Slow Boats to China Read online

  Slow Boats to China

  GAVIN YOUNG

  This book is for my Mother and Father

  Who hath desired the Sea? Her menaces swift as her mercies? …

  Who hath desired the Sea? Her excellent loneliness rather than

  The forecourts of kings.

  Rudyard Kipling, ‘The Sea and the Hills’

  Ah! These commercial interests – spoiling the finest life under the sun. Why must the sea be used for trade – and for war as well? … It would have been so much nicer just to sail about, with here and there a port and a bit of land to stretch one’s legs on, buy a few books and get a change of cooking for a while.

  Joseph Conrad, ‘A Smile of Fortune’

  Bir katredir ancak aldigum hep,

  Derya yine durmada lebalep.

  The things I’ve chosen are a drop, no more;

  The undiminished sea still crowds the shore.

  Ziya Pasha

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraphs

  Maps

  Acknowledgements

  Prelude

  Part One: Piraeus to Jedda

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Part Two: Dubai to Singapore

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty one

  Twenty two

  Twenty three

  Twenty four

  Part Three: Singapore to Canton

  Twenty five

  Twenty six

  Twenty seven

  Twenty eight

  Twenty nine

  Thirty

  Thirty one

  Thirty two

  Thirty three

  Thirty four

  Thirty five

  Thirty six

  Thirty seven

  Thirty eight

  Thirty nine

  Forty

  Copyright

  Acknowledgements

  I owe many people a great debt of gratitude for helping me complete this adventure. I think my warm regard for most of them is to be found in the text, but an extra word is due to John and Glen Swire; to Captain Rashad of Alexandria, who saw me through the formidable obstacle of the Suez Canal; and to Tom Abraham, who smoothed my way to the mysterious Andaman Islands.

  Donald Trelford, the editor of the Observer, and his associates Roger Harrison and Peter Crookston encouraged me and included some of what follows in the pages of the Observer’s colour supplement.

  I have changed a personal name or two in the text and shifted the location of a couple of incidents to protect the people involved from possible political repercussions.

  Finally, measureless thanks are due to Gritta Weil, my sea anchor in London, and to Roddy Bloomfield of Hutchinson.

  Prelude

  It was a simple idea: take a series of ships of many sizes and kinds; go where they lead for a few months; see what happens. It was an adaptation of the old idea of Running Away to Sea, a boyhood yearning bred of

  tales, marvellous tales

  Of ships and stars and isles where good men rest.

  No doubt my dream of the sea was born during the long summers I spent as a child in what I still think of as the oldest-feeling, most soul-subduing and cosily creepy part of England, the part almost hidden between Britain’s battered kneecap and shin. I mean, to be more exact, between Devon’s Hartland Point and Cornwall’s Fire Point Beacon above Boscastle, around the tiny harbour and old stone breakwater of Bude Haven. This is the Wreckers’ Coast: a place of buzzards and seals and effigies of knights in dim, half-lost churches, where seas pound into cliffbound bays that have swallowed seamen from a hundred wrecked schooners and, in wartime, perhaps harboured German U-boats.

  Once, poor Cornish children in these parts prayed, ‘God save Father and Mother and zend a ship to shore vore mornin.’ And on cold, rainy days there always seemed to me to be an aura here of doomed ships and silent watchers on terrible cliffs – an aura that survives today’s asphalted roads and trailer parks. Yet in the summer sun it all looks quite different. Everything smiles on picnickers, surfers, flower gatherers and adventurous walkers with bird books, haversacks, sandwiches and hip flasks.

  Under the sun, these cliffs give almost theatrically splendid views. South of Bude between Compass Point and Widemouth Bay’s Black Rock (actually, the locals say, a Cornish giant eternally plaiting ropes of sand), my grandmother years ago would jerkily brake the Austin two-seater and exclaim, ‘What a lot of sea!’ My grandmother’s house stood back from the sea but on a rising slope of land, so that from my bedroom window I could see the gleam of the Atlantic Ocean over the rooftops of other houses. The attic of the gaunt and ugly Edwardian house smelled of damp floorboards, old suitcases and mouse droppings, but it was dark and large – ideal for hide-and-seek – and full of books, some of which had been my father’s when he was a boy.

  I spent hours up there delving into Robert Louis Stevenson, Jack London, Captain Marryat, R. M. Ballantyne and a Cornish writer of the 1920s called Crosbie Garstin who wrote exciting books about wreckers and smugglers on this very coast. Obsessed with the doings of Long John Silver or the Swiss Family Robinson, I was almost convinced that one clear day I would see on the horizon the Indies … tall ships … Hispaniola … Cathay. ‘Fifteen men on a dead man’s chest,’ I would growl menacingly at my older sister, who would shrug and make herself scarce.

  Even today, when I revisit Bude, this conviction sidles up to me like Blind Pew to Billy Bones. The cliffs there are as high as seven hundred and twenty feet, the waves relentlessly pound against them, larks and hawks move restlessly above, and the biggest gulls I’ve ever seen strut with eyes as cold as the sea below. The coastline here is a chain of tall headlands with names like Cow and Calf, Sharpnose Point, Wrangle Point, Longbeak, Dizzard. Their angry shapes and the prevailing westerly winds have done for dozens of ships, provoking the sailors’ saying:

  From Trevose Head to Hartland Light

  Is a watery grave by day or night.

  At the Falcon Inn in the old part of Bude, Desmond Gregory, the pub owner and a pillar of the hard-working Bude lifeboat team, lets off his signal rockets outside the pub if a boat is in trouble in the bay. Old photographs of spectacular wrecks adorn the walls of his bar; I have one of my own at home of the Austro-Hungarian barque Capricorno, her sails in tatters, her skipper drunk (so history books relate), being pounded to pieces by enormous seas below Compass Point in December 1900. Only two men were saved. In the picture, a solitary seaman stands on the doomed deck like Steerforth in David Copperfield.

  Sailing ships regularly used Bude as a port of call up to 1936; I remember a locally famous ketch called Ceres and old bewhiskered sea captains strolling around the harbour.

  All this contributed to my dream of adventure and sea travel that this book represents. It also gave me a sense of the past, for Bude is ennobled by its cliffs, its thundering surf and its eerie hinterland. Even now, visiting the place after an interval of time, I am startled by the sheer age of the region. You can ramble for hours across headlands that run back forming broad, high land on which scattered farms seem settled hull down in wriggling lanes to escape winter gales that have forced the trees to grow almost parallel to the earth. In long, deep valleys you come across small, ancient churches oddly far from any village, and smelling of flowers and grass. Huge trees loom over th
eir tombstones, under stone canopies armoured effigies turn up stone toes, and fine old wooden pews are fighting erosion by age or the death watch beetle. On the gravestones the same names appear over and over, century after century: Mutton, Sleeman, Oke and Prust. Frequent Christian names here are Eli, Caleb, Joshua, Reuben. As a boy, I was particularly fond of a clifftop church at a village called Morwenstow because it had a ship’s figurehead in its graveyard, and because a once-famous and eccentric vicar is buried there. Parson Hawker (‘Passon’ was how the locals pronounced it) ate opium and wrote outrageous poetry when he wasn’t burying drowned sailors between 1834 and 1878. He was a practical joker, and one moonlit night he clambered on to a rock to impersonate a mermaid. In a book of the time, a Bude man was recorded as saying of this scene, ‘Dressin’ up in seaweed and not much else, and combin’ his hair and zingin’, till all the town went down to see ’un, they thought ’twas a merry maid [mermaid] sure enough.’ Then the ‘Passon’ scared the daylights out of his audience by standing up on his rock and singing ‘God Save the King’.

  If a cloud covers the sun in this old region of England, you may feel suddenly uneasy. As a boy, I was sometimes glad to get back to the life of Bude’s wide sandy beaches, where young men surfed, children’s nannies helped to build sand castles, and hysterical dogs tried to dig their way to Australia. Kids with kites would shriek when their mother capsized in a shrimp pool (‘Oh, Ma, you’re showing all you’ve got!’) while I sat by myself nursing my dream of far places among the long black lines of rock, knobbly with mussels and limpets, like arthritic fingers, running out into the booming surf.

  Years passed before the dream achieved the least substance. This happened not long before my eighteenth birthday, when a school friend and I walked through the dead of a misty night to board a ship at a wharf in Fowey, a small Cornish river port. My friend’s father had arranged with the shipowners for us to be signed on to a 500-ton coaster, the Northgate, out of Hull. A modest adventure, a short voyage up the English Channel to the Scheldt and Antwerp, but at that age it was as exciting as a round trip to Hispaniola and the Spanish Main.

  We went down to Fowey in January, the month some sailors refer to as ‘between dog and wolf’, and it was one of the wildest Januaries for years. The berthed ship seemed as dead as an icicle. I can still hear the ring of our hesitant heels on the freezing metal deck, our whispers in the dark, and at last the wavering cry of ‘Who’s there?’ from the skylight, before the white, balding head of the ship’s cook, a kind, brusque old man, emerged from the companionway.

  I remember thinking that the Northgate seemed disconcertingly indifferent to our arrival. How could that be when we had dreamed about her for weeks? I didn’t know then that a ship only wakes up and pays attention to those on board when she’s at sea.

  In the morning sunshine things seemed different, of course, not alarming at all. The captain was a friendly Yorkshireman, and the crew took our presence on board as a bit of a joke. We had signed on as ‘deckie-learners’, and I suppose we polished the brass and swabbed away the china clay that had clogged the decks during loading energetically enough to satisfy them.

  A short trip, but it was the year of record gales in the Channel and we rode one of them out at anchor in a fleet of other ships off Dungeness on the Kentish coast. The Northgate was unduly long for her width and plunged about abominably – so abominably, in fact, that the captain and all his officers were seasick. A radio battery in the messroom broke loose, and its acid burned awkward holes in my corduroy trousers. I remember my relief at not being sick, and the captain’s white face, and offering him a Capstan cigarette and my pride when he said, ‘Thanks moochly, Gav.’

  At Antwerp, although the city was still in ruins from the air raids in the war which had not long ended, we were allowed ashore escorted by Andie, a diminutive deckhand of about my age. In a deserted square near the bombed cathedral, Andie trotted confidently over to two tarts on a corner. He chose the taller of the two – at least a foot taller than himself. On the cathedral steps he had to stand one step above her, and for a moment he even lost his footing. Later he boasted, ‘You’ve never seen that before,’ and we had to admit we hadn’t. He also boasted that he’d had syphilis and the quack had poured mercury up his penis. God knows if it was true; we’d have believed anything then.

  That short trip marked me as much, perhaps, as the mercury marked Andie. For years I dreamed of taking a much longer sea journey, but travel and war reporting intervened. Only recently did the possibility occur, and by then it was almost too late.

  Almost too late, that is, to find any ships. Working one’s passage is difficult – impossible, perhaps – in these strict days of unions and unemployment. Passenger travel, as I was to discover, is moribund. Nevertheless, I set about finding out what would happen to someone who tried to port-hop to some far destination on the other side of the world. (The end of the line, I thought, could be a port in China – Canton, say; Canton would do.) Surely, it must be possible. How could sea travel be dead?

  I could have taken a long cruise, but I ruled that out; I didn’t want to travel long distances on a single ship. I wondered how travel agents would react to the sort of hop-skip-jump I had in mind, and when I tried a couple of them I found discouragement.

  ‘It’s impossible. Even for a single gent, it’s utterly impossible.’ The middle-aged travel agent ran a finger delicately across his left eyebrow and organized a mouth that might, twenty years before, have been described as ‘rosebud’, into an apologetic smile. ‘So my answer, I’m ever so sorry to tell you, is rather simple: “No can do.”’ He lightly dabbed his lips with a handkerchief he took from his sleeve. He wore a puce knitted tie that looked like a hairnet.

  He had been affability itself when I first came in, but when I told him what I wanted I saw at once that I was going to spoil his day.

  ‘By sea? Oh, dearie me, that’s a poser, that is. Well, let me just think. A single gent, from Europe to Macao, all on your own? I’m not even sure how I’d set about it. You’re a dying breed, you lone travellers – you know that, I suppose. It’s all groups now, you know. Frankly, on your own, you’re more of a nuisance than anything.’

  He looked me over without enthusiasm. ‘A group, I’d know how to handle you. I mean, I can arrange a nice long tour for a group of old biddies, with exciting stopovers – well, quite exciting. But you? I might be flipping through those enormous shipping lists until the cows come home and still not have accommodated you in the way you fancy. Frankly, my time’s limited and I must ask myself, is it worth spending it on this single gentleman? Nothing against you personally, of course.’

  I rose to go.

  ‘It’s modern life,’ he said. ‘You’ve asked me for the utterly impossible, and my simple answer is: “No can do.”’

  His dismissive ‘Cheeri-bye’ followed me out.

  At Thomas Cook’s in Berkeley Street a sensible, much nicer man, Mr Bert Chattell, a former Cook’s tour courier, was equally pessimistic.

  ‘The trouble is, the traditional British sea routes to the Far East and across the Atlantic have disappeared because of rising prices and cheaper air travel. Prices – that’s it in a nutshell. Now there’s only P&O to Australia and New Zealand, and round the world now and again on a limited scale.

  ‘I can’t for the life of me think of any boat going south of the Med. Nothing springs to mind there. In the old days, of course, well…. There’s Polish Ocean Lines, they go from Gdynia to Antwerp, and from there to Port Said, Singapore and Hong Kong, Japan and back again. But not, I think you’ll find, on a schedule. You can never tell what delays there’ll be.

  ‘If someone came up to me and said, “Book me round the world now,” I couldn’t do it. Not on a series of ships, I mean.’

  Not encouraging. But there must, I thought, be some way, however erratic, to travel by sea to Asia. I refused to believe it was impossible.

  I telephoned the P&O Lines people in the City of London, but the
news there was also depressing. P&O have cruise ships, they said, but nothing that would interest me.

  A call to Swire & Sons, one of the biggest British trading and shipping companies in the Far East, brought an invitation from John Swire, head of the giant British group that includes, among much else, the China Navigation Company in Hong Kong. ‘Come and lunch,’ he said.

  Swire’s is big and grand. Grand enough and old enough to have accumulated traditions and a book or two of imperial history. Tycoon is a Japanese word (taikun). The Swires are tycoons. At Regis House (big but not grand) in the City near London Bridge, an elderly servant opened a door and said, ‘For Mr John Swire? This way, if you please, sir.’ Beautiful, meticulously constructed models of Swire ships past and present stood along the walls in glass cases. A collection of old ship’s bells lay in a row like the skulls of warriors in an African burial cave. I was looking at a bell inscribed with the name Hupeh and the date 1937 when John Swire, a towering, soldierly figure, came up. ‘That’s the old Hupeh, not the one we’ve got now,’ he said. Several months later I sailed from Manila on the new Hupeh and thought back to this old bell.

  ‘We have practically no cargo–passenger ships in the East,’ John Swire said at lunch. Swire’s cargo ships were still active between Hong Kong, Taiwan, China, Japan, the Pacific islands, Australia, New Guinea, the Philippines and Singapore, but air travel was taking over eastern passenger routes; the Swires themselves owned the airline Cathay Pacific. If only, he said, I had tried to do this ten years ago….

  Nevertheless, he was helpful, willing to provide a safety net if he could. He would write to his offices throughout the East, asking his managers to look out for me and help where possible; I might need any help I could get if I was to avoid being stranded for weeks in some godforsaken place. Swire’s also had an operation in the Gulf, he added – tugs working with offshore oil rigs, that sort of thing. Might be interesting.