by Gavin Young
Slow Boats Home
GAVIN YOUNG
This book is for Leueen MacGrath
Keep true to the dreams of thy youth.
Herman Melville:
Motto found glued to his
writing-box after his death
It’s like a book, I think, this bloomin’ world,
Which you can read and care for just so long,
But presently you feel that you will die
Unless you get the page you’re readin’ done,
And turn another – likely not as good;
But what you’re after is to turn ’em all.
Rudyard Kipling:
‘Sestina of the Tramp-Royal’
I am not yet born; O hear me,
Let not the man who is beast or who thinks he is God come near me.
Louis MacNeice:
‘Prayer before Birth’
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraphs
Maps
Acknowledgements
Prelude
Part One: A Dream of China Seas
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Part Two: Isles of Illusion
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-one
Twenty-two
Twenty-three
Twenty-four
Twenty-five
Twenty-six
Twenty-seven
Twenty-eight
Twenty-nine
Thirty
Part Three: Uttermost Part of the Earth
Thirty-one
Thirty-two
Thirty-three
Part Four: Rolling Home From Rio
Thirty-four
Thirty-five
Thirty-six
Thirty-seven
Thirty-eight
Landfall
Thirty-nine
Copyright
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
As in the case of my earlier ship-hopping adventure, described in Slow Boats to China, I owe a great deal to many people, not all of whom appear in the book itself. I want to thank Mr Shi Zhi Wei and the China International Travel Service for allowing me to wander so freely about the backwaters of Shanghai. John Swire and his employees in the offices of the China Navigation Company in Hong Kong once again found space for me, this time on two of their ships. On my way across the South Pacific, Alan Grey of ‘Aggie Grey’s’ in Apia, Western Samoa, had the humanity to open the doors of his famous hotel to Tolu’s humble family; Michael Tinne and Tim Wilson introduced me to the strange world of the Melanesian copra plantations; and I shall never think of the daunting tract of ocean between Tahiti and Peru without offering up silent thanks to Raphael Tixier and Jim Hostetler of Papeete, and to Captain Vitaly Segal, master of the Soviet vessel Alexander Pushkin. I owe my sojourn on Alexander Selkirk’s island of exile to Tony Westcott, that fine yachtsman of Valparaiso. And, without any question whatsoever, I should never have fulfilled one of my greatest ambitions – to spend days and nights on Cape Horn island – without the help and sympathy of Señor Don Hernan Cubillos of Santiago. I had invaluable advice from that considerable traveller, writer and diplomat, John Ure; from Brian Shaw of Furness Withy; and from Sir Ronald Swayne, formerly of Overseas Containers Ltd. The indefatigable Andrew Bell, founder of Curnow Shipping (‘the greatest little shipping company in the West’, I call it) saw me safely to St Helena, up the long South Atlantic seaways, and home.
My indispensable sea anchor in London, Gritta Weil, kept up my spirits in times of delay and frustration; the hard work she contributed to the production of this book is beyond appraisal. The same goes for much forthright advice from my friend Gill Gibbins; and for the unending encouragement of Roddy Bloomfield, my editor at Hutchinson.
Prelude
The SS Shanghai is in harbour again. I spotted her as I drove past the Star Ferry and recognized her immediately, though it is more than a year since I saw her here last. Then I had been sitting in this very room and she had been waiting to start me off from Hong Kong on the second stage of a ship-hopping adventure round the world. The adventure is over now. It is all in my head. I have come back here to write it down.
The second stage of that adventure, like the first, had its roots in my boyhood yearning to Run Away to Sea. It was a yearning born, as I have written elsewhere, during days spent lying on clifftops watching Atlantic breakers pound the rock-bound bays of North Cornwall’s Wreckers’ Coast, and dreaming – awake or asleep – of tall ships and thrilling places at the end of the horizon. The attic of my grandmother’s ugly old house on Ocean View Road was full of dusty books by authors who had been my father’s favourites when he was a boy – R. M. Ballantyne, Captain Marryat, Robert Louis Stevenson, and a dozen others. From the attic’s high round window I could see a green, thrusting headland – it bore the Stevensonian name of Compass Point – that resembled the prow of a great ship riding up into a sky full of clouds like the billowing crests of giant waves; and beyond the headland the hypnotic glitter of the ocean itself, the mysterious, irresistible highway to Robinson Crusoe’s cave … cannibal islands … the South Seas … the remote, forested domain of the bird of paradise. Many years later, when the boy who had lain dreaming on those clifftops had long since ceased to be a boy, the opportunity came. I had finished a book about the Marsh Arabs of Iraq and was free. ‘Now, I shall go,’ I said to myself. ‘If I don’t go now, I never shall.’
There was no question of weeks on a cruise ship. I would take a series of ships at random – big ships, small ones, tankers, dhows, junks, whatever I could find – to take me wherever they happened to go. Well, not quite wherever – eastward, for choice. That was my decision, but decision was not enough. Was this kind of ship-hopping actually possible in these days of universal air travel and group tours?
The first London travel agent I approached to see if such a thing could be arranged by passenger ship threw up his arms and said, ‘No can do,’ quite snappishly, and even the Thomas Cook’s men, though friendly, were no help. As I had suspected, the few passenger vessels that have escaped the breakers’ yards are usually cruise ships carrying groups. You can control a group. Individuals are unpredictable, and so too much trouble. All the same, I managed to complete the first stage of what I came to think of as my private game of Traveller’s Roulette, although it was eight months after leaving Piraeus, not the three or four I had imagined, before I found my twenty-third vessel that sailed me up the Pearl River to Canton for my last landfall.
The journey that completed my circle of the globe – the one I am about to describe – took even longer: exactly a year. The tangible relics of it that lie about me now would baffle the most experienced beachcomber were they all to be washed ashore in one place. A goose wing from the Falkland Islands; a whale-tooth dagger with ‘Beagle Channel’ inked on it; cowrie shell necklaces from Apia and a Bible in Samoan; a stuffed woodcock from a back alley in Hong Kong; an illustrated scroll from Shanghai; a set of Russian dolls; two ceramic vases from a ship’s captain on Robinson Crusoe Island. The torn flag in the frame hanging on the wall flew on Cape Horn Island, the southernmost tip of the earth; it is signed by eight Chilean marines and a dog called Tony. The lump of obsidian like black glass comes from Ascension Island; the Gospel according to St Matthew is written in the pidgin language of the Solomon Islanders…. Enough to jog my memory of a
good many places and people in the unlikely event of my forgetting. And then there are thirty-six notebooks that surround me now; big or pocket-sized, lined or unlined, somehow they managed to avoid what I always feared – obliteration by waves or rain squalls or the loss overboard of the bag in which I carried them.
The room I am in now is the one I set out from just over a year ago to join the Shanghai. It is a large room on the fourth floor of the Luk Kwok Hotel in Hong Kong, and I am fond of it. It is not in the least glamorous, but it is friendly and the hotel knows nothing of race or class; rather like the Shanghai herself. A homely old thing, ex-P & O, and before that Belgian, she used to transport Flemish colonial officials and their wives from Antwerp to the Belgian Congo, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. What a different world she has found here on the China coast.
The sun is shining, the harbour gleams and is full of life; a freighter carrying containers slides in from the eastern approach, bright as a freshly painted toy, and the Kowloon ferries move briskly back and forth. The sunshine makes the angular outlines of Kowloon softer and white, and seems to have brought the background of green hills closer. Below me, sunlight washes over the footbridge that spans Gloucester Road, on which a bow-legged old Chinese in baggy trousers is shuffling along carrying a tiny songbird in a cage. A boy overtakes him, running beside a small, happy dog with a curly tail; a plump little dog, the kind some Chinese like to eat – but these two are friends. The dog smiles up at the boy, and he, smiling back, flicks the dog’s tail affectionately with the lead.
I had made up my mind early on that Hong Kong would be my starting point. It was the obvious place to complete my circling of the globe: Europe – China – Europe again, this second journey would take me across the Pacific, round the Horn, and the length of the Atlantic from the Falklands to England. But first, I wanted to take ships up the coast of China, if possible all the way to Dairen (Port Arthur in the days when the tsars of Russia owned it) at the head of the Yellow Sea. Hangchow was a port I particularly wanted to visit on the way. As a very small boy I discovered the name Hangchow one day in a heavy old atlas, full of must and weevils, that I dug out from the back of a cupboard in my grandfather’s farmhouse in South Wales. The name was appealing in itself but there was more to it than that for me. It happened that my grandfather owned a large chow dog, a laughing, black-tongued specimen called Cheeko, with a curving fluffy tail and a most regrettable impulse to chase sheep. That impulse confined Cheeko to the neighbourhood of the house – he had to be restrained – and, thrown together thus, we became close friends. Childish illogic told me that Hangchow must be a chow’s family home, and I made a vow to Cheeko as I gazed at that exciting name among the fly specks on the map of Cathay. One arm round his neck, I pressed my forefinger onto that big yellow patch and, with the force of every determined nerve in my body, I swore: I shall go there when I grow up!
All these years later I might reach Hangchow at last – but what then? Japan? Korea? First things first – although everyone seemed to be going to China these days I had no idea if the Chinese Government in Peking would permit a single traveller from the West to leapfrog between Chinese ports on Chinese vessels, leave alone from a Chinese port to a foreign country. Someone who knows China and me said, ‘Don’t go to the Chinese Embassy in London. Write direct to something called the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries. It might do some good.’ I still don’t know if he was right or wrong; in any case, I wrote to the president of that organization asking permission to visit the ports of Xamen, Fuzhou, Shanghai, Quingdao and Dairen, on my way to Japan. Then I prepared for the long wait for a reply. A reply that never came. Instead, after two weeks – a remarkably short time, I thought – a friendly letter arrived from an Englishman, Mr David Crook, working in the Foreign Language Institute in Peking. Somehow he had seen my letter, and he advised me that the China International Travel Service might be a more useful organization for me than the Friendship Association, which ‘is rather more politically inclined’. Accordingly, he had passed my letter on. ‘I think that’s about the best I can do,’ he wrote. ‘Good luck.’
I could do nothing without Peking’s permission – and a visa. But it was pointless to write more letters from London or to wait for any. In any case, I was impatient to get away.
In the preceding months, there had been sudden deaths in my family, and the swift, successive shocks had thrown me into what now seems to have been an absurdly selfish sense of desertion. Unconsciously you trust those you love to last you out, and when one morning they are as lifeless as the black print in an obituary column, you feel betrayed. That, at least, was my experience. I happened to be reading Graham Greene’s Travels With My Aunt, and I felt deep sympathy for poor Henry Pulling, the retired bank manager, as he coped with the disposal of all the trappings of his newly dead mother, the furniture and unwanted pictures, the unfashionable underclothes of an old lady, the half-empty pots of old-fashioned creams – and the dragging business with undertakers, estate agents, tax inspectors, solicitors…. I had had the same coping to do.
Eager to escape the Laocoön’s coils of Lincoln’s Inn Fields – and the circumjacence of death – I gave urgent thought to my departure for Hong Kong. I decided to visit in person the China Travel Service people there. Perhaps I could bury my black dog mood in their branch in Kowloon.
I lost no more time. I dragged my Haliburton metal suitcase from a cupboard and looked at it with affection. It was dented and scarred by months of rude contact with Arab, Indian, Malaysian and Filipino jetties, and ships’ decks from Piraeus to the Pearl River, but sea water had not rusted the tumblers of its combination lock as I had once feared it would. If it had, I would have had to borrow an electronic blowtorch (if there was such a thing) to open it. My old zipbag was still good for several voyages by the look of it and I fondly dusted that off, too. It seemed to wear its oil stains, the red smears of Borneo tanbark and the old curling labels like the medals old soldiers are given for long service and good conduct. The only other piece of luggage I needed was an overnight bag to hold my Pentax, films, binoculars and the essential Polaroid camera – as useful for breaking the social ice in remote places as beads and mirrors were to the first Europeans.
Then I bought a one-way ticket to Hong Kong, eagerly signed a number of letters giving my solicitors power of attorney over a number of (to me) utterly mysterious affairs, and raced off to catch the Cathay Pacific flight from Gatwick.
January 1982 was an ill-tempered month in which to be starting out again. There was no midwinter sun in Hong Kong. A cold smog accompanied my taxi from Kai Tak airport to the Luk Kwok. The windows of my room looked out onto the harbour, as they do now, but when I put my nose to the glass I found that the view, one of the most dramatic of the world’s harbour views, had shrunk to practically nothing. All colour had drained away. A ferry or two crawled as though drugged across water the colour of dulled metal; a junk with sails like soiled brown paper barely moved at all, and through my binoculars I could see her crew, in baggy blue smocks, squatting under an awning on her deck, listlessly playing cards and smoking. Not far from her the white, blue and red squares of a Panamanian flag hung limply from the stern of a big, rust-streaked tanker. Lifeless at her moorings, she looked abandoned, set there to moulder for ever. Behind their grey veils of rain the white high-rise buildings of Kowloon were a mere jumble of decaying teeth; beyond, the green hills of the New Territories, that in sunlight climb with such radiant luminosity towards China, had vanished.
My nose was cold against the Luk Kwok’s clammy windowpanes. My soul felt colder still. I took my Kümmerly & Frey map of the world from the metal suitcase and spread it on the bed. It gave me immediate comfort, confirming that without doubt Hong Kong was the right place to be. There it was, on the map: a magnificent wen on the convergence of two of the earth’s grandest areas of land and sea – China (canary yellow) and the Pacific Ocean (a bilious, bluish green). In such a busy port, surely, I could fi
nd a vessel to start me off?
I shifted my finger on Kümmerly & Frey, south and eastwards. These were the objectives – to cross the Pacific (now my finger traced a path through the rash of islands that cover the map of the South Seas like chickenpox); to traverse the South Atlantic from Argentina to South Africa (my finger negotiated the lethal storms of Cape Horn without a tremor and moved up between Buenos Aires and the Falkland Islands before crossing the immense block of green-blue Atlantic to Cape Town); then to leapfrog up the coast of West Africa to Portugal, Spain, France and finally England (my finger wavered from the Bay of Biscay towards the knobbly leg of the West Country).
I hoped my last landfall would be Bude Haven, a tiny nick in a sweep of 700-foot cliffs which even in this century was a regular port of call for coastal ketches before they faded away in the 1930s. Now fishing boats and yachts creep in behind the old stone breakwater that at high tide shrugs off the huge Atlantic waves like a stranded but imperturbable whale. I suppose few people would want to end up, after months of sun and lagoons in the South Seas, in an insignificant Cornish resort miles from the nearest railway station; a place of generally unattractive Edwardian villas in a hinterland of ancient churchyards cluttered with memorials to generations of Cornish yeomen and drowned sailors; a place of beaches glorious in the summer sun, but in winter often battered by weather fit only for the Devil or Davy Jones. But my dream had started there, in that dusty attic with its tantalizing view of the ocean, and I hoped it might return after all these years, to rest there in peace.
I was setting off in search of what Henry James called ‘the visitable past’. Robert Louis Stevenson, companion of my youth, was with me now – The Master of Ballantrae and the Vailima Letters, most of the letters he wrote to his friend Sidney Colvin from Samoa, as well as those written by his mother, staunch old Mrs Stevenson who lived to follow her Lou’s Samoan pallbearers up the side of Mount Vaea to his tree-shaded grave. In the metal case I had packed Melville’s Typee, Jack London’s The Cruise of the Snark and Gauguin’s Intimate Journals. Under socks and shirts lay a volume of Saki’s short stories, a Conrad or two, a bunch of thrillers. And – at this moment of imminent departure for China, the most immediately exciting of all – a novel that described in words of fire the street terror which Chinese Communists and Nationalists brought to the international city of Shanghai in 1927 – André Malraux’s La Condition Humaine, translated into English as Man’s Fate. It was years since I had read it but I knew its opening by heart: ‘Should Chen try lifting up the mosquito net? Or should he strike through it?’