by Voyage East- A stirring tale of the last great days of the Merchant Navy (retail) (epub)
Latex in bulk had adhesive qualities and after discharge its residue could only be removed by the use of the wax as a barrier agent. The preparation of the deep tanks took two days, and before we loaded had to be approved by a surveyor, a rotund Englishman who searched for cracks or forgotten corners. Upon his good opinion depended the wages of these unfortunate old women, who stood anxiously silent while the tuan inspected their handiwork. Pronouncing himself satisfied, the orang puteh retired to the hospitality of the Mate’s cabin. The coolie women collected tokens from the foreman, signifying their completion of the work, and made their clucking way ashore. Within the hour a heavy hose was sloshing the viscid, milk-white latex into the tanks. Over four hundred tons were pumped aboard, half for Liverpool, half for Hamburg.
The preparations for the five hundred tons of palm oil which we expected were different. For several days prior to our arrival at Singapore, as Antigone’s holds had filled with the deadweight of Borneo timber and the need to keep sea-water ballast in her diminished, the engineers had been below fitting steam coils to the emptied deep-tanks in Number Three. These steel coils were fitted with scores of flanges whose integrity had to be tested for leaks before oil could be loaded. Steam from the ship’s hot-water system was generated by the Cochrane ‘donkey’ boiler in the engine room and pumped through these pipes, to maintain palm or coconut oil in a liquid state as we passed to colder northern climes. Without this heat the stuff went solid, could not be handled, and had to be shovelled out, a virtually worthless mass.
It was the carriage of such commodities that demonstrated the versatility of ships such as Antigone. Like the derricks that were hoisting aboard a few tons of tin and rubber, some bags of gum arabic and cases of personal effects, they made her a maid for all tasks. But they took labour, man- and woman-power much disliked by hard-headed ship-owners, and it was this very versatility that, among other things, ultimately condemned her class to obsolescence. As we left Singapore through the Western Roads, a Dutch vessel of the Rotterdam Lloyd Line lay at anchor. On her long foredeck were half-a-dozen grey aluminium boxes at which China Dick stared with unconcealed curiosity.
‘What the devil are they?’ he asked the Pilot.
‘They’re containers, Captain,’ the Pilot replied, and no one on the bridge heard the sentence of death pronounced upon us.
* * *
After the mad scramble of the Borneo coast and the tedious heat of Singapore, a non-stop passage north-west through the Malacca Strait and across the Bay of Bengal was as good as a holiday. We slipped easily into the old routine and became noddingly acquainted with our passengers. They too were delighted not to be delayed by stops at Port Swettenham and Penang. We had also shipped on board livestock, in the form of a tapir destined for the London Zoo, with which had come a vast bundle of fig-leaves for provender. The long-snouted beast stood unhappily in a large crate on the centre-castle deck, and was fed daily by the Midshipmen. They also had another creature to feed, a boxer kennelled on the boat-deck, the responsibility of the Junior Midshipman. Just acquiring a beard, he regarded this duty as beneath his dignity until he discovered that the daughter of the Foreign Office official who was travelling with her family, had a great liking for dogs, particularly boxers. Exercising the thing became a regularly-attended routine around the promenade deck, at which China Dick scowled disapprovingly until the young lady smiled at him, and we saw something of that avuncularity he had briefly revealed on the quay at Jesselton.
We had left Melampus and Clytoneus at Singapore, along with the Glenfalloch, just preparing to sail direct to London at the same time as the rival Benloyal, a kind of token, latter-day tea-race. In the Malacca Strait we passed Aeneas on her way out to Singapore from the Sumatran port of Belawan, for our course hugged the Sumatran shore, finally departing from it off Achin Head and Pulo Weh. We made good headway at our loaded draft, and Mike grinned again as he made up his abstract log with its carefully calculated speeds and distances and fuel consumption rates. Only Sparks remained depressed by our homeward track; and perhaps the irresponsible Embleton, awoken after the loss of his allies to a belated realisation of his uncertain future. By a stroke of good fortune the Purser had discovered that our two distressed British seamen were under contract to British Tankers and, seeing two BP tankers at Pulo Bukum, had persuaded the agents to arrange to transfer them where they could be legitimately employed. They left protesting, but their departure undoubtedly helped raise the spirits of the ship’s company generally.
About the decks the Bosun chivvied the Crowd into the final homeward painting programme, and Antigone began to assume the appearance of an Argosy, stuffed with oriental riches and smart as a sultan’s yacht. The mood of her seamen became cheerily irreverent. Snatches of song and whistling were heard, and a more sober diligence than had been evident ‘on the coast’ began to appear. To borrow again from Conrad, we had fallen once more under the thrall of ‘the enticing, dis-enchanting and enslaving life at sea.’
The North-East Monsoon was weakening and the Bay of Bengal lay under skies of almost unclouded perfection. Only a low swell disturbed us, though that is hardly the word, for the gentle motion of the ship had more of a lulling rock than a tiresome roll to it. Bound westward, we were retarding our clocks at midnight, lengthening the ship’s day and conferring upon it a mood of lingering festivity.
Four days from Singapore the low coast of Ceylon rose blue over the horizon and we passed the Narrows to anchor in the landlocked splendour of Trincomalee harbour. Here we had come to fill Antigone’s remaining capacity with chests of tea, Broken Orange Pekoe Fannings as the initials on the chests declared, for London, Bremen, Hamburg…
‘But most for bloody Liverpool,’ grumbled the Mate, ‘to oil the idle wheels of British industry.’
It was a slow process, or so it seemed, for we were in a hurry to be gone, the port lay under curfew, prompted by racial violence between Tamils and Singalese. These riots were the opening gambits of what has since become a bloody civil war, and had already disrupted the port as much as the Christmas cyclone that had uprooted half its coconut palms. To pass the time Trincomalee offered us a score of picnic spots, numerous bays each fringed with palms and scrubby jungle, some inhabited by little settlements of fisherfolk, warm friendly people willing to shin up a palm and trade fresh coconuts for a few cans of Coca-Cola or a packet of cigarettes. From the beaches we would wander into the jungle amid the giant ant-hills and the uprooted trees. Through this wilderness wove overgrown tarmacadam roads, leading nowhere except to the brick ruins of the wartime barracks, the wrennery and the Kinema, Ozymandian relics of past British glory, when Trincomalee had been the base of the Far East fleet, following the fall of Singapore. The place was full of ghosts; rusting guns rotted in concrete emplacements and the roofless barrack blocks, inhabited now by bats and gibbons, still had patches of extempore decoration on their poorly plastered walls. It was odd to read the graffiti of one’s parents’ generation, but comforting to find frustrated desire plagued them as much as it did us. Amid the palms and the dense undergrowth, snakes and the occasional elephant wandered, though our own observations were confined to hooded crows, the gibbons and bats, and the ubiquitous chil kites that reminded one of Kipling’s Jungle Books, for all that this was not India.
Tea was a clean cargo, well marked and rarely damaged. The occasional stove chest was sealed by carpenters, dark skinned Tamils who wielded saw, hammer and nails upon plywood patches which they brought aboard for the purpose. The Tamils wore shirts and sarongs, the latter hitched up and rolled in their groin to form marsupial pouches in which they kept the betel leaves, areca nuts and lime which they chewed incessantly. The nut was rolled in a leaf accompanied by a smear of lime and then tucked into a cheek by a horny finger. Betel chewing resulted in our decks becoming spattered with red expectorant, and any remonstration was met with beams of simulated incomprehension. This constant hawking and gobbing made one long for the open sea.
At last, de
spite the curfew and the work-to-rule and the short-fall of tea chests arriving alongside in the lighters, we finished cargo, actually stuffing the last chests between the hatch-beams. As the hatch-boards went on and the tarpaulins were spread, our own carpenter hovered ready to drive home the wedges. The Tamils drifted away to their waiting launches and the last tally-clerk left the tiny office provided for him in a swirl of litter. The Mate’s whistle blew the signal for departure, the Crowd lowered the derricks for the last time and, driving home the final wedge, Chippy trotted forward to stand-by the windlass. The empty lighters were cast off and drifted away until the fussy little tugs caught hold of them and then only the pilot launch was left bobbing alongside us. From the forecastle now came the steady clunk-clunk of cable links coming home over the windlass gypsy-whelps.
At last the forecastle bell ring, the anchor was a weigh.
‘Half ahead!’
‘Half ahead, sir!’
‘Hard a-port!’
‘Hard a-port, sir… wheel’s hard a-port…’
We swung for the entrance, the water churning white and marbled green under Antigone’s stern, and headed out to sea.
Next morning, off Batticaloa, in a sea as smooth as the proverbial mill pond, we ran amongst a school of whales. All about us their grey backs eased slowly out of the water as they spouted, perhaps twenty of them, occupying an area some two or three miles square. Close to us, about half a mile to starboard one of them fluked, raising his great tail and sliding down into the depths of the ocean. Suddenly they all slid from sight, denizens of another world, and we were left under the blue sky, on the smooth expanse of the limitless sea.
We swung west off Dondra Head and off Minicoy picked up our outward track, covering old ground in our romp home. In our watches below we completed the master cargo-plan, filling in the final details of our most recent lading. It was then photographed several times and half-a-dozen copies were thrust into the half-deck with a packet of cheap coloured pencils.
‘Blue for Liverpool, red for London, brown for Glasgow, yellow for Hamburg and the transhipment stuff for Oslo and Copenhagen, orange for Rotterdam and green for Dublin. Don’t get it wrong or the Mate’ll have your balls for a neck-tie.’
‘No sir.’
‘It’s like being back at school.’
‘It’s worse. Now get on with it because it’s to go air-mail from Aden.’
‘I wish I could…’
‘Stop trying to be clever and get cracking.’
‘But I was going to take the dog for a walk.’
‘Get your lady-friend to do that.’
As I left them I noticed the Senior Midshipman reach out for the green pencil. There were only two stows for Dublin on the ship. The Junior Midshipman was left with the blue and red.
West of the Maldives there was no wind at all, so that only the passage of the ship disturbed the air and the night was filled with the seething wash of the wake and the rumble of Willie Buchan’s engines. As I made my night rounds the Chinese were back at their mahjong tables, free of the intrusions of guitars and drunken fan kwei. They were not homeward bound, they were back to normal, gambling, laughing, smoking: men resigned to their fate, surviving in an over-crowded world. I wondered how long we could hold on to our ridiculous expectations, before we too had to face such realities. The thought depressed me. I came off the after well-deck and walked forward past the seamen’s accommodation. A line of them were sitting under the stars, sharing a case of beer on Number Four hatch.
‘What-ho, Four-O,’ sang out a wit, aping my southern accent. I recognised Embleton’s voice.
I nodded. ‘Evening.’
‘D’you wanna beer, Fourth?’
I shook my head at Wakelin’s offer. ‘No, thanks.’
‘He won’t drink wid us,’ said Embleton contemptuously.
‘I wouldn’t drink wid you’n less I fuckin’ had to,’ put in someone else.
‘You don’t fuckin’ have to.’
‘Yes I do; it’s your fuckin’ beer.’
Laughter drowned Embleton’s snarled reply. It was clear he was far from popular.
‘What you gonna do when you get home, Fourth?’ asked Wakelin in the gloaming.
‘Get fixed up wid some judy?’ the Bosun’s Mate emerged out of the gloom. ‘D’you know what I’m gonna do?’
‘What’s that?’
‘Get fixed up wid a rich nymphomaniac widow wid a pub.’
‘Don’t you think about anything except sex and booze?’
‘Dat’s not thinkin’ about sex and booze; dat’s thinkin’ about money!’
‘Yeah, dey’re all rich nymphomaniac widows in bloody Bootle…’
Two evenings later we observed the most spectacular sunset of the voyage. Just after the disappearance of a blazing red sun, the sky was a brilliant vermilion before which a handful of fleecy cumulus was silhouetted as black as jet. Against this spectacular field Venus blazed as an evening star while, climbing towards the zenith, the sky turned almost green before shading to the purple of the tropic night astern. Smooth as glass, the sea ahead to the horizon was the colour of pewter. The brilliance of the redness was due to dust rising over Africa ahead of us; the strange, preternatural calm a brief hiatus between monsoons.
The Mate emerged from the chart-room and leaned on the rail beside me. We stared in profound silence as the tranquil night engulfed us.
* * *
‘Djibouti!’ Mike ran his hand through his hair in a wild gesture of disbelief. ‘Djibouti?’
‘Yes,’ said the Mate quietly, taking the draught forms from me as we completed connecting up the bunkering pipes, under the burning slopes of Aden’s volcano.
‘What the bloody hell for?’
‘Steers.’
‘Oh bollocks!’
‘No, bullocks… bullocks for Suez, two hundred head of ’em.’
‘Shit!’
‘There’ll be plenty of that too.’ The Mate was laughing at Mike’s petulant anger, for the detour was minimal. Mike withdrew in pique while the Mate perused the arrival draught figure and compared it with the theoretical value he had worked out. He nodded his satisfaction, then looked up at me.
‘You have a little time left to decide, Laddie, but the Second Mate will have to choose soon.’
‘Choose, sir?’ I frowned by incomprehension.
‘Aye, between the sea-life and something else.’
I went out on deck. Below, on the after well-deck, the Chinese, the seamen and the Midshipmen were haggling with the bumboatmen.
‘Hey, Johnnie, I make you special price…’
The heat was unbearable. I sagged under its intensity and it seemed the voices floated up to me as in a dream, ‘How much? No good… twenty dollar last price…’
There was a lot of mail for us at Aden, some forwarded from the Straits ports we had missed out. Reading mine, I thought of the Mate’s caveat.
‘You got some mail.’ Mike stood in my cabin doorway, his tone accusatory.
‘Yes.’
‘From Penang?’
‘Er, yes, and one from Swettenham.’
‘Christ!’ Again he swept his hand through his hair, then turned and left me. It was obvious he had received no mail himself. For a second I stared after him; then I resumed reading my own letters.
Nor was Djibouti any better in the matter of heat. On the opposite coast of the Gulf of Aden, its air was African rather than Arabian. The bullocks were driven down onto the white and dusty quay by thin Somali herdsmen wrapped in woven blankets and bearing long wands with which they prodded their lowing charges.
‘Pardon, M’sieur. Je Suis le…’
I stared, forgetting, despite the tricolours flying prominently from several buildings as well as from our own foremasthead, that this was a French colony. Somehow the impeccable French, issuing from the small brown face with its intelligent eyes, threw me. I tried to muster my meagre stock of schoolboy French.
‘Oh, er, Oui, bienvenu…’
‘What does he want?’ I looked up. Above me, leaning over the promenade deck rail, the Junior Midshipman’s lady friend stared down at me.
‘I’m not sure. He’s speaking French.’
She suppressed a look of withering scorn.
‘I know that,’ and ignoring me she launched into a dialogue with the Somali that left me foolishly nonplussed. On the quay, wearing epaulettes and a kepi, a French immigration officer grinned up at me.
‘Bravo, M’mselle,’ he applauded as she explained to me:
‘He is coming to Suez with the cattle. He wishes permission to come aboard.’
‘Thank you, I suspect you will be useful as an interpreter…’
But she had jumped to that conclusion minutes earlier and I felt utterly stupid as I conducted the tall, thin Somali to the Mate’s cabin. As I made my retreat from this confrontation I bumped into Sparks.
‘You got good news at Aden, then?’
‘How d’you know?’ He looked sharp, pinched, suspicious. The experience of attending a clinic in Singapore had not eased his neurotic anxiety; if anything, it had made it more acute.
‘Well,’ I shrugged, ‘I suppose if the news had been bad you’d have…’ I trailed off – as though remaining silent about the awful options would avoid any sense of guilt if he should attempt suicide. I did not want to put ideas into his head, though from the haggard look of him they had occupied his mind for weeks now.
‘They advise me to have another blood test in a couple of months,’ he whispered.
‘Oh, that’s just a precaution… you’re all right. You want to put it behind you; chalk it up to experience. You’ll be seeing your girlfriend soon.’