Slow Boats Home

by Gavin Young

  At the gate a tall, dark soldier stood guard in a scarlet tunic and a kilt with a jagged hem. Perhaps he had been shot at by Arabs or Israelis in the murder grounds of Lebanon. What an irony that the once cannibal Fijians are now a respected part of an international force formed to restrain some of the most savage killers of our time – even if they do stop short of eating each other – who dwell in a region known as the ‘cradle of western civilization’. A block away, on a large green school field, boys with fuzzy heads played football with Fijian boys who had the delicate features of India. Already the ‘Fiji for Fijians’ meeting was dispersing in small, laughing groups. The ‘extremists’ did not look very menacing. Strolling in the golden light passers-by said ‘Good morning’.

  Fiji seemed to have done well. After all, it was not much more than a hundred years since Cakobau had signed over these cannibal islands to Sir Hercules Robinson in Levuka, on that memorable day when lucky Mr Huon of HMS Dido won a billiard table in the celebration raffle.

  *

  It remained to say goodbye to Fritz Falkner of Carpenters Shipping, who had arranged my onward passage so switfly. He would be sending his man, John Wong, to the dockside when the Tasi sailed.

  I exchanged addresses with Michael Scott, the obliging Sheriff of Fiji, and then there was little left to do but leave. I took one last look at the neat white capital, Suva. Beery Fijian voices and laughter came from the bar of the Central Hotel. On a bank wall a tourist poster said: ‘Fiji … The way the world should be’. A good slogan. Had Charlie Savage and the blackbirders, guffawing horribly, said the very same thing?

  The Tasi lay alongside the wharf. A Soviet vessel – a trawler, a survey ship? – sprouting sinister antennae, nuzzled her from behind. On the Tasi’s deck, John Wong waved to me. A Tongan deckhand as big as a native hut lifted my metal suitcase onto his shoulder. I went aboard.

  Nineteen

  Jellyfish floated ghostly-white in the green, sunlit water below the reefs. On a path of reflected light too bright to look at the Tasi swung eastwards, past the turmoil of surf, past a rusty wreck tilted on a lump of coral like a cockeyed hat. The ridged mountains of Fiji began their steady retreat. When, after an hour or two, the sun had set into strips of dark blue cloud, the effect was as if a great bonfire had been lit behind the headlands of Viti Levu. It was an elementally dramatic departure.

  So elementally dramatic, indeed, was the entire brief passage of the Tasi from Suva to Apia. I shall always recall it with a special affection. Later I read the words of R.L.S.: ‘The first sunrise, the first South Sea island, are memories apart and touch a virginity of sense.’ Samoa was, in a storybook way, my first South Sea island, and memory sets my approach to it apart. Partly because the fat, white little ship had a wonderfully comforting, matronly air about her, partly because her mountainous Tongan captain and his giant sailors were as good-hearted as any I have ever met – and partly because to be sailing from Fiji to Western Samoa in a Tongan ship seemed to me to be an idyllic state of affairs.

  ‘Tasi, Nuku’alofa, Tonga’ was written on the vessel’s stern, but I could read her origins from a plaque: ‘Kaldnes Mek. Verksted, 1966, Tonsberg, Norge’ – so she was another Scandinavian vessel among the many to find their way to the South Seas. Bags of taro were stacked on her deck, marked: ‘For Tonga. Cyclone relief from the American Embassy, Suva’.

  Fijians are tall and big-boned – every Fijian I had seen seemed to be built to play American or rugby football – but Tongans, if the Tasi’s captain and crew were anything to go by, are big in a different way: big all round, verging on corpulent. In his way the captain reminded me of a very genial Japanese sumo wrestler.

  ‘We will be happy to take you,’ he said, beaming. ‘Everyone here will be happy with you! They like to talk.’ He wore a ‘Hawaiian’ shirt of delicate sea-blues and sea-greens, pinks and yellows, over a long, light blue kilt: a many-splendoured Buddha with close-cropped white hair and eyes that, when he smiled, were pinched up Mongol-fashion by his billowing cheeks.

  The second officer, Etuate Lemoto – I read his name from the crew list – had moved in with the third mate so that I could use his cabin, and this worried me until he said, ‘Oh, never mind. I’m okay. Pleasure,’ with such a cheerful expression that I slept almost without guilt for having stolen his bunk. While the Tasi moved across the Koro Sea, aimed for Nanuku Passage through the eastern reefs, leaving Bligh Water, Ovalu Island and old Levuka behind us, choirs of Tongans brought me the first words of Tongan I had heard: the sort of sound an Arabian dove would make, a rather guttural cooing. Tongan music from radios in the saloon or on the bridge was an almost permanent feature of life on the Tasi: electric guitars and soft, singing voices, languid or lively, filled the ship. A lot of the music had a religious ring. I remembered the hymns in the streets of Rabaul. Tongans are very religious people, the captain explained: half of them Catholic, half of them Methodists.

  As he had said, Tongans like to talk. He was no exception. At our first meal of fried eggs, spaghetti, sliced tomatoes, toast and tea I learnt that he was himself related to the Tongan royal family, and a number of other things.

  ‘You won’t be able to say my name,’ he laughed. ‘It is Polonga Tau’alupe. So, I have written it out for you.’ He handed me a small, oblong piece of paper with his name and address on it: such-and-such a town, Tonga Tapu Islands, South-West Pacific Ocean. He talked of his mother – how she had killed a giant octopus that had grabbed a girl and was holding her anchored to a reef while the tide came in. His mother had told the screaming girl to keep still, felt about for the middle of the octopus–the captain felt about his own ample tummy with a forefinger–and stabbed it with a spear ‘all the way in’; here he jabbed an imaginary spear into a gap in his shirt where a button had given way to reveal billowing flesh. The stricken octopus had released the girl and had died quite soon, but it was a monster, so big, so heavy that no one could pull it into the boat; they’d had to tow it home. ‘So big,’ the captain shook his head in disbelief at the very memory of it. ‘So big. Oh, jeez. You remember Queen Salote, perhaps,’ he said. ‘The mother of our King.’

  ‘I saw her riding in a coach at the coronation of Queen Elizabeth,’ I replied. No one who saw her would forget the hugely regal figure of Queen Salote, six foot if she was an inch, bravely smiling and waving to the crowds from her open carriage, utterly undaunted by the cascading rain that must have reminded her of a Pacific typhoon. That day Queen Salote had been the best loved foreigner in London. She had put Tonga on the map for several million Britons. If a last-minute miracle had dictated a double coronation of Queen Elizabeth and Queen Salote, applauding British mobs would have borne her joyfully to Westminster Abbey.

  ‘I sailed with Queen Salote round the islands of Tonga,’ Captain Tau’alupe said, greatly pleased by what I had told him. ‘Then we tied up at Nuku’alofa, our capital and port, where to do so was forbidden from one hour before sunset and one hour after sunrise. Silly regulations. “Okay,” the Prime Minister told me. “Stay alongside all night.” But the police chief came down furious – saying “What! Go out of here and anchor! Outside! Not alongside!”’ The captain beamed. ‘But, going a mile out to anchor is expensive. So I said, “I cannot move unless the agent tells me.” So the police chief goes to Queen Salote. And she says, “You have to ask the PM about dis. I have nothing to do wid ships’ movements.” So he goes to the PM and the PM says, “Oh, dis ship has a very big freezer and I need dis freezer for my own use in dis night.” It was very hot, you see.’

  The captain crammed toast into his mouth and came near to choking with laughter. ‘So, the police chief – dis is true, mind! – went back to Queen Salote and told her about dis freezer. “Well,” said Queen Salote. “It is true, the PM is a very big and fat man. It is hard for him to breathe in hot weather like dis. I am sure he needs the things from de freezer, like ice and so and so. He may die without them. If he dies, you….” And she just look at him. So we stay alongside. Queen Sa
lote was a very sensible lady.’

  Later the third officer said, ‘When I was in primary school, I’d heard of this captain.’

  ‘He’s famous in Tonga?’

  ‘Oh, yes. He comes from the same island as the King.’

  After dark, the captain joined me on the bridge wing. Four-square in sandals and an ankle-length kilt, he was like – although I need hardly say there was nothing effeminate about him – one of those hearty, good-natured ladies who play bowls in English seaside resorts, or a very trustworthy nanny.

  ‘I want to see the ship through these islands,’ he said. ‘Fiji captains have put at least ten ships on the reefs here.’ He grinned. ‘Fiji people never did sail far in the old times. Tongans are more used to that. Samoans, too. And Gilbertese, yes.’

  Just then the third officer bounded up with extraordinary news. An Australian radio station had just reported that a big British fleet had left Portsmouth for the South Atlantic. It was heading for the Falklands: a powerful task force with two aircraft carriers, troops – marines and Gurkhas – even the QE II had been called up.

  I was stunned. Absorbed in my own wanderings, I had missed what I only caught up with much later – the growing political and naval drama that started with the invasion of the Falkland Islands by the Argentines. I suddenly realized I had heard no world news since leaving Hong Kong – at least nothing had registered in my mind as out of the way. Nor had I felt any sense of loss. On the contrary, I felt this world was what mattered. Everything else was unreal. Now, as we moved under the bright eye of the planet Mars towards the international date line, Britain was about to go into battle against Argentina.

  Captain Tau’alupe had followed the crisis from the beginning, and he had made up his mind about its rights and wrongs. ‘I hope de British will shoot dese people out of de islands,’ he said fiercely. ‘What are they doing, de Argentines, invading and occupying de islands? Dese days, de correct thing is to talk about all dat, peacefully. In a civilized way!

  ‘I’d like to be de commander of a battleship,’ he said, quite angrily. ‘Then I’d go to dat war.’

  ‘Take the Tasi. As a hospital ship.’

  ‘Ha! As a target ship, more likely. Too slow and wide.’

  Suddenly I couldn’t help thinking: if there are naval battles near Argentina and the Falklands, how on earth will I manage to find a ship to take me round the Horn? Apart from shells and missiles there might be mines. I might be blocked there for weeks – in the Chilean midwinter, too; I had worked that out. Of course, there was time enough for the crisis to develop and fade away. It might be all over by the time I arrived there. I wouldn’t let it worry me now. But still…. A cloud as big as a man’s hand settled on my mental horizon from now on.

  *

  Dinner on the Tasi demanded stamina – it matched in weight the men who sat down to it: a chillied stew, mashed potatoes and breadfruit, three chunks of it to each man. How they could eat so much of it, God knows. I find breadfruit quite edible but dull and uncomfortably filling. The stew was heavy, too, and I gulped mouthfuls of black tea to wash down the chunks of unchewable meat like logs over a shallow waterfall. It was a miracle that I avoided falling dead of asphyxia at the captain’s ample feet. Recovering in my cabin, I mopped my face, took deep gulps of warm air and finally composed myself to open the Vailima Letters. I found Mr Stevenson finishing The Wrecker and commenting on it:

  … a good yarn on the whole … a long tough yarn with some pictures of the manner of today in the greater world – not the shoddy sham world of cities, clubs and colleges, but the world where men still live a man’s life…. As for wars and rumours of wars, you must surely know enough of me to be aware that I like that also a thousand times better than decrepit peace in Middlesex? I do not quite like politics … to sue and sneak to keep a crowd together – never….

  The increasing nearness of Western Samoa began to affect me palpably. Despite an open porthole, I felt a film of sweat on my back and chest. Though the night air on the bridge was cool and fresh, below by day it was uncomfortably stuffy. ‘Samoa is hotter than Tonga,’ Etuate Lemoto said in explanation. ‘Apia is only 14 degrees south of the equator. Nuku’alofa is 21 degrees south.’

  Samoan heat (‘It suits me and all our family, others it does not suit at all. It is either gold or poison.’) had not slowed up Stevenson’s literary production. In the letters, I found him (after only a month’s writing) fifteen chapters into David Balfour (later to become Catriona), and complaining, ‘What makes me sick is to think of Scott turning out Guy Mannering in three weeks! … Heavens what thews and sinews!’ Even so – and this was the year before his fatal cerebral haemorrhage – R.L.S., thin and sickly, could go five hard hours in the saddle and come home, sopping wet, like a schoolboy, ‘with such a lightness of spirits, and such a brightness of eye, as you could have lit a candle at!’ It was as much as I could do to keep up my note-taking – although this was more to do with the agitating excitement of the approach to Samoa – and Vailima – than with the soggy heat.

  From these notes I read:

  We sight some volcanic islands to starboard – the Niua Fo’ou Islands. We are approaching two important points, according to Etuate Lemoto: ‘First, we pass my island – very remote, halfway between Tonga and Samoa, called Niuataputapu. You can’t pronounce it. We should pass it without seeing it – too far. Second, we pass the international date line. We cannot see that, too.’ The international date line is due to make a change to my life this evening: because I am eastward-bound I gain an extra day. We shall put our clocks on one hour. Then we shall put them back a whole day, and we’ll have two Wednesdays. I look forward to comparing my first Wednesday with my second! (I have often thought of crossing the line the other way – i.e. losing a day of my life. Later, a policeman would say to me à propos some nameless crime, ‘And what were you doing on Wednesday, 7 April?’ And me, I would be able to reply, ‘Nothing at all, officer. For me that date simply did not exist.’ (At that point, I suppose, I would be arrested for contempt.)

  I expect some mark on the surface of the sea. The captain: ‘What I cannot understand is why the IDL is not straight. Tonga should be to the east of the line, but a zigzag leaves it in the west.’ No one on the Tasi knows why.

  Once more, I notice that the Tasi is a floating music box, as full of music as the island in The Tempest was full of noises. Just now I heard ‘Abide with Me’, beautifully sung, with whistled accompaniment from the third officer. Radio Tonga’s news bulletins are heralded by a furious, warlike pounding of drums – particularly appropriate and dramatic when it is the prelude to the latest report of the southward advance of the British task force….

  Good Captain Polonga Tau’alupe was a great one for making young officers learn their stars and use their sextants. He got them onto the bridge wing and waved his wrestler’s arms as if conducting the music of the heavens. Never depend on satellites and giros and radar, he said: they can all go wrong. The most important thing on a ship is the magnetic compass. He showed me the Southern Cross, which I had failed to recognize so far. It was not spectacular like, say, the Great Bear. It was like a very simple, and so beautiful, necklace – an unpretentious, diamond-shaped, four-star group with two pendant tail stars. Once I had seen it, I knew I should never mistake it again.

  ‘My mother took me sailing in de islands of Tonga,’ he said, ‘and she would suddenly stop and say to me – “Ha! Do you smell dat? What is it?” I’d say, “Oh, what smell is dat?” And she’d say, “Stop. Breathe it in. What do you smell now?”’

  ‘And did you really smell anything?’ I asked.

  ‘Ooh, yes. A smell like smoke. “Ah,” my mother said, “that means we’ll have rain. Very heavy rain is coming this evening.” And – wheeeee! – very, very – very, heavy rain came down dat very evening. Jeez.’

  ‘Is that superstition?’

  The captain was scornful. ‘Superstition, no-oo-oo. My father says, “Listen to me, you know if leaves fall
in de water, and lie dere and die, dere is a special smell? Do you know dat?” And he tells me dat means a terrific wind comes later on. No superstition. Fact.’ He turned his nose to the wind, and seemed to be sniffing out a storm then and there. ‘I teach all my young officers. To smell de weather. To feel de wind. To see de water.’

  He looked at me and nodded in time to his words, ‘smell.’ Smell. Feel. See.’

  *

  The third officer came cantering down to us as I was drinking breakfast tea with the captain. ‘There’s whales,’ he cried from the saloon door (pronouncing it ‘whal-es’), ‘if you want to see.’ Whales or whalers? Whales. I shot a mugful of hot tea across the table in my rush to the companionway. Puffs of white spray shot up over the perfect blue of the water. Then a black back or two heaved up; then another; then three black, low islands, rising and falling a hundred yards away. My first whales – I hope not my last. I was surprised they hadn’t heard our engines and taken fright. These days Jap and Russian whalers infest the Pacific. No wonder whales are dying out if they won’t run from such relentless but noisy predators. I felt quite irritated with these heedless mammals.

  *

  The Tongans are proud of their whalelike size in a way I found touching. ‘Have you been to Indonesia?’ Captain Tau’alupe asked, and went on: ‘One day a Norwegian captain told me, “In Macassar, Indonesia port, always must give customs men cigarettes. They come on board, six or seven officers, and will not clear the ship unless you give carton, one to each man.” I say, “Oh? We see.” So we go into Macassar. The customs officers come aboard.’