To All Appearances a Lady

by Marilyn Bowering

  —

  Saigon Harbour spread out in inlets like the fingers of a hand. Along these lines ran barges, black and rusty, which carried loads of rice, coal, matting, and timber to the great ships that lay anchored, crowded together, in the deep water. If there was a plan to the movement, the loading and unloading, it was not evident, crisscrossed as it was by dozens of fishing boats and the little junks, with beet-coloured sails, that seemed to flourish within the network of commerce. The Kowloon junk joined this assortment, searching in and out among the steamers and clippers, with flags of every description—the black eagle, the white ensign, yellow crown, and dragon pennant—for the three-masted Thermopylae.

  At last that noble ship appeared, in the slanting light of evening, and with the whole scene overlaid with the fragrance of spice and rotting vegetation. The junk drew alongside. Fan and India, with their letters of accreditation from Jardine Matheson, were taken on board, ready to sail for the New World. Along with a cargo of grass mats and 1,350 tons of rice.

  The old Thermopylae, my boys,

  The old Thermopylae.

  We wish her luck and give three cheers,

  For the old Thermopylae!

  As the men of the Thermopylae Club in my city sing to this day. For she was the only full-rigged ship ever to call Victoria, British Columbia, her home port.

  They say that ship was alive. Indeed, she was christened with the death of a sailor, Peter Johnson, on her maiden voyage. He fell from the jib boom on the fifth day out, to the west of Portugal, and some say he sailed with her ever after. But she made record time on that first voyage, sixty-one days and eleven hours, pilot to pilot, from London to Melbourne.

  A ship built in Aberdeen in 1868, painted green above her copper plates, topped by teak bulwarks, and with a topgallant brass rail running her entire length; lower masts and yards painted white; upper masts and spars varnished; with gold leafing on her name and decorating the carving under her counter and on her bow.

  Her figurehead was King Leonidas, all white and facing forwards, with his helmet on his head, a shield on his left arm, and on his right a downward-pointing sword, which it was the apprentice’s job to sheath at sea. She was a ship that was said to “walk the waters,” sailing ninety-one days, pilot to pilot, in the tea trade, from Foochow to London, where she flew a gilded cock at the masthead, and the crew were fed on champagne for a week.

  A wonderful ship, a lucky ship with consistent speedy voyages and few accidents.

  But time is what matters in business, and with the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, which sailing ships could not efficiently use, the steamers began to take over. Still the clippers carried on, for the “steam kettles” required coal and frequent maintenance, but eventually the inevitable happened: the steamers monopolized the tea trade and Thermopylae began carrying wool.

  Yet the legends persisted: that a man could walk round her decks with a lighted candle while she sailed at seven knots, because she required so little wind to move her; that while sailing at thirteen knots, with her helm amidships and all sail set in steady quartering breezes, a small boy could steer her. “She went to windward like a witch,” they said, “and she rode out the worst sea like a duck.”

  But in 1890, Aberdeen White Star, having purchased a fleet of steamers, sold her for five thousand pounds to Redfords of Montreal for use in the Pacific rice trade.

  If a ship can feel shame, then she felt it. For after bringing her with a load of coal to Singapore, her captain auctioned every piece of movable gear on her. She was stripped, this beauty, this ship with the bas-relief crowing cock, stamped “Dum Viram Canam,” carved into her forward deckhouse.

  The captain was fired, and the mate, Wilson, given the job in his place, took the ship on to Saigon. Despite the fact that Wilson was a notorious drunkard. Regardless of the fact that my mother and Lam Fan had entrusted themselves to a long ocean voyage in his care.

  —

  Granite Bay. Where I pull the steps leading down from the wheelhouse aside, and worm my way into the cavity that houses the engine. Where my mate, Lam Fan, takes a powder, although strictly speaking all ship’s maintenance should be her—the mate’s—responsibility. Where a woodsman, or as close to one as a man can be in sight of a government float, wanders down to supervise. He insists on telling me what’s wrong: not just with the Rose but with the world. Moreover he stands, butt saluting the head, bracing his arms against the locker, repeating that I’m wasting my time. The engine can’t be fixed. I should give up on it and civilization. He also wants to read my palm.

  “It’s been read before,” I tell him. “It didn’t do me any good.” But I don’t say when that was, or where, or what happened after. I say nothing of the price a young girl paid, before we sailed from Freetown on the Silverbell in 1941, for my fear of going blind. Of the kind of man I was, with the world at war and believing we were losing; a man who didn’t like what the doctors told him about his tropical eye infection, not knowing the Old Man had taken steps to help, procuring a wonder drug called sulpha from the navy hospital, on my behalf; thinking that whatever I did it would never be found out. There was so little time left for the world. That is, thinking only of myself. For who was there to speak for her?

  The woodsman, called Joe Alexander, who is from Russia, he tells me, having walked overland from Siberia—a story I pretend to accept, out of indifference—stares at me as if he would read my thoughts. I am glad that my ghost, Lam Fan, who lets nothing go by unremarked, is absent. For here is a man who, surely, she would question; and how would I deal with a complication like that? He thinks he is better than everyone else because he has so little; yet he wants what I’ve got. He covets the blankets on the bunks, the supplies in the locker, the charts in the wheelhouse, the clothing, equipment, gear of the Rose. He knows that I know it.

  “I would know what to do with her,” he says with a lift of his jaw, indicating the Rose and meaning that I don’t. That I have no right to what I’ve worked for all my life.

  I give him a beer and ask him why he’s come out of the bush, away from the homestead he’s talked of, if he dislikes the world and the rest of us in it so much.

  “I’d go crazy if I didn’t,” he answers. “I get bushed. I come down and watch the steamer land two, three times, then go back home. That’s enough.” He looks around for cigarettes. I shake my head no. Then he reaches into his pocket and brings out a coin, a Chinese coin made of bronze with a hole in the middle of it.

  “Some woman gave it to me once,” he says. “You take it. For luck. It ain’t brought me none that I can think of.”

  And with that he’s gone, lifted himself up into the wheelhouse sans steps, and out the sliding door. He pads around on the deck for ten minutes, though; but I resist going up to see what he’s taken in exchange for his coin.

  It makes me think of Captain Jenkins of the Thermopylae. Who auctioned that ship down to the bare bones so that no one else could have her. For only Thermopylae at her best was Thermopylae. Anything less was a different ship. Almost as if he knew what would happen: her masts shortened, cut down to a barque; then loading lumber; finally used as a coal hulk near Lisbon, in Portugal. As if the future was in the air for all to see—if you had the courage to look. As if the Thermopylae’s life, her real life, her dignity, was for him alone to dispose of.

  Ah, well. A ship has her own kind of being, with or without men, and Thermopylae did go on, into a new frame of reference, a lesser one, perhaps, like the Rose here, who has seen better times; and like some others of us.

  —

  Thermopylae left Saigon on April twenty-sixth, sailing north through the South China Sea, past Hong Kong and out through the Luzon Strait into the Pacific Ocean. The irony of that return, past the point at which they had started out, was not lost on the women. But the earth is a circle. It brings us back to where we began, at some time or other. Even so…

  “Even so,” says Fan, who has appeared on deck, checking the manifest of the R
ose’s movable gear—as she should, it is her job—”we were not happy about it.”

  No, certainly not. But conditions onboard the clipper ship were better than on the junk.

  The captain had a well-appointed suite aft, to which the ladies were invited to dine, with a steward waiting at table. The captain’s bathroom and water closet, off his saloon and chart room, were also made available to the women. They slept in a cabin vacated by the third mate and were mothers to the apprentice boys in the midship house. The men were housed in the fo’c’sle—if there was grumbling as to the women’s presence, it was kept quiet. And for the first few days, at least, neither captain nor crew was drunk.

  Sixty-one days to cross the North Pacific. It shouldn’t have taken much more than forty—but they met nothing but fierce gales, varied with dead calms, from the start. A trip like most others: they started out, then they arrived.

  —

  Lam Fan squints at me over the manifest. She puts it down on the fir planking of the deck. The stranger has left footprints from the wheelhouse door to the well at the stern. Everything has been touched, but nothing, as far as I can tell, has been taken. I finger the Chinese coin in my pocket, unconvinced that somehow I won’t be made to pay for it.

  Fan looks at the pieces of the Rose’s engine that lie strewn over the wharf. She seems to be puzzled.

  “It’s all right,” I say, “I know how it goes back together.”

  “No, Robert Lam,” says Fan. “That is not what bothers me, it is what you said.”

  I have to think for a moment before I remember. “About the Thermopylae and your voyage on her?”

  She nods. “All journeys are different, Robert Lam. Surely you know that. How else could you be a pilot?”

  “I disagree,” I say, holding a pocked bearing up to the sunlight. “The sea is the sea, a boat is a boat, and there are only so many things that can happen.”

  Fan shakes her head sorrowfully. “Poor, Robert Lam,” she says, “to have travelled so much and seen so little.”

  Which annoys me, of course. “What do you know about it? Who are you to judge?”

  “I only know what you tell me,” she says, and goes back to looking puzzled.

  —

  And so, a voyage that was not like any other. Beating up the South China Sea in the teeth of a gale, making slow headway at the tail of the northeast monsoon. But once through the straits, the wind died away. India stood by the hour on the poop deck watching the crew turning braces and halyards end for end, drawing and knotting yarns, making and trimming sail. She listened to the talk in the saloon where the mate or second joined the two women, when not on watch, for their meals. Lam Fan, who was taken to be India’s servant, sat quietly, not at all displeased to be left alone, for she had decided to give up opium, and tins, pipe, lamp, and spoon had been consigned to the deep off Hong Kong.

  Their route lay north towards Yokohama, picking up the Kuro Shio, then east, at about forty-two degrees north to catch the North Pacific current, crossing the meridian of one hundred fifty degrees west in about forty-four degrees north. It was a journey of some seven thousand miles, although ships had been known to cover seventeen thousand on a particularly bad crossing.

  At midnight the larboard watch was called and the starboard watch ordered below. The wind began to increase until it blew a strong gale, obliging them to close reef the topsails. No one slept that night, nor for the next three, what with the noise of the wind and breaking water and their fear of foundering.

  Lam Fan snorts. “I was not afraid,” she says from her perch on the rail from which she is watching me.

  “You were a better man than me, then, Fan,” I tell her. I have given up on the engine and hired a local man to fix it. There was nothing else to do, since I could not buy the parts I wanted. This man, however, has four or five similar engines in his basement. I am letting my feet dangle over the dockside, keeping watch on some children further down the wharf, fishing for minnows.

  “No,” I reiterate. “Not once did I go to sea without fear.”

  “Why go then?” asks Fan with straightforward logic.

  I pause to consider my answer. “I never knew what I wanted to do, so I kept on searching. Going to sea is one way of looking.”

  Fan blows through her lips dismissively. “You did what you wanted to, and that’s that.”

  “Like you did?”

  “Like anybody.”

  “You know what they say about sailing in ships, Fan. It’s just like being in prison, but with the added chance of being drowned.”

  “Who said that?”

  “I read it in a book one day, waiting for the tide to turn.”

  “You read too much, Robert Lam. You should be a man of action, like your…” Her voice trails off.

  “Like who, Fan? Like my father? Well, who was he, then?” I think she is going to turn away from the question as she has before, but this time is different. I am given an answer of a sort.

  “I was going to say your mother,” she says. “Your father was a Chinese man. His name will mean nothing to you now. And anyway, I am telling you.”

  “Telling me?”

  “I am telling you about him every day.”

  —

  A journey like no other, with variations of wind and calm, fear and peacefulness. A sailor comes down with smallpox, the telltale blisters appearing on the bottoms of his feet, and India, in the absence of a ship’s doctor, is asked to lance his soles. She does so, with Fan swabbing the pus as she cuts. It is a job that has to be done. And besides, half the officers and crew are drunk.

  “A.B. was this day beastly drunk, and incapable of doing any work…. All hands were this day called aft, and in the presence of the steward, each man took lime juice…A.B. has fits, and I am feeding him the medicine prescribed.”

  So ran my mother’s diary.

  On May thirteenth a typhoon was encountered. The glass began to drop alarmingly, and the captain readied the ship for a storm. In the late afternoon, dense black clouds appeared in the southeast quarter, driving furiously to the northwest. All the light sails were furled, and the yards braced so as to take the wind on the starboard tack. Spray clouded up from the surface of the ocean, and the wind and rain struck with such violence that the gunwhale lay in the water. Quickly the mizzen topsail was furled, and the lee-main-topsail braces were slackened; the helm was put to starboard, and the ship ran before the wind.

  For several days neither sun, moon, nor stars were seen, and the ship stayed under close-reefed sails, with a heavy sea running.

  Just as they thought the worst had passed, another black wind arrived, driving from eastward. Once more all but the fore topsail was furled, and it was close-reefed. The ship ran before the wind again, and all that had not been properly secured on deck washed overboard.

  With night the scene worsened. There were thunder and lightning, seas breaking on either beam, the stem lifted by the sea, then the head plunging into the vortex below, tossed like a twig upon that ocean. Even the most experienced seamen feared for their lives when the sea stove in the stem boat and also took both swinging booms. But towards daylight the gale moderated, and within twenty-four hours the wind fell away to almost nothing.

  “It plays with you, Fan,” I say. (The local mechanic has pronounced on the engine. The Rose will be herself again, he says, by morning.) “Just when you know you’re going down, when you’ve made your peace with yourself and all creation and are ready to die, the storm abates. And so the whole thing starts over. Once more you are full of hope, looking ahead. But the storm that’s going to finish you off is only biding its time. It is still out there somewhere. And so you have a false sense of comfort.”

  “False, Robert Lam? Why false? Is it comfort or isn’t it?” She opens her mouth, and I’m sure she’s about to lecture me.

  “It’s all false, Fan,” I say before she can start. “War and peace, storm and calm. Even the atom bomb. It’s no more than another shift of weather
.”

  —

  They had been at sea for more than a month, and now lay drifting. To cheer the crew the cook made lobscouse—salt beef with potatoes cut up with broken biscuit and some fat, mixed together with fresh water and boiled, and considered a treat in the circumstances. The crew were set to duties such as making new sails, laying rope, and stripping and overhauling the ship’s rigging; that is, every yard and mast, except the lower masts, were sent down. The yards were stripped, all the rigging was taken off the mast heads, then put on a stretch. The service and parcelling were stripped, the rigging tarred, service and parcelling were heaved on afresh, then the rigging clapped on again. Captain Wilson, wanting to make a good impression when they arrived in port, relied on calm. Otherwise, nothing transpired of importance to interrupt the monotony for days, and Fan says she would have forgotten all about this part of the voyage if it hadn’t been for a singular event—a battle among a thresher shark, a whale, and a swordfish.

  They heard a noise like a cannon going off, then about two hundred yards from the ship they saw the combatants. The shark, raising his whole length nearly out of the water, fell with crushing force on the back of the whale. Again and again the shark leapt and fell as the whale, throwing its flukes high in the air, dove, only to reappear at the surface to be again attacked. For while the shark was striking the whale on the surface, a swordfish was harrying it from below. The battle lasted only a short time, then the whale went down and was seen no more.

  And since Nature is full of correspondences, even as the sailors had predicted, with the end of the battle, the wind rose.

  The night was terrifying. The gale had increased almost to hurricane, with a short, high cross sea breaking in almost every direction. But the ship, a gallant ship, a wet ship, behaved beautifully.

  Although all on board, including Lam Fan, who had succeeded in her struggle with opium, were looking forward to the journey’s end.