by Gavin Young
Like the rest of North Borneo and Sarawak, Sandakan had experienced the harshness of Japanese occupation, and many of the indigenous Dusuns and Kadusans formed an active underground resistance. It was in this obscure port in 1945 that the Japanese command, seeing that the war was going against them, decided to eliminate the eighteen hundred Australian and six hundred British prisoners of war still alive in Sandakan. They organized a death march through a hundred and fifty miles of malarial swamp and thick jungle to Ranau, a small town at the base of Mount Kinabalu. The prisoners were given a ration of two and a half ounces of rice a day; they supplemented this lethally inadequate diet with snakes, rats – anything they could find. If they collapsed from exhaustion the Japanese soldiers shot them where they lay. Dennis Bloodworth told me that one of the six survivors later recalled that Kinabalu towered over them higher and higher, like a ‘gigantic tombstone’, as they staggered towards it – and for most of them this was exactly what it was.
Those who reached Ranau heard there of the Asia-wide Japanese collapse and surrender. There weren’t many of them. The six Australian survivors – the six hundred British were all dead – weighed, on average, less than sixty-five pounds when loyal Dusuns began to nurse them back to health. Now, thirty-five years later, driving to lunch with this amiable timber expert, it was difficult to imagine such horrors. What was the point?
My host led me into an open verandaed house with polished wood floors. We kicked off our shoes at the door, and from the terrace looked down on a breathtaking view of Sandakan Bay through the spreading foliage of large trees. A European meal was served by his amah, a smiling Muslim girl from Macassar, who moved silently on bare feet. Over the chicken, he told me that his immediate boss had worked in North Borneo for seventeen years, and that his general manager was entering his thirty-fourth year.
‘Almost a working lifetime.’
‘It is, when you consider that these days people who work in the tropics retire in their mid-fifties.’
Sandakan has a very small British community. I wondered if, à la Maugham, there was much infidelity and ‘going off the rails’. ‘No,’ said my host with a smile, ‘these days wives don’t seem to do that sort of thing out here.’ Since he was young, personable, available, and so a natural prey for predatory wives with too much time on their hands, he must have known what he was talking about. Perhaps TV diverted their minds into less active channels.
And the Sabah people?
‘Well, I’m beginning to think there are hidden depths to them. I had thought that without exception they were the nicest people in the world, but not long ago I went to a bar here – a bit sleazy, I admit – and, without warning, someone smashed a chair over my head. Lucky the chair was made of wood.’
‘What did you do?’
‘I was too stunned to do anything, but my friend, a big chap with a black beard, stood up and they all scattered. It shows that some sort of antagonism is simmering near the surface, doesn’t it?’
‘Possibly. But in a dark bar there might be no significance whatever. Just drunkenness.’
‘I hope that’s what it was, because I like the people of Sabah.’
Knowing he was a timber man, I asked him how the government looked after North Borneo’s magnificent forests. In Indonesian Borneo and in Celebes, a cruel and common sight is an expanse of bald mountainside, the result of the ripping out of forest and undergrowth by mechanical grabs imported by greedy foreign timber companies. Once destroyed, rain forests can never be restored.
‘It’s not as bad as that here,’ my host said, ‘although there’s too little replanting, and generally it’s pine trees for quick money.’ He added, ‘I love being in a forest. I like wandering further and further in, you know, so that I almost get a feeling that I’m lost. I love the sense of wave after wave of huge trees stretching up around me, of the canopies of foliage overhead blotting out the sky.’ He laughed. ‘Once I was carried away like that, feeling I was quite lost in the wilds, when suddenly I was astounded to hear a police siren, loud voices and shots. Fifty yards on I found timber workers in a camp gathered round Charlie’s Angels on their telly. That’s modern Sabah for you!’
He told me of a government centre for orang-utans near Sandakan, a praiseworthy effort to save those shaggy, sad-faced creatures from extinction.
‘They have eight orang-utans there. There’s one lovely great male, tame and friendly, except that, oddly enough, he can’t stand European women. Attacks them. God knows why.’
Before I left, my host recommended that I have a word with a local old hand, Dr Nigel Lever, who knew about the Sulu Sea area and Zamboanga.
In the evening I had a drink in the Sandakan Recreation Club, where I found Ian Guthrie, the chief engineer of the Straits Hope, in the bar in an undershirt and old shorts with the bottoms rolled up. He and Captain Barker were sailing next morning, he said. I felt as if a bridge were burning behind me.
Later, in the Nak Hotel café, Dr Lever, a friendly man and unexpectedly young, gave me the name of a satisfactory hotel in Zamboanga, which he described as a pleasant town, if dull. He had crossed the Sulu Sea only by air, but had two things to say about my journey. The first thing was that patients of his – local seafarers, Dusun, Malay and Filipino – had been made to walk the plank in the Sulu Sea. Walk the plank? ‘Usually it’s the boats the pirates are after, not you.’ It was nice to hear that one could be made to walk the plank and still survive to tell the tale.
Dr Lever’s second point was, ‘Don’t on any account let the kumpit captain drop you at any island en route.’
Alone at the table, I reflected that my situation was a little nerve-racking. Zamboanga was a longish way; I didn’t know the kumpit’s captain or the crew from Adam; and I had no firm facts about the Sulu Sea. On the Baluchi boat to Karachi and on the Maldivian launch to Malé, the risks mainly involved the weather or fire. Here the weather hadn’t entered my thoughts. The monsoon rains were ending. There had been rain today, but nothing like earlier downpours that had washed gaping holes in the asphalted roads. Besides, bad weather might keep the pirates and the Moros in port.
Anyway, I thought, the choice has been made for me. After all, I have chosen travel by sea from Europe to Canton; the Sulu Sea is on the way; I must cross it by boat, not by air; and that is that. The priority is clear, the requirement obvious, and it only remains to get on with it. In which case, instead of worrying about it over cold coffee or nervously prodding the plastic tablecloth with the prong of a bent fork, it’s best to go to bed. I went upstairs, stared from the window for a few minutes at the darkened kumpit wharf, read a few soothing paragraphs of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, and slept.
In the morning, John of Special Branch came round early with a police friend, and we had coffee and omelettes together. Slicing the toast in two, the friend said, ‘These pirates of Sulu are very merciless.’
John glanced at me. ‘But they haven’t killed any foreigners yet.’ This wasn’t quite true; recently they had shot the wife of that Norwegian yachtsman and two other European sailors near Jolo Island. Still….
‘Thank you, John,’ I said.
Thirty one
A dark-skinned, half-naked man with the shoulders of a wrestler was squatting on the water’s edge at the kumpit wharf when I arrived. His slanting eyes stared as though he had been waiting for me. Great activity encircled him. A dozen kumpits had nosed in to pick up cargoes and passengers for Tawitawi or islands further down the Sulu chain. Their shouting crews were humping cargo ashore, passengers squatted chattering among their bundles, merchants and captains of kumpits darted about, impatiently flourishing export permits for boats’ manifests or shore passes for themselves and their crews.
I found Inspector Ahmat in his office and gave him my passport, which he stamped at once, muttering, ‘If you must go.’ Presently the captain of my kumpit appeared displaying his gold tooth. ‘We go soon. Please put bag on board.’ Ahmat said, ‘No stopping at islands.’
‘Okay, okay,’ the captain answered, and led the way to the head of the narrow tilted plank spanning a ten-foot gap between the bank and the deck of a yellow kumpit loaded and low in the water. ‘Carlos take bag,’ said the captain, and the dark-skinned wrestler rose from his squatting position and flicked my heavy suitcase onto his shoulder as if it were an empty cardboard box.
I shook hands with Inspector Ahmat and teetered after Carlos down the bucking plank to the heavy bows of the Allimpaya. The boat was stacked almost to the gunwales with thick bundles of branches, each of them perhaps an inch wide and of a dark reddish colour. I wondered what the cargo could be. Carlos led me down under the roof and pushed my suitcase and the smaller bag beneath and behind these bundles so that they were well hidden – a sensible idea, as it turned out – and then was gone with an effortless leap from the deck to the top of a small water tank, from there to the roof and back to the wharf, like Tarzan springing from one jungle branch to the next.
The captain, I was glad to see, was not one for hanging about. From the roof-deck he watched Carlos and other men casting off, and soon the Allimpaya nudged out between the other kumpits into the bay, her engine put-putting parallel to the straggling town and the misted high ridges of forest. Before long, her nose pointed to the slabs of cliff and an island like a small Gibraltar crowned with trees and a lighthouse at the bay’s entrance. Small steamers lay at anchor, and launches and outriggers powered by outboard engines sped between them. At the wharf where Bob Barker had berthed Straits Hope two days before was a sad, empty space.
*
I had slung my binoculars around my neck and kept the Polaroid in my hand. There were several packs of film in the pocket of my anorak, which I hung over one of the two wooden chairs on deck. It was shortly to become an object of almost murderous dispute.
As we came abreast of the miniature Gibraltar, families were visible picnicking on a small beach, and one or two children waved. When we had left them behind, a lumbering motion of the kumpit signalled our emergence from the bay into less protected waters. We were in the Sulu Sea.
‘Why do you enter the Philippines through the back door?’ a dull tenor voice singsonged at my elbow, and I turned to see a tall man of about thirty-five with unusually pale features, more Chinese than Malay or Filipino. ‘I am Haji Daoud,’ he said. ‘I live in Zamboanga. Are you from America?’
‘No, from England.’
‘Why are you going to the Philippines?’
‘I am writing a book.’
‘But why you go to Philippines illegally through the back door?’
‘It’s not illegal, is it? If you come to England you can enter any port you choose if you have a visa.’
‘But Zamboanga is not a port like that. There are many troubles there. Have you heard of the Moros?’
I asked Mr Daoud what he thought about the Moro rebellion and how the Moros were faring against President Marcos’s forces.
‘I think the war is dying,’ he answered. ‘The fighting is very hard for the Moros. They are in jungles, and their families suffer. Who will pay if they are sick? Who will look after their children and wives?’
He’d mentioned ‘many troubles’ in Zamboanga. What else did he mean?
‘Zamboanga is a violent city. Many grenades explode in crowds, in the market, in the movie houses.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘I’ll give you advice. The bad time for grenades is between six and seven o’clock every evening, when the streets are full, so go out in the city only at eight or nine at night. In any case, you will have trouble with the immigration people in Zamboanga.’
I promised to remember his warnings, but I wasn’t going to worry about Zamboanga now; it still seemed a long way off.
‘Do you know what “Haji” means?’ he asked, and when I said I knew it meant that he was a Muslim and had made the pilgrimage to Mecca, a glimmer of satisfaction appeared on his calm Chinese face. ‘I was a Catholic as a boy and was taught by the fathers; that’s why I speak English well. Later I read about Islam and was converted. My conversion stopped my heavy drinking. I drank very much at one time. I am a Muslim now, so I no longer drink.’
I said I supposed he was Chinese by birth. ‘Half Chinese and half Eurasian,’ he said. ‘But Filipino by nationhood, of course.’ He added that he traded between Zamboanga, Jolo and Tawitawi, shipping Coca-Cola in his own kumpit to Tawitawi and bringing back copra. He had visited Sandakan to search for spare parts for his kumpit.
In the wheelhouse the captain was drinking a mug of coffee with an elderly Filipino helmsman. They stared out like human prisoners in a hen house with glass windows. Carlos–Tarzan had changed from brief, ragged shorts into a sarong, and he and two other Filipinos had sidled up to listen to our conversation. Carlos interrupted in a high voice that contrasted with his deep chest. ‘What time ees eet, surr?’
‘Ten thirty,’ I said, showing him my watch.
He peered at it. ‘Lucking thirty minutes beefore eleven?’
‘Yes, lacking thirty minutes to eleven.’
‘I am Carlos,’ he said and produced an identity card, which said ‘Licensed for barter trade only. Issued in Zamboanga City,’ over a smudged photograph.
One of his companions thrust out an open palm for me to shake. ‘I’m crazee man,’ he announced cheerfully as I took it. He was about twenty, rather skinny, and certainly looked zany, a comedian with a swarthy face and a wild long black moustache. He had a very wide mouth, and his lips drew far back to display acres of teeth and gums in a smile that made you grin in return. The blue and yellow sweatband around his head, the red towel around his neck like a kerchief and a yellow shirt gave him something of the look of a very humane and jolly pirate. ‘I’m Jan,’ he cried. ‘Eef you forget my name just theenk of the crazee one!’
‘I don’t think I’ll forget you, Crazy One,’ I told him, and he gambolled about the deck with delight, returning to pull up a shorter, plumper, shyer man of about his age.
‘Thees my friend Jalah,’ he said. ‘Veree good friend, same school in Jolo. Haji Botu’s Inst-it-uto of Arr-ts in Jolo. Jalah wants to see you telescope.’
I handed Jalah the binoculars, and he scanned the deck through the wide end with a baffled expression until I turned them round for him and pushed them up so that he could see the fading line of trees on the horizon behind us.
While Jalah gazed at Sabah, Jan introduced another member of the crew. ‘Thees ees Armando,’ he said, holding a small grubby sparrowlike youngster by the shoulder. ‘He ees second engineer. See, he ees black. His name ees Small-But-Terrible. Please call him that.’
‘Hello, Small-But-Terrible, how are you?’ I said, and he and Jan fell into each other’s arms, howling with laughter. ‘Armando ees kung-fu champion,’ said Jan when he had sufficiently recovered. To demonstrate the truth of this, Small-But-Terrible threw himself into a succession of acrobatic contortions, striking the air with the sides of his hands and kicking out like Bruce Lee, the kung-fu film star. I could see that travelling with Filipinos would be an enlivening experience. I liked them already.
The Haji had watched these shenanigans with a tolerant smile. Now he said, ‘There is food.’ I followed the others to the stern section of the roof, where lunch was waiting in the form of a bowl of cheap, almost powdery rice, a plate of strips of dried fish and a saucer of raw red chillies. We ate with our fingers, standing under the blazing sun and washing down the dry food with water from chipped enamel mugs. Like the Bedouins of Arabia – who would have expected a better meal than this – the Filipinos crammed the rice into their mouths in big handfuls, and the meal was all over in five minutes. The captain asked, ‘Food okay?’ and I said, ‘Food is fine.’ I would lose weight on the Allimpaya, but I hadn’t the least objection to that.
The others washed their mouths as most Asians do after a meal, swilling water around their tongues, using their fingers as toothbrushes to rub their teeth, and spitting over the side. Then they delicately picked remnants of dried fish from their teet
h with matchsticks or splinters of wood torn from the handrail.
I took my mug below and sneaked a mouthful of gin from the bottle in my bag, but for all my stealth I didn’t escape Jan’s curiosity. As I swallowed the gin, his big front teeth, partly veiled by his ragged moustache, appeared at my elbow as they were to do constantly, at all hours, during the whole voyage. Jalah, his less ebullient friend, was just behind him.
‘Do you drink wine?’ Jan asked.
‘Sometimes.’
‘What ees the name of your wine?’
‘It’s called gin.’
‘It’s called jeen-jeen,’ Jan informed Jalah.
‘No, just gin.’
‘Give me leetle beet.’
‘Jan, it’s haram, forbidden to Muslims.’
‘Just a leetle,’ Jan begged, putting on a pleading expression. I gave him a sip and he made a face, then laughed at Jalah. ‘He knows haram. You hear heem? He says haram!’
I was not, I discovered, the only non-Muslim on the Allimpaya. The chief engineer, an elderly man called Jesus with a puffy drinker’s face (though I may do him an injustice; perhaps he never touched a drop), was a Catholic, as were José the cook, Armando (Small-But-Terrible)and Ernesto, a beefy deckhand capable of as many Tarzan-like leaps about the boat as Carlos. As for the old helmsman, who later developed a passion for wearing my anorak during his night watches, I never learned his name or religion. Apart from the nine men who formed the boat’s complement, Haji Daoud and I were passengers pure and simple. The tall, saturnine man I had seen in Inspector Ahmat’s office with the captain, and who resembled Anthony Quinn, was also aboard. He had chartered the Allimpaya and was accompanying his cargo to Cebu City, a port far beyond Zamboanga on the route to Manila. Anthony Quinn, the Haji, the captain, Jan and I were to share the wooden structure that opened off the wheelhouse and contained five small, narrow bunks.