The offices of P. B. Umbichy Ltd, Shipping Agents, Contractors, Colombo, took some finding. They were hidden away near the docks in a two-storey row of ramshackle offices and shops off a narrow street in which, on the rainy Saturday I went there, processions of bullock carts, rickshaws and ancient, diminutive taxis crept through potholes and mud. A strong smell of dried fish pervaded the area.

Umbichy was the name I had been given by a shipping man in Cochin. Having just arrived in Colombo, my immediate concern was the means to leave it for my next major destination, Madras, so I tried Umbichy.

 

‘Upstairs.’ One of two skeletal men crouching in a narrow doorway pointed up a dim staircase. Squeezing up to the third floor, I found a small office and two clerks at a desk. We exchanged greetings.

‘Oh, yes, we know Mr Muthukaruppan of Lakshmi Lines, Cochin,’ one of them said when I handed him the card I had brought. ‘What can we do for you, sir?’

I explained my presence in Colombo and said, ‘According to Mr Muthukaruppan’ – it was not an easy name to pronounce – ‘the steamer Raj Lakshmi is due to sail from Bombay for Colombo soon. Her destination from Colombo, he told me, might be southern India, Madras.’

‘That certainly seems likely. Not Madras, though. Tuticorin might be her destination.’ Again that name. It was beginning to mesmerize me.

‘She’d take me?’

‘If the captain agrees.’

‘Of course, I’d really prefer to take a country boat to Tuticorin.’

He shook his head. ‘Country boats will not take passengers, certainly not in this weather. We are in the time of the north-east monsoon, and it is very rough. Country boats would not take you.’

‘It would be at my risk.’

‘Ha, ha. Yes.’ He was amused. ‘But personally, I doubt….’

‘To Trincomalee?’

‘The east coast is battered by the monsoon gales. Nothing will sail to Trinco until February.’

The gentleman promised to call me at my hotel when the Raj Lakshmi arrived, but as I splashed from puddle to puddle in the decaying street I was only marginally encouraged. By now I knew I couldn’t put my trust in freighters. The country boats could hardly be less reliable, and they offered a greater adventure. Perhaps I could find a sailing vessel to Madras, Calcutta or Rangoon.

My itinerary now became a process of elimination. There were four ways ahead, apparently. A steamer to Tuticorin? Unlikely; perhaps the Raj Lakshmi later. A sailing ship to eastern India or Burma? Or to southern India? Hmm. A steamer to Madras or Calcutta? Possible.

Using an introduction that Angus Wilson, the novelist and biographer of Rudyard Kipling, had given me in London, I met Mrs De Mel, a Colombo hostess and travel agent. Like others, her agency loved airlines and spurned ships, but she put me in touch with the father of the Sri Lankan navy. In vain: Admiral Rajan Kadirgamar politely dismissed the idea of sailing boats to the Bay of Bengal.

‘There used to be marvellous brigs – sailing brigs, three-masted, square-rigged, full-fledged sailing ships to Rangoon and Chittagong.’ Dismally I noted the words ‘used to be’. ‘All gone. These chaps used to take salt to the Andamans and bring back rice. All gone.’

The second weakly soaring bird of hope folded its wings and plunged lifeless to earth. Two to go.

*

Meanwhile I looked around Colombo. Someone – a shipping man in Dubai, I think – had told me the city was ‘a dump’. If he was right, I like dumps. Colombo retains the look of an early twentieth-century city. It has a splendid seafront, grand trees and open spaces, and a great many charming or dignified buildings. The heart of Colombo, around the port, is ennobled by handsome rows of awnings and perfectly proportioned pillars outside the Senate, by the red and white arches and decorative cornucopias of Cargill’s emporium, by the vice-regal grandeur of the Chartered Bank guarded by stone ceremonial elephants, and by the towering halls of the post office. In the side streets behind the Taprobane Hotel one might expect to see ladies driving with their grooms in horse-drawn gharries and English tea planters in topees on horseback trotting past the Pagoda Tea Rooms (‘Bare-bodied people not permitted inside’), the offices of Canon, Cumberbatch and Co. Ltd, Agents, and the square clock tower topped by its lighthouse dome and weather vane, sniffing the pungent air of the Toddy Shop and giving the men with mottled noses who staggered from it a wide berth. Now saris and sarongs have replaced the topees and divided skirts.

The Taprobane Hotel was a perfect lodging for anyone concerned with the port or the sea. From the moment the dark wood-panelled and mirrored lift rose to the Harbour Bar on the fourth and top floor, the Taprobane seemed to me one of the most interesting hotels between Suez and Singapore.

Taprobane was the Greek and Roman name for Ceylon; the Muslims called it Serendip. Once the hotel had been known as the Grand Oriental Hotel. Mrs De Mel showed me some old advertisements for the GOH, as people called it: ‘The first modern hotel known in the East…. Lift, Electric Light and Electric Fans in the Bed Rooms and Public Rooms…. The Hotel Porter meets all Steamers and takes delivery of Passengers’ Luggage. Hire of Carriages or Rickshaws from the Door Porter.’

My room was immense, a relic of those days, with high ceilings and a bathroom as big as most hotel bedrooms. It looked down on Colombo’s old harbour, horseshoe-shaped, an artificially made haven full of vessels of all kinds, with godowns (or warehouses) all around and a lighthouse where a plaque said, ‘This great work Projected by Governor Sir Hercules Robinson KCMG … was completed April 1885.’

From the Harbour Bar and Restaurant above my room, wide windows looked down on the same scene. The restaurant specialized in curry ‘tiffin’ (the Anglo-Indian for ‘luncheon’), and the bar was a delightfully old-fashioned place, something like the snug, unpretentious wardroom of an old sailing ship. From it, the harbour very much resembled a photograph Mrs De Mel showed me that had been taken ninety years before. Here and in the rest room of the Mission to Seamen Hostel (or Flying Angel Club) I had a few odd encounters.

There was the English ship’s engineer, for instance, who had been put ashore by his captain with instructions to the company’s agent to get him aboard a flight to London without delay. But delays there had been. At first the engineer had refused to go; then, when the unfortunate agent managed with great difficulty to drive him to the airport, the airline captain refused to take him, on the ground that such a dishevelled and liquor-soaked apparition would terrify his other passengers.

I found myself sharing a table with the engineer in the Harbour Bar. His arm was heavily bandaged. He commented that the bar was ‘nicely put together; must be some carpenters around’. A drink or two later he asked, ‘What’s “a whopper” mean?’

‘A whopper? Well –’

‘I’ve fallen a whopper. That’s what I’ve done. What’s tha’ mean?’

His bandages hid a wound, a big bad one, I could tell. ‘Is it painful?’

‘Not yet. Delayed shock must follow a thing like that, mustn’t it?’

‘Caused by a human or an inanimate object?’

He liked the long word. A grimace altered his features into a brief smile. ‘Inanimate … inanimate … very, very inanimate. A glass door.’

His face twitched as he took a long gulp of beer. He had very pale blue eyes, completely expressionless. Some people would have called them killer’s eyes.

A youngish man with yellow hair lurched over and sat down with us. He, too, I saw, had been drinking for a long time. He held out an uncertain hand, which I shook; the engineer ignored it, or perhaps he didn’t see it.

‘Monro Stahr. Tycoon Lines. Know what I’m talkin’ about?’ the newcomer asked. (I have changed the names here.) He had an American accent, Midwestern. I’d seen his ship, a big container vessel, in the harbour, and I ordered him a whisky (a dram was the official measure in Colombo). ‘God is love’ was tattooed on his right forearm.

‘An instant in time,’ the engineer said, as if the American didn’t exist. ‘Who said that?’

‘God knows,’ I said and the word God seemed to press a switch somewhere in the American.

‘God,’ he said in a loud, dramatic voice. ‘God is beginning to fade on the Monro Stahr, I’m tellin’ you. God has gone below.’

The engineer ignored him. ‘The moment of birth, that’s what an instant of time is,’ he said. ‘A sad moment. Or it could be the moment of death, I suppose. Another sad moment. Or the time in between. Sadder still. What’s the important thing about dying?’ His cheeks sagged, and he seemed to be looking for the answer under this chair. Or preparing to vomit.

‘How to avoid dying full of tubes in a hospital bed,’ I suggested.

This cheered him. ‘Yes. How right. To avoid tubes.’ He looked at me and demanded, ‘What carries oil to an engine?’

‘Tubes?’

‘Tubes, yes.’ He raised his eyes and his glass. ‘Glorious tubes.’ He toasted them gaily.

The American said, ‘Let me also inform you that God is now back on that ship. I have brought him back – in full strength. It just don’t matter no more what the devil tries.’ He pointed at me. ‘I’m tellin’ you. Even if the devil opens all the valves and tubes on the ship, it ain’t goin’ to matter one shit. That son-of-a-bitch ship will keep goin’. Because why?’

The engineer looked at him but was silent.

‘Because those fuckin’ valves and tubes would not be really opened, no sir. God’s will ain’t goin’ to be stalled – know what I’m sayin’? Those open tubes would be a goddam illusion, nothin’ more.’

‘Are you leaving tonight?’ I asked, turning to the engineer. I’d heard that the agent might make a second attempt to extricate him tonight.

‘I am always bein’ thrown out of bars for preachin’,’ the American said, draining his beer. ‘It always happens, so I know the pattern. They tell me to shut up, but I go on preachin’. I’m one hell of a preacher. I stood up for God when I was five. I was reborn aged five. I was being devoured by mosquitoes; the bites I could see, but not the mosquitoes. Can you imagine that? That’s how I knew I was reborn. An’ now I jest go on preachin’ the fuckin’ Word of God in bar after bar.

‘Some guys’ – he leaned forward and lowered his voice – ‘some guys look as if they’re goin’ to zap me. Their fists start comin’ at me, then they stop in mid-air. God has stopped those fists. Then the bartenders say, “We won’t serve you,” so I move on, and it starts all over again in another bar.’

‘Are you going to start preaching in here?’ I asked.

‘No. This ain’t the right bar. God tells me – know what I mean? Just talkin’ to you may be all He needs tonight. He knows. He’ll tell me what to do. Like, I might maybe visit the White House and tell the president to move over. If God tells me to.’

The engineer’s blue gaze had settled on the American’s nose. I waited to see if God would catch his fist in mid-air.

‘So far God ain’t told me to do that. So far I’ve jest brought God back to the ship. Other day, the captain called me up and said, “Boy, they tell me you’ve brought God back aboard again. I’d bin wondering where the hell He’d got to.” He said, “I sure as hell see the fuckin’ Will of God movin’ in you, boy.” That’s what he said. Yes, sir. The captain’s seen the light. Now that he sees God movin’ in me, he says he ain’t never goin’ to let me out of his goddam sight.’

He got up and moved unsteadily to the bar. The engineer didn’t bother to watch him go. ‘Are you flying to London tonight?’ I asked again.

‘I shall endeavour to,’ he said mournfully. ‘Nice word, endeavour.’ His face twitched, and he demanded in low, furious tones, ‘Endeavour to what? Eh?’

‘Endeavour, if you’ll excuse me, to get us both another drink.’

Nothing would stop the engineer from drinking himself into oblivion. Perhaps the agent would come to collect him soon.

*

In the Harbour Bar of the Taprobane a jumpy figure on a stool knocked his glass of arrak to the floor. He had a young, grey face, which, although not exactly sour or malevolent, was uninviting. He might have been on drugs. He was about to step down shakily from his stool onto the splinters of the glass when I pointed them out to him. He sneaked off, muttering, ‘Zank you,’ sounding French.

The next day he was back in the bar, and we sat on adjoining stools and began to talk. He was excessively nervous, and there was an aggressive furtiveness about him. His lips shook, and he sipped his arrak convulsively, swallowing with a gasp. Behind us two Englishmen talked in businessmen’s tones. ‘Ah, that’s a good drop of beer after a walk,’ one said. ‘Yers. Yers, indeed. Hits the spot. I say it hits the spot. Realler does,’ said the other.

The Frenchman talked jerkily of Paris. I told him that I sometimes lived there. ‘There’ll be trouble there this winter. An uprising.’

‘Do you mean of those hooligans who call themselves autonomes?’

‘I am an autonome,’ he cried, suddenly sitting up straight, ‘and I am not a hooligan. We are very, very serious. We are very, very numerous.’ His voice rose, and his hand fumbled toward his glass. ‘The struggle is growing. It is only just beginning…. Perhaps a holocaust.’ His eyes seemed to grow larger in a face so pallid that it might have been raised in a cellar like a mushroom. The little mouth turned down, half baleful, half pleading, seeming to say, Please believe me – and also, Watch out.

Autonomes had made their appearance in the streets of Paris in recent years. They are anarchists, mainly middle-class, extremely violent wreckers with no definite left-wing ideology but dedicated to the destruction of property, even by bombs. Parisians had seen them rushing about in commandos – peeling off from peaceful and legal demonstrations of, say, trade unionists, to engage the police in pitched battles and to wreck cars and shop windows. Their attitude, it seemed from their spasmodic statements to the press, was: destroy everything – then let’s see.

From behind us, English boardroom voices came to me in snatches. ‘Werll them, what’s the problem?’ … ‘So I said, “Now look here, just you look here….”’ ‘Go werst, young man, go werst, eh? Huh, huh, huh.’ One of them was laughing.

At the bar the big eyes looked at me intensely. ‘What do we want, we autonomes? We want work for all. Minimum wages. No more support for Idi Amin and for fascist colonels in South America. Idi Amin’ – his face contorted in disgust – ‘was a sort of black Englishman. Uganda was a new British colony, with Amin at the head.’

‘But he was hated and ridiculed in England.’

‘I know all about it. You’re wrong.’ He spoke fiercely. ‘Britain wants to control the riches of South Africa – the gold and the copper. They want to use it to make the black peoples poorer. Everyone knows that. It’s well known.’

‘Where do you find this unquestionable truth?’

‘From the newspapers. Luckily, all important problems in the world are quite simple. Black and white. It’s all so clear when you come from the ranks of the deprived.’ He was beginning to shout.

The imperturbable voices behind me never faltered: ‘… In a bit of a merss, I’ll be bound….’ ‘Well, he ran off to – where was it? – somewhere beginning with “s”. Bromley; that’s it….’ ‘Bromley doesn’t begin with “ers”. Something wrong there. Same again?’ ‘Why not? Hits the spot….’ ‘God blerss.’

I said, ‘All right, calm down. You’d better eat something.’

Over lunch, the autonome – his name was Jean-Marie – quietened down. He was a dropout, he said, and lived with his parents, who ran a restaurant near the Rond Point on the Champs Elysées.

‘You’re hardly one of the deprived, then.’

He let that pass. ‘A poll taken by Student magazine in Paris recently showed that fifteen per cent of the students are with us. There’ll certainly be a big upheaval. Oh, certainly we can’t take power in France, but by violence we can push the system into an extreme fascist reaction. We can force people to make the choice: the fascist system or us.’

‘Do your parents worry about you?’

‘They worry about me not having a job.’

‘What do you do for money?’

‘I steal. I love going into those big stores and taking things under the nose of the guards. Then I give a lot of it away, just hand it to people in the street, for fun.’

‘If you’re deprived, why are you here? How can you afford it?’ He was wearing an expensive watch.

Jean-Marie shrugged without answering. ‘I liked Mexico. The people have dignity there. Poor, but dignified. Here they’ve no dignity.’

‘Hospitable and friendly, though.’

‘I don’t want that. I can’t stand sentiment, although I like dogs. In Ceylon a dog bit me.’

‘A hard one, are you?’

‘I’m a cyclopath.’

‘A what?’

‘A cyclopath.’ He made an up-and-down movement with his flat palm. Mad for bicycles? Smiling a Mona Lisa smile, he held out his arm. ‘Look.’ I saw a thin grey arm, nothing more. Impatiently he jabbed with a finger at a faint line or two across the wrist. ‘I wanted to kill myself.’ It was a proud declaration. (Ah, a psychopath.)

‘Recently?’

‘In July. That was the third time.’

‘Slash your wrists each time?’

‘First two times I tried gas.’

‘The restaurant’s oven?’

‘The gas ring in my room.’

‘And?’

My sister noticed I was in that kind of state, so she was keeping her eye on me. She turned off the gas twice, and bandaged me up in the bath the third time.’

‘In the bath?’

‘That’s where I did it.’

‘Please don’t try again now.’

‘No, no, I don’t feel like that any more. Not now that the uprising is coming. I’ll be ready for it. In February or March.’

‘To the berst of my knowledge,’ a familiar English voice floated across our chopped paw-paw, ‘it wasn’t a shotgun wedding so much as a popgun wedding.’

‘Werll, God blerss my soul. Oh, wine. Thanks much-ler.’

February or March is a year ago, more or less, so Jean-Marie is still waiting for his upheaval. I hope his poor sister hasn’t had to save his life yet again.

*

Admiral Kadirgamar had advised me to visit the harbour master. It was good advice that worked like magic to dispel my problems.

The Port Authority building lay below my window at the Taprobane. In a spacious Victorian office, all dark wood and polished brass, Captain George Henricus murmured, ‘Take a pew. Cup of tea?’

A slender man, he wore a white shirt and shorts, high white stockings and black slippers. A telescope hung on a wall; wide windows looked down on the harbour. On his door was a sign, MASTER ATTENDANT.

There are only two Master Attendants in the world; one is in Colombo, the other in Singapore. All other ports have harbour masters. It is not clear why. In ‘The End of the Tether’, Joseph Conrad writes of the Master Attendant in Singapore:

A Master Attendant is a superior sort of harbour master … a Government official, a magistrate for the waters of his port, and possessed of vast but ill-defined disciplinary authority over seamen of all classes. This particular Master-Attendant was reported to consider it miserably inadequate on the ground that it did not include the power of life and death.

It was impossible, I soon discovered, to imagine the gentle Captain Henricus, descended from a Dutch Baptist ‘burgher’ (the term for Dutch or Portuguese colonists of Sri Lanka), pining for such powers. (In an old book about Ceylon I read that ‘the Portuguese came with sword and cross; the Dutch with ledger and law-book; the British with roads and railways’. The dates it gave for their respective periods of supremacy were 1500–1650; 1650–1800; 1800–1950: a hundred and fifty years each.)

A servant with a wall-eye poured tea from a large brown teapot, then wound a brass-fronted wall clock with a heavy key. A board listed the names of all Master Attendants since 1815; mostly they were captains in the Royal Navy. A chalk scrawl reminded Captain Henricus that the liner QE2 would arrive on 7 March 1981. ‘We like to know in advance,’ he said, smiling.

The captain’s duties were contained in a copy of the Legislative Enactments of Ceylon, 1956 edition, which lay on his table. He could, for instance, ‘penalise captains who threw overboard stones or ballast or rubbish, or any other thing whatever likely to form a bank or shoal or to be detrimental to navigation’. (Fine: two hundred rupees.) He could claim as government property all anchors recovered and not claimed within twelve months. He could enforce prohibition of diving for money. (Penalty: one month in prison.)

Further, the master attendant raised wrecks impeding navigation and gave assistance to ships in distress. He also licensed bumboats and their tindals. Tindals were the men in charge of the bumboats, and bumboat is the term for private boats, perhaps carrying laundrymen or ships’ chandlers with stores alongside vessels, or jolly boats or gigs carrying passengers about the harbour.

Oil pollution? ‘That will be part of my duties soon,’ said Captain Henricus. ‘But even now I don’t hesitate to say to captains, “Look, you know what you’ve just done – now clear up the mess you’ve caused.” I don’t hesitate.’

Captain Henricus confirmed that it was useless at this time of year to look for sea transport to Trincomalee or Madras. ‘Why don’t you take a look around the harbour?’ he suggested. ‘There are a couple of Tamil sailing ships in from Tuticorin.’ That name again….

He gave me a pass, and I set out to wander around the walled harbour, visiting the old breakwater and its lighthouse, pausing by the ancient steam tug with a long funnel that still whirred and panted about the harbour. In their very names, old landmarks advertised their age and the international maritime history of Colombo: the Ley den Bastion, the Delft Warehouse and the Baghdad Gate (an old and still-existing trade with Iraq accounts not only for this name but also for the Muslim population of Colombo).

There were two schooners at berth, as Captain Henricus had said, and I stared at them and stared again at these magnificent ships. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Great heavy-timbered three-masters, with soaring thick black masts like sooty columns in a burned-out temple, and mainsails that arced up, Arab style, from the deck on sickle-shaped spars. They looked as I imagined those ships the great Captain James Cook first went to sea in, the Whitby colliers. These had broad decks covered with coils of ropes, tarpaulins and sails, and a swarm of very black men with muscular limbs who gathered around me pointing and laughing when they spotted the camera around my neck.

A man in shirt and trousers, an agent’s representative, I suppose, asked if he could help me, and then said, ‘Yes, these ships will be sailing to Tuticorin as soon as they’ve loaded a cargo of seeds. A few days more, depending on the weather.’ Did they take passengers? What about me? The men laughed, and the agent’s man said he doubted if it would be comfortable for a passenger like me. They had no engines, only sails. ‘Very primitive.’

‘I don’t mind that.’

‘Well, you could talk to our office about it. Ceylon Shipping Lines, Apothecary Buildings.’

I thanked him and made for Apothecary Buildings, my heart pounding. Soon I was talking to the general manager of the Ceylon Shipping Lines, a young, courteous man, who was surprised and amused by my request.

‘You’re not afraid of taking one of those sailing ships, Mr Young? There’s a risk….’

‘Can you arrange it?’

‘Well, actually, it is not we who, strictly speaking…. I’ll just use the telephone if you’ll excuse me … to the man who….’

He dialled, and soon a voice sounded faintly on the other end. ‘I have a Mr Young here,’ the general manager said, and explained the circumstances. Laughter followed at both ends of the line. In a moment he rang off.

‘Mr Missier says the last European passenger he allowed on one of those ships turned out to be wanted by Interpol. Are you wanted by Interpol, Mr Young? In any case, Mr Missier is waiting for you.’

Mr Missier’s office was even harder to find than Mr Umbichy’s had been; it was deeper into the tumultuous maze of muddy streets around the old port. I had to squeeze between roaring trucks, under the snuffling noses of oxen in shafts, and against the sweat-streaked skins of coolies in sarongs knotted at the hips who heaved at long iron-framed barrows and still found the breath to shout, ‘Helloo, sir.’ I ended up at the corner of a narrow cobbled lane carpeted with squashed coconut tops, mango skins and ox dung. Here and there a dead rat lay in the gutter.

Mr Missier’s office was in a small rectangular loft at the top of steep wooden steps. You approached it from the street through a long shadowy room at the entrance of which clerks with the Hindu spot on their foreheads tabulated the weighing of sacks of small onions, potatoes, green and red chillies, dried prawns and peanuts. Sacks of these commodities were stacked against the walls. In an aroma of onions an old woman squatted in a corner chewing betel and squirts of betel juice marked the floor.

As my head slowly rose above the level of the office floor where Mr Missier made his living, I registered two pairs of legs, two waists and finally two pairs of hands stretched out to help me up the last three steps. An elderly voice said, ‘Hullo, sir. Well, well….’

Mr Missier was sitting at a desk, looking at me over his spectacles. An elderly man with a long, thin face and nose, he stretched forward a bony hand. ‘Please be seated.’

The clerks and the teaboy who had helped me up now offered a rickety wooden chair, and placed before me on the desk a small glass, a bottle of fizzy, sweet barley water, a packet of cigarettes and a box of matches.

A telephone on a high, old-fashioned cradle rang and Mr Missier answered it.

‘Yes, yes,’ he said into it, waving at me to drink the barley water. ‘If … if … for the sake of argument … the documents, there’s some hitch. Can the goods be shipped back…. I mean with no fuss and that sort of thing?’ His face set into a sterner expression, although it was not a face that could be very stern. ‘No, no, impossible…. Exchange-control regulations…. That would never do…. Quite, quite.’ As he rang off his face cleared again. A kind face. I liked Mr Missier even before he arranged everything for me.

He pushed a card across the table, and I pushed mine back. His read:

R. Missier and Co.

Sole Agents for Ceylon Shipping Lines Ltd,

Sailing Vessels, Shipping Clearing and

Forwarding and Customs House Agents

A sketch of a sailing ship like the ones I’d seen in the harbour was printed in blue under the lettering.

The basic contents of Mr Missier’s headquarters were whitewashed walls, a single overhead fan, two wall calendars, a tiny safe, a filing cabinet, three tables and six people, one of them a teaboy. There were other objects, of course: his desk, covered in black leatherette with a ziggurat of torn files; an umbrella hanging from the top of the plastic curtain over the bottom half of a window with rusty bars. The window opened outwards, and a large crow perched on the frame, cawing loudly. One of the clerks poked at it every now and then with the umbrella, and it flew off, returning a moment later to continue its cawing.

A wax Virgin and Child in a glass case, lit with one small bulb on the wall behind Mr Missier’s head, attracted my attention. He said, ‘Formerly, Mr Young, our family was Hindu. We were converted by Francis Xavier when he came to Tuticorin. We’re all Catholics in this shipping business – one hundred per cent. My father-in-law owned sailing vessels in Tuticorin, but he became very old and so gave it up. We came here many years ago now, in 1926.’

The crow let rip with a string of caws that were like the harsh noise of a man wrenching the fender off a bus. Mr Missier’s soft voice disappeared under the sound for a while, although his lips continued to move.

‘That’s my future son-in-law,’ he said audibly at last, pointing to the young man who was trying to jab the crow off the window frame with the umbrella. ‘It’s a family business, here and in Tuticorin. I was born, bred and married in Tuticorin.’

‘Those sailing ships I saw in the harbour –’ My pulse accelerated. ‘Would they take me?’

‘That depends, Mr Young. Let me tell you about them. At Tuticorin there are no mechanized boats at all, but these sailing ships, built there, sail up to Cochin – sometimes even to Bombay in the right monsoon. From here to Tuticorin it is too rough when the south-west monsoon blows. They’ve lost several vessels on this crossing.’

The trade with southern India, he said, was in buffalo hides, graphite, grams, dried fish, betel leaves, gypsum, salt (Tuticorin is famous for salt), safety matches, cement – everything.

‘Another thing. The last man we put aboard a ship of ours’ – Mr Missier smiled and shook his head in mock disapproval – ‘was a German fellow, and it turned out Interpol was searching for him. Very embarrassing, as you can appreciate.’

An obvious question seemed to hang silently in the air, so I explained why I wanted to sail to Tuticorin.

He listened carefully – the whole office listened – and then sat back and smiled an angelic smile. ‘I love England, Mr Young. We used to do such a lot of good business with England. Lace business. Nottingham. I had so many friends in England, very big merchants and very good friends to me.’

He opened a drawer and handed me a photograph, taken in a studio in Colombo, of a comfortably built Englishman posed with a younger, black-haired Missier. ‘Very rich men. Millionaires, I suppose. The war changed everything. Before it, commerce was free; you could do what you wanted, and all you needed was energy, keenness, hard work. But after the war, so many controls made it nearly impossible to trade. Now….’

His face looked sad and pinched, contemplating the dead past. Then he said, ‘You’ll be very uncomfortable on those ships,’ and smiled, ‘you’d better take some biscuits with you. And a pineapple.’ He hadn’t said, ‘Why don’t you go by air to Madras?’ I knew then that he would arrange everything.

‘I’ll speak to the captain. You will have to see the immigration people here. Captain Henricus, you’ve met him? Oh, well, that’s all that matters. Get a letter and perhaps a visa for India. I shall write to the customs in Tuticorin; I have a nephew there. The ship will take on cargo in a day or two. Please come and see me tomorrow.’

While I finished my barley water Missier’s future son-in-law slapped at the wire mesh over the window with a rolled Sinhalese newspaper. The crow sprang away, flew a lazy circle, alighted again on the same spot and the cawing resumed, like a man ripping the roof off the same bus. The sequence repeated itself like a Morris dance: slap, spring, circle, slap….

I pushed back through the lane of sweaty black bodies. The heat was intense, but the sweat of anxiety and urgency had left me. I stopped at the Nawa Rasa ‘Cool Spot’ stall and sucked a pineapple, strolled past the row of clothing stalls near the Sri Bodhiraja Temple opposite the Baghdad Gate, sidestepped the crowds around the Sir Cyril De Zoysa Building, which houses the Young Men’s Buddhist Association, and skirted the offices of the Sunday Times of Ceylon and the Ceylon Daily Mirror. Beyond a grogshop and a crumbling hostelry I turned right and found the Taprobane.

The stately Edwardian lift took me to the third floor. From my window overlooking the harbour I focused with my binoculars on the black spars of the two Tuticorin sailing ships. Their sails were partly expanded, limply drying in the sun after a downpour, so that they looked like the wings of an exhausted moth.

*

The Tuticorin adventure was not to take place right away, however. Mr Missier was outraged by the churlish attitude of the captain of the sailing ship he had planned to put me on. Having agreed to take me, the captain had started to argue over what I should pay. It was never clear to me exactly what was said, but whatever it was shocked Mr Missier’s sense of honour. Later he said, ‘Such shouting. I told him, “Don’t be so hard. Hardness in life does no one any good.” And he is a Catholic! I told him he should be proud to have you on his ship, not go shouting like a wild man. It was not Catholic behaviour – that is what I told him.’

The upshot was that I had to wait for the next ship to arrive from Tuticorin, which would not be for a week or ten days. I composed myself, and luckily, two possibilities arose to keep me busy.

Mrs De Mel had introduced me to Admiral Kadirgamar. At a party at the house of this all-knowing lady I now met the admiral’s brother, Sam, one of Sri Lanka’s best lawyers, and also a former acquaintance from Singapore, Tom Abraham. At this moment, he was the Indian high commissioner in Colombo, which could hardly have been a better stroke of luck.

When I had moaned to him about the delay, Sam Kadirgamar immediately advised me to fill the time before Tuticorin with a visit to the Maldive Islands – ‘a necklace of tiny jewel-like atolls,’ he said, four hundred miles west of Sri Lanka. Small vessels went there at regular intervals, and some of them took passengers, he thought. It was an appealing notion.

Tom Abraham did even more. In the middle of yet one more recitation of my plans and progress so far, he stopped me when I mentioned the unhelpful Tourist Board man in Bombay.

‘Wait. The Andamans. You couldn’t get a permit for the Andamans, is that right? And you want to go there?’

‘Very much, but I’m afraid Indian government regulations –’

‘I have no time for red tape.’ He thought for a minute, then told me that if I could occupy myself for a week or so, he would see what he could do about a permit for the Andamans.

‘Tom, with every respect, I doubt –’

‘You want to bet?’

I didn’t want to bet, so I took a supportive drink instead, and time showed that it was by far the wiser thing to do. I left Mrs De Mel’s feeling so blithe that I fairly skipped through the doors of the Taprobane.

The voyage to Malé, the capital of the Maldives, began badly with a dispute between the captain of the launch and Sea Eagle that delayed our departure by several hours.

It was a filthy night when I reported to the harbour for sailing. Rain was bouncing off the docks, but it would have been difficult in any weather to spot the launch, the smallest of all the vessels I sailed in during my odyssey: twenty-five tons, forty feet long, powered by a Thorneycroft 125-h.p. engine making six knots – with luck. I found her at last, crouched like a frightened pygmy between two metal giants, a Sri Lankan freighter and a ship from Canton. The comparatively huge hawsers of these two towering neighbours somehow added a puny absurdity to the launch’s littleness, so that she looked more like a dinghy. I stood in the rain and thought, Is this what we’re going to cross more than four hundred miles of water in? Three days or more in this?

Naturally Sea Eagle did nothing to raise my spirits. His dispute with the captain postponed our time of departure to 11.45 p.m., trapping us all in solid sheets of rain. Despite, or because of, the rain, it was muggy almost beyond endurance on the cramped deck of the launch, and a nauseous smell rose from the stygian, stagnant water trapped in our corner of the harbour, the area farthest from the outlet to the sea.

The angry Sea Eagle kept urging the crew to cram an immense cargo of furniture from trucks into the tiny holds of the launch: large, heavy panels of compressed wood, chairs and dozens of lavatory seats. ‘The owner’s representative has accepted this cargo,’ he snapped when the captain protested, and refused to allow any of the shipment to wait for a later vessel. Truck after truck drew up, the crew forced more chairs and tables into the last nooks and crannies of the hold, and we settled lower and lower into the water. I waited, getting wet, noticing Sea Eagle’s avian ability to turn his head rather more than ninety degrees, and fighting a desire to go ashore and forget the whole adventure.

The launch had two bunks, no mattresses and no awnings. Space in the tiny hutchlike cabin area, apparently constructed out of a handful of nails and a hundredweight of driftwood, was further diminished by the metal trunks of the crew, a spare outboard motor, and the exhaust pipe of the engine that thrust up through the middle of the cabin to the upper air. This exhaust was a serious continual danger to the unwary because in rough weather it was exceedingly well placed to serve as a natural handhold, and yet was almost red-hot. As a result, by the time we reached Malé, I lacked skin on three fingers of my right hand.

When Sam Kadirgamar, QC, had urged me to take a look at the Maldives, I knew nothing about them, and the next day I had accepted his invitation to consult a book or two in his library. From these, I discovered that the Maldives were an archipelago four hundred miles south-west of Ceylon, a chain of two thousand coral islands stretching six hundred and fifty miles, some only a few yards long. Maldivians were Muslims, the books said, and their ancient rulers had titled themselves Sultans of the Thirteen Atolls and Twelve Thousand Islands. The islands produced fish, breadfruit, coconuts, pumpkins, paw-paws, limes, and the inhabitants spoke their own language, although words from other tongues had been fused into the original, like new coral into a reef: Sinhalese, Arabic, Urdu, Persian, English, Malay, Sanskrit and Portuguese.

‘The Maldivians are a civilised and peaceful race,’ a monograph informed me, and dark brown of hue. Patronizingly it added, ‘The women are somewhat fairer than the men – some of them distinctly pretty.’

The West Coast of India Pilot informed me that in 1960 HMS Scarborough reported that the coral islands on the atolls could be detected by radar at a range of just over twenty miles, but that the intricate channels between them required local knowledge. Between Sri Lanka and the Maldives were great sub-oceanic trenches, some perhaps thirteen thousand feet deep. ‘There is no bottom at the depth of 200 fathoms,’ the Pilot said.

We moved out of the harbour at last, past the friendly light at the end of the breakwater, and felt the light lift and fall of the open sea. Lightning flashes silhouetted mountainous cloud formations.

I moved back to the stern of the launch – it wasn’t far to scramble over the roof of the cabin with its protruding funnel – and found the captain, a thin young man with big teeth, and a helmsman, an even younger Maldivian, standing in a small raised, roofed area, an even tinier hutch than the cabin and engine housing. The launch had no wheel; the helmsman steered standing up by straddling a long thick, rounded wooden spar attached to the rudder, pushing it or restraining its movements with the muscles of his thighs. It looked agonizing. The spar was heavy, and in a high sea I imagined that it would slam back and forth almost uncontrollably.

The helmsman was having no trouble now. He stood in a red undershirt and bathing trunks, peering at the compass on the ledge formed by the roof of the engine housing in front of him, the helm spar protruding between his upper thighs like a giant phallus, each vibration of the rudder travelling up the spar and shaking his leg muscles like jelly. He looked at me, grinned and wrapped a tiny, inadequate towel around his hips. If this was modesty, it was misjudged; the great spar thrusting through the towel only increased the effect.

My notes read:

A young Australian was on the launch. He was taciturn – shy, I think. He was travelling – slowly, he said – to Europe. ‘What is Time?’ he asked, and was silent.

There were also two Maldivian passengers who travelled on the cabin roof. During the night, they offered me a cut or two from what looked like a hard plug of dark, rich tobacco, but which was in fact a dark, rich plug of compressed fish. It looked like the dried meat of South Africa called biltong. The Maldivians extracted it from the folds of their sarongs and hacked pieces off it with a penknife. It tasted mildly fishy and was very hard on the teeth.

I wondered what fish it came from. ‘Maldive fish,’ they answered.

‘Mullet?’

‘Mullet,’ they agreed. But they were repeating what I said.

The launch’s crew spoke very few words of English, and that included the Starling Cook, although when I think of him I recall that somehow we communicated quite effectively. I call him the Starling Cook because of his looks. He was more or less the colour of a starling, very dark in blue shorts and shirt. He was short and fat-bodied, and his skinny bowlegs protruded out of his shorts like a black wishbone. He had long bare feet and very little neck; his shoulders were hunched, his arms long, and his nose was a beak that curved thinly between large expressive eyes. I suppose he was in his forties or fifties. Some seamen, I have noticed, quietly observe the pitch and toss of a deck and time their moves across it like a computer, perhaps quite unaware of their calculation. The Starling Cook was not like that; he scuttled crablike over the deck, hardly laying a hand on any support.

The first morning, the wind rose and the broken water swayed and rocked us quite a bit – a foretaste of things to come. The launch was so small that anything affected its stability. I could hear the fresh water sloshing in the two tanks of the foredeck. The sea looked very big.

The Starling Cook’s domain was near the bows. Here he presided over a wooden-box structure that shielded a small metal stick-burning stove about a foot high. From it the wind blew clouds of sparks that showered across the rusty barrels of diesel fuel, crates, piles of rope, pineapples and tyre fenders, as well as a tangle of bamboo chairs that were part of Sea Eagle’s cargo. We might, I thought, all go up (or down) in a spectacular Viking’s funeral. Here the Starling Cook cut and served pineapple chunks at night, and for breakfast made tea and nan – flat, oily bread – with a very sweet form of custard. Breakfast was at first light. At 9.00 a.m. the first day, and on succeeding mornings, the Starling Cook appeared at my elbow. I felt a very gentle plucking at my sleeve, and a sound it is difficult to describe – a mew is perhaps the best word. The Starling Cook was offering me pan, the tiny sandwich of betel leaf, areca nut and lime that all Asia east of the Gulf chews the way Westerners chew gum. It has a tart, clean taste, not bitter or fiery as I had expected, and the juice trickles from the corners of the mouth like blood. I remembered seeing middle-aged Vietnamese women, their teeth blackened from years of chewing, sitting with red juice glistening on their lips as if they had just eaten their babies.

I watched the Starling Cook for hours as he moved about his restricted kingdom. I saw, for example, how he opened a coconut with a spanner, holding it in one hand, the spanner in the other, and tapping it with many small, firm strokes around its middle until it fell apart in two neat halves. He scraped each half against the upturned sharp metal prong of what looked like a shoehorn, which he clamped between his knees; then he wrapped the gratings in a porous cloth, and dunked them into a wide pan of water and rice. He scooped up seawater to cook the rice in, and always cleaned his pots and pans in seawater too. On vessels like this, no one dreams of using fresh water for anything but drinking. His implements were few but sufficient; a huge soot-black kettle and two deep cooking pans were the basic containers. There was also a wide, open tray onto which he poured uncooked rice before he and a wild-haired assistant of dishevelled aspect picked out the bad grains. Just inside the cabin door were arranged his little sacks of cabbages, beans, leaves, chillies (green and red), cardamom, small cumin seeds, coriander, black peppers, cinnamon and garlic.

What did the Starling Cook make us for dinner that first day? My notebook says: rice, dried fish, diced and curried potatoes, onions and raw chillies. He ladled it out of pans into chipped metal plates, and we staggered away with our portions like squirrels caching acorns, and sat on diesel barrels or coils of rope to eat in silence with our fingers. We got no tea with meals, only tepid fresh water from the tank.

*

The weather was unfriendly. The sea was black and ominous like the sky, and soon seemed to grow bigger. Although it retained its oily smoothness, I felt as if under the surface something very big and unpleasant were waiting to burst up and horrify us. It was a menace not unlike that at the opening stages of my recurring nightmare.

In this dream I am sitting alone on a flat, empty beach, or perhaps in mid-ocean in a rowing boat. The sun is shining; the sea sparkles; I am happy and at peace. But soon small shadows begin to smudge the sunlight. Little by little, terrifyingly, the sky and the sea darken, and at last the sun is extinguished by immense black clouds; what has been a perfect day becomes at last a sort of night. A roaring noise, a slow diffused thunder makes itself heard, filling the seascape like a swelling drum roll, a prelude….

I am prepared for what I see next, which is why I grip the sides of the boat. What I see looks like an immense island of wet slate slowly rising from the water; it stretches almost a hundred and eighty degrees before my eyes. But it is not an island. It is a whale – the biggest whale anyone has ever imagined.

Soon the whale is fully surfaced, and the roaring grows even louder – another prelude. I know that the whale is not going to lie there. It is going to do its trick, and its trick is to imitate a salmon; it is going to leap.

It leaps. Can you imagine a leviathan as big as the Queen Elizabeth leaping several hundred feet in the air? I sit alone in that sea, clinging to the sides of the rowing boat. What else can I do but hold on desperately, knowing what will follow when the whale falls back into the water? A tidal wave from horizon to horizon….

But I always wake up before the tidal wave.

When the Starling Cook had finished swilling out his pots and pans with seawater, the waves started to grow larger, and a big and mounting swell from the starboard began to push the launch over to an angle of thirty degrees. The sky was quite bright, not at all like the sky in my nightmare, and a full moon was rising behind us, coming up over Sri Lanka, which by now was well out of sight. The moonlight turned the agitated water into heaving sheets of wet mackintosh. I thought of the immense depths below us. ‘No bottom at the depth of 200 fathoms.’

The Starling Cook was watching me; he was obviously fascinated by the presence of this European passenger on board. When he caught my eye he grinned and danced a few steps on his piece of deck, pointing excitedly at the moon. He made a hoop with his long arms, miming a full moon, and then jabbed a finger at the waves. The moon’s to blame for all this, he was saying. His expressive eyes looked anxious.

I paid a hazardous visit to the captain in the stern, who gave me all his white teeth in an ugly grin and said, ‘Storm. Moon make big sea. Big sea storm.’ I staggered back to the bows and lay down tensely on my towel in the hard little bunk. The Australian was already in his, and finding it difficult to stay there. A discarded volume of Kurt Vonnegut lay on the deck, and a forty-degree list threw me violently after it. Scrambling back bruised into the bunk, I tried to wedge myself by pushing one foot against the ceiling and the other against the bulkhead, grasping with one hand the window frame over my head. The strain on my legs and arms soon became too great. Hauling myself out on deck, I saw that clouds now covered the stars and that the moon was only an area of bright haze in the sky. The wind took one’s breath away.

My notes become sea-stained here:

We are nearly on our beam ends once every minute and a half. The planks shuffle back and forth on the deck as the waves strike us, and the grinding and creaking parts of the old launch drown the noise of the engine, pistons, prop shaft, wind and sea. The chimney seems to be red-hot, and acts like a stove in the already overheated, confined space of the cabin. Boxes slide and fall; metal trunks shift. A heavy case – it must weigh a lot because it was the last thing to be loaded, and the whole crew had to struggle to manhandle it aboard – has begun to crash into and buckle the only lifeboat, which in any case is a poor light metal thing buried under a small mountain of pineapples, bamboo furniture and ceramic lavatory bowls.

One of the fresh-water tanks is leaking. The crew ladles the water from it to the other tank, which requires much rushing up and slithering down sodden decks in semi-darkness, with sarongs hitched up, slipping down or falling open. (Sarongs, it seems, are fair-weather garments.)

The sight of Hassan Ali in the wheelhouse window alarms me. He is clutching for dear life two vertical beams on either side of the compass. His face is fixed in an expression of agony or terror, teeth gritted, eyes staring. He looks terrified to dementia: a man facing a watery death? But I remember what I cannot see. His lower half is straining to control that heavy rudder handle, which must be vibrating and jerking about like a bucking bronco, battering his thighs. Hassan is grimacing with effort, not fear.

The seas are very big; they are breaking over us. The moon has gone behind two banks of cloud: one grim, thick and unmoving, the other low and scudding. From my ‘porthole’ I can see the black and grey strips of cloud streaming past back and forth according to the roll and dip of the launch. The corkscrew motion is exhausting. Two of the Maldivian passengers have already been very sick; they huddle together, green and horrified. I have offered them my ledge and seasickness pills, but they have refused both.

Now the Starling Cook joins the drama. Facing me, he is smiling and gibbering unintelligibly. Suddenly his eyes switch from my face to something over my shoulder – something, to judge by the horror on his face, too appalling to imagine. His eyes stretch open to an amazing size, and he opens his wide mouth and screams, ‘Eeeeeeeeeee———aaaaaa———aaayyyyyyyyyy.’

The sound was shattering, rising like the mixed sound of a whistling kettle and an air-raid siren above the racket of creaks and thuds of shifting cargo, wind, and crashing of the sea against the old wooden hull. Even if the whale of my dreams had surfaced behind us, I would have had to follow his pointing finger, turn and look. There was no whale; instead, I saw a low black cliff, visible because it was darker than the grey-black of the clouds. Higher than our stubby mast, it was about eighty yards away and advancing.

Thanks to the Starling Cook’s scream, I had time to wedge myself into the cabin doorway, bracing myself with feet and elbows. The Starling Cook himself leaped with astounding agility for the mast and clung to it, wrapping his arms and wishbone legs around it like a koala bear on a eucalyptus trunk. The impact of the wave was awesome. The launch heeled over – ninety degrees? God knows. Solid slabs of black water toppled over the gunwales, and everything on deck or in the cabin seemed to go adrift. Water filled my clothes, eyes and ears. Water cascaded from the legs of the Starling Cook’s shorts. He squawked like a wet hen and gestured at me, pointing once more at the moon with one hand and at the waves with the other.

The Australian, I saw, was out of his bunk again, and as the launch righted herself – she surprised me by managing to do so – he crawled his way past me in the doorway, shouting, ‘Someone’s got to tell that captain to steer a different course. He’ll have the bloody thing capsizing.’

‘Leave him alone!’ I yelled into his ear. ‘Must know this route by now. Must know the weather. It’s his beat.’ I knew enough about seagoing to be well aware that passengers should never try to advise a captain on how to sail his ship, whoever he is, whatever the size of the vessel, or however frightening the storm. I can imagine some captains taking such backseat driving very ill indeed – even, perhaps in an emergency, taking a pistol from a pocket: ‘I must ask you to leave the bridge at once.’ Like Captain Ahab, or Captain Bligh.

I didn’t catch more of the Australian’s reply than ‘… do something …’ as he scrabbled his way astern. Later I looked back to see if he’d been thrown overboard, but he was only crouched near the ramshackle wheelhouse, where by now another unfortunate was straining and grimacing astride the rudder bar in Hassan’s place. Next day the Australian told me he had politely suggested that the captain might alter course by a degree or two in order to take the seas nearer to head-on. The captain had smiled toothily – had he even understood? – and had altered nothing.

Again and again, the clifflike waves came at us and every few minutes the eyes of the Starling Cook forewarned me of impending disaster. Sometimes he tugged at my shirt before releasing his awful cry – ‘Eeeeeeeeeee———aaaaaa———aaaaayyyyyy’ – and again we would cling: I in my doorway, he like a monkey to the mast. There was nothing else to do but hope – although once or twice I did ask myself what I was doing there at all.

During the night I saw the lights of three or four big ships going north or south. They were small comfort; we could have capsized quite near them and they would have been none the wiser, for we had neither radio nor rockets.

*

In the early morning I fell uneasily asleep. The first thing I saw when I woke up was a big Maldivian sailor perched on the rail brushing his teeth under a triangular sail. The crew had hoisted canvas during the early hours when the sea’s fury abated. The wind was now north-east, and the sail filled satisfactorily.

The Starling Cook was up and about, too, shaping lumps of dough into white cricket balls, and then rolling them out flat on a hot plate on the stove. His woolly-headed assistant had already mixed jam and butter to make a very sweet custard, and we dipped the bread into it and drank dark, sweet tea.

The horror was over. The seascape had changed into a gentle blueness. The wind was benevolent, and in its way our mild roll was soothing. Soon it became very hot. The crew raised a tarpaulin over the roof of the cabin and I went and lay there.

Later the crew wanted their pictures taken in Polaroid. I discovered their names while I took them: Ali Qasim, Hassan Ali, Musa, Ibrahim, Captain Azia Ali – all Muslim names. I wrote them down in Arabic script to amuse them; peering over my shoulder, they murmured ‘Muslim’ to me, but when I said, ‘No Muslim. Christian,’ they showed no disappointment. They were pleased enough by the Arabic writing and murmured approvingly, ‘Arab, Arab.’ Their reaction to the Polaroid was immediately to throw off undershirts and shirts and to pose, stripped to their bathing trunks or sarongs, flexing their biceps and holding in their bellies like Asian Charles Atlases. In fact they were only fairly muscular, verging on the plump.

As the Baluchis had done on Al Raza, the crew made a great play with combs and mirrors. Hassan Ali caressed his long hair with a metal-bristled brush, looking with great attention at his reflection and going back over a certain swoop of hair, turning his head this way and that like a vain girl at her dressing table. After meals they relaxed in tumbles of tangled limbs on the cabin roof, always shifting arms around shoulders, legs over legs, lighting cigarettes, laughing, jumping up to dip a mug into the fresh-water tank or to spit over the rail.

Like an ageing film star bored with all that, the Starling Cook was uninterested in the Polaroid, and quietly continued to grind a stick of cinnamon to powder with a stone rolling-pin. His assistant made tea and carried it to the Maldivian passengers, who by now had recovered from their sickness. He even played a trick on them – I don’t know what – which is how he became known as the Black Devil. His face was very black and knobbly, and usually he was grinning. His trick made the passengers shout and laugh, and because of it I said, ‘Shaitan!’ (‘devil’ in Arabic), which I suppose is the same in Maldivian because from that moment they began to call him Shaitan, one of them adding ‘Black’. ‘Black Devil!’ they shouted, and he shouted back in glee, ‘Blaack Divil.’

The Black Devil was really anything but devilish. He had a good nature. I found him up in the bows blowing his nose in his fingers and watching the result slowly unstring itself to fall into the sea. He was turning back to knead the dough when I called to him and motioned to him to wash his hands, and at once he trotted away and washed them meticulously. Then he smiled warmly and nodded at me. A bond seemed to have been established; from then on, he gave me the first mug of tea. I was the first to feel his invariable invitation to take the mug, the finger tapping my forearm three times, like a gentle tapping at a door.

An odd incident occurred on our last day at sea. Hassan Ali, the crewman I had seen first at the helm, came to me weeping and distraught. The passengers gathered around, and with signs and bits of Arabic I learned that the captain had confiscated from Hassan Ali all the Polaroid pictures I had taken of him. ‘Master take, master take,’ was all he could splutter out. I didn’t want to tangle with the captain and I would never know his reasons, so I snapped Hassan Ali again out of the captain’s sight. He whipped the picture into the top of his trunks and smiled once more.

On the last day it also turned out that one of the crew, Musa, spoke quite good English. He came up to me, my notes remind me, and said, ‘Please, I have a pain in my penis. Have you a medicine?’ What was the trouble? I asked. Inflammation? Discharge? When had he last had a woman? In Colombo? I imagined that almost any disease of the penis was freely procurable in a seamen’s bordello in Colombo.

One month ago, Musa answered. He’d need an injection from a doctor there, I said. Would the injection be enough? he asked. I told him it would be.

‘Have you hashish?’

‘No, Musa.’

‘Have you hero-een?’

‘No, Musa. Why? You want?’

‘No, no. Five weeks in island jail. But you drink beer?’

‘Yes, I drink beer. Muslims also drink beer.’

‘Sometimes. Khomeini no drink, you know why?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said, feeling that our conversation was sidling up to the delicate subject of fundamentalist Islam and had gone far enough. I didn’t want to discuss militant Islam.

*

If the captain’s grin was awful, his navigation was excellent. On the third evening the outlines of Malé lay dead ahead of us.

The Starling Cook was beside himself with relief and the thought of home. First he cooked a magnificent curry full of chilli and pungent exotic leaves – a dish I would like to try again. I gestured at him, ‘Good, very good,’ and he wriggled about the deck in a happy dance step, arms raised, stamping his black feet, swaying sinuously on bowlegs, laughing. Everyone laughed back, even the Australian.

Dolphins leaped alongside the launch, a reassuring sight. The ocean was flat, the horizon clean and so well defined that it seemed we might drop over the edge if we could only reach it. The clouds were milk-white; had I really seen those ragged strips of grey scudding past my ‘porthole’ at the height of the storm?

The Starling Cook began to sing in a high undulating whine, ‘Feni, feni, sarna … feni, feni, sarna …’ a chant he repeated over and over. The crew joined him, and the Maldivian passengers jumped down from the cabin roof onto the foredeck and began to clap in time with the Starling Cook’s singing, arms in the air like Scottish reelers, and stamping around in a circle. ‘Feni, feni, sarna … feni, feni, sarna….’

‘What’s that mean?’ I asked Ibrahim.

‘It mean, “Good heavens, look, look, it’s love. Look, it’s love!”’

How could I have asked myself with such anguish in the storm, ‘What am I doing here?’ I was delighted to be exactly where I was at this moment.