Red Lead was the only one on the boats that fared well in the night as the two boats floated about 100 yards from the shore. The task was made even more formidable by shards of spiked coral below. Despite the rocking, and two of the men, Tait and Farrow, being seasick, she stayed stretched on the floor, only to meow whenever Bolt spoke to her. She shocked him by leaping over the side for a swim in the clear, oil-free water at first light.
‘Sharks smell animals in the water,’ Wallis warned.
‘Hope they have her for breakfast,’ Nadler said, loud enough for everyone on both boats to hear.
‘You’d be a more interesting meal,’ Bolt said.
Burroughs lowered his voice and said to Bolt, ‘But bitter, I’d say.’
Bolt smiled. He kept his eye on Red Lead, who ducked under the surface a couple of times, much to the appreciation of the onlookers. After about ten minutes, Bolt beckoned her to the boat. Like a defiant child, she turned away and swam further out. A few minutes later, in her own time, she swam to the stern and the small platform. Red Lead struggled onto it, shook herself and then leapt onto the stern to applause.
‘I need a wash,’ Bolt said as the cat settled back in the boat. He stripped and dived in, swimming closer to the shore. He was careful to tread water and not step on the coral. He took a moment to urinate.
After a few minutes, there was consternation back on the boats. A shark fin was spotted closer to the boats than Bolt was. He swam into the shallows and rocks. His heart beat fast from the effort and fear. He climbed onto the rocks and watched the shark weaving near where he had been. Bolt regretted urinating. He guessed that the odour had attracted it.
He waited half an hour. When the shark had swum away, he returned to the water, sprinted to the boat and climbed in.
‘You’re fit, man,’ Burroughs said, helping Bolt aboard. His heart and lungs were pumping hard after the effort.
‘Amazing what speed you … can get to … with the thought of a shark possibly … right on your tail!’
‘I guess you’ve explained why there aren’t any holiday resorts around here,’ Farrow said, bringing some much-needed smiles to the gloomy sailors.
Burroughs doled out mixed rations of potato, pumpkin and the rock biscuits. There was no more bully beef. Water was passed around on the swimmers’ boat, but eschewed by Wallis, Tait, Nadler and Grout on the other. They opted for rum, again.
Bolt warned them against dehydration. He was ignored.
Burroughs spent some time cajoling Red Lead into his backpack, using pieces of pumpkin to entice her until she jumped in on request, but she wouldn’t do it every time. She always wished to display her independence.
They were on their way again by 6.30 a.m., hoping to cover more than 20 miles to Labuhan, marked by a black and white lighthouse, just short of Peper Bay, about halfway down Java’s west coast. Before noon, the sun was scorching. Both boats had the covers up for protection and the sails down. They were in the doldrums, that low pressure area near the equator between the trade winds. This, along with the rum, the heat and the humidity caused tempers on Nadler’s boat to fray.
Nadler refused to take his turn at the oars, claiming that he was not well enough. This incensed Wallis, the ex-Aussie Rules player known for his thuggish acts on football fields. It led to some push and shove that rocked the boat and forced the beanpole Tait and solid Grout to pull them apart.
By mid-afternoon, there had been more altercations between Nadler and Wallis, enough for Bolt to pull his boat close to theirs and suggest they pull into shore.
‘Yeah, let’s do it,’ Grout said, sick of the verbal stoush between the others. ‘Sparky reckons we’ve come 20 miles today, same as yesterday.’ He paused and added, drily: ‘Guess good old Aussie is out of the question.’
His words were met with solemn silence. It reminded them all of their families in Australia who probably had no idea of the fate of Perth and its sailors.
‘There’s a village or somethin’ marked as “Charita”,’ Tait added. ‘It also has a red and white lighthouse.’
They reached a jetty that led up to the steel-towered lighthouse, protruding high on a rocky escarpment, but decided to wait until the morning to explore the area. They bedded down but after a few hours of sleep were woken by a tribe of screaming orangutans, who did not appreciate this batch of humans sleeping on their beach. The sailors threw rocks at them and the primates swung off through the jungle trees, keeping up a racket.
Bolt suggested they attempt to sleep more, but the others were intent on finishing the rum barrel, and taking swigs of scotch. The orangutans’ raucous activity had strained their nerves. The alcohol led to slumber, which was only broken rudely the next morning by angry shouting, this time from four Indonesians in semi-uniforms of overalls and caps. They pointed rifles at the eight sailors, who rose carefully from their sandy beds.
Bolt was quick to explain they were shipwrecked Australians, not Dutch. The Indonesians relaxed with this knowledge. One, the chief lighthouse keeper, Amat, who spoke reasonable English, shook hands with Bolt and smiled. He suggested that they follow him to the village at the foot of the rocks that led up to the lighthouse where they would be fed.
Burroughs quizzed Bolt again about the Javanese hatred for the Dutch.
‘They have ruled here for about two hundred years,’ Bolt explained, ‘and they have been quite brutal at times.’
‘Like all colonisers.’
‘Correct.’
‘How many Japs in the area?’ Bolt asked Amat.
‘Several hundred.’
The Indonesian asked his wife and three effervescent, dark-haired daughters, aged thirteen, sixteen and seventeen, to prepare food, and a half-hour later, the eight sailors were looking at a feast of eggs, pork, salad, rice, fish and chicken and other food. The woman was chirpy and obliging. Red Lead became the centre of attention for the girls. Their father explained that the only cats they’d ever seen were ‘big and wild’, not domesticated. Red Lead amused everyone by sparring at the family dog, a timid, slow-moving animal that backed away under the table from this new little monster in his midst. She loved the attention, rubbing against the girls’ legs, jumping in and out of their laps, and meowing her appreciation. She was offered food by almost everyone, but, showing she could not be bribed, ignored most of it, except pieces of fish. She even waltzed over to Bolt, sat on her hind legs and dug her claws gently into his thighs as he ate. It got his attention.
‘Fish!’ the girls said, laughing. ‘She loves the fish!’
Bolt held a sizeable piece in his hand and, still on her hind legs, she gobbled it up. Red Lead got more laughs when she meowed at him, either as thanks or a plea for more.
‘The girls never see foreigners out here,’ Amat said. ‘We school them ourselves in three languages—Dutch, English and French. Later we want to send them to university.’
The sailors watched with mixed feelings. It reminded most of family life, especially the happy, carefree children. Such personal thoughts were so distant at that moment, they felt almost nostalgic, even if it was only less than a month since they had been with family and friends.
‘I wonder if anyone at home knows what happened to Perth and us?’ Farrow asked.
The others shrugged.
‘Us?’ Wallis said cynically. ‘We don’t even know what happened to hundreds of the crew. We haven’t seen anyone else. For all we know they are all dead.’
This observation sobered the table until Grout commented, ‘This is heaven. No more green bloody coconuts and the shits.’
‘Sure is beautiful,’ Nadler said quietly, as he eyed off the pretty teenage girls.
Bolt leaned across the table and caught Nadler’s eye.
‘You keep your hands off them,’ he said in a quiet, firm tone out of earshot of the family. ‘We don’t want any more of us having our heads removed.’ He indicated the lighthouse keeper’s rifle resting on a bench outside the family hut and added, ‘Or shot.’
The sailors at the table went silent, waiting for Nadler’s reaction. He glared back but said nothing.
‘I agree with that,’ Wallis mumbled, happy to keep up his anger towards the unpopular Nadler. ‘You got Haget killed, remember that, over a fuckin’ native woman.’
Nadler was about to get to his feet.
‘Eat!’ Bolt commanded even though they were well into the meal. ‘Mr Burroughs will say a late grace.’
Burroughs obliged and defused the tension.