Slow Boats to China

by Gavin Young

  ‘Old Montague lay back, feet up on his chair, talking about tiger shooting in the Arakan area. Tigers had snatched one or two chaps from the Eighty-second West African Division when they passed through. After a drink or two, he called out, and an aged Burmese woman shuffled out from behind a curtain – his wife, it turned out – carrying a spittoon. She lowered his legs, put the spittoon under his lungi, and we realized he was peeing.’

  We turned from the Padang into the bar of the Aurora and sat down at a small table behind a trio of large Sikhs, who sat talking volubly over a thicket of empty bottles. Bushey resumed: ‘Well, he kept on chatting, and after a bit he said something to her, and she bent down and dived under the lungi, then bore the spittoon away covered with a piece of cloth. Talk went on as before, no one had taken a bit of notice, and the old man put his feet back up.’

  I wonder whether Eric Blair of the Burma Police, later to change his name to George Orwell and write 1984 and Animal Farm, knew old Montague?

  *

  Next day Bushey Webb got out his old car and made his annual round of New Year courtesy visits to Chinese friends. Through the leafy avenues of Kuching he drove like a Panzer officer afraid of slowing up a blitzkrieg, waving gaily at people on the pavements who waved back, Malays and Ibans – the local people – as well as Chinese. Once we passed three young Malays who pranced and giggled in women’s dresses. Bushey said, ‘Malays don’t mind that sort at all. They accept transvestism as quite normal. Look, one of them, the one in the beautiful red dress, has the whole works – tits, brassière, the lot. Wonderfully tolerant about that, the Malays. Good for them, I say.’ Good for Bushey, too, I thought.

  As we slowed at a corner, two Malays called out cheerfully, ‘Orang putih!’ – ‘white man’ – and we exchanged waves. ‘Funny how they call us white,’ said Bushey. ‘We’re anything but, really. Pink, purple – pink and purple – off-white. Red – the Chinese are right to call us red barbarians.’

  Twenty eight

  By the time Mr Ho announced our departure I had been in Sarawak four days and the crackers had stopped exploding. The Chinese lion-dancing – boys hidden under a great grinning animal long enough to accommodate several dancers – had come to an end. The holiday was over, the Year of the Monkey was launched and even Bushey’s stories had almost run out. When he drove me to the little riverside port where the Perak lay, I found I was glad to see her again. ‘Send me a postcard from Zamboanga,’ he said. ‘Something with a pirate on it.’

  The Perak swung out at high tide. The crew of a little ship behind us, the Getah Kinabalu of Singapore, waved and called, according to the custom of Asia, and out in the stream we moved steadily away. ‘Barrrp!’ The Perak belched like the battered tuba in a street musicians’ band. ‘Barrrp!’ Sampans and a few motor fishing vessels scattered before us. ‘Baarrrrp!’

  A timber yard disfigured the east bank: logs and planks, a tall, thin metal chimney. Rusting tugs. A decrepit riverboat or two on slipways. Then we turned a bend, Kuching disappeared and mangrove and nipa palm closed in. Occasional figures in plate-shaped hats slid by in canoes heading for lonely waterside houses on piles. Angry clouds towered in the sky, growing nearer and darker by the minute. At the mouth of the river, where we crossed the inner and outer bars, a Chinese temple stood in the woods above the ramshackle pier of Muara Tebas village, and to seaward sheets of rain advanced. Hundreds of smooth round coconut shells blackened by long immersion floated in the water like heads severed by Borneo headhunters, and nipa-palm fronds floated like skeletal ribs. We began to roll slowly but decisively.

  In the dining saloon, the Perak’s little cannonball captain ran up and down the steeply sloping deck, intuitively judging each roll. ‘Must take exercise or be sick-sick,’ he said, flashing a golden molar. The rolling created a fleeting intimation of space travel, but I had no feelings of sick-sick.

  The storm continued through the night. At breakfast next morning the little captain, scooping up the egg yolks in his cup with a spoon, said, ‘Not sick-sick? Weather threw ship up, down. Very confused. Brunei maybe five o’clock tomorrow evening.’ I wondered where the Straits Hope was after our four-day stopover in Kuching.

  The second officer said, ‘I’ve never been to Brunei.’ I had been there once with the Fiona. I told him, ‘There’s a town – a large village, really – built entirely on stilts over water.’

  ‘Brunei produce fish?’

  ‘Oil, natural gas – worth about a billion pounds. Apart from oil, fish and timber, I suppose. I read somewhere that the people of Brunei are the fourth richest per capita in the world.’

  In a year or two Brunei would become an independent sultanate; for now, it was under British protection. In 1841 a sultan of Brunei had rewarded the English adventurer James Brooke with the territory of Sarawak in return for his aid in putting down rebellious chiefs and fighting off, in his sailing ship, the Royalist – and sometimes in alliance with the ships of Captain George Keppel of the Royal Navy – the swarms of Sulu marauders.

  As the Perak rolled through the South China Sea towards Muara, the port of Brunei, Mr Boon, the white-thatched steward, scuttled on his bowlegs across my cabin like an albino crab, backwards, forwards, sideways, wielding a dustpan and brush. Looking for exercise, I staggered along the deck towards the stern.

  Two Chinese with bandannas around their heads were hammering rust off the rail. ‘Where you go after Brunei?’ one of them asked me. Manila, then Hong Kong, I told him. The other man said, ‘Hong Kong more better. Have subway now. And China better than bee-fore.’ As an afterthought, he added, ‘China soya-bean countly. Countly for soya bean.’ I suggested a photograph, but they smiled, immediately shy, saying no, they were in working clothes. They had a fishing line over the stern.

  ‘Any fish?’

  ‘No fish this place. Oil ligs, dlilling. Fish lun away.’

  Oil rigs were all around us like bits of abandoned Meccano.

  In the chart room, Captain Abdul Rahman was striding his dividers across the chart. We were, I saw over his shoulder, passing south of Ampa Bank, where there was a light. We had skirted Iron Duke Shoals and Victoria Patches; these seas, explored, surveyed and charted over two or three centuries by British buccaneers and naval navigators, have Malay or English names. The words ‘Densely wooded’ cover the land on the chart, and they certainly describe the shoreline.

  ‘Poosy cat, poosy cat!’ Mr Boon was staggering along amidships with a dish of food pursued by the ship’s cat, a small grey and white animal with a lump on the end of its shortened tail, which looked as if it had been caught in a mangle. A small bell tinkled under its chin. ‘Poosy, poosy-cat,’ Mr Boon called seductively again, setting down the dish. ‘Ship has cat, no rat on ship,’ said the captain. ‘Nobody see rat on this ship.’ I made a mental note to present Captain Bala of the Nancowry with a cat to deal with his bandicoots the next time I passed through Madras.

  Captain Abdul Rahman was the antithesis of the ebullient Bala; quiet, though friendly, wearing trousers rather too short for him and very narrow at the bottoms, which gave him the look of Mr Micawber. Suddenly he turned into Winnie the Pooh as he stood on tiptoe holding the hood of the radar screen and peering down hopefully as if scanning the bottom of a honeypot. ‘Muara, Muara, Muara, Muara,’ he called into the radio, and ‘Perak, Perak, Perak.’ A prolonged gabble answered him; to judge by his smile, it did not displease him. We were very close to Muara and would anchor offshore for the night in sixty feet of water.

  The morning was grey but calm; the bad weather had blown itself out. The harbour master gave permission to enter the port, a little bay at the end of a narrow opening in a tongue of land, and marked by an avenue of green and red lights. A big, serious Malay pilot came aboard and guided the Perak to a mooring next to a Japanese freighter, whose crew waved when I stared at them through my mottled binoculars. The crew of the dredger had done the same at the entrance to the bay: the waters of South-east Asia are full of waving, smiling people.<
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  Alongside the quay were three Singaporean freighters in line behind a shoddy Panamanian, six slick police launches and a tiny tanker, rather like a toy, with an elegant awning encircling a dainty bridge more appropriate to a steam yacht. There were a few acres of modern warehouses, and then the undergrowth resumed. Along the water’s edge were the wooden stilted houses of South-east Asia. As usual, they were small and simple, but at each door lay at least one boat with an expensive Japanese or American outboard engine.

  I bought a bottle of vodka from Mr Wong’s pantry, then tipped Mr Boon, thanking him for having been so attentive. ‘Oh, no,’ he said, shaking his big head with its white hair standing up like a cockatoo’s crest. ‘Thank you. Come soon.’

  An assistant from Harrisons & Crosfield, the agents, arrived on board with the immigration men. I said goodbye to Captain Abdul Rahman, Chief Officer Oman and the rest, including Mr Wong and my Chinese hosts at the New Year’s Eve feast in the mouth of the Sarawak river. ‘Happy travels,’ they said. As the launch pulled away towards the jetty, I looked back affectionately at the little Perak’s perky bridge, snub nose and decks smelling of fruit.

  I was lucky to be looked after in Brunei by two helpful Englishmen. One, Guy Nickal, general manager of Harrisons & Crosfield, was on the quay at Muara and drove me into Brunei. The other was someone I’d bumped into in Brunei two years before, when I called here in the Fiona: Derek Hewett, manager of the Chartered Bank, who gave me a room for my two days’ stay. The Harrisons & Crosfield office looks out over one of the most extraordinary water scenes in the world. The lake-like expanse of smooth water runs back to green slopes and looming wooded hills, or up broad creeks out of sight into the impenetrable tangle of mangrove roots and mud. The sprawling village of wooden bungalows on stilts is linked by raised wooden catwalks, and between that quarter and the modern town on dry land, where sit Harrisons & Crosfield, the Chartered Bank, shops, hotels, government buildings and the dominant golden onion domes of the grand mosque, there is a frenzied, unceasing roaring and splashing of scores of outboard-powered boats – the taxis of Brunei – crossing and recrossing, bearing families, housewives, children to and from the dwellings suspended above the water.

  The news from Harrisons & Crosfield’s shipping manager was that the Straits Hope was expected to arrive in a day or two at Kota Kinabalu, the port and capital of the Malaysian state of Sabah, or North Borneo. Thereafter she would probably call at Sandakan, Lahad Datu and Tawau – in other words, make the full semicircular trip around the wild coastline from Brunei to Indonesian east Borneo. These ports were tiny places – most people would regard them as ‘off the map’ – and my task was to find out which of them was the best jumping-off point for a sea crossing of the pirated-haunted Sulu Sea to the Philippines.

  I consulted my map. As Tony Blatch had said in Singapore, Zamboanga on the western tip of Mindanao would be the most convenient port on the Philippines side of that sinister and dangerous expanse of water. Most convenient, yes, and the name appealed to me, too, but the problem was that every island between Sabah and Zamboanga – and there were a great many – was a potential, perhaps actual, haunt of one of three groups of ruffians with a formidable reputation for kidnapping, torture and murder: pirates, smugglers, or the Muslim desperadoes of the rebel Moro National Liberation Front who had been giving the Filipino armed forces a bloody time of it for years in their bitter struggle against the regime of their enemy up in Manila, President Ferdinand Marcos. The area was one of great political and military tension. I couldn’t be sure that any steel-hulled ships crossed from Borneo to Mindanao, and it looked as if another Becher’s Brook was just ahead of me. Was I going to have to make another miserable compromise and fly from Brunei to Hong Kong in order to get a ship to Manila? And then return from Manila to Hong Kong by sea to complete the itinerary I had planned? But this would mean missing the great tract of sea and island between Borneo and Luzon, and that would be intolerable. Once more, anxiety began to nag like an aching wisdom tooth, and it grew more insistent the closer I got to Sandakan.

  Twenty nine

  I don’t know a place where the mood of the landscape can change so swiftly from happy to sombre as Borneo, except perhaps the Andamans. Now, in spite of its beauty, it was gloom-laden.

  Derek Hewett’s house looked down from a fringe of frangipani and flame-of-the-woods trees on a snaking strip of water. In the morning the mist hung thickly about the forest trees on the other side, obscuring the water, mud, mangroves, a small jetty and a smaller launch. The sun, lurking behind its smoke veil, had no brightness or heat. Le soleil noir de la mélancolie. A bird nearby made a maddeningly regular sound like a man chopping wood. I read through the odd scraps of information I had collected about the Sulu Sea, weighing my chances. What I read was depressing, but it didn’t make me afraid; that came later.

  My notes read:

  November 1979: Hijacking of local ferry Saleha Baru with forty-four passengers and crew on board as it plied its way from Semporna to nearby Lahad Datu. (This is from the Straits Times report. The Straits Hope is going to Lahad Datu.) I may have to take a boat from there to cross the Sulu Sea. Launch captured by a gang of pirates who took it and the passengers to an isolated island in the nearby Philippines. There they were robbed of valuables while the pirates set about repainting and disguising the captured launch. It was two weeks before the remaining passengers returned to Semporna; in the meantime two had died, one from gunshot wounds, one from drowning. Seven of the hijackers were killed when Filipino troops went to the rescue.

  December 1979: The Japanese fishing vessel Daisan Hokko Maru attacked by gunmen off Sarangani Island. Thought to be Moro National Liberation Front separatists fighting for greater Muslim autonomy in the predominantly Christian Philippines.

  Same month: ‘Pirates shot dead a young mother in the Sulu Sea while she was sailing with her Norwegian husband and three-year-old son from the Philippines to Borneo.’ (The Borneo Bulletin reporting.) ‘Mr. Peer Tangvald told Brunei police that his wife fell overboard after being shot by the pirates, who boarded the fifty-foot schooner on the high seas and took away all valuables. Mr. Tangvald said he had not believed that it could be possible in this day and age.’ It is not only possible but has become so frequent as to verge on the humdrum from what I’ve heard.

  In the last year, there had been more than sixty people killed and nearly five hundred wounded in political violence in the southern Philippine islands, all part of the eight-year-old Moro war. Bombs seemed to be exploding everywhere, including Zamboanga. I read that the Filipino commander in the Southern Military District, Rear Admiral Romulo Espadron was inclined to think that anyone killing or hijacking in his area was a Moro, although that might be professional bias. More seriously, there were political strains with the Malaysian state of Sabah in northern Borneo. Everyone seemed to agree that about ninety thousand southern Filipino Muslim refugees had taken refuge there from the fighting on the island. The admiral’s charge that the Moros were getting arms and fast boats from Sabah was, of course, hotly denied by the Sabah chief minister, Mr Harris Selah, who said that the pirates were probably Filipino soldiers; at least they had cropped hair like soldiers and called their senior colleagues ‘sir’. To which the admiral retorted, ‘What about the fact that these pirates and terrorists are using fast Volvo-Penta speedboats made in Sabah?’ So the political cannonade went on, back and forth. In an anarchic situation, truth is elusive, but the case of an ore tanker called Berge Istra hardly seemed to fit Admiral Espadron’s ideas about the exclusivity of Moro terror. The tanker had vanished south of Mindanao five years before, and nothing more had been heard of it except for faint SOS signals. Who would have done away with a tanker?

  Piracy was nothing new to this strange region, to which an aura of the eighteenth century still clings. Scenically, it cannot have changed much since Dampier, the English buccaneer, and Captain James Cook, the Yorkshire navigator, boldly sailed this way into the virtually unknown S
trait of Macassar and the Java Sea. No cement jerry-building has sullied these palm-covered islands, looking so deceptively meek in sky-blue seas full of dolphins and turtles; the greatest change in this beautiful and perilous backyard of Asia is that the pirates have equipped their outriggers and praus with high-speed engines and heavy machine-guns. Piracy was an honoured way of life in these obscure parts for several hundred years before the Moro Liberation Front added its idealistic brand of terror to the prevailing tradition.

  I didn’t brood much on the risks that waited for me around the corner; I was depressed enough by the gloom that suddenly and mysteriously struck me that misty morning in Derek Hewett’s pleasant living room. My immediate concern was to find a ship to take me to a place where it might at least be possible to cross that long stretch of treacherous water to Zamboanga. The pirates might crop up in due time, but first things first.

  To reach Kota Kinabalu, Guy Nickal of Harrisons & Crosfield had suggested, take the ferry, a powerful and reliable motor launch, to Labuan Island two and a half hours offshore, where Harrisons & Crosfield had a branch office. Labuan was becoming a busy, free-trade port; it belonged to Malaysia and was part of the state of Sabah. From there Kota Kinabalu was a long stone’s throw by air. I decided impatiently that my pride could accommodate a plane-hop over an inconvenient ditch. The Straits Hope might even be at Labuan, but more likely it was at Kota Kinabalu; Harrisons & Crosfield’s Captain David Corrie in Labuan would know the exact situation, and could be in touch with his office in Kota Kinabalu, and with Blatch or MacGregor of the Straits Steamship Company in Singapore.

  I left Brunei on the ferry, the Seri Sungai Express, to Labuan. Derek Hewett’s driver delivered me at the landing stage on Jalan McArthur, or McArthur Street. A Murut, one of the tribesmen of the Sarawak–Borneo border, he drove with dogged caution at a good speed so that we arrived early and watched the motor taxis ploughing up spray between the landing stage and the village on stilts across the hundred yards of water. American Johnson engines were outnumbered by the Yamaha and Suzuki 25s, but the drivers could have been in Florida or California. A slant-eyed daredevil who hurled his boat into a ninety-degree swerve to stop just in time, deposited two fat and startled Chinese women at the jetty near the Brunei ferry, and saluted me by raising his hand to the peak of a military baseball-style cap bearing the words ‘Don’t Ask Me’ on one side and ‘Deputy Dawg’ on the other. The Brunei ferry launch was modern, sleek and white, and had a notice on it saying, ‘Powered by Caterpillar’. On time, it roared throatily down the winding forest-bound waterway to the bay at Muara and out into the sea towards Labuan, then surged into full speed. The crossing was short, pleasant and uneventful. At the wharf at Labuan an old Chinese porter loaded my bags into a handcart and wheeled it to Harrisons & Crosfield’s office just outside the harbour gate.