They that go down to the sea in ships,
And occupy their business in great waters;
These men see the works of the Lord,
And his wonders of the deep.

Psalm 107, verse 23

A day on a lugger

BANJO PATERSON

In this story Paterson refers to himself as ‘the stranger’ as he enters the world of the pearling industry. He was fond of latin terms, which he used commonly as a solicitor—et praeterea nihil means ‘and apart from that, nothing’.The story was written for the Sydney Mail newspaper in 1902.

The schooner Tarawa is lying at anchor in Endeavour Straits, just opposite the place where Captain Cook landed. Around her, like chickens round a hen, are anchored her fleet of a dozen pearling luggers. The sea is as smooth as glass, and there is a constant clatter of rowlocks and splash of paddles as the native boys row the little dinghies from lugger to lugger, laughing and chattering with their countrymen; ‘go walkabout’ they call it.

The sun strikes down dazzlingly on the white sand of Possession Island, and the hills of the Australian mainland are wrapped in a blue haze; on the beach a crowd of black men are disporting themselves, swimming and racing and shouting with laughter. On the luggers the Japanese divers, serious little men, are overhauling their gear, and round the schooner there is a cluster of small boats, because it is refitting season, and every lugger wants something, either a new diver’s dress, or a new sail, or a new anchor, or a new meat cask, or some other item. The clerk of the stores on the schooner consults with the captain as each demand is made, but no reasonable thing is ever refused, because a diver will not work with bad gear: so that to be sparing of stores is false economy.

By degrees some of the luggers are fully fitted out ready for work, and they are ordered to go out and fish until the rest of the fleet are ready, when they will all move off together to the pearling grounds out by Radhu Island or down the coast. A slight breeze springs up, and at once there is a clinking of pawls, a rattle of chain, and the creaking of blocks as the anchors are got up and the sails set in the luggers that are ready for sea, and away the little white-sailed vessels go, each with its crew of happy black faces forward and its serious little Japanese diver at the helm.

The diver is always the captain of the lugger, and there are matters of etiquette in connection with pearl diving which the outsider finds it hard to grasp. The diver, for instance, never rows a dinghy. If he wishes to visit the schooner or another lugger, one of the crew has to pull the dinghy for him; also the diver and ‘tender’ sleep aft in a tiny little cabin the size of a dog kennel, while the crew live forward under the half deck. Among the luggers ready for sea is the Pearl, commanded by Billy Makeela, a South Sea islander who has been diving for 25 years, and on this lugger the stranger is sent out to see how the pearl oyster is obtained.

On coming aboard he finds the lugger to be a 10-ton vessel of beautiful yacht-like lines, and, indeed, some of these luggers are designed by the best designers in Australia. The sails are white and the gear in good order. Billy Makeela makes us welcome in a stately way. He is very black, and his only clothing is a dirty loincloth, but that is his service equipment. When he goes ashore in parade order he is majestic, and Solomon in all his glory is not arrayed like Billy Makeela. As this is only a short trip to kill time till the other luggers are ready, Billy has taken with him his wife, Balu, a native of the Torres Straits. Balu is about 30 years younger than Billy, and is clothed in a white print dress which she got at the mission station. She can read or write English, but the unaccustomed surroundings make her shy, and as the lugger moves off and Billy squats down by the helm she crouches submissively behind him, holding on to his shoulders, with her nose buried in the small of his back, and all that one can see of her is the back of a round, woolly head.

The lugger bends over to the breeze till her lee rail is under water and the spray comes flying aboard. The crew forward consists of four Torres Straits Islanders; they are born natural boatmen and are as much at home in the water as the dugong which they occasionally hunt. As soon as the lugger is fairly under way they go below and begin to play cards. Two of them are brothers of Balu, so that it is quite a family party. They are dressed in cheap pyjama trousers, et praeterea nihil.

Aft with Billy and his wife sits Joe, the Portuguese tender, who has to attend to Billy’s lifeline. Joe has been a steward on various vessels, and has been in more parts of the world than the Wandering Jew. He confides to us that ‘dis Billy ’e altogether good diver. ’E get shell on de reef. Dese Japanese dey walk over it; dey do not see it.’ As a matter of fact, the Malays and islanders have more natural hunter craft than the Japanese, and they can find shell in the reefs and under rocky ledges; but the Japanese will outwork them on open bottoms.

We thresh our way to the ‘old ground’, a large area of open sea about eight fathoms deep, and here Billy studies his landmarks by the neighbouring islands and studies the look of the water. At last he orders, ‘“Stan” by foresail. Down foresail. Down mainsail. Down jib. Let go,’ and the anchor goes over with a couple of turns of chain round the fluke, so that it will allow the lugger to drift.

Billy dresses rapidly with the assistance of Joe, the tender. The dress is canvas and india rubber, with great heavy lead-soled boots, a corslet of great weight, gun metal helmet and two lead weights to hang over the shoulders. A man can only just move with this gear on him. Billy stands on the ladder, half in the water, two of the black boys set to work at the pump, and the plumb line is thrown over. This is sent down so that the diver may keep hold of it and see what sort of bottom he is coming to. If he chanced to find that he was descending just over a big valley in the bottom of the sea, or among jagged rocks likely to foul his line, he could hold on to the plumb line and reconnoitre the bottom before finally descending.

Joe screws the face-plate into the helmet and Billy suddenly throws himself backward with a loud splash into the water, and sinks slowly, a grim, uncanny object descending through the blue water. Joe, the Portuguese tender, holds the lifeline, one of the boys holds the air pipe to prevent it drifting and fouling, and a smother of white bubbles coming up in the lee of the lugger shows where Billy is walking along beneath us. Balu, his wife, is not concerned at her husband’s peril; she takes little interest in the dress or the descent, but stares fascinated at her two brothers, who are methodically turning the air pump. The revolution of the handles and the rise and fall of the cylinders seem to her much more wonderful than the diving does.

Meanwhile from below Billy is talking through the rope to Joe, the Portuguese tender. Two sharp vicious pulls come, and Joe calls over his shoulder to the two boys at the pump, ‘More air,’ and the boys make the handles fairly spin for a few moments, to Balu’s great admiration. Then four distinct tugs, and Joe calls to the forward hand, ‘Haul up; li’l piece more chain. Dat’ll do.’ For Billy has seen a shell out of his reach, and wants the lugger to drift over to it. Then a shake on the line and Joe calls sharply, ‘Slack up chain’; for evidently Billy has got on to a patch and wants the boat’s pace retarded. Thus the lugger drifts for nearly an hour, the signalling going on all the time, when suddenly there comes one sharp pull, and Joe calls, ‘Haul up’; it is curious what a different tone is impressed into the ‘haul up’, because if the other orders are muddled it only means the loss of a shell or two, but ‘haul up’ may mean that the diver is in trouble, and ‘haul up’ must be obeyed at once.

Down below, Billy, having been down long enough, has decided to come up, so he closes the escape valve of the helmet, and the confined air fills his dress, and as Joe and the boy with the air pipe haul away, Billy suddenly floats to the top about 20 yards from the lugger, a ghastly, sprawling, bloated sea monster; his huge uncanny helmet is face down, half-buried in the water; the air has filled his dress till it looks as though his body were swollen out of all proportion of humanity; his legs and arms sprawl feebly like the limbs of some wounded animal. This gruesome object is hauled alongside, and the stranger is quite sure that some accident has happened and the diver is dying. Once alongside he clutches the ladder and hands up his little open basket full of shells. Then the face-plate is unscrewed, he is helped on the deck, and the lugger sails away with Joe at the helm, to another ground, while Billy sits on deck in his diver’s dress and smokes and tells stories of the old days ‘before dem Japanese come’.

Arrived at the new ground Billy dives for another hour or so, and while he is down the shells are inspected by the strangers. They are the size of a fruit plate, covered with weed and coral growths. The smaller oysters are always attached by a strong green ligament to some object, a piece of rock or pieces of coral, but this ligament dies as the oyster gets older. The shells are opened in the lugger on this occasion only; by rule they should be brought to the schooner unopened. Inside each shell is a creature more like a squid than an ordinary oyster, and with it there live on terms of great amity a small reddish-coloured lobster about an inch long, and a small crab about a quarter of an inch in diameter. These three seem to agree well with each other.

The pearls, if any, are visible among the fringe of the oyster’s beard, but occasionally they are hidden among the oyster’s anatomy. On the long cruises, when the schooner and her fleet are out for months at a time, it is the rule for the schooner to send her collecting boat, a half-decked 20-footer, round the luggers every second day at least, if it be at all possible. But sometimes the weather is bad, and the luggers have got a long way from the schooner and the shell may be a week or more on the luggers before it is collected. Then the heat of the sun makes the oysters open and the deft little Japanese fingers soon pick out any pearls that may be visible. Sometimes an oyster is induced to open by being held near the galley fire on the lugger, and once open is kept open by the insertion of a piece of cork, while the pearl, if any, is hooked out by a piece of wire. Then the cork is removed and the oyster closes again as good as ever. Sometimes the bumping in the collecting boat shakes the pearl out of an oyster that is just a little open, and when these boats are washed out a careful search for pearls is always made among the bottom boards. Fancy getting a pearl worth a thousand pounds drifting about among the slime and rubbish at the bottom of a dinghy!

One great difficulty is keeping the boats in water. In the tropics a lot of water is wanted, and it is always carried in canvas bags. By great persuasion, Billy Makeela is induced to allow the stranger to go down in eight fathoms. Billy is not encouraging. He says, ‘I frighten let you down. S’posin’ anything go wrong; you die queek.’

At eight fathoms the pressure is severe for a beginner; the blood is crushed out of the body into the head, but the severe feeling of oppression vanishes after a time. The floor of the ocean lies level and flat, studded with knobs of coral and patches of greyish weed. Here and there are clusters of marine growths, and a few shells lie about on the bottom. The diver can see some 10 or 15 yards, apparently, and beyond that all is an opaque mist; small fish come and look in at the eye holes of the helmet; the novice feels oppressed by the weight of the water, and blunders along, feeling as though he were held back by some invisible power as he tries to walk. The mud rises as he moves, and beyond him stretches always the level sand and all round him the oppressive opaque mist. He feels like a very small and insignificant fish in a very large aquarium.

After 10 minutes’ search, he finds one shell and is hauled up by the anxious Billy. Then the lugger is headed for the schooner; the dress is turned inside out and hung up to dry. Joe and the black boys lie down and smoke, while Balu makes a fire in the little iron fireplace bedded in some earth in a box in the well of the lugger and makes tea, while Billy sails the lugger back. One boys goes up in the rigging to look out for reefs, and thus we get back to the Straits just as the soft tropical darkness shuts out the islands, and the mainland, and leaves only the schooner’s lights to show the way.