by Gavin Young
On deck, sweating stevedores offloaded bags of copra into lorries on the little wharf; some were very black, others pale as golden syrup. Captain Stan strolled about wearing his wide pixie grin, showing bad teeth, exchanging jokes with his crewmen and the stevedores’ foremen. He was obviously popular with everyone on the wharf, leave alone on the ship. ‘Nice place, Rabaul,’ he said. ‘The best in PNG by a long way.’ He told me he’d been in the islands eleven years.
It would have been pleasant to sail with an experienced island sailor like Captain Stan. But that afternoon John Taylor told me of the imminent sailing of another small vessel called the Kazi; she would take me to Kieta. She had a Filipino captain, Taylor said. I wandered down to the wharf again, and where Captain Stan’s Burtide had been, instead was the Kazi. ‘Captain?’
Several squatting men in torn sweatshirts opened betel-red mouths at me, waving hands towards the bridge: ‘Up there.’
The Kazi’s awnings were low enough to make me stoop. Washing hung on a line; a radio was playing what sounded like ‘Where My Caravan Has Rested’ arranged by missionaries for a Tolai choir and guitars: a domestic atmosphere. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see window boxes and chickens. The captain, a tall, nonchalant Filipino, put his head out of a doorway. ‘Oh,’ he said when I introduced myself. ‘I’ve no cabins, you know. The contracted labourers sleep on the main deck, or below. Passengers take the deck at the stern. But, shit, that’s not very good for you.’
‘The after-deck is fine. Shall I bring a blanket? Food?’
‘It’s quite warm at night. If you can eat sardines and rice with the passengers….’
‘That’ll do,’ I said.
‘There is this small bunk….’ Gesturing at me to follow, he ambled down to a cabin next to his which was as muggy as a greenhouse and smelt of unwashed armpits, feet and slept-in air. It had two bunks. Someone was sleeping on the top one, the other was strewn with dirty sheets and towels. I said I would prefer the deck, and he shrugged, ‘Oh, well….’
*
My notebook records an optimistic mood: ‘The captain says he expects to sail at 4 p.m. next day. Tonight I shall sleep well.’
But I did not sleep immediately. I opened Asterisk again and read:
I don’t think that even for a good screw I could stand this plantation life much longer. It’s the nigger-driving that beats me. The mere fag of tramping about from dawn till dark I don’t really mind…. No, it’s the beastly slavery business that I cannot stand. I absolutely refuse to thrash the niggers or to trade. Trading simply means wholesale thieving, and I haven’t sunk to thieving from a black man yet…. You remember I told you of the carpenter who had been with So-and-So? I heard the other day that he had been sacked for pulling out a revolver at dinner and letting fly at the Kanaka boy for not bringing the mustard quickly enough.
At least he was sacked. I put the book aside and closed my eyes. I suppose I should have dreamed of dark, furious men with birdlike faces pouring from a steaming ship’s hold to tear me apart with their vultures’ beaks and pour mustard over me while I struggled to fire an unloaded revolver into the black horde. But after a time I slept soundly without dreaming at all.
Ten
The Kazi puttered across the St George’s Channel and swung round the inkdrop of New Ireland’s southern tip and up the long, forested ridge of its eastern coast. We had left Rabaul after dark the evening before. I had watched the volcano shapes, the lights, the two rocky teeth that guard the entrance to Blanche Bay, all disappear; then sipped some gin, decided again against the airless cabin with the one empty bunk, removed the bunk’s thin mattress and spread it on the deck outside, rolling my anorak into a pillow. I had been fortunate to find a space among the sprawling islanders, for the deck was cluttered with bodies. Now, as the morning light roused them, like furry moths from chrysalises, fuzzy heads emerged from the laplaps tightly wound like winding sheets to keep off the dew, and peered round, blinking. Something had bitten me; I scratched hard lumps under my shirt.
One stop was scheduled on the east coast of New Ireland before the Kazi turned about and steamed south to Kieta on the island of Bougainville. In heat untempered by the slightest breeze, hook-nosed Papuan Highlanders with faces like ebony masks at a ritual, their womenfolk with babies, and young, flat-nosed men from the islands, ‘modern’ in sawn-off denims, queued up to wash at a tap near the rail and then flopped down against coils of rope and sacks of vegetables and baskets made of woven banana or sago leaves that bulged with coconuts and pineapples. Through blackened teeth scarlet-stained mouths inaccurately spewed streams of betel juice over the ship’s side where it stained the white paint like trickles of fresh blood.
I sidled across the limited deck space to the stern and watched the Kazi’s frothing wake. A slim young man with marmalade hair, mascaraed eyes and a blue and yellow laplap wrapped tightly round his hips was twanging a tiny ukelele to an interested audience. He was watched with special intensity by a wizened Papuan Highlander through whose nostrils, bored through to accommodate some bone decoration, daylight disconcertingly showed like light through a tunnel. A group of men crouched down, frowning intently at a transistor radio blaring out brass band music, as though they suspected it of purveying a dangerous brand of alien magic.
A member of the crew with a Tolai face squatted by me for a chat. ‘You travel,’ he informed me, and then: ‘What work?’ When I told him I was a writer, he didn’t understand, and when I mimed typewriting and said, ‘Book,’ he nodded his head, knowingly. ‘Oh, yes. You write comics.’
He gave his name as John and showed concern about my comfort. ‘You must sleep in cabin,’ he said, anxiously. ‘Not on the deck outside. You can sleep under chief engineer bunk. Better.’ I had seen the chief engineer, a tubby Filipino, trotting about the deck in a flowered shirt flapping open to reveal a copper-coloured pot belly with a large convex navel embedded in it like the boss of a shield.
‘Too hot in there, John.’
‘Yes, too hot.’
At midday, sweating men appeared from the bowels of the ship lugging a great metal bowl containing a mass of sticky rice, and emptied six or seven tins of Australian mackerel onto it. They ladled the rice and fish onto metal plates which the passengers eagerly snatched, and at once they wolfed down the lumps of food in fistfuls and at amazing speed. In a flash the bowl was empty; no second helpings. Dutifully, the passengers took their plates to the railside tap and carefully washed them.
I wasn’t in the least hungry. It was as much as I could do to force down a few biscuits I had bought in Rabaul. My mouth was too dry for them and I ducked down into the sultry near-darkness below decks to find the galley and perhaps a mug of tea. Any exact impression of what the galley was like is lost in a memory of pungent smells of fish and urine, of damp heat that drenched my body with sweat, of scuttling cockroaches, and of one or two dark-skinned men, half-hidden in steam, pouring hot water into a mug. I had a second vision, of a doorway, a large, murky portholed space and in it bare chests streaked with moisture, and anxious eyes. Fifty to a hundred men squatted: Papuans, with the ugly bird-mask faces and dwarfish aspect of the remote Highlands. These were the contracted labourers for the plantations of New Ireland and Bougainville. On deck I noticed some decidedly African features – flat faces and thick lips – among the Highland beaks, and even one or two snub noses on men who strolled about with the easy sway of Africans and the same African double-jointed look of arms and wrists.
There were far more men on board than women, but four ladies in a busy circle near the rail made up for their lack of numbers with a great hubbub of jolly sound. They wore the loose blouses called maris with which the missionaries covered native nakedness in the name of civilization. They sat together, rocked by spasmodic explosions of laughter, sharing out little snacks wrapped in leaves. They fed their babies and scrubbed their children and their clothes, festooning the deck with acres of washing as colourful as flags at a naval review. They were indefatigable. When other ac
tivities waned, they produced large combs shaped like long wooden hands and attacked their children’s wiry topknots, stabbing into the black or yellow tangles and flicking upward, snapping the knots in their depths.
On the wheelhouse chart, New Ireland looked appropriately like a shillelagh standing on its head. The chart showed Mount Bongmut, Schleinitz Mountains and Likiliki Bay. William Dampier, the English buccaneer, arriving here in 1670 on his ship the Roebuck, found the natives not particularly generous. They refused to part with anything more than a few coconuts, so Dampier’s men helped themselves to pigs, wood and water, and sent back in exchange a canoe loaded with 2 Axes, 2 Hatchets, 6 Knives, 6 Looking-Glasses, a large Bunch of Beads, and 4 Glass-bottles’, which seems a very fair exchange.
Off the east coast of New Ireland we stopped with a rattle of anchor chain. John came up to say that we would drop twenty passengers here. They would be ferried ashore to a small wharf just visible from the ship, but their departure was delayed by a mishap with the winch which would lower the ship’s boat to take them. ‘Shit,’ said Captain Lim on the bridge wing. He looked tired and pale, and while the crew fumbled with the recalcitrant winch he told me he was much deprived of sleep because he had no deck officers on board. He was captain, first mate, second mate and third mate all in one; radio officer, too, he added. ‘Maybe at night I sleep an hour; get up; sleep half an hour more; get up again.’ He offered me a cup of cold water from his private refrigerator, and when we entered his cabin I saw it was almost entirely filled by a double bed – his wife, he said, had chosen to stay in Rabaul this trip. ‘Help yourself. Also you want orange or an apple?’ A video screen stood in one corner, and – oddly – a broken ‘space wars’ electronic game machine in the other. The air conditioner was also broken; at any rate it was not working. To get to the fridge, I had to step over a large rat trap against a wall. ‘Oh, the rats are terrible,’ Captain Lim said, throwing up his hands. I mentioned the cockroaches below. ‘Ha!’ Cockroaches! Rats are bigger.’ He smiled in a resigned manner. I had taken him for a recluse. At Rabaul he had seemed cold and unfriendly, but now he began to tell me his grouses and I realized he was shy, unsure of his English rather than hostile. He told me his wages came to the equivalent of £1000 a month, ‘less fourteen per cent tax’. It was not enough.
‘Why not ask for more?’ I suggested.
‘If I ask for more, what do they say? They say, “Okay, finish your contract as you are, then we see”. At contract’s end they say, “Oh, if you aren’t happy, go back to the Philippines.”’ All over the world the poor, despised Filipinos automatically brace themselves for this reply when, like so many Oriental Oliver Twists, they dare ask for more – more food, more money, more anything.
At last the winch was repaired. The departing passengers were helped into the boat, a light metal thing which swayed precariously away towards a ramshackle wharf on the shore where there was nothing like a town to be seen. Perhaps there was only a plantation there and the boat was feeding it more workers. That was likely, considering that the little boat’s complement of passengers were mostly those parrot-nosed Highlanders, clutching bags of plastic or woven sago leaves and cheap umbrellas, all plainly very scared of water. As well they might have been, since shortly after the Kazi had retrieved the returning boat and had got under way, there was a prolonged swirling in the sea. The captain called out to me: ‘Sharks,’ and John began pointing and waving like a maddened dervish, ‘Shark! Shark! Ha-ha!’
As the headlands of New Ireland faded behind us and the light with them, I descended yet again to the murk below, this time to see how the plantation labourers were housed. Immediately sweat soaked my clothes and the smell of it mingled with the rancid stench of bodies in the gloom where the crush of men slept, or leaned against the bulkhead. An untuned television screen flickered and roared visual gibberish to these men of the hidden Papuan mountains who sat fascinated, or merely stupefied, by what they took, I suppose, to be a normal transmission. Who could tell what they thought they were watching – white magic of some sort. A voice in the semi-darkness said something, and a man less wizened than the others edged along the deck towards me. His stink reached me well before I felt his hand on my arm.
‘Mister, how you like stop here? Too hot place.’
‘Too hot. Plenty too hot, yes.’
It certainly was hot. It was lucky that the sea was flat calm. What would become of them down here if a storm began throwing us all about? I saw no air conditioning and it would be impossible to open a door or a porthole in rough weather.
‘How you like stop down here? Eh, Mister?’
‘No good,’ I said, with the stink in my nose and the sweat in my eyes.
It had been a hundred times worse in the old days. In Isles of Illusion I read:
An Australian went into the business of kidnapping niggers for work in Queensland. He enticed them on to the ship, and locked them in the hold. If a nigger got the chance he jumped overboard and swam for the shore. Then this beauty used to shoot, not to kill, but to maim so that the sharks’d get ’im. Oh, it was rare fun in those days.
Asterisk raised a horrid ghost. Probably no one today could force a Papuan to go to Bougainville, Queensland or anywhere else. It was most improbable that anyone today would jump overboard and ‘swim to freedom’, with or without the accompaniment of sharks. But Asterisk’s accounts of cruelty and mayhem are still appropriate reading. Plantations at any period of history are remote, and cheap labour is cheap labour….
The little Kazi pursued her plebeian way through sombre islands that had not changed in sixty or seventy years – and perhaps not much since Dampier stared at them from the deck of the Roebuck. The self-same shaggy profusion of trees, the identical silent dark green islands had appalled and excited the vagabond soul of Asterisk.
*
A black finger appeared on the horizon to starboard – Buka Island, the signpost to Bougainville – and in the early morning the Kazi approached Kieta. Unexpectedly, John brought me breakfast: a slice of currant bread, one fried egg. I had subsisted entirely on biscuits and mugs of tea, not out of sickness but due to the loss of appetite I associate with ships as others associate a raging appetite. ‘From the captain,’ John said, handing me the tin plate, and began hosing down the deck for our arrival, drenching the possessions of several protesting Papuans.
It was not going to be a joyful landfall. A black storm cloud like a crouching cat seemed to block our way to the little mousehole of a bay in which Kieta lies. I watched it, leaning on the ship’s rail with the tubby Filipino chief engineer, his protruding navel resting against one of the metal uprights. The cloud was not his concern. He indicated, by tapping my arm and pointing, the growing crowd of sweating passengers that milled about near where the gangway would be lowered to the wharf.
‘Filipinos would never travel like that.’ He jerked a thumb in the direction of the hold. ‘Every day you see thousands of Filipinos, poor people travelling by ship through the islands, third class, yes, but air conditioned, cheap, clean. No sweat. Here….’ It was true. Filipinos suffered much, but among their own islands the shipboard accommodation I had seen was far better than this.
The cloud moved on towards the Solomon Islands and the Kazi moved into the bay. Kieta was in sight. A few buildings appeared on the shore, half-muffled by trees. I saw a compact little bay, its mouth stoppered by an island shaped exactly and uncannily like a monstrous green crocodile. A crocodile half-submerged, waiting for its prey, waiting for us. I felt no surprise when John sidled up and pointed to it. ‘That is Puk-Puk or Crocodile Island.’
‘I know,’ I said, although I’d only known a second before he spoke.
‘See the head and the long nose; and the tail.’
I could very easily see those features; uneasily, too. ‘It looks very real.’
‘Maybe it is – what is it? – a spirit. Maybe it will eat Kazi. And you and me as well – ha-ha!’
I didn’t try to laugh with him a
t something that seemed too real to joke about. It was not only the waiting Puk-Puk and the great cloud that now reared an inky cobra hood over the south-eastern horizon that made me feel Bougainville was a place of ill omen. It was also the whole long, silent stretch of island coast that for hours had kept pace with us, as if malevolently and inquisitively watching our approach. It was the silent shelves of forest that heaved about like an erratic tidal wave – volcanic peaks pushed up here and there under the green blanket – that closed in at last on this insignificant little port as if preparing to bulldoze its few buildings into the bay and into the maw of that patient crocodile. I see Bougainville, as I write, as a sea and landscape in black and white; not a painting but an etching out of an old book of prints. It had a hostile, haunted look that inspired instant foreboding.
I gave John two tins of sardines, my remaining biscuits and an Air Niugini map. In return he gave me a grin and carried my heavy metal suitcase to the gangway, and later down it to the wharf. ‘See you,’ he said. On the dock wall, in big white letters, someone had painted Kazi’s name and her size, 400 tons. Next to that was a macabre reminder: one of her crew had painted ‘Sir Garrick, 150 tons’ – the name of the passenger barge that had sunk the previous week. Seeing it was like finding in your pocket the visiting card of someone who had just died.
*
The Papuans left the ship in a black cascade to the jetty, a vociferous tumble of baskets and bundles. There they stood turning their angry bird faces here and there; helpless, waiting to be gathered up by a boss man from the plantation. Captain Lim chalked on a blackboard near the gangway, ‘Sailing for Rabaul, Kimbe and Lae, today at 0900 hours…. Shore leave expires at 0800 hours.’ He hung it on a nail over the heads of the disembarking passengers. It was half past six in the morning. Captain Lim didn’t believe in hanging about. I waited for the agent’s man to come to the ship. ‘Shit,’ Lim said. ‘He won’t be along before eight o’clock,’ adding contemptuously, ‘office hours.’ When the agent’s man, a shock-headed, blue-black Bougainvillean, finally appeared, his eyes blinking with anxiety, he said he hadn’t expected the Kazi until tomorrow morning. No message; no telex. ‘But I phoned,’ the captain said, grinning with irritation. But Lim, long-suffering like all Filipinos, quickly composed himself. We shook hands. I carried my zip-bag down the gangway to where John stood with the metal suitcase. A sharp report – it could have been a pistol shot – sounded from the direction of Captain Lim’s cabin. The rat trap had been sprung.