Voyage East

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

  I spent the forenoon with the Second Engineer as we filled an empty deep-tank with salt-water ballast.

  ‘Aye, wee Richard,’ Willie Buchan said, ‘if you want tae see the real Japan, come ashore wi’ me tonight…’ He seemed to have buried the hatchet of inter-departmental war.

  We began in Clancy’s Bar, an all-male-no-bar-girls establishment run by an expatriate Australian with a penchant for all things Japanese. Over a beer we watched a few bouts of Sumo wrestling on the television blinking in one corner. It was clear that Willie and Clancy were old friends.

  ‘You off to see Akiko tonight, eh, you old bastard?’

  ‘Aye, can I use your phone?’

  Willie picked up the phone Clancy shoved across the bar and used it with impressively proficient ease. He spoke a few words of Japanese and I could hear a squeal of delight. Ten minutes later we were in a taxi, heading out across the suburb of Ikuta to pay our respects to Willie’s lady friend.

  ‘Ah’m a fortunate man, you know,’ he said expansively, leaning back, his round white moon-face with its undistinguished puggish features happily complacent. ‘Ah’ve known both kinds o’ love. The love o’ marriage to ma wife Margaret, back hame in Bearsden, an’ the other kind…’ his voice trailed off wistfully and he stared out of the window, suddenly heaving his bulk forward and tapping the driver on the shoulder. ‘Here we are.’

  We scrambled out and he bent into the driver’s window, then straightened up, beaming. ‘Why, bless the lass, she’s even paid for the taxi…’

  We went up some stairs and into what seemed to be a restaurant with low tables and cushions laid on tatami matting in an immaculate symmetry. The walls were hung with heavy drapes and a glowing brazier burned in the centre of the room.

  Willie pulled off his coat. ‘Akiko…’ he called.

  ‘Willie-San!’ She ran to his arms, her dark hair loose, her kimono flying, pinched into her tiny waist by the huge bow of the obi. She clung like a limpet to the vast bulk of him and they kissed with the passionate frenzy of old lovers. I saw she was not young, but a handsome woman in her late thirties, with every appearance of great happiness at the sudden arrival of Willie Buchan. I was introduced to her and she inclined her head with a gracious little bow, then sat upon a cushion and drew Willie’s wobbling body down beside her. They nestled together like the prints one could buy in the Moto-machi, showing the thousand positions for love.

  I drank saki with them for half an hour and left them to their idyll.

  * * *

  I was never precisely sure why Willie Buchan suspended the sporadic warfare of our two departments with this intimacy. Some of his sudden friendliness may have been impulsive; but I think not. Perhaps his motivation was more complex, obscure even to himself. I had sailed with him before, coasting the Antilochus from Hamburg north-about to Glasgow, where his wife Margaret had come aboard. I knew both poles of his love – so was my invitation a kind of boasting? Was he simply wanting to share his triumph but reluctant to let one of his own engineers off duty? Or was it merely to show one of ‘the enemy’ how real men took their pleasure and lived their lives to the full? Certainly he was a marked contrast to the dour Mate; a street-wise Glaswegian with little love for Calvinistic souls, whatever their nationality. I thought at the time the matter lay between him and the Mate, and that he saw me as the Mate’s creature.

  It was of little moment. The crackling bush-warfare flared again in the morning. As our holds were emptied and cleaned and we had gained access to the bottom of the ship, it was necessary to test the wells, drainage pockets from which any water which penetrated the space could be pumped. For this testing the Midshipmen used firehoses to fill them, then the engine-room was requested to check the bilge line and pump them out. For some strange reason the correct selection of valves was a matter of great mystery to Junior Engineers. It could take an hour or two before they had the thing right, and this proved intolerable to Mike. The wait had been punctuated by the usual sending of messages below and the receipt of helpful advice to the effect that the suction pipe was probably blocked by debris. This was refuted by a soaking Midshipman who was required to duck into three feet of filth and satisfy himself the strum was clear, a duty made harder by the fact that half an hour earlier the bored boy had urinated into the well.

  But even this had not made any difference, and Mike had carried the war into the enemy camp, raging up to the Chief who had been enjoying a pre-prandial chota-peg. Mr Kennington had summoned Willie Buchan who came grumpily, having been woken from an illicit sleep, exhausted after his night of voluptuous excess. Willie raged into the engine-room; within minutes the bilge lines gurgled in responsive fury and the well drained in seconds.

  ‘That’s reassuring,’ remarked Mike in ear-shot of the embarrassed Junior. ‘At least we know who to send for if we get caught in a typhoon.’ Billy incautiously opened his mouth to shout Mike down but was silenced by the dejected and urinous Midshipman who at that moment slopped past in quest of a shower.

  ‘Excellent training for shit-stirring,’ said Billy, evening the score.

  It was in Kobe that I had the unnerving experience of being accused of paternity. At breakfast next morning, trying to read the Purser’s copy of the Mainichi Daily Times in which our arrival had been announced to the English-speaking commercial fraternity of the Kobe waterfront, I was brought-to by a flurry at the saloon door. One of the dock security officers was asking for the Fourth Mate. There was a stir of interest at Captain Richard’s table and I left as inconspicuously as possible, fearful of some problem with the cargo.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘You come gangway please.’ The hand on my arm was unpleasantly insistent; I jerked free, but the urgency and the tight-lipped face suggested an accident. I hurried out onto the centre-castle deck and the head of the gangway where a curious little crowd had gathered.

  ‘This lady say you make her baby, now big trouble, you make much pay money.’ He pushed me onto the platform of the gangway jutting out high above the taxi on the quay. There was a babble of delight among the onlookers as I protested. Looking down at the taxi I saw the window open and a face stare back up at me. The guard had repossessed my arm and his free hand stabbed accusingly at my innocent countenance. He shouted something to the effect that I was Antigone’s Fourth Officer. For perhaps five seconds the girl and I stared at each other in mutual disbelief, then her head withdrew, the window was wound up, and with a gangsterish squeal of tires the taxi and its gravid burden disappeared round the corner of the adjacent godown.

  ‘Not belong right man,’ I said to the nonplussed guard, jerking my arm from custody for the second time. I returned to the saloon and my breakfast.

  ‘What was all that about?’ asked Mike.

  ‘Case of mistaken identity,’ I said, ruminating over corn-flakes. ‘Anyone know where Dai Morrison is now?’

  ‘Yeah, shagging sheilas on the old Stentor, Mate,’ replied Bob in his best Australian. ‘Why?’

  ‘I’ve just met the mother of his first child, and she wasn’t too pleased to find a proxy arrived for the wedding.’

  ‘Ploody Welsh goat,’ said Bob, shifting his accent gleefully then flushing scarlet as he felt China Dick’s baleful glare on the nape of his neck.

  Red Barbarians

  Our dawn sailing from Kobe was such as we should have had from a home port. For me, shackled as luck would have it to the cargo-watch, it unfolded in a series of vignettes: lonely arrivals of men cast out of hotel bedrooms into a freezing dawn, drugged by drink and love, their emotions still some distance astern of them. They stumbled up the gangway, individual bundles of remorse or repletion according to temperament. Even the bellicose Embleton had forgotten his private war and greeted me with a wan and sheepish smile.

  Last came Willie Buchan, only minutes before the Mate stepped out onto the boat-deck to recall us to duty with an imperious blast of his whistle. Akiko brought him, bathed to the last in the extraordinary warmth of her affectio
n; he popped from the taxi and stumbled tearfully up the gangway.

  ‘Christ… oh, Christ,’ he mumbled, disappearing into the accommodation as Akiko called a last Sayonara after his departing bulk.

  ‘Like the last act of Madam Butterfly,’ remarked the Mate sourly, lifting the whistle to his lips.

  To prolong the agony of departure, we made no clean break with Japan but trailed its tantalising coastline on either side throughout the day. Our passage lay through the five ‘inland seas’ of the Naikai, the main island of Honshu to the north and the successive coasts of Shikoku and Kyushu to the south. Thousands of islands dotted our route beneath the craggy mountains of sandy rock upon which pines grew dark and mysterious, jewelled here and there with the scarlet arches of Shinto shrines. These congested waters crowded with ferries, fishing boats, junks and coastal traders demanded a high standard of navigation, and we were aided by the presence of our pilot Mr Yamaguchi.

  He was a small elderly man in a shapeless fawn raincoat, his lugubrious face peering through falling folds of parchment skin. He stood alone on the bridge-wing, giving helm orders from time to time, unwilling to fraternise with us.

  ‘Don’t ask him what he did in the war,’ Bob whispered at me as we wove through the remnant minefields, along the advertised safe passage. Suddenly Mr Yamaguchi turned from the bridge-wing and sucked in his breath in a queer, strained sound, almost as if he was in pain. He bobbed towards us, then having caught our attention he turned and pointed. Another town lay in the distance at the head of one of the hundreds of gulfs that opened from the Naikai.

  ‘Hiroshima,’ he said, and we passed the prime meridian of our epoch while Mr Yamaguchi returned to his sad contemplation of the invisible channel down which we thrashed.

  The tide caught us in the narrow gut of the Shimonoseki Strait and we were rushed past the ancient town, seven additional knots added to our propelled speed. We discharged Mr Yamaguchi off Moji and as his launch turned away from us he gave us no parting wave, no sign of luck or bon voyage. Then the tide spewed us forth into the wide Strait of Tsu Shima that lay between Japan and Korea, where Admiral Tojo destroyed the last Tsar’s Baltic Fleet, which under Rozhdestvensky had come half-way round the world to fight him.

  For us, hostility came from the wind whipping southwards from the tundra of the not-so-distant Siberian Arctic, a bitterly cold wind that froze the salt sea spray as it lifted from the wave-caps, and drummed it on our bridge dodgers or stung our injudiciously exposed cheeks with an agonising pain. The cold became intense as we left the maritime climate of Japan and were embraced by the polar air of the Asian mainland. The bare steel was cold enough to ‘burn’, the exposed surfaces of bulkheads and the dogs of watertight doors became thickened by layers of ice, while stays and rails were festooned by a rime of icicles. We made an uncomfortable passage, glad of our ballasted deep-tanks but still light enough to be tossed about by the severe gale that screamed down upon us with primordial ferocity. Our cheeks were wan as jilted brides’ while ears and noses acquired the dangerously rosy hue of exposure. We kept our watches hunched in duffle coats, polo-necked sweaters under our thick doeskin uniforms topped with scarves wrapped around our throats. Antigone banged and pitched, her empty hull sounding like timpani, moving relentlessly in the close circle of her visible horizon so that we might have been the last living thing on a watery world reversing into chaos. And then we saw other men as we rounded the great promontory of Korea and stood north into the heaving greyness of the Yellow Sea, the fishermen of the Huang Hai. They were aboard motor-trawlers, rugged craft a quarter our size, their bows lifting bodily from the sea, then wallowing into the troughs and sluicing white water aside. They flew the Yin/Yang ensign of South Korea; their tough crews were out on deck hauling nets, though logic and common-sense told us the thing was impossible.

  ‘Those bastards deserve every penny they get,’ said the Mate through the side of his mouth as we peered through our glasses at the incredible sight of such hard-bitten men. I could sense in his admiration a regret that we had lost this capacity for enduring extremes, and his unconsummated kinship with such men.

  ‘It makes you think…’ he mused, lowering his glasses at last.

  I knew he was thinking of the past and the long rope of tradition that bound him and men like him to it. But it occurred to me that he had been doing too much musing. As far as I knew he had not yet been ashore, but such was his quality of self-sufficiency, so fenced about was he by his competence and so distanced by the responsibilities of his rank, that I did not take this seriously. I only realised its significance with hindsight.

  Passing between the peninsulas of Dairen and Shantung we entered the cul-de-sac of the Gulf of Po Hai. The winds that roared about the fringe of the Siberian anti-cyclone, skimming down the pressure gradient crammed between the two weather systems of this corner of the Pacific, now petered out. We were almost entirely landlocked and a still, fog-filled calm settled upon us and upon the smooth waters of the gulf. Four days out of Kobe we dropped anchor off the Taku Bar, where we were to spend six days of frozen misery. That night the fog cleared and a full moon rose, red as an Edam cheese, an oddly appropriate manifestation to herald our arrival off the coast of Red China.

  Our only distraction was the celebration of the Chinese New year. It was an irony that our Chinese crew members were unable to spend it ashore – if a shore existed, for we were too far distant from the low, alluvial coast to see it. The only eminences in the area were the remains at Taku of the Manchu forts razed by the Combined Expedition which landed in 1900 to raise the seige of the Peking legations during the Boxer rebellion. Within sight of the Taku Bar lightvessel we and half-a-dozen other ships swung-to in a desolation of dirty ice-floes and sea-water fulvous with the rich loess of the interior, brought down by the Hai Ho River. Its dun colour only added to the overwhelming impression of drabness.

  But our Chinese swept these disadvantages aside in their desire to celebrate. Their courteous hospitality to us was impressive and their messroom under the poop was full of multi-coloured dishes and bowls containing the diverse ingredients of Chinese cuisine. Crayfish and prawns, squid and chopped meat; a sucking pig roasted whole, its eviscerated belly held open by bamboo splints; bowls of sauces and vegetables, water chestnuts, mushrooms and bamboo shoots; the table positively groaned under this mass of food. Bowls of rice, bowls of fish and bowls of soup punctuated the line of main dishes, as did saucers of delicate prawn crackers, cashew nuts, peanuts and other mouth-watering savouries.

  Da-Foo, the Mate, was in his element, airing a hitherto unrevealed working knowledge of basic Cantonese, to the evident delight of the Chinese, whose wide grins exhibited rows of gold-capped teeth and a corporate goodwill that shamed our Christmas hospitality. Intent on enjoying the foods, he made me take up the challenge he received to yam-sing. It was a terrible responsibility and as well for us that we were at anchor. On the face of it, it was the innocent playground game of ick-ack-ock, in which one produced from behind one’s back a fist either balled for ‘stone’, flat for ‘paper’, or with forked fingers to make ‘scissors’. ‘Paper’ defeated ‘stone’ by wrapping it, but was defeated by ‘scissors’ which cut it. ‘Scissors’, however, succumbed to ‘stone’, by which they were blunted. The game got under way after China Dick had departed. The Chinese almost always had the edge on us and we lost disastrously. What made it nearly as lethal as Russian roulette was that the loser had to yam-sing a drink, in this case half-a-glass of Johnny Walker Scotch Whisky. Successive rounds were increasingly difficult to stand up for, never mind win.

  ‘Ay-yah, Tze-Foo plenty no… yam-sing!’

  Bob went down gallantly while upholding the honour of the deck-department, his legs buckling slowly under him, a muck-sweat beading his pale brow. Derisive laughter came from the engineers who clustered round Billy, two games ahead of Bob with one win to his credit and the engine-room Storekeeper for an opponent. The glass of whisky seemed to have had no effect upon Yue
n Kau, or perhaps he had a stomach for it. He lost two further games to Billy before slaughtering the hapless Fourth Engineer who was by now emboldened to play again. But the initiative had passed to Yuen Kau and at last Billy too was beaten, literally to his knees, and was helped outside while the Chief Engineer did the decent thing and looked the other way.

  ‘Gone for a technicolour yawn,’ said Mike, wisely declining a game on the excuse that he was on watch at midnight.

  Only Willie Buchan put up a fight, out-playing the Number One Greaser with a street-wisdom acquired from a Glasgow childhood more robust than our own. The Mate and I declined to go on, both paying the forfeit of supplying another bottle of Scotch.

  ‘You’ve no fighting spirit,’ complained the Purser, ‘no stomach for it.’

  ‘It’s a waste of good Scotch,’ said the Mate, adding, with the relish of the gourmet ‘and wrecks good food.’

  We did not overstay our welcome; most of us were incapable of doing so after such a parlour game. Bellies bloated and heads spinning in the frosty night air, we slithered on the icy ladder rungs with shouts of Kung Hey Fat Choy to usher in the year of the Tiger or the Monkey, or whatever it was. The ship lay still, brilliant moonlight glancing off a rime of frozen moisture on her decks, spars and rigging. Behind me the Mate belched low and appreciatively.

  ‘Beautiful night…’

  ‘Bloody cold…’

  ‘Bloody China.’

  Two of the seamen passed us, turning in from a night of cards with the Bosun. Our tracks crossed at Number Four hatch.

  ‘G’night…’

  ‘Night…’ and then in a stage whisper meant for our ears, ‘…officers pissed again…’

  Morning anchor watch was an agony of cold. During the four hours I spent alone on the bridge the thermometer rose from -11° to -8° Centigrade. One’s ears and nose seemed prominently distant from one’s reluctant and sluggishly thin blood. Only a few short weeks before we had been broiling in Singapore and Bangkok; now I was glad of my beard, for the assiduously shaved cheeks of others had the look of raw meat. It was difficult to imagine the same anchorage in the summer, when the continental climate inverted itself. A voyage earlier in a different ship I had lain a week at anchor on the Taku Bar in stifling heat, the ship infested with flies which hung over us in a malevolent black cloud dark enough to threaten sanity in its nightmarish persistence. With the flies came small insectivorous birds who gorged themselves into flightless immobility and only added to our sense of madness. For weeks afterwards the dark corpses of flies were to be found in odd nooks and crannies.