Slow Boats to China

by Gavin Young

  Tony Blatch, ever helpful, telexed the agents Harrisons & Crosfield in Sandakan. Their answer was less helpful: ‘For Blatch presently no sea passage available to Mindanao from Sandakan suggest take scheduled flight from Sandakan to Zamboanga.’ At least the reply was not a prohibition to travel.

  First things first, I thought. Get to Sandakan, then look for fresh possibilities. My eyes roamed more closely over the map. Assuming I could cross the Sulu Sea to Zamboanga, I would need ships north to Cebu City and Manila, and from there a vessel to Hong Kong. Swire’s. For the last hop, Manila–Hong Kong, Swire’s came to my aid.

  I called on John Olsen, Swire’s representative in Singapore, at his office in the by now familiar Ocean Building, and learned that two Swire ships were scheduled to leave Manila for Hong Kong at about the time – a month from now – that I, with luck, would be arriving there. The ships were the Hupeh and the Poyang, and they would stop at Taiwan before reaching Hong Kong, he warned, but to me that was a welcome bonus. As for the Philippines themselves – well, all island nations had plenty of inter-island transport; I’d find something.

  But that small hurdle disappeared when by a stroke of luck I met in the house of a Singaporean friend, an Englishman named Kerry St Johnston, whose first words to me were, ‘I hear you may want a ship to or from Cebu City in the Philippines. Have you any objection to meeting a Filipino millionaire shipowner with a fleet of inter-island ships?’

  At that moment there were few people I would have preferred to meet if he could allay my fears of further defeats in the last long lap of my journey. ‘My God, no!’

  ‘Then you must meet the Chiongbian family,’ said Kerry St Johnston. ‘They own the William Lines based in Cebu City. Want me to telex them to say you’ll be bobbing up?’

  So Kerry St Johnston and the Chiongbian family joined the golden rollcall of those who helped. Into my notebook went the name William Lines, and an address and telex number in Cebu City. The William Lines had a branch office in Zamboanga, and it turned out that, if that branch hadn’t existed, I might have been obliged to swim back across the Sulu Sea to Borneo.

  *

  With the decision taken to forgo Bangkok, I could relax with Dennis and his family for a day or two until the Perak completed her loading in Empire Dock.

  In a way, it was a homecoming. I had worked as a reporter for the Observer based in Singapore. During my ten years in Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand and Indonesia, I had returned to the city regularly as to a rest house after the physical and emotional hurly-burly of wars and disasters.

  Dennis and Judy, his Chinese wife, now listened patiently to my stories of the Starling Cook, Dennis Beale, Bala and Hentry, Chandra and Darson; of Sumar the Baluchi and Captain Musa the Egyptian. Captain Sujit Choudhuri of the Chidambaram met the Bloodworths and they became friends.

  With them, in honour of Maugham, I drank the Raffles’s ‘million-dollar cocktail’ for the first time. Invented, it is said, by the wife of the defence counsel in the murder case Maugham adapted for his story ‘The Letter’, this cocktail – which some people would call a killer in its own right – is made by mixing gin, sweet and dry vermouth, egg white, pineapple juice and bitters. Of Raffles and the million-dollar cocktail, I began to feel, as S. J. Perelman once said about the old Semiramis Hotel in Cairo, that, if I stayed there drinking pink gins long enough, all the world and little black specks would pass before my eyes.

  I lightened my baggage by leaving notebooks and exposed film at the Bloodworths’. I had been worried about the possibility that seawater, the daily humidity or an accident might deprive me of several months’ work by ruining film or notes.

  I also thought of having my Pentax cleaned; I had a lurking fear of a rusted shutter in the steam-bath atmosphere of these seas; an expensive watch, in theory waterproof, had rusted on my wrist during an earlier visit. But there was no time for that, nor for the overhaul of my Leitz binoculars, bought in Aden so many years before.

  I have spoken of the strange blotches on the lenses of the Leitz. They had increasingly worried me. Not only did they impair the vision; worse, they were reminders of something better forgotten, and they had seemed to grow like the loathsome stain in a story by Edgar Allan Poe. This troubling flight of fancy wasn’t affectation on my part, though clearly it was a superstitious absurdity. Yet this awareness in no way cleared from my mind the intolerable half-belief that the disfiguring blobs and blotches were physical traces of an afternoon fifteen years before when a shell fragment burst open the stomach of a Vietnamese soldier and he died across my knees.

  In 1965, before the American forces landed en masse in Vietnam, the Vietnamese army seemed to be heading for total destruction; it was losing a battalion or two every week, most of them in engagements very close to Saigon. One day I travelled from Saigon to the riverside township of My To, south of the capital, in a bus crowded with Vietnamese civilians and soldiers; bundles of shopping and chickens cluttered the floor under the seats.

  We crossed bridges fortified with sandbags and barbed wire, and sometimes soldiers stopped the driver and peered in at the passengers. Two laughing Vietnamese behind me leaned over my shoulder: ‘Aren’t you frightened of VC? Maybe Vietcong come on bus.’

  A day later, with my Leitz binoculars strapped around my neck, I was walking in a single file of Vietnamese soldiers along the narrow banks that divided the paddy fields of the Mekong delta. The column was part of a larger force scraped together to clear the Vietcong out of an area of several square miles of trees, paddies, water buffaloes and hamlets. Sometimes we heard a propeller-driven aircraft overhead, and the deep voice of artillery.

  On the wider tracks it was possible to break the single file, and I walked beside the young Vietnamese soldier who had been in front of me. He looked like a child playing soldier; his helmet was absurdly big, his American carbine too long and heavy. His dull-green battle dress revealed the amazing slightness of his body. Small dark crescents of sweat stained his armpits and the small of his back. He pointed at my suede boots and said admiringly, ‘Shoes you number one.’

  ‘I give them to you.’

  Oh, no. You very big. Small, me.’ After a pause he looked up at me again. ‘Home America?’

  ‘England.’

  ‘Home me Nha Trang. You see Nha Trang?’

  I hadn’t, up to then; I got to know it later, a small and beautiful city on the South China Sea. It has fine beaches, and in those days a French restaurant served fresh lobsters.

  ‘So much fishing in Nha Trang,’ the soldier said, smiling.

  I hadn’t met many Vietnamese at that time, and I looked at him with interest. Where the fine line of his Oriental cheekbones swept down to the rosebud mouth there was no hint of hair. He couldn’t have been much over nineteen.

  It began to rain, and the dark stain on my new friend’s back quickly widened as water dripped from his helmet. He turned his carbine upside down on his shoulder so that the rain wouldn’t run down the barrel, then he put a hand on my sleeve and smiled up at me.

  ‘You number one friend. Come Nha Trang, okay?’

  ‘I come Nha Trang.’

  A sergeant waved impatiently and laid a finger on his lips. In silence now, except for the drumming of the rain and an occasional clink of metal or a cough, we approached a tree line. When the shell burst, my impression was that a small volcano had sprung out of the ground, not that something had fallen from the sky. I felt a tremendous shudder through the soles of my boots, and then the blast threw me to the ground.

  I lay there waiting for other shells, but it was not an ambush or even a sustained harassment. Another shell roared much further away, and then heavy silence fell. My heart thumped and my hands shook. Then I heard a human sound quite close, half-sob, half-gasp. A helmet lay on the ground like an abandoned seashell, and near it was my friend from Nha Trang, clasping his stomach with one hand, pushing feebly at the ground with the other, trying to get up. I went over and stopped him.

  I put
my left hand around his shoulders and made him lean back across my knees, but I didn’t know what to do next. His eyes were closed, and the rain poured through his hair and down his face and neck. There was a terrible smell. I opened his sodden shirt and saw below his breast-bone a dark, shining mess – ripped clothing stained black with rain, blood, bile and whatever else comes out of bellies torn open by metal splinters.

  His eyelids flickered open and he frowned. ‘Hurt, me,’ he said faintly.

  He was dying. He fumbled for my right hand – in a futile way, I had been trying to wipe the rain from his face – and pressed it to the warm, liquid mess. I didn’t feel the least disgust. I had an idea that between us we might hold him together.

  ‘Hurt, me,’ he whispered again. At the inner corner of the delicate half-moon fold of his eyelid a drop of water had lodged. Rain? A tear?

  Soon people came and carefully carried him away, limp, with his head lolling back as if a hinge in his neck had snapped.

  I was left with my hands and clothes stinking of an abattoir. The strap of the binoculars around my neck had snapped, so that the glasses were slippery with blood and bile. Something seemed to have got into the lenses, for later, however much I wiped them, blobs and blotches remained that had not been there before.

  From then on, because of those blobs, I felt a revulsion for my excellent glasses, and when I was on leave in Singapore I bought another pair and put the tainted ones away. But years later in Paris someone stole the new binoculars, so for this adventure I had been obliged to fall back on the old ones.

  Now, staring through the blotches at the anchorages of Singapore, I remembered with anguish my friend from Nha Trang.

  Twenty six

  ‘m.v. Perak. Wharf 20–21. Gate 2. Empire Dock. Sails 15.00 hours. Board 14.00 hrs.’ I noted all this as I talked on the phone to Captain MacGregor, the Straits Steamship Company’s operations manager. The Perak would sail the next day.

  ‘I warn you, she’s not the QE Two,’ he said.

  ‘I’d be extremely disappointed if she were.’

  ‘I hope you like curry.’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Good. You’re the only passenger, of course.’

  ‘Two days to Kuching?’

  ‘That’s the theory, but the Nahoon had a very stormy crossing the other day and took three days. North-east monsoon. The weather’s still unpredictable.’

  Next day Dennis drove me to Empire Dock, and after a short search we discovered the Perak. I say ‘discovered’ because the Perak was easily dwarfed, and the godown on Wharf 20–21 of Singapore’s Empire Dock was a long, high building. Hidden by it, the Perak lay in the water looking almost small enough to float in one’s bath. I liked the look of her immediately. She had almost no foredeck at all; her bridge and officers’ cabin area swept up abruptly just behind twin winches that raised and lowered her two anchors, so that from the dock she looked as if her face had been flattened by a tremendous blow on the nose. Amidships, two elderly Chinese in straw hats and dirty shorts, shaded from the fierce afternoon sun by paper parasols, pushed and pulled the winch levers that lowered the last few slings of cargo into the Perak’s holds. There was a smell of fruit on the cluttered deck and a sound of ducks quacking. A steward, a spare, pleasant-faced Chinese with grey hair, led us up a companionway to the officers’ dining room and the three former first-class passenger cabins that led off it. ‘This is for you, sir.’

  Somerset Maugham would have been satisfied: a bunk, a dressing table and mirror, a wardrobe, two armchairs covered in white leatherette and a stool. The two portholes were square wood-framed windows with curtains; a thermos of ice water hung in a wall bracket, and on the ceiling a large fan rotated inside a cage designed to protect abnormally tall passengers like myself from a scalping. I took my copy of Maugham’s Short Stories out of my bag and laid it on the dressing table, where it looked at home.

  As soon as we stepped into the cabin, Dennis said with surprise, ‘This was my cabin twenty years ago. Sailed in it to Palembang in Sumatra with Keyes Beach of the Chicago Daily News and Pepper Martin of US News and World Report, to cover the rebellion in central Sumatra against Sukarno’s government in Jakarta. Remember? Revolt in Paradise, someone called it. We landed at Palembang after thirty hours in Perak. Her captain was called Brown, a nice, rather eccentric character who caused a stir in Singapore by bringing back a Sumatran panther as a pet. It got loose on the deck. Yes, this was the ship.’

  Now the elderly steward was offering us a drink. But Dennis had to go ashore. ‘Good luck and bon voyage,’ he said. ‘By the way, those Sulu pirates still make their victims walk the plank.’ A minute later he called from the quay, ‘See you – maybe.’

  The tug Teman moved the Perak cautiously into the narrow dogleg of the dock, edging her past the King Dragon of Penang and the King River of Labuan. Heads turned to point to the Perak’s old-fashioned silhouette, to her prizefighter’s nose. Along other wharves the angular shapes of container ships formed rigid cubist patterns, the skyscrapers of Singapore behind them. To our right, a noisy craft dashed through the water spewing smoke, and faces peered intently from a long row of portholes. Compared with the Perak, it was almost a Martian spacecraft.

  The steward’s voice again. ‘Tea, sir?’ He laid a tray on a small table. ‘My name is Wong,’ he said. ‘Sir, Perak now cargo ship. Good cook at home sick. This cook maybe make European food, maybe not.’

  ‘Mr Wong, I’ll eat Chinese or Malay food.’

  ‘Chinese cook no good, food very greasy,’ cautioned Mr Wong. ‘Captain and chief officer eat Malay, hot food, more better.’

  ‘I’ll eat Malay.’

  ‘No problem,’ he said, relieved. ‘I tell Cook.’

  The Perak moved sedately through the anchorage cluttered with ships. There must have been forty or fifty of them at anchor before the grand buildings of Singapore’s Padang, the porticoed Supreme Court and the white needle of St Andrew’s Cathedral spire, the only part of the great port now that Maugham, Conrad or his Captain Tom Lingard might have recognized. Tankers belonging to BP and Esso; one disturbingly long, green Japanese one; a Soviet tanker, the General Kravtsov; a Maersk Line ship in a coat of unfortunate green and blue; a Singapore navy gunboat; one of the Singapore shipowner Mr Y. C. Chan’s modest vessels in from Jakarta or Surabaya. As she has regularly for many years, under a pale cloudy sun, the Perak picked her self-confident way eastwards on the 436 miles to Borneo at 8.5 knots.

  ‘Dinner six o’clock,’ Wong informed me. ‘Now I bring you duty-free drink.’

  ‘Good. I’ll have a gin.’

  At dinner, I met Captain Abdul Rahman Hadi, the master of the Perak, a short, jolly cannonball of a man in his forties with a shy smile that exposed gold teeth. The dining room was panelled, and the windows could be raised or lowered by wide leather straps with round brass eyeholes of the kind once found in British railway carriages. Malay and Chinese officers ate separately at two tables. The Perak even had two galleys and cooks. The pork that is loved so much by Chinese could not be prepared in the same galley as the Malay food; pork is haram (forbidden) to Muslim Malays. Two galleys in a small ship like the Perak? ‘British system,’ said the captain. ‘No problem.’

  Captain Abdul Rahman was a Malay Singaporean, born in Malacca. He had joined the Straits Steamship Company as a cabin boy in 1952, and his first command had been a 2500-ton rice carrier between Bangkok, Penang, Christmas Island, Singapore and west Sumatra. He was waited on by Mr Wong and a second elderly Chinese, a massive old man in bulky blue shorts and sandals with a shock of white hair standing straight up on his big head as if thousands of volts were permanently running through him. They had been with the company for ever, the chief officer said. The Perak’s swaying deck failed to disconcert their old bowlegs.

  I asked the captain if he had many problems with the behaviour of the crews. He looked surprised. ‘No problem. All our men old employees of Straits Steamship Company. If young men come and make troubl
e, I kick them out!’

  ‘In India that might be difficult. The unions might delay the ship and organize a walkout.’

  ‘If a man is not working, how can ship work, make money? Man not work, kick him out.’

  The chief officer added, ‘Young men don’t like Sarawak and Borneo so much. Nothing to do.’

  ‘They like Jakarta, Bangkok, Manila, more girls.’ The captain laughed.

  ‘Young men like to enjoy.’ The chief officer was himself about thirty. From his cabin, one deck down, Western pop music could be heard when he was off duty. The captain’s dayroom and sleeping cabin were one deck up, behind the wheelhouse and little chart room. No pop music there. He watched the sunsets from a wicker easy chair on the deck outside his dayroom.

  Although the Perak gave the impression of being tiny, she weighed 1400 tons – huge compared with the Herman Mary or the Maldivian launch. On this trip she had on board 580 tons of cargo, much of it for Chinese New Year celebrations in Kuching. We were due to reach the Sarawak river on the eve of the Year of the Monkey, and the decks were stacked with crates of Chinese apples, mandarin oranges, Korean peaches, sacks of cabbages and vats, gaudily labelled, of salted vegetables from Thailand. In addition, she carried a general cargo of canned goods, clothing, and frozen chicken and meat. As Kuching produces very little meat of its own, the Perak’s arrival was a popular event.