Slow Boats to China

by Gavin Young

  Such a sign of Western encroachment was matched by saddening experiences I had endured with the Imam’s forces. The Observer, for which I was then a foreign correspondent, had required me (quite properly) to take a look at both sides in the war, and by the time I joined the Imam’s men I had already spent ten days in Sana, the capital of Yemen and the base of operations for the Egyptian expeditionary force engaged in making sure the Imam never returned to the throne from which a republican coup d’état had ousted him. Because of my excursion into their enemies’ camp, the Yemeni royalists regarded me with suspicion; they thought I might be an Egyptian spy. I found myself obliged to eat, walk and sleep apart from the Yemeni tribesmen whose way of life interested me more than the actual war itself; I suppose the Imam’s officers, knowing that I spoke some Arabic, feared I might coax from them some military secret of vital importance to the Egyptian high command. But that wasn’t all. Unfortunately, the Imam’s cause had already attracted hordes of Western mercenaries and journalists, whose empty corned-beef cans, Coca-Cola bottles and toilet paper (tribal Arabs use water or sand) disfigured a mountainous landscape of hitherto unsullied beauty where heretofore no more than a handful of European explorers had ever set foot. My dispiriting experience in the mountains culminated in a dreary week in that new hotel in Jedda, waiting to be summoned to an interview with Prince Faisal, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia – the man whose portrait, though he is now dead, had dominated the office of the Saudi consul general in Alexandria.

  In the old days Jedda had been a small but important port of the kingdom of the Hejaz, an entity that ceased to exist when in the twenties the Bedouin armies of Ibn Saud swept out of the eastern province of Nejd, deposed the ruler of the Hejaz and gathered the region into a united kingdom of Arabia under the Saud family. Jedda retained its importance as the largest Arabian port on the Red Sea and as the sea gateway to Mecca.

  My best memory of the city was the first time I had seen it. In 1954 I arrived in Jedda to join the British-run part of an international organization called Desert Locust Control, which tried to destroy those devastating insects by poisoning the swarms as they laid their eggs in the Arabian wilderness. I had already spent two years with the Marsh Arabs of southern Iraq, and the Englishman who had taken me to meet them – Wilfred Thesiger, the last of the great Arabian explorers – had urged me to see the wild and beautiful west of Arabia before it was too late. I had arrived in Jedda from London in an old propeller-driven aircraft to embark on two of the best years of my life, two years freely roaming the highlands and lowlands of Arabia from Mecca to the Yemen, alone with the Bedouins of the desert and the long-haired men of the well-watered valleys of the Asir.

  Western Arabia was still unspoiled then, and Jedda was an antique Hejazi port with a mere handful of modern buildings. Now, from the deck of Al Wid, I saw something unrecognizable: a skyscraper city high-rising round a vanishing curve of sealine; a bristling of cranes and masts; glass and steel gleaming in the sun. Was this Chile, Spain, Japan?

  The Saudi pilot was a huge, discontented-looking man in a white thobe, the Arabian ankle-length shirt. He seemed overweight for the job. A wave leaped up as he sprang awkwardly from his launch and soaked the thobe from the thighs down, so that when he waddled up to the bridge his massive buttocks shifted back and forth under the white cotton like captive balloons. Over the ship’s radio came a gabble of voices – voices of captains, mainly deferential Greeks or feebly imploring Scandinavians, begging to be allowed to move into port to escape from the sun-broiled roads where their ships lay, a score or more of them, among the hulks of rusty freighters that had gone aground on the port’s famous reefs. Jedda filled the minds of seamen with a peculiar dread of delay – days, weeks, even months, of baffling, almost insupportable delay. Who could stand out among the reefs, burned by those terrible temperatures and soaked by the humidity, with no relief, no alcohol (Saudi officials insisted on coming aboard and searching for it), no shore leave, no women? Delay, at least, we were spared. Our pilot brought us straight in to the wharf. Of course the blessed difference was that Al Wid was a Saudi ship.

  Another pleasant surprise, the last one for some time: as we approached the quay, Captain el Zenati pointed – ‘Your French ship is very near us. Look. Three berths away.’ It was true. The high château and pale-blue funnel were visible over what looked like a large customs shed. Somewhere over there was a captain called Jean-Noël Visbecq, a Breton first officer and a Basque chief engineer.

  *

  At first things seemed to go very well. With Captain el Zenati’s introduction, I met the chief immigration officer, who permitted me to enter Saudi Arabia without fuss. I lugged my bags ashore and, thanks to the same officer’s intervention, was permitted by a suspicious and unsmiling man in a thobe to leave them in a corner of the shed while I walked over to the Patrick Vieljeux five minutes away – long enough to stick the shirt to my back in that heat. There I climbed the gangway and pressed through the crowd of dark-skinned Orientals wearing hard hats and jeans (‘Malays?’ I asked, glad to see those familiar cheerful, high cheekbones; ‘Filipinos,’ they winked back over flashing teeth.)

  Captain Visbecq took the surprise with a smile and a shrug. ‘Ouf! If you can bear the pilot’s cabin again.’ Within an hour or two I had retrieved my baggage, said a warm goodbye to Captain Mohamed el Zenati (who sailed as soon as he had off-loaded his pilgrims and on-loaded a new mob of passengers for Suez), and returned to the Patrick Vieljeux. ‘Hodeida, then Djibouti, then Aden. That’s our programme!’ said Captain Visbecq. ‘Eh bien, have a beer!’

  But it was not to be that easy. Already, the captain told me with gestures of frustration, his Jedda agents had shown themselves to be slack, even uncooperative. Just at this moment, the agency’s representative came on board. An unprepossessing and slouching youth, he was a surprising human being to find in a position of such relative authority. He wore sloppy Western dress and looked more like a tout for an Alexandria disco than a shipping agency’s clerk. He was tailor-made for a job at the Star Cabaret in Port Said; his manners would have been appropriate there. He had already delayed the cash the captain had ordered in advance so that his men could go ashore and shop for souvenirs. It seemed probable that part of the cargo to be loaded would also be overdue, which meant that either the sailing of the ship would be delayed or the cargo left behind. None of this was of any visible concern to the agent’s representative as he lolled on Captain Visbecq’s banquette, legs crossed, a young man of malignant expression, waving a disdainful hand in the air as he talked.

  When the kindly Captain Visbecq turned to this youth and observed that he was willing to take me as passenger to Djibouti, my anxiety rose. ‘We have nothing to do with this man,’ the clerk said with a dismissive gesture in my direction. ‘I take no responsibility for him.’

  ‘But I am willing to take him. I know him,’ Captain Visbecq nobly persevered.

  ‘It cannot be done. We will take no responsibility.’

  Captain Visbecq said heavily, ‘Merde!’

  ‘The captain gives his permission for me to travel to Djibouti,’ I said to the agent’s representative. ‘All I need is an exit stamp from the immigration office. You could arrange that. How about it? If you don’t feel like doing it, suppose I talk to your boss?’

  ‘What boss?’ His expression was one of quiet triumph. ‘I am the boss.’

  ‘Your boss. The managing director of the agency.’

  ‘In Paris.’

  ‘Your operations manager, then.’

  ‘In Beirut. I am the boss, I tell you, and I will not be responsible for you.’ He got up, said, ‘I’ll be here early morning,’ and left. ‘Merde!’ Captain Visbecq repeated. ‘Sheet!’

  I had not, at this point, met many shipping agents, although of course Captain Rashad and Ahmed Bey clearly had been admirable representatives of a fine profession. Agents are scattered around the ports of the world to assist distant shipowners in the matter of the procuring of c
argoes and their loading and off-loading, and the provision of necessities for the running of their vessels and the well-being of their officers and crews. As far as I knew, ships’ owners or masters were responsible for any decision concerning the acceptance of passengers aboard. But Jedda is not like other ports. In Jedda, attitudes to foreigners – any foreigners, not only sea travellers – depend largely on the whims and personal relationships of individual Saudi officials. It was outrageous that Captain Visbecq should have to kowtow to this young man, but he was certainly prudent to do so in a port like this. Here such a young clerk had it in his power so to engineer delays in the loading and sailing of the Vieljeux – by ‘forgetting’, for example, to order trucks or stevedores or by ‘mislaying’ essential papers – that her owners would be faced with hideous expense and a horribly disrupted schedule. The young man’s motive would be sheer malice; we were not acting illegally, but Jedda is different. Even my inexperienced brain told me to stop embarrassing kind Captain Visbecq. If in the morning the agent’s representative hadn’t softened his attitude to my presence on board, I would leave the ship immediately.

  At Captain Visbecq’s invitation, I occupied the pilot’s cabin and took a shower. After a few hours in this heat I looked as if I’d had a ducking in the harbour, and my clothes were full of salt. I changed them and returned to the office. ‘À table!’ I heard Captain Visbecq’s commanding voice like that of a genial cavalry general ordering a welcome advance.

  At dinner the captain and the chief engineer from Biarritz made a pantomime of closing the dining-room curtains before we helped ourselves to the Spanish rosé or the French red. (The official puritanism of the Saudis involves depriving even passing sailors of so much as a glass of wine or beer, while behind their high marble walls the Saudi élite make merry with their cellars of smuggled Scotch.)

  ‘Let not the Saudis see us wicked persons drinking the wine and the beer.’

  ‘And eating pig meat!’ It was true; the steward had served us with a nicely cooked leg of pork.

  ‘Oh là là là!’ Captain Visbecq moaned richly, rolling his tragedian’s eyes around the room. ‘Pork, too! Mon Dieu, steward, what were you thinking of?’

  *

  Early next morning, the agent’s representative appeared looking, if anything, more malignant than before. I had hoped that by now his stubbornness might have mellowed. In a brief conference with me, Captain Visbecq had proposed typing a letter stating clearly that he was prepared to have me aboard. The kindly Breton could hardly do more, and I was grateful. Sitting with great solemnity at his own typewriter in the dayroom, he tapped out slowly and carefully: ‘I undersigned, Captain of m/s/ “PATRICK VIELJEUX” declare accepté as passenger from Jeddah to Djibouti Mr: GAVIN DAVID YOUNG – Ship expected sailing from Jeddah on the 3rd of October.’ He signed it. ‘You have a visa for Djibouti, yes?’ I told him I had.

  ‘Now,’ he said in gentle but confident and businesslike tones when the agent’s representative appeared, ‘about this problem –’

  He was rudely cut short. ‘There is no problem,’ said the Saudi with a moody insolence. His eyes fixed malevolently on a patch of carpet, he added, ‘I will not talk about it to you. Or to this man,’ and he flicked a thumb in my direction.

  There was nothing for it but to leave the Patrick Vieljeux before she sailed. Who knew what mischief a man like this might not get up to, what charges he might trump up to inflame the Saudi authorities? I imagined all sorts of evils befalling poor Captain Visbecq: the ship delayed, himself arrested, fines, God knows what, but, not least, bitter recriminations from the owners in Paris.

  Once more I lugged the suitcase – its metal body seemed solid lead – down to the deck at the head of the gangway. The first officer was there, and I asked him if I could safely leave my baggage there while I said goodbye to Captain Visbecq.

  ‘Ouf! Oui! Il n’y à rien a craindre de ces philippins, hein? They steal nothing.’ I knew that he was right, and glad that he knew it too; I like Filipinos. I quickly said goodbye to the captain in his cabin, and thanked him for his efforts on my behalf. ‘Eh bien, je regrette…’ he said with a sad smile.

  Much later I found the key of the pilot’s cabin in my pocket.

  *

  A friendly Filipino volunteered to drive me in a small pick-up to the dock gates some way from the Patrick Vieljeux. He told me he was the overseer of this particular gang of workers. Jedda docks are largely populated by Filipino stevedores: cheap, imported labour, part of a foreign workforce of thousands, mostly Filipinos, Koreans and Pakistanis. I had seen the old hull of a French ship, the Pasteur, where the Filipinos were barracked like battery hens, moored just off the wharf as Al Wid sailed in. The Pasteur was big, about 32000 tons, built in 1938, a fine trim ship then. She had ferried troops in the Second World War, then been turned over to North German Lloyd as the Bremen on the North Atlantic run from Bremerhaven. Subsequently she was bought by a Greek company, renamed Regina Magna, and finally sold to the Filipinos as a ‘hotel ship’: a floating dormitory, bunks slapped everywhere, for five thousand Filipino workers.

  The Filipino drove me past dozens of his countrymen manhandling cargo or resting, on ships or on the docks, skins dark as treacle, coloured scarves around their heads, like pirates in oily jeans, naked to the waist. He seemed to find it a relief to talk to an outsider. A stocky, dark-skinned man with scarred arms, he opened his mouth wide and threw his head back when he talked, revealing several gold teeth. He drove through the containers, crates and warehouses in erratic bursts of speed, wrenching the wheel from side to side in some kind of eccentric counterpoint to his animated chatter.

  ‘We’re about three thousand men in our company,’ he shouted above the engine, ‘and we get about five hundred dollars US a month – that is for supervisors like me, the others less. Not so much because here is hard. No drink here. We live in that old ship for two years. Tough, eh? Yeah, tough. Two years no girl! But we save some money. Philippines is a very poor country. Only we are not happy that the Koreans here get one thousand dollars US a month. When we say to our boss, “Why we only get five hundred dollars?” he says, “Take it or leave it. You want work or you no want work? If not, we bring other Filipinos and you go back home.” So what can we say?’

  Like Cubans, Filipinos are easygoing, irrepressible people, and their country is an uproarious mélange of spontaneous song, easy sex and flamboyant spirits highly spiced with a strong dash of day-to-day mayhem, mostly by shooting. But two years cooped up in the Pasteur! It was not pleasant to imagine it, whatever the pay.

  The overseer dropped me at the dock gates and I went through the police control and found a taxi. Captain el Zenati had told me of a small but adequate hotel in central Jedda, so I took the last available room there. Jedda hotels are always full of affluent pilgrims or businessmen. People come to Saudi Arabia to find God or gold; there is nothing else there.

  *

  My urgent need was for a ship out of Jedda next day or the day after – or else to get an extension to my visa. But the next day was Friday, and nobody worked on Friday. If I wanted an extension I would have to acquire it today before noon. I stayed in the hotel just long enough to wash, and then went to call on one of the biggest shipping agencies.

  The shipping manager in a big airy office high over the port was as unlike the young agent’s representative who had insulted Captain Visbecq on board the Patrick Vieljeux as a man could possibly be. He was courteous and understanding, and he wanted to help; unfortunately, there were, I soon saw, considerable problems. A major one was the attitude of the Saudis.

  ‘Their attitude to what?’

  ‘To everything. Your difficulty here will be documentation, Mr Young. It is our difficulty too. Indeed it is!’ The shipping manager was a Pakistani by birth. From the precision of his English he might have come from Oxford instead of a college in Karachi or Lahore. ‘I have to tell you – warn you – the documentation is fantastic. We are bombarded by circulars from the
government. Often they contradict themselves. Sometimes they are impossible to comply with unless we want to put ourselves out of business.’

  Behind him through a wide, tinted window I could see the anchorage of Jedda, the ships lying helplessly inert on that steaming water, the abandoned wrecks listing on the reefs.

  ‘Then there is the fiddling. The government is trying to stop all the fiddles that go on here. Deals involving sale of cargoes on the high sea, that kind of thing, mostly involving Lebanese in cahoots with Saudis.’

  ‘So I’m a bit of a documentary nuisance.’

  ‘Frankly, most shipping people won’t want to bother with someone like you, a single individual who doesn’t fit in the normal routine pattern of sea travellers.’

  He ran a finger down the shipping lists: ships in port, ships due, ships sailing, where they were going and when. Nothing fitted my timetable or itinerary. Either the ships he handled were the wrong type – container ships, perhaps, with no accommodation of any kind that wasn’t occupied – or the dates and destinations didn’t fit. Later, perhaps; he would let me know as soon as something promising turned up. ‘Don’t despair.’ He gave me his telephone number and urged me to return on Saturday. My heart sank. Without a visa I could not be here on Saturday.

  I sped around to another agent, whose name the Pakistani had given me. He, too, wanted to be helpful. I had seen a Hansa Line vessel in the port; the black Maltese cross on her funnel took me back to the fifties, when I had worked in a dingy shipping office in Basra and supervised the loading of grain into the ships lying in the river. There had been many Hansa Line ships there, and I can still recall the taste of the schnapps and Beck’s beer in the un-air-conditioned cabins of sweating, jovial German mates. But now the agent told me that to hitch a ride on a Hansa vessel would mean telexing Hamburg or Bremen for permission from the owners. This he would do, he said, but the answer would take time, or might never come; the owners were the sort who would probably ignore a request involving a single, unknown man. As for the Saudis, now if only I had been a group of pilgrims! ‘Come back next week to see if Hansa has answered.’ I wished I could turn myself into a group just long enough to leave Jedda by sea.