by Voyage East- A stirring tale of the last great days of the Merchant Navy (retail) (epub)
‘Bloody cheek,’ muttered Bob, aware that the Mate’s comment contained a veiled illusion to his own conduct in Hong Kong.
We did not work cargo at night, for there was only a single shift of workmen. Before they settled for the night, the Dyak labourers hunkered down on the after deck, where their cook had set up a field kitchen, an affair of dunnage, cargo mats and brazier fire. The evening air was filled with the smell of fried meat and boiled rice. After eating they smoked, gambled and talked, before drifting off to the primitive floating hotel that lay alongside our gangway.
The following dawn they broke their fast then turned to, hoisting the big logs aboard with wire slings and hauling them out into the sides of the holds with bull-wires led through snatch-blocks. It was slow, dangerous work, for the logs were heavy, weighing up to seven or eight tons, and four or five feet thick. Some had been in the water for weeks and were slimy with weed. Occasionally a snake would drop from one, and there would be much shouting and banging to frighten the thing into the depths of the ship. Sometimes the logs were reluctant to be drawn into the ‘wings’ by the bull-wires, which parted under the stress. As a result our ‘Doctor’ was kept busy dressing cuts, for the men worked barefoot and often slipped between the treacherous logs.
The timber Superintendent dined with us, telling of the piratical raids of Filipinos and Indonesians and of how, a year earlier, they had pillaged Lahat Datu and killed seven men before being rounded up by the local Mobile Defence Force and a detachment of the British Army.
‘After capture, the pirates were sent to walk through Lahat Datu,’ he explained, ‘and the people called them bad names and beat them.’
‘Good idea,’ said Mike.
‘Sure,’ went on the Superintendent, ‘then they get ten year in prison.’
‘You must feel pretty exposed here,’ remarked the Purser.
The neatly groomed head nodded. ‘Sure. Little bit,’ he admitted, ‘but I have two Dyak soldiers on Bohihan and they have a machine gun. You have seen watch-tower? Soon we have a search-light. If pirates come they get good welcome.’
‘What do they come for?’ asked the Junior Midshipman, to whom Bohihan seemed a place of extreme indigence.
‘Transistor radio, tape-recorder, woman.’
‘In that order?’ asked Mike, helping himself to the Tournedos Rossini.
* * *
The grounding of the motor boat had made Bob and me partners in crime. On the evening of our departure from Bohihan I remained on the bridge after handing over the watch. It was a quiet night, overcast and black, the sea empty to the horizon. Somewhere to starboard Borneo lay silent, the teeming life of its jungle brought to us as the scent of the land breeze.
‘It was a bloody silly thing to do,’ he said, irritated by his own stupidity.
‘Look, I was as much to blame as you…’
‘No, you weren’t. I’m the senior, it was my fault.’
‘You were simply relaxed. Anyway, everybody’s entitled to the occasional mistake and there was no harm done.’
‘Only to my reputation… hey, what’s that?’
He pointed into the darkness fine on the port bow. Was there the faintest concentration of darkness? I stared uncertainly over the dark water while Bob dived for the radar set. A few seconds later he ran back into the bridge-wing.
‘There’s a bloody great echo less than a mile away. Can you see anything?’ I was already staring through the binoculars.
‘No, not a thing… wait a minute…’
But Bob was not going to be caught for incompetence twice. He dashed back into the wheelhouse and Antigone leaned sharply to the impetus of her adjusted auto-pilot. A moment later Bob reappeared with the aldis lamp. He switched it on and played it out to port like a searchlight.
‘Bloody hell!’
The hull was low and ghostly in the aldis beam, the unmistakable shape of a British frigate, the Pennant Number F61 clearly visible beneath her bridge.
‘What the hell is she doing there with no lights on? Christ! We could have run her down!’
Bob began sending the AAAA of the call-up. There was a pause before an answering wink from the frigate, then a peremptory query: What ship? Where from? Where bound?
Bob clicked out the reply: British ship Antigone from Bohihan to Tawau. What ship are you and why no lights?
Back came the riposte with the dedicated and impressive speed of the naval specialist: British warship Llandaff. Was waiting for pirates. Thanks for blowing my cover.
‘Oh shit,’ I said.
‘Better than another bawling out from China Dick,’ said Bob, clicking the lamp again: Sorry. Buy you a drink some time.
Llandaff’s navigation lights came on and she turned in our wake, abandoning her now pointless vigil.
‘What the devil are you two up to now?’ Captain Richards stood four-square in the wheel-house doorway, lit from behind in aweful silhouette by the dimmed chart-table lamp.
‘Oh shit,’ Bob muttered.
* * *
Tawau was on the very border with Indonesia, its short wharf occupied by the Hernod of the Norwegian Asia Line. Offshore the Royal Fleet Auxiliary Gold Rover lay at anchor, joined half an hour after our own arrival by HMS Llandaff. The roofs of the small town were a tiny smear of red surrounded by the dark green of jungle. Coils of heavy mist lay in the valleys of the forest that stretched away into the interminable hills of the hinterland. Somewhere behind Tawau there was an airstrip from which RAF Beverley transports periodically lifted off with supplies for the isolated army patrols. That afternoon Jardine Matheson’s Hewsang arrived from Wallace Bay with tales of Indonesian raids resulting in the deaths of several people.
We began loading immediately: bags of gum damar, cubic bales of rubber, sacks of peppercorns, bales of hemp and more logs for Liverpool, Hamburg and Rotterdam. Across the wharf tongkangs were landing copra in bulk. Ironically, these heavy sailing barges came from the kampongs on Sebatik Island, enemy territory beyond the border. The business of survival crossed political divisions easily. As the copra came ashore it was bagged, and some made its way aboard Antigone. Next to these ‘enemy’ craft lay a nondescript motor prau, a barge of undistinguished appearance. During the afternoon we noticed a platoon of Dyak soldiers go aboard and conceal themselves below. Soon afterwards the prau fired up her engines and slipped out of Tawau.
‘Who belong this prau?’ I asked one of the tally-clerks.
The man jerked his chin in its direction. ‘Special navy ship. Special to catch pirates.’
I watched the Royal Malaysian Navy’s diminutive Q-ship vanish in a cloud of exhaust smoke: a more practical proposition, I thought, than a frigate.
Bob and I were apprehensive of reprisals from the Llandaff, keeping an eye on her boats as they came and went from the wharf. We had explained to Captain Richards that she had lain in our track without lights and he had done no more than grunt. Our concern proved unfounded; it was China Dick who seized the initiative, and the sequel ran contrary to our worst fears. We had the story from the Purser who had it from the agent who had picked it up on the gossip circuitry of the port.
‘The old devil waylaid one of her officers and tore him up for arse-paper,’ the Purser explained gleefully. ‘Took him apart, you see,’ the Purser went on, imitating China Dick’s accent, ‘told him his ploody warship had no business sitting in international waters on the shipping routes without lights, that he was damned lucky his own officers had their wits about them, otherwise they’d have been cut clean in half, see…’ The Purser abandoned his attempt to ape the Master. ‘Then he launched into his favourite polemic about the Royal Navy being a social refuge and demonstrably sod-all to do with seamanship, and that if they thought they would frighten the pirates, they hadn’t the faintest notion of the realities of life. I expect there was quite a lot more.’ The Purser finished his beer, belched gently and tossed the empty can into his cabin rosy with a clatter. ‘It all stems from the war, of course. I’m surp
rised he didn’t accuse the poor bugger of not being around in 1942 when some Kraut stuck a torpedo in the Glencoe.’
‘That’s the one he got into port, isn’t it?’ The Purser nodded.
‘He really hates ’em, doesn’t he?’
‘Like poison.’
From Tawau we turned north, through the Balabac Strait, beneath the snow-clad summit of Mount Kinabalu. The strait lay between Borneo and the Philippine island of Palawan and was littered with dangerous coral reefs and islets. Several lighthouses and beacons had been built to guide ships through, but there was no sign of their reassuring flashes during our transit. Whether this failure was due to piratical sabotage, corruption, inefficiency or plain mischance, we never knew. It was not our lot to know, we were mere birds of passage. This not-knowing was one of the frustrations of the sea-life, dulling one’s inquisitiveness; the opposite of that voracious appetite for gossip that flourishes elsewhere, about the parish pump. We had no parish pump, no fixed watering hole; nor, for that matter, any need to know. But the unsatisfied curiosity natural to human beings could produce a sense of isolation and insignificance strong enough to dominate a sensitive mind. Perhaps some of this underlay China Dick’s excessive prejudice against the Royal Navy; it was certainly one of the irritants that made seamen drink, and part of the fascination of the Mate’s character (and, to a lesser extent, the Purser’s), that he had armed himself against such corrosion. But victory over this and other deprivations was never assured, not even in so strong-willed a man as the Antigone’s Chief Officer.
It seems so small a thing, this not-knowing, and perhaps at the time we barely noticed it ourselves; yet its onslaught was ineluctable and the extent of its damage would be revealed when we arrived home. The world had functioned without us and, for the married men especially, this was a tiny death. At the time we took its manifestation in our stride, picking our way through the complexities of the strait by radar.
And it was beautiful; the sea placid, the air thick with the scent of foliage, of hibiscus and flame-of-the-forest, of oleanders and bougainvillea vines, borne on the night wind. We could only guess at the species which cloaked the myriad islands beyond the obvious, ubiquitous palms. Casuarinas, perhaps, and peepul; tamarind and percha gums, mangroves and durian, and the red jasmine called frangipani. This too was part of our unknowing, an unwilled, frustrating ignorance that bred a thwarted desire to explore, aroused to an almost passionate intensity by the soft, sea-wafted terral.
But these primitive surroundings that so delighted me and the Mate were not everyone’s idea of paradise. The long, hot coasting was a test of stamina, and sporadic drunkenness was now endemic, breaking into rowdy excess among the junior seamen and led by our idle and disruptive ‘passengers’ from Sandakan. Sparks roamed the ship almost totally withdrawn from our world, unable to shake off his obsessively specific hypochondria, the victim of a disastrously irresponsible practical joke that threatened his reason. Silent, morose, nails bitten bloodily to the quick, time hung heavily as he kept his statutory watch in the isolation of the radio-room, listening to the stutter of morse and static in his head-phones. Such was his preoccupation with self that I do not think he any longer harboured any hatred for Mike, the author of his misfortune.
As for Mike, his nerves were already eroded by our Borneo diversion. His affair with Mrs Saddler and some form of reconciliation brought by letters from his wife had for a while recharged his cocksure self-confidence, but the continuous hot slog, the lack of proper sleep and the passage of time only made him raw, irritable, impatient and resentful of any delay, however caused.
We made a brief stop at Jessleton, now Kota Kinabalu, then called at Labuan, a port which seemed to beat to a faster commercial pulse, as though our approach to Singapore brought us within the ambit of more energetic forces. Sawn ramin formed the bulk of the cargo loaded at Labuan, stowed plank by plank, each consignment separated by lines of coloured gouache. This paint was mixed in buckets and laid on by resentful Midshipmen who thought the job too reminiscent of the kindergarten. Much of this resentment was justifiable, born of the knowledge that in Liverpool the streaks of blue and red and green would be ignored, and the planks would be torn out by damaging wires, a percentage ruined in the profligate haste of Western consumerism.
Because of the alteration to our schedule Antigone was filling rapidly. As we prepared to sail from each successive loading port our estimations of the ship’s remaining capacity became more acute. So too did her stability, and the Mate toiled over long calculations to determine metacentric height, that factor which governed Antigone’s inherent ability to resist the capsizing moments of the sea. There were also lesser calculations, chiefly concerned with our draught and trim at predicted times in our homeward voyage, tiresome arithmetic that could be rendered fruitless with a change of orders. There was a problem with the cargo pumps below and they would be wanted in Singapore, so that even the sybaritically inclined Chief Engineer could not avoid toiling alongside the indefatigable Willie Buchan and his cohorts. Only China Dick could therefore avail himself of local hospitality, and I recall one shipper’s daughter leaping about him in girlish glee as his portly, genial figure waddled towards her parents’ waiting car.
‘Tell the Mate to have her ready to sail at 1600, Mister,’ he said, as he shouldered his golf-clubs at the head of the gangway.
‘He’s already told me that,’ the Mate snapped back, wrestling with some problem just dumped on his desk by the agent’s runner.
‘He just told me to tell you,’ I said, the heat of the Mate’s reply warming me in turn.
As predicted, this fractiousness found more permanent and damaging lodgement with our ‘distressed’ British seamen. They lounged in chairs at the break of the poop, strumming Embleton’s guitar and throwing out gratuitously insolent asides at all but those they numbered as cronies. The conventions under which officers laboured obliged us to ignore them, but the Bosun and Carpenter gave as good as they got, thereby raising the level of abuse. It was a shining example of the devil making work for idle hands. Resentful of authority in any shape or form, two or three of the younger sailors began to mix with these reprobates, supplying them with beer, forming a little coterie which, innocent enough at face value, was already intruding on the privacy of the Chinese.
Embleton was the fall-guy; enticed to excess by our ‘passengers’, he could not be roused from his bunk one morning.
‘Like bloody Lazarus he is,’ the Bosun reported, ‘dead-drunk and pissed his mattress…’
Later that forenoon Embleton was hauled before China Dick and deprived of a further two days’ pay. It seemed Captain Richards, provoked beyond tolerance, would ‘decline to report’ on Embleton’s conduct when the time came to pay-off. This was a euphemism for dismissal, but Embleton continued his wayward association and old heads wagged prophetically over his folly.
On the berth ahead of us Mansfield’s Kunak was embarking deck-passengers. The Junior Midshipman and I leaned on the rail and watched the last of them hurrying along the wharf: men in loose cotton shirts carrying innumerable parcels, women running awkwardly in tightly wound sarongs, trailing whimpering children and accompanied by a leaping and barking pye-dog infected with the hysterical excitement of last-minute departure.
‘Where are they all going?’ the Midshipman asked.
I shrugged. ‘Singapore mostly, I suppose.’
‘But why? What for?’
I should have liked to be able to answer him with certainty, but that too was part of the not-knowing and he would have to come to terms with it.
Good news came aboard with the agent at sunset. Mansfield’s in Singapore sent word that the Clytemnestra would leave Hong Kong the next day and pick up her own schedule at Tanjong Mani in the Rejang River, after which she would proceed to Singapore and load our homeward cargo in the Straits ports.
‘We’ll gain a week, then,’ said Mike brightening, ‘and we won’t have to go up that stinking ditch of the Rejang.�
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‘That’ll make them sweat off their good time in Hong Kong,’ added Bob. ‘They’ll be days at Tanjong Mani and days in Swettenham picking up their own consignments as well as ours.’
The contemplation of Clytemnestra’s coming ordeal made light of our own disruption, modified as it now was by the news.
‘I was wondering where we were going to put it all,’ mused the Mate, staring at the cargo plan on his desk.
‘So what happens at Singapore?’ I asked.
‘Oh, just a few odds and ends and the cargo tanks already booked.’
‘Thank the Lord for small mercies.’
It seemed the gods were suddenly with us, even the primitive deities, for we saw the unusual spectacle of a moon-rainbow on our way down the Sarawak coast. The pale, luminous arc faded as the shower found its way overhead, eventually blotting out the moon and deluging us with a chill rain.
Homeward Bound
It was the sharp, acrid stink of latex that dominated our brief homeward halt at Singapore. Antigone moved directly to a waiting berth and a stream of ancient Chinese coolie women, dressed identically to their sisters-in-toil at Hong Kong in black samfoo pyjamas and cardboard-stiffened head-dresses, padded barefoot up the gangway. They moved with an arthritically hipslewing walk, their careworn faces wrinkled as prunes, their hands, clawed by the work they did, brandishing tiny bamboo brushes and small steel scrapers. With them came a handful of athletic young men who, poking bundles of bamboo poles, planks, ropes and cargo mats down Number Four hatch, erected scaffolding within those cargo tanks designated for latex.
Although scrupulously cleaned in Hong Kong, the bare steel surfaces were covered with the brown dust of oxidation and not yet ready to receive the sticky ammoniacal solution. Perched like black birds on the rickety bamboo framework and lit by the patchy illumination of bulb-clusters, the coolie women brushed loose all the rusty dust and swept it from the steel. Then they painted the entire interior of the two cavernous tanks with hot wax which when it dried became pure white, a pristine uncracked coating. Against this background their black flapping cotton pyjamas stood out, throwing surreal shadows, while their cackles echoed round the webs, frames and stringers.