THE MISSION TO THE ANDAMANS WAS AN ADVENTURE BILLY WILLIAMS had been spoiling for. And yet he couldn’t focus entirely on it, because he was leaving behind those dearest to him: his elephants, his Alsatian dog Molly Mia, and Susan Margaret Rowland.
He had reason to worry on all counts. The elephants, whom he had doted on for ten years, were in the hands of a new recruit, capable but untested. Molly, the jungle-trained dog who had never been apart from him, would now be staying with someone she hardly knew, and in the crowded city no less. And Susan. He knew by now that she was the love of his life, but he had to trust she felt the same way. He had seen far-flung tuskers converge on a tiny patch of jungle, drawn by a receptive female, and the human equivalent was happening in Rangoon in his absence. Susan had been the target of attention from other Bombine men, and, most unsettlingly, from He Man, who had promised to look after her. That thought, more than the heaving ocean, had the power to sicken him.
Would he have a soul mate, a dog, or even his platoon of elephants in four months? With all of those unknowns, he wasn’t sure what he would be returning to. And that was assuming he would return, which not everyone at the time would have bet on.
The Andamans, consisting of 550 islands, had for centuries unnerved outsiders. It was a mysterious archipelago surrounded by shark-infested waters. Harboring hostile natives, terrible disease, huge monitor lizards, and mangrove swamps, this was a corner of the world in which explorers could vanish without a trace. Some of the islands were no more than rocks jutting up from the water. Very few were inhabited; fewer still had ever been seen by Westerners, but all were feared. Ptolemy called them the “Cannibal Isles.” Williams’s Burmese friends referred to the place as “Kalah Kyan”—the Black Islands, the Islands of No Return, or the Disease Islands.
He would have three young assistants for the work: Geoffrey W. Houlding, of Bombine’s Rangoon mills, Max Christian Carl Bonington, and a young man named Bruno. “I had no briefing for the adventure,” Williams wrote. “I was merely told that since the competition of Pacific hardwood timbers was so affecting the prices of teak markets of Burma the company which employed me were considering entering the field. It was believed that the forests of the North Andaman Islands might offer supplies. My work was to explore them, cruise them, enumerate sufficient trees and sample areas of what I found and report.”
The only timberwork that had been done there previously was on narrow coastal plots, so the quality and quantity of wood in the interior were unknown.
Most of all, Williams’s personal contribution would be assessing whether elephants, so necessary to hauling logs in the jungle, could survive on the available vegetation. In preparation, he had followed one of his female elephants for three days and nights, getting little sleep himself, in order to identify what and how much she ate. If he was going to look for adequate elephant forage he wanted to know it when he saw it. Geoff, “a Forest engineer with expert knowledge of timber milling,” would determine if the forests contained timber worth harvesting.
The most remarkable part of the trip—the fact that his colleagues found repugnant—was that Williams would be employing a crew of forty-eight hardened criminals. He had always viewed Burmese prisoners in the mold of Robin Hood, not Western thugs, and had no qualms. The convicts would be given the utmost courtesy. He believed now, years after the stabbing incident with Aung Kyaw, that treating others with the respect he gave his elephants could, often enough, work miracles.
The deal made with the convicts was a good one: They would have a year shaved off their sentences for good behavior, they would receive payment in cash at the end, plus, at Williams’s insistence, they would be issued new shorts and vests—or light button-neck undershirts—and a blanket. Burmese knives, or “dahs,” used during workdays, would be returned each night.
MOSTLY, THE JOURNEY WAS what Williams had hoped it would be. There were natural marvels awaiting him: emerald green islands, white breakers, and thousands of varieties of coral, including fire and staghorn. The archipelago was home to massive saltwater crocodiles, sharks, cobras, geckos, deer, and robber crabs—the largest crabs in the world, big and strong enough to crack open and consume coconuts. He even came close to a dugong, a marine animal that is a near twin of the manatee, and may be the inspiration for mermaid tales.
The work in this “richly timbered, but very difficult country” was punishing, and the crew members felt they were hacking their way through an inch at a time. When Singapore-based RAF Supermarine Southampton flying boats arrived to take aerial photos for the expedition, Williams scrambled into one of them. From high above, without the slow work of cutting paths, he was even more amazed at the beauty: seas “in every shade of blue,” dotted with pinks from coral beds below or “blotches of dark seaweed” waving like cornfields, and mangrove swamps patterned like “dark green oriental carpets.”
The planes not only rendered a heavenly vision of the islands, they would, before they left, provide his one chance to correspond with Susan. He had been eager to stay in touch, but now, quite suddenly, he felt seized with doubt—not about his own feelings, but hers. Back down on the ground, he wondered if during his exile he had exaggerated the depth of the connection between them. “I did not know how to write to Susan what was in my heart. Perhaps the sympathy which I thought existed between us, unspoken, was all my fancy. My letter might arrive between one date with He Man and the next. I had not the trust in my own love. I was afraid of making a fool of myself.”
Perhaps it would be best to write nothing, “preferring the certainty of not being hurt to the possible joy that a letter might give.” But he had a book by John Still, Jungle Tide, lying open on his camp bed. And he copied out longhand one of the poems that had resonated with him. It seemed a safe way to take a chance. The verse was an ode to nature, all the things that Williams cherished—mountains, jungles, the sea, and “wild things that wander there.” But it kept coming back to the refrain “All these I love with a love that possesseth me / But more than all of these I worship thee.” He placed it into an envelope unsigned, sealed it, and gave it to the pilots returning to Singapore. He wouldn’t know her response for weeks.
In the meantime, the islands provided a moment of tenderness. While exploring a wooded area with one of the men, he saw a spotted deer stag leading a small group of females. The male strolled directly toward Williams, his movements “full of grace and quite without fear.” He waggled his tail and cautiously approached to within inches. “His long neck stretched out and the twitching nostrils of his velvet muzzle were close enough for me to touch.” The buck extended his neck another inch and gently licked the salty sweat from his hand. “It was an extraordinary sensation,” Williams said.
Throughout the expedition, Williams saw ample evidence that the islands could support elephants. In fact, he was excited to discover proof that one single male elephant, shipped down here decades before, was still on the loose, island hopping. But by this time, Williams already knew that Geoff’s report would not be favorable and would kill the project’s prospects. There was plenty of timber—a variety of species including highly prized padauk, marblewood, and soft woods used by the match industry in India—but Geoff believed there were too many potential hazards in extracting it from the remote islands, which had no infrastructure in place.
Everything the party had done, Williams felt, had been useless. The worst of it was the fate of the prisoners, who had been so hardworking and conscientious. Williams had hoped to hire them as free men when a logging operation started up. “Never were my heartstrings so torn,” he wrote, as on seeing the men loaded aboard the boat to return to prison, where he knew they would sink back into their “sheep-like lethargy.” They had turned out to be “good and honest and reliable.”
He had climbed aboard the Rangoon-bound ship looking like a bearded “pirate,” wondering what lay ahead for himself, his elephants, dog, and girlfriend. Clean-shaven and upbeat by the time of arrival, Williams eagerly scanned the waiting faces on the docks. Susan wasn’t there, but the last person he wanted to see—He Man—was. In fact, the cheeky bastard had already spotted him and was grinning and waving madly. He didn’t even wait for the gangway. Always a show-off, he sprang from the dock and heaved himself over the railing, bouncing in front of Williams with an exhalation of breath. Did this mean he was engaged to Susan and breathless with the news?
As it turned out, Williams had nothing to worry about. He Man told Williams that Susan had been delayed in Mandalay but would be back in Rangoon the next day. He carried a cable from her. Williams ripped it open and read. She had booked herself on the ship back to England that she thought Williams would take when he went on leave in a couple of months, the Staffordshire. Her intention was clear, but he would cable her back immediately: “You’re on the wrong ship. If you are coming home with me it’s the Shropshire you should be on.”
Along with the joyful news came a terrible report. In Williams’s published writing, he maintained that the note read, in part: “Molly Mia sends apologies not meeting you, but we are delayed a day in Mandalay.” Susan Williams’s own memoirs concur. But the truth was more painful. In his private papers Williams wrote of a terrible “heartache” on learning that Molly Mia had “died as a result of an accident whilst I was away.” He didn’t say what exactly had happened; it was his habit to bury the most painful events of his life in silence.
In a cable from Mandalay, Susan Rowland made her feelings clear to Williams, whom by now she was calling “Jim,” as his family did. She was in love with him.
The next day Susan arrived, and even in grief, Jim found “there was an understanding between us.” There wasn’t much time for romance; Williams had a detailed report to write in the week before he was to head up-country. But it helped keep his mind off Molly. “Like most heartaches I have had in life,” he wrote, “it was good for me, for only by keeping going full out can such things be lived down.” Something else would comfort him, too: elephants. As luck would have it, he was about to be immersed in them. Before taking leave, he was scheduled to head north for the satisfying task of inducting fifty newly purchased elephants from Thailand into the Bombine ranks.
The animals and their riders had been making their way to Upper Burma for the past year. The elephants would stay, and the men would be returning to their homeland, handing their charges over to a set of new riders.
Out of Rangoon and returned to the forest, Williams was back in his element, marching for miles every day in the corner of the world he knew best. Williams’s new recruit, “Edward,” had been up-country all this time—in charge of hiring the new men and coordinating the rendezvous. The camp he had chosen was a fine clearing framed by massive tamarind trees that provided desperately needed shade in the hot season, and a wide creek bed offering the only trickle of water available for miles.
IT WASN’T LONG BEFORE Williams, so starved for the company of elephants over the past months, heard the symphony: the sound of fifty teak kalouks approaching. Then, the hot, hushed forest came alive with the unmistakable presence of giants. Williams was on his feet. Out from the wall of vegetation and into the clearing walked an incredible sight—the first regal tusker. The massive bull was clearly in musth—his temples darkened in streaks with the flow of his glands. He was ridden by a mahout and flanked by two spearmen. After him, one after another after another, came the colossal convoy. One out of every four was a tusker. Atop each squatted a rider, bare-chested and wearing loose black trousers as if they were in regiment uniform.
“Never in my service had I seen such a parade of magnificent animals,” Williams thought. They were stockier than his own Burmese animals. And despite a year of marching, “their condition was superb.”
Williams, with Edward and his lead elephant man, walked the towering line, taking the animals in one by one. Feeling nostalgic for his own start in Burma, Williams turned to Edward and echoed his old taskmaster Harding, who had entrusted him with his first four elephants twelve years before: “There are fifty of the finest elephants in Burma. They’re yours, and God help you if you can’t look after them.”
Williams now raced to his up-country headquarters in Mawlaik, where he had been transferred once again, for some quick tying up of loose ends. This was where he had spent most of his service as a young man, and further, it was Bandoola country. He was about to head off on home leave and would instruct the man who would fill in for him there. Edward had his work cut out for him: settling the fifty elephants and riders into several new camps with about seven animals per camp. They would not actually start work just yet, since this was the beginning of their hot weather season rest.
It was a whirlwind, but by May 1932, Jim Williams was aboard the Bibby liner Shropshire with Susan by his side for a six-month leave. Hopwood had given his blessing to their union. Old Uncle Pop had said, with characteristic restraint, “He really is a man, Miss Poppy.”
Williams was, in fact, a real man now. And the realization of it as the ship cruised by the Andaman Islands prompted something surprising—what he called a “confusion of feelings.” He had survived more than a decade in the jungle and was reaping the rewards that company lore had always promised him—a promotion, a wife, a sense of destiny fulfilled. But beginnings brought endings. Molly was gone, and his dream of the Andamans, too. In addition, he was, quite clearly, leaving something significant behind. “Looking back,” he would write, “I date this as the end of my being a young man.”
