Slow Boats to China

by Gavin Young

  I had little chance to wave back. As soon as the driver opened the throttle, the pump boat began to buck and dip, and large sheets of water descended on us. We sat very cramped, our knees drawn up, our buttocks balanced on the sharp edges of the baggage. Soon, when the boat roared out of the sheltered water of the islands, we became wet from our hair to our toenails.

  Thirty four

  Don’t you go, don’t you go to far Zamboanga,

  Where you may forget your darling far away,

  Don’t you go, don’t you go for if you leave me,

  How can I without you stay.

  Ο weep not, my dear Paloma,

  Ο weep not for I’ll return.

  Ο weep not, my little darling,

  I shall remember and I shall yearn.

  With feathers of loyal dove, dear,

  With red ink of my warm blood,

  I’ll write you my burning love, dear,

  My own Paloma so true and good.

  Song of the Filipino Scouts

  In the pump boat we were plagued once more by engine trouble. Three times our headlong progress through the spray of a confused sea was halted by that familiar choking splutter from the outboard in the stern. Three times our driver, stripping down the engine to hammer in its bowels, disclosed a murky tangle of rusty metal clearly far from its first youth. And three times, after half an hour of rocking from one outrig-bar to the other while waves broke over gunwales no more than a foot above the surface, the engine unexpectedly returned to life and we battered our way onwards towards Mindanao.

  At each breakdown, Mindanao was still a long way out of sight. The captain had calculated the pump boat would take at least four hours to reach Zamboanga. With the stops, I thought, it would take longer: an uncomfortable thought, since we were all soaked to our underwear. To keep to our course, the pump boat had to drive across the grain of the main swell, so that the outrigger scuttled like a crab diagonally up and down waves as high as bungalows, tilting steeply and taking aboard slabs of green water.

  It was not so bad for the driver in the stern or for Captain Amin, who had cannily taken a seat beside him, huddling in a mackintosh and peering out from a cap with a green eyeshade. Nor was it hard on Crazy Jan, who crouched just behind me in an outsized yellow oilskin, from time to time yelling into my ear, ‘Ooah, thee sea ees sonofbeetch,’ or ‘Ya-a-ah! I want to pee-pee.’ The Haji beside me shouted, ‘Fasten seat belts,’ as the pump boat careered like a roller coaster into a deep trough; once, to reassure me, he said, ‘Don’t worry. We will be in a Zamboanga nightclub by six o’clock.’ I wondered what the Haji would find to do that was not haram in a Zamboanga nightclub.

  I was mainly concerned that my anorak, rescued from the Allimpaya’s old helmsman, was adequately protecting the films, cameras and notebooks in my metal suitcase. This water treatment might be exactly what was needed to rust the tiny tumblers of the combination locking system, leaving me with a portable but extremely heavy and unopenable safe. Water coursed down my neck, roared in my eardrums and filled my shoes, but the charterer, Anthony Quinn, was getting the real battering. Whenever the boat nosedived into the heart of a wave, a wall of water seethed over him as if he were a bollard on a breakwater. He must have been very cold, as well as half drowned, for he was covered by nothing but his dripping jeans, a T-shirt, a towel twisted around his head like a turban and another around his neck. He showed amazing fortitude. Every now and then he unwound the towels, wrung them out, and then replaced them, hardly less sopping wet, around his head and neck to await the next ducking. For three hours he emerged from successive waves shaking his head and laughing.

  Small craft crossed our path; sometimes outriggers, their crews only intermittently visible in the rise and fall of the waves; sometimes vessels with square striped sails of pale-or cypress-green, sky-blue, white, yellow and an autumnal brownish gold – colours an artist might have chosen – transfigured by the strong rays of the afternoon sun.

  At last the high whale-back outline of Mindanao emerged through the spray. ‘One hour and half more,’ Jan shouted in my ear. When the pump boat bucked and plunged into the strait that separates Mindanao from Basilan Island, now a long ridge of land on our right, the waves diminished. In another half-hour we could see woolly forest shapes and the small white cubes of the city of Zamboanga.

  A large sea snake wriggled past us, twisting its loathsome coils of yellow and chocolate-brown stripes under my elbow; it must have been six feet long. ‘Keep arms eenside boat,’ called Jan. But, when three shining fins sliced through the water like headsmen’s axes, he couldn’t contain his glee – ‘Ja-a-a-a-aws!’ he screamed to me, pointing, ‘Ja-a-a-aws!’ and leaped up, so that the captain had to grab the tail of his yellow oilskin cape and pull him down again.

  ‘I want to urinate,’ the Haji said with prim urgency, looking around as if selecting a spot to aim at. I shook my head, shouting, ‘No, no,’ and he thought better of it; he would certainly have toppled overboard. Accustomed to acrobatic motions at sea, Jan had earlier tried to overcome the barriers of the oilskin, a zipper and tight underwear in an attempt to pee in a wildly rocking boat, but in vain, and had had to give up. The Haji retained a pained expression until we landed on Mindanao.

  On Mindanao, not at Zamboanga. I was surprised to see the high outlines of Zamboanga City far off to our left as the pump boat approached a shaggy shoreline disfigured by a couple of low buildings and a few nondescript houses. I craned my neck to the huddle of oilskin in the stern and asked the captain, ‘Zamboanga, no?’ A tooth flashed, and the Haji answered for him, explaining that the captain didn’t dare be seen in Zamboanga harbour. He was not meant to be anywhere near Zamboanga. The police would ask him where he’d come from, what I was doing with him, and all manner of awkward questions, the true answers to which would land the lot of us in jail accused of espionage, smuggling, insurrection, or all three. ‘So we land,’ the Haji said, ‘some miles from Zamboanga, and find transport to take us into the city by road.’

  ‘We will find a jeepney,’ said the captain from the depths of his yellow mackintosh. Ah, a jeepney: a nice idea. A jeepney is an exclusively Filipino phenomenon: a long-bodied jeep arranged inside like a bus, gaily and garishly painted and chromed all over its outside in the style of a fairground merry-go-round, with silver models of horses adorning its hood and loudspeakers booming heavy rock music at the passengers. When I boarded that jeepney, I would know without any doubt that my arrival was a reality. I could be nowhere else but in the Philippines.

  *

  Our landing lacked style. Once out of the boat, which quickly turned away to sea and disappeared, I found myself floundering on the edge of a shoreline of mud under some ramshackle wooden houses on stilts. The others were wading ankle-deep to a track behind the houses, splashing through water black and thick with mud, oil and unnameable substances. We were in a tiny horseshoe-shaped bay with two warehouses, a couple of rusty chimneys and piles of wooden planks nearby – some sort of timber yard.

  Jan met me ashore, puffing, his jeans caked with black slime to the knee, carrying my small bag, teeth and gums agape with joy, and the captain, the Haji and Anthony Quinn followed. We all looked like walking corpses washed up by the tide, but to the people watching us from the houses we were all old friends. Many of them exchanged greetings with the captain.

  Near the road we stopped. ‘I leave you now,’ said the captain. ‘Go straight to hotel. Immigration closed already. Open tomorrow 8.00 a.m. No worry.’ He shook hands and left us. The rest of our bedraggled group of four, our shirts and trousers sticking to our bodies like cellophane, stood by the roadside and waited. Not for long. Within three minutes I heard the sound of a discotheque in full swing rapidly approaching. The thundering beat, the falsetto voices and howl of over-amplified guitars seemed to envelop us from the surrounding banana groves like a stereo system turned carnivore. Around a bend, heading towards Zamboanga, a jeepney appeared like a moving carnival, gleaming with silver ho
rses, festooned with young Filipinos, shuddering with the beat of the rock.

  The driver braked hard, raising dust. ‘Hey, man, you bin for a swim?’ he yelled. His assistants leaped down, grabbed my bags and shoved them under the legs of a full load of Filipinos, sitting seven a side, who dragged us aboard, shouting loud words of welcome, showing no resentment as our sodden bodies squeezed them uncomfortably.

  ‘Hiya, Joe, you goin’ to Zamboanga Zeety?’ asked the young man next to me. He nursed four mangoes in a basket. Jan leaned over: ‘I’ll pay to Lantaka Hotel, okay?’ he told me. ‘I go down before you. See you tomorrow at hotel.’

  ‘You from America?’ the young Filipino asked.

  ‘England,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, that’s very fine. My name ees Jerry Abdallah, schoolteacher.’ He held out his hand.

  I was wet and feeling cold, and the coating of road dust stuck to me like a clown’s make-up. An angry Immigration Department awaited me, and, for all I knew, a Zamboanga jail. I didn’t give a tinker’s damn. Nothing on earth mattered. I wanted to hug these cheerful Filipinos who, without turning a hair, welcomed a shivering, dust-caked scarecrow of a foreigner from the sea. I had crossed the Sulu Sea under the Pirate Wind without having walked the plank. My throat was uncut, my notes were intact, and I could have kissed them all.

  We bumped and rattled, half deafened by bass guitars, past handsome wooden bungalows in gardens vivid with tropical flowers, between avenues of slender coconut palms beside a sea that looked as pretty as a picture postcard. I stared at the horizon, imagining those invisible islands and the grey-faced Moro elders; hearing Ali growl, ‘Geeve me watch, geeve me jacket also’; remembering Musa the Ayatollah, his knees across my lap, his bottle-green eyes, his tic and lopsided grin. I saw again the low, cunning shape of the mysterious pump boat sliding out of the islands across the Allimpaya’s bows, and felt the twist in my stomach when Carlos whispered, ‘Pirate.’

  The jeepney rocked and swayed past more banana trees interspersed with roadside establishments called Dennie’s Place or Ernie’s. The Philippines! I felt cold, tired and exultant.

  The Haji and Anthony Quinn got off in a suburb, nodding to me briefly. I saw they were nervous and now found me an embarrassment. Not so Jan; he knew friendship and had never heard of embarrassment. Before he hopped away he called to me loudly, so that every passenger could see and hear, ‘Tomorrow I come, yah?’ and darted off with a flash of teeth. Even that wasn’t the end of him; in the middle of the street, his legs black with slime from knee to foot, and despite carts bearing down on him from both directions, he stopped and waved.

  *

  Before we reached the centre of Zamboanga, the jeepney developed a puncture. While three young Filipinos were changing the tyre, shouting, laughing and pushing each other, Jerry Abdallah, the teacher, introduced me to three girls who were fellow passengers. ‘These are teachers also,’ he said, and they smiled and bowed. ‘You are quite safe. I will take you to your hotel. Please take one of these mangoes.’ He passed the bag. ‘They are for my wife.’ I accepted his offer to guide me to my hotel.

  I could hardly wait to get there. My face was burning, my eyes smarted whenever they caught sunlight, and my back ached from the hours of pounding in the boat and the half-hour in the jeepney. When we stopped again some way from the hotel, Jerry Abdallah said, ‘You are too tired. I’ll get a taxi. Wait here.’

  The Lantaka Hotel is on the seafront, and the balcony of my room gave me a beautiful view of the strait that separates Zamboanga from Balisan Island, and Mindanao from the Sulu Sea. I looked again at the sea I had crossed; already it was becoming hard to believe I had done so.

  BIENVENIDOS, said the notice on the back of the door. I felt thirsty; my system was still full of ocean salt. ‘Time for a beer, Jerry?’

  ‘Okay. It is still early. My wife is not yet worried.’

  ‘Two San Miguel beers, please,’ I said over the phone to room service.

  ‘Family size or regular size, surrr?’ crooned a sweet female voice. ‘Family size.’

  The beer was a reward for Jerry Abdallah’s kindness and a celebration present for myself. When he had gone, I pulled back the bedcovers, threw off my damp clothes, bounced once on the unfamiliar springy softness, and fell into the deepest sleep I’d had since I’d left the Nak Hotel in Sandakan.

  *

  ‘I can hardly believe you have come by kumpit from Sabah. It is very risky, very unwise. I would say never do that again. Many bad things can happen.’

  ‘I won’t,’ I promised.

  ‘You came from Balisan Island?’

  ‘I’m sorry. You won’t mind if I don’t tell you the names of the places we passed through, or the name of the kumpit or her captain. I don’t want to make mysteries, but you know….’

  ‘Of course, I understand. You are right. People could make much trouble if they knew. No sweat.’

  It was the morning after my arrival and I was in the local office of the William Lines not far from the hotel. Anticipating immigration trouble, I had decided to enlist the aid of Victor Chiongbian, the president of William Lines, whose number in Cebu City Kerry St Johnston had given me in Singapore. Thanks to Kerry’s letter, Chiongbian would be aware of my impending arrival in Zamboanga, and I might need his help if the immigration authorities decided to play it rough.

  Across a desk on the first floor I had introduced myself to the William Lines representative in Zamboanga City, Frank Manching. He was a young man, friendly and willing to help. He had called in one of his experts on local shipping, and I told them my story. The shipping expert, older than Manching and a local man, looked as if he knew every island and pirate from Mindanao to Labuan. ‘You are quite right,’ he said again. ‘Names only make much trouble. Let’s not talk of names.’

  Manching said, ‘Mr Victor Chiongbian wrote me to expect you by plane from Sandakan. It is surprising you come by sea.’

  ‘Do you think I should report to immigration now?’

  ‘Definitely. I will come too. It will take five minutes.’

  But it took considerably longer. In a dark, narrow, ground-floor office with wood-panelled walls and a concrete floor, an elderly immigration officer flicked through my passport, lifted a stamp and said, ‘You come by the plane from Sandakan?’ When I told him by ship, he put down the stamp and frowned, then consulted a broad, white-haired man in gold-rimmed spectacles at a bigger desk, who said sternly, ‘Mr Young, you are here illegally. Why?’

  I explained my purpose in being there, but failed to move him. ‘I admire your enterprise,’ he said, ‘but you are here in violation of this country’s laws. You cannot land here.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I was not aware that to enter the Philippines through Zamboanga was illegal. It is a port. If you come to Great Britain you are not obliged to enter through the port of London. There are other ports – Liverpool, Cardiff, Southampton….’

  ‘You came in a kumpit. Did you stop at any islands?’

  ‘Only one.’

  ‘Was it Tawitawi?’

  ‘No. It was very small. I don’t know the name.’

  ‘What was the name of the kumpit? The captain?’

  ‘The kumpit had a difficult Filipino name. The captain I simply called “Captain”.’

  ‘And where is this kumpit now?’

  ‘On its way to Cebu City, I guess.’

  ‘Hm!’ He looked at me heavily. ‘Mr Young, you are in violation. No foreigner may enter this country by sea through Zamboanga.’

  ‘Where, then?’

  ‘I should turn you back. I should say, “Go back the way you came.” I cannot let you in.’

  ‘But I must get to Cebu City. I can’t go back to Sandakan now.’

  ‘If you try to go to Cebu, I must arrest you and put you in jail.’

  After crossing the Sulu Sea, I wasn’t worried about a Zamboanga jail, but I did want to get on. He examined the visa I had thought it wise to get in Singapore. ‘You are going to Cebu and Manila
, yes? Mr Manching’s company knows you? Well, I’ll do this: I am sending now a cable to my head office in Manila, the office of Commissioner Reyes, who is in overall charge of immigration and deportation’ – I noted the last word – ‘announcing your illegal entry. He will say yes or no. If yes, I will stamp your passport and you will be free. If no, I will put you in jail. It’s a fifty-fifty chance.’

  ‘When will he get your cable?’

  ‘This afternoon. Maybe tomorrow morning if he is busy.’

  I turned to Manching. ‘Could I phone the British consul in Manila?’

  *

  Back in the William Lines office, I called the British consulate in Manila, praying that I wouldn’t have to explain things to one of those British officials who regard such problems as mine a waste of time and energy, a barely tolerable interruption to the task of solving The Times crossword puzzle.

  I was in luck. Mr Ferguson, whose voice soon came thinly down the line, took my story in his stride, sounded relieved when I assured him that I had not been wandering about Tawitawi and Sulu to cover for a newspaper the Moro rebellion against the Marcos government to which he was accredited, and promised to get in touch with Commissioner Reyes and ask him not to deport me. He added, ‘The commissioner is sometimes extremely difficult to find. A busy man, you see.’ All those deportations, I presumed.

  Reading the copy of the cable that had gone to Commissioner Reyes, I didn’t care for its wording:

  Young reported today his arrival this port from Sandakan via Tawi-Tawi aboard Philippine motor-boat thence boarded another Philippine motor-boat for Zamboanga stop subject claiming to be a writer … entry through back-door contrary to existing regulations … request immediate instructions … Francisco F. Banez, Alien Control Officer, Zamboanga City