| We try to hustle the East—The Captain and the Consul—A Malay that ran amok—“Ya, Ya, plenty monkey”—The Australians get badly left—“Black squad” and “poop ornaments”—Trouble in the deep-sea trade. |
All nations, therefore, sent troops to China to take up the white man’s burden and, incidentally, any of the yellow man’s concessions that might be lying about. Then, too, there was talk of a war between Russia and Japan. As I had received a letter of thanks from Baron Reuter for my correspondent’s work in the Boer War, I thought I would draw four cards to that ace: I would go up to the East and see if I could get a job from Reuter’s on either side in any war that might happen along. I preferred to be with a white army as I had an idea that Chinese impaled correspondents on bamboos. But Australians cannot always be choosers.
July 29th 1901—Sailing for China. There is a shipment of horses on board for griffin racing in Shanghai. They are shipped by a little Jew horse-dealer who is sending three grooms with them—and three lively specimens they are. One of the grooms is an old Englishman, a fine-looking man who has been coachman to a governor, but has spent too many years of his life collecting the contents of glasses. The other two are Australian flotsam and jetsam; one a big hulking fellow who will probably do a bit of second-class prize-fighting when he gets to the East. They agreed to go for thirty shillings a week and second-class accommodation, but the Jew has only paid for third-class accommodation. There is much argument, and the old Englishman has a few words with the second-saloon steward. “Ho,” he says, “don’t speak to me about bein’ himpitant. I’ve been himpitant to the Marquis of Normanby, I ’ave, so I ain’t drawin’ the line at second-saloon stooards.”
The grooms bring their gear ashore—old tin boxes and shapeless bundles—and sit on the wharf. The Jew haggles with the purser, and each time that he comes back to the wharf the grooms say to him: “No, it’s no use, Frank, we won’t go now; even if they gave us the captain’s cabin we wouldn’t go. If they treat us like this in port what’ll they do when we get outside—puttin’ us among the Chows!”
Finally a deal is struck and we get away, the ship having been delayed two hours. But the white men have carried their point, and they do not herd with Chinese passengers.
Must learn all I can about the East. Made friends with the chief engineer, a Scotchman. He says Kipling is dreadfully inaccurate. “He talks of destroyers lyin’ close in to the reefs—close in to the reefs, mark you—an’ they drawin’ six feet forrard and nine fit aft.”
Even Homer sometimes nods, apparently.
He says that the Chinese are a peculiar people. It seems they had a custom of putting half-bricks into every bag of sugar, not clandestinely but openly. Why, he didn’t know.
“The shipping manager at Swatow—that big fat man, y’unnerstan’—he used all his influence wi’ them. He said they might as well put in five pounds of sugar as five pound of bricks. Just as cheap. The sugar’s worth very little an’ they had all the trouble of gettin’ the bricks. But they wouldn’a have it. ‘It belong old fashion’ was all he could get out of them.”
July 30th—At sea. A Sydney lady, whom I knew as a very beautiful girl, is on board. She is married to an official in Siam and is going back with a small child to rejoin her husband. She says Siam has a climate like the worst parts of India. Neither she nor the baby look fit to go back to it. Our girls go out pluckily to the ends of the earth, where they struggle with sick children, malaria, prickly heat, etc. But no one writes poems about them.
Our captain, Typhoon Tommy as they call him on the water-front, is an Australian. Over six feet high, strong as a bull, and particularly hard-boiled. He doesn’t drink at all at sea and when he comes on board after some glad days ashore be is pretty irritable. When getting under way he roared:
“Hoist up that jib!”
“Jib is hoisted, sir!”
“Well, hoist it down again. Who told you to hoist it?”
He would make a good general: he wants the initiative in everything.
The lady passenger for Siam has no nurse with her and has to look after her child herself. The youngster is very trying, and is wearing the mother out. Typhoon Tommy comes to the rescue.
“I’ll fix it for you, Mrs Floyd,” he said. Then, roaring down the deck: “Send number one boy here!”
Number one boy is the chief Chinese steward, and he comes ambling up, wondering what he has done now.
CAPTAIN: “Catchee one piecee steward, all same nurse pidgin, longa baby. Can do?”
NUMBER ONE BOY: “Can do.”
By which is meant that one of the Chinese stewards is to adopt the pidgin or business of nurse to the baby. Soon an impassive Chinaman comes along; takes all the child’s expensive toys away, and gives it a small onion and an empty reel of cotton as playthings. Jointly they hurl these objects about the deck. After half an hour of it the child is thoroughly happy and would as soon go to the Chinaman as to his mother. From that day on the mother had no trouble with the child. The captain says that Chinamen are the best nurses in the world.
At Thursday Island, which is a little bit of the East. There are more nationalities here than there were at the Tower of Babel—every Caucasian nation, local blacks, kanakas, Chinese, Japanese, Javanese, Malays, New Guinea boys. The local white police have to be very widewake to nip any troubles in the bud; for, when the Orientals, especially the Malays, have any grievance to avenge, they go stark staring mad. So the police here act like American police—club them first and find out about the trouble afterwards. Nobody has any rights up here; the glorious doctrine of democracy does not run north of Rockhampton. A pearler engaged two men, a Malay and a kanaka, to work on his lugger, and gave them the usual advance of ten pounds. They made a plot to stow away on our ship and get away with the tenners. The Malay billiard-marker at the local hotel gave the plot away and the kanaka was captured and locked up. The Malay evaded capture till dark. Then he went to the hotel, called out the billiard-marker and opened fire on him with a revolver. The first bullet took the ground; the second hit a bystander; and the third broke some bottles on the bar. The billiard-marker ran upstairs chattering like an ape. The barmaid lay flat on the floor among the bottles. She said: “I guessed he would have to fire low if he wanted to lay me out.” Then the Malay decamped, and up to the time we left he was at large in Thursday Island.
This trip up the Australian coast between the Barrier Reef and the mainland is one of the world’s ideal excursions. There is no swell, and the sea is so smooth that a cabin door, left ajar, will, remain ajar for hour after hour, neither swinging shut nor open. All day long the ship is passing coral reefs, and tropical islands where flying foxes in myriads sleep all day in the jungles, and Torres Strait pigeons settle in clouds on the wild fig-trees. In the interior of some of these islands there are flocks of wild goats; and on the beaches the turtles come ashore to lay their eggs in the sand. The sea is intensely blue and the climate just pleasantly hot. There is nothing to do except order drinks from the Chinese stewards and listen to the Chinese leadsman calling “Mark Tu-wev” (mark twelve) as he swings his lead over side; for the sea, though beautiful, is treacherous, and here and there the charts show unsurveyed patches that keep the already irritable Typhoon Tommy on tenter-hooks. By way of learning something about horse transport at sea in the tropics, I went down and gave the grooms a hand with the horses in the ’tween decks.
It makes one realize how hard the world has to work. Down in a sort of Turkish bath, caused by the close air and the heat of the animals’ bodies, each of these men has to feed, water, and groom twenty-eight horses, a lot of them unbroken. The animals are closely packed in little, narrow stalls, so that, in case of a typhoon, they will not be thrown off their feet; and spare stalls are left so that, as each horse is cleaned, it can be moved up one place. The horses get so tired and leg-weary that they fall down if they go to sleep; then the whole lot may have to be moved to get one horse on his feet again. The old English groom who looks like a cavalry colonel is in charge, and whatever his previous shortcomings may have been be is certainly doing his best by these horses.
“There you are,” he says, “I was coachman to the Marquis o’ Normanby, and if ’e kep’ my ’osses waitin’ of a cold night, ’e’d ’ear from me, I can tell yer. And now I’m groomin’ twenty-eight of these savages for thirty shillin’ a week, when a man oughn’t to be asked to do more than eighteen, And we used to get two pound ten a week. We tried to get the two ten; but there’s so many after a job they had us beat.”
It recalled Kipling’s man on the cattle-boat, who said:
| And I am in charge of the lower deck with all that doth belong. Which they wouldn’t give to a lunatic, with the competition so strong. |
After I had paid my footing with a few drinks, they took a brighter view of life. The old Englishman thought he might get a Government House job up in Hong Kong; the big hulking Australian said that he ought to be able to fix up for a fight or two in the East; and the little fellow who had never been away from Australia in his life was quite confident that be would do well among the “Pats” (Chinese).
“I’m one of these blokes,” he said, “that can plait meself in anywhere. If they was to shut me up in a hen-house I’d start to crow.”
Off Port Darwin. One of these violent little interludes that occasionally enliven a tropical voyage was staged to-day. The chief steward had been allowed to bring his wife with him as far as Port Darwin on their honeymoon trip, and the lady had laid out all her best clothes on the bed, intending to stagger Port Darwin when she went ashore. A Malay deck-hand, washing down the decks, let a full head of water go down a ventilator into the cabin, soaking the lady and her clothes and the chief steward’s papers. The chief steward ran on deck and hit the Malay; then the Malay dropped the hose and charged straight at the steward with a kris in his hand. The steward ran far his life with the Malay after him, round the horse-stalls and up the alley-way like a rabbit. The steward darted through the door into his cabin, and while the Malay was fumbling with the lock the second engineer arrived, hit the Malay a couple of times, took his kris from him, and scragged him back to his work.
(Then the Malay complained to the captain that the second engineer had hit him.)
There is an everlasting feud, like a Sicilian vendetta, between the deck officers and the engineers on some deep-sea vessels. The engineers refer to the deck officers as “poop ornaments” and the deck officers call the engineers the “black squad.” Sometimes when a ship is due to sail, a shipper will come down and hail the captain and say: “When are you ready to sail, Captain?” And the captain, in a voice to be heard all over the ship, will reply: “You’ll have to ask the black squad.” Then, when the query is referred to the chief engineer he will reply in a hoarse Scotch bellow: “Whun the poop ornaments are ready.” As our ship had been making bad time owing to a foul bottom, the captain had chosen to blame the engineers and was even more ready than usual to throw his weight about.
CAPTAIN (to second engineer): “What do you mean, Mr Macpberson, by striking a deck-hand? I won’t have any of the black squad strike a deck-hand on my ship. What do you mean by it?”
SECOND ENGINEER: “Ah wuz savin’ the chief steward’s life.”
CAPTAIN: “Never mind about the chief steward’s life. Never mind about that. If the chief steward gets killed, that’s my look-out. It’s got nothing to do with you. If you’d attend to your own business and strike some of your firemen we’d get the ship along better. For two pins I’d put you in arrest.”
SECOND ENGINEER (who, being a Scotchman, must have the last word): “Aye, ye hov the power to do that, an’ we’ll see whut the Marrine Engineers’ Assossiation wull say when we get ashore.”
As the captain knows that the marine engineers could boycott his ship and that he would have to walk the beach for the rest of his life he drops the second engineer like a hot potato and sends for the Malay. That worthy, being still in a state of “amok,” doesn’t draw the line at being insolent to captains. When asked a question in the Malay language by the captain he retorts, in Malay, with a foul insult. The captain hits him, knocking him down the companion-way, and breaking a bone in his own hand. So the good ship Floating Hell goes on her voyage with the chief steward’s wife in hysterics, or next thing to it; with a Malay deck-hand who has been hit: (1) by the steward for ducking his cabin, (2) by the second engineer for trying to kill the chief steward, and (3) by the captain for insolence, and is just waiting, to get level with one or all of his oppressors. Add to this that the black squad are furious at the treatment accorded their hero, and are holding meetings at which they congratulate the second engineer on having made the captain back-water, and at which they appoint a bodyguard to accompany the second engineer every time he goes on deck at night.
They staged the drama of the “Black Squad’s Revenge” later on, when Typhoon Tommy was a bit out of his latitude trying to find a small island port in the Celebes group. They found out, in some uncanny Scotch way, that Tommy had calculated that twelve hours steaming at the ship’s normal crawl of eight knots an hour would fetch him just opposite the port at daylight. So all that night they drove their firemen feverishly and piled on coal enough to stoke a Cunarder. They got twelve knots an hour out of her, and when Tommy came on deck at daylight, instead of being off the island he was forty miles past it. Climbing up to his bridge he was surprised to see the three engineers on deck, all leaning over the rail and spitting contentedly into the sea.
“Look at him,” said the chief engineer. “He does na’ ken whether he’s at Hong Kong or off Parramatta.”
Then, when Tommy put her about, and found the island, there was more trouble. When he went astern to drop the anchor the log-line had not been hauled in and the propeller gathered it up in style and chewed up the log and about thirty feet of the line. A dug-out came off crowded with Malays and skippered by a half-bred Portuguese, who was port officer, collector of customs, consul and general Pooh Bah. We had to land four Ballarat mining-engineers—they say there are Ballarat men even in Siberia—and Tommy wanted to know what port dues the ship would have to pay. The torpor of the tropics had eaten all the intelligence out of the Portuguese—or so we thought. But we were to find out our mistake later on.
“Your esheep, captain, she stay port only one day? Good, I go shore and I see. I not know what ze port due one day.”
Tommy sent the chief officer and the doctor and myself ashore and gave the chief officer six pounds to pay the port dues. On shore the people, little brown Malays like Japanese, many of them with a very Jewish type of face, simply swarmed. A corpulent Dutchman with spectacles and a silk umbrella was the head serang of the place, and after him trotted his aide-de-camp, a little brown Malay carrying a sword. Transport was provided by bullock-carts not much bigger than wheelbarrows and drawn by cattle not much bigger than goats. The ponies were so small that a man could stand alongside and put his leg over them just as easily as over a bicycle. It all looked like a doll’s house come to life. And over it brooded the sweltering heat of the tropics; the smell of rotting fish and decaying vegetation. Somebody started to eat durians in a shack alongside the road. The durian has a smell that can make Limburger cheese, or an American skunk, appear like attar of roses. Vessels loaded with this fruit are exempt from carrying lights.
In this pantomime country we three Australians felt like Gulliver among the Lilliputians. Of course, the first thing was to sample the local drinks. One naturally drinks vodka in Russia, samshoo in China, and in Malaya it had to be arrack.
“I haven’t much left to live for,” said the ship’s doctor. “I’ve been everywhere and eaten and drunk pretty well everything. Now I’m going to have a feed of durian and a drink of arrack; and if I live I’ll go home and set up a retreat for inebriates. Bring on your arrack.”
The cringing little Malay opened a cupboard and produced—a bottle of square gin.
“No, not that stuff,” said the doctor, “on board ship we put that stuff on sugar to intoxicate cockroaches. Arrack! Arrack! Haven’t you ever heard of arrack?”
The Malay made the wash-out signal with his hands, and stood looking at us as if he were going to burst into tears.
“Oh, well, don’t cry about it,” said the doctor. “You’ve done your damnedest. We’ll assimilate some gin, and then we’ll go and look for arrack later on.”
After absorbing a few gins the chief officer rose and said:
“Well, I feel just right now to take on this consul. Come down and see me make him hang by his tail from a tree.”
We found the official in at little sweat-box of an office, nervously pawing over the ship’s papers. As he answered “Ya, ya” to practically every remark, we gathered that he didn’t understand much English.
“Very katoogrious weather we’re having,” said the chief officer.
“Ya, ya,” said the Portuguese.
“Are there many monkeys about? I mean besides what’s in the town.”
“Ya, ya, plenty monkey.”
They then set to work to calculate the ship’s tonnage, and after getting four different results they agreed on a figure. In a weary, indifferent sort of way the small man did some figuring on a bit of paper and handed over the result—fifty-eight pound ten!
As the doctor afterwards said, the chief officer looked as aghast as a man who had swallowed a chew of tobacco.
“Fifty-eight pounds ten,” he roared. “Why, Hong Kong wouldn’t charge a quarter of it! Sydney would only charge fifteen pounds! We anchor two miles off shore, and we send four passengers and three tons of stuff in our own boats on to a sandy beach where there’s no harbour at all, and you want fifty-eight pounds ten! They’re moving all the stuff we landed up the beach in bullock-carts that look like two goats in a perambulator, and you want fifty-eight pounds ten!”
The consul gave the wash-out signal and said: “I send Minhado,” meaning that he would refer the matter to his official headquarters.
“Minhado. How long will that take?”
“Two day.”
“Two days. You want us to keep the ship paying wages for two days while you send to Minhado?”
“Ya, ya.”
Like a man going over the top against a heavy barrage the chief shouldered his way through about a thousand hostile natives that had been listening outside the shack.
“Come on,” he said. “Give me a few more gins and then I’ll go off and tell Tommy. This bird has got the ship’s papers and I don’t want to start anything that I can’t finish. Tommy can speak Malay and he’ll give this cove some ya, ya, if I’m any judge.”
The arrival of Tommy, very spick and span and belligerent, drew about a thousand more children of nature down to the beach. They looked so hostile that Tommy decided to do his bluffing in English.
“Why didn’t you tell me on board,” he said, “then I wouldn’t have landed these people? I treated you as a gentleman. Where’s your book? Where’s the bill the Guthrie paid? Where’s your official papers? You may be a swindler for all I know. Will you take an order on Butterfield and Swire?”
The consul—if he was a consul—just shook his head at everything and repeated his chant of “Minhado, Minhado.”
Tommy came over to us and whispered very softly:
“I’ve a good mind to plug him one under the jaw, take the ship’s papers, and clear.”
The gin had given us a lot of Dutch courage, and most of us endorsed the suggestion, but the doctor was not enthusiastic: he had made several voyages to the East.
“Good enough for him if you did,” he said, “but let us others get down to the boat first. Every one of these banana-coloured sportsmen has a creese hidden in his night-shirt, and you know what Malays are like, once they start!”
So Tommy paid out fifty-eight pounds ten in gold, grinding his teeth at each sovereign, and we marched off to the beach escorted by a hooting rabble. They packed the long jetty. Once we were safely in the boat Tommy drew his revolver and waved it at them. With one accord they sprang off the jetty and disappeared under water like black ducks. We boarded the ship in silence; hauled in the pick, and started away for Manila. We had often heard about a Dutch uncle; now we had met one.