U.C. missed the best of the Orient. Singapore and Batavia were a whirl of gaiety, specially Singapore with all the charming chaps in uniform fresh from Britain to defend that bastion of Empire. The gaiety might have been on the feverish side. I think the Dutch consciously and the British unconsciously sensed that they were living in the last act before the fateful curtain. There was much to criticize but, compared to the Chinese Imperial Boss Class as just seen, the European Imperial Boss Class was Florence Nightingale. British colonialists were warped by a colour complex, the meanest stupidity of the British Empire, shaming to newcomers from Britain. The Dutch were not. The Dutch were enlightened and honourable rulers though their good deeds didn’t help them later. I wasn’t hired to study the problems of Empire. Those were not horror journeys and have no place in this book. I lived in luxury, clean as a whistle, cured of China Rot, dashed about on military business and rounds of pleasure with marvellous companions of the road, and concealed my foreboding for those who had to stay.
I was right about one thing: in the Orient, a world ended.
With Captain V. C. Griffin at the Naval Air Station in San Juan, Puerto Rico, 1942
Three
MESSING ABOUT IN BOATS
During that terrible year, 1942, I lived in the sun, safe and comfortable and hating it. News reached us at regular hours on the radio and none of it was good. But we didn’t understand how bad it was; piecemeal and (I now see) wisely censored, the news gave us no whole view. The only war I understood or could imagine was war on land and that was enough to shake the heart with the Germans moving like a tidal wave into Russia and Rommel rampaging in the desert. I think my ignorance was typical; the general public, which is most of us, did not realize that the fatal danger was on the sea. We would have lost the war if we went on losing ships at the appalling rate of 1942. Cargo ships, ungratefully neglected in the annals of glory, without which Britain would have starved and our war everywhere from Russia to North Africa halted like an engine out of fuel. 1,508 Allied merchant ships, 8,336,258 gross tons, sank to the bottom of the sea in one year. I can’t make a picture of that for myself let alone for anyone else. The nearest I can come is that it was like bleeding to death.
Then American news broadcasts began to tell, with great excitement, of German submarines sinking ships along the eastern seaboard of the U.S., and in the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean and as far south as Brazil. I was leery of the tone; it sounded boastful as if suggesting that we too, in our impregnable safety, were endangered. Which we weren’t. There has been no war on American soil since 1865. The suffering in Europe and the Orient was and is beyond American conception; no one can know what modern war means until it happens at home. But I was going into a decline from hearing about the war on the radio instead of being where I wanted to be, with the people whose lives were paying for it. I could get a short leave of absence from private obligations and domestic duties and at least escape the radio by roaming around the Caribbean to report on this sideshow, this minor if any submarine warfare in nearby waters.
Thirty-four years late, I bestirred myself to look up the facts and found with amazement that 251 merchant ships were sunk in 1942 in the Caribbean alone. In August and September, the months when I was dawdling through the area, the losses were heaviest, seventy-one ships in sixty-one days. As I had no idea of this at the time, nor could have had since it was highly classified information, I intended to do my best with the mild material at hand. I love journalism, it is always a chance to see and learn something new and I was interested by everything I saw, though hardly overcome by the importance of the assignment.
In Haiti, interned Nazis, German residents, well treated and swelling with pride, expected Germany to win next year and expected to be powerful Gauleiters. Puerto Rico had become a huge naval and air base; I begged a ride in a Flying Fortress on anti-submarine patrol. The crew was fun but the trip was like bus travel, flying with CNAC had spoiled me. The small brown gentle Puerto Ricans, who lived and died too young in shameful slums, were the people I liked best. Their sons volunteered eagerly for the U.S. Army, fifty dollars a month and as much as they wanted to eat was the first chance they’d ever had for a decent life.
All survivors, sailors from the torpedoed merchant ships, were brought to Puerto Rico before being sent off on other ships. You could recognize them at once in the waterfront bars, gaunt men in new cheap civilian clothes, suffering a different kind of shell-shock. I hung about listening with pity and admiration but knew that I wasn’t understanding. Lifeboats were outside my experience.
“I guess the tenth day was about the worst. I just about gave up hope that day.” “One of the chaps went a little wacky about the fourteenth day, remember, Bert?” “You didn’t look too good yourself, John.” “You can see it around their eyes, see, they get sort of a cuckoo look in their eyes. Had one chap wanted to kill hisself.” A boy alone at the Condado bar kept telling me that kapok was much better than the old lifebelts, they ought to have it in all ships. He came from Brooklyn. He’d been adrift for eighteen days in a lifeboat. He spoke of a man who got caught in the ropes of a lifeboat just after the torpedo struck. “The guy must of jumped or something but not far enough and he was hung there, see what I mean, you know, dead.” What was it like in the lifeboat? “I don’t remember, I guess it was all right.”
I wrote of these matters as I was employed to do and Charles Colebaugh, the angelic editor of Collier’s, was pleased but I was not. By now I knew there was a real war on, in these parts, though it was invisible beneath the bright blue water and it seemed tame and boring to report a war without action or eye-witness news. There must be a better way to go about the job.
To justify the Collier’s expense account, I told myself I might pick up survivors from torpedoed ships or find stashes of supplies for submarines or hidden enemy radio transmitters and anyway, since the war hereabouts was taking place on the sea, obviously I should travel on the sea too. My private dream, which I had the sense to keep to myself, was that I would actually sight a submarine. St Thomas, an American island, was easy to reach by plane from Puerto Rico. After that, formal transportation ceased until the next American base at Antigua, some 275 miles away as I figured on the map. In between was a string of little islands, with delectable names, Tortola, Virgin Gorda, Anguilla, St Martin and St Bartholomew, Saba, St Kitts. Whatever else might come of it, I would see an unknown world.
At St Thomas, I tried to hire a sloop. An old black man, agent for pre-war island trading boats, explained that no one on St Thomas was fool enough to leave port in the hurricane season. Neither he nor any of the locals worried about submarines but worried hard about hurricanes and their Bible, a regional almanac, predicted a bad hurricane this month. When I asked advice of resident whites they asked whether I hadn’t heard of the submarines, almost next door in the Anegada Passage. They also said that no white person could travel in the native sloops; I better wait until after the war and hire a yacht like everyone else.
Word of my scheme got around and resulted in a visit from a burly Texas Major in charge of guarding the island. He brought me a miniature pearl-handled silver-plated derringer. It looked just the weapon for a crackpot wearing a négligée trimmed in ostrich feathers who planned to shoot her lover. He gave me four bullets, blunt-nosed 32s, showed me how to load this lethal toy, told me earnestly that it would cut a man in half and not to hesitate to use it. “You don’t know what can happen, all alone out there.”
I said I could not accept his expensive pistol, had never used a hand-gun, and was never anxious about my honour. He insisted until finally I thanked him, wrapped the pretty thing in Kleenex, put the bullets in an airmail envelope and the lot at the bottom of my suitcase. Somewhere during the journey, I must have given it away. On this note of comedy, I departed in an ancient motorboat for Tortola, a four-hour trip.
My heart rose like a bird at once. It always did incurably, except in rain, as soon as I felt I had fallen off the map. The moto
rboat dumped me, soaked by spray and chirpy, at Roadtown, a cluster of unpainted shacks and a single dust street. There were ten white residents on the island and seven thousand blacks, no cars, few bicycles, and one taxi, which was a rowboat. The British Commissioner who also served as doctor, dispensing their small stock of medicines, and magistrate and editor of the mimeographed newspaper, deplored my scheme but passed me on to the local grocer, Mr de Castro, a white-haired dignified black man.
Mr de Castro introduced me to his son Carlton, owner of a potato boat, a thirty-foot sloop called the Pilot. A potato boat is an overgrown rowboat, with one sail and a hold for potatoes, which sold its cargo from island to island and returned carrying whatever could be bought en route, preferably rum and tobacco and preferably smuggled back into the home island.
Carlton de Castro was the Tortola glamour boy, aged twenty-five, coffee-coloured, with curling eyelashes, curling sideburns, and gold front teeth. He wore his captain’s cap over one ear and had a droll style as if he were a Parisian nightclub Apache playing sailor. His boat, he said, was “clean as fire” but he wasn’t crazy about making the trip because of the “hurry-cane.” I waved Collier’s dollar bills under his nose and corrupted him. We would leave the next morning.
In the meantime I shopped since I had to feed myself. Carlton would lay in two casks of water and some stones for ballast; the rest was up to me. I bought the usual sustaining grim assortment of tinned beans, sardines, tea, crackers and an object called Superware Sanitary Pail, made of shining grey enamel, and a large black umbrella to ward off sunburn. The Commissioner generously loaned me two army blankets and a pillow.
Rain then poured down as if here to stay. The sea looked like churned cement. I was marooned in the Social Inn, an inexplicable hostelry—why would anyone come here?—two dirty bedrooms, with beer bottles swept into corners and drifts of cigarette butts, mementoes of survivors off an English ship who had been moved on to Puerto Rico a few days earlier. Rain blew through the shutters and under the door. There was no electric light, hardship for a reader as the only place to perch was beneath the stained mosquito net on the boards of the four-poster bed and I thought I might set fire to the place with a kerosene lamp in that tent. The Social Inn reminded me sadly of the Palace Hotel in Kweilin but there were no bedbugs and one must always be grateful for small mercies. The rain went on and on. I sat amidst my canned goods, eating them from time to time, and read detective stories while the dim daylight lasted.
From time to time I ventured into the downpour under my new umbrella to call on the only patient in the one-room hospital, a Jewish refugee from Vienna whom I believed to be dying, he was so yellow and so thin, burning with fever. Probably he had malaria and jaundice. Having escaped the Nazi gas chambers, he outlived the Blitz in London as a fire warden. By one of the wild vagaries that mark war, the British government then sent this man, whose original business was the manufacture of perfumes, to Tortola to start a tobacco industry. Of course tobacco could not be grown here and he wanted either to die, as release from the hopeless boredom of the island, or get back to England and join the British Army. He had a clearer idea than anyone else in the area of the reason for this war and a fierce need to take active part in it.
I felt callous leaving him to die there, among kind but uncomprehending strangers. At least he could talk to me, we both knew the Nazis, we had the bond of hatred for them. But when the rain stopped after three days I said goodbye, falsely assuring him of future health. Perhaps a year later, he sent a photograph of a plump smiling man. Christmas cards followed. He had settled on St Thomas, married, was employed in some business connected to perfumery and delighted with his new life. I love happy endings, and specially from that war; there were all too few.
The Pilot set sail at seven in the morning, me waving graciously to the public, Mr de Castro Senior and an elderly American whose son was stationed in Australia. The American had shaken my hand in the way one salutes bereaved relatives after a funeral and said, “My dear, I hope you know what you’re doing.” Having before me two small snapshots, brownish, out of focus, showing the Pilot and the crew and me, I understand his farewell-forever manner.
The Pilot, pictured upon the sea, looks like the celluloid sailboats children play with in bathtubs. The other photo records me, centre front, dressed in my comfy kit of short shorts, shirt, sandals, surrounded by barefooted black men: Carlton (Cahltin) with a bandana tied about his neck for extra swank, George (Gawge) a lovely giant wearing a felt hat without brim and ragged trousers to mid calf, Walter (Walteh) in dirty singlet and shorts, Voosten bare to the waist and Irvine in a shirt which he wore open and flapping like a coat over underpants. They look villainous. I thought them sweet apart from Carlton who was too vain, and had no qualms about that dubious boat.
The Pilot had once been white. The deck sloped downwards without guardrail. The deckhouse was five feet high and five feet square, in which I could neither stand nor lie nor even sit since it was like a sauna. Amidships on the port side a small dinghy was lashed to the deck. You could see worm holes in it and they had one oar; at best it would have held three people before it filled and sank. There were no lifebelts, no sextant, no log, no barometer and no charts. A compass wobbled on the stern by the tiller. The single sail resembled a patchwork quilt.
The dinghy was not as long as I am. Carlton put the hatch cover in it, making a peculiar seating or lying arrangement, a convex curve for two thirds of the length then a drop to a concave curve. I spread the blankets on this surface, placed the pillow at one end, slid my legs under the seat and established myself with umbrella for sunshade. All I had to do was duck when the boom swung over.
The sea looked flat calm, a deception. Long swells moved like muscles under the skin of the water. The Pilot dipped and rose, in short jerky movements. Reclining as much as possible in the dinghy, I didn’t feel too good but refused to think about it. If this was the Pilot’s best behaviour in the best weather, I preferred not to look ahead. Hours later, still sailing along the shores of Tortola, we were accosted by another smaller sail-boat.
Carlton called to the passers-by, an old man and his son: “Whatsaysay, Mon, whatsaysay?” shouted Carlton.
The old man shouted, “Oh good, Mon, where you goin?”
“Right roun de globe, boy.”
“What you cargo?” asked the son.
“De lady,” said Carlton and all men on both boats shrieked with laughter.
Five hours later the crew began to bellow at each other which was the way orders were given and obeyed. It was mid-afternoon and we tied up to the pier on the beautiful beach at Virgin Gorda because Irvine had to get money from his wife. “She de cashier,” he said. With Collier’s dollars, divided according to rank, and their own, each man would buy what he could and sell where he could; free enterprise trading.
A black man with white hair and moustache, a white topee and rose-coloured dark glasses received me in the name of His Britannic Majesty. He was Mr Samuel Flax, the government agent for this island. He gave me a can opener as I had left mine in the Social Inn and guided me to the loveliest cove I had seen anywhere in the world. “Oh Moddom the war is very hard,” said Mr Flax. “We don’t get no flour and such practically. And those poor men what gets torpedoed. Yes Moddom we can only hope the Almighty will watch over us.”
The war seemed too far away to be true, no work for the Almighty on Virgin Gorda, and this cove was a place where nothing had changed since time began, a half circle of white sand, flanked by huge squarish smooth rocks, the rocks overlapping to form cool caves and the water turquoise blue above the furrows of the sandy sea bed. George slashed open some coconuts for me to drink. Mr Flax warned me against touching the leaves of the Manchineel tree if my skin was wet because I’d get blisters big as a two-shilling piece, and they left me to one of the three greatest joys in life, swimming naked in clean tropical sea.
At ten that night, we sailed. The moon was up, new and clear, and the sky was soft bl
ack, dusted with stars, the sort of sky guaranteed to engender romantic love affairs on cruise ships. We were heading out into the Anegada Passage, mystical name, and famous as a hunting ground for submarines. This was the longest lap of the journey, ninety miles between Virgin Gorda and Anguilla. Though feeling a certain distaste for the hatch cover mattress, I was thrilled by the beauty, the silence, the great sense of space, and excitement: we were in the real war zone, who knew what might not happen. Then the rain started and I cowered beneath my umbrella and it was surprisingly cold. The night took on the most unpleasant quality of nights which is to be long. At sunrise, Virgin Gorda looked within swimming distance. At noon it was still as close. Wind barely flapped the sail.
The special motion of the Pilot, when becalmed, was a bumping jig in one place. Being becalmed sounds like floating on a lilo in a swimming pool. Not so, anyway not so aboard the Pilot. Jig isn’t exactly right either, the boat bumped and rolled simultaneously.
The day before, with the wind to blow off the smell, I thought the crew’s mealtime rough stuff. Gawge, the cook, set up a charcoal brazier alongside the dinghy, doubtless because the dinghy would prevent the brazier and pots and food from sliding off the deck. He then cooked a pan bread called Dumb Johnny Cake, tea, and rice with fish and onions. In the windless heat, sun burning on my umbrella and the brazier burning beside me, the smell of fish and onions added to the rolling jig made me feel excessively queer.
I had not foreseen seasickness and had been actively seasick only twice that I could remember but remembered it well as one of the worst ails that flesh is heir to. I never reached the active stage; I stayed permanently queasy. Numb nausea reduced my hopes to a single aim in life: get off the Pilot. This was years before I understood the spiritual and medicinal value of liquor; when alone I carried none.
Travels with Myself and Another Page 8