by Gavin Young
‘I like them. And tea, I suppose.’
‘Coffee,’ said Mr Missier. ‘In south India they grow good coffee. Ooh, very good coffee they grow in south India.’
I felt like hugging Mr Missier. He had kept his word and arranged matters exactly as he had promised. A schooner would take me; bound for Tuticorin, she lay in the harbour almost ready to sail.
‘Do we sail at night?’ I was recalling the miserable, rain-soaked sailing to Malé.
‘Of course, sailing depends on the weather. Remember, the vessel has no engine, only sails. Morning is usually preferred.’
‘I can be there very early.’
‘The captain is a good man. He is Tamil like all the crew. Here is his letter accepting you on board.’
I read:
I, A. Cellathural, the Master of TIN 15, the Herman Mary, have no objection to have Mr G. Young to take along with me on outward voyage from Colombo to Tuticorin,
Thanking you, Yours faithfully….
Mr Missier had also written letters to immigration and customs, and even to the Sri Lankan navy. ‘The Herman Mary’s owner is a very strict Catholic gentleman,’ he assured me.
I made my way down the dark staircase, and through the knot of tallymen weighing sacks of onions, vowing to see Mr Missier again.
A message at the Taprobane from Tom Abraham, the high commissioner of India, asked me to drop in to his office as soon as possible. I found him looking downcast deliberately – I knew this in a minute – as a joke. ‘I’m afraid I have to tell you …’ he began heavily, ‘that … your request for permission to visit the Andamans has been’ – he paused, and then quickly stood up and put out his hand – ‘granted. You can pick it up in Madras. It allows you to stay one week. Lucky you didn’t bet me.’
Another man had kept his word. Sam Kadirgamar, QC, Mr Missier, Tom Abraham and Captain Henricus had done all they could. Perhaps my luck had turned.
I joined the Herman Mary at 4.30 a.m. At that silent hour I seemed to be leaving a dead hotel, and to be walking through a doomed city, ‘a city taken by storm, where none are left but the slain!’
A watery moon still hung in the sky. A few white figures scurried past in the street, and in the Leyden Bastion a voice said, ‘Hey, baba, railway stay-shun that way.’ At the Baghdad Gate, the guards waved me through with a ‘good morning’. On the docks, barges sloshed and squeaked against each other and the quay. Two men were shovelling coal into the glowing furnaces of two ancient steam cranes. The lights of big ships in the harbour glowed, but a tug was the only vessel that moved. The harbour still slept.
The Herman Mary showed no sign of life. On her wide deck the shapes of the sleeping bodies of her crew were lumped under the sail they were using as a communal counterpane. An occasional cough or snore escaped from the heavy canvas. I put down my bag, sat on a bollard and waited.
At five thirty a Sri Lankan navy jeep drove up and a man in white shirt and shorts politely checked my passport. His arrival acted as a wake-up call. ‘All hands,’ cried a voice, and the crew began to emerge from under the sail, yawning and stretching. Two small boys hastened to hang a wreath of white jasmine-like flowers around the base of the bowsprit, and then planted smoking sticks of incense at the foot of the mainmast. Having performed their first religious duty of the day, they dropped down a hatch near the stern, and soon the light of a stove flickered and wisps of smoke rose from below, followed by the smell of coffee.
Meanwhile some of the crew cleared the deck as others hoisted into position over the stern a huge steering boom – a rounded piece of wood, like the steering spar on the Maldivian launch but bigger, perhaps ten feet long, and painted red, white and green. I counted eleven men on deck, all in loud checked sarongs. One of them, a smiling young man, came up to me, saying, ‘Good morning, sir. I am Chandra, brother of the captain. Are you Catholic, sir?’ When I said, ‘Protestant,’ he answered cheerfully, ‘All same, sir. Excuse us now while we go to pray,’ and under the black masts of Herman Mary, against a backdrop of grey-white warehouse walls, the Tamils stood to pray in the bows of their ship.
These prayers were brief compared with the later services at sea. In two minutes the sailors had crossed themselves, and then began to swarm about the ship. The mainsail was hauled up, ropes were cast off, and Mr Missier’s supervisor waved from his bicycle on the quay. ‘Sit here, sir,’ said Chandra, patting a ledge near the helmsman. Suddenly transformed into something like a giant moth poised for flight, the Herman Mary silently and slowly edged away from the wharf.
It takes some time, I found, to get used to a sailing ship’s slow, silent ways, particularly to her utter dependence on a breeze, after weeks of noisy but self-reliant motor vessels. At first, the Herman Mary’s progress, though silent, was almost nonexistent. We hung about. The sun came up, but no breeze followed suit, and we continued to be becalmed. An hour and a half after casting off we were still in Colombo harbour. It was a little embarrassing. Ropes had to be flung to barges and other vessels ahead of us, and our crew took turns jumping across to them and pulling the dead weight of the Herman Mary along like mahouts trying to shift a recalcitrant elephant. At one point a young crewman stripped off his sarong, dived into the harbour with a rope around his waist and carried it with a vigorous breaststroke to a dredger, whose crew helped him aboard. Before diving, he was careful to kiss the talisman he wore on a chain around his neck, and he held it firmly between his teeth as he swam.
For the first time in my life, I heard sailors whistling for a wind. The Tamils wandered about the deck, lips pursed, uttering plaintive birdlike sounds, which eventually seemed to work. At last, as we reached the old white lighthouse at the harbour entrance, something swept a wisp of my hair across my eyes. A breeze.
Immediately the captain – I could see the fraternal resemblance to Chandra – shouted an order, and in a flurry of sarongs and black limbs the crew ran up other sails, which devoured the masts like white flames and filled out. We moved.
At a fair speed the Herman Mary, alive at last, dipped through the troughs of sea, alive in the creaking of her spars and the hiss of water under her bows. I hadn’t felt a greater elation since leaving Piraeus. One of the boy cooks brought me a mug of grainy coffee and, as we tacked down the Sri Lankan coast, my strongest desire was to canonize Mr Missier as soon as it could possibly be arranged.
The crew soon rigged other sails on heavy booms which they pushed out on either side of the Herman Mary between her mainmast and bowsprit. A sail was run up below the foresail, then a topsail on the mainmast; by now we had five sails over our heads. Steering west we moved briskly into the Indian Ocean.
Now that I could have a good look at her in daylight, I saw that the Herman Mary was a formidable vessel. Even the caulking between her deck planks was as wide as my forearm. Decking, crossbeams and stanchions were knotted, gnarled, and bolted together with enormous pieces of metal, so that they looked as if they had grown together like parts of a single tree. The planking of her sides was four inches thick, and a lifeboat containing two spare sails had the solid look of a dugout.
Through Chandra, the captain’s brother, and a grey-haired seaman called Darson who spoke some English, I learned that the ship could take no less than thirteen pieces of canvas, and that the mighty mainmast had cost one hundred thousand Indian rupees (fifty-five thousand pounds), and the mizzen half that. The Herman Mary had been built in Tuticorin, and there were plenty more like her, some a good deal bigger, they said.
At noon we began to steer north-north-west, going nicely. The two young cooks scrambled up through their hatch from the smoky darkness of their ’tween-decks galley, and laid out on the deck half a dozen bowls: rice, curried vegetables, pieces of crisp dried fish, fried eggs, small sweet bananas, and drinking water in a large kettle. After a short grace from the captain, we squatted in a circle and ate with our fingers.
After the meal I took some Polaroid pictures. The first to pose was the young man who had leaped overboar
d to carry the rope to the dredger. His name, he said, was Hentry Rodrigo. He was slim, wiry and short, like all the crew except Chandra, the tallest man on the Herman Mary, who was what in the West we would call of medium height.
At siesta time the sun ran behind monstrous clouds and rain like Niagara Falls hit us. Soon the Herman Mary glistened from deck to masthead. The crew simply let the water cascade over their half-naked bodies; they could always discard wet sarongs and slip into dry ones later. Perhaps I would have been wise to take off my shirt and trousers, too; instead I ducked below, down the forward hatch, and discovered a more mysterious world.
A short but dangerously steep wooden ladder led to a small, amputated ’tween-deck area halfway down the hull of the vessel; it was really more of a cramped semicircular ledge shaped like the Herman Mary’s blunt bows. Its open, near edge fell precipitately into the belly of the single hold, a stygian cavern that ran the length of the vessel, uninterrupted by bulkheads and nearly full with a cargo of black lentils in sacks. Any swift movement here was tricky, for the ledge had no rail. In the near-total darkness it would have been easy to slip backwards off the edge; the fall would certainly result in a broken back or neck on the floor of the hold. An additional problem was that, because torrential rain was falling through the hatch onto the cargo, the hatch cover had to be pulled across the opening with a tarpaulin over it. What little light there might have been from the sky was thus cut off, and the only illumination came either from my torch – or from the shrine.
The shrine took me by surprise; how could I have expected such a thing in such a place? All I saw at first was a faint, flickering light in the far corner of the ledge where the massive black timbers of the ship converged under the bowsprit. This dim corner reminded me of old bookplates of the cockpit of the Victory, and of Nelson dying by the light of a lantern. It was even darker here, and it took a minute before I saw the wreaths of faded white flowers and the joss-sticks, and smelled the incense. Three candles burned on the little altar and, while water slapped and gurgled four inches away, the wax faces of the Virgin, Jesus and St Anthony seemed to come alive in the faltering glow of their pale flames. Speculatively, two cockroaches looked down on them from a beam.
It was hot and humid in the hold with the hatch closed. The crew’s sarongs and shirts swung back and forth on lines attached to the bulwarks and in the rank-smelling cavern below me sacks of cargo lay like white shrouded bodies stacked thirteen deep.
One or other of the cooks – they couldn’t have been more than twelve or thirteen years old – bobbed up from time to time to keep an eye on the altar candles; I suppose the Tamils believed something fearful would happen if they went out. The boys had made a tunnel through the sacks, and were small enough to squeeze from one end of the ship to the other without bothering to go on deck. Once they somehow fumbled mugs and a full kettle of tea through the tunnel for the shivering crewmen coming off duty.
These included Hentry, who tumbled down the companionway, his hair plastered to his skull and the rain running down his chest as if he had been swimming again. He and his mates immediately threw off their sopping sarongs and rubbed themselves dry with frayed towels. Then they sat in dry clothes, looking at me, grinning and wagging their heads in the Indian way to signify (a wagging head can have a number of meanings, according to context) that all, though wettish, was well. Two of them pointed to their chests and pronounced their names, Nobel and Ignatius. They wore cheap miniature crucifixes on neck chains, and seemed to draw comfort from fingering them constantly.
The hold was dry but airless, and claustrophobia and the stale, muggy heat finally got to me. The wind was fierce and the sea broke over the deck, but it was worth getting soaked to watch the crew in action, never still, adapting the sails to every rise, fall or shift in the wind, shouting and chasing one another up and down the back of this wallowing 215-ton, man-made whale of wood and iron. I could hear the booming of the sails – the origin, Conrad said, of the sailors’ saying, ‘It blows great guns.’
By afternoon, when the rain had stopped, the crew had hoisted eight sails. The vast diagonal sweep of the mainsail, now at full stretch, was awesome; I had never before seen a working sail anything like as big. High above me, Nobel and Hentry were poised on its spar like flies on a curtain rail.
I told the captain, Darson and Chandra of my fears of capsizing on the Maldivian launch, and they didn’t laugh. Chandra said, ‘Two of our ships were lost a year before last year.’
Apparently a cyclone had caught them between Colombo and Tuticorin, more or less where we were now. Sixty-foot waves had overwhelmed them, Chandra said, and they’d gone down with all hands. I could imagine the irresistible cataract crashing onto the deck of the Herman Mary, carrying all before it: hundreds of tons of ocean descending on the ship, winkling the boy cooks out of their galley like escargots from their shells, hurling overboard Chandra, the captain and myself, snapping the mainmast, pouring down the hatch and swamping the great cave of the hold, engulfing the whole ship. If such a wave came when I was below, I thought, perhaps the last sight my eyes would register would be the final flicker of the candles on the little shrine.
This image reminded me of the Maldivian launch again. The little vessel had seemed so helpless in that comparatively unexceptional sea. It had been only twenty-five tons; now 220 tons didn’t seem much, however indestructible the Herman Mary’s beams, planks and spars might at first appear.
I wondered how big the early sailing ships had been, those of the navigators who first risked ocean crossings and typhoons. Later, I found a book that told me that Magellan’s Trinidad was only 110 tons, and Columbus’s Santa María, Pinta and Niña nearer sixty tons. Much later, Cook’s Resolution was 462 tons, while the English Admiral Anson’s Centurion, which went round the world, was a comparative giant of 1005 tons, with a 521-man crew.
According to my notebook:
I join Chandra and Darson beneath the mainmast. It’s like standing beneath a redwood tree painted black. Chandra is singing, but all I hear is the creak of this mighty mast and, when I put my hand against it, I can feel it shifting and shivering like a muscle under great stress. The spar holding the mainsail is as thick as a fat man’s body and feels like iron. It jabs skywards like an iron bar, surely fifty feet from the end nearest the deck to its distant point that seems to scrape the heavens – the height of a four-storey house. The mainmast is shorter but much thicker; it has to be to support the great weight of a lopsided rectangular sail that wrenches about as if struggling to get away. The sail opens and contracts under the different pressures of the north-east wind like the hood of a very vigorous cobra.
Just now a staysail sheet parted far overhead and fell like a black mamba at our feet: everyone nearby sprang up. Ignatius and Hentry were aloft in a trice to make good the sheet, both taking time to cross themselves first. They climbed the halyards by grasping them between their big and second toes; descending, they dropped down swiftly, hand over hand, their legs hanging free.
Ten sails up! They are hauled up with much effort and loud chanting, and everyone, including the captain and old Darson, turns to the haul. What are they chanting? It’s difficult to grasp from Chandra’s phonetic version of the words. One chant goes something like: ‘Ma-da-ve un udave maravain – uru na lung,’ which means, according to Chandra and Darson, ‘Blessed Mary, don’t forget to give me a helping hand.’ A reasonable prayer.
These Tamils are far more open, friendly and less shy than the Maldivians – the Starling Cook excepted, of course. Physically they are not so different. Although their skins are very black, their backs and shoulders are lightly covered with a very faint down of brownish hair. On their chests, arms and legs, however, the hair is as black as pitch.
I asked Hentry and Nobel how much they earned per voyage. Four hundred Indian rupees, they said – that is, fifty American dollars or twenty pounds sterling, with all food provided. ‘Hentry is a very hard worker and knows everything about sailing,’
Chandra whispered. ‘His father is also sailor.’
How many years have Hentry and Nobel been at sea?
‘Three or four. To start they were the same size as cook-boys.’
Twice a day, at sunset and sunrise, the entire crew, led by the captain, repaired to the stern of the Herman Mary for prayers. ‘We will pray now,’ the young captain said to me, shyly trying out his English for the first time. I noticed his betel-red mouth and the Virgin Mary locket on his chest. Pray they did: not just a mumbled prayer or two, but twenty minutes of litany and hymns. They sat cross-legged in two rows, the captain a little in front, near the compass with its oil lamp in a green box and a large alarm clock, a white rosary in his hand and a prayer book open on a towel neatly folded on the deck before him. Only the helmsman, wrestling with the huge steering boom behind the captain, remained standing, so I sat and tried to be inconspicuous.
The captain read fast, low and clear, in Tamil, of course, so that only later did I learn what it was. ‘Remember, Ο most gracious Virgin Mary, that never was it known that anyone who fled to thine aid was left unaided….’ The crew spoke their responses loudly, and later sang a hymn with enthusiasm. More prayers followed. ‘I fly unto thee, thou Virgin of Virgins, my mother….’ Then another hymn, followed by more prayers and responses.
As the Herman Mary moved on, brandishing her spars against a perfect sunset of orange and gold, the male voices rose and fell to the background of her humming and groaning. This moment remains one of the most vivid images I carry with me from the seven months of my journey. The great mast loomed as black and menacing as Beelzebub above the bowed figures. ‘O, Mother of the Word Incarnate … hear and answer me.’
At prayers’ end, the squatting sailors crossed themselves but remained seated for a time, as if in meditation. When at last they stood up, each one salaamed the captain, briefly bowing his head and pressing together the flats of his extended palms, level with his mouth. The captain salaamed back, then, to my surprise, walked up and salaamed me. Touched, I joined my palms together and bowed back in the same way.
