As soon as the Straits Hope berthed a little way down the coast in the middle of the morning, I told Bob Barker I’d be back and took a taxi to the centre of town. I wanted to be sure that Sandakan was a better jumping-off point to Zamboanga than Tawau further around the coast. If Tawau was better I would have to sail on with the Straits Hope. I didn’t fancy any more delays.
In Harrisons & Crosfield, one of the firm’s senior men, Rodney Jago, who had worked for seventeen years in North Borneo, said doubtfully, ‘You really want to cross to Zamboanga by sea?’
‘I certainly do.’
‘Well, I think Sandakan is a better place to start from than Tawau. Things called kumpits cross fairly regularly, I believe. They’re launches – Filipinos in the barter trade run them back and forth. But you’ll find out more about it if you come with me today to a Rotary lunch. Are you free?’
I hadn’t expected a Rotary Club in Borneo. Nevertheless, at lunchtime I found myself sitting at a long table in a hotel restaurant. I had shaken hands with several Rotarians – an easygoing company of young Chinese businessmen and British trading-company representatives – and had time to read only one of the several jokes on the bulletin of the Rotary Club lying by my plate. ‘A mistake,’ it said, ‘is something a virgin and a parachute jumper can only make once.’
A Chinese meal came and went, and once the bowls and chopsticks had been removed an American Peace Corps worker lectured us on the problems of malaria control in the sprawling wilderness of North Borneo; he warned us that the local mosquitoes could impregnate us with lethal cerebral malaria unless we took a new drug whose name I forget. When we stood up to leave, Jago said to a Chinese Rotarian, ‘Mr Young wants to cross to Zamboanga by boat. How would you advise him to do it?’
‘By air is by far the best way. Of course, the planes don’t leave if there aren’t enough passengers, but by boat is very risky. I definitely don’t advise it.’
‘But Sandakan is the place for a boat crossing, is it? Not Tawau?’
‘Sandakan is the best place if you have to go by sea. Kumpits cross now and then. They’re dodging the pirates, you know, but they go. If you insist, go and see a government shipping-control official, Inspector Ahmat, at the kumpit wharf, which is in the centre of town. He should know the kumpit schedules, such as they are.’
‘He’s near our office,’ said Jago, and drove me back. But I thought I’d call on the police before I tried the kumpit wharf. They might not take kindly to a strange Englishman snooping around a wharf full of Filipino kumpits looking for a crossing on a sea so busy with piracy and intrigue. Arrest and deportation back to Singapore would be a disaster.
Sandakan’s police headquarters were housed in low, modest buildings near the water. The superintendent, a stout and friendly Malay wearing a casual shirt outside his trousers, offered me a chair and sent for his colleague, the local representative of the Malaysian Special Branch. After I told them my story, the police chief said, ‘What have you heard about the situation here?’
I told him what I’d read about the hijacking of ferries, the boarding of trading vessels, the pillaging of cargoes, the murder of crews, the machine-gunning of merchant ships, and of the battles between the Moro separatist rebels and the Filipino government troops. When I had finished he said that I had more or less got the picture. It was not a good situation, he added.
‘What I would like to know before starting out,’ I said, ‘is whether you hear of many cases of offhand unprovoked murder? I mean, boats boarded, throats cut indiscriminately, bodies thrown over the side?’
‘Let’s say that the Sulu pirates are not as bad as the Thai pirates in the Gulf of Siam. They don’t rape all the women they capture, and don’t kill all the men. I can’t say I’m sure of the percentage.’
‘We’re not sure at all,’ the Special Branch man admitted. He was small and slightly paler than the superintendent, a Dusun – a man from the indigenous people of North Borneo – with sharp, alert eyes. ‘You see, we patrol our waters around here very well, but they don’t go very far out to sea – twelve miles at most – before they become Filipino waters. Beyond that we don’t know what goes on. We may hear this and that, but we can’t be certain.’
‘You have no direct communications with the Filipino authorities?’
‘None at all. So, you see, I’d be worried about your safety out there beyond our control.’ I began to wonder if he was making up his mind to prevent me from leaving.
The Malay police superintendent said, ‘If you’re stopped out there by the Filipino navy bobbing about in a kumpit, they’ll ask you why you’re travelling in a kumpit; it’s illegal, they’ll say, for foreigners to travel to the Philippines like this. They’ll tell you that if you want to go to the Philippines legally, you should go by boat to Manila, or fly from here to Zamboanga. The immigration people in Zamboanga don’t let foreigners come ashore from boats – especially from kumpits. You could be a foreign mercenary helping the Moros. You’ll have trouble at that end, I expect.’ He smiled. ‘Still, if you are stopped on the way, it had better be by the Filipino navy and not by pirates or Moros. The navy doesn’t kill offhand, eh? It’s a civilized world, the navy, isn’t it?’
‘I have a passport and a visa.’
‘The navy wouldn’t treat a foreigner too badly.’ He paused, then added, ‘Of course, if the navy took the kumpit for a Moro rebel boat – ah ha! – I don’t know what would happen then. They might shoot first and ask about you later.’
‘I’d rather you didn’t do this,’ said the Special Branch officer. Again I felt that a direct order to take a plane was only a breath away.
‘I have an idea,’ I said quickly. ‘Surely the men who know the risks of the crossing best are the kumpit captains, who make the trip quite often. Could I talk with one or two of them who have arrived recently? Would you help me to do that?’
To my relief, the superintendent said, ‘Oh, yes, we could do that.’ He rose from his desk, opened a drawer, took out an automatic and put it in his hip pocket. Then we drove to the wharf.
A large shed on the water’s edge served as an office for immigration, customs and police officers, and as a waiting room for the crews and passengers of the kumpits arriving or leaving for the Philippines. Five or six large ones lay alongside each other on a seafront reinforced by a wall of solid wooden piles. A kumpit, I saw, was nothing more than a large launch with a roof over much of its deck which provided shade for those beneath it and a sightseeing platform with a low wooden rail for anyone who sat on top of it. A wheelhouse and a small cabin like a chicken coop protruded above the level of the roof, the cabin containing the captain’s bunk and three spare ones for a charterer or senior members of the crew. The bunks were narrow and lined with wafer-thin mats. A thin metal funnel protruded from the roof over the deck. The kumpits were made of heavy wood from stem to stern and were about a hundred feet long.
A number of men lounged nearby, and I asked one of them if the kumpits came from Zamboanga.
‘Yes, tuan.’ He spoke with the Hispano-American accent that distinguishes a Filipino from a Malay.
‘Are you from there yourself?’
‘I’m living this side now, tuan.’
A young police officer who had joined us and been introduced to me as the shipping-control official, Inspector Ahmat, said, ‘He’s living here, but he’s from Mindanao Island in the Philippines.’ Zamboanga is the westernmost town of Mindanao.
I asked the man how many days a kumpit took to cross the Sulu Sea between Zamboanga and Sandakan. I had an idea it would take eight or ten hours, although I can’t think now how I’d invented such an absurd timetable.
‘About three days, tuan,’ the man said. Three days! It was a long time to be dodging pirates and the Filipino navy. Later, when I looked at my map again, I saw that this was a reasonable length of time, and that I’d misjudged the distance.
At the superintendent’s bidding, Inspector Ahmat led us into his office and then went out to the kumpit wharf. Soon he returned with a stocky, dark-skinned kumpit captain with a wide nose and eyes far apart in a long high-cheekboned face. The man shook my hand. He looked strong, but he took my hand in a tentative, lifeless way, not limply, but as if he hadn’t done much hand-shaking and wasn’t sure how it should be done.
I said to Ahmat, ‘Can you speak to him in Malay and then translate?’ He laughed; the man couldn’t speak Malay, he said. His native language was Tagalog, but he could speak a little English.
To the kumpit captain I said slowly and distinctly, ‘How many trips have you made between Sandakan and Zamboanga?’
‘Maybe, ah …’ – he looked up at the ceiling trying to count the times – ‘maybe, nine, ten trips.’
‘How many times you stopped by pirates?’
‘Two times.’
‘Only two?’
‘Only two.’
‘They kill anyone, shoot anyone?’
‘No killing. But they have guns. Take money. Take every wallet, everything take.’
‘You think pirates attack us?’
He smiled. ‘Cannot tell. Sometimes attack, but not always. Sometimes not attack.’
‘Two attacks out of ten trips,’ I said to the superintendent. ‘Not a bad percentage. Makes it a fair risk.’ He shrugged, as much as to say, That’s your opinion.
To the captain I said, ‘Will you take me?’
‘What about emi-gra-tion?’ he asked.
Ahmat said with a glance at the superintendent, ‘No problem here.’
‘When do you sail?’
The captain said, ‘Saturday.’ It was Thursday. The Straits Hope sailed on Friday at noon, and the little weekly plane came to Sandakan and returned to Zamboanga on Saturday. I hoped he really would take me on Saturday. If he was delayed or refused me, I might be stuck once more for at least a week, this time in the relative wilds of North Borneo, and would risk missing the connection with Swire’s steamer, the Hupeh, in two weeks’ time in Manila.
‘Will you take me?’ I repeated with greater urgency.
‘I want to consult my companions, please.’
‘Of course.’
‘We meet here tomorrow 9.00 a.m., okay?’
‘Fine, okay.’
‘See you,’ he said, flashing a gold tooth.
I had checked into the Nak Hotel, the nearest to the kumpit wharf. There, that evening, I sat with the Special Branch officer and pondered the situation. I had returned to the Straits Hope and informed Barker of the opportunity with the kumpit, at which he’d muttered dourly that he couldn’t say he envied me.
I needed a drink. ‘Only Black Label, no Led Label,’ the Nak’s barman said. I ordered a double.
‘On lok?’
‘Yes, on the rocks, please.’
John, the Special Branch officer, took a glass of milk. Chinese pop music floated over us from loudspeakers over the bar. ‘I think the kumpit captain is going to say no to me,’ I said.
‘Better for you if he does. Well, I won’t go so far as to say that. But we can do nothing for you after you pass that frontier on the sea.’
‘I’ll survive. If not, I won’t blame you. I promise I won’t sue you for responsibility if I’m thrown to the sharks.’
John laughed and ordered me another whisky.
To my surprise, when we met next morning at nine o’clock in Inspector Ahmat’s office, the kumpit captain said he would take me. He didn’t want any money, he added, but could I eat their fish and rice? Of course, I said; again I held out my hand to him, and this time he took it more firmly. A tall, broad Filipino who looked a bit like Anthony Quinn had accompanied the captain, and he, too, shook hands and said, ‘Welcome.’
Inspector Ahmat said, ‘The captain told me that he can’t take you all the way to Zamboanga. You see, what he is doing is illegal – the barter trade, I mean. In any case, his real destination is Cebu City, not Zamboanga, so he wants to drop you off at an island before Zamboanga. A friend of his will take you on from there, he said.’
‘I don’t much like the sound of that.’
‘Exactly. I told him that he must take you right to Zamboanga.’
I turned to the captain. ‘Do you agree, Captain?’
He smiled and shrugged. ‘Okay. I agree to Zamboanga.’
It was arranged that I should present myself at the wharf the next morning at ten o’clock with my baggage; the kumpit would sail soon after.
The day was left to me. I took a taxi to the Straits Hope and told Barker regretfully that I would be leaving him. I had enjoyed my short voyage and his stories and mock gloom as we threaded our way through the islands at night.
At the head of the gangway we said goodbye. ‘Take care,’ Barker said. ‘See you in Singapore,’ I told him.
‘You’ve got a nerve, haven’t you?’
‘Well, you have to admit that creeping across this sea by plane would be cheating, and it would take much more nerve to explain that away when I get home.’
‘“Oh, the monkeys have no tails in Zamboanga, ta tatatatatatatatata ta….”’ Singing like a music-hall comedian Barker winked and waved as I lugged my cases down the gangway. From the quayside, I took a snapshot of him looking down at me from high up on the wing of the bridge.
‘Have you permit to photograph this ship?’ A policeman was coming toward me.
‘Of course,’ I said, and quickly got into the taxi.
*
A young Englishman I had met with Jago in Harrisons & Crosfield who had something to do with timber and forests had asked me to lunch. As we drove down the main street before turning off to his house in the hills above the port, I noticed the high percentage of Chinese names over the shopfronts and restaurants, although the Chinese are a minority here.
‘It’s a pity Sandakan was bombed during the war. Not many old houses survive,’ my host said.
‘It was the same story from Brunei to Macassar. Senseless bombing.’
The Allies, as much as the Japanese, were responsible for the destruction. But thinking of the Second World War reminded me of the puzzle I had discussed with Lindsay Emmerson in Calcutta. The Japanese army came ashore in North Borneo and Sarawak, defeated the British and Australians, and took many prisoners. As elsewhere when they captured British or Dutch or French possessions, the Japanese commanders announced themselves to the local populations – Chinese, Malays, Dusuns, Dayaks, Ibans and the rest – as liberators, brothers come to free fellow Asians from the European imperial yoke. But, having made that point, they began to behave towards the local population they claimed to have ‘liberated’ with a good deal more savagery than the former European masters had ever meted out. They had the hearts and minds of millions of Asians in their grasp, and then proceeded to treat them like enemies, jailing, torturing, humiliating and beheading them. It was an amazing psychological error, induced by the Japanese ‘master-race’ attitudes of the time.
Like the rest of North Borneo and Sarawak, Sandakan had experienced the harshness of Japanese occupation, and many of the indigenous Dusuns and Kadusans formed an active underground resistance. It was in this obscure port in 1945 that the Japanese command, seeing that the war was going against them, decided to eliminate the eighteen hundred Australian and six hundred British prisoners of war still alive in Sandakan. They organized a death march through a hundred and fifty miles of malarial swamp and thick jungle to Ranau, a small town at the base of Mount Kinabalu. The prisoners were given a ration of two and a half ounces of rice a day; they supplemented this lethally inadequate diet with snakes, rats – anything they could find. If they collapsed from exhaustion the Japanese soldiers shot them where they lay. Dennis Bloodworth told me that one of the six survivors later recalled that Kinabalu towered over them higher and higher, like a ‘gigantic tombstone’, as they staggered towards it – and for most of them this was exactly what it was.
Those who reached Ranau heard there of the Asia-wide Japanese collapse and surrender. There weren’t many of them. The six Australian survivors – the six hundred British were all dead – weighed, on average, less than sixty-five pounds when loyal Dusuns began to nurse them back to health. Now, thirty-five years later, driving to lunch with this amiable timber expert, it was difficult to imagine such horrors. What was the point?
My host led me into an open verandaed house with polished wood floors. We kicked off our shoes at the door, and from the terrace looked down on a breathtaking view of Sandakan Bay through the spreading foliage of large trees. A European meal was served by his amah, a smiling Muslim girl from Macassar, who moved silently on bare feet. Over the chicken, he told me that his immediate boss had worked in North Borneo for seventeen years, and that his general manager was entering his thirty-fourth year.
‘Almost a working lifetime.’
‘It is, when you consider that these days people who work in the tropics retire in their mid-fifties.’
Sandakan has a very small British community. I wondered if, à la Maugham, there was much infidelity and ‘going off the rails’. ‘No,’ said my host with a smile, ‘these days wives don’t seem to do that sort of thing out here.’ Since he was young, personable, available, and so a natural prey for predatory wives with too much time on their hands, he must have known what he was talking about. Perhaps TV diverted their minds into less active channels.
And the Sabah people?
‘Well, I’m beginning to think there are hidden depths to them. I had thought that without exception they were the nicest people in the world, but not long ago I went to a bar here – a bit sleazy, I admit – and, without warning, someone smashed a chair over my head. Lucky the chair was made of wood.’
‘What did you do?’
‘I was too stunned to do anything, but my friend, a big chap with a black beard, stood up and they all scattered. It shows that some sort of antagonism is simmering near the surface, doesn’t it?’
‘Possibly. But in a dark bar there might be no significance whatever. Just drunkenness.’
‘I hope that’s what it was, because I like the people of Sabah.’
Knowing he was a timber man, I asked him how the government looked after North Borneo’s magnificent forests. In Indonesian Borneo and in Celebes, a cruel and common sight is an expanse of bald mountainside, the result of the ripping out of forest and undergrowth by mechanical grabs imported by greedy foreign timber companies. Once destroyed, rain forests can never be restored.
‘It’s not as bad as that here,’ my host said, ‘although there’s too little replanting, and generally it’s pine trees for quick money.’ He added, ‘I love being in a forest. I like wandering further and further in, you know, so that I almost get a feeling that I’m lost. I love the sense of wave after wave of huge trees stretching up around me, of the canopies of foliage overhead blotting out the sky.’ He laughed. ‘Once I was carried away like that, feeling I was quite lost in the wilds, when suddenly I was astounded to hear a police siren, loud voices and shots. Fifty yards on I found timber workers in a camp gathered round Charlie’s Angels on their telly. That’s modern Sabah for you!’
He told me of a government centre for orang-utans near Sandakan, a praiseworthy effort to save those shaggy, sad-faced creatures from extinction.
‘They have eight orang-utans there. There’s one lovely great male, tame and friendly, except that, oddly enough, he can’t stand European women. Attacks them. God knows why.’
Before I left, my host recommended that I have a word with a local old hand, Dr Nigel Lever, who knew about the Sulu Sea area and Zamboanga.
In the evening I had a drink in the Sandakan Recreation Club, where I found Ian Guthrie, the chief engineer of the Straits Hope, in the bar in an undershirt and old shorts with the bottoms rolled up. He and Captain Barker were sailing next morning, he said. I felt as if a bridge were burning behind me.
Later, in the Nak Hotel café, Dr Lever, a friendly man and unexpectedly young, gave me the name of a satisfactory hotel in Zamboanga, which he described as a pleasant town, if dull. He had crossed the Sulu Sea only by air, but had two things to say about my journey. The first thing was that patients of his – local seafarers, Dusun, Malay and Filipino – had been made to walk the plank in the Sulu Sea. Walk the plank? ‘Usually it’s the boats the pirates are after, not you.’ It was nice to hear that one could be made to walk the plank and still survive to tell the tale.
Dr Lever’s second point was, ‘Don’t on any account let the kumpit captain drop you at any island en route.’
Alone at the table, I reflected that my situation was a little nerve-racking. Zamboanga was a longish way; I didn’t know the kumpit’s captain or the crew from Adam; and I had no firm facts about the Sulu Sea. On the Baluchi boat to Karachi and on the Maldivian launch to Malé, the risks mainly involved the weather or fire. Here the weather hadn’t entered my thoughts. The monsoon rains were ending. There had been rain today, but nothing like earlier downpours that had washed gaping holes in the asphalted roads. Besides, bad weather might keep the pirates and the Moros in port.
Anyway, I thought, the choice has been made for me. After all, I have chosen travel by sea from Europe to Canton; the Sulu Sea is on the way; I must cross it by boat, not by air; and that is that. The priority is clear, the requirement obvious, and it only remains to get on with it. In which case, instead of worrying about it over cold coffee or nervously prodding the plastic tablecloth with the prong of a bent fork, it’s best to go to bed. I went upstairs, stared from the window for a few minutes at the darkened kumpit wharf, read a few soothing paragraphs of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, and slept.
In the morning, John of Special Branch came round early with a police friend, and we had coffee and omelettes together. Slicing the toast in two, the friend said, ‘These pirates of Sulu are very merciless.’
John glanced at me. ‘But they haven’t killed any foreigners yet.’ This wasn’t quite true; recently they had shot the wife of that Norwegian yachtsman and two other European sailors near Jolo Island. Still….
‘Thank you, John,’ I said.