Slow Boats to China

by Gavin Young

  I spent most of my seven days with Dennis Beale, and several evenings under those areca palms. He told me of the fauna of the islands – of the robber crabs, for instance: big creatures, shaped like a giant fist, with seven or eight legs. They were also called coconut crabs because they would scrabble up the slender, silvery trunks, pluck a coconut down, husk it fibre by fibre and, when their huge claws had broken open the shell, drink the water and eat the kernel.

  I should return one day, Beale said, to see all the creatures unique to the Andaman region: the regal python, the Nicobar quail, the Andaman red-breasted parakeet and the saltwater crocodiles.

  I had seen a ‘Dugong Creek’ marked on a map, and asked about it. Dugongs are rare sea creatures with heavy bodies, not unlike seals, with big blunt, whiskered heads. Olden-day sailors often mistook them for mermaids – heaven knows why.

  ‘The sea cow?’ said Beale. ‘Rare now. The aborigines kill them sometimes, I think.’

  *

  The headline I had seen in the Daily Telegrams about government concern for the welfare of the tribes obviously reflected the truth; everyone seemed agreed on that. The matter was literally one of survival or extinction, and the government had a difficult task. The tribes of the Andaman Islands need all the protection they can get. Two of the four tribes, the Jarawas and the Sentinelese (they inhabit Sentinel Island), are ‘outside the scope of friendly contact’, according to a government report of 1979. Few survive: they number only two hundred and fifty, and fifty people, respectively. As for the two ‘friendly’ tribes, the Great Andamanese and the Onges, only twenty-four of the former and ninety-four of the latter remain. No wonder the government is engaged in protecting them from outsiders. Diseases introduced by foreigners, including the convicts, almost decimated them. The more friendly they were, the more they caught syphilis, measles, mumps and influenza.

  The curator of the excellent museum in Port Blair showed me tribal spears and arrows whose iron heads were presumed to have been made from vessels shipwrecked here in the nineteenth century or earlier. But there were no blowpipes or poisoned darts. In that detail, then, as the emphatic lady on the Nancowry had insisted, Conan Doyle was ‘off his rocker’.

  The museum showed a documentary film of a few years ago in which the camera crew’s boat was seen approaching the beach of Sentinel Island and facing a hostile reception committee of aborigines gathered on the shore. Short, slim, muscular men, practically or completely naked, raced down to the surf – and waist-high into it – obviously beside themselves with fear or fury, shaking their fists at the boatful of Indian intruders. Others waved spears. Still others fired bows and arrows from the shore or from the water, and one arrow struck a cameraman in the boat on the thigh. It was impossible to land.

  In a fascinating book on the Andamans by an Indian writer, Iqbal Singh, I found an account by Lieutenant Blair in 1788 of the first meeting with these tribes:

  I met two canoes, and gave the people which were in them, some bottles with which they were highly pleased, or seemed to be so, but to my astonishment one of them suddenly jumped out of his canoe, ran within twenty yards of the boat and shot all his arrows at us, which luckily did not hurt, though most struck the boat.

  This, of course, mirrored what I saw in the Indian documentary film shot in the 1970s.

  The Sentinelese, anthropologists say, are probably the world’s only surviving paleolithic people. But these prototypes of Tonga are not pygmies. The average height of the men is four foot ten and a half inches; of the women, four foot six. Their origins are obscure. As they are Negritos, not Negroes, they may have the same ancestors as the people of the Malacca peninsula in Malaysia, or of the Philippines.

  In 1874 two tribal boys nicknamed Kiddy Boy and Topsy were taken by kind Englishmen to Calcutta. (Topsy was a name applied as often to boys as to girls; other common names were Snowball, Friday and Crusoe.) They did not transplant well. Topsy died of ‘inflammation of the lungs’, and Kiddy Boy was soon carried off by consumption.

  *

  Captain Beale and Francis, the young teacher at the government college, took me sightseeing after Bala had sailed back to Madras in the Nancowry, giving us two hoots on his siren at Perseverance Point.

  Beale obligingly posed for me on the trapdoor of the double gallows of the Cellular Jail, the museum and monument that once housed thousands of prisoners – a tall, austere system of single-windowed cells fanning out from a central tower like the spokes of a wheel. It was completed in 1910, and only part of it is used now. A large room on the ground floor is given over to photographs of the Indian martyrs of the struggle for independence in the first half of the twentieth century.

  There were pictures of convicts in ‘punishment dress’ – a sacking shirt; of men convicted of ancient murders: the Cornwallis Street shooting, the Barisal police inspector’s murder case, and other cases involving dacoity, gang robbery or murder. An official notice of 1908 admonished: ‘Transportation entails hard labour under strict discipline with only such food as is necessary for health….’

  There were statistics: Three months after the establishment of the penal settlement in 1858 the total number of convicts received was 773, of whom the following had already died:

  In hospital 61

  Escaped and not captured (probably died of starvation or killed by savages) 140

  Suicide 1

  Hanged for attempting escape 87

  By 1874 there were 7567 prisoners at Port Blair, of whom 5575 were murderers. And the figures bounded upwards. In time, a number of prisoners through good behaviour became ‘ticket-of-leave’; among other labours these men cleared the lower slopes of Mount Harriet. This – or rather the fact that their desire was to be clean-shaven – accounted for the murder of the viceroy, Lord Mayo, on 8 February 1872.

  As it happened, Lord Mayo was interested in building a sanatorium for the convicts suffering from tuberculosis and, just before leaving the islands at the end of an official visit, he walked up Mount Harriet. ‘How beautiful,’ he said at the top. This would be the ideal place for the consumptives to recover.

  It was dusk when he and his entourage reached the little jetty – I walked on it – to embark on his steam launch, and the viceroy stepped quickly in front of the rest to descend the stairs to embark.

  Now people in the rear heard a noise as of ‘the rush of some animal’ and saw ‘a man fastened like a tiger on the back of the Viceroy’. British officers and native guards seized the assailant on the spot while the Viceroy, who had staggered over the pierside, was dimly seen rising up in the knee-deep water. He was hoisted up and seated on a rude native cart, but the blood streamed out of a wound in his back. ‘After a moment he fell heavily backwards. “Lift up my head,” he said faintly. And said no more.’

  His murderer, Sher Ali, went to the gallows on Viper Island. A massive Pathan convicted for a murder at Peshawar, he was the barber for the ticket-of-leave men on Mount Harriet. ‘God gave me an order,’ he said when questioned. On the gallows he shouted, ‘Brothers, I have killed your enemy and you are my witness that I am a Muslim.’ He died reciting the Koran.

  ‘In the midst of life’ – you can barely see the inscription in the murky light that filters down through the trees of Ross Island onto the graves in the British cemetery opposite the Cellular Jail. ‘To the Memory of Lawrence, the Infant Son of … 1863.’ The stones are half obliterated by moss, rot and age. ‘Sergeant William Henry Irwin, “B” Company, 2nd. Bn. 10th Foot….’ ‘Gone before, but in our love never forgotten.’ Roots like writhing snakes have forced up the stones. Creepers smother them or have smashed them into fragments. Inquisitive spotted deer sniff at them and the splendour of blue kingfishers and peacocks seems inappropriate under the disembodied tower of a ghostly church through which a tree has grown, withered and died.

  Beale and his children accompanied me to Viper Island, the oldest part of the prison colony: before the Cellular Jail was built here, the convicts had either tents or shac
ks thatched with atap or nipa palm leaves.

  The little island looked deserted and was very silent when we landed at an old stone jetty projecting from a crude sea wall and walked up a slope glowing green as emerald in an early sun. A few men appeared carrying darbs, the tender coconut of the Andamans, and Beale hailed them. ‘The water of the tender coconut,’ he told me, ‘is the purest in the world. You could mix it with medicines, like distilled water, and inject it into a patient.’

  ‘Can we have a coconut, Daddee?’ asked Gavin. ‘I’m so thirstee.’

  We sat on an old wall and the men hacked off the tops of several coconuts.

  ‘Any ghosts here?’ I asked them.

  ‘No, sahib, we’ve never seen any on this island.’

  The gallows had been erected at the top of a small knoll above the jetty. A ruined building, red-brick, cupolaed, more like a temple, now stood there among coconut trees. The old guardhouse was beneath it: six arches in a colonnade, then a brick-vaulted chamber. Springy grass covered the condemned cells.

  We wandered over gradually rising green knolls, skirting half-buried causeways, half-hidden brick stairways, the surviving half of a red-brick sentry box. In a hollow the coconut cultivators have built atap huts, just as the first convicts, who had planted the first of the coconut plantations, had done.

  ‘There’s a cemetery at the highest point of the island,’ Nicholas Beale said. ‘Shall we find it, uncle?’

  ‘Of course,’ I said.

  We came to a frangipani tree, spreading more white blossoms and smelling more sweetly than any I can remember and, beyond it, a crumbling flight of brick stairs.

  ‘That’s it. The cemetery’s up there, uncle.’

  We started to climb the stairs, but soon they turned an awkward corner and disappeared into a wilderness of scraggy bushes, creepers and spiteful thorn-fringed trees. Two long thorns lodged deep in my shoulder, but we pushed on, drenched in sweat, wrenching and tearing our way upwards to the hidden graves.

  We never reached them. They weren’t far ahead; in fact, there were old stones underfoot already, but the undergrowth was too dense to be stormed. The light under the trees had become dim, and my will to press on was flagging; the thorns in my shoulders were beginning to feel like Tonga’s poisoned darts. Cut off from Nicholas Beale by a bamboo thicket, in my imagination I could hear Sher Ali’s triumphant roar from the gallows down the hill: ‘Brothers, I have killed your enemy.’

  I was relieved to find Dennis Beale sitting under the frangipani. He and the innocent sun banished ghosts from the green slopes of little Viper Island. ‘I wish I’d been born twenty years earlier,’ he said, looking around with a planter’s eye. ‘I might have bought some land just here.’

  *

  The day I left Port Blair it was not a happy moment saying goodbye to the Beales and to Francis. I was appalled by the thought of what I might have missed if I hadn’t run into Tom Abraham in Colombo. But my visa had expired and another ship, the m.v. Harsha Vardhana, was at Haddoo Wharf preparing to leave for Calcutta. I had packed and paid my bill at the Megapode’s Nest guest-house. There was nothing for it but to go aboard and prepare to follow Bala out of the narrow gap between Perseverance Point and the dying graves of Ross Island.

  Twenty three

  Biff! Bop! I opened my cabin door and stared. At 11.00 p.m. an elderly Bengali in cotton pyjamas was staggering about as though possessed, wildly thumping a whimpering youth of eighteen who was trying to protect himself from a hail of punches and slaps.

  ‘Yow … yow … yow,’ the enraged Bengali howled with every blow of his skinny arms as they reeled about the empty corridor ricocheting from wall to wall. Were they drunk? Should I help?

  They moved slowly but violently down the corridor away from me, punching and staggering, until at the far end a woman in a sari appeared at a cabin door and leaped into the mêlée. ‘No! No!’ she cried. Momentarily she was the blurred centre of a flurry of resounding slaps, then the three of them fell through the door in a tangle and out of sight. Another ‘Yow’ or two and a muffled thud could be heard, then silence.

  At breakfast in the dining room next morning, I looked around and saw the battling trio of the night before. The elderly Bengali was happily dribbling his porridge. His son, unbruised – I passed close enough to check – simpered beside him, pulling long rinds of bacon from his mouth like a conjurer drawing strings of coloured handkerchiefs from his sleeve. The lady in the sari sat opposite them both, smoking a cigarette and regarding them fondly. Did I detect a dark smudge on her left cheekbone just below the eye?

  The voyage from Port Blair to Calcutta took two quietly enjoyable days in spite of the quirks of the passengers. Surprisingly, we were on time despite the fascinating revelation that the little people who inhabit the banks of the Hooghly river, the threshold of the great port, have stopped all navigation on it by big ships at night, not out of any anarchistic desire to sabotage the port, but out of a collector’s love of the brass light fittings on the buoys that mark the safe channel in the waterway.

  The Harsha Vardhana, a well-run, modern ship, vibrated more than the old Nancowry but moved twice as fast. In her dining room – a large one – I found myself wondering whether Indian government servants had been starved in the Andamans. They ate like famished refugees, wolfing down potatoes, fat bacon and porridge, grabbing two thick wedges of toast at a time, slapping a quarter of an inch of butter between them and shouting to the waiters as they did so, ‘Bring toast. More butter. More potatoes.’ Cries for second or even third helpings rent the air, crumbs showering from callers’ mouths. I even had the awkward experience of finding the arm of my fat young neighbour between my mouth and the fork with which I was about to convey a mouthful to it: he was collaring the last piece of bread, being too impatient to ask me to pass it. Breakfast on the Harsha Vardhana became an athletic competition: to the fleetest the butter, to the strongest the toast.

  Captain John’s laughing explanation for this phenomenon was that Indian passengers were very much aware of their rights. If they or their government had paid a supplement for food, they would certainly eat as much as they could for the money.

  It was not only the table manners that suffered from such insistence on passengers’ rights. ‘Government servants just don’t worry enough about the fittings. We’ve gone to trouble to make everything nice, and because people’s fares are paid by the government, they don’t care. They pull out the fittings.’ Once upon a time the cabins had telephones, Captain John said, ‘but the children were always calling up the bridge and the engine room, so I had them taken out’.

  The Harsha Vardhana was a modern ship, named after the Indian emperor who ruled between 606 and 647 AD. A generous man of liberal spirit, he had worshipped both Buddha and Shiva. The ship had been built in 1974 for the East Africa run in the days when that continent had a large Asian population. But East Africa had ceased to be profitable. ‘Too many Idi Amins,’ Captain John said. ‘The Indians have left for the UK or India. Aeroplanes can cope with the rest, so here we are.’

  A booklet in my cabin gave more details of the Harsha Vardhana’s parent company, the Shipping Corporation of India, with which I had now sailed twice – three times if one included the Mogul Line vessel to Goa. The pamphlet said that the SCI had a hundred and thirteen ships of over 2.77 million deadweight tonnage, with a new one being added practically every week. ‘The SCI has but one way to look – forward!’ The Harsha Vardhana herself was 132 feet long and could make seventeen knots.

  Captain K. V. John came from Cochin; a good-looking Keralan, he must have been one of the youngest captains in the company’s passenger fleet. He had a deadpan way of talking, and a deadpan humour, too. I told him of my delays in his home town. ‘Strikes!’ he said, rolling his eyes in mock agony. ‘Poor Calcutta. Labour unrest is proving to be the death of that great port. Once we were about to sail, and I heard there’d be a strike of the lock operators. The passengers, hundreds of them, arrived at the
ship. No sailing. We had to send them away – furious, of course. They went to the chief minister, the labour minister, the union boss. No one would do a thing. Finally we sailed, eleven days late. Who suffered? Not the company. Not me. Not the strikers who were paid by the state government. The passengers suffered. The public.’

  And the port. Foreign ships were avoiding Calcutta.

  There was even a surprising, though minor, labour dispute on the Harsha Vardhana. A film was to be shown to the passengers, but the crew wanted to see it too. Furthermore, their spokesman said, they wanted to be seated, just like the passengers. ‘There’s no chance of that,’ said Captain John, quite reasonably, ‘if the passengers come to the film. If there’s room, members of the crew can stand; if not, I’ll have it shown again tomorrow.’

  The first officer reported that this had been received with angry mutterings. But the captain said, ‘I can’t offer any more. This is a passenger ship. If the crew want to see the film, they can see it tomorrow.’

  Later the first officer, an experienced and genial Keralan named Joseph, a good man to negotiate with strikers, returned to say, ‘Some booing. But they finally cooled it.’

  Captain John said, ‘This is not the worst I’ve had. But you have to be strict. I feel I have no choice in these decisions. I have a duty. There are standards, don’t you think?’

  At the Bingo session a young officer called out, ‘One fat lady – number eight. You and me – thirty-three. Watch your son – twenty-one.’