Slow Boats to China

by Gavin Young

  ‘That’s my future son-in-law,’ he said audibly at last, pointing to the young man who was trying to jab the crow off the window frame with the umbrella. ‘It’s a family business, here and in Tuticorin. I was born, bred and married in Tuticorin.’

  ‘Those sailing ships I saw in the harbour –’ My pulse accelerated. ‘Would they take me?’

  ‘That depends, Mr Young. Let me tell you about them. At Tuticorin there are no mechanized boats at all, but these sailing ships, built there, sail up to Cochin – sometimes even to Bombay in the right monsoon. From here to Tuticorin it is too rough when the south-west monsoon blows. They’ve lost several vessels on this crossing.’

  The trade with southern India, he said, was in buffalo hides, graphite, grams, dried fish, betel leaves, gypsum, salt (Tuticorin is famous for salt), safety matches, cement – everything.

  ‘Another thing. The last man we put aboard a ship of ours’ – Mr Missier smiled and shook his head in mock disapproval – ‘was a German fellow, and it turned out Interpol was searching for him. Very embarrassing, as you can appreciate.’

  An obvious question seemed to hang silently in the air, so I explained why I wanted to sail to Tuticorin.

  He listened carefully – the whole office listened – and then sat back and smiled an angelic smile. ‘I love England, Mr Young. We used to do such a lot of good business with England. Lace business. Nottingham. I had so many friends in England, very big merchants and very good friends to me.’

  He opened a drawer and handed me a photograph, taken in a studio in Colombo, of a comfortably built Englishman posed with a younger, black-haired Missier. ‘Very rich men. Millionaires, I suppose. The war changed everything. Before it, commerce was free; you could do what you wanted, and all you needed was energy, keenness, hard work. But after the war, so many controls made it nearly impossible to trade. Now….’

  His face looked sad and pinched, contemplating the dead past. Then he said, ‘You’ll be very uncomfortable on those ships,’ and smiled, ‘you’d better take some biscuits with you. And a pineapple.’ He hadn’t said, ‘Why don’t you go by air to Madras?’ I knew then that he would arrange everything.

  ‘I’ll speak to the captain. You will have to see the immigration people here. Captain Henricus, you’ve met him? Oh, well, that’s all that matters. Get a letter and perhaps a visa for India. I shall write to the customs in Tuticorin; I have a nephew there. The ship will take on cargo in a day or two. Please come and see me tomorrow.’

  While I finished my barley water Missier’s future son-in-law slapped at the wire mesh over the window with a rolled Sinhalese newspaper. The crow sprang away, flew a lazy circle, alighted again on the same spot and the cawing resumed, like a man ripping the roof off the same bus. The sequence repeated itself like a Morris dance: slap, spring, circle, slap….

  I pushed back through the lane of sweaty black bodies. The heat was intense, but the sweat of anxiety and urgency had left me. I stopped at the Nawa Rasa ‘Cool Spot’ stall and sucked a pineapple, strolled past the row of clothing stalls near the Sri Bodhiraja Temple opposite the Baghdad Gate, sidestepped the crowds around the Sir Cyril De Zoysa Building, which houses the Young Men’s Buddhist Association, and skirted the offices of the Sunday Times of Ceylon and the Ceylon Daily Mirror. Beyond a grogshop and a crumbling hostelry I turned right and found the Taprobane.

  The stately Edwardian lift took me to the third floor. From my window overlooking the harbour I focused with my binoculars on the black spars of the two Tuticorin sailing ships. Their sails were partly expanded, limply drying in the sun after a downpour, so that they looked like the wings of an exhausted moth.

  *

  The Tuticorin adventure was not to take place right away, however. Mr Missier was outraged by the churlish attitude of the captain of the sailing ship he had planned to put me on. Having agreed to take me, the captain had started to argue over what I should pay. It was never clear to me exactly what was said, but whatever it was shocked Mr Missier’s sense of honour. Later he said, ‘Such shouting. I told him, “Don’t be so hard. Hardness in life does no one any good.” And he is a Catholic! I told him he should be proud to have you on his ship, not go shouting like a wild man. It was not Catholic behaviour – that is what I told him.’

  The upshot was that I had to wait for the next ship to arrive from Tuticorin, which would not be for a week or ten days. I composed myself, and luckily, two possibilities arose to keep me busy.

  Mrs De Mel had introduced me to Admiral Kadirgamar. At a party at the house of this all-knowing lady I now met the admiral’s brother, Sam, one of Sri Lanka’s best lawyers, and also a former acquaintance from Singapore, Tom Abraham. At this moment, he was the Indian high commissioner in Colombo, which could hardly have been a better stroke of luck.

  When I had moaned to him about the delay, Sam Kadirgamar immediately advised me to fill the time before Tuticorin with a visit to the Maldive Islands – ‘a necklace of tiny jewel-like atolls,’ he said, four hundred miles west of Sri Lanka. Small vessels went there at regular intervals, and some of them took passengers, he thought. It was an appealing notion.

  Tom Abraham did even more. In the middle of yet one more recitation of my plans and progress so far, he stopped me when I mentioned the unhelpful Tourist Board man in Bombay.

  ‘Wait. The Andamans. You couldn’t get a permit for the Andamans, is that right? And you want to go there?’

  ‘Very much, but I’m afraid Indian government regulations –’

  ‘I have no time for red tape.’ He thought for a minute, then told me that if I could occupy myself for a week or so, he would see what he could do about a permit for the Andamans.

  ‘Tom, with every respect, I doubt –’

  ‘You want to bet?’

  I didn’t want to bet, so I took a supportive drink instead, and time showed that it was by far the wiser thing to do. I left Mrs De Mel’s feeling so blithe that I fairly skipped through the doors of the Taprobane.

  My rough ride to the Maldives sticks in my mind as the ‘Tale of Two Bird Men’. I shall never really know how close I was to being drowned. On the other hand, I now know how to open a coconut with a spanner.

  There was a good bird man and a bad one. The bad one sat in an office in Chatham Street, cold, white-haired and hunched over like a vindictive sea eagle. He represented the owners of the small Maldivian launch, a mere twenty-five tons, that would accommodate me for three days and three nights across that quite wide stretch of water. He took obvious delight in keeping customers seated on hard chairs while, with excruciating deliberation, he busied himself with other matters without so much as a glance, much less a ‘good morning’. There was no offer of tea here, nor even a minimum of Sri Lankan warmth. The only good thing about Sea Eagle was that he finally arranged my passage, and this was all that really mattered.

  The voyage to Malé, the capital of the Maldives, began badly with a dispute between the captain of the launch and Sea Eagle that delayed our departure by several hours.

  It was a filthy night when I reported to the harbour for sailing. Rain was bouncing off the docks, but it would have been difficult in any weather to spot the launch, the smallest of all the vessels I sailed in during my odyssey: twenty-five tons, forty feet long, powered by a Thorneycroft 125-h.p. engine making six knots – with luck. I found her at last, crouched like a frightened pygmy between two metal giants, a Sri Lankan freighter and a ship from Canton. The comparatively huge hawsers of these two towering neighbours somehow added a puny absurdity to the launch’s littleness, so that she looked more like a dinghy. I stood in the rain and thought, Is this what we’re going to cross more than four hundred miles of water in? Three days or more in this?

  Naturally Sea Eagle did nothing to raise my spirits. His dispute with the captain postponed our time of departure to 11.45 p.m., trapping us all in solid sheets of rain. Despite, or because of, the rain, it was muggy almost beyond endurance on the cramped deck of the launch, and a na
useous smell rose from the stygian, stagnant water trapped in our corner of the harbour, the area farthest from the outlet to the sea.

  The angry Sea Eagle kept urging the crew to cram an immense cargo of furniture from trucks into the tiny holds of the launch: large, heavy panels of compressed wood, chairs and dozens of lavatory seats. ‘The owner’s representative has accepted this cargo,’ he snapped when the captain protested, and refused to allow any of the shipment to wait for a later vessel. Truck after truck drew up, the crew forced more chairs and tables into the last nooks and crannies of the hold, and we settled lower and lower into the water. I waited, getting wet, noticing Sea Eagle’s avian ability to turn his head rather more than ninety degrees, and fighting a desire to go ashore and forget the whole adventure.

  The launch had two bunks, no mattresses and no awnings. Space in the tiny hutchlike cabin area, apparently constructed out of a handful of nails and a hundredweight of driftwood, was further diminished by the metal trunks of the crew, a spare outboard motor, and the exhaust pipe of the engine that thrust up through the middle of the cabin to the upper air. This exhaust was a serious continual danger to the unwary because in rough weather it was exceedingly well placed to serve as a natural handhold, and yet was almost red-hot. As a result, by the time we reached Malé, I lacked skin on three fingers of my right hand.

  When Sam Kadirgamar, QC, had urged me to take a look at the Maldives, I knew nothing about them, and the next day I had accepted his invitation to consult a book or two in his library. From these, I discovered that the Maldives were an archipelago four hundred miles south-west of Ceylon, a chain of two thousand coral islands stretching six hundred and fifty miles, some only a few yards long. Maldivians were Muslims, the books said, and their ancient rulers had titled themselves Sultans of the Thirteen Atolls and Twelve Thousand Islands. The islands produced fish, breadfruit, coconuts, pumpkins, paw-paws, limes, and the inhabitants spoke their own language, although words from other tongues had been fused into the original, like new coral into a reef: Sinhalese, Arabic, Urdu, Persian, English, Malay, Sanskrit and Portuguese.

  ‘The Maldivians are a civilised and peaceful race,’ a monograph informed me, and dark brown of hue. Patronizingly it added, ‘The women are somewhat fairer than the men – some of them distinctly pretty.’

  The West Coast of India Pilot informed me that in 1960 HMS Scarborough reported that the coral islands on the atolls could be detected by radar at a range of just over twenty miles, but that the intricate channels between them required local knowledge. Between Sri Lanka and the Maldives were great sub-oceanic trenches, some perhaps thirteen thousand feet deep. ‘There is no bottom at the depth of 200 fathoms,’ the Pilot said.

  We moved out of the harbour at last, past the friendly light at the end of the breakwater, and felt the light lift and fall of the open sea. Lightning flashes silhouetted mountainous cloud formations.

  I moved back to the stern of the launch – it wasn’t far to scramble over the roof of the cabin with its protruding funnel – and found the captain, a thin young man with big teeth, and a helmsman, an even younger Maldivian, standing in a small raised, roofed area, an even tinier hutch than the cabin and engine housing. The launch had no wheel; the helmsman steered standing up by straddling a long thick, rounded wooden spar attached to the rudder, pushing it or restraining its movements with the muscles of his thighs. It looked agonizing. The spar was heavy, and in a high sea I imagined that it would slam back and forth almost uncontrollably.

  The helmsman was having no trouble now. He stood in a red undershirt and bathing trunks, peering at the compass on the ledge formed by the roof of the engine housing in front of him, the helm spar protruding between his upper thighs like a giant phallus, each vibration of the rudder travelling up the spar and shaking his leg muscles like jelly. He looked at me, grinned and wrapped a tiny, inadequate towel around his hips. If this was modesty, it was misjudged; the great spar thrusting through the towel only increased the effect.

  My notes read:

  A light rolling. I take one of the two ledges – or bunks, if that is what they really are. It has a wafer-thin woven mat on it. I roll my anorak into a pillow and spread my towel like a blanket. The engine pounds away; its chimney throws up a bright jet of smoke and sparks. A breeze stirs the fug of the cabin but cannot dispel it.

  Through the night, I see the crew (I don’t sleep much) changing their watches. Six men plus the captain. They scramble agilely about in the cramped space, changing from towels to sarongs and back again. Sometimes they bathe on deck outside the cabin door, pouring sea water over their wiry hair, drying themselves with small coloured towels, rubbing scented ointment into their chests, cheeks, armpits and under their sarongs. The sweet smell of the ointment tempers the prevailing odour of fuel oil, hot metal, sweat and vegetables.

  A young Australian was on the launch. He was taciturn – shy, I think. He was travelling – slowly, he said – to Europe. ‘What is Time?’ he asked, and was silent.

  There were also two Maldivian passengers who travelled on the cabin roof. During the night, they offered me a cut or two from what looked like a hard plug of dark, rich tobacco, but which was in fact a dark, rich plug of compressed fish. It looked like the dried meat of South Africa called biltong. The Maldivians extracted it from the folds of their sarongs and hacked pieces off it with a penknife. It tasted mildly fishy and was very hard on the teeth.

  I wondered what fish it came from. ‘Maldive fish,’ they answered.

  ‘Mullet?’

  ‘Mullet,’ they agreed. But they were repeating what I said.

  The launch’s crew spoke very few words of English, and that included the Starling Cook, although when I think of him I recall that somehow we communicated quite effectively. I call him the Starling Cook because of his looks. He was more or less the colour of a starling, very dark in blue shorts and shirt. He was short and fat-bodied, and his skinny bowlegs protruded out of his shorts like a black wishbone. He had long bare feet and very little neck; his shoulders were hunched, his arms long, and his nose was a beak that curved thinly between large expressive eyes. I suppose he was in his forties or fifties. Some seamen, I have noticed, quietly observe the pitch and toss of a deck and time their moves across it like a computer, perhaps quite unaware of their calculation. The Starling Cook was not like that; he scuttled crablike over the deck, hardly laying a hand on any support.

  The first morning, the wind rose and the broken water swayed and rocked us quite a bit – a foretaste of things to come. The launch was so small that anything affected its stability. I could hear the fresh water sloshing in the two tanks of the foredeck. The sea looked very big.

  The Starling Cook’s domain was near the bows. Here he presided over a wooden-box structure that shielded a small metal stick-burning stove about a foot high. From it the wind blew clouds of sparks that showered across the rusty barrels of diesel fuel, crates, piles of rope, pineapples and tyre fenders, as well as a tangle of bamboo chairs that were part of Sea Eagle’s cargo. We might, I thought, all go up (or down) in a spectacular Viking’s funeral. Here the Starling Cook cut and served pineapple chunks at night, and for breakfast made tea and nan – flat, oily bread – with a very sweet form of custard. Breakfast was at first light. At 9.00 a.m. the first day, and on succeeding mornings, the Starling Cook appeared at my elbow. I felt a very gentle plucking at my sleeve, and a sound it is difficult to describe – a mew is perhaps the best word. The Starling Cook was offering me pan, the tiny sandwich of betel leaf, areca nut and lime that all Asia east of the Gulf chews the way Westerners chew gum. It has a tart, clean taste, not bitter or fiery as I had expected, and the juice trickles from the corners of the mouth like blood. I remembered seeing middle-aged Vietnamese women, their teeth blackened from years of chewing, sitting with red juice glistening on their lips as if they had just eaten their babies.

  I watched the Starling Cook for hours as he moved about his restricted kingdom. I saw, for example, how he
opened a coconut with a spanner, holding it in one hand, the spanner in the other, and tapping it with many small, firm strokes around its middle until it fell apart in two neat halves. He scraped each half against the upturned sharp metal prong of what looked like a shoehorn, which he clamped between his knees; then he wrapped the gratings in a porous cloth, and dunked them into a wide pan of water and rice. He scooped up seawater to cook the rice in, and always cleaned his pots and pans in seawater too. On vessels like this, no one dreams of using fresh water for anything but drinking. His implements were few but sufficient; a huge soot-black kettle and two deep cooking pans were the basic containers. There was also a wide, open tray onto which he poured uncooked rice before he and a wild-haired assistant of dishevelled aspect picked out the bad grains. Just inside the cabin door were arranged his little sacks of cabbages, beans, leaves, chillies (green and red), cardamom, small cumin seeds, coriander, black peppers, cinnamon and garlic.

  What did the Starling Cook make us for dinner that first day? My notebook says: rice, dried fish, diced and curried potatoes, onions and raw chillies. He ladled it out of pans into chipped metal plates, and we staggered away with our portions like squirrels caching acorns, and sat on diesel barrels or coils of rope to eat in silence with our fingers. We got no tea with meals, only tepid fresh water from the tank.

  *

  The weather was unfriendly. The sea was black and ominous like the sky, and soon seemed to grow bigger. Although it retained its oily smoothness, I felt as if under the surface something very big and unpleasant were waiting to burst up and horrify us. It was a menace not unlike that at the opening stages of my recurring nightmare.

  In this dream I am sitting alone on a flat, empty beach, or perhaps in mid-ocean in a rowing boat. The sun is shining; the sea sparkles; I am happy and at peace. But soon small shadows begin to smudge the sunlight. Little by little, terrifyingly, the sky and the sea darken, and at last the sun is extinguished by immense black clouds; what has been a perfect day becomes at last a sort of night. A roaring noise, a slow diffused thunder makes itself heard, filling the seascape like a swelling drum roll, a prelude….