nubile young creatures clad in white jackets and high-heeled sandals. They smiled and giggled when they realised it was Europeans they had to deal with.
‘Go on, off you go,’ I encouraged a suddenly reluctant Sparks, who looked terrified of the dark-haired beauty bending over him. She was tugging his wrist with a gentle persistence, talking to the girl appointed to look after me, and there was more giggling, their free hands going up to their mouths as if to suppress their amusement.
‘Come on Joe…’
‘Go on. She won’t eat you. Ask her what her name is.’
‘Me Michiko… you come with Michiko Joe-San.’
I stood up, Sparks followed and we were led away to the mirth of the waiting Japanese men.
My own attendant was tall for a Japanese, with a pleasing figure and waved black hair that rolled down to her shoulders.
‘Me call Mitsuko,’ she announced matter-of-factly as she showed me into the tiled room and kicked off her sandals. I introduced myself and she made several unsuccessful attempts to cope with my name.
‘I call you name Fuji-San,’ she said smiling prettily and tapping my long occidental nose with a finger.
‘Arrigatou… thank you…’ I replied as she took off her jacket, emerging in a pair of white briefs and a provocative brassiere. She motioned me to undress and handed me a towel, directing me into a steam box from which I looked out ridiculously as she prepared a bath, watching the light catch the vertebrae of her spine and the soft curves of her belly as she bent over. But concupiscent thoughts were boiled out of me, like the life from a lobster. Once she looked up and smiled engagingly then came over and stepped up the steam temperature until I broiled helplessly.
‘You like, Fuji-San?’ she asked, still smiling, and I recalled Japanese attitudes to the pain of others.
‘No… no like…’
She released me before I was entirely wasted, though my body felt as though every pore had been forced open, and I was bathed in sweat. I was plunged into a hot bath, limp, inert as a waterlogged rat, the sweat still pouring from me, sunk in a mindless lassitude of well-being. As I dozed, Mitsuko knelt at my head and gently massaged the muscles of my scalp, then suddenly hauled me out and sat me on a tiny stool so that I squatted at her feet. With a lubricious skill she soaped me all over, avoiding only my dangling genitals, rinsing me with pannikins of bath-water until the deck was swimming. My scalp was scrubbed and then I was dunked back into the bath, where I lay like a wallowing hippo.
Again I was brought out and sat on the stool, this time to be deluged with cold water, Mitsuko laughing at my protests and shudders and the spectacular contraction of my genitalia from this savage assault. Declaring herself satisfied, she laid me face down upon a table and began to walk upon my back.
Her feet slid expertly outwards from my spine, the balls of her heels kneading odd knots of muscle, her toes stimulating unguessed-at erogenous zones as, in a slow and meticulous promenade, she made several passes from neck to coccyx while I groaned in luxuriating delight beneath her. But this was nothing to the performance to be endured lying on my back. Her strong fingers probed the tense muscles of my legs, over stood-upon in the long watches of our voyage, or cracked the tendons in my arms and gave my head a sinew-snapping twist that made me fear for my life – except that in its aftermath I felt extraordinarily revitalised. During this clinical operation my physical lassitude was such that desire seemed moribund, despite the strange intimacy. To preserve the decencies Mitsuko, her almond eyes averted in deference to my libidinous sensibilities, draped a small cotton towel across my limp penis.
But looking up at her, her breasts alive within the restraint of her brassiere as she kneaded my thighs, sitting astride my lower legs, it was impossible not to respond to her presence. The little cotton towel rose like a diminutive bell-tent and Mitsuko smiled at me.
‘Ah-so… Fuji-San…’ she laughed and moved her hands upwards. I surrendered to her ministrations. ‘A standing prick has no conscience,’ I heard Mike’s voice saying, and wondered if Sparks was enjoying himself.
* * *
Heavy rain accompanied our departure. We edged down towards the forts and the Uraga Strait, our whistle blasting every two minutes, the Mate at the radar and Captain Richards and myself on the bridge-wings. The rain fell in an icy torrent, driven by a strong and cutting north-easterly wind.
‘That bloody Masefield,’ said the Mate, peering out at me, ‘with his “wind like a whetted-knife” bullshit. Perhaps if he’d done more than one trip he’d have written about women like a decent poet.’
I smiled despite my discomfort. The rain had penetrated my duffle coat and my reefer jacket and, running in chilly trickles down my neck, was already filling my shoes.
‘Can you see that echo ahead, Fourth Mate?’ asked China Dick, stumping anxiously across the bridge.
‘Not yet, sir.’
‘Put her on dead slow then, and blow that bloody whistle again…’
‘Aye, aye, sir.’
Then quite abruptly the rain ceased. I felt myself getting warmer and thought at first that the prickling of sweat was relief at the sight of a ship looming up on the port bow, a freighter of the Osaka Yusen Kaisha which swept past us at unreduced speed heading for her home port. But it was not relief that brought on the muck-sweat; the wind had chopped around and suddenly began to blow with increasing freshness from the south, a warm wind that caused every piece of glass on the bridge, including our binoculars, to steam up instantly. Within an hour we were rolling in a Force 8 gale and the Mate was anxious for his new stows. In Yokohama we had loaded the first of our homeward cargo – piece goods, cameras and tape recorders, marked conspicuously for Liverpool.
Light as we were, we spent a most unpleasant night of it. By midnight we were
labouring through a Force 10 which veered slowly to the west with the glass dropping. It was little better at 0400, except that we had skirted the coast and were headed up into Suruga Bay with the smoky chimneys and cluster of industrial buildings of Shimizu taking form ahead of us as the daylight grew. The further up the Bay we progressed, the greater the shelter. Pine-clad shores and rocky bluffs reminded one of the prints of Hokusai and Utamaro, but the greatest splendour lay ahead of us, for Shimizu sits at the foot of Mount Fuji. The dark, fir-covered slopes rose above us, changing to volcanic scree and talus above the tree-line, then to snow and ice that gleamed in the sunshine.
We were a mere six hours at Shimizu: six hours of frantic loading, mainly canned goods and heavy bundles of plywood, before the Mate’s single whistle-blast sent us to stations again and, derricks secured, we once more butted the swells in Suruga Wan. Another fatiguing night passage followed, with little rest below and a watch of intricate navigation and collision avoidance. Dotted with rocks and islets, assiduously fished and busy with traffic of all sizes, the Japanese coast was a stimulating test of our professionalism.
Kobe nestled under a range of hills dark with pine trees and capped with snow, its quays and industrial heart lining the shore and the gentler, residential quarters rising up the hills beyond. Here our mad rush was terminated by Japanese bureaucracy. The port health authorities kept us swinging idly round our anchor for several hours, drawing forth reminiscences from the older hands of pre-war humiliations, when uniformed doctors calling for ‘short-arm’ inspections (examinations of the penis for symptoms of VD) could cause embarrassment to individuals and delays to the ship. Happily those days were over, though I noticed a worried pallor replace the defiant heartiness that had followed Sparks’s bath in Yokohama.