Slow Boats Home

by Gavin Young

  James and I anxiously examined every horizon for the telltale cloud formations that would herald the approach of our doom from north or south. It was odd, I thought, that the immediate prospect could be so outwardly placid and yet so implicitly menacing. The Ann gently rose and fell on the long, languid, soothing swells on an ocean so sleek it might have been smoothed out by the sheer weight of the thick heat. Nothing could have been farther from a landlubber’s idea of the prelude to a storm. Yet I found the stillness and the relentless undulation of the water deeply disturbing. Something huge and threatening seemed to be moving under that suave surface…. It recalled a recurring nightmare I had had since childhood – a dream of a gigantic whale, as big as the Queen Elizabeth, rising slowly out of the sea like a wet slate hillside from the waves and then – horror! – leaping like a salmon. Imagine the tidal wave when it fell back into the sea.

  *

  Luckily there were comforting distractions. Flying fish a foot long skimmed the water as if playing private games of ducks and drakes, quite unaffected by the malevolent aspect of wind or sea. Comforting, too, were Jehovah’s falsetto cries from the stern of ‘Fees! Fees!’ and the sight of Reginald the Cannibal Cook or George rushing to the lines and hauling in tuna, yellow-finned and yellow-spined, measuring two and a half feet from nose to tail, good to eat. The fish flapped and writhed on the battered deck, then lay staring at us with big, dead eyes before the cook chopped them up with swift, brutal strokes of his knife, and Jehovah, giggling excitedly, sluiced the blood and innards over the side.

  All over the Ann, washing hung out to dry like makeshift bunting that, despite all elemental threats, lent her the air of some down-at-heel, back-street reveller tipsily celebrating a royal jubilee. Blue shorts, white singlets, green and yellow towels and laplaps of all colours hung slackly in the still air on the deck, in the alleyways, around the engine well, even over the porthole cover in the chief engineer’s cabin.

  Whenever the grim cook – the massive Cannibal Cook – came on deck, he emerged into the light like a hungry but suspicious badger emerging from its sett in search of prey. He trimmed his moustache on deck, nipping off each tough hair with a pair of scissors almost a foot long, and peering at his dark upper lip in a thin sliver of broken mirror. The severed hairs lay at his feet like short lengths of black wire. His usual expression was a ferocious one, but if he had really been as ferocious as he looked someone would have been obliged to lock him up; in fact he was shy. His scowl broke into a most sweet smile when he spotted my binoculars. Seizing them in his huge hands, and clapping them to his reddened eyeballs, he swept them over the empty sea until they focused quite by chance on a flying fish, and then his pleasure was a delight to see. He pumped my hand saying, ‘Ha-ha! Yah!’ and showed me every tooth in his head. ‘Good!’ We were friends from that moment, and to cement the friendship he brought me an extra sardine and extra half-handful of rice at noon.

  Of course, Jehovah had taken against James, but no one else showed hostility of any kind. John the captain was amused by him and said: ‘Your friend is nervous.’

  ‘So am I,’ I said.

  ‘Well, see, the low depression six hundred miles south could move east or south-east or south-west. If it moves north towards us, we can always change course.’ We would make Suva in three more days, he estimated – that would make it a week in all. Usually reserved, he was sometimes in a chatty mood. His master’s certificate came from Singapore, he said, and I was glad to hear it because Singapore is not one of those places where incompetent officers can buy, for a few hundred dollars, permission to steer ships around the world like drunken truck drivers.

  James waved to me from the fo’c’sle, sweat band round a forehead scarlet with sunburn. His nose, white with anti-burn cream, stood out like an alp in a forest fire. He clutched a yellow, sweat-soaked paperback called Trucks, a novel, its blurb announced, about evils in the transport business. ‘One thousand millibars on the barometer,’ he said with grim relish. ‘It was just below that yesterday evening.’

  ‘Well, we’re holding our own, then.’

  ‘Well, yes … but remember one thousand and ten is a healthy norm,’ James said. ‘And – let me tell you about the captain’s last experience in these parts; he’s just been coming clean about it.’

  I leaned against a rusty winch and prepared to be harrowed.

  ‘He was master of another old rust-bucket, called the Pluto, I think, and just about where we are now, when he discovered that nine bolts in the hull were either loose or entirely missing. The bloody ship was coming apart, and already leaking badly. The pumps weren’t working either, so the Singapore-Chinese crew – a no-nonsense lot, Singaporeans, aren’t they? – struggled to improvise a pump, God knows how. Well, this was not a howling success – not in the crew’s eyes, anyway. Water kept coming in. It looked bad. So … they mutinied. Went in an angry bunch to the wheelhouse and told the captain, “Go back at once to the Santa Cruz Group – the nearest land.” Quite bravely, he refused point blank, and insisted on going to Port Vila in New Caledonia. They made it, but once there the Singaporeans promptly leaped off and disappeared into the blue!’

  ‘Did he go after them?’

  ‘He didn’t bother. He hired a new crew locally – a whole lot of Jehovahs, I suppose – then he blundered blindly up to Tarawa and – what do you think? – ran the ship aground on a reef. I’d say he’s a bit of a chancer.’

  ‘James, will you stop trying to make my flesh creep? He’s got a master’s certificate from Singapore. He must know more or less what’s what.’ I hoped I was right.

  ‘Oh sorry.’

  But James, I knew now, throve on drama.

  Meanwhile the Ann laboured bravely on, panting like an old and dutiful dog up humps of water as smooth as the Sussex Downs. The northern horizon filled with bruise-coloured clouds; they dispersed; the southern sky darkened in its turn. Rain storms came and went. Then, at last, thirty-six hours later and quite suddenly, all my anxiety ebbed away. The powerful swells had grown gradually weaker and fewer. James tumbled down from the bridge, sweating and grinning: ‘The barometer says one thousand and four!’

  ‘Saved!’ I cried, like a character in a boys’ adventure story. Evidently both cyclones had missed us; as if in collusion, they had changed their minds about pincering in on us and gone to terrorize someone else. My relief was tremendous. I have little doubt that in a cyclone we would have gone down without a trace. I had imagined the Ann’s bows dipping into an extra large swell like a diving submarine; Jehovah, cockroaches, the Dwarf’s Y-fronts and all.

  The captain peeped into his ‘toy’ radar screen, his forehead on the rubber eyepiece, as if it were a ‘What the Butler Saw’ machine on a seaside pier. ‘Not far now.’ Bligh Water lay ahead of us. Is this where Fletcher Christian set the captain of the Bounty adrift?

  Circling inquisitively, the first friendly terns appeared. The crew wanted their photographs taken and they posed expectantly on the forehatch like schoolboys at the end of term. A strange school. Reginald and the Cannibal Cook squatted grimly in front, disdaining to smile. Shem, John the captain, the Dwarf behind them, inscrutable; in the back row, Daniel thrusting out his chest to bring into focus the tattooed eagle diving on the mermaid; and Jehovah, his mouth gaping, a chicken feather in his hair like a cockade, a can of pilchards in one hand, and the first finger of the other beginning to work its way up a flaring nostril. The Cannibal Cook held his great knife like a sceptre – his orb was a can of corned beef. Both Reginald and the Dwarf flourished their thimble-bowled, long-stemmed pipes. When the group broke up, Jehovah sprang to the rail, turned his great bottom towards us, hauled up the front of his laplap, and began to pee untidily into the sea. This infuriated Daniel who, with a roar of disgust, real or feigned, rushed at Jehovah in his unusually vulnerable state, beat him away from the rail and chased him, stumbling and shrieking, his legs tangled in his laplap, towards the stern. Is this really love, as George said – or sheer raw hate,
as it appears? ‘It’s just a way of killing boredom, if you ask me,’ James said.

  *

  The green mountains of Viti Levu – the largest Fijian island, with Suva on its south-eastern coast – came to meet us through an afternoon mist. We entered an area of reefs and a bay with a semicircle of white buildings. We stopped. Presently, from behind the bulk of a big Mobil tanker, the Satucket, a launch emerged and circled our way. ‘Health,’ John said. I had expected bossy, energetic young men with brown skins and bushy hair, but the trio of health department officers who came aboard consisted of a very tall, elderly Indian in a long-sleeved white shirt and baggy grey trousers, an only slightly less tall Fijian lady – her head supported the highest and widest fuzz I had ever seen – and a shorter, stout man who might have been part Fijian and part European. Courteously they said to us, ‘Welcome to Fiji,’ and glided about the Ann, murmuring apologies whenever they sprayed insecticide. They soon left as genteelly as they had come, waving and smiling from their launch. We waved back. It was a pleasant landfall.

  We were alongside; no delay. ‘Fill in this form. That’s all.’ An immigration man put a month’s visa in my passport. Someone else gave me a ‘Miscellaneous Gate Pass’ in the name of ‘Mr Gavin and Barclay’. I went below for the last time to lug my metal suitcase up on deck. George was there.

  ‘George, I’ve made a damp, sweaty mess of your bunk. I’m sorry and grateful.’ I saw he had already replaced my ‘Forget Me Not, Darling’ pillowcase with a fresh one embroidered with ‘My Dreams Follow Where You Go.’

  ‘You were welcome,’ he said, smiling in a most open way, and ‘I won’t take that,’ when he saw money in my hand. I gave the remaining cans of food to the Cannibal Cook, who just smiled silently and touched the haft of his knife to his forehead in a rough salute. Jehovah and Daniel were at work on the forward hatch – at peace for once. I called to them and they waved back. Of Shem and Reginald there was no sign.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said to John the captain, ‘for avoiding the cyclones.’ And to the impassive Dwarf, ‘Thank you for keeping up the revs.’

  When I suggested a meal ashore John said, ‘Well, we should be loading tonight for Funafuti in Tuvalu. Let’s see.’ I followed James over the rusty rail and from the quay glanced back to the Ann’s mermaid flaunting her green nipples from the funnel. I had a last glimpse of Jehovah, too, his mouth hanging open, a finger probing a nostril. With his other hand he waved again.

  I saw in the Fiji Times a day later that the Ann had not hung about; she had swiftly taken on biscuits and general cargo and rolled away north-east, past the Yasawa Group, Bligh Water and the Great Sea Reef to Tuvalu. She’d allowed poor Jehovah no time to ‘spy for lady’ in Suva. Over a long glass of white rum and pineapple on the terrace of the Grand Pacific Hotel, I imagined my pillowcase where George would have pegged it like a brave banner on the Ann’s washing line, white as a gull once more, flapping its lovelorn entreaty to each indifferent wave that passed.

  Seventeen

  Suva. Here they were around me, these brown giants, six foot or more, big-handed, saying, ‘Good morning’ on the sidewalks, smiling with strong teeth. Colson had been a fair-sized man; these Fijians were half as large again. Pint glasses could disappear in these fists and, judging from the laughter, high shouts and sound of breaking glass in some Suva bars, many were doing so.

  James and I parted in Suva. Tonga had recently been hit by a particularly bad cyclone and he wanted to see the damage, which was said to be incalculable. If in Honiara I had felt a little apprehensive at the prospect of a white man’s company on the Ann it had been totally unjustified. He had been a good companion; we had got on very well in that strange, restrictive little world. A cutting from the Fiji Times sent on by James reached me later, in Samoa, with the following news:

  BERNIE BREAKS YACHT IN TWO

  A 42-ft yacht bought in Fiji about six months ago, was broken in two and sunk off Honiara in the Solomons when Cyclone Bernie struck the islands late last week. According to reports from Honiara, none of the crew aboard the yacht Camping Loo were injured although nothing was salvaged from the wreck.

  The ketch was skippered by an Englishman. It was reported to have broken its anchor chain in the yacht basin off the Mendana Hotel, and broken in two on the rocks, leaving only broken wood washed up on the beach….

  So our good luck had been the Camping Loo’s matchwood. It looked as if Cyclone Bernie had been misinformed; searching for James, it had destroyed the vessel he had just left. Later still, when I was back in England, James wrote again from the Solomons. He had rediscovered the Ann – and found that there had been one significent crew change. ‘Yes,’ he said in his letter, ‘you’ve guessed. No more Jehovah. The captain mysteriously mentioned that Jehovah would be better off as a married man on Santa Cruz. His behaviour had become so arbitrary that he had been put ashore at some obscure port.’ He added, ‘I was surprised to find a blonde German girl emerging from the captain’s cabin. He explained that she was married to an Ellice Islander and was on her way to Funafuti. Well, well. Tut, tut.’

  *

  As soon as I was ashore and settled in my hotel, I began as usual to think about an onward ship. My next stop was Western Samoa. I longed to see the island Robert Louis Stevenson had chosen; the sultry place of his death on 3 December 1894; the path up which devoted chiefs had carried him to his grave on the hilltop overlooking the bay of Apia.

  I visited a few shipping offices, including Burns Philp, of course – a name as ubiquitous in the South Seas as Gray Mackenzie is in the Middle East, or as John Swire or Jardine Mathieson are in south-east Asia. But there was nothing doing. Not just then at any rate. It was in the offices of Carpenters Shipping that I found salvation this time. A friendly, thick-set man with dark hair rose from behind a desk in a moderate-sized office to take my hand and pass me his card:

  Fritz Falkner

  Master Mariner

  Area Manager Central

  Shipping and Transport.

  Captain Falkner was a traveller himself; he understood at once what I wanted and why, and without delay he decided to help me.

  From him I learnt to my great delight that a small Tongan ship – the Tasi, 1300 tons – was due in Suva within a few days and would be proceeding to the port of Apia. ‘New Zealand owner. Smallish company. I should think they’d take you. I’ll ask their head office, if you like. No trouble.’ Tongan ship! To Samoa? What more could I want?

  With that next step half assured (Captain Falkner had an optimistic look about him as he sat down to write out the request for a berth from the owners), I turned to the question of the next move but one. (To anyone who might think I was being over-anxious, I can only say that by now I was fully aware that, on top of the ordinary problem of getting aboard cargo vessels, I had doomed myself to the role of a swimmer battling adverse currents. By moving against the prevailing east-to-west flow of ships across the South Pacific, I had made things very hard for myself.) Nevertheless, a perusal of the shipping pages of the Fiji Times revealed, among the schedules of the Kyowa Line, the Columbus Line and New Zealand United Express service, something that looked very convenient indeed. The Bali Hai service, an advertisement told me, plied between Kobe in Japan and the South Pacific islands, and I saw the name of a Swire vessel, the Pacific Islander, which had become familiar to me from the conversations of Julian Gomersall and Jim Bird on the Chengtu. She would be in Apia in a couple of weeks en route to Tahiti.

  ‘Bali Hai Service – You’ll Find It, Where the Sky Meets the Sea,’ the notice said, and I saw that Burns Philp were its agents in Suva. I hurried to their office in the small centre of the town and, as at Carpenters, found friendliness and a promise. A tall shipping manager in glasses said he would ask permission by telex from Tim Bridgeman’s China Navigation Company office in Hong Kong for me to take a lift from Apia to Papeete. I didn’t believe the kind men at Swires would refuse me. I left Burns Philp ecstatic: from Fiji to Tahiti my way seemed se
cure. And Tahiti – I checked it on my Bartholomew’s map of the Pacific – lay roughly halfway across the ocean. I was getting on!

  *

  What could I see of Fiji? I had seen the bay of Suva, a wide, misty piece of water within the reef, enclosed oddly as if by a pair of dislocated arms, and a strange outcrop of rock like a comb on a rooster’s head. I walked about Suva town – a well-kept place of pleasant old and the usual nondescript modern buildings, low, green with trees and parks. I had been smiled at, I had seen soldiers wearing the famous jagged-hemmed kilts.

  From a book of Fijian history I knew that indented Indian labourers, brought by ship from Madras and Calcutta by the British in the later years of the nineteenth century – coolie labour for sugar and cotton fields – had subsequently multiplied until they formed more than half the population of the Fijian Islands. Energetic, they now dominated the economy, and this had alarmed the Fijians. In the Fiji Times an election campaign was reported in which Fijian nationalists were talking about ‘restoring Fiji to the Fijians’. The then Indian Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi, on a recent visit to Suva, had warned the Fijian Indian community, ‘Your ideas must be totally identified with your country, Fiji,’ which seemed to be the most sensible thing she could have said. If the opposition party won the election, the newspaper editorials prophesied that Indian ambassadors would soon represent Fiji abroad. Intimations of racial friction hung over a group of islands that, to judge by their looks, should have been a fairly close approximation to paradise.