Slow Boats Home

by Gavin Young

  The captain and Jim Bird get on well, despite non-stop backchat. Bird talks very loudly. Gomersall shouts back, ‘Jim, I’m two feet away from you. D’you see? Only two feet away!’ And: ‘I should’ve brought my bloody ear trumpet down to dinner, I should.’ The second officer laughs and calls them the Odd Couple. There is an element of light-hearted, knockabout, music hall about them: Morecambe and Wise or Laurel and Hardy.

  Like Jim Bird, the noise in Darby’s engine room is a serious danger to your hearing. Darby handed me a pair of ear muffs, then shouted descriptions of the various restless bits of gleaming machinery that pumped, spun and oozed hot oil. To no avail. I couldn’t hear a thing. Darby looked like an actor on TV with the sound turned off. When I pointed this out, he shook his head. ‘You have to be a lip reader down there, you do.’

  Into the Molucca Sea. Flat water. To port, the horizon disappears into the Pacific towards Guam and the thousand coral islands of Micronesia. I am in a new world, heading for a huge stretch of newness – thousands of unknown miles of it. What do I see ahead of me? Stern missionaries in pince-nez (or lapsed ones like Noël Coward’s Uncle Harry), outriggers skimming blue lagoons, whales, fuzzy black heads and filed teeth, Sadie Thompson, unflagging sunshine, coconut wine, Gauguin’s grave. The razor-like winds of Shanghai and the China Seas seem far away in time as well as space. But wait! Someone spots a white object in the water. More Vietnamese?

  ‘A bit off-course if they’re Boat People,’ Julian Gomersall says, looking through binoculars.

  ‘And it’s not waving its arms.’

  ‘An albatross?’ Ken suggests.

  ‘An albatross, he says!’ Gomersall sniffs contemptuously.

  It is – harmless, unharrowing, innocent – a fisherman’s buoy washed away from some village on the coast of New Guinea. Perhaps I might take its innocence as a sign that, for now at least, refugees, war and political terror are behind me. Farewell then to the tormented shores of Asia!

  Part Two

  Isles of Illusion

  The term ‘Savage’ is, I conceive, often misapplied, and, indeed, when I consider the vices, cruelties, and enormities of every kind that spring up in the tainted atmosphere of a feverish civilisation, I am inclined to think that so far as the relative wickedness of the parties is concerned, four or five Marquesan Islanders sent to the United States as Missionaries might be quite as useful as an equal number of Americans despatched to the Islands in a similar capacity.

  Herman Melville: Typee

  Seven

  Salute to Melanesia!

  Approaching our first port of call, Wewak (pronounced Wee-wak), we raised the flag of Papua New Guinea over the wheelhouse. A pretty flag, of an interesting design, it is diagonally divided with the bottom half depicting the five golden stars of the Southern Cross on black, and the upper half red with the golden silhouette of a bird of paradise on the wing. The bird of paradise is a famous local inhabitant.

  Pointing to the beautiful bird, Ken, the second officer, said, ‘Know what we call that? Kentucky fried chicken.’

  ‘Legless chicken,’ I said.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘They have no legs.’ I read out loud:

  In these islands onlie is found the bird which the Portingales call pasaros de Sol, that is Fowle of the Sunne, the Italians call it Manu codiatas, and the Latinists, Pradiscas, and by us called Paradice-birdes, for ye beauty of their feathers which passe al other birdes; these birdes are never seene alive, but being dead they fall on the Islands; they flie, as it is said, alwaies into the Sunne, and keep themselvs continually in the ayre without lighting on the earth, for they have neither feet nor wings, but onely head and body and the most part tayle.

  This description was written by a Dutch geographer, John van Linschoten (1563-1611), who was not alone in denying the wretched birds of paradise legs and even wings. A more reasonable man, Antonio Pigafetta, Magellan’s lieutenant, described these shy birds: ‘Big as thrushes, with small heads, long beaks and legs slender like a writing pen.’ ‘The most part tayle’ of Linschoten’s description is accurate enough: both the king and the red-plumed variety (among others) are very like multi-hued feathered waterfalls – their tails dwarf their bodies in such startling cascades of colour that you wonder if they really have strayed from Paradise, rather than from the leafiest recesses of the rain forests of New Guinea and the Malay archipelago. What a pity that their voices do not match their noble appearance. Alas, they are related to the harsh-tongued jays. Instead of the melodious fluting you might expect, their raucous shouts convey the impression that, feather by heavenly feather, they are being plucked alive. Or even Kentucky-fried, very slowly, by heartless emissaries of Colonel Sanders.

  Nothing but sun from now on? Approaching Wewak, the sea was a stagnant-looking green, the radio said there was rain over Port Moresby to our south-west, and large logs began to appear in the water.

  Dark ridges rose up on the western skyline of West Irian. On the chart, the names were becoming the names of explorers: Mount Bougainville to starboard and the Schouten Islands to port. Bougainville, who circumnavigated the world between 1767 and 1769, established a colony on the Falkland Islands, visited many Pacific Islands, named this one after himself, and somehow missed Australia. He also, of course, gave his name to a brilliant-coloured flowering creeper. The far more obscure Wilhelm Schouten – why were we never taught about him at school? – discovered what we know as Cape Horn Island and named it after his home town, Hoorn in Holland. Here, three of Schouten’s other islands have attractive Dr Doolittle names – Bam, Mot Mot and Blup Blup. Otherwise names becoming unsmilingly Teutonic – Marienbad lay beyond Wewak, and so did Richthofen Point. The sea we moved on, as smooth and shining as a Prussian cuirass, was the Bismarck Sea; the colony on our right hand and ahead had been German New Guinea until the defeat of the Kaiser in 1918.

  *

  My notes say:

  Not much to Wewak. All I see is a promontory and behind it an open shore; smoke over attap roofs; palms; a mission church. Near us, on the shore: a meagre sprinkling of neat white bungalows with corrugated iron roofs some way away, a broad but featureless meadow; a background of creeper-draped trees.

  A causeway with a jetty crossing its head to form a T, at the end of which we must tie up and offload.

  ‘If they’d looked hard they’d have found it difficult to find a worse place to put that causeway,’ says Gomersall. ‘Famous swells here. Daft.’

  We approach the causeway dead slow and an Australian voice on the radio warns us of ‘something of a swell’, but there is no hitch. Black stevedores with the gnome faces of New Guinea quickly come aboard.

  I went below and read the South Pacific Handbook – which people in Hong Kong had told me was an indispensable guide for an ignorant traveller like me. It had pages of down-to-earth information and sensible advice. It also contained some history. I read of the hard-handed rule from the 1880s of the Kaiser’s Germans in the north-eastern part of New Guinea we were skirting and in the banana-shaped island of New Britain, which then they called Kaiser Wilhelm Land; its capital, Rabaul, was one of our ports of call. After the German defeat in 1918, Australia took control of this entire region until in 1975 it became the independent state of Papua New Guinea. In between the Germans and independence came the Second World War. From 1942, much of New Guinea was occupied by Japanese forces whose commanders set up a major base at Rabaul. The Americans and Australians fought them off before they could reach Port Moresby, the chief city of the territory. It took three years of carnage before the Japanese finally surrendered to the Australians at Wewak – after the American atom bombs had fallen on their homeland.

  This little I learnt on my bunk on the Chengtu. The more dramatic events in the war against the Japanese – the fall of Singapore, the sinking of the British capital ships Prince of Wales and Repulse, the prisoner of war camps – were familiar, yet who in Europe knew much of the jungle and naval war Japan brought to Australia
’s doorstep, of the American counter-attack from Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands to the Gulf of Papua, through the Philippines and, finally, to the atom-bombed shores of Japan? What was Guadalcanal but a noisy gung-ho film, starring John Wayne – or was it Errol Flynn? I was ashamed of my ignorance, and correspondingly glad that Guadalcanal Island was a stop on the itinerary I hoped to follow.

  While the sun went down on little Wewak, I tried to imagine how it was here forty years ago – the smoke from bombed petrol dumps, the terror of the emaciated, fever-struck soldiers of Nippon, a tattered Rising Sun over the scorched tatters of jungle round the airstrip. But instead of the roar of propeller-driven warplanes, there were the short, sharp screams of the clouds of small bats that darted in and out of our deck lights. A few black men hung about the wharf, smoking, idly gazing while the stevedores worked. I was glad to hear Gomersall’s ‘Full ahead!’ and to feel the current carrying us smoothly away from the wharf. Perhaps we all were. That evening, there was Australian champagne with dinner, and brandy in the bar.

  My notes record a debate: Tony Darby claimed that Queen Elizabeth I spoke English with a Yorkshire accent.

  ‘For a start,’ Julian Gomersall said, ‘she didn’t even come from Yorkshire.’

  ‘Her father did.’

  ‘Her father was a bloody Welshman. Tudor. Henry VIII. Talked like Stanley Baker, the actor.’

  ‘Don’t say we were ruled by a lot of bloody Cambrians!’

  Later, I found Tony on deck staring at the stars. ‘Millionaires would spend millions of pounds to see this view,’ he said. He told me his wife was Japanese and that she and their two children spoke real English – real Don-caster: ‘The language in which – it’s mah con-sidered joodgement – Queen Elizabeth spoke to Sir Francis Drake.’

  *

  Two books might provide useful preparation for the host of islands we were fast approaching. These were my 1923 edition of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Vailima Letters, his correspondence from his Samoan home, and the old, mysteriously discovered book lent to me by Tim Bridgeman in Hong Kong, called Isles of Illusion: Letters from the South Seas. In its first few pages, Isles of Illusion’s anonymous author revealed himself as an opinionated Englishman of some education who, enchanted by Stevenson’s accounts, had run away to the South Pacific before the First World War to escape the boredom of schoolmastering in England. The book is a collection of his letters home, pungent evocations of the South Sea islands on which he laboured and suffered. He saw plenty of white cruelty and the terrible evil of ‘blackbirding’, as slavery was called then in the Pacific. He worked on remote plantations from 1912 into the 1920s, at first for a German trader called Müller, who had set him up as manager in one of a handful of islands which were then known as the New Hebrides, and which became independent Vanuatu in 1980.

  The recipient of these letters, his literary friend Bohun Lynch, arranged in 1923 for their publication. But Lynch was prudent. To conceal the writer’s identity – he was still living among the people he commented on so uninhibitedly in his letters – Lynch gave him the pen-name Asterisk. Asterisk was intelligent and observant. His views were strongly expressed and sometimes interestingly contradictory. His character soon began to emerge in my mind as a rough diamond, a hard worker, brave, irascible, easily shocked by the cynical brutality of Australian plantation managers (he writes with an angry contempt of these ‘Orstryliuns’), and by what he saw as the dishonesty of missionaries. Naturally, Asterisk was a man of his time: he used the term ‘Kanaka’ (the white man’s word for Pacific Islanders that is as unacceptable as ‘nigger’ is today) without a second thought. Nor did he pull his punches when describing what he saw as the islanders’ shortcomings: the dirt, the smells, the fecklessness. At the same time he showed great compassion for them; doctored them; eventually took a New Hebridean woman into his bungalow and had a son by her. He was a gruff romantic despite himself, and never ceased to admire Stevenson, who had died in Samoa twenty years before. Yet I suppose the ‘illusion’ in the title of his book was the illusion Asterisk had brought with him from England – that every South Pacific Island was a Stevensonian paradise.

  Now, sitting on my bunk in the Chengtu, I looked from one book to the other. ‘God’s best, his sweetest work’, was Stevenson’s view of his beloved Polynesians, the Samoans, while Asterisk was feeling cheated in Melanesia:

  I wish I had gone to more beautiful islands … a strict line divides the South Sea Islands of Stevenson flavour from the merely interesting islands inhabited by ugly semi-cannibalistic savages. This line is drawn from the south-west corner of New Zealand to Honolulu, and passes between Fiji and the Tongan Islands…. The eastern islands are … the real lotos land….

  Yet there was much more to it than beauty.

  I doubt whether the dreamed-of Pacific Isle exists now. The horrible octopus of missionary-cum-trader-cum-official has spread his tentacles everywhere.

  He wrote that in 1913. I wanted to see if things had improved or worsened in seventy years.

  *

  The British Admiralty’s Pacific Islands Pilot – I found a copy in the chart room – told me that the Sepik River, which we soon passed, is the largest in north-east Papua New Guinea: a mile wide at its mouth. The Sepik had been investigated in 1910 by a mixed Dutch and German boundary commission (West Irian, now Indonesia, belonged in those days to Holland), whose members penetrated thirty miles upstream in canoes. They found ‘dense swamps, reed-beds, crocodiles, exceptionally troublesome mosquitoes, a malignant type of malaria, and natives eager to trade’.

  Nothing in that daunting inventory, except perhaps for the trade-hungry natives, could possible by applied to Madang, which we came to next day, a small, bland place of green bays and inlets. ‘All the best, Charles and Diana’ was painted on the harbour wall. I remember a walk ashore through a kind of garden suburb, lunch at a pleasant restaurant, an Australian wine called Coolabah Riesling; and a colony of huge fruit bats hanging upside down in an avenue of eucalyptus trees. One Australian-owned hotel advertised rooms for the equivalent of £75 a night. It catered, I suppose, exclusively for well-paid expatriates – Australian plantation staff, technicians, traders, tourists. Tourists flew up here from Australia, Jim Bird said, on a local airline that could be the most expensive in the world. It was called Air Niugini.

  *

  ‘Julian, do you think you could lift my pilot boat from the wharf into the water? We have crines, but you could do it better, ya?’ The harbour pilot at the port of Lae was Norwegian, but his accent had a lot to do with his years in Australian outposts like New Guinea. ‘A cridle and slings are on her, ready to tike her out. Ok-eye?’

  The pilot’s name was Rolf Underdahl and, according to Jim Bird, who could do a clever imitation of him, he was an old-timer here. Tall, beaky nose, white singlet, shorts and sandals, peaked white cap, pale gold hair, friendly, pale blue eyes – he looked like Danny Kaye impersonating Hans Christian Andersen.

  A ring of hills encircled a bay where the wide mouth of the Markham River ran into the Solomon Sea. We lay alongside a long wharf and warehouses, near bustling fork lift trucks and stacks of coloured containers. From the shore a stiff breeze brought a sweet, damp smell of vegetation, but failed to stir the heat and humidity. ‘What a little shit of a gulf,’ said Underdahl cheerfully, rotating his wrists over his head like a man winding two grandfather clocks at once. ‘Reel in, reel in!’ he called in the direction of Generoso and his mates near the winches of the bows. ‘Ya!’

  When the Chengtu’s cranes had swung his little pilot launch into the water, Underdahl used it to take Julian Gomersall, Jim Bird and myself to the Lae Yacht Club, an unpretentious little place some way round the northern shore of the ‘shit of a gulf’. There, large blond men and athletic-looking women milled about interspersing energetic swigs of beer with shouts welcoming numerous small yachts which charged ‘home’ amid much cheering and clapping.

  ‘Oh, there’s a little race on, is there, Gordon?’ Und
erdahl cried genially to a man in an eyeshade, and led us under a board marked ‘Lae Game Fishing Club’, announcing that the biggest marlin caught here so far had weighed 250 pounds, to the water’s edge where we sat among a happy, raucous group of the Australians of Melanesia at play. Most of the men wore shorts and sandals or ‘sensible’ shoes, were large and hearty, and their upper lips disappeared under the thick waterfall moustaches favoured by the cowboys in the Marlboro cigarette advertisements and by Dennis Lillee, the Australian fast bowler. Some wore long socks with their shorts; they looked like members of a hockey team, or schoolboys at one of those English schools which keep boys in shorts well after the time has come for longs. Their hair on the whole was fair and short, and their hands large and clamped round cans of beer. Sweat ran down faces burned scarlet by the sun.

  Against a burst of cheering that greeted the dashing arrival of a small yacht, first in its heat, Underdahl and his tall, blonde wife, Astrid, told a story of a recent holiday – a drive round part of the Highlands behind Lae with their children. It sounded exciting. ‘Yes, and for that I wouldn’t do it again,’ Rolf Underdahl smiled. ‘Well – we ran into this bush war up there. Ya, a war! With our kids!’ They had turned a corner in wild country a few thousand feet up, and suddenly spears and arrows shot back and forth across the road. Dark figures with painted faces pranced ferociously out of the bush. Were they rushing down to massacre the Underdahls? No – despite their hideous grimaces, these wild warriors were in single-minded pursuit of another set of warriors fleeing down the precipitous hillside, and the road had had the temporary halting effect of a firebreak. In the bushes on either side of the Underdahl family fierce faces under hornbill feather caps, and grotesquely transformed by streaks of paint into masks of implacable fury, peered and scowled. Shrill, inhuman cries arose. Spears rattled. Another volley of arrows down the hillside seemed to be on the cards. To the terrified Underdahls, caught in the middle of a sort of Papuan Agincourt, an immediate detour seemed de rigueur. ‘Well, I had Astrid and the children with me, eh? Of course, those fellows would never attack whites. But better be sife, ya?’ He had turned the car and accelerated away.