by Gavin Young
There had been a rampage when Madrasi students ran wild, assaulting passengers, throwing chairs overboard, even stripping a girl or two – so terrifying them, the purser told me, that they wanted to jump overboard. But the leaders of the rampage had been handcuffed in their cabins and later fired from their university, and on subsequent voyages peace had become the rule. ‘I know students who are barely literate,’ the purser said contemptuously.
The captain sent me a message that I was welcome on the bridge any time I wanted to see the charts. Of the same school as Bala and Dennis Beale, he knew and loved the Andamans, especially for the fishing. He told me all this the first afternoon, and showed me the bridge, wide and deep like that of the Patrick Vieljeux.
‘No brass fittings,’ I noticed.
‘Brass is a thing of the past.’
‘Bala’s got a lot of it on Nancowry.’
‘Oh, yes, there.’
Captain Sujit Choudhuri lived up to the standards of no-nonsense friendliness I had come to expect from Indian masters like Dennis Beale, Bala and John. In fact, now that I think about it, I found this quality in all the masters I met between Cyprus and Singapore. It is as if ships’ captains live at some isolated level of self-assurance, philosophically removed by a life sandwiched between sea and sky from the landlubberly pettiness of the rest of us. The wide world must contain petty ships’ captains, but I have yet to meet one. Perhaps the reason is contained in Joseph Conrad’s remark that, ‘of all the living creatures upon land and sea, it is ships alone that cannot be taken in by barren pretences, that will not put up with bad art from their masters’.
*
I spent a considerable time reading on this leg of the journey. I had a cabin to myself and, although the ship was quite full, its saloons were usually empty and the Muzak was muted. The French decorator employed by Messageries Maritimes had done something bizarre to a main wall of the largest saloon, transforming it into a massive tableau of a frozen city of unreal turrets, weed-filled streets and ghostly ships at leprous wharves. This romantic nightmare he had underscored with a quotation from Baudelaire:
Cette ville est au bord de l’eau
On dit qu’elle est bâtie en marbre….
Voilà un paysage selon ton goût;
Un paysage fait avec la lumière et le minéral,
Et le liquide pour les réfléchir….
It was an unexpected picture to come across in the Bay of Bengal. It struck me even more oddly in the evening when the reading room and saloon became alternately a cinema and a miniature casino where, surprisingly, two British girls presided over games of blackjack. The brittle lights of the fifties décor twinkled happily, a group of mountainous Parsee ladies and gentlemen whooped with high spirits and laughter, and the comforting clink of glasses came from the bar. A pop song that throbbed from speakers over a small dance floor had an unusual title: ‘Save All Your Business for Me’. Above all this the crumbling turrets and spectral quays of that inappropriate mural seized the attention and chilled the heart.
A middle-aged Australian couple travelling back to Adelaide had been touring Afghanistan in a minibus for some months. ‘You could stand up in it,’ she said, ‘although it had no fitted things. I mean, I had to use a plastic pot, but I managed. We’ve taken it all over the world.’ Near Hunza or Gilgit in Pakistan’s extreme north, they had been attacked by tribesmen and badly beaten up, but they told the story as a joke.
‘Bob loves anything mechanical,’ she told me. ‘He’s got a beaut bike he can’t wait to get home to. He rode it from Sri Lanka to London in 1952.’
Later I was talking to Bob when she came up laughing and said, ‘I’ve just been in the loo. Do you know, a man tried his best to join me while I was squatting in there. When I came out, I found he’d peed in the washbasin.’
‘Who was it, then?’
‘One of those Kurds.’
There were indeed three Kurds aboard the Chidambaram. Later I tried to talk to them in mangled English, French and Arabic. They were a thick-set, blue-chinned trio. ‘You are from Germany?’ they asked.
‘No, England.’
‘We are Kurds,’ they said gruffly.
When I asked them who they preferred, the Shah or Ayatollah Khomeini, they answered, ‘Both are bad. The Shah is looking too far forward, Khomeini too far back – he wants to see 700 AD in 1980.’
They were Kurdish nationalists, they said, and were confident that one day their country would be united and independent. ‘There are problems but in fifteen, twenty years….’ Were they, I wondered, on an arms-buying mission?
They bought bottles of Teacher’s whisky from the bar and drank fiercely, toasting ‘Kurdistan or death’. I never discovered which one had peed in the washbasin in the ladies’ lavatory, or what they were doing crossing from Madras to Singapore on the Chidambaram.
*
Sheltering behind the funnel, I read copies of Harry Miller’s ‘Speaking of Animals’ columns in the Indian Express. In one on whales, he quoted Hilaire Belloc:
The whale that wanders round the Pole,
Is not a table fish.
You cannot bake or boil him whole,
Nor serve him on a dish.
In another column, Harry considered the large forms of squid, a creature which, even more than snakes, fills me with revulsion. He wrote:
Attacks on boats appear to have been made by giant squid, but even the largest come nowhere near the size of the monsters depicted in some old prints. However, such stories have given rise to many legends, such as the persistent Scandinavian belief in the Kraken, a colossal sea monster measuring two kilometres in diameter with mast-like arms capable of dragging the largest ships down into the sea.
The combination of whale and giant squid jogged my memory about an old sailor’s story that had impressed me some years before, and I looked it up again in a book by Sir Francis Chichester called Along the Clipper Way:
A reliable eyewitness of what happened said later that near Sumatra in the Indian Ocean, something he thought might be a volcano lifted its head above the sea. It was a large sperm whale locked in deadly combat with a cuttle-fish, or squid, whose tentacles seemed to enclose the whole of his body. The eyewitness, Bullen by name, estimated the mollusc’s eyes to be at least a foot in diameter. The silent struggle ended when the whale clamped his jaws on the body of the squid and ‘in a businesslike, methodical way’ sawed through it.
I quickly scanned the sea. After all, we were in the waters north of Sumatra where Bullen had witnessed this spectacle, and it seemed uncomfortably close to my nightmare. But the sunlit waves winked innocently back at me.
*
I went ashore only briefly in Georgetown on Penang Island, but the beauty of South-east Asia struck my eyes with the full force of an old love suddenly revived. I suppose to the superficial eye the landscape on Penang is almost the same as that in Tamil Nadu, the Tamil state in southern India more than a thousand miles away, but it is not. There is as subtle a difference in the size and shape of the simple buildings, in the appearance and arrangement of trees, and in the rig of native craft in a bay as there is in the colour and physiognomy of men.
I passed through Georgetown’s customs office, showing my passport to big Sikhs in boastful turbans, and wandered down the Pesara King Edward, stopping to take in the orientally domed ochre and cream clock tower presented to Penang by Cheoh Chen Eok ‘in commemoration of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee’. I admired the olive and white pillared and porticoed colonial buildings; there is nothing overbearing about them. A parade of Malay Muslims chanted ‘Allahu Akbar’ on the Padang, and I ate a plateful of flower crabs at the Anchor Bar of the handsome old Eastern and Oriental Hotel, a small version of Raffles in Singapore, and one of the great hotels of the East. A young European tourist came in from the garden wearing a dressing gown and a white plastic beak to save his nose from the sun, and I wondered what Khalat or Hentry or Dennis Beale would say about that.
*
/> The next day we reached the Strait of Malacca. The Malacca Strait and East Coast of Sumatra Pilot said:
The Malacca Strait is the main seaway used by vessels from Europe and India bound to Malaysian ports and the China Sea. It provides the shortest routes for tankers trading between the Persian Gulf and Japan.
The strait not only is narrow and busy, but contains critical areas like one called One-Fathom Bank, a menace of shoals and sand waves. Furthermore, the Pilot warns, ‘Navigational aids … in Indonesian waters are reported to be unreliable.’ Thus, ‘since passage through the strait entails a run of more than 250 miles, long periods of considerable vigilance are necessary in order to maintain safe standards of navigation’. Nothing could be more blunt than this warning.
Captain Choudhuri talked about collisions in the strait. ‘There are quite a few unreported – if it’s just two ships grazing or bumping and no one hurt. In the latest the smaller ship went down. Luckily, no one was lost.’
Like the Strait of Hormuz or the Suez Canal, the Malacca Strait is a funnel of the sea world where the appalling vision of colliding supertankers is a distinct possibility. There are smaller hazards, too. The water was dotted with tiny Sumatran or Malaysian motor trawlers, seemingly contemptuous of our approach, which chugged across our bows and sometimes made us change course.
‘The trouble with them,’ said Captain Choudhuri, fixing his glasses on them severely, ‘is that the crew are often asleep, tired from their hours at sea, so they don’t look.’
The sea traffic had relatively the same density of a weekend city street. A Panamanian freighter passed so close to us that without glasses I could see a man leaning on the rail in a red bathing suit, a man in a hammock dangling a leg, and another, squatting on the deck, slicing a watermelon.
Opposite Malacca, the coast of Sumatra pushed east and narrowed the channel still more. A white octagonal tower on piles signalled One-Fathom Bank. The coast is described by the Pilot as ‘mostly muddy, low-lying and uniformly covered with mangroves’. But on my side of the wing of the Chidambaram’s bridge there was nothing to be seen save for a slight smudge.
The radio began to bark and whine; magnified human voices chattered irritably, and babel invaded the bridge.
‘Listen,’ said Captain Choudhuri. ‘One ship’s captain is complaining that another ship has hit him and gone on regardless. A hit-and-run. And they’re all speaking different languages, so no one is understanding the others. A real mix-up.’
As a vision from the sea, Singapore is still exciting. Stamford Raffles’s creation remains a great Eastern port. The sweep of its anchorages, the graceful green frontage of the Padang, the white dignity of St Andrew’s Cathedral and the pillared public buildings behind, even the cluster of very new skyscrapers – all have grandeur. The city has supermarkets, too, but it is still the East. I seem to see a signpost here – a fantasy, of course – reading, ‘From here on is the East – behind you, the Rest of the World.’ The long elephant’s trunk of Malaysia and the spray of islands at its tip form a screen between the wider world and the concentrated Orient.
The western approach to the Empire Dock is the inner one curving around to creep inside these islands. A strong tide went past us towards the hazy Rhios Islands to the south. Overhead, like a schoolboy’s paper aeroplane, a British Airways Concorde lowered her conical nose – just like the plastic beak on the tourist’s nose in Penang – for landing. I had no desire to be up there looking down on the Chidambaram heading for her familiar resting place, moving over an obedient sea. As we docked I saw from her rail Dennis Bloodworth waving on the quay.
Three
Singapore to Canton
Twenty five
In between writing his columns for the Observer and a book on Mao Tse-tung, Dennis Bloodworth had worked nobly on my behalf. As the Chidambaram crossed the Bay of Bengal he had kept in touch with the Straits Steamship Company, and at first he had heard nothing from their offices in the Ocean Building to comfort me. On the contrary, Tony Blatch, the man in charge, had a case of euthanasia to report: the old and much revered Rajah Brooke was even then under the shipbreakers’ hammer in Keppel Dock.
The Straits Steamship Company’s passenger fleet was not, Dennis warned me, what it had been in the high old days of Somerset Maugham. The recent decisions of the company’s management reflected a depressing trend, and portended, it seemed to me, the total demise of passenger vessels throughout the East.
In the Ocean Building on Collyer Quay, it was possible from a high window to survey an impressive fleet – scores of ships of all sizes and flags lying in the eastern and western anchorages – but few would have accepted a passenger aboard.
The general manager of Straits Shipping, Mr Khong Chai Seng, explained the two simple, obvious reasons for the shrinkage in passenger ships: the high costs of fuel and maintenance. Fuel, we all know about. As to maintenance, a passenger or cargo–passenger vessel is subject to more stringent regulations by Lloyd’s – for example, an annual dry-docking.
‘The Rajah Brooke,’ Mr Khong said, ‘was not built as a passenger ship. She was built as a cargo ship that would carry passengers – a subtle difference. In the good old days she carried thirty passengers regularly to and from the Borneo states of Sarawak and Brunei.’
Fuel costs, maintenance and airlines are the three major and victoriously advancing enemies of passenger sea travel. In the days of Maugham, how could ships have failed to do well? How else could far-flung planters and government servants travel on business or cart themselves and their wives and children back for leave in Singapore? How else could they have made sure of connections with the grander P&O or British India Company ships to Great Britain?
‘Rajah Brooke had to be replaced because of sheer old age,’ said Mr Khong sadly. ‘We had to decide whether to replace her on the Brunei run with a passenger–cargo vessel or a purely cargo vessel. We had to bear in mind that Air Brunei is advertising ten flights a week to Brunei. So….’
So the new Rajah Brooke is a pure cargo vessel – the middle-aged Nahoon, newly named. The passenger Rajah is dead; long live the cargo Rajah.
For me, however, arriving in Singapore in the twilight of passenger sea travel, not all was yet lost. ‘There is hope,’ Dennis said comfortingly. Tony Blatch had told him about the little Perak, once a cargo–passenger ship but now purely devoted to cargo, which sailed to Kuching in Sarawak about once every nine days. She had one or two panelled Maugham-style cabins still, although they were never used. Perhaps he could arrange for me to travel on her to Sarawak as a supernumerary. She would be leaving in a few days.
This was one possibility. The Perak was sailing in a direction I preferred to the only alternative: a voyage north to Bangkok, with the hope of a ship from there to Hong Kong. I decided to investigate this alternative, although it would short-circuit the detour I had looked forward to – the slow swing up along the coast of Borneo and across the Sulu Sea (that traditional and still-flourishing haunt of pirates) to the Philippines.
I tried a Malaysian line, but the rebuff was immediate. ‘A passenger,’ the agent said, aghast, ‘would be most unusual. Quite impossible.’ It was a response of the Jedda and Dubai variety, and I felt again the chill of exasperation. But, of course, it was quite useless to work oneself up in nervous frustration over the lack of obliging shipowners and the commercial interests that now have turned their contemptuous backs on the innocent serenity of sea travel. ‘Ah!’ Conrad exclaimed in ‘A Smile of Fortune’, ‘These commercial interests spoiling the finest life under the sun.’
With as much equanimity as I could muster, I crouched over the shipping pages of the Straits Times spread out on a table in the tropical splendour of the terrace of Raffles Hotel. Japanese cameras clicked, gin slings tinkled, golden orioles, mynah birds and tailor birds all failed to break my concentration on the essential business of finding an onward ship. Only an importunate black starling, which reminded me of a certain cook in high seas off the Maldives,
disturbed me. ‘Feni, feni, sarna,’ I murmured foolishly at it over the newspaper, and wondered how many waiters at Raffles knew how to open a coconut with a spanner.
The shipping pages had little to offer in the direction of Bangkok. A company called the Singapore Union Line was the only possibility that caught my eye. ‘Regular Singapore–Bangkok Service,’ a notice said; the Mulia was loading for Bangkok, and the Heong Leong Building housed the company’s offices. But on the fortieth floor of that giant structure a Mr H. C. Lau flatly refused to discuss the matter – or, indeed, anything at all. ‘Mr Lau is so busy,’ his pretty secretary apologized. I could see the disobliging Mr Lau through the glass door of his office; he didn’t seem to be busy. His refusal was a pity and, without the Perak at my back, it might have meant a setback on the Jedda scale. For his churlishness, I now bracket Mr Lau in my mind with the agent’s representative in Jedda who made me leave Captain Visbecq and deprived me of a look at Djibouti. His shipping manager, a young Chinese, murmured dubious excuses: ‘An Asian crew would never agree to a supernumerary. Passengers, even one like you, would delay the ship.’ (In all, I travelled by sea between Piraeus and Canton on twenty-three vessels, and only three had non-Asian crews. Crews don’t mind who travels with them; they are a tolerant lot, and never once was there a delay because of me.)
These two men were exceptions in a long series of voyages, and were more than offset by such glowingly bonhomous people as Captain Rashad in Alexandria and dear Mr Missier in Colombo.
*
So Kuching in Sarawak was the next stop. And now, Tony Blatch said, the Perak – exceptionally – would be going on to Brunei. I was in luck. I consulted my Bartholomew’s map of South-east Asia and followed the coast of Borneo with the tip of my pen: Kuching to Brunei to Kota Kinabalu, the capital of the Malaysian state of Sabah, formerly known as North Borneo, where another Straits Steamship Company vessel, the Straits Hope, was due to arrive soon; she would take me around the serrated north-west corner of Borneo to … where? Sandakan, nestling discreetly in a bay in a coastline so indented that it might have been gnawed by bandicoots, seemed the best-positioned place to make the leap across the difficult Sulu Sea. Then I had to find a way to Zamboanga City in Mindanao, the southernmost island of the Philippines.
