by Voyage East- A stirring tale of the last great days of the Merchant Navy (retail) (epub)
This was where it had all started; the first questing Indiamen, the opium clippers and then the lovely tea clippers. Just here, off the Woosung forts, the Thermopylae and Cutty Sark had cast off their steam tugs and spread studding-sails for the 14,000 miles’ race to the Channel. Here too old Alfred’s Agamemnon had arrived, to give the clippers their death-wound and open the tea trade to steam ships.
We swung out of the swift brown stream of the Yangtze and into its narrower tributary, the Whang-Pu. Passing the embrasured ramparts of Woosung where a sleekly modern Chinese destroyer lay alongside, we made our slow way upstream towards Shanghai. Pilotage regulations prohibiting the use of radar compelled us to anchor in fog, which closed in frequently, prolonging our passage. Moisture dropped from every awning spar and funnel guy, every davit span and aerial, cloaking us in a sodden blanket of abjection.
The main reason for our enforced immobility in fog was the density of river traffic, for the Whang-Pu was crowded with small craft. Tugs towing lighters, sampans and night-soil boats were among this floating mass, but it chiefly consisted of junks. Low northern junks with their almost horizontally battened sails, or the high-pooped, batwinged southern variety, worked the winds and tides up and down the river with a masterly, timeless skill. Many of these junks were ancient, bearing the remnants of opulent decoration, their sails over-patched and tattered, their anchor cables twisted bamboo, yet sailing with the efficiency that had established the craft as an ocean-going success long before the Portuguese had ventured into the eastern seas. Nor was their role thalassic, for a Chinese admiral had ventured to the southern tip of Africa before an imperial decree dismembered his navy and set the boundaries of the middle kingdom at its landward frontiers. They were curiously fascinating craft and many had doubtless served the ancient Chinese calling of coastal piracy which had flourished until the Communist victory of 1949.
As we lay at anchor ringing the bell and gong that International Regulations demanded at anchor, these junks ghosted past us. Out on the bridge-wing the Mate stood watching them, his eternal fascination with the seafaring of others undiminished by the penetrating chill of the fog. Eventually it lifted and we made our way steadily upstream. As we passed a long wharf at Pootung the mate pointed out the poorly obscured lettering on the corrugated iron of the godown roof: Holt’s Wharf it read, long since sequestrated by the Communist authorities.
‘There was quite a colony out here when I was a youngster,’ said China Dick, suddenly conversational now that the anxiety of the fog had gone. ‘The wharf-manager had a house just over there,’ he pointed, ‘and there was always a Blue Funnel or a Glen ship alongside, see…’
I had not imagined Captain Richards as anything other than the portly master he was now. Even the story of him reboarding his torpedoed ship had somehow taken shape in my mind with him in his present physical state. It occurred to me to wonder why he had been called ‘China Dick’ in the first place, and later I asked the Mate; he refused to answer.
‘Ask the Old Man himself,’ he replied dangerously. Instead I consulted the ship’s memory.
‘I thought everybody knew,’ said the Purser, amused. ‘Well, when he was a young midshipmite he had an unfortunate mishap here in Shanghai. He tore his foreskin and had to be circumcised. He was operated on by a woman, a chi-chi doctor who told him his penis was a delicate part of the anatomy, like a piece of porcelain…’
So the old joke at the Shipping Office had been right after all! Time, age and rank had converted the reference from the anatomical to the geographical.
‘He’s got good cause to remember the place, then,’ I said, laughing.
‘It was a wide-open city in the days before the Long March,’ went on the Purser, ‘when the International Concessions were wrung out of the poor bloody Chinese; run as a western enclave in the twenties and thirties, full of gangsters, hoodlums and whores, white Russians and expatriate British police officers and God knows what besides. I’ve heard it called the most exciting city on earth…’
It almost looked as though time had stood still as we rounded the last bend and steadied our course for the Garden Reach. On the west bank the purple skyline was Chicago Odeon, petrified tombstones of western commercial interference set among the fatal aspirations of Sun Yat Sen’s republic. We swung off the Bund where the cruisers and destroyers of the imperial powers once lay, showing their respective flags in ‘Warship Row’. Now a few deep-water merchantmen like ourselves, Chinese coasters and the usual multitude of sampans and rag-sailed junks churned the turgid yellow waters of the Whang Pu in a duller scene. Our berth was just downstream from the Bund, below Soochow Creek where lay the British diplomatic presence. Once a posting of considerable prestige, the place now pandered to Chinese sensibilities as ‘The Office of the Official of the British Charge d’Affaire’s Office in Peking looking after the affairs of British nationals in Shanghai’, a piece of splendidly Orwellian tautology in which lingering remnants of Lord Macartney’s handkerchief might still be detected.
But commerce remained even after the flags had gone, just as it had preceded them. The riches of this vast country were still exported by its stoic, industrious and long-suffering people. From the rapacity of foreign exploiters and the Manchu mandarins; through the dissolution of the Celestial Empire and the foundering of the first republic; the anarchy of warlords and the long uninterrupted conflict that began in a war with Japan, went on with China’s participation in the Allied effort of the Second World War and tore itself to pieces in the Nationalist defeat by Mao’s Communists; China had survived. The dragon had woken to shake the world in Korea, and more peaceful symbols of her collective will to survive poured now into Antigone’s holds. Sacks of talcum, bone glue, apricot kernels, cotton goods, hides and furs, frozen eggs and prawns, tobacco, ingots of antimony, precious silks triple-wrapped in matting, all found their way below. In the deep tanks we loaded white tung oil, pressed cold from the roasted and powdered seeds of Aleurites cordata, the woodoil tree, which possessed a high specific gravity, polymerised easily and was much used then in the manufacture of paints. The 340 tons we took on board were said to be worth most of the voyage’s expenses. It was not the only mysterious substance.
‘What is this stuff used for?’ Bob asked me as he took over the deck and we watched a sling of bags containing barium bromide being lowered into Number Five hatch.
‘Putting in the tea at Wormwood Scrubs.’
‘No, seriously…’
‘Seriously, no idea. Don’t recall a thing about chemistry beyond the process of turning yeast into alcohol…’
‘Barium, sir, emits electrons when heated.’ We turned and stared at the Junior Midshipman. ‘It’s used in cathode ray tubes… you know, for radar…’
‘I know what a bloody cathode ray tube is!’ snapped Bob. ‘Have you got a knife on you?’
‘A knife?’
‘Yes, a knife, a bloody seaman’s knife, for cutting ropes and getting stones out of horse’s hooves.’
The Midshipman looked even more puzzled. ‘Well, no, actually…’
‘And I don’t suppose you know how to make a carrick bend?’ went on Bob relentlessly.
‘A carrick bend?’
‘Don’t keep repeating what I say… you can’t, can you?’
‘I’m not sure, sir…’
‘Of course you can’t. That’s the trouble with you modern lads. You know all about electrons and cathode ray tubes, but you haven’t a clue about carrying a knife or tying a few knots.’ Bob paused, and then added accusingly ‘Got a comb?’
‘Yes…’ The Midshipman reached into the hip pocket of his shorts.
‘See what I mean?’ Bob turned to me with an expression of mock-despair.
‘I don’t understand why…’
But the lad got no further, for just then an irritated Senior Midshipman arrived in search of his subordinate. ‘The Mate wants you! And quick! Christ, you’re really in the shit!’
The two Midshipmen hurried
off. Bob and I exchanged glances. Bob shrugged.
‘Haven’t a clue, chum. Perhaps we should go and find out what’s going on.’ He looked satisfied at the completeness of the Middy’s discomfiture.
‘When did you last tie a carrick bend?’
‘Sod off,’ he grinned amiably.
I watched a sling of barium sway down into the open maw of Number Two hatch and then followed him.
The boy was in trouble; potentially very serious trouble, here in a suspicious, wounded and defensive country. We could hear the Mate roaring at him as soon as we reached the boat-deck.
‘You bloody, stupid young fool. D’you not understand what you’ve done? Eh? You could be shipped off to prison or an internment camp. This is a bloody crime against the People’s Republic of China! Christ, laddie, this is no joke, this is the big bad bloody world!’
Bob and I passed a Chinese soldier on the boat-deck. He had his head cocked beneath his small-crowned peaked cap and was listening to the row, aware that something unusual was in progress. He began to walk with a predatory gait towards the noise. We accelerated our stride to beat him to its source. The Mate, standing in his cabin doorway, looked up as we entered the alleyway.
‘D’you know what this silly little bastard’s done?’ he asked us rhetorically. ‘He’s bloody near stopped the ship and got himself arrested. If I hadn’t happened to send for the Middies’ journals this morning and the Chinks had got hold of his before we sailed, God only knows what might have happened. They’ve already had the guards in their accommodation once; you’d think they’d bloody learn.’
The Mate held up the Junior Midshipman’s log-book, tore a page from it and held it out to us. It was beautifully written, for the Middy had a flair for such things: and there, halfway down the page, was a detailed impression of the Chinese destroyer we had passed at Woosung. In pencil and watercolour, it showed the sleek grey warship in detail. The Mate was right. With cameras forbidden, British intelligence in Hong Kong would be quite interested in the sketch.
Behind me the loom of the guard was tangible. Fortunately Bob and I effectively blocked the access. I could feel my heart beating and next to me Bob was grimacing and gesturing at his chest, drawing the irate Mate’s attention to the presence of approaching Nemesis.
‘Fancies himself as James Bond,’ said the Mate, venting the last of his furious exasperation on the hapless Midshipman as he realised how close we were to the consummation of his fears. He handed back the mutilated book to the Midshipman, struck a match and set it to the torn-out page. The flame caught and flared, and he dropped the charring sheet into his cabin rosy where it expired in a thick twist of smoke.
‘Don’t you ever do such a stupid thing again. The Chinese authorities are bloody touchy… go on, bugger off.’
We parted to let the shaken Midshipman through. He was suddenly confronted by the guard and brought this log-book up in front of him like a shield, edging past the small figure with the evilly gleaming black Kalashnikov. The guard’s expression was suspicious, his finger curled round the trigger of the weapon. Then he said something angrily and turned away. The Mate let out a long breath.
‘Christ! He could have stopped the ship!’
In the Mate’s eyes that would have been a greater crime than espionage.
* * *
Mike and I stretched our legs on the Bund after dinner. Hordes of Chinese cycled vigorously past us, over-crowded buses surged along and dilapidated and overloaded lorries chugged by, fuelled by the collapsing balloons of gas bags tied to their cab roofs. Once we were surprised to see a smartly-dressed woman, quite unlike the androgynous creatures we had hitherto observed with only white socks and bobbed hair as sexual identification. She lay back in a rickshaw, the only one we saw.
‘Class warfare, you see,’ said Mike, sardonically, trotting out the catch-phrase of the voyage, ‘even here in the worker’s paradise. I suppose she’s the wife of a party official.’
‘Or a party official herself,’ I added, vague imaginings of Midshipmen under interrogation stirring in my mind’s eye.
And we too moved like aliens, head and shoulders above the Shanghainese, who lacked the stature of their northern cousins. They stared at us with undisguised curiosity and apparent amusement.
‘I suppose we all look alike to them,’ observed Mike. ‘Red barbarians…’
My beard aroused excited comment from a gaggle of laughing children who followed us in increasing numbers until Mike found them irritating, and we sought the sanctuary of the Seaman’s Club.
It had once been the Jockey Club, an establishment of such sanctity that, before 1949, our entry would have been proscribed on the grounds of our social undesirability. Times had changed. Inside the palatial foyer stood a huge white marble statue of Chairman Mao gazing benignly over our heads. Along one wall black and white photographs showed the paunchy white police of Alabama beating up negro protestors, a convincing demonstration of American imperialism.
‘Now that,’ said Mike nodding at the propaganda pictures, ‘is the land of the free.’
Above stretched a huge scarlet banner bearing White Chinese characters, and an English translation: Seamen of the World Unite!
‘Be the biggest piss-up in history,’ remarked Mike as we made our way towards the bar. It had once been the longest in the world, an impressive perspective of dark mahogany trimmed with a brass foot-rail, at which stood a lone pair of Jugoslavs from a Rijeka-registered freighter.
‘The Purser told me,’ I said as we blew the froth off the Tsingtao beer, ‘that in the old days, as Master of a Blue Funnel ship, China Dick would have just been tolerated at the lower end of the bar. Apparently where one stood and drank here depended upon where one ranked in the pecking order of Shanghai society.’
‘Jesus Christ, it must have been intolerable,’ said Mike. ‘You can’t blame the Chinese for wanting it all to end, can you?’ He smiled amicably at the Jugoslavs.
We sailed the following afternoon, slipping down the Whang Pu in a thin, watery sunshine. As we pulled off the berth and the screw churned up the debris which the river had swept under our stern, it dislodged something which rolled over with a white flash.
It was the body of a man, thin and rigid beneath black pyjamas, the face ghastly with decay.
‘Too much people,’ said the Pilot.
A Change of Orders
The Mate had the Crowd turned-to on the forecastle long before we entered the Lei Mun Pass on our homeward approach to the Crown Colony. There had been a lightening of spirits as we approached Hong Kong, a compound of excitement at being homeward bound, of anticipation of mail, and of release from the dreary restrictions of the China coast. This feeling was less than just to the Chinese, for of all the world’s ports, one need never lock one’s cabin in those of the People’s Republic, and if there was something intimidating about the heavy-handed presence of guards, we had at least had no trouble from the less tractable elements in our crew. But now, despite the Bosun’s eagle eye, Embleton was in high good spirits on the forecastle as he assisted in the operation known as ‘breaking the cable.’
This was done prior to making fast to the mooring buoy at which we would load from junks. It meant that one of the ship’s anchors had to be lashed in its hawse-pipe with several turns of heavy wire, then a few fathoms of its cable tugged laboriously on deck and disconnected by ‘breaking’ it at a shackle, the joining devices that made up each anchor cable from standard fifteen fathom lengths of stud-link chain. Once it had been separated from its anchor, the loose end of cable was hauled forward and passed over the bow.
As we approached the buoy a wallah-wallah, the local name for a small motor-boat, detached itself from the crowd of water-craft in the vicinity and made for our bow. It contained a crew of three Chinese, two of whom would leap aboard the big steel buoy and shackle our cable to its mooring ring.
‘Half-astern!’
The telegraphs jangled and Antigone trembled as her propeller began
to stir the water under her counter. The cluster of boats awaiting our announced arrival were pitched about as they moved inexorably towards us. The Mate was signalling from forward, one arm raised as he leaned over the bow. The wallah-wallah had disappeared from our view on the bridge, hidden by the flare of the bow.
‘Full astern!’
The vibration increased, the seething whorls of water up our side boiled white and green and an incautious sampan was whirled away like a chip of wood in a whirl-pool.
‘Stop her!’
There was frantic activity on the forecastle. The windlass ground into gear, then slowed and stopped. After a little the telephone rang and the Mate’s distorted voice reported the ship securely moored.
‘Finished with engines!’
The triple ring was responded to with obvious enthusiasm by the engineers below.
Almost immediately we were again subjected to invasion. A Hong Kong harbour craft brought a pontoon alongside, close above which we lowered our gangway to give safe access to the ship, then first the agent, then the foreman and the tally clerks, the vendors, tailors, shoemakers, coolies and half the world, it seemed, poured aboard with a gravity-defying energy that swept me from my station on the gangway as I attempted to get down it to hail the company wallah-wallah and read the Antigone’s arrival draught.
For purposes of individual transport to and from a ship on the buoys, the agents, Butterfield and Swire, hired one of these boats. They ran a ferry service as-and-when required, for a dollar a trip. Scores of these boats touted for business in the harbour or off the official landing places at Kowloon and Hong Kong, the lucky ones flying the house-flags of the Companies which had chartered their services. If one missed the last of the Company’s wallah-wallahs, the hire of one of the irregular boats could prove expensive, particularly after midnight.
As my own boat approached the bobbing pontoon, having made a slow circuit of the ship to enable me to read the draught marks on Antigone’s stem and stern posts, I was aware of a smart white launch delivering a passenger to our gangway. The launch bore an unfamiliar flag and was called, oddly I thought, Dayspring. Its passenger had vanished by the time I reached the accommodation but as I inscribed the details of our arrival draught on the Board of Trade’s form, I heard laughter from the Mate’s cabin and, forcing my way through a crowd of Chinese, I found a red-faced priest in a black soutane sitting on the Mate’s settee with a large glass of whisky in his massive paw.