Slow Boats to China

by Gavin Young

  In his office, young Captain Corrie was helpful. The Straits Hope, he said, was in Kota Kinabalu waiting for a replacement captain, Bob Barker; her previous master, Captain Rankin, was going on leave tomorrow. I breathed a sigh of relief. David Corrie booked me on a flight to Kota Kinabalu, then took me on a drive around the tiny island of Labuan. The Japanese forces in this theatre of military operations during the Second World War had surrendered on Labuan; a memorial marked the spot. It was a green and pleasant island, thriving on a barter trade with the Philippines. Corrie pointed out one sign of our times in the waters of Brunei Bay off the harbour: a huddle of tankers laid up because of the cutback in OPEC’s oil production and the world’s oil consumption. Shell, BP and Chevron tankers stagnated here, some well into their second year of idleness. The largest of them was the British Resource, 133,000 tons, and there was no one on her but a single watchman. Like elephants, but not nearly so precious, the huge vessels looked as if they had sought out this quiet corner to die in.

  Corrie talked about the Sulu pirates. ‘A Japanese freighter anchored near Semora Island a little while ago was approached by a launch full of wild-looking Filipinos – you know, bandannas around their heads and all that. They shouted to the captain that they wanted to come aboard to sell fruit. Well, the captain was no fool; he’d heard all about the pirates around here, and so refused to let them come up. At which they opened up with their automatic guns, punching a number of holes in the hull and around the bridge. Luckily, no one was hurt, but it shows they’ve started attacking full-sized ships now.’

  I asked if merchant ships in these waters carried weapons for self-defence.

  ‘Some do now. The Filipino government has made it illegal for their barter traders to do business in Sandakan and Tawau because they think the Moro insurgents will kill or kidnap the crews and use their boats. The Filipino authorities don’t want their nationals coming and going unchecked between the Sulu Islands and Zamboanga to just anywhere in Sabah. Therefore they can trade now only in Labuan and, for their protection from pirates on the way here, they are allowed to carry arms up to Banggi Island, where they deposit them with the Malaysian authorities. On the way home from Labuan they recover their arms from Banggi before running across the Sulu Sea past the risky spots around Sandakan and the islands of Tawitawi and Jolo.’

  That afternoon Corrie drove me to the little airstrip. As the Fokker Friendship crossed to North Borneo, I wondered glumly how I was going to continue if the Philippines government had banned barter-trade boats between Sandakan and Zamboanga, and if merchant vessels avoided the area. Disguised as an old fisherman in a canoe? I decided to think about this tomorrow.

  *

  I had visited Kota Kinabalu during the Indonesian conflict in the sixties, when it was still called Jesselton. Since then it had acquired a Malay name and grown. Like many ports hereabouts, it had been needlessly bombed by the Allies in the war, razing its two-storey houses and dignified arcaded shops. Now it is all concrete and trying its best to be high-rise and up-to-date. It has none of the charm of Kuching, which was spared such senseless bombing attacks. But beyond it is the glorious savagery of Borneo’s landscape. The mountains of Sabah rise up like a series of tidal waves, with Mount Kinabalu dominating the skyline at fourteen thousand feet, the highest peak in South-east Asia. The indigenous tribal people, the Dusuns, consider it sacred; until recently, at least, many believed that the spirits of their dead gather now and then on its top two thousand feet.

  Dennis Bloodworth had told me that, according to local custom, you should be careful to sacrifice a number of cockerels before climbing Kinabalu. ‘A British governor of North Borneo,’ he said, ‘thoughtlessly climbed the mountain without sacrificing a single rooster. He came down, was taken ill and died. The Dusuns said, Serve him right. One night, as his successor waited for guests to arrive for a reception at the residency, he was horrified to see an unearthly figure in dress uniform floating down the staircase. He shakily grabbed an aide, and was told, “Oh, that’s the last governor.”’

  The anxiety that had accompanied me to Labuan persisted in Kota Kinabalu. I took it with me to the seafront offices of Harrisons & Crosfield, where, Captain Corrie had informed me, Mr John Fung was shipping manager. When the clerk told me he was on board the Straits Hope, which had arrived the day before, I walked down the street to a travel agent, pessimistically intent on taking out a sort of insurance policy.

  In the travel office two pert young Chinese girls struggled Laocoon-like with ringing telephones amid posters showing Malaysian Airlines System jumbos, Thai jets (‘smooth as silk’) and beefeaters in ‘Visit Britain’ advertisements. When one of the girls had freed herself from the telephones for a minute, she answered my inquiry about a flight to Zamboanga from Sandakan or Tawau (Corrie had said he thought there was one) without a second’s pause: ‘No flight. Only from Labuan.’

  ‘I’m fairly sure there is one from Tawau. If you could just ask….’

  She telephoned a friend, enjoyed a long, laughing conversation, then turned back to me. ‘Sandakan or Tawau to Zamboanga on Thursday and Sunday. But the flight only goes if they have enough passengers – like a taxi service, you know.’

  I asked her to make a reservation from Tawau, the timber port at the head of the Macassar Strait, and took the ticket with a minimally enhanced sense of security, but without joy. To have to fly over the Sulu Sea…. I read the Sabah Air ticket: ‘Tawau–Sandakan–Zamboanga’. A slip of paper clipped to the boarding pass said, ‘Smallpox vaccination required.’ I pushed it into my hip pocket and tried to forget it.

  Mr Fung was back in his office with Captain Barker, newly arrived from Singapore, and the man he was replacing, Captain Rankin. I knew Rankin’s dark, sleek head from a voyage I had made two years before from Brunei with him in the Rajah Brooke. Sitting at Mr Fung’s desk, he was reading Captain Barker’s hand. ‘You’ll live to seventy-five,’ he said. And Barker exclaimed, ‘Oh, not that long, surely!’

  ‘You own three houses and forty acres of land.’

  Barker raised eyebrows like small wire brushes and winked at me. ‘I’m not sure that’s accurate. I’ve never counted my acres.’

  Captain Barker was in his fifties, tall and rangy, with long, thin white legs beneath blue shorts and greying hair going thin on the crown. He had a face as red and cheery as Rankin’s was pleasantly solemn. Between them, John Fung sat listening; he was a tall, thin elderly Chinese with a lined face, gold-rimmed spectacles and a serious legal air, like a benign solicitor out of a novel by Dickens, an oriental Mr Wemmick.

  The Straits Hope, I gathered, was due to sail the next day at ten o’clock. ‘Straits Hope won’t call at Tawau this trip,’ Mr Fung announced. ‘Read this and sign it, please, Mr Young.’ He handed me a typed piece of paper as if he were requesting my signature on a new will.

  I read: ‘I, Gavin Young, hereby declare that I will not claim on your company nor the Master of the Straits Hope for responsibility for any accident which may happen to me during presence on board between Kota Kinabalu and Sandakan. For Harrisons & Crosfield (Sabah), John S. Fung.’ I signed it without delay. ‘There we are, then,’ said Captain Barker.

  *

  The Straits Hope was a bigger ship than the little Perak, but still no giant of the seas. She had strange bows that curved up sharply and narrowed into a sort of towering peak, so that when I stood there my head was almost level with the line of sight from the bridge. ‘Bloody nuisance,’ Captain Barker complained cheerfully. ‘Sometimes I can’t see a damned thing ahead.’

  Barker was no exception to the rule I had discovered: that ships’ officers are an easygoing, friendly – though often bitchy – lot with an interest in talking as a safety valve for the restrictive nature of their monkish existence. Relationships on ships are generally easy and casual, and antipathies are kept well in hand, even ashore. I suppose they have to be, for what alternative is there but bodily harm and murder?

  Barker had a nice line in
mock anxiety. He liked to sprinkle chilli sauce, so to speak, on the blander periods of shipboard existence. ‘I hope we can muddle through between here and Sandakan,’ he said glumly as we rocked out into the South China Sea, heading north-east. Why shouldn’t we? I wondered.

  I had discovered an unused bar and game room on the deck below my quarters in the owner’s cabin, a large though not luxurious room with a bunk, chest of drawers, and shower attached.

  Barker came into the game room, a relic of passenger days, a couple of hours after we’d sailed, and found me sitting at a low table with a writing pad in front of me. I had already inspected the posters of Swiss lakes, a wall chart identifying several varieties of ferns and a collage of nude girls cut from magazines. Over the three-ply bar stood a TV set, and near it a dartboard.

  ‘Writing letters?’ asked Barker, and immediately went on, ‘My God, I find the third mate’s never been up this coast before, and none of the officers have been around to the Macassar Strait.’

  ‘None of them?’

  ‘Not on this ship. It’s new to them. Nor have I, so it’ll mean an extra eye open.’ He shook his head gloomily, and said again, ‘I hope we can muddle through.’

  ‘Let’s hope so.’

  ‘Oh, I daresay it’ll be okay.’ He looked around the cabin and his eyes lit on the collage of nudes. ‘You know, these girlie pictures can spread all over the ship.’ He might have been talking about some pernicious tropical fungus. ‘There are pussies all over the crew’s quarters. What do you think? It’s all right, I suppose. But there shouldn’t be pussies all over the outside of their quarters, too. Suppose female visitors come aboard and see them? I’ve said to the crew, “No, no. Fair’s fair. Inside the cabins, not outside!”’

  All told, the Straits Hope’s complement consisted of forty-one men: an English captain, a Scottish chief engineer, the rest Malays or Chinese. ‘Quite a big crew for these days,’ Barker said.

  Darkness was falling by the time we steamed up to the tip of Borneo and swung due east to starboard, leaving Banggi Island (where the Filipino barter-trade masters left their guns on the way to Labuan) to the north of us. Still in Malaysian waters, we were entering the south-western part of the Sulu Sea.

  I opened Norman Sherry’s book on Conrad and read a passage quoting a letter written to a Singapore newspaper in 1879:

  Sir:

  I notice a paragraph in your issue of Wednesday last commenting upon the action of H.M.S. Kestrel in burning a native piratical village on the North East Coast of Borneo…. Well, Sir, I was attacked in the Subahani six months ago by pirates at the mouth of the Beelungan River. I was apprehensive of an attack, knowing the coast, and put on deck rattans 8 ft. high and my guns were double shotted, when about 200 piratical sampans attacked me and I fired upon them…. A horde of pirates infests the coasts, and I, for one, am delighted that H.M.S. Gunboat Kestrel has taught them a lesson.

  Yours truly,

  John Kelly,

  late master of the schooner Subahani

  Journals kept by travellers and seafarers in the nineteenth century spoke of the broken coastline just south of Tawau as a pirate haunt and slave market. Conrad wrote that the pirates were ‘very fine men, brave, fierce, never giving quarter to Europeans’. The Sulu Islands’ capital of Suq had been a fine slave market too, and so had Palawan Island, the long rib of land pointing like a dagger to Mindoro as it lay north-east across the sea above Banggi Island – where the Straits Hope now moved in the dark with Captain Barker on her bridge.

  Of course, I had read of Joseph Conrad’s Sulu pirate, ‘the one-eyed statesman’, ‘the one-eyed crocodile, factotum, harbour master, prime minister to the Rajah of Sambir’ – the crafty Babalatchi of Almayer’s Folly and An Outcast of the Islands:

  He was a vagabond of the seas, a true Orang Laut (man of the sea), living by rapine and plunder of coasts and ships in his prosperous days; earning his living by honest and irksome toil when the days of adversity were upon him…. He was brave and bloodthirsty without any affection, and he hated the white men who interfered with the manly pursuits of throat-cutting, kidnapping, slave-dealing, and fire-raising, that were the only possible occupations for a true man of the sea. He found favour in the eyes of his chief, the fearless Omar el Badavi, the leader of the Brunei rovers, whom he followed with unquestioning loyalty through long years of successful depredation….

  Babalatchi, the one-eyed boaster, in conversation with an English seaman, regretted the days of glory:

  ‘Ah, Tuan! … the old days were best. Even I have boarded at night silent ships with white sails. That was before an English Rajah ruled in Kuching. Then we fought amongst ourselves and were happy. Now when we fight with you we can only die….’

  It has been convincingly pointed out by Mr Sherry that Babalatchi, the crafty, one-eyed shahbandar – harbour master – of Sambir was partly modelled on a real Sumatran, Jadee by name, who first became a slave of the Sulu rovers and later fought with them. The author of an eighteenth-century book of travels, My Journal in Malayan Waters, met Jadee, who by then had given up piracy after an unfortunate encounter with a British man-of-war. One can see that he must have led a grand life. Opium, curry and rice, and wives galore:

  ‘We were all very rich then – ah! such numbers of beautiful wives, and such feasting! – but, above all, we had a great many holy men in our force! … such brass guns, such long pendants, such creeses [krisses, or Malay daggers]! Allah-il-Allah! [La ilah ill’ Allah, is what he meant] … fighting cocks, smoking opium and eating white rice.’

  There were sultans of Sulu in those days (Sulu City is called Jolo now). For fear of retribution, they were not always willing to embark on wild adventures in alliance with the sea rovers who came and went through their scattered island possessions, but the rovers visited the court or took refuge there when the contest with orang putih (the white man) grew too hot for them.

  The headlands and forests of North Borneo remain as mysterious and reticent as ever. As I did now, the turbaned rovers had stared at them as they sailed bravely south through these glittering seas to pillage the coast and river settlements of Brunei and Sarawak. These are the shores of the Land Below the Wind, as Malay sailors still call the wilderness of Borneo because they lie ten degrees below the typhoon belt from Japan to Luzon.

  The Land Below the Wind! The moon was not full, but it was very bright and the stars were enormous. As we passed through Marudu Bay I saw a beacon ahead; I counted a flash every ten seconds. Islands began to loom up amazingly fast; we were on top of them in no time, as if we were going to ram them.

  Captain Barker came up to the bridge in his curiously cheerful ‘disaster-ahead’ mood and said, ‘Sometimes when we get close to an island like this, I wonder if the radar is working.’ He sent an officer of the watch below, and murmured to me with a comedian’s grimace, ‘I don’t want idiots up here in this time and place. One idiot’s enough.’ He pointed to himself. ‘Ha!’

  Later he said, ‘Once upon a time my radar did break down, so I stopped and anchored. Bless me, another ship came up behind us and rammed a little island – just there.’ He pointed at a group of shadows on the sea. ‘Twelve knots. But no puncture or leak, apparently. I asked him if he needed any help from me, but he seemed not to.’ He embraced the sea around us with a circling finger. ‘Crews don’t like to anchor here.’ He drew a finger across his throat. ‘Pirates.’

  Do captains use talk of possible disaster as a verbal talisman against the real thing? Perhaps Barker did, although most of what he said was sheer irrepressible clowning. On sea hazards: ‘Luck. You need it all the time. If your ship comes alongside fast in current and you get the anchor down in time – luck! If you don’t get it down, crash, into the wharf – bad luck. No one’s fault necessarily.’

  At breakfast next day, present besides Barker and myself were Mr Low, the Chinese radio officer, and the chief engineer, a Scotsman called Ian Guthrie, with a rutted face and bristle of grey beard of the ‘torpe
do’ variety I associate with schoolboys’ pre-Second World War sea stories by ‘Taffrail’, ‘Bartimeus’ or Percy F. Westerman.

  ‘Nae,’ said Guthrie, tackling his herring’s roe as a surgeon digs for an appendix. ‘No one’s fault, necessarily, at a’.’

  ‘Sparks here puts everything down to magic, don’t you, Mr Low?’

  The radio officer smiled bashfully. ‘Tell Mr Young about your mysterious fishing allergy,’ Barker said.

  ‘Well,’ said Low, ‘I’d been a month on a Straits Steamship Company ship and fishing all the time. At one o’clock in the morning our agent came up to me when we were alongside the wharf at Port Dickson, up west Malaysia way, and said, “Why is it that every time you fish here a Malay woman cries in that kampong over there?”

  ‘Soon I found strange white patches on my skin, dead white, spreading from my calf to my buttocks. I put ointment on it, and after three days it went away. Next day I threw a line over the side, and this time my hands and arms turned dead white. So I stopped fishing there and then in a panic.’