Slow Boats to China

by Gavin Young

  ‘Any pain?’

  ‘Only itching. Six months later I tried fishing again, and the same white patches appeared. The third time, a year later, in the Malawali Channel off North Borneo, we were anchored and I’d really forgotten how scared I had been. The same thing happened.’

  ‘You could be allergic to your bait.’

  ‘No, the bait was only cuttlefish. It was something spiritual.’

  ‘Look, try again now. Throw a line over and let’s see.’

  ‘No! Never! The fourth time, there’ll be no cure.’ He shivered. He was perfectly serious.

  I was telling Bob Barker about the man who died on board the Nancowry on the way to the Andamans, and about Captain Bala’s dread of having to bury the corpse at sea or stick it into the freezer to prevent it from putrefying before we reached Port Blair.

  The captain had strong views about it. ‘Put the body in the fridge? No way would I do that. My word, if the cold-storage people who install these things heard that you’d put a body in the freezer!’ He slapped his forehead with his palm, bowled over by the thought.

  *

  The morning we berthed at Sandakan I groped my way in the semi-dark up to the bridge. I had rolled out of the owner’s bunk at cockcrow in order to see our approach to Sandakan; ‘It’s like a miniature Hong Kong,’ Captain Rankin had said, ‘cliffs and islands and a bay. Imposing.’ It was imposing. By the time the sun was well up we were passing under soaring rock faces that looked as if they’d been carved with a cleaver, and past forests still half hidden in cloud, their tops rising out of early mist like brush-strokes in a Chinese painting.

  ‘“Oh, the monkeys have no tails in Zambo-ang-a,”’ sang Barker. ‘By God, you’d better not sing that old American song when you reach Zamboanga; they’d kill you for sure.’

  ‘What are the rest of the words?’

  ‘I can’t remember. It’s an old song from the time the American forces were there.’

  ‘Terrible, being out of bed so early,’ Barker said cheerfully a moment later, stamping up and down. ‘That’s the trouble with this life at sea. You get half the amount of sleep most people get and at fifty-five you feel it. If I started life again and had the wife I have now, I wouldn’t do it. I would not, sir.’

  ‘What would you do?’

  ‘Well, I’ll tell you – my wife would be better off as a housemaid and me as a gardener. Honestly. At least I’d see her all the time.’ Barker genuinely missed his wife after all these years of marriage. I’m not surprised. I met her later over a curry tiffin at Raffles in Singapore, an amusing, intelligent Filipino lady.

  A personal aura of drama attended Barker on the bridge rather as it does a major actor. He cocked an ear to his ship-to-shore radio like Macbeth hearing the Porter’s knock, and when he said irritably, ‘The harbour people say they’ve got no agent’s instructions for us. What the hell’s going on, I’d like to know. I don’t see any bloody tugs, do you?’ he might have been Napoleon at Austerlitz demanding to know where Marshal Murat’s cavalry was.

  ‘Dead slow ahead. Stop engines.’ At the wharf, Barker gripped the forward edge of the wing of the bridge and pushed it convulsively, urging the Straits Hope around, moaning to the chief officer, ‘She’s not coming around, is she? Tell the tug to give her a push.’ He gave his final order – ‘Finished with engines’ – in tones of unforgiving gloom, as if his ship had deliberately let him down, and he was finished not only with the engines and the Straits Hope, but ships in general and almost with life itself. But in a moment his usual high spirits returned, and he turned to me proudly. ‘We made it,’ he said, spreading out his arms. And now he was Amundsen at the South Pole.

  Thirty

  As soon as the Straits Hope berthed a little way down the coast in the middle of the morning, I told Bob Barker I’d be back and took a taxi to the centre of town. I wanted to be sure that Sandakan was a better jumping-off point to Zamboanga than Tawau further around the coast. If Tawau was better I would have to sail on with the Straits Hope. I didn’t fancy any more delays.

  In Harrisons & Crosfield, one of the firm’s senior men, Rodney Jago, who had worked for seventeen years in North Borneo, said doubtfully, ‘You really want to cross to Zamboanga by sea?’

  ‘I certainly do.’

  ‘Well, I think Sandakan is a better place to start from than Tawau. Things called kumpits cross fairly regularly, I believe. They’re launches – Filipinos in the barter trade run them back and forth. But you’ll find out more about it if you come with me today to a Rotary lunch. Are you free?’

  I hadn’t expected a Rotary Club in Borneo. Nevertheless, at lunchtime I found myself sitting at a long table in a hotel restaurant. I had shaken hands with several Rotarians – an easygoing company of young Chinese businessmen and British trading-company representatives – and had time to read only one of the several jokes on the bulletin of the Rotary Club lying by my plate. ‘A mistake,’ it said, ‘is something a virgin and a parachute jumper can only make once.’

  A Chinese meal came and went, and once the bowls and chopsticks had been removed an American Peace Corps worker lectured us on the problems of malaria control in the sprawling wilderness of North Borneo; he warned us that the local mosquitoes could impregnate us with lethal cerebral malaria unless we took a new drug whose name I forget. When we stood up to leave, Jago said to a Chinese Rotarian, ‘Mr Young wants to cross to Zamboanga by boat. How would you advise him to do it?’

  ‘By air is by far the best way. Of course, the planes don’t leave if there aren’t enough passengers, but by boat is very risky. I definitely don’t advise it.’

  ‘But Sandakan is the place for a boat crossing, is it? Not Tawau?’

  ‘Sandakan is the best place if you have to go by sea. Kumpits cross now and then. They’re dodging the pirates, you know, but they go. If you insist, go and see a government shipping-control official, Inspector Ahmat, at the kumpit wharf, which is in the centre of town. He should know the kumpit schedules, such as they are.’

  ‘He’s near our office,’ said Jago, and drove me back. But I thought I’d call on the police before I tried the kumpit wharf. They might not take kindly to a strange Englishman snooping around a wharf full of Filipino kumpits looking for a crossing on a sea so busy with piracy and intrigue. Arrest and deportation back to Singapore would be a disaster.

  Sandakan’s police headquarters were housed in low, modest buildings near the water. The superintendent, a stout and friendly Malay wearing a casual shirt outside his trousers, offered me a chair and sent for his colleague, the local representative of the Malaysian Special Branch. After I told them my story, the police chief said, ‘What have you heard about the situation here?’

  I told him what I’d read about the hijacking of ferries, the boarding of trading vessels, the pillaging of cargoes, the murder of crews, the machine-gunning of merchant ships, and of the battles between the Moro separatist rebels and the Filipino government troops. When I had finished he said that I had more or less got the picture. It was not a good situation, he added.

  ‘What I would like to know before starting out,’ I said, ‘is whether you hear of many cases of offhand unprovoked murder? I mean, boats boarded, throats cut indiscriminately, bodies thrown over the side?’

  ‘Let’s say that the Sulu pirates are not as bad as the Thai pirates in the Gulf of Siam. They don’t rape all the women they capture, and don’t kill all the men. I can’t say I’m sure of the percentage.’

  ‘We’re not sure at all,’ the Special Branch man admitted. He was small and slightly paler than the superintendent, a Dusun – a man from the indigenous people of North Borneo – with sharp, alert eyes. ‘You see, we patrol our waters around here very well, but they don’t go very far out to sea – twelve miles at most – before they become Filipino waters. Beyond that we don’t know what goes on. We may hear this and that, but we can’t be certain.’

  ‘You have no direct communications with the Filipino authorities?’
>
  ‘None at all. So, you see, I’d be worried about your safety out there beyond our control.’ I began to wonder if he was making up his mind to prevent me from leaving.

  The Malay police superintendent said, ‘If you’re stopped out there by the Filipino navy bobbing about in a kumpit, they’ll ask you why you’re travelling in a kumpit; it’s illegal, they’ll say, for foreigners to travel to the Philippines like this. They’ll tell you that if you want to go to the Philippines legally, you should go by boat to Manila, or fly from here to Zamboanga. The immigration people in Zamboanga don’t let foreigners come ashore from boats – especially from kumpits. You could be a foreign mercenary helping the Moros. You’ll have trouble at that end, I expect.’ He smiled. ‘Still, if you are stopped on the way, it had better be by the Filipino navy and not by pirates or Moros. The navy doesn’t kill offhand, eh? It’s a civilized world, the navy, isn’t it?’

  ‘I have a passport and a visa.’

  ‘The navy wouldn’t treat a foreigner too badly.’ He paused, then added, ‘Of course, if the navy took the kumpit for a Moro rebel boat – ah ha! – I don’t know what would happen then. They might shoot first and ask about you later.’

  ‘I’d rather you didn’t do this,’ said the Special Branch officer. Again I felt that a direct order to take a plane was only a breath away.

  ‘I have an idea,’ I said quickly. ‘Surely the men who know the risks of the crossing best are the kumpit captains, who make the trip quite often. Could I talk with one or two of them who have arrived recently? Would you help me to do that?’

  To my relief, the superintendent said, ‘Oh, yes, we could do that.’ He rose from his desk, opened a drawer, took out an automatic and put it in his hip pocket. Then we drove to the wharf.

  A large shed on the water’s edge served as an office for immigration, customs and police officers, and as a waiting room for the crews and passengers of the kumpits arriving or leaving for the Philippines. Five or six large ones lay alongside each other on a seafront reinforced by a wall of solid wooden piles. A kumpit, I saw, was nothing more than a large launch with a roof over much of its deck which provided shade for those beneath it and a sightseeing platform with a low wooden rail for anyone who sat on top of it. A wheelhouse and a small cabin like a chicken coop protruded above the level of the roof, the cabin containing the captain’s bunk and three spare ones for a charterer or senior members of the crew. The bunks were narrow and lined with wafer-thin mats. A thin metal funnel protruded from the roof over the deck. The kumpits were made of heavy wood from stem to stern and were about a hundred feet long.

  A number of men lounged nearby, and I asked one of them if the kumpits came from Zamboanga.

  ‘Yes, tuan.’ He spoke with the Hispano-American accent that distinguishes a Filipino from a Malay.

  ‘Are you from there yourself?’

  ‘I’m living this side now, tuan.’

  A young police officer who had joined us and been introduced to me as the shipping-control official, Inspector Ahmat, said, ‘He’s living here, but he’s from Mindanao Island in the Philippines.’ Zamboanga is the westernmost town of Mindanao.

  I asked the man how many days a kumpit took to cross the Sulu Sea between Zamboanga and Sandakan. I had an idea it would take eight or ten hours, although I can’t think now how I’d invented such an absurd timetable.

  ‘About three days, tuan,’ the man said. Three days! It was a long time to be dodging pirates and the Filipino navy. Later, when I looked at my map again, I saw that this was a reasonable length of time, and that I’d misjudged the distance.

  At the superintendent’s bidding, Inspector Ahmat led us into his office and then went out to the kumpit wharf. Soon he returned with a stocky, dark-skinned kumpit captain with a wide nose and eyes far apart in a long high-cheekboned face. The man shook my hand. He looked strong, but he took my hand in a tentative, lifeless way, not limply, but as if he hadn’t done much hand-shaking and wasn’t sure how it should be done.

  I said to Ahmat, ‘Can you speak to him in Malay and then translate?’ He laughed; the man couldn’t speak Malay, he said. His native language was Tagalog, but he could speak a little English.

  To the kumpit captain I said slowly and distinctly, ‘How many trips have you made between Sandakan and Zamboanga?’

  ‘Maybe, ah …’ – he looked up at the ceiling trying to count the times – ‘maybe, nine, ten trips.’

  ‘How many times you stopped by pirates?’

  ‘Two times.’

  ‘Only two?’

  ‘Only two.’

  ‘They kill anyone, shoot anyone?’

  ‘No killing. But they have guns. Take money. Take every wallet, everything take.’

  ‘You think pirates attack us?’

  He smiled. ‘Cannot tell. Sometimes attack, but not always. Sometimes not attack.’

  ‘Two attacks out of ten trips,’ I said to the superintendent. ‘Not a bad percentage. Makes it a fair risk.’ He shrugged, as much as to say, That’s your opinion.

  To the captain I said, ‘Will you take me?’

  ‘What about emi-gra-tion?’ he asked.

  Ahmat said with a glance at the superintendent, ‘No problem here.’

  ‘When do you sail?’

  The captain said, ‘Saturday.’ It was Thursday. The Straits Hope sailed on Friday at noon, and the little weekly plane came to Sandakan and returned to Zamboanga on Saturday. I hoped he really would take me on Saturday. If he was delayed or refused me, I might be stuck once more for at least a week, this time in the relative wilds of North Borneo, and would risk missing the connection with Swire’s steamer, the Hupeh, in two weeks’ time in Manila.

  ‘Will you take me?’ I repeated with greater urgency.

  ‘I want to consult my companions, please.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘We meet here tomorrow 9.00 a.m., okay?’

  ‘Fine, okay.’

  ‘See you,’ he said, flashing a gold tooth.

  I had checked into the Nak Hotel, the nearest to the kumpit wharf. There, that evening, I sat with the Special Branch officer and pondered the situation. I had returned to the Straits Hope and informed Barker of the opportunity with the kumpit, at which he’d muttered dourly that he couldn’t say he envied me.

  I needed a drink. ‘Only Black Label, no Led Label,’ the Nak’s barman said. I ordered a double.

  ‘On lok?’

  ‘Yes, on the rocks, please.’

  John, the Special Branch officer, took a glass of milk. Chinese pop music floated over us from loudspeakers over the bar. ‘I think the kumpit captain is going to say no to me,’ I said.

  ‘Better for you if he does. Well, I won’t go so far as to say that. But we can do nothing for you after you pass that frontier on the sea.’

  ‘I’ll survive. If not, I won’t blame you. I promise I won’t sue you for responsibility if I’m thrown to the sharks.’

  John laughed and ordered me another whisky.

  To my surprise, when we met next morning at nine o’clock in Inspector Ahmat’s office, the kumpit captain said he would take me. He didn’t want any money, he added, but could I eat their fish and rice? Of course, I said; again I held out my hand to him, and this time he took it more firmly. A tall, broad Filipino who looked a bit like Anthony Quinn had accompanied the captain, and he, too, shook hands and said, ‘Welcome.’

  Inspector Ahmat said, ‘The captain told me that he can’t take you all the way to Zamboanga. You see, what he is doing is illegal – the barter trade, I mean. In any case, his real destination is Cebu City, not Zamboanga, so he wants to drop you off at an island before Zamboanga. A friend of his will take you on from there, he said.’

  ‘I don’t much like the sound of that.’

  ‘Exactly. I told him that he must take you right to Zamboanga.’

  I turned to the captain. ‘Do you agree, Captain?’

  He smiled and shrugged. ‘Okay. I agree to Zamboanga.’

&nb
sp; It was arranged that I should present myself at the wharf the next morning at ten o’clock with my baggage; the kumpit would sail soon after.

  The day was left to me. I took a taxi to the Straits Hope and told Barker regretfully that I would be leaving him. I had enjoyed my short voyage and his stories and mock gloom as we threaded our way through the islands at night.

  At the head of the gangway we said goodbye. ‘Take care,’ Barker said. ‘See you in Singapore,’ I told him.

  ‘You’ve got a nerve, haven’t you?’

  ‘Well, you have to admit that creeping across this sea by plane would be cheating, and it would take much more nerve to explain that away when I get home.’

  ‘“Oh, the monkeys have no tails in Zamboanga, ta tatatatatatatatata ta….”’ Singing like a music-hall comedian Barker winked and waved as I lugged my cases down the gangway. From the quayside, I took a snapshot of him looking down at me from high up on the wing of the bridge.

  ‘Have you permit to photograph this ship?’ A policeman was coming toward me.

  ‘Of course,’ I said, and quickly got into the taxi.

  *

  A young Englishman I had met with Jago in Harrisons & Crosfield who had something to do with timber and forests had asked me to lunch. As we drove down the main street before turning off to his house in the hills above the port, I noticed the high percentage of Chinese names over the shopfronts and restaurants, although the Chinese are a minority here.

  ‘It’s a pity Sandakan was bombed during the war. Not many old houses survive,’ my host said.

  ‘It was the same story from Brunei to Macassar. Senseless bombing.’

  The Allies, as much as the Japanese, were responsible for the destruction. But thinking of the Second World War reminded me of the puzzle I had discussed with Lindsay Emmerson in Calcutta. The Japanese army came ashore in North Borneo and Sarawak, defeated the British and Australians, and took many prisoners. As elsewhere when they captured British or Dutch or French possessions, the Japanese commanders announced themselves to the local populations – Chinese, Malays, Dusuns, Dayaks, Ibans and the rest – as liberators, brothers come to free fellow Asians from the European imperial yoke. But, having made that point, they began to behave towards the local population they claimed to have ‘liberated’ with a good deal more savagery than the former European masters had ever meted out. They had the hearts and minds of millions of Asians in their grasp, and then proceeded to treat them like enemies, jailing, torturing, humiliating and beheading them. It was an amazing psychological error, induced by the Japanese ‘master-race’ attitudes of the time.