Slow Boats Home

by Gavin Young

  Then, before the final collapse of South Vietnam, before the horrendous panic at the American Embassy and the entry of the Communists into Saigon – in his own hotel, in his own time, Jean Ottavj died of heart failure.

  ‘That was my Corsican,’ I said to Luc. ‘He made me believe one can meet saints anywhere.’

  ‘A great old man.’

  ‘Yes, he was,’ I said.

  There was a pause.

  ‘Well, now,’ Luc smiled and raised the bottle. ‘I don’t know the day or the month of this wine. Even the year is dubious. But have another glass anyway. To Corsica!’

  *

  Honiara. At six in the morning I came up to the bridge, having quickly splashed cold water over my head. A low coastline under an overcast sky, a few native fishing skiffs; two or three rusty motor vessels, one very battered indeed. ‘That’s your next adventure!’ Captain Luc laughed, pointing to it. ‘That’s yours.’

  ‘Just so long as it moves and points east.’

  ‘Welcome to Honiara’ was stencilled in huge black letters on a long corrugated iron shed on the wharf, and other sheds were enlivened with the painted silhouettes of crocodiles, serpents, a canoe. A hooting, giggling crowd of stevedores with the familiar busby hair arrangements rushed through the dock gate and on to the wharf, shouting up at us, ‘Good morning to you!’ A good sign, I thought.

  ‘Have you an air ticket onwards?’ an immigration officer asked me when we were alongside and tied up, flicking a finger at my passport in the saloon. A new question, but Captain Luc said, ‘That’s something you’ll be asked right through the Pacific – “Where’s your return ticket? Where’s your onward ticket?” Modern travelling! No adventuring allowed! Everyone must be the same, have an air ticket, copy everyone else. That’s it, eh?’

  Luckily, the Sofrana Line’s agent, a pleasant, bearded young German, came to my rescue and said he would sponsor me. I said a warm farewell to Captain Luc Duflos and Marie-Louise and told them I would miss their floating pension. ‘Drop me a line to Noumea.’ There was a possibility we might all meet again in Tahiti – if Luc could get leave, and if I could get there at all. ‘Go and see old Gauguin in the Marquesas Islands. His grave,’ Luc advised me. I would do my best, I said.

  Thirteen

  ‘It’s as if they were wading through wet sand,’ I said. ‘Mentally, I mean. And I don’t mean they’re stupid.’

  It was disconcerting. The Solomon Islands seemed to exist in a different timescale from Asia. Time seemed to pass more slowly here. In the Mendana Hotel, down the road from the wharf at Honiara, the receptionists and waiters, though pleasant and smiling under their fuzzes, reacted to questions or requests like men and women in a dream. Sometimes there was a pause before they answered; sometimes they just smiled and wandered slowly and airily away. The air might have been drugged.

  Gerry Stenzel, who had gone surety for me with the immigration officer, had driven me to the Mendana, and next day came round to see me. He agreed.

  ‘Everybody notices this,’ he said. ‘Everything really is slow. You will become slow. I have. It gets to you. I’ve been here two years and I’ve noticed newcomers trying to act as they have in other places: in quick-time. They seem unreal, even to me. They move at quite a different speed from people here. I can’t help laughing. They look like, well –’

  ‘Clockwork mice?’

  ‘Ha! Yes, exactly, and they can’t keep up that speed for long. Like a man in deep water trying to fight the waves, they learn that to float is the only way to avoid exhaustion.’ It was really a nice way to live, floating, he said, as long as everyone else was floating, too.

  We were sitting in his bungalow office with the sign of Tradco Shipping on the door. ‘Islanders are very self-sufficient. If you speak too sharply to a lazy man in his office, he’ll just get up, wander out into the street. And he’ll keep wandering to the bus stop, and take a bus to his village. Why should he care? The village has everything. He’ll be looked after. He really doesn’t need money at all. Anyway, there are times when he’d rather forego money than work. It’s very usual, this kind of thing, in the Pacific. You’ll see.’

  I am impatient by temperament, despite my years in Asia. Yet I could see how this easy-going place had its attractions, particularly if, like me, you lacked any pressing reason to hurry life along. Stenzel seemed to have adapted cheerfully. And later, when I met other foreigners who lived and worked here, they swore by the place and its people – and defended their life in bottom gear with enthusiasm.

  The Mendana Hotel was named after the Spanish explorer Don Alfonso Mendana, the first European to set eyes on the Solomons, which he named in the expectation – false, as it turned out – of great caches of gold on these shores. My guidebook told me that the Mendana visit turned into an appalling tale of cannibalism and massacre, from the moment when some succulent part of a boy, tastefully garnished with taro roots, was presented to Mendana for his dinner by the islanders, until their villages were razed and they themselves put to the sword by the Spaniards. It was the first gory instalment of that grim saga – the Fatal Impact of white men on the South Seas.

  *

  Here, I was back in the world of gold or black atomic hairdos and honey skins, and the excited exclamations and falsetto giggles with which all Melanesians enliven their conversations. Honiara, the Solomons’ capital, is also the main town and port of Guadalcanal Island, a name I knew very well but only from an American war film. It is a modest-sized place. Running past the hotel and the Tradco office and supermarket is a single main street, on which, in one direction, are the law courts and government buildings, and in the other, banks, a few stores, Air Nuigini’s office, the office of Solair (the inter-island line of propeller-driven hopabout planes), a Chinese restaurant and a trio of tiny offices belonging to the local shipping firms that carry cargo and passengers through the islands. A shabby cinema was showing a new version of Dillinger. Honiara port was hardly more than one long wharf, several long warehouses and a few Nissen huts smartened up into offices.

  With Gerry I discussed the all-important matter of my onward journey. My next port of call, we both agreed, should be Suva in Fiji, about 1600 miles away across open sea according to my measurements with a pencil on my map. However, there was, said Gerry, one serious problem. The big cargo vessels that might take me travelled, almost without exception, from east to west, not the way I was going, west to east. It had to do with currents and obscurely technical things like the way the planet turns. The old explorers had come that way, and more recently, yachtsmen did so, too.

  Tradco were also agents for the Bank Line of Great Britain, whose big cargo ships were regular visitors. Lord Inverforth, the Bank Line’s chairman and owner, accompanied by several Bank Line bigwigs from London and Australia, and their man in this island area, Captain John Mackenzie, a veteran sailor who based himself at Lae, were arriving on a brief visit in a week’s time. A marvellous character was John Mackenzie, Gerry said. It would be worth my while to meet him and ask his advice about what to do next. But I could see from the board over Gerry’s head that the next Bank Line ship, Clydeside, was coming from Samoa and Fiji, not going there. Meanwhile, what about local ships, I asked. What about those motor vessels lying in the harbour? Admittedly, some of them looked a bit dilapidated – but did none of them go to Suva?

  Gerry laughed. ‘Well, if you want that sort of thing –’

  ‘Anything. The soonest possible, although I would like to look at the Solomons, too.’

  ‘Don’t worry. I think you’ll get time for that before we find you a ship.’ The vessels I had seen from La Pérouse, he said, were mostly inter-island craft. There was one, it was true, he said – the Ann, a bit of an old rust-bucket belonging to an Australian called Roy Clemens…. He picked up the telephone. ‘Oh, Roy….’

  Clemens, I soon gathered, was willing to be helpful, but the Ann was not due to go anywhere as far afield as Suva just yet. Perhaps she had a cargo for San Cristobel Isl
and, the next one of the Solomons to the east of Guadalcanal. I forget the reason. But if I would keep in touch, Clemens said…. I certainly would, Gerry told him.

  So there was time to explore a bit.

  Gerry said, ‘I’ve a suggestion. Spend the next day or two with me here. Then take a boat to that island to the east. Malaita. A very big island, and an interesting one. It takes seven or eight hours to get there. Stay there a day or two, then come back and we’ll see what’s moving east.’

  That afternoon we drove along a long, flat coastline, treeless and rather dull. Inland a dark mass of foliage rose into Guadalcanal’s central spine of mountains, but by the sea the road trailed wanly through the soaring stems of coconut plantations. Here, the interest for me was not in the landscape, but in what lay half buried under it. It was forty years since American marines repulsed, then decimated, the Japanese in the Second World War holocaust that the Solomons became. In the appropriately named Iron Bottom Sound, facing my hotel terrace, lies who knows what tonnage of sunken scrap metal that was once the most modern component of the American and Japanese battle fleets. Along the coast road to the west there was a garden museum of that terrible time. In it, twisted chunks of Japanese Zero and American planes I couldn’t identify had been arranged like modern sculptures in an exhibition, side by side. It was a weird metallic cemetery; the dead machines were their own headstones. Some of the planes had been dredged up from the seabed; yet, after thirty or forty years under the Sound, the metal in their crumpled wings and broken cockpits gleamed like new, almost like silver. They made things well in those days: of stainless steel. One cockpit had survived its crash intact and, hoisting myself up to look into it, I half expected to find a pilot’s torso and a goggled head bowed over the joystick. I saw only instrument dials and a tangle of wires like worms. Beside these planes, there were anti-aircraft guns and machine guns and bayonets; and rows of helmets laid out, like two lines of country dancers. American this side, Japanese that, among the hibiscus in the short-cut grass. You could see the bullet or shrapnel holes in the helmets.

  To reach the main battlefield we drove past the airport and turned down muddy tracks. After a time Gerry stopped the car and led the way on foot in the shade of a coconut forest through the damp afternoon heat.

  ‘The Americans invaded the island here, took the airfield and then had to defend it for six months,’ Gerry said. ‘The Japs threw everything at them. Then they broke. A slaughter.’ It was wilder here: no gardens. We stepped over rusty barbed wire, and scuffed through ugly tough grass and creepers that dragged at our ankles like the fingers of dead soldiers. It was twilight under the trees, and very still.

  We were in the battlefield now. In the grass there were swampy shell holes, half filled with black mud, half dug out again. ‘Look.’ Gerry stopped and poked at the earth with a rusty bush knife. I saw that the creepers and mud partly covered dozens of Japanese military water bottles, fragments of rotting boots – studded heels, uppers with metal laceholes – and whole boots, too. And boots with no toes and heels whose owners had lost half a foot when those boots took their last step in the minefield. Mess tins, rice cooking pots of the Imperial Japanese Army, more flaking bayonets, more skull-like helmets….

  Sweat ran down my face. In the fading rays of the setting sun, hundreds of small white and yellow butterflies tumbled about us like spirits of the mutilated dead. Green parrots screeched among the palms. The Japanese had crawled through the trees, calling to the Americans, ‘Marine, you die.’ The black mud underfoot gave out a nasty, dank smell and I imagined decaying human bodies. At any moment I felt I might see a skeletal foot in a putrefying boot, or a skull in a punctured helmet.

  Searching, in awe, we moved closer to the contested airstrip – Henderson Field – and Bloody Ridge, another major American defence line, a curiously lumpy upheaving of the land, now green with grass like an old Roman encampment. Then, it must have been a bald, ruined expanse of shell-filled mud.

  A heroic American, Colonel Merritt Edson, and his men had thrown the Japanese banzai attackers back from another zigzag outcrop now called Edson’s Ridge. And between here and the sea – not far – is where the material refuse of battle mostly lay – the shells of trucks, jeeps and armoured cars, a tank or two: steel corpses. Ammunition, mortar bombs and shells lay where they had been carefully stacked forty years before – pyramids of explosives that looked (and may have been) still too dangerous to touch. Sudden birds’ cries, our legs swishing through tall grass on the jungle’s edge, and the soft sound of sea creeping up the beach – that was all there was to hear now. And in the stillness, I shuddered at the thought of peering too closely into concrete bunkers whose mouths gaped through the creepers, harbouring God knows what neglected phantoms. They were as lonely as lost Inca tombs in the remoteness of a South American rain forest.

  Gerry told me that human remains were still being found here. ‘We’ve found a lot of Japanese teeth here. Some of them gold and silver.’ He thought fifty Americans were still missing, unaccounted for after all the others had been shipped home for burial so long ago. Only a week before a bulldozer driver, a local man, had dug up a skeleton in a valley near here. ‘It had US Army medical tags. The driver pinched all its teeth, but the police got some of them back, and sent them to the United States authorities in Hawaii. They think they may be able to identify him – a guy 5 feet 8 inches tall and with big hands.’

  There are numerous Japanese still unaccounted for, too. The Japanese Government is convinced that several soldiers of the Imperial Army who fled into the densest jungle in 1943 are still hiding there, unaware that the war ended forty years ago.

  ‘It’s touching,’ Gerry said. ‘The Ministry of Health in Tokyo sent two expeditions to entice them out – well, whoever may be there. They dropped leaflets on the jungle – in Japanese, of course. They brought loudspeakers, too, and waded about in the bush broadcasting messages that said, “Come out, come out! It’s all over.”’

  ‘Anyone come out?’

  ‘Well, no one as yet. But the Japanese haven’t given up hope. One of the expeditions is still around. They’ve even put up mailboxes in out-of-the-way places, which these lost soldiers could use if they wanted to communicate with Tokyo. Of course, any left-over soldier would be getting a bit aged now.’

  ‘Any actual evidence that they are there?’

  ‘The locals say they’ve found odd footprints quite different from their own. And one day in the jungle people saw a hairy man, in rags, eating a banana. He ran away, but they swear he looked Japanese. Who knows?’

  At the Japanese war memorial, white, concrete, overlooking Honiara, I found a strange sight. At its foot a group of Japanese squatted or knelt in prayer. A wavering, unearthly chanting rose like incense from a small tape recorder over the bowed heads of nut-brown old men in singlets and wide khaki shorts and elderly women in smart picture hats and pleated skirts. One old man wore a kind of commando knife in his belt; I supposed it was part of his old uniform, and that the men were survivors of the war, or that some of them and the women were mourning relatives of the owners of the rusting helmets and scattered teeth. The plain fell away to the Sound where the Japanese and American battle fleets once pounded one another to scrap. The plain was green and humpy and oddly scattered with dead trees whose bare white trunks stuck up like skeletal fingers. The landscape looked unreal, as if all its spirits had fled.

  *

  In the Honiara Yacht Club, a modest-sized place, tanned young men, mostly Australian, dressed in shorts, ankle socks and heavy boots, lounged about in wicker chairs; these were managers in from the copra plantations. Others, older and better dressed in white shirts and slacks or tailored shorts, had brought their wives. The general drink was Castlemaine XXXX (‘Four X’) beer.

  The club, perched on a strip of beach on the edge of Iron Bottom Sound between the hotel and the port, was half traditional, half modern; iron beams and wood supported a very high coconut weave roof arching over tables a
nd chairs, a small film screen and a bar. You could almost step from the club into the water.

  ‘A word of warning. Don’t drink here with the islanders,’ said a German called Fritz Markworth, introduced to me by Gerry as the owner of two or three inter-island trading vessels; an Old Hand. His accent had overtones of Queensland. ‘I like them,’ he told me. ‘But after two beers, three, there’ll be an argument about race’ – he pronounced it rice. ‘They will start it and it’s pointless to argue. They won’t listen.’

  ‘The Samoans are the most vicious in grog,’ another man said. ‘Everybody says that.’

  Gerry was talking shipping ‘shop’ to somebody else. ‘Polish Lines have the concession to ship the copra from the Solomons by undercutting the freight rates. But the Bank Line – British – gets all the general cargo: coconut oil, timber, canned fish, cocoa. Bank Line does well. It’s old and reliable.’

  Cheerful waiters topped with black fuzz moved about with trays. One wore a T-shirt with a cryptic messsage: ‘Solomons, where are you, yourself?’ it asked.

  Darkness fell. More beer came, round after round. People began to talk of the Solomons’ Government practice of cutting down trees indiscriminately and not replanting – or of ministers allowing unscrupulous foreigners to pay them for the privilege of doing so.

  ‘Fiddling about with nature,’ Markworth said. ‘I used to have a couple of boats on the Rhine. Well, you know they had a fine idea to straighten’ – striten, he said – ‘the Rhine, to smooth out some curves. And they did. And the river ran straight towards the sea. But something unfortunate occurred. Some towns and villages downstream had been used to getting plenty of fresh water for washing and so. Now the river was straight, no more water. Why? Well, the river water now was flowing very fast down between its bank and the speed somehow was draining water from its sides much faster. No one had thought of that.’ He waved his glass at us. ‘No one had thought about nature.’ Throughout the world, greedy governments were allowing greedy foreign timber contractors to decimate their forests. You could never replace a rain forest and its fauna died with it. It was happening all over Asia, they said.