Slow Boats Home

by Gavin Young

  He laughed – a good joke was coming. ‘I say to them, “Okay, here is de crew list and de stores list.” “Captain,” dey say, “you have cigarettes?” I take out cigarettes and give one packet to every officer. “Oh!” dey say – “but, captain, one carton each, please. We are heavy smokers.” I say, “If you do not like de packets, I throw dem over de side. Then you clear de ship.”’

  ‘You’re a brave man,’ I said, thinking how dangerous seven furious Indonesians grinding their teeth could be.

  ‘Tongans are brave,’ he agreed with a smile. ‘And dese officers are surprised. So I explain. “Look,” I say. “We are Tongans. We are not Filipinos.”’ How indignant Sonny-Sebastiano-Sonngen III of the Chengtu would have been to hear that, I thought. ‘“And we are not Europeans with many stores.” “Oh? Oh?” they say, like dat. I say, “No, we are like you, except we are very big and you are very small. One Tongan,” I say, “can pick up twenty Indonesians.”’

  I said I knew something of the people of Celebes round Macassar; they were fiery-tempered. That was putting it mildly, in fact. What on earth…?

  ‘Well, dey cleared de ship,’ the captain said, indifferently. ‘Very quick. And den dey say, “Your men should go ashore two-by-two, or three-by-three. Our young men will sometimes take on foreign seamen ashore – sometimes with knives. Yes, with knives.”’

  ‘I hope you took their advice,’ I said, ‘to be careful.’

  ‘Oh – our men went ashore all de time one-by-one. Not afraid.’ He made a ballooning motion with his arms. ‘So big. Tongans are not afraid to go ashore one-by-one.’ Well, it was true it would take an exceedingly long, sharp knife to penetrate a Tongan to any depth. But Tongans did have a serious Achilles heel, the captain admitted. Alcohol. He allowed no beer aboard his ships. ‘If they have one beer, they cannot stop.’ He tut-tutted sadly, telling me of the Fijian women and children he’d seen waiting outside bars in Suva on pay nights for their man to spend all his money on beer.

  *

  The second evening’s sunset was as fine as the first – no, finer. I had put down the Vailima Letters and gone onto the bridge wing. One memory from the Pacific that is embedded in my mind for ever is what I saw then – a massive bank of cloud that had reared up over us: towers of cloud, swelling mountains of orange, pink and silver on the western horizon. How can you estimate the size of clouds like these? We were dwarfed utterly. The sun’s rays shot out of the immense, solid-looking continent of vapour in great glowing shafts of light. Stevenson (I found the letter later) put his finger on it: ‘O what aweful scenery, from a ship’s deck, in the tropics! People talk about the Alps, but the clouds of the trade winds are alone in sublimity.’ He talked of a cloudtop flamed in sunlight enlightening all the world. ‘It must have been much higher than Mount Everest…. A thing to worship.’ As I watched, a member of the crew came up, scraped some chicken bones from a plate over the side, looked up and said to me, ‘What an art, eh?’ referring to the miracle above us.

  Presently, the sky was doubly worthy of worship. Darkness was gathering fast. Behind us, the sun had sunk below the horizon yet still threw splashes of fire across the very tips of the cloud banks, and now the near-full moon rose, scattering its quite different light, giving the sea a queer, pink, flat look, like gently undulating swathes of Oriental brocade.

  In the midst of these unearthly lights of sunset and moonrise on sky and sea, the Tasi crossed the date line from one Wednesday to another. How can I forget that evening? How could Tongans ever not have worshipped the god of such sunsets and such moons? Now, indeed, several Tongans came up from below to point at the glory overhead, laughing and chattering among themselves. And slowly, the character of the beauty changed. Deep darkness succeeded the sun. The Southern Cross, Jupiter and Mars threw their own reflections in the water, and the rising moon, so harshly bright I could not look at it directly, hung like the glittering disc of a kite, its reflection wavering on the ocean like a fluttering tail of pure silver. I made my way to the Tasi’s bows. Everything was white. I put out a hand and saw the hand of a leper. White moonlight seemed to have covered the winches, the anchor chain, coils of rope, the ship’s mast and rail with a layer of snow. Fragments of silver glinted on the waves, and for a moment I thought the sea was full of the natural phosphorous blobs that bejewel the shallow night-time seas of Java and Borneo; but it was the moon’s broken reflection winking on small, abrupt upheavals of water.

  *

  I lived an idyll that night and the following dawn as the Tasi approached the two islands of Western Samoa. What more could I have desired, with that sky above us and then, slowly and darkly rising from the water, the dim shapes of those so-long-imagined Samoan mountains. We should reach the little port of Apia at about dawn, the captain said – the best time to reach anywhere. ‘I hope dere is no ship sitting in de wharf at Apia. Den we can go straight in.’

  Any thought of the British task force in the Atlantic had vanished from my mind, banished by my reading more of R.L.S.

  On the Mountain, Apia, Samoa, November 2nd, 1890

  My dear Colvin,

  This is a hard and interesting and beautiful life that we lead now. Our place is in a deep cleft of Vaea Mountain, some six hundred feet above the sea, embowered in forest, which is our rangling enemy, and which we combat with axes and dollars….

  I sprang up, restless, and wandered down to the saloon. An obliging steward gave me ice from a fridge quite empty except for a strange smell and two small dishes of butter. Over a whisky or two, I looked up Somerset Maugham’s story The Pool: ‘He liked Apia straggling along the edge of the lagoon, with its stores and bungalows, and its native village….’ Then I slept, on the brink of fulfilling one more dream; as excited as a child on Christmas morning.

  At 2.40 a.m. we could see the dark hump of Savaii Island to port, the sleeping turtle of Samoan legend. A light flashed on the pinprick islet of Apolima. The sea was calm, the stars still hard and bright; the Southern Cross was lying on its side now, with its tail horizontally behind it like a flying silver arrow. But when I next came up on deck, at 0600, the lights of Apia were advancing low on the water; the stars had become faint and watery, and the moon, palely orange, was sinking to extinction. Over the eastern silhouette of Upolu Island towered indigo domes of cloud, and strips of gold, fiery orange and blue shot up like the trails of unimaginable rockets. The Tongans once more came up on deck to watch the celestial fireworks as if they were aweful portents. Perhaps poor, suffering ‘Lou’ Stevenson, arriving here, had taken one such Samoan sky as a heavenly sign that this would be his last resting place. Perhaps the world would end with ‘something to worship’, like this.

  We stopped outside the white waves along the reef. Captain Tau’alupe peered through the early morning haze. He looked more hugely nanny-like than ever in his kilt and a white shirt with scarlet hibiscus flowers on it, holding a mug of tea. Almost at once a voice on the radio said, ‘All right, you can come in.’ We moved slowly through the turbulent line of waves that enfolded the lagoon.

  A woolly ridge, before it a hill (was that Mount Vaea?). A scattering of low, colonial-style buildings; white church towers; several large, spreading trees; a wharf. Now the sun was up, sending a warm wash of light across the little horseshoe bay. We slid gently alongside the wharf, not a bump, not a scrape. The ropes snaked down.

  Captain Tau’alupe took my hand at the head of the gangway. ‘Come to Tonga,’ he said. ‘You have my address. Christmas time it is very amusing. Lots of choirs in de streets and brass bands.’ A jolly Tongan brass band was playing at that moment on the Tasi’s radio – the last few bars of ‘Rule Britannia’ and then ‘Sussex by the Sea’.

  And when you go to Sussex –

  Whoever you may be –

  You may tell them all that we stand or fall

  For Sussex-by-the-Sea!

  Twenty

  A land

  In which it seemed always afternoon.

  Alfred, Lord Tennyson: ‘
The Lotos-Eaters’

  Henry Betham, the shipping manager of Burns Philp in Apia, said, ‘The Pacific Islander. Oh, yes. She’s due in here in a week or so. Let’s see – she’s got a Japanese captain now.’

  The Pacific Islander was the Swire container ship I had looked up in Suva. I hoped she would get me to Tahiti. Was there a new policy at Swire’s China Navigation Company to employ Japanese officers – something to do with placating Nippon? It seemed unlikely.

  ‘I don’t think that can be right,’ I said.

  Henry, a large friendly man, checked his files again. ‘No, sorry. It’s Captain Carter now. It was Captain Ralph Kennet.’

  ‘I know Ralph Kennet.’ A couple of years before I had sailed with him from Manila to Hong Kong on another Swire vessel, the Hupeh.

  Betham smiled. ‘Well, you’ve got a week or so before Captain Carter gets here.’ Time enough to pay my respects to R.L.S. and see something of Samoa, too.

  I walked up the few steps into a two-storey white wooden building that seemed the perfect entrance to a Samoan hotel, and found a large Samoan lady behind a counter.

  ‘Aggie Grey?’ I asked, and she shook with throaty laughter as if she had never heard anything so funny.

  ‘Not Aggie. I’m Annie,’ she said. ‘Call me Big Annie, dear.’ She had a room for me – ‘Of course, dear’ – in the garden.

  Aggie Grey’s Hotel stood a few hundred yards from the wharf, ideally situated with a wide view over the little bay of Apia – a famous hotel, Michael Scott had told me, owned by a handsome South Seas ‘personality’. Some people thought Aggie Grey was the original of the character James Michener called Bloody Mary in the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical South Pacific. It seemed she was in New Zealand. Her son, Alan, and his wife were in charge.

  There was a book about Aggie Grey on sale in the lobby and I took a copy to my room. It told the story, the blurb said, of ‘how Aggie rose to fame from selling hamburgers at her rollicking waterfront club to owning a mighty tourist complex in the South Seas’.

  A mighty tourist complex? When I took a stroll I found a pleasant tangled garden and thatched-roofed guest rooms: no mighty tourist complex at all. In an open-sided bar a few tourists quietly sat over beer, and presently the sound of singing led me to a beehive-shaped thatched building where a group of young men and women in lava-lavas were rehearsing native dances, stamping and chanting with flowers in their hair.

  My first Samoans were quite different from the Solomon Islanders or Fijians–no one here had a busby like Colson’s, or a Papuan gargoyle face. These Polynesians had straight hair, black or dark brown, skins that were fair and faces that were almost Malaysian.

  Somerset Maugham, Stevenson and Rupert Brooke had all extolled the glory of the Samoans, sometimes in such extravagant terms that one suspected poetic exaggeration. ‘God’s best, his sweetest work,’ Stevenson had written. And now, watching these unself-conscious dancers, I knew there had been no exaggeration at all.

  *

  Aggie Grey’s Hotel commanded one end of Apia’s horseshoe bay, while Burns Philp’s emporium and office, with Henry Betham in it, stood at the other end. In between were stores, a church or two with off-white towers, a bank, and a modest complex of wooden verandahs which, a sign said, housed government offices, including the office of the Prime Minister. There can hardly be a more self-effacing Prime Minister’s office in the world. Modern Apia, it was evident, had mercifully escaped the ravages of ‘progressive’ architects, and was still a small town. I had no difficulty in imagining the little trading station Stevenson saw in 1889 when he disembarked from his schooner, the Equator, and took his first brisk exploratory ramble, looking, one of Apia’s merchants said later, ‘like a lascar out of employment’. The emaciated writer and his family – possibly because his stepson, Lloyd Osborne, chose to wear earrings and dark glasses and carry a ukelele – were taken by the chief Anglican missionary for a troupe of scallywag vaudevillians from San Francisco. Who else, he wondered, could they be?

  Stevenson’s house at Vailima was still standing and his grave was now a place of pilgrimage, so it took an effort to remember that when he came here no one in this Pacific backwater had heard of Robert Louis Stevenson. Who among the German, American and British traders and plantation managers had opened any book other than a ledger or a shipping timetable? Anyway, it was the Samoans who gave him the name Tusitala, the Teller of Tales. Now he was a tourist attraction. Exploring beyond the centre of the town, I found a looming block of masonry built in the sixties or seventies with a sign which said it was the Tusitala Hotel, and its bar stocked Vailima beer.

  In Aggie Grey’s breakfast room next morning the young Samoan dancers of the day before had become smiling servants, but there were few customers. A Samoan and his jolly wife (between them they must have weighed a ton) bolted papayas and eggs and bacon and beamed around them. A sallow young white man in stained shorts blocked conversation from a pallid girl with two unvarying replies – ‘No way’ or ‘Not likely’ – while he gave an American student hints on how to travel round Samoa cadging off the natives. ‘Just leave quick when they begin to look less hospitable,’ he said with a snigger.

  I consulted Big Annie, bought a map and a Samoan dictionary, hired a car from a European garage and headed east in it along the shore.

  After two or three miles I pulled up by the roadside with a thumping heart. Of course, I had expected the magnificent, violent blue of the Pacific, beaches of pure white sand and graceful colonnades of tow-headed palm trees – all that was a common natural combination in the South Seas. Yet here it was only part of a much greater beauty.

  Beehive houses, somnolent under their sunbaked thatch and raised on platforms of stones, appeared to float in a sea of brilliant foliage, their mat walls rolled up now to catch the sea breeze so that whole families were visible, sitting cross-legged, chatting and smoking, or gazing silently across the lagoon at the white tumble of foam on the reefs. Barefoot men, elegant from waist to calf in bright-coloured lava-lavas that no Paris fashion designer could improve on, and women with parasols and flower-patterned skirts, strolled on the road’s edge with the upright yet languorous grace that only people who walk barefoot can achieve. Village after roadside village basked serenely, in the sunlight behind glistening screens of breadfruit, papaya and banana trees, frangipani, hibiscus and hedges of flowers whose names I do not know. On my map I read their soft, lilting names – Lauli’i, Salelesi, Vailele, Lufilufi. I moved on. Soon, a bumpy red-dust track swung inland, and I slowly climbed into a different world of scrub and upland trees. Villages and resplendent flowers disappeared, the sea was only visible in snatches from sharp turns along the way, and wisps of mist like an old man’s beard rose from slopes of green mountains that looked two thousand feet high.

  I had bumped along for perhaps an hour when I saw a house by the track. There had already been a few houses along the way, but they had been set well back, half hidden in the bush. This particular shaggy little roof lay near the road from which an apron of coral chips and flowering bushes ran up to it. A chestnut horse was hobbled by the doorposts. Behind the thatch, blue smoke rose from an open fire. I had slowed down and somebody waved. I stopped and got out of the car and a teenage girl in a lava-lava with a flower in her hair ran out of the house towards me, framed by the flowers and clouds of tiny blue butterflies.

  ‘Talofa’, she said, smiling, and then unexpectedly in English, ‘Will you have some food?’ Her large eyes tilted up from a small, slightly flattened nose. ‘My name is Emma,’ she added as two women, one of them grey-haired, the other old enough to be Emma’s mother, ducked out of the house, followed by a boy of eleven or twelve. A larger boy, perhaps seventeen, evidently Emma’s brother, came towards the car from the bushes. ‘This,’ Emma patted the smaller of the two boys on the head, ‘is Isaia. This is Manino.’ She pointed to her mother.

  The bigger boy patted his own bare chest. ‘Fili,’ he said. Within a minute I had been conscripted into
Tolu’s boisterous family.

  The simplicity of the house on the empty track and Emma’s wave among the flowers were the reasons for my coming to Tolu’s house and my ‘adoption’ into his family. Not that I knew Tolu at that moment. Now I was answering five excited voices at once. ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘Just to the end of the island,’ I said.

  ‘We show you. Come!’

  I hardly had time to get the doors open before Emma, Fili and Isaia dived into the car.

  I had wanted to meet Samoans – well, here they were.

  *

  The eastern beaches of Samoa are everybody’s dream of the Blue Lagoon. The one my new friends preferred looked across its inevitable reef to a green pimple in the sea, a miniature Treasure Island, it seemed, where with Captain Flint’s map and a bucket and spade you could find pieces of eight in a dead man’s chest. Instead, I sat quietly with Emma on sand like caster sugar while the boys splashed and screamed in turquoise water so curiously bright it looked as if it was lit artificially from below. On the way, we had discovered a family friend, Amosa, clinging halfway up an eighty-foot palm tree; his athletic descent in response to Fili’s call was so immediate that he might have been waiting to join us all his life. He and Fili were in the water in a flash of limbs.

  ‘Fili … ooo!’

  ‘Amo-o-o-sa!’

  Their shouts were like seabirds soaring from the lagoon or Ben Gunn’s demented yodelling from the island opposite. While they played I talked of prosaic things to Emma. ‘You go to school?’

  Yes, she went to Lufilufi school, she said. And she was nineteen years old.