Voyage East

by Voyage East- A stirring tale of the last great days of the Merchant Navy (retail) (epub)

  As we bore up for Hong Kong the China Sea showed us its most treacherous face. Though deep it is littered with vast areas of shallows ready to trap even a modern ship, out in her reckoning. On our passage from Bangkok to Hong Kong we had to pass between the Paracels, an archipelago of reefs, islets and shoals over one hundred square miles in extent, and the Macclesfield Bank, a slightly smaller area resembling a sunken island. In the absence of observations we navigated on dead-reckoning, a process that diminished in accuracy the longer one relied upon it and the slower one travelled. At our normal speed it was surprisingly precise; but at sunset, such was the violence of our motion that Captain Richards ordered a reduction in our speed to 95 rpm, to ease the working of the hull and preserve the cargo from damage. This introduced an element of wind-drift, known as leeway, into our calculations.

  Next morning the Mate decided to open up Number Five hatch and inspect one of the stows of cargo. For this purpose small access hatches were provided, but that by the main-mast, giving entrance into the ‘tween-deck, led directly onto a stow of cartons.

  ‘You’re a wee, skinny fellow,’ he said to me, ‘away down and check the tomming.’

  I did as I was bid, wriggling over the top of the uneven cargo just beneath the beams of the upper deck, my boiler suit catching on every crate, and hampering my progress. I found the edge of the stow when my torch, being pushed ahead, dropped over it and, in a stygian gloom which creaked and groaned as the ship laboured and the cargo bent to the influence of gravity, I squirmed out into the comparative freedom of the hatch to the lower ’tween-decks. Recovering my torch I played its beam on the tomming. Vertical billets of timber were jammed between the deck and deckhead, secured by wedges and with cross-members nailed to them, holding the wall of boxes remarkably secure, except in one place where a kind of ‘cliff-fall’ had taken place. A few cartons had split open and their contents, some knitted fashion goods, had been strewn across the hatch. I gathered up what I could get out, secured the stow as well as possible and returned to the Mate.

  He took the woollen cardigans and turned them over curiously with a grunt. I could sense his irritation at the mishap, trivial though it was.

  ‘Aye. I’ll advise the Old Man to note protest when we get to Hong Kong.’

  I met Sparks in the alleyway as I went for a shower. He had the haunted face of the possessed. ‘Cheer up,’ I said, ‘you’ll be at it again in Hong Kong…’

  He disappeared with a groan.

  ‘You really are a bastard,’ I said to Mike as we each drank a beer before noon. He smiled that superior smile of his. ‘He’s worried sick…’

  ‘Syphillophobia, the Doc calls it. Well-known medical condition among incautious mariners.’ He looked at me sideways. ‘Besides, you didn’t try and stop me.’

  ‘No.’ The thought nagged my conscience.

  ‘Hong Kong’ll sort him out.’

  ‘I’ve just told him that and he went wailing down the alleyway.’

  ‘If you can’t take the heat of the fire, keep out of the bloody kitchen,’ said Mike standing and tossing his empty beer can into the rosy. I felt irritated by his cavalier attitude to Sparks, born as it was out of his own problems.

  ‘Have you heard from your wife?’ I heard myself asking.

  He turned and looked at me and I saw for a second his own anguish, a compound of guilt and uncertainty.

  ‘Yes,’ he replied with a catch in his voice. We stared at each other for a second and then his confidence returned. ‘Come on, drink up. Let’s go and find Hong Kong.’

  * * *

  Hong Kong found us in the nacreous mists of the following dawn. It peppered our radar screens with the outposts of its teeming population, mixed indiscriminately with those of its giant neighbour, the People’s Republic of China. The clusters of glowing dots spread out across our track so that it seemed impossible that we could find a way through to the harder echoes of the Lima Islands beyond.

  As the daylight grew the Mate and I anxiously flitted between radar screen and bridge-wing, our eyes straining to adjust between the lambent echoes on the screen and the vacant image lenses of our binoculars.

  ‘Fine to starboard!’

  ‘Aye, I see her…’

  Antigone leaned to her rudder and we began a slalom among the dense mass of junks patiently fishing the coastal waters off Kwang-tung. High-sterned, with their triple, pterodactyl-wings of sail, these craft had an exotic, impossible look to western eyes; yet their technical simplicity, the culmination of almost a thousand years of empirical design, had produced one of the most seaworthy and durable sailing craft in the world. Their windward performance astonished early western observers and their rig has, more recently, been adopted in yacht design. As we swept past the first of these wonderful little ships, some sixty feet in length, we could see her crew hauling nets, a cascade of silver pouring over her rail and into the wooden fish-pounds on her deck. At her stern a single old man, his creased face visible in my binoculars, looked up at us, his hand raised. Greeting, or clench-fisted gesture of annoyance? We had no means of knowing, for he and his boat had slipped astern and a frantic three rings from the forecastle bell told where a wide-awake lookout had spotted the next. The Mate had anticipated this and Antigone was already listing to port as her helm forced her bow round to starboard.

  ‘Got your arse in a tangle with the Aberdeen fleet, eh Mister?’ China Dick puffed up onto the bridge, pyjama bottoms flapping beneath a brocaded silk dressing gown of mandarin splendour. Brought from his bunk by the sudden tilt of the deck, he referred to the home-port of many of the fishing junks, Aberdeen Harbour on the west side of Hong Kong Island.

  ‘Aye sir, and the Whampoa Commune out o’ of the Pearl River…’

  China Dick bent over the radar set. The coiled dragon that wound its way over the blue hillock of his broad back glared balefully at the Mate who stood impatiently aside.

  ‘Another junk right ahead, sir!’ I called from the starboard bridge-wing, but the Mate had anticipated again and Antigone was swinging to starboard, her deck tilting to the sudden thrust of her rudder.

  The mist was lifting now, drawing back its veil as the sun rose, red and watery, revealing the sea studded with literally hundreds of junks. And there were ships too, a white P & O liner ethereal in the morning light but recognisable as the Chusan, bound south towards Singapore. Astern of us a tanker was making up towards Hong Kong like ourselves, while a black-funnelled cargo-liner, the Hanyang of Butterfield and Swire’s, was coming in from the eastwards. Still swimming in wraiths of mist, the islands of the Li-Ma Ch’un-Tao, the Lima Islands, were already abeam, their spiny crests hard-edged against the sky. Ahead, the lighthouse of Wang Lan winked its double flash at us before surrendering to the daylight.

  Wang Lan’s wink was a reminder that Hong Kong was an anomaly, a place of extremes, its very existence of such moral dubiety that one suspended all judgements and accepted it for what it was: a market place created by the colliding of political dogmas. Such was the violence of the collision that sharp edges were blunted, reduced to impotence, in the face of human necessity and human resilience. The Crown Colony, wrested from Imperial China during the shameful wrangling of the Opium Wars, existed by courtesy of Communist China, and its harbour made possible a pragmatic truce between the Marxist and the Capitalist world.

  Now immaculate in his doeskin reefers China Dick took over the con as we swung into the Tathong Channel. To the west of us the high peaks of the Dragon’s Back formed the eastern rampart of Hong Kong Island, to the east Joss House Bay and Junk Bay were backed by the rising land of the New Territories. We followed in Hangyang’s wake as she slowed to pick up her pilot from the launch bucking alongside. Ten minutes later we had done the same and Mr Wong arrived to the bridge, to shake hands affably with Captain Richards and give him his orders.

  ‘We discharge dangerous cargo at Quarantine anchorage, then go ’longside Holt’s Wharf.’ He bobbed a nod that was almost a bow at the bluff fi
gure of the Mate and added, ‘Okay, we go half the speed and come to port now.’

  China Dick nodded his assent, the telegraphs jangled and Antigone picked up speed again, slowly opening a cleft in the high green hills that formed the harbour’s eastern entrance, the Lei Yue Mun Pass. At the start of this narrow gutway, on the headland of Pak Sha Wan, a cargo ship of comparable size to the Antigone lay cast ashore, lifted completely out of the water, a victim of the last typhoon.

  ‘Let the wrecks of others be your seamarks, Laddie,’ muttered the Mate.

  Along the ship’s rails heads had appeared, eager to see the bowl of the harbour and the concourse of ships and boats that churned its waters into a froth and all but obscured it with their movements and activity, for no ship was ever wholly idle in Hong Kong, even the warships were beseiged by sampans and wallah-wallahs eager to trade, barter or pimp to their crews.

  We anchored long enough for a gang of coolies and a lighter to remove seventy drums of hydrogen peroxide from our fore-deck and then weighed, sliding alongside Holt’s Wharf at the toe of the Kowloon peninsula, the salient of mainland China that neatly divided Hong Kong harbour in two. As we swung alongside we passed the men-of-war: the aircraft carrier Eagle, the British destroyer Caesar and the frigate Loch Killisport, in company with the Australians, Vampire and Quiberon, and the Kiwi, Taranaki. The usual units of the United States Seventh Fleet were also lying at anchor: the Guided Missile cruiser Providence and two destroyers.

  ‘Look at that,’ said the Mate, wearing his tight smile of ironic delight as he contemplated any example of the folly of mankind. I raised my glasses. Passing quite close to the Providence a large motorised junk chugged its way across the harbour. At its grubby stern a huge red flag bearing the gold stars of the People’s Republic snapped in the breeze and the cargo, of live beef steers going for slaughter, could be clearly seen standing jammed in the junk’s waist.

  ‘Those’ll be steaks in an hour or two,’ remarked the Mate, tamping his pipe and picking up his cap, ‘being eaten by the dough-boys.’

  It made nonsense of the United States’ refusal to recognise the existence of Communist China.

  Hong Kong, the Isle of Fragrant Waters, was full of such contrasts. At the wharves deep-water merchantmen discharged their cargoes. At the fifty-odd mooring buoys others loaded, surrounded by junks and lighters whose progress to and from the waiting vessels was ceaseless. From time to time a merchant ship would slip her mooring and depart, to be replaced immediately with another in a seething, endless sequence of movement and activity. Backwards and forwards ran the ferries from Kowloon and Hong Kong. In the lee of the former the typhoon shelter was black with junks waiting for cargoes or being repaired and overhauled. The roofs of Kowloon’s shops and tenements disappeared into the greener country of the north under a blue haze of vehicle smoke rising from its teeming streets. On the other side of the harbour the waterfront of Victoria presented a similar spectacle, the high towers of the taipan’s offices, the banks and luxury hotels patronised by American tourists rose up the sides of the Peak. Wealth climbed with altitude, the higher one lived the more space one could purchase, so that towards the top the houses stood in isolated splendour, with groves of trees and lush green undergrowth between them. Even at this wintry season of the year, with the very summit of the Peak wreathed in cloud, the cool isolation of the hillside seemed highly desirable above the almost hysterical movement below. From Holt’s Wharf we could see other hillsides, the shanty towns and mean dwellings beyond Wan Chai and Aldrich Bay.

  Police patrol launches gave the impression of a watchful bureaucracy, but the sheer scale of this great battle for survival by the Chinese defied true regulation. Under tattered sails junks ghosted through the anchorage bringing cargoes that were, without much doubt, from Canton. Even the millions of industrious hands in Hong Kong could not have produced all the curios, the silk paintings, the lacquer work, the intricately carved ivory, the cruder rosewood, the camphor-wood chests, the bamboo-ware, the ebony figures, the jade and the silks that tourists carried home as booty from a visit to this incredible place. Much came from the ‘non-existent’ country beyond the border but if provided with a certificate of origin from Hong Kong could be taken into the United States. It was a baffling example of, in the Purser’s dry phrase, ‘man’s hypocrisy to man.’

  At water-level subsisted the most indigent of Hong Kong’s population. In tiny sampans not much bigger than an average yacht tender, and beneath whose flush-decks people slept, women and girls paddled around the harbour begging from the ships. Propelled by a yuloh, a single stern-sweep kept in constant motion by the wrist of a prematurely aged female whose cheap cotton smock and trousers flapped in the breeze, these pathetic craft hung around for hours in the hope of anything they could turn to advantage. Known as ‘dunnage girls’, their main-stay in the fight for survival was discarded dunnage, old planks and pieces of wood, torn down tomming and redundant packing that was used in the merchant-men for the protection of cargoes, for keeping vulnerable stows away from the condensation on steel decks and bulkheads. Coconut matting provided for the same purpose was also sought after, as was money, the odd coins every seaman had sculling around in a cabin drawer. To see these scavengers living off the prodigal waste cast off from the ships was a sight to stir compassion in even the most hardened breast, and we had hardly secured alongside Holt’s Wharf before the harrassed Mate was bellowing at me: ‘For Christ’s sake get down aft and stop those bluidy Middies chucking all my dunnage over the side…’

  If we had been a hive of activity in the Malay ports, the next few days defy description. The ship was like a dying animal beset by legions of flies. She was a Babel of noise, a vast confusion of disparate activity, a conflict of intent and rabid disorganisation from which some odd miracle of sense began to emerge. Holt’s commercial empire was seen at its best in Hong Kong where ‘things got done’, as the Bosun said, in a manner ‘that would make a Scouse shop-steward fucking weep.’

  Within minutes of our arrival the Mate was closeted with Hang Lee, the hatchet-faced sub-contractor who provided labour for the many jobs to be attended to about the ship. News of our homeward cargo was arriving via the agent and the appropriate arrangements were put in hand. The officers’ alleyway became a thorough-fare for the Chinese tally-clerks, the foreman, the security guards who were usually Indians, the agent’s runners, the powerful Chinese wharfinger and a sweating white cargo-surveyor come to make arrangements for a joint survey of damaged cargo.

  Pushing and shoving through this clamorous throng besieging the Mate’s door came the barbers and tailors, the laundry-boy and the curio-hawkers, the shoe-maker and the taxi-tout. It was impossible to read one’s mail without frequent interruptions and the Purser, driven to almost as much distraction as the Mate by the mass of paperwork that all this entailed, was importuned by the individual members of the ship’s company who wanted their ‘sub’, the advance of wages that formed their spending money in this paradise of bargains.

  On deck it was little better. Antigone swarmed with Chinese coolies, labourers of both sexes undertaking twenty tasks simultaneously. There were gangs of men trimming derricks to discharge our Hong Kong-consigned cargo; gangs of women, armed with brooms, sacks and scoops swept our emptying ’tween decks. More men chipped and painted areas of the ship it was impossible to undertake at sea. A gang of carpenters was ripping sections of caulking out of the promenade deck and forcing new oakum and pitch into the gaping seams and a host of black-clad and ancient women, their alopecia hidden under sheets of cardboard covered by black cotton so that they seemed a sect of satanic nuns, hovered over the yawning pit of the deep-tanks as the last of the cargo was ripped out.

  These unfortunate creatures, known unkindly as ‘Hang’s Virgins’, worked with a small group of men who erected bamboo scaffolding inside the big cargo tanks. As soon as this framework was assembled they would take their tiny steel scrapers and their brushes below and remove every particle of l
ast trip’s residual latex and every scrap of scale, so that the inside of the tank almost gleamed with bright metal, for in Shanghai we were to load wood oil, an almost fabulously valuable substance.

  Escape from this bombardment by humanity was essential. Only the stoic Mate endured it without relief. China Dick, exercising the privilege of rank, had disappeared soon after our arrival, carted off by the agent to visit friends ashore. Later, we too went roistering in his wake, our pockets loaded with a month’s pay in Hong Kong dollars, to slake our thirst and titillate our cheated senses in any one of the numerous bars that lined Kowloon’s main thoroughfare, Nathan Road. Among the tables of these caravanserais glided the almond-eyed whores in the gleaming brocaded sheaths of their cheongsams. This most erotic of dresses covered a girl from calf to neck, yet revealed flashes of leg from ankle to upper thigh as she walked or danced under the dim lighting.

  Our group split up, according to inclination, avoiding the exorbitant charges for drinks for the girls who slid next to us on the bench seats, teasing a tumescence out of us. Between bars we were importuned by gangs of Chinese boys offering to conduct us to a good bar, to meet nice girls, to black our boots. Our refusal turned these offers into bald beggary. To give money meant a limpet-like devotion from a posse of conductors, their black hair spiky on their crowns, their eyes bright despite the hour, their hands outstretched. To rid ourselves, we would hurl handfuls of cents down the road and leg it in the opposite direction. Sometimes it worked. A sleeting rain began to fall around midnight. Those of us recalled by duty hailed rickshaws and went lolling back to the ship. Others went their own way.