by Voyage East- A stirring tale of the last great days of the Merchant Navy (retail) (epub)
‘And who’s this fine fellow?’ The other fist was thrust out towards me and I was introduced to Father O’Rourke of the Stella Maris, the Roman Catholic mission to seamen.
‘The good father’s come to save us,’ said the Mate, obviously anxious to have the priest gone so that he could attend to the queue of Chinese blocking the alleyway. Father O’Rourke clearly thought such commercial considerations could wait until he had dealt with our spiritual welfare.
‘I hear you’ve all been sinning up in Japan.’
‘Prodigiously, so, Father,’ said the mate between impatient puffs of smoke as he sucked his pipe into ignition.
‘As I thought, as I thought…’
‘The draught, sir…’ I held out the form and the Mate took it with a look of agony.
‘And I suppose a fine fellow like you has been fornicating?’ Father O’Rourke made it sound like scoring a try in a Rugby International, and I think my denial disappointed him. Perhaps he simply did not believe me. I tried to change the subject.
‘What’s the ensign you’re flying, Father?’
‘Why, ’tis the flag of the Holy See… as far as Oi know the Dayspring is the only vessel in the world to be registered in Vatican City… and talking of flags, I must be off. We’ve the first ship to fly the Irish flag in Hong Kong arriving at any moment and I must meet her.’ He stood, fixing me with a baleful stare. ‘At least she’ll be full of honest sinners, willing to confess themselves…’
He turned to the Mate and wagged an admonishing finger. ‘And you, Mister Mate, you give them poor apprentice boys the afternoon off, and I’ll take ’em all up to St Michael’s shrine and do ’em some decent good. God bless you both.’
And he was gone, leaving the Mate and me staring across the cabin. The Mate blew a cloud of smoke in relief.
‘The Dayspring from on high hath visited us…’ he said. ‘Go and tell those fornicating little bastards in the half-deck that their guardian angel has just got them an afternoon off… St Michael’s bloody shrine… does he think I’ve fallen for that blarney?’
The news was not welcomed in the half-deck. If the Mate was prepared to give free time, there were other things Midshipmen could do in Hong Kong.
‘Oh, sir!’ The Junior Midshipman protested (and I noted this new and rebellious maturity with wry disappointment), ‘St Michael’s bloody shrine… do we have to go?’
‘Not if you don’t want the afternoon off. You can stay and help me round the deck.’
‘Fuck that,’ said the Senior. ‘No, we’ll go…’ I thought I caught a gleam of mischief in his eye. It looked as if the Vatican City’s principal vessel might be suffering its first case of desertion before the afternoon was out.
I kept the afternoon on deck. At each hatch, moored side by side, the lighters and junks assembled in accordance with the instructions pencilled on their boat notes by the indefatigable Mate. As each inner one emptied, it warped out clear, allowing the remaining stack to heave themselves alongside. The high-sterned junks provided a fascinating insight into the domestic life of the water-folk of Hong Kong. Fifty or sixty feet in length, they bore two or three masts. The many-battened sails were lowered to one side, allowing the derrick runners to whip out their cargoes. The cases, cartons, casks and so forth were netted by the males in the junk’s crew, for these were family homes, not merely cargo carrying craft. Father and sons laboured in the waist and sometimes an older man, presumably the grandfather of the youngest generation on board, would also help. They were lean men in scanty cotton trousers and tee shirts, often bare footed despite the danger to their unprotected toes as the cases skidded under the snatching impulse of the derricks while the junks bobbed alongside, rocking dangerously in the wake of passing ships.
The poops of these amazing craft provided the family accommodation. Tiny cabins contained sleeping rolls, while across the stern, overhanging the great rudder, a series of cunningly-made cubicles and lockers provided a variety of facilities. Above the rudder stock, where a hole allowed the tiller to be shipped, a plank formed the shitting-place. To one side a suspended bamboo basket formed a small chicken coop, with a pair of laying hens; to the other were an inset iron bowl containing the charcoal cooking fire, and lockers for food-stuffs. The daughters of this tiny commune cleaned pannikins and woks, or helped the women of the junk to prepare the next meal, another child played with simple wooden toys on the tiny poop-deck, while the toddler of the family was restrained by a piece of string about the waist. On the wife’s back the head of the newest arrival bobbed uncontrollably, while a balding grandmother squatted in a black samfoo, and split fire-wood with a billhook. This domesticity ignored our towering presence, just as it did rain and wind, when the only protection was a mat awning that pulled over a rough frame-work set above the poop.
Loading now proceeded apace, for a great deal of our homeward cargo was taken aboard in Hong Kong, much of it of a general nature: plastic goods, curios, toys and the cheap manufactures we were used to having on display in our high street shops. Tinned food, much of it from China, came aboard for the growing numbers of Chinese restaurants in British cities; cotton clothing, Chinese in origin but often made up in the sweat-shops of Kowloon and Wan-Chai; bamboo rattans and some coffee for Hamburg, bags of chili, noodles and caraway seeds; army stores and personal effects together with odd and valuable cases whose contents were obscure. One came aboard under armed guard, a second lieutenant, a corporal and a pair of squaddies accompanying it. The manifest later proved it to contain government cipher equipment.
I was attending to a stow of casts of ginger being loaded into Number Two upper ’tween deck, a complicated matter of dunnaging the deck and wedging each barrel so that its bung was uppermost and its weight was taken on the hooped area, leaving the fat ‘bilge’ of its middle free to hang between the dunnage beams. It was already late afternoon and a mist was creeping over the harbour, the sun having sunk behind Victoria Peak. Above the babel of shouting, the squeak and judder of braked winches, the hum and singing of the derrick runners in the sheaves and the squalling of a pair of babies alongside, there came the strident sound of singing.
Show me the way to go home,
I’m tired and I want to go to bed,
I had a little drink about an hour ago
And it’s gone right to my head
I looked outboard and saw the Dayspring approaching. Father O’Rourke sat in the stern, unobtrusively conducting this unholy choir with the foot of his crossed over left leg. He wore a beatific smile; though his sense of dignity prevented him from joining in, I felt sure that he was familiar with the words.
I looked anxiously up at the boat-deck, half expecting China Dick to be standing outside his cabin staring at the returning Midshipmen. His absence spurred me to action: if we got the Midshipmen to the half-deck without attracting attention, trouble might be avoided. I ran towards the gangway, tripping over hatch-beams and dodging wires. A tally-clerk waylaid me and I was delayed sufficiently to find the Midshipmen swaying up the gangway, tramping in unison so that the wire fall vibrated and the whole thing twisted under their determinedly drunken exertions.
‘For Christ’s sake…’ I hissed. Below, Father O’Rourke raised his hand in a gesture of blessing as the Dayspring sped away towards the Irish ship a mile away.
‘It’s the Fourth Officer… sir…’ The Junior Midshipman swayed dangerously and almost fell.
‘Where the hell have you buggers been?’
‘S’nt Mike’s shrine… sir…’
I looked at the Senior Midshipman for an explanation. He was grinning, though experience had taught him to keep his mouth shut.
‘St Michael’s shrine?’ I had never heard of the place and wanted some form of rational explanation.
‘Actually,’ the Senior Midshipman enunciated with care, ‘it was the San Miguel Brewery…’
* * *
They got away with it, and the following afternoon went on a picnic with the opposition, sailing o
ff to Telegraph Bay with the Anglican padre from the Mission to Seamen. Though alcohol was restricted, the padre had played a trump card by bringing some girls along, daughters of British inhabitants of Hong Kong. Dewy-eyed with love the Midshipmen returned with plans for dating these girls in the evenings remaining to us in Hong Kong. Alas, China Dick, summoned ashore that afternoon, had returned with news that turned their triumph to ashes. The Mate explained it to Mike and Bob and myself.
‘The Clytemnestra has a tail-shaft problem. She’s to go into the Taikoo dry-dock as soon as the Ashcan comes out. We’re cutting short our Hong Kong lading, transhipping her Manila cargo and picking up her run…’
‘Christ, that’s a bloody Borneo,’ Mike broke in. ‘That’ll add a fortnight onto our schedule…’
‘Probably three weeks,’ replied the Mate uncompromisingly.
‘Shit!’ I thought of those small indications of marital reconciliation Mike had let slip. ‘That’s really fucked it!’ His mood was venomous.
Bob sighed philosophically; it made little difference to me.
‘Well there it is… we all signed two-year articles…’ The Mate lit his pipe.
‘And that gives us one more night here,’ said Bob.
‘Yes, and either one of you two can look after the ship this evening,’ snapped Mike, distressed and frustrated by the untimely news. ‘I’m going ashore.’
The Mate blew a long plume of smoke from his pursed lips. ‘No, you’re not’ he said. ‘I am.’
The lighters with Clytemnestra’s Philippine-bound cargo arrived the following morning as we were emptying the last of the junks that remained alongside. I had the forenoon cargo-watch and I remember it as a bedlam of noise and confusion. Small ragged Chinese boys, barefoot and anxious, chased me about the deck waving the boat-notes for the cargo in their father’s junks. The boat note was an authorisation to load, an instruction from the agents to the ship. They were annotated by the Mate, who indicated where the consignment was to be stowed, and they were initialled by the officer-on-deck as the cargo came aboard. The news that Antigone had closed for cargo had gone smoking round the harbour by some telepathy not wholly dependent upon the agents. It may have had something to do with the Blue Peter that Captain Richards had ordered hoisted. The blue flag with its conspicuous central square of white fluttered at the foremasthead, an old fashioned gesture that harked back to the days before telegraphy.
‘Boat note, sir, boat note.’ The small urchin waved the paper in front of me and I took it from him: fifty tons of iron pyrites due for stowage in Number One lower hold. The hatch had been awaiting the stuff since our arrival.
‘You come just in time,’ I said, scribbling my initials on the docket. ‘You savee just-in-time?’
‘Ya, ya,’ the boy nodded vigorously, ‘jus’ in time, ya, ya.’
‘Ship sail soon. You belong late.’
‘Ya, ya, b’long late…’
The pyrites had obviously come down from Mainland China. The junk containing it wallowed with its burden.
‘You fetch Canton-side, eh?’
‘Ya, ya, Canton-side.’
‘Number One hatch.’
‘Okay sir.’ He ran off, bare feet flying, shouting to the hovering junk, waving it forward and clambering up on the forecastle to take a bow line. I went to see the Chief Tally Clerk. ‘One more junk, Crani, for Number One hatch.’
‘Last one?’ he asked smiling tiredly, for he had been up all night.
‘Hope so.’
‘Where’s the Mate?’ the Purser’s face suddenly appeared amid the mêlée of the deck.
‘Haven’t seen him this morning.’
‘No, neither have I.’
‘He went ashore last night.’
‘I know, that’s what’s worrying me.’
‘The Old Man wants him, does he?’
‘Everybody wants him.’
‘You mean he’s not on board?’ I asked, astonished.
‘He’s gone bloody walk-about.’
‘Does Mike know?’
‘Yes, he’s topside now.’
Mike stepped into the breach, clewing up the paper-work so that when China Dick bellowed for the documents necessary to our departure, Mike presented them to him with the Mate’s compliments and an intimation that the Mate was busy elsewhere. As the appointed hour for sailing approached and the Mate still had not appeared, Mike offered his apologies to China Dick, inventing a delay concerning the verification of the remaining space, which Mike charmingly attributed to my incompetence.
‘Thanks very much,’ I said.
‘When you tell a lie it has to be believable,’ replied Mike with his usual warped sense of humour.
But even this charade could not be maintained indefinitely. Bob and a Midshipman prepared the bridge while I saw the last of the pyrites swung down into Number One lower hold. The hatch beams went below, and then the hatch boards, one set for each deck, until the weather deck was reached and the heavy tarpaulins were hauled across. The empty junks pulled away from our side and the Crowd arrived, Chippie and his mate to batten down, the Bosun and his derrick gang to lower the heavy steel booms into their crutches. With the last space figures I made my way up to the boat deck and the Mate’s office.
‘I can’t spin in out much longer,’ Mike was saying. ‘The Old Man’ll have to be told…’
‘He hasn’t been ashore since we left Birkenhead,’ said the Purser, offering some mitigation for the Mate’s extraordinary behaviour.
‘Well I…’ Mike’s voice tailed off and we turned round. China Dick stood behind us. The moment for subterfuge had passed.
‘Diawl,’ he growled. ‘Bloody Mate’s missing, is he? That what you’ve been scurrying about trying to hide, Second Mate?’
‘Well, sir, I, er…’
At that precise instant the air was cut by the piercing blast of the stand-by whistle. Through the alleyway door stepped the Mate, immaculately uniformed, a secretive smile on his face.
‘Ship’s ready for sea, sir,’ he said, addressing China Dick. ‘I’ve just blown stand-by.’ And then to us, ‘Excuse me, I need my hat…’
‘Where the bloody hell have you been, Mister?’ China Dick asked, flushing.
‘Been, sir?’ said the Mate with an air of astonishment. ‘Why, about my duties.’
China Dick’s gaping mouth snapped shut with the force of a gin-trap. I think he sensed he was in danger of being made to look a fool. He turned on his heel and made for the bridge ladder.
‘Come on,’ the Mate chivvied the rest of us, ‘didn’t you hear the whistle?’
The Land below the Wind
‘At least we get out of this wintry weather,’ the Mate remarked to me as we stood our morning watch waiting for twilight to reveal the horizon ‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘Back into whites today, I suppose?’
It was not the question I wanted to ask, but our diversion to Manila, though a passage of only six hundred miles, took us from the wet, windy misery of a temperate winter back into the perpetual warmth of the tropics.
‘Too overcast for stars,’ said the Mate, staring up at three or four constellations which appeared through rents in the last clouds of that disappearing winter. I said nothing to this uncharacteristic lack of zeal. If the Mate did not want to take stellar observations, that was his prerogative. It was my duty to corroborate his falsehood and I guessed he had other things on his mind. I was correct.
‘You’re not married, are you?’ but he did not wait for an answer, hurrying on. ‘Get yourself fixed up, permanently… the alternative’s bloody senseless…’
‘You mean,’ I ventured, ‘casual relationships?’
‘I mean whoring… och, she’s a bonnie girl, no bar lassie, and I’ve known her a few years. Works in an office in Victoria…’
The enigma of the Mate’s disappearance was explained, but he was a strait-laced Scot, an uncompromising judge of his own conduct. He sighed.
‘Women, we put them on bloody pedestals. Seamen are
worse than most at that nonsense. They’re either saints or slatterns, those you marry and those you screw. One lot belong up on marble plinths, the others… well…’
I wondered what the unknown Chinese girl would have thought of his cynicism, or whether he really meant it. The dawning light caught the jutting brow and the thin line of his mouth and I realised he was experiencing the pain of separation, cocooning his hurt in a harsh self-wounding. He pulled out his pipe and began stuffing it with tobacco.
‘They still know how to be wife to a man,’ he said, as the match flared, separating the whole female sex along an imaginary meridian somewhere east of Suez. He felt the rebelliousness of Western women as a faintly personal insult.
‘I mean,’ he went on, ‘women are even coming to sea now.’
He found the notion of British girls applying for cadetships profoundly disturbing. No doubt he would have treated such a trainee with his usual good sense, but his tone manifested his unhappiness. Like all seafarers, he was conservative by inclination; he felt the presence of women at sea would be an intrusion, a diminution of himself, not as hero, but as provider. He wanted someone he loved to be immune from the laborious toils of his job, and could not understand why women should insist on joining the rat-race.
‘I suppose they want power,’ he went on; ‘to be the arbiters of their own fates.’ The aroma of his black shag was snatched away by the ship’s wind. ‘And I suppose it says something about the consistency of human folly… proves they’re not superior, after all.’ With the pipe drawing he turned forward again, leaning on both arms. Then he pulled the briar from his mouth with a jerk of indignation. ‘Not to mention the fact that they’re doing some poor bastard out of a job.’