by Voyage East- A stirring tale of the last great days of the Merchant Navy (retail) (epub)
Our idleness ended at three o’clock one morning when the Chinese authorities came aboard from an anciently elegant white steam-cutter. We were turned out of our bunks and made to stand about for three hours, while in the comfort of the passengers’ lounge the bureaucracy of the People’s Republic of China ground its remorseless way. In their high-collared suits of dark blue cotton the two officials, an immigration officer and a doctor, sat at card-tables with our identity documents piled next to them. Two khaki-jacketed and blue-trousered soldiers armed with Kalashnikov automatics flanked them, their unsmiling faces filled with the importance of their task. Beside them China Dick sat awkwardly, his presence necessary for reasons of protocol, while the Purser, an acolyte to this solemn ceremonial, produced the appropriate discharge-book for the identification of each of us in turn.
‘What’s it for?’ asked the Junior Midshipman.
‘See if you’re a known enemy of the people,’ said his mentor and senior.
‘Christ!’
‘Something to write home about, eh kid?’ whispered Chippie, grinning widely at this potent exhibition of proletarian power.
‘They might lock Embleton up,’ muttered Mike.
‘No such luck.’
‘Bloody class warfare,’ we mumbled, catching the Purser’s eye.
If we British objected to standing idly for hours in the pre-dawn cold, we at least had little to fear. For our Hong Kong Chinese the experience could be less pleasant. The aggression of the interrogating officials was occasionally blatant, causing their victims to blanch and tremble so much that China Dick intervened. The arsis of the immigration officer’s voice silenced China Dick; the humiliation was irksome to him. The matter blew over and the chastened greaser was allowed to go, leaving the unfamiliar surroundings sheepishly. Both he and Captain Richards had lost face, and this seemed to be the purpose of the ritual. One had experienced similar mass humiliation elsewhere from the anonymous bureaucracies of other countries.
We went forward in turn and extended our hands, palms downwards, to the doctor.
‘What’s that for?’ hissed Sparks.
‘See if you’ve got syph,’ said Mike.
‘They can tell the general state of a person’s health by the growth of his nails…’
But Sparks was not listening to Bob. He had gone deathly pale and looked as if he was about to faint.
‘Woodman, Extra Third Mate.’ The Purser’s voice purred in my ear and the immigration officer looked up from my papers. He seemed to be considering something.
‘You been Imperialist America? United States?’
I nodded. ‘Yes, two years ago…’
I had endured a similar scrutiny on board the Telemachus in Los Angeles: ‘You bin anywhere near Red China, Richard?’ Yessir, I had visited both poles of the habitable world and neither official had asked me which I preferred. The immigration officer nodded and I moved on to the doctor. He had dark, intelligent eyes that surveyed me briefly; his nod of dismissal was curt but not unfriendly. I moved off to join Mike and Bob, who had been detailed to attend the other facet of this long-winded procedure, the inspection of the ship. Alert for drugs, stowaways, or the illegal imports of filthy capitalism, we conducted the guards round the accommodation. It fell to my lot to accompany the party inspecting the engineers’ alleyway and our own cabins. The soldiers opened drawers, stared at upside-down letters and personal photographs. There was more of curiosity than malice in it, though our Englishness resented the intrusion. Privacy, like individuality, was not a concept readily appreciated by the Chinese mind.
A pile of magazines was rifled and a triumphantly zealous revolutionary cry came from one of the soldiers. As he held one up the centre-fold dropped open and a cascade of impossibly depilated limbs was exposed, above which the pertly arrogant breasts of the Playmate-of-the-Month jutted provocatively. The three guards collected round and for a long, libidinous moment they stared at the glossy-lipped blonde before rounding on me indignantly.
‘American!’ the leader shouted. I nodded. They turned further pages; still nude, the same girl sat astride a Harley Davidson and rolled on a satin-sheeted bed. They pointed at her expurgated pudendum and burst into chatter amongst themselves. Suddenly the leader thrust the magazine at me.
‘American!’ he repeated. ‘No good!’
In the Mate’s cabin their eyes fell upon his tape-recorder. One of them pressed a button and the fiery chords of Beethoven’s ‘Appassionata’ sonata struck us, producing incredulous expressions on the soldiers’ faces.
‘Belong favourite music of Lenin,’ I offered in an inspired moment, nodding furiously as they looked at me. I held up a thumb. ‘Lenin’s number one.’
They recognised the name, nodding back. ‘Lenin… Lenin number one… Lenin good!’ The majestic notes of Beethoven must have fallen as discordantly upon their ears as did Chinese music upon our own.
But it was over at last; none of us was declared utterly undesirable and the officials departed, to be replaced by a pilot. Two of the soldiers remained, tall men from the northern provinces, of a stature that had surprised the Americans in Korea. They were there to keep an eye on us, pickets on the other side in the class war of the Purser’s phrase. With total impassivity they watched us go to our stations as we edged into the mouth of the Hai Ho. The Taku coast lay like a brown smudge to port, the northern shore a low drab plain, dusted with snow. Brown ice swirled about our bow, retarding our progress as we approached the port of Hsinkiang, a consummately ugly modern sprawl of low concrete sheds, pine power poles and festoons of overhead wiring. The only spots of colour were the flags and hoardings, huge boards depicting the heroic achievements of the Chinese proletariat. Who were we to ridicule their progress? China had been an unhappy country until it seized its own destiny from the hands of the taipans and the warlords. There was a triumphant flutter to the red flags that lifted like oriflammes to the icy northerly breeze sweeping down from Siberia, and perhaps our sense of remote isolation was compounded by inherited guilt.
One of these gigantic hoardings depicted a smiling girl holding a sheaf of wheat and a youth holding a sickle in front of a background of tractors set against the new dawn. Beneath it, a party of some two hundred labourers plodded to work. They were diminished by the naive and powerful image above them, yet it conferred upon their progress an immense sense of purpose as, with their shovels and picks, they went to extend the wharves of Hsinkiang.
The ice had rafted between the ship and her berth, scrunched into an impenetrable mass; it needed the churning of an old steam tug to reduce the pancakes of grubby ice to a slush, through which we hauled Antigone alongside. I was the first person down the gangway, to read our arrival draught from the white numerals cut into stem and stern. Men with padded coats and fur caps with flapping ear-covers were heaving the final ropes ashore as I stood by a bollard and read the after draught. Curious, they peered over my shoulder at the Arabic numerals I jotted down, the smell of garlic strong on their breath. They grinned and chuckled to themselves, exchanging remarks, smiling and nodding through wrinkled, wind-burned complexions. I grinned back and one pulled at his chin, nodding vigorously while they shared a huge joke.
‘They think you’re an animal,’ Mike called down from the poop, ‘you hairy bastard.’
The seamen turning the ropes up on Antigone’s after bitts laughed and I heard Embleton agree. ‘He’s a bastard all right…’
We were fan kwei, red barbarians, hairy foreigners, little better than the beasts of the field with whom our kinship was made manifest by our beards.
‘You know,’ said the Purser later, when the amusement value of my beard came up for discussion, ‘when Lord Macartney’s embassy was received by the Chinese Emperor in 1797, Macartney reported the filthy habit of the Chinese of closing one nostril with a finger and blasting the contents of the other over the deck. At the same time the Chinese commented upon the disgusting habit of the foreigners of blowing warm snot into small pieces of sil
k and concealing the matter in their clothes!’
‘They don’t teach history like that at school,’ said Bob.
‘Too complex in significance for the teaching profession to grasp,’ said the Purser.
The wharfinger was a bespectacled and enthusiastic young man with a degree and an excellent command of English. Liaison with the Chinese was a happier matter over cargo than over immigration or port health. In contrast with the static disfavour of the latter bureaucrats, our wharfinger introduced a cheerful note of purpose. He seemed an embodiment of the hoarding that silently exhorted effort from the work-force. Meeting in the Mate’s office, it was a matter of minutes to assimilate the details of the coming consignments and their eventual location in the ship: that delicate compromise of weight, capacity occupied and eventual destination. Human hair, hog-bristles, hides and hammers would form the bulk of our lading, together with cases of wire nails and other simple manufactures, mainly hand-tools. By the time the meeting broke up, the hatches were already open and after discharging a hundred drums of acetone we began loading in earnest.
The strictest supervision was essential. Of major importance was the matter of ventilation, achieved by the use of wooden planking, or dunnage, combined with rush cargo mats. The disparate climates through which we had to pass, the differing hygroscopic characteristics of various commodities and their liability to taint, their relative weight and value, all had to be taken into account. Hog-bristles and human hair (for wigs, uncompromisingly black though it was) were of considerable value. Arsenicated cattle hides stank to high heaven and could not be stowed anywhere near tea, which readily took up odour and would be utterly ruined by such a juxtaposition. But Antigone had been built for this. For all the cunning of her hull design she remained a great floating box, her stock-in-trade her internal capacity. As we prepared to sail from each successive loading port, the last duty of the cargo-officer was to measure her remaining vacant volume – a matter of inspired guestimates and calculations which became increasingly important (and easier to measure) as she filled. The tonnage, in ‘space tons’ of forty cubic feet, was telegraphed ahead of the ship and the agents arranged the consigning of parcels of cargo accordingly.
Antigone was divided into six hatches, each with its lower hold and ’tween deck. Numbers Three and Four had an additional centre-castle deck while Number One, to increase the forward strength of the ship, had an extra ’tween deck. Number Three hold was divided into deep-tanks for liquid or dry cargo as required, as was the forward half of Number Four. Its after section ran through into Number Five, making an enormous space in both ’tween deck and hold. Below the holds lay the ship’s double-bottom tanks, holding our fresh water and bunkers, with additional water-ballast tanks fore and aft. Only the engine room really intruded into this gigantic and voluminous construction.
As if the Mate’s work was not complicated enough by the differing and sometimes conflicting demands of individual consignments, their ports of discharge and their liability to produce or absorb condensation, smell and so forth, he had also the matter of the ship’s stability to consider. Transversely this affected her ability to remain upright as the sea sought to capsize her; longitudinally this governed her trim, draught and the consequent efficiency of her hull. In general, heavy loads were placed in the bottom of the ship, though this should not make the ship too ‘stiff’ or it would result in a violent jerking roll, destructive in itself. However, too little positive stability would make her ‘tender’, liable to roll with a heart-stopping sluggishness at the slightest provocation. Ship stability, as so much else at sea, was a matter of sensible compromise.
Finally, there were also the small parcels of really valuable cargo to consider. These might consist of mail, spirits, currency, valuable metals, lizard and snake skins, silk, scientific equipment, personal effects, arms and even commodities like pepper or gum. These were stowed under lock and key in either the strongrooms, the fore-cabins or the other small cargo lockers situated under forecastle and poop.
Resolution of all these multifarious demands, demands which exploited the versatility of Antigone’s breed as a general cargo-liner, placed a heavy and relentless burden upon the shoulders of the Mate. His labour was heroic – as heroic as that suggested by the Communist hoarding. For the rest of us it was different; even in Hsinkiang, amid the barren plains of North China with its history of foreign rape and the present domination of all activity by the single-minded ethics of Mao Tse Tung, we went rollicking ashore. Not that I recall seeing a single woman in Hsinkiang, for even pleasure followed strict principles. There was a Seaman’s Club and a Friendship Store and little else; but the Tsingtao beer and the truly magnificent fried king prawns at the former were excellent, while the goods at the latter reflected the New China’s desire to acquire foreign currency. Beautiful carpets from neighbouring Tientsin were offered at staggeringly cheap prices, as well as the other usual curios. There were more practical items too, hampers and vacuum flasks and fur hats. I bought one of these for a pound. Folded it looked like a Cossack papenka, but possessed sealskin flaps that pulled snugly down over my frozen ears; it came into its own as we returned to Antigone at midnight. The wind keened menacingly in the overhead wires which shared the poles with clusters of loud-speakers, silent now after the strident clamour of the day. For hours we had been subjected to discordant exhortations to the port’s workers to graft harder and defeat imperialism. The relative poverty of the Chinese language, employing no more than a handful of sounds, made the experience very wearying to western ears.
The moan of the wind was suddenly pierced by the shriek of a steam-whistle and out of the night a monstrous black steam locomotive puffed and clanked past us with a long train of trucks. Fine coal dust swirled about us.
‘Coal for that Chinese ship astern of us,’ remarked Bob, flogging his body with his arms ‘going down to the Chapei power station at Shanghai.’
The train passed at last and we galvanised our bodies forward. Along the wall of a newly erected shed the dockside lights illuminated a painted slogan, white characters on a scarlet background with a thoughtfully-provided English translation: ‘Our thinking is guided by Mao Tse Tung and the principles of Marxist-Leninism.’
‘Makes a change from sex,’ said Bob as we made the final dash for the gangway.
We found where such intellectual guidance could lead next morning, when the off-duty Midshipmen woke to find their accommodation occupied by Chinese soldiers. In pursuance of the fundamental equality of their creed, the two assigned to guard us had entered the half-deck, made themselves tea and, with every appearance of curiosity at such barbarian misuse of porcelain, pissed in the lavatory. The Midshipmen were indignant, but there was little they could do. The soldiers were stolidly indifferent, and the subtle menace of their native-made Kalashnikovs deterred further action.
To some extent the Midshipmen were avenged the following afternoon, from an unusual quarter. I had gone on deck to relieve Mike, and witnessed the whole incident. Impatient to get more dunnage into a stow of canned goods, Mike had sent the Senior Midshipman up into the ’tween deck of Number Five hold where a bundle of dunnage planks lay awaiting use. Resentful at having to undertake a task that the gang of labourers should have done, the Midshipman began hurling plank after plank into the lower hold. I waited at the coaming until Mike should finish and clamber up on deck to be relieved. He shouted up to the Midshipman that he had thrown sufficient planks, but the young man, well into his muscular stride, continued tossing dunnage down. The planks sailed gracefully out of the ’tween deck, imperfect aerofoils, descending at odd, cracking angles.
‘That’s enough!’ Mike bawled.
Still the planks rained down and Mike, angering fast and losing face before the Chinese who had feigned incomprehension when he asked them to get more dunnage, now resorted to his last-ditch tactic.
‘For fuck’s sake stop!’
The crudity had more than the desired effect. Although the descending s
tream of dunnage ceased, it was replaced by a storm of invective from the Chinese charge-hand, who railed against Mike’s verbal imperialism. Amid the torrent of invective the universally understood vulgarism was repeated. It had clearly offended the Chinese who saw in the incident the evils of capital exploiting labour. In the ’tween deck above, the Senior Midshipman smirked his enjoyment of this sudden ally’s onslaught. Furious, Mike climbed out of the hatch.
‘What the hell are you grinning at?’
‘Your non-conformity with the principles of Marxist-Leninism.’
‘Bollocks!’
‘Precisely.’
‘Bloody class warfare…’
* * *
We left Hsinkiang in a snow-storm, the flakes sweeping horizontally, direct from the Arctic. It cleared as we steamed out into the gulf and after dark we spoke by aldis lamp to the signal station at Tengchow. Slowly we left the extreme dry cold of the north astern, steaming southwards towards the damp fogs of the Yangtze Kiang.
It was a total change of climate, though only of a mere six degrees of latitude, for the temperature rose above freezing. Yet the penetrating damp seemed colder and the germs, frozen in North China, now infected our throats and noses, so that we went miserably to our stations as we moved up the Yangtze Kiang towards the pilot station off Tsungming Island.