The Best Australian Sea Stories

by Jim Haynes

  Joe screws the face-plate into the helmet and Billy suddenly throws himself backward with a loud splash into the water, and sinks slowly, a grim, uncanny object descending through the blue water. Joe, the Portuguese tender, holds the lifeline, one of the boys holds the air pipe to prevent it drifting and fouling, and a smother of white bubbles coming up in the lee of the lugger shows where Billy is walking along beneath us. Balu, his wife, is not concerned at her husband’s peril; she takes little interest in the dress or the descent, but stares fascinated at her two brothers, who are methodically turning the air pump. The revolution of the handles and the rise and fall of the cylinders seem to her much more wonderful than the diving does.

  Meanwhile from below Billy is talking through the rope to Joe, the Portuguese tender. Two sharp vicious pulls come, and Joe calls over his shoulder to the two boys at the pump, ‘More air,’ and the boys make the handles fairly spin for a few moments, to Balu’s great admiration. Then four distinct tugs, and Joe calls to the forward hand, ‘Haul up; li’l piece more chain. Dat’ll do.’ For Billy has seen a shell out of his reach, and wants the lugger to drift over to it. Then a shake on the line and Joe calls sharply, ‘Slack up chain’; for evidently Billy has got on to a patch and wants the boat’s pace retarded. Thus the lugger drifts for nearly an hour, the signalling going on all the time, when suddenly there comes one sharp pull, and Joe calls, ‘Haul up’; it is curious what a different tone is impressed into the ‘haul up’, because if the other orders are muddled it only means the loss of a shell or two, but ‘haul up’ may mean that the diver is in trouble, and ‘haul up’ must be obeyed at once.

  Down below, Billy, having been down long enough, has decided to come up, so he closes the escape valve of the helmet, and the confined air fills his dress, and as Joe and the boy with the air pipe haul away, Billy suddenly floats to the top about 20 yards from the lugger, a ghastly, sprawling, bloated sea monster; his huge uncanny helmet is face down, half-buried in the water; the air has filled his dress till it looks as though his body were swollen out of all proportion of humanity; his legs and arms sprawl feebly like the limbs of some wounded animal. This gruesome object is hauled alongside, and the stranger is quite sure that some accident has happened and the diver is dying. Once alongside he clutches the ladder and hands up his little open basket full of shells. Then the face-plate is unscrewed, he is helped on the deck, and the lugger sails away with Joe at the helm, to another ground, while Billy sits on deck in his diver’s dress and smokes and tells stories of the old days ‘before dem Japanese come’.

  Arrived at the new ground Billy dives for another hour or so, and while he is down the shells are inspected by the strangers. They are the size of a fruit plate, covered with weed and coral growths. The smaller oysters are always attached by a strong green ligament to some object, a piece of rock or pieces of coral, but this ligament dies as the oyster gets older. The shells are opened in the lugger on this occasion only; by rule they should be brought to the schooner unopened. Inside each shell is a creature more like a squid than an ordinary oyster, and with it there live on terms of great amity a small reddish-coloured lobster about an inch long, and a small crab about a quarter of an inch in diameter. These three seem to agree well with each other.

  The pearls, if any, are visible among the fringe of the oyster’s beard, but occasionally they are hidden among the oyster’s anatomy. On the long cruises, when the schooner and her fleet are out for months at a time, it is the rule for the schooner to send her collecting boat, a half-decked 20-footer, round the luggers every second day at least, if it be at all possible. But sometimes the weather is bad, and the luggers have got a long way from the schooner and the shell may be a week or more on the luggers before it is collected. Then the heat of the sun makes the oysters open and the deft little Japanese fingers soon pick out any pearls that may be visible. Sometimes an oyster is induced to open by being held near the galley fire on the lugger, and once open is kept open by the insertion of a piece of cork, while the pearl, if any, is hooked out by a piece of wire. Then the cork is removed and the oyster closes again as good as ever. Sometimes the bumping in the collecting boat shakes the pearl out of an oyster that is just a little open, and when these boats are washed out a careful search for pearls is always made among the bottom boards. Fancy getting a pearl worth a thousand pounds drifting about among the slime and rubbish at the bottom of a dinghy!

  One great difficulty is keeping the boats in water. In the tropics a lot of water is wanted, and it is always carried in canvas bags. By great persuasion, Billy Makeela is induced to allow the stranger to go down in eight fathoms. Billy is not encouraging. He says, ‘I frighten let you down. S’posin’ anything go wrong; you die queek.’

  At eight fathoms the pressure is severe for a beginner; the blood is crushed out of the body into the head, but the severe feeling of oppression vanishes after a time. The floor of the ocean lies level and flat, studded with knobs of coral and patches of greyish weed. Here and there are clusters of marine growths, and a few shells lie about on the bottom. The diver can see some 10 or 15 yards, apparently, and beyond that all is an opaque mist; small fish come and look in at the eye holes of the helmet; the novice feels oppressed by the weight of the water, and blunders along, feeling as though he were held back by some invisible power as he tries to walk. The mud rises as he moves, and beyond him stretches always the level sand and all round him the oppressive opaque mist. He feels like a very small and insignificant fish in a very large aquarium.

  After 10 minutes’ search, he finds one shell and is hauled up by the anxious Billy. Then the lugger is headed for the schooner; the dress is turned inside out and hung up to dry. Joe and the black boys lie down and smoke, while Balu makes a fire in the little iron fireplace bedded in some earth in a box in the well of the lugger and makes tea, while Billy sails the lugger back. One boys goes up in the rigging to look out for reefs, and thus we get back to the Straits just as the soft tropical darkness shuts out the islands, and the mainland, and leaves only the schooner’s lights to show the way.

  ‘The Pearl Diver’

  Banjo Paterson

  Kanzo Makame, the diver, sturdy and small Japanee,

  Seeker of pearls and of pearl-shell down in the depths of the sea,

  Trudged o’er the bed of the ocean, searching industriously.

  Over the pearl-grounds, the lugger drifted—a little white speck:

  Joe Nagasaki, the ‘tender’, holding the life-line on deck,

  Talked through the rope to the diver, knew when to drift or to check.

  Kanzo was king of his lugger, master and diver in one,

  Diving wherever it pleased him, taking instructions from none;

  Hither and thither he wandered, steering by stars and by sun.

  Fearless he was beyond credence, looking at death eye to eye:

  This was his formula always, ‘All man go dead by-and-bye—

  ‘S’posing time come no can help it—s’pose time no come, then no die.’

  Dived in the depths of the Darnleys, down twenty fathom and five;

  Down where by law and by reason, men are forbidden to dive;

  Down in a pressure so awful that only the strongest survive:

  Sweated four men at the air pumps, fast as the handles could go,

  Forcing the air down that reached him heated, and tainted, and slow—

  Kanzo Makame the diver stayed seven minutes below;

  Came up on deck like a dead man, paralysed body and brain;

  Suffered, while blood was returning, infinite tortures of pain:

  Sailed once again to the Darnleys—laughed and descended again!

  Scarce grew the shell in the shallows, rarely a patch could they touch;

  Always the take was so little, always the labour so much;

  Always they thought of the Islands held by the lumbering Dutch,

  Islands where shell was in plenty lying in passage and bay,

  Islands where divers
could gather hundreds of shell in a day:

  But the lumbering Dutch, with their gunboats, hunted the divers away.

  Joe Nagasaki, the ‘tender’, finding the profits grow small,

  Said, ‘Let us go to the Islands, try for a number one haul!

  ‘If we get caught, go to prison—let them take lugger and all!’

  Kanzo Makame, the diver—knowing full well what it meant—

  Fatalist, gambler, and stoic, smiled a broad smile of content,

  Flattened in mainsail and foresail, and off to the Islands they went.

  Close to the headlands they drifted, picking up shell by the ton,

  Piled up on deck were the oysters, opening wide in the sun,

  When, from the lee of the headland, boomed the report of a gun.

  Once that the diver was sighted pearl-shell and lugger must go.

  Joe Nagasaki decided—quick was the word and the blow—

  Cut both the pipe and the life-line, leaving the diver below!

  Kanzo Makame, the diver, failing to quite understand,

  Pulled the ‘haul up’ on the life-line, found it was slack in his hand;

  Then, like a little brown stoic, lay down and died on the sand.

  Joe Nagasaki, the ‘tender’, smiling a sanctified smile,

  Headed her straight for the gunboat—throwing out shells all the while—

  Then went aboard and reported, ‘No makee dive in three mile!

  ‘Dress no have got and no helmet—diver go shore on the spree;

  ‘Plenty wind come and break rudder—lugger get blown out to sea:

  ‘Take me to Japanee Consul, he help a poor Japanee!’

  Down in the ooze and the coral, down where earth’s wonders are spread,

  Helmeted, ghastly, and swollen, Kanzo Makame lies dead:

  Joe Nagasaki, his ‘tender’, is owner and diver instead.

  Wearer of pearls in your necklace, comfort yourself if you can,

  These are the risks of the pearling—these are the ways of Japan,

  ‘Plenty more Japanee diver, plenty more little brown man!’

  Civilisation ends at the waterline.

  Hunter S. Thompson

  Ringed with menace

  JIM HAYNES

  FEW AUSTRALIANS REALISE HOW much enemy naval activity took place in the waters around our coastline in World War II.

  Most Australians who know anything about naval action in our waters only know about the Battle of the Coral Sea, but a wartime propaganda poster was actually telling the truth when it claimed Australia was ‘ringed with menace’.

  Each year, in early May, military and religious services are held across Australia to remember the Battle of the Coral Sea as the turning point of the war against Japan in 1942. Yet US Vice-Admiral H.S. Duckworth called the Coral Sea in May 1942 ‘the most confused battle area in world history’.

  Although Japan had decided not to invade Australia as part of its wartime strategy, Australians did not know that in 1942. Indeed, all the evidence seemed to point to the opposite conclusion. The Japanese already controlled the seas to our north and could use aircraft carriers operating in Australian waters to bomb Darwin with impunity in February 1942. Indeed Australia was bombed on 97 separate occasions, Darwin over 60 times.

  Japan’s plan was to establish military control in the Pacific, invade New Guinea and then take Fiji, Samoa and other Pacific Islands. In short, Japan sought to conquer the Pacific and separate us from our American allies, making an immediate invasion unnecessary.

  Allied intelligence knew that a massive Japanese invasion fleet was heading from Rabaul to Port Moresby. To counter this, two fleet aircraft carriers, nine battle-cruisers, thirteen destroyers and three support vessels were sent to the Coral Sea, off the coast of Queensland, from Allied bases in Hawaii and Australia.

  Over two days, planes from the carriers USS Yorktown and USS Lexington engaged two Japanese fleets, made up of three carriers, nine cruisers, fifteen destroyers, twelve troop transports and fourteen support vessels, while planes from the Japanese carriers attacked the Allied ships.

  Each side had two fleets operating in different parts of the Coral Sea, and all engagements were air-to-sea or air-to-air. The opposing fleets never actually met or engaged each other ship to ship.

  Allied losses amounted to one fleet carrier, one destroyer, a fuel ship, 70 aircraft and 660 men; the Japanese lost one light carrier, one destroyer, three gunboats, 90 aircraft and 990 men.

  The real ‘victory’ lay in the fact that the Japanese invasion fleet heading for Port Moresby was forced to turn back; the Japanese also lost a small carrier, which was sunk, and a fleet carrier, which had to return home for repairs.

  The Japanese then had to revise their plans, and subsequently invaded New Guinea by landing on the north coast and attempting to take Port Moresby via the Kokoda Track. Losing two carriers from their fleet also cost them dearly at the Battle of Midway, the ‘real’ turning point of the war at sea in the Pacific. The Japanese could not make up for their losses at Midway and lost the initiative at sea from that point.

  While these unsettling events were unfolding to Australia’s north and east, to the west a fleet of German raiders was operating in the Indian Ocean. One of them, the Schiff 41/Kormoran, had sunk the battle-cruiser HMAS Sydney, which was lost with all 645 hands in November 1941.

  The shock that the nation felt over the loss of the Sydney is hard to imagine more than 70 years after the event. Add to that the devastating bombing of Darwin in February, and a major sea battle off the east coast another three months later, and you begin to appreciate just how like an island under siege Australia felt to its citizens in 1942.

  A different menace, however, lurked in a much more sinister and silent fashion, in waters all around Australia—including the heavily populated southeastern corner of the continent.

  Over 50 enemy warships operated in the oceans around Australia between 1940 and 1945. Some were ‘normal’ Japanese naval vessels, carriers, cruisers and destroyers, but others were German raiders (Hilfskreuzers or auxiliary cruisers disguised as merchant ships), and 28 were submarines. The German raiders laid extensive minefields off the coasts of Tasmania, Victoria, New South Wales, South Australia and Western Australia, as well as in Bass Strait.

  The Schiff 33/Pinguin was the most successful of the Hilfskreuzers. She was responsible for capturing sixteen ships and sinking sixteen more between June 1940 and 8 May 1941, when she was blown apart by the cruiser HMS Cornwall near the Seychelles in the Indian Ocean.

  The Hilfskreuzers were converted freighters, armed mostly with World War I guns and torpedo tubes. They were given the official name ‘Schiff’ and a number. The captain of each vessel chose a name for his ship. Captain Kruder, in command of Schiff 33, decided to call his vessel Pinguin when he was ordered to patrol the Southern Ocean after taking command in June 1940.

  Most Hilfskreuzers could disguise themselves as several different merchant ships, depending on the area of ocean in which they were operating. Their task was to capture or destroy merchant ships by guile, pretence, and force when necessary. They were, however, under orders to run up their true colours before taking any aggressive action.

  On 7 October 1940, Schiff 33/Pinguin captured the 9000-ton Norwegian motor-tanker Storstad, off Christmas Island. Loaded with 12,000 tons of diesel oil and 500 tons of heavy fuel oil, Storstad was on her way from British North Borneo to Melbourne. She was taken to a remote spot between Java and the northwest tip of Australia, converted into an auxiliary mine-layer and renamed Passat. The Germans transferred 110 mines to her from the Schiff 33/ Pinguin.

  Passat/Storstad laid her mines in Bass Strait and along the west and east approaches to Melbourne, while Schiff 33/Pinguin headed for the ports of Sydney, Newcastle and Hobart, and later laid mines off Adelaide.

  Between 28 October and 7 November, the two ships laid their mines without being detected and then rendezvoused in the Indian Ocean.

  O
n 7 November 1940, the mines off Wilsons Promontory claimed the 11,000-ton British refrigerated cargo liner Cambridge, which was making its thirty-first trip to Australia. Next day the MS City of Rayville struck a mine off Cape Otway and became the first US merchant ship sunk in World War II.

  The US had not entered the war when the City of Rayville, which had the stars and stripes painted on both sides of her hull, hit a German mine laid by Passat/Storstad between Cape Otway and Apollo Bay.

  In a letter to Prime Minister Menzies, the 37 crewmen who survived the sinking of the City of Rayville wrote:

  Since the time of our rescue by the fishermen of Apollo Bay, through our stay at the Ballarat Hotel at Apollo Bay, and since our arrival in Melbourne, we have received every consideration and courtesy from our Australian friends. We cannot adequately express our deep appreciation of this kindness.

  It was a portent of things to come—a friendship that would help save Australia in the years ahead.

  A month later, on 5 December 1940, the Australian freighter MV Nimbin hit a mine laid by Schiff 33/Pinguin and sank off Norah Head, north of Sydney, with the loss of seven lives. Two days later the British freighter Hertford hit a mine at the entrance to Spencer Gulf, but managed to limp into Port Lincoln for repairs, which enabled her to be towed to Adelaide.

  The trawler Millimumal hit one of Schiff 33/Pinguin’s mines off Barrenjoey Head, just out of Sydney, in March 1941, and seven of her crew of twelve died.

  Some of the mines washed up on the coast of South Australia. The first men killed on Australian soil as a result of enemy action were two members of a REMS (Rendering Mines Safe) patrol who responded to reports of a mine found floating in Rivoli Bay near Beachport, South Australia, by a fisherman, who towed it to shore on 12 July 1941.

  Naval headquarters in Adelaide was advised and a party arrived at Beachport the next day. Able Seamen Thomas Todd and William Danswan were killed when a wave picked up the mine and dropped it on the shore, causing it to detonate as they attempted to disarm it.