We steamed south-east out of the Gulf of Thailand, slipping into the familiar, comforting round of the ship’s routine, passing ‘bits of strange coasts under stars, shadows of hills in the sunshine, men’s passions in the dark, gossip half-forgotten, faces grown dim.’ Thus reminisced Conrad in the introduction to Nostromo, and I recalled ‘The Secret Sharer’, a story of his set in the Gulf. He had cause to know those waters, having taken three weeks to work the barque Otago down to Singapore with a sickly crew and a jinx to hinder him. Delay was to dog us, too, though not on such a scale, for round Cape Cambodia we began to lift to a low swell, rolling down from the north-east as we followed the curve of the coast of Indo-China across the mouth of the Mekong Delta.
As we edged away from the Vietnamese coast the swell steepened and the wind slowly increased to a strong breeze, bringing to mind the old weather couplet:
Long foretold, long last,
Short notice, soon past.
We were in for a blow.
The Mate began to worry about the cargo, for the stows had been broken down in our discharging, and although the Carpenter had ‘tommed-off’ what he could, heavy weather could dislodge the wooden planks and beams jammed skillfully and wedged with care to stop the cargo taking charge.
‘Where’s the bluidy lookout?’ asked the Mate suddenly.
‘On the fo’c’s’le,’ I replied, whipping up my glasses, to find the catwalk across the bow empty. We had not yet shipped any seas but a sudden sensation of panic uncoiled in my belly that we had lost him over-board.
‘Who is it?’
‘Embleton, sir.’
‘Bluidy hell! That bugger skated on thin ice in Bangkok… get up there and have a look. If he’s asleep, leave him and let me know.’ I went forward as a spy, but with expectations less cynical than the Mate’s. I descended to the centre-castle, went past Number Three hatch, and paused by the contactor house at the head of the well-deck ladder. I half expected to see a limp body, pallid in the dark swirl of water that had accumulated at the after end of the well-deck. The sibilant hiss of the sea took precedence over the muted rumble of Antigone’s racing engines as she drove her bow into the swell. The sea rose to her sheer strakes, black and suddenly very close. I chose my moment and made for the forecastle, legs leaden with compression as the ship heaved upwards beneath me, light as a feather as the deck subsided, falling through twenty feet before theatening to crush me again with the massive upsurge of her buoyancy. I reached the forecastle ladder, hoisted myself up and dodged round the windlass. Fearing what I might find, I scrambled over the low breakwater as the cables chinked in the pipes and Antigone climbed upwards into the sky. My guts surged into my throat as she fell back. Two geysers of water roared up the hawse pipes and collapsed in dark rushing streams, foaming aft, deflected over the side by the breakwater. I was soaked to the knees, half off-balance, and my torch beam wavered around the triangle of deck beyond the pipes.
Embleton lay asleep, half-tucked under the grating upon which he should have stood his watch, his face as innocent as his mother supposed him to be. Feeling the guilt of the informer, I worked my way back to the bridge.
‘He ought not to be up there, sir,’ I said, ‘she’s shipping…’
‘He’s asleep then?’
‘Yes.’
‘If-he was awake he’d have rung and asked to be shifted.’
The Mate picked up the forecastle telephone, pressing the bell insistently. Lifting the glasses I saw Embleton wake with a feral shrug. His arm went out to the phone.
‘You’re asleep on lookout, Embleton,’ I heard the Mate say. ‘Get yourself up here.’
I watched Embleton’s progress down the deck, half thinking he would be washed overboard, but he arrived safely. He gasped his denial with an affronted dignity that made me wonder if I had been deceived.
‘You were asleep on lookout,’ the Mate repeated, cutting short the torrent of defiance, innocence and outrage that Embleton began. ‘You’ll see the Master tomorrow morning. Now go below and call your relief.’
Embleton passed me swearing under his breath. I could smell the beer on him. At the after end of the boat-deck he stopped and rounded on the distant bridge.
‘Scotch bastard!’ I heard him bellow into the rising wind.
The full force of the gale struck us at dawn. Grey and tumbling seas foamed down-wind towards us, their streaming sides streaked with spume, so that the violence of Antigone’s pitching increased. The regular motion of the swell was now compounded by the wind-driven seas and the ship staggered occasionally, thumping into the walls of water. Her rivets screeched, she panted with a strange clicking noise and flung white sheets of water a hundred feet from her thrusting bow. Embleton was arraigned for punishment. This formal process was held in the Master’s cabin and known colloquially as a ‘logging’, for the entire transaction had to be recorded, verbatim, in the ship’s Official Log-Book, a document supplied by the Board of Trade into which all such events, plus dates of boat and fire drills, the list of the crew, their conduct, notes of protest and sundry matters involving the discipline, business and regulation of the ship were recorded. It was distinct from the Mate’s, or Deck, Log, which contained the record of weather and navigational details. The Official Log-Book was filled in by the Purser acting as clerk and I wondered, as I joined the Mate, cap under my arm, whether successive occasions such as this had given him his dry outlook.
China Dick sat at his desk looking at the Mate’s written report. There was a knock at the cabin door and the Bosun ushered Embleton in, then waited behind him, representative of Embleton’s interest.
Embleton looked round at us, scowling at me ferociously. After a moment Captain Richards turned and regarded Embleton.
‘Well, Embleton…’
‘Mister Embleton, Cap’n.’
China Dick ignored the interruption ‘…Here you are again. You went absent without leave in Penang and were docked a day’s pay and your train fare to Port Swettenham. You misbehaved in Bangkok…’ His crime in Singapore had gone undiscovered.
‘What the fuck did I do wrong in Bangkok?’
China Dick turned to the Purser, allowing the frantic pen to catch up. I could just see the expletive recorded for posterity.
‘You know very well there was trouble in the seaman’s alleyway. Count yourself fortunate that you didn’t end up on the carpet for that…’
‘There was others involved… dis is fucking victimisation. Yeah, victimisation. You got a note of that, eh?’ Embleton stepped forward, wagging his finger at the Purser. The Purser nodded, his face a mask of neutrality. I saw the Bosun’s hand on Embleton’s arm, restraining him.
‘And now,’ went on China Dick smoothly, ‘you have been found asleep on lookout during the four-to-eight last night.’
‘Who says?’ Embleton swivelled to me.
‘I say, Laddie,’ put in the hitherto silent Mate, his voice low and menacing. ‘You were asleep on lookout.’
‘How d’you know I was asleep. I might have ducked down behind the windlass for a quick drag…’
‘The Fourth Mate came forward and checked,’ said Captain Richards with an air of exasperation.
‘And you didn’t wake me, you bastard.’ Embleton turned his fury on me, snarling with bared teeth so that I felt the full force of his malice.
‘I told him not to wake you, Embleton,’ snapped the Mate. Embleton’s eyes remained on my face. He knew he was powerless against the Master or the Mate, but a mere junior officer was a different matter.
‘D’you have anything to say?’ Captain Richards asked, almost wearily.
‘Yeah. I wasn’t asleep.’ He was on the defensive now, gauging our reaction to his protest of innocence. Our eyes watched, opaque with disbelief and he was compelled to ridiculous justification: ‘I was just resting.’
China Dick turned to the Purser. ‘D’you have that? Embleton says he was “just resting”.’
‘I have it, sir,’ nodded the Purser, his pen continuing to fly over the lined pages.
‘This is a serious offence, Embleton. While I gave you the benefit of the doubt in Bangkok, your conduct does nothing to persuade me that I should do so again.’ China Dick’s mellifluous English picked his words with barbed precision and we waited for sentence. ‘You will be fined two days’ pay, your bar account will be stopped and you will not be allowed ashore in Hong Kong.’
‘Bloody hell, Cap’n, you can’t do that!’ Embleton exploded. ‘This ain’t the fucking Bounty, this is the nineteen sixties… you can’t stop my shore-leave. I know my rights!’
‘And I know my duty, Embleton! You were fast asleep on lookout and that endangers the ship!’
‘You’re a right bloody shower, you bastards…’ Embleton scowled round at us.
‘Come along boyo,’ said the Bosun, ‘don’t get yourself into more trouble…’
We could hear Embleton protesting in the alleyway as the Bosun took him aft. At the boat-deck door he flung one final imprecation at us. ‘Bastards!’
‘Cythral,’ growled China Dick looking up and dismissing us. ‘Thank you gentlemen.’
‘Always one fly in the ointment,’ remarked the Mate in the less tense atmosphere of the alleyway as we trooped out of the Master’s cabin.
‘The trouble is the buggers don’t really want to come to sea,’ said the Purser, as if men like Embleton besmirched his own calling. ‘They only come to make a few bob.’
‘And trouble,’ added the Mate.
‘Aye, and trouble.’
‘Don’t know why we bother with buggers like that.’
‘Keep the Unions happy and uphold the rule of Law,’ said the Mate sarcastically.
‘Strike a defensive blow in the class war,’ I put in sententiously, knowing the Purser’s penchant for such references. He rounded on me with astonishing ferocity.
‘Our class has no champions,’ he snapped, turning into his cabin. The Mate raised one prominent eyebrow and pulled his pipe from his pocket.
‘Just responsibility, Laddie. No power, just responsibility.’ And sighing, he too entered his cabin, leaving me in the alleyway feeling stupidly inexperienced.
The ship shuddered as she butted a heavy sea. Outside the wind was increasing and though we assembled on the bridge at noon, the grey scud that overcast the sky prevented our finding our latitude. We were alone in a heaving desolation of water, the sky thick with it and the horizon furred and indistinct. We sank into the gloom of bad weather, retreating to our bunks when our duties were over, breathing the stale, uncirculated air that was also thick with the taint of bad conscience. As I dozed in my cabin in half-hearted pretence at reading, I was disturbed by a faint scrabbling at the door. Sparks, pale with what I presumed was sea-sickness, asked if he could speak to me.
‘Yeah, sure. Come in.’ Reluctantly I stirred myself, sticky with sleep in the enclosed and humid atmosphere of the accommodation.
‘I, er…’
‘What’s the matter?’
‘Well… it’s… it’s bloody embarrassing,’ he managed in a rush and I could see the pallor was fear, not sea-sickness. It was more than embarrassment that had driven him to his confession, for I knew what was coming.
‘I think I’ve got a dose.’
‘Oh, shit…’
It was out now and he could let it flow in a torrent of relief. ‘I went with one of those Bangkok girls, you know… she got into my cabin one night and, well, one thing led to another, and… well, you see, there’s my girl-friend… she’s my fiancee really, we’re engaged…’
‘Have you told the Doc?’ He shook his head unhappily and I sensed he was close to break-down. ‘What are your symptoms?’
‘Well…’ he seemed to consider the question.
‘Have you got a discharge? I mean does it hurt when you pass water. I’m told it’s like pissing through broken glass… eh?’
‘No, nothing like that.’
There was a greater fear than the clap. ‘Any hard red spots?’ I was doing some sums in my head and cursing Mike at the same time. Sparks shook his head.
‘No… no spots.’ He swallowed. ‘That’d be syphilis, would it?’ he asked, his voice barely audible above the rumble of the engines and the howl of the gale.
‘Well, it would, yes. But if you’ve got nothing to show, why are you worried?’
He shrugged. ‘It’s a feeling… a sort of pain… I don’t know…’ He was plunged in an abyss of misery.
‘Look, see the Doc. As far as I know nothing shows for nine days.’
‘But the Old Man’ll have to know, and then…’ Sweat was pouring off him.
‘I suppose you didn’t use a johnnie, or an Anti-VD kit?’
He shook his head. ‘No.’
‘Well, don’t worry. It can be cured.’ I forbore to tell him all the horror stories one had heard, or about the symptoms sometimes taking three months to emerge, feeling sorry that Mike’s foolish practical joke had had such a devastating effect. ‘Look, have a beer and try and forget it.’
‘Okay. Thanks.’
‘Look forward to Hong Kong.’
‘What’s it like?’
‘In a nutshell, the most fantastic place on earth.’
As we brought Antigone’s head onto a more northerly course, a mood of cheerful expectancy filled the faces of our Chinese. Despite the gale, the poop showed signs of spring-cleaning. Normally scrupulously tidy, the Chinese nevertheless cleaned everything. Rows of washing danced in the wind alongside the drying bodies of fish and extemporised dust-pans made out of Teepol cans cut in half (the thrifty Chinese fashioned such artefacts out of the ship’s refuse). Gaily painted and drying in the gale, these turned alongside the fish and the washing under the wings of the docking bridge.
The Chinese quarters under the poop were a distinct contrast to those of the Europeans. Whereas our cabins were temporary abodes from which we decamped the instant we were given leave, the Chinese regarded the ship as their home. Where we reckoned our service aboard in months – though our senior officers sometimes stayed for years – the tenure of the Chinese was for much, much longer. Their chieftan was Chao Ven Ching, the Number One Greaser, a tall, cadaverous man with a pigeon chest, whose neck was as thin as a chicken’s and whose hoarse voice was attributed to the opium he took. Whatever the truth of this claim (and the penalities for possession of the drug were Draconian), he was all-powerful, a man to be reckoned with, who condescended to take orders from the Second and Chief Engineers, holding them in higher esteem than the Mate or China Dick himself.
The Chinese were a self-contained and self-regulating community. They had their own cook and galley, their own customs and hierarchy. They maintained a spotless ship and were rarely any trouble.
The bunk-space of every Chinese crew-member was his tiny home, a neat, personalised cubicle filled with photographs of an extended family, a small vase of plastic flowers, perhaps a shrine or book of Maoist philosophy, a shelf of books, a porcelain bowl and box of mahjong. At night, particularly in the still of the tropics, they played mahjong avidly, the click of the bricks loud on the messroom table, the excitement high in their conversation, for Chinese seamen were great gamblers and would bet on two flies crawling across a porthole. At Christmas China Dick had sent them all a couple of drinks and at Chinese New Year they would invite us down to their great feast. Occasionally the Mate, gratifying a minor vice, would send aft to the Greaser’s cook for a Chinese supper. He and the Purser, the men among us British most wedded to the ship, would relish their surreptitious indulgence with evident enjoyment. But for the main part we did not impinge upon their privacy beyond the Master’s daily rounds at sea.
As we bore up for Hong Kong the China Sea showed us its most treacherous face. Though deep it is littered with vast areas of shallows ready to trap even a modern ship, out in her reckoning. On our passage from Bangkok to Hong Kong we had to pass between the Paracels, an archipelago of reefs, islets and shoals over one hundred square miles in extent, and the Macclesfield Bank, a slightly smaller area resembling a sunken island. In the absence of observations we navigated on dead-reckoning, a process that diminished in accuracy the longer one relied upon it and the slower one travelled. At our normal speed it was surprisingly precise; but at sunset, such was the violence of our motion that Captain Richards ordered a reduction in our speed to 95 rpm, to ease the working of the hull and preserve the cargo from damage. This introduced an element of wind-drift, known as leeway, into our calculations.
Next morning the Mate decided to open up Number Five hatch and inspect one of the stows of cargo. For this purpose small access hatches were provided, but that by the main-mast, giving entrance into the ‘tween-deck, led directly onto a stow of cartons.
‘You’re a wee, skinny fellow,’ he said to me, ‘away down and check the tomming.’
I did as I was bid, wriggling over the top of the uneven cargo just beneath the beams of the upper deck, my boiler suit catching on every crate, and hampering my progress. I found the edge of the stow when my torch, being pushed ahead, dropped over it and, in a stygian gloom which creaked and groaned as the ship laboured and the cargo bent to the influence of gravity, I squirmed out into the comparative freedom of the hatch to the lower ’tween-decks. Recovering my torch I played its beam on the tomming. Vertical billets of timber were jammed between the deck and deckhead, secured by wedges and with cross-members nailed to them, holding the wall of boxes remarkably secure, except in one place where a kind of ‘cliff-fall’ had taken place. A few cartons had split open and their contents, some knitted fashion goods, had been strewn across the hatch. I gathered up what I could get out, secured the stow as well as possible and returned to the Mate.
He took the woollen cardigans and turned them over curiously with a grunt. I could sense his irritation at the mishap, trivial though it was.
‘Aye. I’ll advise the Old Man to note protest when we get to Hong Kong.’
I met Sparks in the alleyway as I went for a shower. He had the haunted face of the possessed. ‘Cheer up,’ I said, ‘you’ll be at it again in Hong Kong…’
He disappeared with a groan.
‘You really are a bastard,’ I said to Mike as we each drank a beer before noon. He smiled that superior smile of his. ‘He’s worried sick…’
‘Syphillophobia, the Doc calls it. Well-known medical condition among incautious mariners.’ He looked at me sideways. ‘Besides, you didn’t try and stop me.’
‘No.’ The thought nagged my conscience.
‘Hong Kong’ll sort him out.’
‘I’ve just told him that and he went wailing down the alleyway.’
‘If you can’t take the heat of the fire, keep out of the bloody kitchen,’ said Mike standing and tossing his empty beer can into the rosy. I felt irritated by his cavalier attitude to Sparks, born as it was out of his own problems.
‘Have you heard from your wife?’ I heard myself asking.
He turned and looked at me and I saw for a second his own anguish, a compound of guilt and uncertainty.
‘Yes,’ he replied with a catch in his voice. We stared at each other for a second and then his confidence returned. ‘Come on, drink up. Let’s go and find Hong Kong.’
Hong Kong found us in the nacreous mists of the following dawn. It peppered our radar screens with the outposts of its teeming population, mixed indiscriminately with those of its giant neighbour, the People’s Republic of China. The clusters of glowing dots spread out across our track so that it seemed impossible that we could find a way through to the harder echoes of the Lima Islands beyond.
As the daylight grew the Mate and I anxiously flitted between radar screen and bridge-wing, our eyes straining to adjust between the lambent echoes on the screen and the vacant image lenses of our binoculars.
‘Fine to starboard!’
‘Aye, I see her…’
Antigone leaned to her rudder and we began a slalom among the dense mass of junks patiently fishing the coastal waters off Kwang-tung. High-sterned, with their triple, pterodactyl-wings of sail, these craft had an exotic, impossible look to western eyes; yet their technical simplicity, the culmination of almost a thousand years of empirical design, had produced one of the most seaworthy and durable sailing craft in the world. Their windward performance astonished early western observers and their rig has, more recently, been adopted in yacht design. As we swept past the first of these wonderful little ships, some sixty feet in length, we could see her crew hauling nets, a cascade of silver pouring over her rail and into the wooden fish-pounds on her deck. At her stern a single old man, his creased face visible in my binoculars, looked up at us, his hand raised. Greeting, or clench-fisted gesture of annoyance? We had no means of knowing, for he and his boat had slipped astern and a frantic three rings from the forecastle bell told where a wide-awake lookout had spotted the next. The Mate had anticipated this and Antigone was already listing to port as her helm forced her bow round to starboard.
‘Got your arse in a tangle with the Aberdeen fleet, eh Mister?’ China Dick puffed up onto the bridge, pyjama bottoms flapping beneath a brocaded silk dressing gown of mandarin splendour. Brought from his bunk by the sudden tilt of the deck, he referred to the home-port of many of the fishing junks, Aberdeen Harbour on the west side of Hong Kong Island.
‘Aye sir, and the Whampoa Commune out o’ of the Pearl River…’
China Dick bent over the radar set. The coiled dragon that wound its way over the blue hillock of his broad back glared balefully at the Mate who stood impatiently aside.
‘Another junk right ahead, sir!’ I called from the starboard bridge-wing, but the Mate had anticipated again and Antigone was swinging to starboard, her deck tilting to the sudden thrust of her rudder.
The mist was lifting now, drawing back its veil as the sun rose, red and watery, revealing the sea studded with literally hundreds of junks. And there were ships too, a white P & O liner ethereal in the morning light but recognisable as the Chusan, bound south towards Singapore. Astern of us a tanker was making up towards Hong Kong like ourselves, while a black-funnelled cargo-liner, the Hanyang of Butterfield and Swire’s, was coming in from the eastwards. Still swimming in wraiths of mist, the islands of the Li-Ma Ch’un-Tao, the Lima Islands, were already abeam, their spiny crests hard-edged against the sky. Ahead, the lighthouse of Wang Lan winked its double flash at us before surrendering to the daylight.
Wang Lan’s wink was a reminder that Hong Kong was an anomaly, a place of extremes, its very existence of such moral dubiety that one suspended all judgements and accepted it for what it was: a market place created by the colliding of political dogmas. Such was the violence of the collision that sharp edges were blunted, reduced to impotence, in the face of human necessity and human resilience. The Crown Colony, wrested from Imperial China during the shameful wrangling of the Opium Wars, existed by courtesy of Communist China, and its harbour made possible a pragmatic truce between the Marxist and the Capitalist world.
Now immaculate in his doeskin reefers China Dick took over the con as we swung into the Tathong Channel. To the west of us the high peaks of the Dragon’s Back formed the eastern rampart of Hong Kong Island, to the east Joss House Bay and Junk Bay were backed by the rising land of the New Territories. We followed in Hangyang’s wake as she slowed to pick up her pilot from the launch bucking alongside. Ten minutes later we had done the same and Mr Wong arrived to the bridge, to shake hands affably with Captain Richards and give him his orders.
‘We discharge dangerous cargo at Quarantine anchorage, then go ’longside Holt’s Wharf.’ He bobbed a nod that was almost a bow at the bluff figure of the Mate and added, ‘Okay, we go half the speed and come to port now.’
China Dick nodded his assent, the telegraphs jangled and Antigone picked up speed again, slowly opening a cleft in the high green hills that formed the harbour’s eastern entrance, the Lei Yue Mun Pass. At the start of this narrow gutway, on the headland of Pak Sha Wan, a cargo ship of comparable size to the Antigone lay cast ashore, lifted completely out of the water, a victim of the last typhoon.
‘Let the wrecks of others be your seamarks, Laddie,’ muttered the Mate.
Along the ship’s rails heads had appeared, eager to see the bowl of the harbour and the concourse of ships and boats that churned its waters into a froth and all but obscured it with their movements and activity, for no ship was ever wholly idle in Hong Kong, even the warships were beseiged by sampans and wallah-wallahs eager to trade, barter or pimp to their crews.
We anchored long enough for a gang of coolies and a lighter to remove seventy drums of hydrogen peroxide from our fore-deck and then weighed, sliding alongside Holt’s Wharf at the toe of the Kowloon peninsula, the salient of mainland China that neatly divided Hong Kong harbour in two. As we swung alongside we passed the men-of-war: the aircraft carrier Eagle, the British destroyer Caesar and the frigate Loch Killisport, in company with the Australians, Vampire and Quiberon, and the Kiwi, Taranaki. The usual units of the United States Seventh Fleet were also lying at anchor: the Guided Missile cruiser Providence and two destroyers.
‘Look at that,’ said the Mate, wearing his tight smile of ironic delight as he contemplated any example of the folly of mankind. I raised my glasses. Passing quite close to the Providence a large motorised junk chugged its way across the harbour. At its grubby stern a huge red flag bearing the gold stars of the People’s Republic snapped in the breeze and the cargo, of live beef steers going for slaughter, could be clearly seen standing jammed in the junk’s waist.
‘Those’ll be steaks in an hour or two,’ remarked the Mate, tamping his pipe and picking up his cap, ‘being eaten by the dough-boys.’
It made nonsense of the United States’ refusal to recognise the existence of Communist China.
Hong Kong, the Isle of Fragrant Waters, was full of such contrasts. At the wharves deep-water merchantmen discharged their cargoes. At the fifty-odd mooring buoys others loaded, surrounded by junks and lighters whose progress to and from the waiting vessels was ceaseless. From time to time a merchant ship would slip her mooring and depart, to be replaced immediately with another in a seething, endless sequence of movement and activity. Backwards and forwards ran the ferries from Kowloon and Hong Kong. In the lee of the former the typhoon shelter was black with junks waiting for cargoes or being repaired and overhauled. The roofs of Kowloon’s shops and tenements disappeared into the greener country of the north under a blue haze of vehicle smoke rising from its teeming streets. On the other side of the harbour the waterfront of Victoria presented a similar spectacle, the high towers of the taipan’s offices, the banks and luxury hotels patronised by American tourists rose up the sides of the Peak. Wealth climbed with altitude, the higher one lived the more space one could purchase, so that towards the top the houses stood in isolated splendour, with groves of trees and lush green undergrowth between them. Even at this wintry season of the year, with the very summit of the Peak wreathed in cloud, the cool isolation of the hillside seemed highly desirable above the almost hysterical movement below. From Holt’s Wharf we could see other hillsides, the shanty towns and mean dwellings beyond Wan Chai and Aldrich Bay.
Police patrol launches gave the impression of a watchful bureaucracy, but the sheer scale of this great battle for survival by the Chinese defied true regulation. Under tattered sails junks ghosted through the anchorage bringing cargoes that were, without much doubt, from Canton. Even the millions of industrious hands in Hong Kong could not have produced all the curios, the silk paintings, the lacquer work, the intricately carved ivory, the cruder rosewood, the camphor-wood chests, the bamboo-ware, the ebony figures, the jade and the silks that tourists carried home as booty from a visit to this incredible place. Much came from the ‘non-existent’ country beyond the border but if provided with a certificate of origin from Hong Kong could be taken into the United States. It was a baffling example of, in the Purser’s dry phrase, ‘man’s hypocrisy to man.’
At water-level subsisted the most indigent of Hong Kong’s population. In tiny sampans not much bigger than an average yacht tender, and beneath whose flush-decks people slept, women and girls paddled around the harbour begging from the ships. Propelled by a yuloh, a single stern-sweep kept in constant motion by the wrist of a prematurely aged female whose cheap cotton smock and trousers flapped in the breeze, these pathetic craft hung around for hours in the hope of anything they could turn to advantage. Known as ‘dunnage girls’, their main-stay in the fight for survival was discarded dunnage, old planks and pieces of wood, torn down tomming and redundant packing that was used in the merchant-men for the protection of cargoes, for keeping vulnerable stows away from the condensation on steel decks and bulkheads. Coconut matting provided for the same purpose was also sought after, as was money, the odd coins every seaman had sculling around in a cabin drawer. To see these scavengers living off the prodigal waste cast off from the ships was a sight to stir compassion in even the most hardened breast, and we had hardly secured alongside Holt’s Wharf before the harrassed Mate was bellowing at me: ‘For Christ’s sake get down aft and stop those bluidy Middies chucking all my dunnage over the side…’
If we had been a hive of activity in the Malay ports, the next few days defy description. The ship was like a dying animal beset by legions of flies. She was a Babel of noise, a vast confusion of disparate activity, a conflict of intent and rabid disorganisation from which some odd miracle of sense began to emerge. Holt’s commercial empire was seen at its best in Hong Kong where ‘things got done’, as the Bosun said, in a manner ‘that would make a Scouse shop-steward fucking weep.’
Within minutes of our arrival the Mate was closeted with Hang Lee, the hatchet-faced sub-contractor who provided labour for the many jobs to be attended to about the ship. News of our homeward cargo was arriving via the agent and the appropriate arrangements were put in hand. The officers’ alleyway became a thorough-fare for the Chinese tally-clerks, the foreman, the security guards who were usually Indians, the agent’s runners, the powerful Chinese wharfinger and a sweating white cargo-surveyor come to make arrangements for a joint survey of damaged cargo.
Pushing and shoving through this clamorous throng besieging the Mate’s door came the barbers and tailors, the laundry-boy and the curio-hawkers, the shoe-maker and the taxi-tout. It was impossible to read one’s mail without frequent interruptions and the Purser, driven to almost as much distraction as the Mate by the mass of paperwork that all this entailed, was importuned by the individual members of the ship’s company who wanted their ‘sub’, the advance of wages that formed their spending money in this paradise of bargains.
On deck it was little better. Antigone swarmed with Chinese coolies, labourers of both sexes undertaking twenty tasks simultaneously. There were gangs of men trimming derricks to discharge our Hong Kong-consigned cargo; gangs of women, armed with brooms, sacks and scoops swept our emptying ’tween decks. More men chipped and painted areas of the ship it was impossible to undertake at sea. A gang of carpenters was ripping sections of caulking out of the promenade deck and forcing new oakum and pitch into the gaping seams and a host of black-clad and ancient women, their alopecia hidden under sheets of cardboard covered by black cotton so that they seemed a sect of satanic nuns, hovered over the yawning pit of the deep-tanks as the last of the cargo was ripped out.
These unfortunate creatures, known unkindly as ‘Hang’s Virgins’, worked with a small group of men who erected bamboo scaffolding inside the big cargo tanks. As soon as this framework was assembled they would take their tiny steel scrapers and their brushes below and remove every particle of last trip’s residual latex and every scrap of scale, so that the inside of the tank almost gleamed with bright metal, for in Shanghai we were to load wood oil, an almost fabulously valuable substance.
Escape from this bombardment by humanity was essential. Only the stoic Mate endured it without relief. China Dick, exercising the privilege of rank, had disappeared soon after our arrival, carted off by the agent to visit friends ashore. Later, we too went roistering in his wake, our pockets loaded with a month’s pay in Hong Kong dollars, to slake our thirst and titillate our cheated senses in any one of the numerous bars that lined Kowloon’s main thoroughfare, Nathan Road. Among the tables of these caravanserais glided the almond-eyed whores in the gleaming brocaded sheaths of their cheongsams. This most erotic of dresses covered a girl from calf to neck, yet revealed flashes of leg from ankle to upper thigh as she walked or danced under the dim lighting.
Our group split up, according to inclination, avoiding the exorbitant charges for drinks for the girls who slid next to us on the bench seats, teasing a tumescence out of us. Between bars we were importuned by gangs of Chinese boys offering to conduct us to a good bar, to meet nice girls, to black our boots. Our refusal turned these offers into bald beggary. To give money meant a limpet-like devotion from a posse of conductors, their black hair spiky on their crowns, their eyes bright despite the hour, their hands outstretched. To rid ourselves, we would hurl handfuls of cents down the road and leg it in the opposite direction. Sometimes it worked. A sleeting rain began to fall around midnight. Those of us recalled by duty hailed rickshaws and went lolling back to the ship. Others went their own way.
My own cargo-watch was dominated by the discharge of a sixty-five-ton transformer out of Number Two lower hold. For this we used the ship’s heavy-lift, or ‘jumbo’ derrick, capable of handling seventy tons, and the ticklish business occupied the forenoon. It took an hour to rig the guys (the wires that slewed the heavy steel boom) through a series of lead-blocks onto adjacent winches, effectively paralysing discharge from Number One hatch. The Mate appeared at the critical moment and the ship’s crew, under the vociferous direction of the Bosun, who obviously enjoyed the occasion, played to an audience of temporarily idle Chinese labourers. My own role was tutelary, to be called on only if something went wrong. As the heavy transformer emerged from the hold and traversed the deck, Antigone heeled to its shifting weight, listing at an appreciable angle until the waiting lighter received its load and Antigone rolled back towards the wharf like a live thing.
As the jumbo-derrick swung inboard again to be resecured, the suspended work resumed and the Bosun’s audience melted away. Walking aft I bumped into Embleton.
‘Oh, aye, it’s you, eh?’ I could smell stale alcohol on his breath.
‘Excuse me…’
‘Don’t fuck me around, Mister… I know your fucking sort. You just let me catch you shore-side, you bastard, and I’ll fucking fix you…’
‘Get on with your bloody work, Wacker!’ The Bosun’s grunting bulk rescued me from the embarrassment of public confrontation. I was clearly not to be forgiven for discovering Embleton asleep on look-out.
‘Thanks Bose.’
‘I should keep you head down, Fourth,’ he advised with uncompromising toughness.
‘Good advice.’
‘He’ll come to a sticky end…’ he waddled off and I made my way aft.
‘You should have knocked him down with a belaying pin,’ remarked Mike with his usual cynicism when I told him of the incident.
‘Say one word out of line and you’re in the shit,’ remarked Bob, taking over the deck from me. ‘What a bloody life.’
‘White trash,’ said Mike dismissively, all his old self-possession back in place.
‘Class warfare,’ said the Purser, handing me a bundle of boat-notes for small parcels of coasting cargo to be loaded before our departure.
‘Here, Bob, you can have these’ I handed them to the Third Mate. ‘I’m off ashore.’
‘Keep your eye open for Embleton, then.’
‘You tell Embleton I’m going to Ah Seng’s… but don’t tell him I’m having chow with a Police Inspector…’
I visited and was entertained by friends during our remaining duty-free nights in Hong Kong. After the chaos of ship-board life and the banal pursuit of pleasure along the fringes of Nathan Road, these glimpses of regular colonial life were oases of rest.
Four days after taking it up we relinquished our berth at Holt’s Wharf to the Menelaus, reloaded our hydrogen peroxide at the Quarantine anchorage and headed for the Lei Yue Mun Pass. About the deck’s hoses blasted rubbish out of odd corners and the derricks were swung inboard and secured. Odd sticks of dunnage were hurled over the side, to the delight of a few sampans bobbing in our wake. Discharging our pilot, we headed for the Tathong Channel and the Taiwan Strait beyond.