That gave Stan an idea. World Vision didn’t have a US-owned ship—they had been chartering the Cal Loader from a company in Singapore. But what if they did? What if World Vision bought a ship of its own? President Carter’s directive was addressed to currently owned and registered vessels; would the presidential directive apply to ships that would be purchased in the future?
Stan immediately flew to Washington to seek a ruling from the State Department, and he was elated when the ruling came back: any ship owned by an American entity, including World Vision US, would fall under President Carter’s directive—and that included ships that would be purchased in the future.
Washington’s unexpected change in policy had just solved Stan’s biggest problem. Now all he needed was a ship, one big enough to handle the unpredictable weather in the South China Sea. A suitable ship was soon found—a fourteen-hundred-ton cargo freighter currently being used to haul coconut meat from the Solomon Islands to Singapore, where it was processed into coconut oil and copra cake to feed livestock. The Cal Loader had barely tipped the scales at 345 tons, but this ship had more than four times the bulk and a deep enough draft to allow it to stand up to the worst weather the region could throw at it. The ship was purchased for $200,000, and it took another $100,000 to completely overhaul it and make it ready for its new use.
The only detail that remained was to get the ship registered because every ship operating in international waters was required to fly the flag of some country. If it failed to do so, the ship could be considered derelict, and according to international maritime law, it could be seized and sold for salvage by anyone who wanted it. Even if Stan had been willing to take that risk, the port authorities in Singapore would never have allowed the ship to leave port without a flag, which meant that Operation Seasweep was on permanent hold until the ship could be registered.
The ship was too old to be registered in the United States. It would never have met US Coast Guard requirements, and it would have been too expensive and too time-consuming to try to bring it up to standards. Besides, a US-registered ship was required to employ a crew of all US citizens, and American salaries were astronomical compared to those in Southeast Asia at the time. No country in the region was willing to register the ship for fear that granting approval to the ship might be mistaken for granting approval to its mission, so it was eventually decided that the ship would sail under a “flag of convenience,” which essentially meant that some small country would be willing to ignore the ship’s poor condition in exchange for a hefty fee.
The ship was eventually registered in Honduras, and that made Operation Seasweep a truly international venture. It was an American-owned ship flying a Central American flag with an Indonesian captain, an Indian doctor, Chinese nurses, and an Asian crew—all they were lacking was a French chef.
The ship had to be given a name, and since Operation Seasweep was already achieving international recognition, it was decided to christen the ship with the same name: Seasweep.
But Seasweep had been purchased in Singapore and would dock and sail from Singapore Harbor, and that made the Singaporean authorities acutely aware of the ship’s mission and purpose. The United States had guaranteed resettlement to any refugee that Seasweep picked up, but that did not mean that Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, or any other nation of first asylum actually believed that promise. Those nations knew that even if America made good on her promise, it would still mean more refugees for them to deal with on a temporary basis, so to avoid that problem, they began to apply pressure to the Singapore-based members of Seasweep’s crew: the captain, doctor, nurses, and several crew members were privately warned that if Seasweep attempted to return to Singapore with any refugees aboard, the ship would be refused entrance to the harbor, which meant none of them would be allowed to return to their homes and families. Stan wasn’t sure if he would end up stranded in the South China Sea with a shipload of refugees that no one wanted, and his crew wasn’t sure if they would even be able to return home.
So it was with fear and trepidation that on the afternoon of July 6, 1979, Stan Mooneyham took a launch from Clifford Pier to join his crew aboard a converted cargo vessel named Seasweep, waiting at anchor in Singapore Harbor to begin their second year’s mission—this time not only to resupply the boat people but, he hoped, to rescue them.
No one knew exactly what to expect this year. It was not the best time to put to sea since they were leaving in July and the typhoon season had already begun. Seasweep was supposed to be large enough to handle a typhoon, but no one on board had actually experienced a typhoon, and no one particularly wanted to.
But it was an ideal time to go fishing for refugees with sixty-five thousand ethnic Chinese pouring out of Vietnam every month. Since the beginning of the year, the Malaysian government had towed more than fifty-five thousand refugees back out to sea, which meant Seasweep would be able to rescue boat people coming and going.
Seasweep left Singapore Harbor just before midnight on July 6, and once it passed Horsburgh Lighthouse, it turned to port and followed the Malaysian coastline, being careful to remain in international waters outside the twelve-mile limit. The crew stood watch in four-hour shifts around the clock because, unlike commercial vessels, the derelict refugee boats rarely carried lights and would be easy to miss in the darkness. Seasweep itself carried a bright flashing beacon atop its forward mast to make it easily visible to other ships and avoid collisions. Ted Agon, who was aboard that night and would eventually become Seasweep’s project chief, would have to climb that mainmast two weeks later to replace a burned-out bulb in the middle of Super Typhoon Hope, the worst typhoon to pass through the South China Sea in almost a decade. The typhoon’s waves were so enormous that they swallowed an entire boat carrying four hundred refugees off the coast of Macao, and no trace of the boat or the refugees was ever found. Seasweep was caught in violent seas on the western edge of that typhoon, and whenever the ship dropped into a trough, the surrounding water was taller than the mast and rendered the ship invisible. Because Seasweep operated near major shipping lanes, there was a very real danger that a massive container ship or tanker could cut Seasweep in half before anyone knew the ship was there. In that kind of weather it was absolutely imperative to have a working masthead light; but in the hurricane-force winds, Seasweep’s mast was whipping back and forth like a metronome, and no one in the crew was willing to climb the mast to replace the bulb. Ted Agon had to do it himself, and he will never forget clinging to the mast with one hand while he desperately tried to pry the beacon’s rusted lamp housing open with the other.
But the seas were much calmer on the night of July 6, and as Seasweep steamed northwest at a conservative eight knots, everyone on deck stared into the darkness and hoped to be the first one to spot a refugee boat—but no one did. From time to time Seasweep would turn aside to take a closer look at some small vessel that couldn’t be positively identified at a distance, but none of them turned out to be refugee boats.
The next day they continued to follow their course up the Malaysian coast, but even in the daylight there were no refugee boats to be found. Seasweep encountered all kinds of commercial vessels: container ships, cargo freighters, oil tankers, auto carriers, and fishing trawlers of every imaginable shape and size. Half of the world’s commercial shipping passes through the South China Sea, and it seemed incredible to the crew of Seasweep that so many ships would pass by dying refugees without stopping to help. But statistics confirmed it: with all the refugee boats leaving Vietnam during the first seven months of that year, only forty-seven boats had been rescued.
The following day brought similar results—commercial ships everywhere, but not a refugee boat in sight. It was discouraging to the crew that with so many refugee boats at sea, they had encountered none, and Stan began to wonder if Seasweep had journeyed so far up the Malaysian coast that it had moved out of the path most refugee boats followed from Vietnam to Malaysia. That night the skies were cloudy, and the stars we
re unavailable for navigation, so under cover of darkness Seasweep headed west toward Malaysian territorial waters to take a location bearing from the lighthouse near Kota Bharu. Just as he thought, Seasweep had traveled almost to the border between Malaysia and Thailand, so Stan gave the order for the ship to head northeast in the direction of Vietnam and pick up speed. That was a wise strategy since the Malaysian coastline was more than five hundred miles long, and a refugee boat could land anywhere along it. Five hundred miles was a lot of water for Seasweep to have to search, but its new course would allow it to focus on a much smaller area by intercepting refugee boats not long after they left Vietnam.
By dawn on July 9, Seasweep was directly south of the Mekong Delta and headed east across a strip of water that had come to be known as “refugee alley.”
Twenty-Three
ENDLESS SEA
NINETY-THREE PEOPLE PRESSING SKIN AGAINST SKIN made the boat unbearably hot on our first day at sea. No one said much that day because everyone was still in shock from the realization of what had been done to us the day before. The Malaysians had lied to us. They had never intended to take us to a refugee camp at all, and they told us the trip would take only two or three hours in order to convince us to leave everything behind. Food, water, additional clothing—everything we now desperately needed we had abandoned back on the beach. The Malaysians’ last-minute inventory had been nothing but a ruse to rob us of anything else of value, to keep us from taking it with us to the bottom of the sea. The receipts they gave us were worthless pieces of paper. They were just like the worthless receipts the Nazis gave the Jews when they stripped them of their possessions before packing them into boxcars like cattle. The Nazis understood that bureaucracy has a calming effect when people feel out of control.
No one knew what to do next because there was nothing to do. Our engine didn’t work, and even if it had, we had no fuel. There was no sail to unfurl or even an oar to row with. There was no compass, and even if there had been one, it couldn’t have told us how far we were from land. Without engine or sail the tiller was useless, and without power our boat was at the mercy of the shifting tides and rolling sea. Even if someone aboard had possessed the foresight and navigational skill to take a bearing from the stars the night before, the knowledge would have been useless. Our boat drifted, turned, slid silently down the side of the swells, and turned again. We were pointed in every direction and headed in none of them.
We could have been anywhere. A twenty-hour tow at even a modest nine knots would have put our boat more than two hundred miles out to sea, and once the sun dropped below the horizon, we had no way to tell which direction we were traveling. The South China Sea was a 1.3-million-square-mile body of water, and all we knew for certain was that we were somewhere in the middle of it.
The only food we had was the scraps a few people had stuffed into their pockets, and the only water was a few small cups and containers that some had thought to grab as we left the beach. There was nothing on the boat that could help us survive. It was a fishing boat, not a lifeboat, so it carried no emergency supplies—no food, no water, and no flares or dye markers to help make our tiny speck visible against an infinite sea.
The night we set sail from Ca Mau and journeyed down the narrow Ganh Hao River, irritating black flies had circled our heads and picked at us all night. We had hoped to escape them when we reached the open sea, but we were disappointed to discover that flies inhabit the oceans too. Now they appeared again, and the annoyance only added to our anger and frustration. On the voyage from Vietnam to Malaysia, some of the passengers had become seasick, and that boat was much larger and far more stable than this one; our tiny fishing boat bobbed in the water like a cork, and it wasn’t long before people began to double over and retch.
The other three boats had disappeared from view the previous day, and we could only hope that one of them was having better luck than we were. Maybe one of them would manage to repair their engine, or maybe they would drift to land and send someone back to search for us. We knew it was a remote possibility, but any hope is important in a life-and-death situation.
By the end of the first day, all the water and food had been consumed. Most of it had been given to the children, who suffered most from the heat and couldn’t understand the reason for their misery. My mother tried in vain to nurse the twins, but her body was thin and frail, and the stress of the last few weeks combined with her recent hemorrhage and hospital stay had caused her milk to dry up completely. At eighteen months old the twins needed more than milk to survive, but milk had been a significant addition to their meager diet, and now it was gone.
All we could do was sit and wait, and the heat that slowly increased through the day turned the boat into a floating slow cooker. The children found it intolerable to have to remain seated for long hours in a rigid and cramped position, and they longed to move and stretch their legs—but there was no room to move and no place to go. The elderly moaned because of their stiff limbs and aching joints, but there was no relief for them. The real agony was that no one knew how long we would have to endure these conditions or if rescue would ever come at all. No one dared to say what everyone was thinking—that we were all just waiting to die, and the process could be long and terrible.
We had no relief at all until sunset that first day. Even then the temperature dropped only a few degrees, but at least we had a brief reprieve from the baking sun. When the sun disappeared below the western horizon, the blue-gray sea turned inky black, and the sky settled over us like a shroud. During the daytime, the sea had looked infinite and made us feel that we were nothing but a microscopic speck of living dust, but at night the darkness closed in around us and somehow made us feel larger but even more alone—as though we were floating in a dark room with no way to reach the walls. Our sleep was fitful and constantly interrupted by the cries of children and the shifting of aching bodies struggling to change positions.
We began the second day exhausted and weak from the day before, which shortened tempers considerably. Everyone stared at the horizons, hoping to spot a passing ship that could help us. Maybe the Malaysians had abandoned us somewhere near a commercial shipping lane; that would have been the compassionate thing to do though the night before the Malaysian sailors had not demonstrated much compassion. If our boat happened to drift near a big commercial shipping lane, like the Singapore–Bangkok line, a passing freighter might spot us and come to our rescue. But the odds were against us because we were just a flyspeck in the middle of an endless sea. A crewman standing on a freighter’s deck thirty feet above the water could see only about seven miles to the horizon, and seven miles is a microscopic margin of error in the vastness of the South China Sea. And even if a ship did happen to pass within seven miles of us, these were commercial ships with schedules to keep and cargo to deliver. Why would they be any more compassionate than the Malaysians had been?
Still, it was possible that a ship would pass by, and searching for one at least gave us something to do. But no ship ever appeared, which added a feeling of hopelessness to our fear, frustration, and anger.
On our third day at sea, we spotted a rocky outcropping, about twice the size of a house, protruding from the water. It was much too small to be called an island but more than large enough to reduce our boat to tinder if we happened to crash into it—there was a strong wind that day driving our boat directly toward it. We assumed our boat had been floating almost motionless for the last two days, but the rock was a true stationary point; when we saw it, we realized that our boat actually had been drifting fast.
Our boat had been abandoned in an area known as the Sunda Shelf, a region of the South China Sea so shallow that geologists wonder if it was once a land bridge that allowed ancient travelers to walk dry-footed between Southeast Asia and the Malay Peninsula. When the Titanic went down off the southern coast of Newfoundland, it sank in two and a half miles of water, but the water under our boat was fewer than a hundred feet deep in some places. Th
at was more than deep enough to drown in but shallow enough to allow rocks like this one to poke up from the bottom. Our boat began to rush directly toward the rock, but for some reason we would veer off at the last moment and pass by unharmed; then the strange current would turn us around and force us to make another pass. Each time we thought we were about to crash into the rock, our boat would narrowly miss it and drift on. It was a strange experience that added a touch of terror to an otherwise monotonous day.
By the fourth day people were so hungry and thirsty and weak from constant exposure to the sun that they just slumped against each other in exhaustion. Some began to hang over the sides of the ship and stare into the water, where they saw slender silver fish gliding back and forth beneath the boat. One man came to the conclusion that the fish were tiny sharks; and he warned us that if there were baby sharks near the surface, there must have been a monstrous mother shark lurking down below that was waiting to eat us. No one bothered to argue with the man because by that time none of us was thinking any more clearly than he was.
My mother and father began to have fantastic nightmares that bordered on hallucination; my mother had a vision that the eighteen-month-old twins were rowing our boat and working as hard as they could to rescue the rest of us. My mother started to display the first signs of heatstroke, and nine-year-old Yen actually passed out from the heat. My father had to slap her to bring her out of it, and my mother had to pry her mouth open and place tea leaves on her tongue to help her produce saliva. Bruce sat farther forward in the boat than the rest of us, and because he was a growing boy, he struggled the most with hunger. When his hunger pangs became unbearable, he would beg our mother or grandmother for nonexistent food, and the only way he could get to them was to crawl around the railing of the boat. My mother was always terrified that he would slip and fall into the sea.
Where the Wind Leads Page 17