Slow Boats to China

by Gavin Young

  There was other music, of course. There is a saying in Manila: ‘Filipinos have survived Spanish and American domination: four hundred years in a convent and fifty years in Hollywood.’ Behind the broad sweep of Roxas Boulevard with its palm trees, skyscrapers, hotels and supper clubs, the Quick-Quack coffee lounge leaned against the Guernica restaurant. There the strolling guitarists, Filipinos of Basque origin, bawl out ‘Arriba España’ and ‘Valencia’ until you are tempted to cry ‘Enough!’ or beg them to switch to the songs they keep up their broad gaucho sleeves for British visitors: ‘Onder Neath Ze Arches’ or ‘Mi-bee it’s bee-corz oi’m a Londoner’.

  I liked the smiles and Spanish–American accents of Manila (‘hot dogs’ pronounced ‘hut dugs’, ‘leisure’ becoming ‘lee-shure’) and the sign my smiling taxi driver from the docks had pinned on his dashboard:

  Grant me, Ο Lord,

  A Steady Hand and a Watchful Eye

  That No one

  Shall be Hurt As I pass by.

  It says something for the Filipinos that they affectionately bestow on their public-transport vehicles the name ‘love buses’, and paint large imprints of scarlet lips on their sides. There is even an attractive liveliness to the American-style tabloid headlines, which refer to city councillors as ‘city dads’ and to congressmen as ‘solons’. Two headlines I noted: ‘Baron Slay Brains Tagged’, which referred to the arrest of the mastermind in the case of a kidnapped foreign nobleman. ‘Mayor Nixes Graft Charges, Blames Ex-dad’ meant that the present mayor of Manila had denied accusations of corruption and blamed his predecessor.

  *

  Hong Kong was the next stop, and there was no time to dawdle. A well-named taxi driver, Ramon ‘Speed-boy’ Perez, drove me to see John Swire’s representative in Manila, Duncan Pring, who had dug up ancient artifacts in Central America and won a Ph.D. in archaeology from London University before joining Swire’s.

  Pring delivered me in the afternoon to the shipping agency that looked after Swire’s shipping interests in Manila. There, in a neon-lit first-floor office on Roxas Boulevard, Mr Xavier Pertierra, the general manager of the Soriamont Steamship Agencies, gave me the latest news of the Hupeh. He thought that she had left New Guinea, which meant that, weather permitting, she should reach Manila in a couple of days. Another Swire vessel, the Poyang, was likely to be delayed in Hong Kong, he said. Yet another Swire ship, the Asian Jade, was on its way, but it was a container ship and not so pretty. The Hupeh had an owner’s cabin, he added. She had a nice name too.

  The Hupeh seemed certain to stop a day and a night in Taiwan, probably at the port of Keelung (Chi-lung), on her way to Hong Kong. Mr Pertierra urged me to get myself a visa from the Taiwanese consul, for I wouldn’t be allowed ashore there without one.

  Manila is one of those capital cities – they are in the majority these days – in which the Taiwanese consulate must pretend to be something else. Marcos’s government recognized mainland China; officially, therefore, the Philippines has no Taiwanese diplomatic connection at all.

  Duncan Pring guided me to the right building, pointing out where the office sheltered coyly behind a notice – ‘Pacific Economic and Cultural Centre’ – that assumed a bland innocence. I took the lift. On the eighth floor a door faced me, with nothing but a sign that said OPEN. Beyond it, a second door said, AUTHORISED PERSON ONLY. Inside were counters, partitions and girls behind stacks of passports with application forms in them, like waitresses behind piles of cafeteria sandwiches.

  When I reached the head of a queue a girl looked at me and said, severely, ‘You’ll need a certificate for your transit visa application.’ I returned to Soriamont where the kindly Mr Pertierra dictated a certificate to his secretary:

  This is to certify that Mr. Gavin David Young will board our M.S. HUPEH sailing Manila for Kaohsiung, Keelung and Hong Kong. Inasmuch as the M.S. HUPEH is not a passenger ship, sea fare tickets are not issued before arrival of the vessel; only the Master will do so on board.

  Back at the eighth-floor office, this did the trick and my transit application was granted.

  The next day Duncan Pring rang to say that the Hupeh had arrived, and was expected to sail in two days, some time in the evening. The next-to-last leg of my journey was secure.

  Thirty Eight

  Madang, Lae, Kimbe, Rabaul, Kieta: these ports formed part of the ocean-girt island chain of calling places familiar to the crew of the China Navigation Company’s Hupeh. How many geography teachers can name the islands on which these small and remote towns are situated?

  The Hupeh had come to Manila direct from Port Moresby, the capital of Papua New Guinea. But these other names? The captain, Ralph Kennet, had to tell me that Madang and Lae are also ports of Papua, but on its northern coast; and that Kimbe and Rabaul, a day’s steaming apart, are both on the island of New Britain, which divides the Bismarck Sea from the Solomon Sea, east of Papua. Good names; they seemed to me to speak of those ‘tales, marvellous tales/Of ships and stars and isles where good men rest.’

  Nylon fishing nets (for Rabaul), plastic combs (from Port Moresby), talcum powder and asphalt roofing (for Kimbe), sewing machines (from Kao-hsiung in Taiwan to Nouméa in New Caledonia), copra cakes, shells to make buttons, car parts and plywood are some of the general cargoes that the China Navigation Company – part of John Swire’s Oriental dominion – carry through the area in the holds of the Hupeh.

  Captain Kennet was in his early fifties, an old hand east of Suez, including all seas and most shorelines between Jedda in the Red Sea and the Fiji Islands in the Pacific, and between Vladivostok in eastern Russia and Perth in Western Australia. He was a man of medium height, slight, with grey eyes and a humorous mouth, which, after a glass or two of the rum and Coke to which he was partial off duty, took on the mobility of a comedian’s hand puppet. He was a good man to sail with – warm-hearted, modest, a born talker, intelligent and funny. He had worked out East for half a lifetime, but for his retirement he had bought what he called ‘my shed’ in Gloucestershire. From his photographs, I could see that this was a fine country house in Cotswold stone. He was not a Gloucester man himself, but a Yorkshireman from Don-caster, which is how he pronounced it. This led to much good-natured badinage with the chief officer, a much younger Yorkshireman called Jimmy Granger, who came from Robin Hood’s Bay.

  Kennet had a fine way with words, and liked to employ unlikely ones that meant something nobody quite understood. ‘You’re a nutmeg, you are,’ he said laughing over a drink in the ship’s little bar after a sally by Granger, adding ‘You’re as daft as a brush.’ (‘God knows what “nutmeg” means,’ Jimmy Granger said when I asked him later. ‘No one knows. Maybe the Old Man doesn’t either.’)

  Kennet had dipped into English literature too and quotations slipped out of him at the most unlikely moments. ‘“Shall I com-pare thee to a soomer’s day?”’ he murmured once to Granger on the bridge apropos of nothing at all, and then turned on his heel and disappeared down the companionway.

  *

  The Hupeh had more British officers than any ship I had travelled on so far. Apart from the captain and first officer, her officers included a Scots chief engineer named Jimmy Morrison, a second engineer with a beard, and a second and third officer, respectively a Londoner and a Pole who lived in Essex. The radio officer was a Pakistani, Sajid Ali, and the third and fourth engineers were Chinese and Burmese. There were also three cadets, two of them Hong Kong Chinese and one a long-haired boy from New Guinea called Samson.

  Jim Morrison, the chief engineer, had been the first on the Hupeh to welcome me. Boarding a big ship for the first time is an uneasy experience, and each time I did so I remembered boarding the Northgate all those years ago, so I was grateful to him from that moment. He was standing in the doorway of his cabin as Mr Cheung, the steward, led the way to the owner’s cabin next door. ‘You could do with a beer, I’ve no doubt,’ he said and, when I gratefully agreed, he handed me an opened, chilled can of Brisbane beer.

&n
bsp; Morrison’s cabin had a false fireplace of real stone and a mock fire that switched on and pretended to be real. He had a red face, a moustache and an arrangement of cheeks, jaw and teeth that reminded me of pictures of the middle-aged Arnold Bennett. On one wall a poster displayed ‘The Game Birds of Scotland’, and several knickknacks and bits of tartan, as well as Morrison’s accent, spoke of north Britain. Attached to the cabin was an equally large bedroom and a bathroom with a real bath.

  ‘A bath! You could bring your wife with you.’

  ‘Oh, I have in the past. Mr Cheung, the steward, calls her “My Missy”.’ He pointed to a framed photograph showing an attractive blond woman. ‘That’s Betty. She’s lived in Hong Kong for twenty years. Trouble is, rents are awful high there now, so we’ve bought a place in Scotland. That’s the only place for me in the end.’

  The Morrison I saw later in his engine room was a prince in his dominion. I would never have descended into that kingdom except by special invitation. Gleaming cliffs of metal towered up to the skylights far overhead like the walls of the Ice King’s palace and, though the Hupeh was far from being a giant of the seas, the descent down those twisting, metal catwalks and companionways was a dizzying experience. As I descended towards Morrison’s upturned face, the infernal racket of the engines seemed to engulf me.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ Morrison shouted in my ear when I reached him. ‘It’s verra quiet down hee-er, isn’t it?’

  He wandered confidently about in oily white overalls turning wheels, tapping dials, and patted the shoulder of a young Chinese who stood, hands on hips, a torch in his hip pocket, a spanner in his breast pocket, watching the telegraph. On metal walks, other Chinese engineers peered at electrical switches and panels, padding like caged animals up and down shimmering catwalks between rods, pipes and tubes.

  The Hupeh’s crew was Chinese to a man, all from Hong Kong. Most of them had worked on China Navigation Company vessels for years, even decades. Swire’s, everyone said, was a good employer, and had been since John Samuel Swire started trading in the Far East in 1866.

  Ralph Kennet liked Chinese – luckily, for he could hardly have worked on ships out East if he had been unable to get on with them. For one thing, he didn’t underestimate them. ‘The essential thing in coping with a Chinese crew,’ he explained, ‘is to understand from the outset that you can’t win. They are going to win any dispute. Now, when that piece of wisdom has settled into your brain, it’s simply a question of hanging on as long as you can until the inevitable moment when you give up. Face. You save that, d’y’see? But then you give in. Got it?’

  Kennet had had experience. He’d even had a mutiny. ‘It was in Brisbane, years ago – ’67, ’68. The crew began shouting and yelling and meeting and discussing. All about work shifts or pay. They’d come to me; I’d answer their complaints; they’d have another conference and start shouting again. So it went, back and forth. I’d start out patiently explaining, but at the end one of them would say that he couldn’t understand my Cantonese dialect – could I speak Hakka? Another would shout he wanted everything explained in Swatownese, and another in Mandarin. On and on, just to foil me. I couldn’t win. No one could.’

  Kennet had a basic maxim: ‘Watch your crew in fine weather. That’s when there can be trouble. If it’s rough, there are no problems; people feel they need each other, and close ranks. The complaining begins when it’s calm.’ I remembered the closeness Londoners felt in the aerial bombardment of the Second World War.

  He swapped my tale of the Moros with one about Chinese pirates. Selwyn Jones was the name of the last captain to be pirated in the China Navigation Company – well, touch wood, Kennet added. In the Taiwan Strait, it was, about 1955. ‘A junk came alongside old Selwyn’s ship, the Hupeh – the old Hupeh, not this one. It had Oerlikon guns aboard, and it fired a few rounds, so Selwyn Jones prudently stopped.’ Here Kennet stopped, too, remembering what a character Selwyn Jones had been.

  ‘Well, he sent off a radio SOS and then went to his cabin and sat there, waiting for his visitors. The pirates burst in armed to the teeth, filling the cabin. At first, he said, he was nonplussed, and just looked at them through his misty glasses. They stared back. This wouldn’t do. He pulled himself together and sent for his quartermaster, a Chinese, to translate. “Who is the Number One pirate?” he asked of this wild crowd. One or two pointed to one of them, and he stared at the man for a minute, then suddenly yelled, “He’s got a bloodshot eye. It’s bloodshot. Send for the doctor.” The pirates were thunderstruck.

  ‘They laid the Number One pirate down and the chief officer poured eyedrops into his eyes. The pirates were bamboozled by this and, when their Number One had got up blinking and happy, they disappeared for some time, coming back eventually to hand Jones a handful of fountain pens. They were all filched from the passengers, of course, but it was the thought that counted and this was their way of thanking him.

  ‘Now, what was admirable about all this, and showed there is trust and honour at sea even among pirates, was that, when a New Zealand frigate appeared at the top of the strait in response to the radio call, the pirates did not do Selwyn any mischief. Formerly, in like circumstances, a captain and his chief mate would have been taken ashore and marched all over China, sometimes shown to the public in cages, like strange animals. Now the pirates came to Selwyn and said, “Look at that frigate. We’ll need hostages. You’ll have to come ashore with us.” Nasty.

  ‘But Selwyn stood up slowly and majestically, like some sort of white god. “Go in peace,” he said, like Jupiter addressing a few of his favourite mortals. “I will personally order that frigate to bugger off. You, pirate chappies one and all, are not to worry. Savee?”

  ‘Perhaps he used the royal “we”. At any rate, those murderous Chinese pirates trusted him, and off they went and the Hupeh sailed on. All because of those eyedrops in the Number One pirate’s eye.’

  ‘The captain of the New Zealand frigate must have been mystified. One moment “Pirates aboard”, the next “Bugger off”.’

  ‘I daresay old Selwyn Jones explained it all to him later over a gin. Bit of a nutmeg, Selwyn Jones.’

  A deck higher, in the ship’s laundry, a dignified white-haired Chinese with the face of an elderly violinist worked among a garden of white cotton shirts on hangers. A huge pair of white bloomers three feet across, like a giant’s shorts, was draped over a clothes horse.

  The old laundryman saw me looking at them, and laughed. ‘Those tlousa belong ladio offica. Indian style. Velly stlange tlousa. One day one ship I see many tlousa same this in laundly. All Indian. Velly funny.’

  My cabin was straight out of Somerset Maugham. Bigger than that on the Perak and the Straits Hope, the owner’s cabin consisted of a dayroom with simple panelling, a desk, a large table, a sofa and armchairs, and a quartz wall clock; a good-sized bedroom; and a shower room leading off a tiny entrance in which hung five lifejackets – made, a tag said, by Cheong Keo of Hong Kong, three for ‘persons under 70 lbs.’ and two for ‘persons of 70 lbs. or more’. Every morning Mr Cheung, the motherly steward, a pale-skinned man with widely spaced eyes, knocked on the door and quietly entered in soft black Chinese slippers.

  ‘Bling bleakfast now, afta five minutes.’

  ‘Thanks, Mr Cheung.’

  ‘Okay same-same yestaday?’

  ‘Yes, fine.’

  ‘Egg, bacon, melon, two toast, mamalade, butta, okay?’

  ‘Okay.’

  The officers seldom used the dining room together. According to their watches, they ate at staggered intervals, and wasted no time at the table. In the bar after dinner, the scene was livelier. Here Ralph Kennet’s genial cries of ‘You’re a nutmeg, you are’ could be heard while one officer or another served behind the little bar. Here, one evening, Jimmy Granger, the first officer, gave us the history of the Battle of Trafalgar as seen by a Yorkshire lad named Joe. In the quiet accent of Robin Hood’s Bay, leaning on the bar, he recited:

 
‘I’ll tell you a seafarin’ story

  Of a lad ’oo won ’onour and fame,

  Wi’ Nelson at Battle Trafalgar.

  Joe Muggeridge, that were ’is name.

  ‘’Ee were one o’ the crew o’ the Victory

  An’ ’is job when t’ battle begun

  Were ta pick cannonballs out t’ basket

  And shove ’em down front end o’ t’ gun.’

  Many stanzas later Admiral Nelson was declaring that Joe deserved the VC.

  ‘But findin’ ’ee ’adn’t none ’andy,

  ’Ee gave Joe an’ egg fer ’is tea.

  ‘An’ when battle were over,

  An’ t’ Victory were safely in dock,

  Crew saved up all their coupons –

  And bought Joe a nice marble clock.’

  ‘Daft as a brush,’ said Ralph Kennet, happily congratulating Granger for his recitation. On that warm note we sailed next day into the port of Kao-hsiung on the island of Taiwan, formerly known as Formosa.

  *

  A scattering of small explosions greeted us at the approach to Kao-hsiung harbour, and puffs of blue smoke from firecrackers floated across the narrow entrance, where a cluster of fishing boats jostled each other. Ralph Kennet was already on the bridge, bareheaded, wearing half-moon glasses. ‘How’d you feel this mornin’, Gavin?’

  ‘Not so good, thanks.’