Slow Boats Home

by Gavin Young

  It was safer in those Highlands than in towns like Port Moresby, someone said, what with the muggings there, the assaults on white people. ‘Even on tourists.’

  Astrid Underdahl said, ‘We’ve turned the locals into Baptists, Methodists, Lutherans, Seventh Day Adventists, Catholics, all sorts. No wonder the poor devils are all muddled. What to believe? They take to the grog, can’t handle it, and just get terribly violent.’

  In the confident atmosphere of the white man’s club, we confident whites handled more beer non-violently, and then still more. It was a friendly place. But when I stood up to stretch my legs and looked around a bit, no hospitality could blind me to the fact that Lae was a white man’s suburb transplanted with fine trees, a startling profusion of flowers and a good deal of corrugated iron roofing.

  Back on board Chengtu, I gave the ship’s rail an affectionate slap. Hearing it, Sonny Generoso, on the foredeck, returned me a grin and the thumbs-up sign.

  *

  Things flew around my cabin. While I rescued the Gordon’s gin bottle from the floor, books dived under the couch; drawers popped open. The deck was rocking like a seesaw. I tucked the bottle snugly into the blankets on my bunk and climbed with some difficulty to the bridge. I found Jim Bird holding onto the front rail with a puzzled expression.

  ‘I’ve never seen this kind of weather here before,’ he said. ‘Never in twelve years.’ I looked out on an angry greyness. Cascades of water pounded down the windows. A small, battered bird that seemed to want to land was snatched past us. We might have been off the Shetlands instead of a few hours east of Lae, passing the southern entrance to the Dampier Strait. The chart showed volcanoes and the 6000-foot Whiteman Range to port but the eye said they did not exist. Even the coast of New Britain was almost hidden by sheets of rain. A cement-grey sea broke over our bows, and the Filipino seamen struggled across the deck in oilskins, heads down in the spray like characters weathering a bad storm in Kipling’s Captains Courageous.

  In his radio room Robert Lau, too, was fighting the storm. Now and again he pounded out a lightning run of Morse dots and dashes but nothing much seemed to come of it. He shrugged at me, dimly muttering ‘Gale’ while, unasked, the machinery flung back gibberish. In rapid succession, plaintive chirps like the cries of newly hatched chicks, the drooling and burbling of a drunken idiot, angry bursts of what seemed like gunfire, and maddeningly insistent peeps as of some celestial traffic jam issued from the electrical apparatus stacked round the bulkheads. I thought Robert might start gibbering, too. I fled.

  Across the Solomon Sea, the storm continued to rage. Thundering west through the darkness into the Gulf of Papua, it sank a passenger-freight barge called Sir Garrick, with thirteen people aboard, and drowned five of them, including the captain and his wife.

  Eight

  An important question in New Britain seemed to be whether Rabaul, its capital, would blow up or disappear under the sea before or after the year AD 2000. But that was something I only learned when I had been there two days.

  In the unsociable way of container ships, Chengtu had sailed away the evening of the very day she’d arrived, wasting no time. Julian and Jim had barely managed a drink ashore because there had been a minor confusion on board: the Rabaul customs officers discovered a large cache of pornographic magazines in the Filipinos’ quarters and seized them. While they were at it, they had confiscated books and two watches and a Sheaffer pen belonging to Patrick, the Chinese third engineer. They had even eyed Robert Lau’s alarm clock. Harry, the young shipping man from Steamships, the China Navigation Company’s agents in Rabaul, was going to have to negotiate with the customs people.

  So, after sunset, Chengtu sailed away, leaving behind a cargo of cloth for sarongs (here called laplaps), canned duck, umbrellas, sewing machines and nylon fishing nets, and bearing away bêches de mer (sea cucumbers) for Hong Kong and cocoa for Singapore. Waving her goodbye, I found myself spotlit on the wharf like an actor on a stage by Jim Bird’s searchlight; drawn away stern-first by an invisible tug, the Chengtu passed out of sight in the darkness of the bay.

  Harry, the agent, drove me from the dock. He was a Polish Australian, he said. He liked Rabaul, and his wife was a local girl, a Tolai. ‘It’s become rather quiet here, actually. A whole lot of expats have moved out recently,’ he said. ‘The Burns Philp copra plantations are closing down, some of them, since the world price for copra crumbled away.’

  ‘Copra is the industry?’

  Harry the Pole looked at me through thick spectacles as if my ignorance worried him. ‘It’s always been plantations here. Coconuts and cocoa. All over PNG; and all over the Solomons; and Vanuatu, come to that. Vanuatu – that’s what they call the New Hebrides.’ Suddenly, he said, ‘We’ll make a detour. Just to show you a little bit ….’ and steered the car into another world.

  First, an empty avenue of beautiful trees, then a less kempt region of shrubs and bushes, and finally we drove into a low, dense forest of bananas. The banana trees screened off any glimpse of what might lie behind, and we turned into a small, shadowy region of thatched huts, smoking fires, an uneven earth floor and black-skinned people. Children ran out of dimly lit doorways and up to the car, which I saw they recognized.

  ‘What’s your name?’ they shouted at me.

  Harry got out and said, ‘This is my wife’s family’s place,’ and a handsome woman came out of the shadows and said to me, very quietly, ‘Hallo.’ A tall man who looked like her brother came up and shook my hand.

  ‘Shall we go for a short drive?’ Harry said to his wife.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ she said.

  At the top of a hill of big trees, Harry turned off and stopped at a ramshackle bar with a billiard table in a three-walled wooden room open to the night. A number of fuzzy-headed men were drinking beer and playing snooker. Harry joined them; I watched and drank beer, and talked to Harry’s wife, but without much purpose. I had hardly slept during the storm the night before, and soon I fell asleep in the car. Now and again I saw dark, bowed shapes against the weak light over the billiard table, and heard the click of the balls and the clash of beer cans, as if through the mists of a dream.

  Next morning I wandered into the neat streets of Rabaul. They had the Teutonic exactness you would expect from a town that once was the capital of Kaiser Wilhelm Land; large white ladies from Hamburg and Düsseldorf had driven their horse-drawn gharries up Mango Street accompanied by stiff-necked men with cropped blond hair, high collars and white duck suits. The Germans had planted magnificent avenues of frangipani, too, and the streets still glowed as though they were not flowers but brilliant white candles. After the heavy Allied bombing that had destroyed most of Rabaul, the town had risen again, and in these days of independence and Australian residents I suppose it looks much as it did in the old colonial days.

  Rabaul smiles. Among the one-storey shops of Mango and Kamakeke Streets, the smiles of its inhabitants match the white of the frangipani outside. ‘Sorry to disturb you,’ bushy-haired local girls said, inadvertently bumping into me in a doorway.

  The hair of the New Britons in the streets amazed me. I had never seen anything like it. It is not the hair of the Caribbean. It is not what I had seen on West Indian heads in England, or on black American heads, or African ones. It was altogether fluffier and lighter in texture – it looked like thistledown – and it seemed to come in a variety of shades. Here, a head of midnight blue; there, one the colour of rust or lime. Sometimes, I saw hair that was apparently black but which, with the sun behind it, turned to a deep reddish-brown. And, most vivid of all, hair that was apparently an unabashed peroxide yellow, not far from the colour of a dizzy Hollywood blonde. Was it peroxide? Was it dyed? And the shapes were as carefully coiffed as the sculptured bushes in a rich man’s park. Sometimes the fuzz ballooned up from its owner’s head, framing it and crowning it; sometimes it looked like a giant puffball; sometimes like a guardsman’s bearskin. On others – the most striking – it was exactly the shape
of an atomic explosion, rising and expanding upwards and outwards like a mushroom cloud. The New British floated down the sidewalks, in and out of shops, their great clouds of spun sugar borne airily aloft, above broad, smiling mouths and big, inviting eyes, and the odd voices uttering the strange, half-familiar, almost-English sounds of pidgin. It was a new, rather grand spectacle. I found it hard not to stop and stare. I wanted to applaud.

  Music issued from shop doorways and floated across Mango Street, and from one side of it or the other I heard a tight, rhythmic harmony of voices singing what sounded like cheerful Negro spirituals. I crossed over to the sign saying ‘Rabaul Music’, and inside the smiling, frizzy girl behind the counter told me the tape we were listening to was of the We Have This Hope Singers, a group from Port Moresby. She put on other similar local groups for my benefit: ‘Guba Gaba Tona’; and a Papuan choir belted out ‘Saved by His Grace’ and ‘I Must Tell Jesus’ in fine spiritual style. Several customers joined in as they wandered about. Further up the street in a newspaper shop I bought that day’s Niugini Nius, and on a shelf of religious books I saw the New Testament in pidgin – the Nupela Testamen.

  In his office over the Steamships Company sales room, Harry the Pole handed me a booklet. ‘You may find this handy,’ he said. It was a simple guide to the local language, called pisin here, or to be more exact Tok Pisin (talk pidgin). Over a cup of Steamships tea, I flipped through it and read:

  Tok Pisin is a language in its own right. It is spoken by a million people in Papua New Guinea ….. It is not broken English. It is not baby talk. It has rules and grammar. Pidgin is a language between language-groups which cannot speak each other’s language. Typical would be the stevedores who load and unload the ships coming from dozens of countries into a harbour like Hong Kong. This is where the word pidgin originates. Pidgin is the Chinese approximation of the word ‘business’. ‘Business’ = ‘bisin’ = ‘pisin’ = ‘pidgin’ (which only anglicises the spelling)….

  Evidently pidgin is spoken in all the islands of New Guinea and in the Highlands of Papua. Since 1975, it has been the national language of independent Papua New Guinea.

  Harry said: ‘Start off with Moning, Apinun, and Gut Nait. That’s easy. Remember the definite article is non-existent, but the indefinite article is wanpela. And if you want to say “This is my house”, you say “Haus bilong me”. See?’

  He searched about again in the booklet. ‘Look – Dok i ron hariap tumas. What’s that say to you?’

  ‘It says “Dog he run hurry up too much”. Which I suppose means “The dog ran – or is running – too fast”?’

  ‘Close. Actually, it’s “The dog ran very fast”. Tumas is “very”, not “too much”.’

  It was fun to look through the vocabulary. At random I found: sapos meaning ‘if’; pikinini man meaning ‘son’; and kalabusman meaning ‘prisoner’. Namba wan dokta meant not ‘best doctor’ but (more pompously) ‘District Medical Officer’. I liked ‘hill’, which was liklik maunten (small mountain). And it was nice to find that ‘to urinate’ was pispis, and that ‘penis’ was simply kok.

  *

  When Harry introduced me to his assistant, a dark Papuan called Gimana Kila, he said, ‘Gimana will take you on a tour of the Jap relics and the volcanoes.’ He added, ‘By the way, I’ve talked to John Taylor, the shipping manager of Burns Philp. They run most things in PNG – plantations, trading, shipping, all sorts. A small passenger vessel leaves for Kieta tomorrow evening, and it’s got a tiny cabin. It may call at a port or two on the way – very small ones. Three days. Sounds good.’

  It did sound good.

  ‘We’ll see John about it,’ Harry said.

  Rabaul’s Simpson Harbour is a green-fringed horseshoe, with the peninsula of Gazelle like a hammer poised to close it. At the bay’s entrance two rocky snouts stand up as if begging ships to bump into them. The Gazelle hammerhead was curiously knobbly, like the head of a man suffering from carbuncles, and close to you saw these knobs were volcanic cones overgrown with vegetation. There were open craters, too, like boiled eggs with their heads sliced off.

  Behind the Gazelle peninsula, among a conflagration of flowery shrubs, I found my first Pacific island landscape. It was unforgettable. We looked across the long, forested body of New Britain; a stormy ocean of trees, rolling waves of forest alternating with great troughs of palm, from which rose faint blue wisps of plantation fires signalling a few hidden clearings. Through my binoculars I could see enormous trees that put out long, smooth branches or shaggy, undulating ones from which screens of creepers fell to tether them to the forest floor. Flaring roots like the solid folds of grey-green togas buttressed their trunks, and on their slender, silver stems the tousled heads of coconut palms, neatly in line and gently stirred by breezes from the sea, gave an extraordinary illusion of movement, as if well-drilled waves of shock-headed tribesmen were advancing up the hillsides. Ridge after ridge the forest stretched away, green at first, then changing to deep blue that faded, paler and paler, and at last, on the farthermost ridges, disappeared into haze and rain.

  Relics of the last war – it seemed to me unbelievably distant – lay half-visible in the luxuriant undergrowth. Gimana showed me rock caves that had sheltered Japanese naval barges from Allied bombers; their wheels and bodies were rusty now. We approached them up a muddy rivulet bed that led from the road through a coconut plantation, where in a clearing a small boy with an orange fuzz was playing with a yo-yo. High over the bay and the volcanoes was a great gun, a Japanese Big Bertha on a swivel, still pointing its metal snout at Rabaul and Simpson Harbour and Blanche Bay, like a forgotten sentinel watching for enemy ships that had long since been scrapped. No one had bothered to remove the Japanese pocket submarine that, like an Egyptian mummy case, crouched in a cave by the edge of the bay. The wreck of a huge floating crane still disfigured the view.

  The Japanese in Rabaul had been heavily bombed and then left to rot. To get to General Yamamotu’s Lilliputian bunker, his last refuge, I had to squeeze past a ruined tank and down a low stair – hot and damp and claustrophobic. Pre-First World War German wall charts anachronistically showed ‘Humboldt Bay’ and ‘Berlin Road’, and the mountains of New Britain were in ‘Kaiser Wilhelm Land’. There were Japanese army radio parts and photographs of the bombed boulevards of Rabaul and iron carcases of cargo vessels destroyed in Simpson Harbour. Oppressed by the smell of damp and urine, the aura of forty-year-old decay, I turned to leave.

  ‘Let’s see the volcano experts on the Gazelle peninsula.’

  ‘Okay,’ Gimana said, relieved.

  At the Observatory, a cool, modern hilltop complex of buildings with a good view, the senior government ‘volcanologist’, Dr Peter Löwenstein, sat me down with a report entitled Recent Eruptive History of the Rabaul Volcanoes, in which I read:

  Rabaul must be one of the most strikingly situated towns in the world. It has been built inside a still-active volcano …. The magnificent harbour resulted directly from successive large eruptions and the eventual collapse of one or more large volcanoes … the harbour and the main port of the town is a volcanic caldera.

  To this dramatic information Dr Löwenstein had more to add. The last eruption, it seemed, had been as recent as 1980, though rather mild. An old volcano behind Rabaul had sent up ‘a cloud of ash and vapour, oh, several kilometres into the sky. The most recent big one went off in 1937. That one lasted four days. And at the end of the nightmare, a mass of land came up through the water, and stayed there.’

  ‘Anyone hurt?’

  ‘Five hundred people suffocated by ash and vapour.’

  Imagine the horror of a whalelike mass rising through the surface of the bay.

  ‘There was no warning?’

  ‘Ample warning. Two days in which the earth shook and the dry land kept appearing, but quite gently. People had forgotten earlier eruptions. But then suddenly – whoosh! – up it went.’

  There were five potentially active volcanoes in the immediate vi
cinity of Rabaul, Löwenstein said. It seemed a lot. ‘Our calculations point to an eruption about the volume of the 1937 one before the year 2000.’

  Lowenstein said the majority of opinion was against anything like the big bang of two thousand years ago, when the bottom dropped out of the land, the sea rushed in and the bay was formed. But a few experts gave it a ten-to-one chance.

  I was aware of Gimana Kila shifting uneasily in his chair.

  ‘The whole place might sink, the water rush in on all that very hot matter underground, and explode,’ Löwenstein said. And then smiled. ‘But I don’t think it will happen.’

  Now Gimana was prowling restlessly by the window. He looked as jumpy as a cat besieged by dogs. ‘I suppose if you did,’ I said, ‘you wouldn’t be here.’

  ‘My predecessor was killed by a volcano out here,’ Löwenstein replied. ‘At Karkan Island off Madang.’ I remembered the island and its volcano, standing guard at the entrance to the little port.

  Driving down the hill, Gimana moistened his dry lips and said, ‘I may leave for Port Moresby soon, after what that man said about another volcano explosion.’

  ‘Now, now, Gimana, Dr Löwenstein didn’t say it would happen. Look, he lives here himself. Just keep an eye on him. If he does a bunk all of a sudden, then you might worry.’