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1. Forsaking Pudding Island

London

29 September 1999

It was raining heavily as I clambered out of the taxi in the Mall and ran up the grand flight of steps past the Duke of York column into Waterloo Place. The statues of the explorers Sir John Franklin and Captain Scott looked stern and Olympian. I was heading for the High Commission of Papua New Guinea through a forest of history and high culture, umbrella up, head down. The high classicism of Nash’s Via Triumphalis, former site of the Regent’s wanton and ruinous Carlton House, could not have contrasted more strongly with the musky odour in the corridor of pagan carvings that led to the High Commissioner’s office. Grimy windows overlooked Waterloo Place. The national flag wrapped around its pole badly needed cleaning. Papua New Guinea time and GMT were indicated by rough signs on mismatching clocks. This was clearly the lair of a culture unconcerned with cosmetic niceties. His Excellency Sir Kina Bona, the High Commissioner, was chewing gum and watching the Rugby World Cup as I wandered in. He had an instantly likeable face and seemed unaffected by his diplomatic status.

‘How do you do, sir?’ I held out my hand respectfully.

‘Much better if I could get out of here mate! Do you like rugby? What can I do you for?’

The gum thunked into the bin. Rugby was the furthest thing from my mind, but this was a promising beginning. He had a refined, educated air and wore fine-rimmed glasses. Underneath the banter I felt a moral outlook at odds with the modern political world.

We sat down and began to talk. An islander from Kwato in Milne Bay Province, he had attended the mission school as a child, secondary school in Sydney, studied Law at the University of Papua New Guinea and was Crown Prosecutor at the Public Prosecution Office until 1994 when he was subsequently appointed to the post of High Commissioner. Married to a ‘Lancashire lass’, he should have left London two years ago.

‘Britain has little interest in PNG but all the Commonwealth High Comms cooperate very well.’

Grotesque Sepik river masks grinned down like a nightmare from another world.

‘Where are you off to?’ he enquired vaguely, settling uncomfortably into a leather chair.

‘I’m planning a trip around the islands next year. I don’t intend to go to the Highlands at all. Far too violent. Just the islands.’

‘Yes – the violence. Moresby is pretty bad. The police are so under-funded that corruption is rife … the jungle hardly lends itself to strict policing. Not like Surrey!’

He laughed with a hint of derision at the ease of civilised life.

‘I used to live on Norfolk Island off the coast of Australia. Home to the descendants of the Bounty mutiny.’

I was fighting to establish a rapport with this fellow islander, some common ground. The masks seemed threatening in Waterloo Place. The contrast was suffocating.

‘Really? Islands are special places. I miss the sweet waves of Samarai and Kwato on moonlit nights. Cities, well …’

He drifted off into an unexpected romantic reverie. I explained myself.

‘I got bored with catching the seventy-three bus down Oxford Street to Victoria every morning. Threw it up in the end. The job I mean.’

‘What were you doing?’

‘Teaching languages.’

‘I had fine English teachers at the Mission. The very best.’ He paused. ‘Now we only bash the missionaries during election time!’ He grinned broadly.

After some desultory chat about the independence movement in East Timor and the excitement of family life in Hampstead Garden Suburb I rose to leave.

‘I’ll send you some family contacts and useful people to look up. They’ll look after you, or eat you!’ More good-natured laughter.

I signed the visitor’s book and left the office. I was heading for Berry Bros in St James’s to collect a good bottle of red Graves. A final farewell to civilisation. A feeling of exhilaration passed over me as I glanced back through rain-lashed Waterloo Place at the windows harbouring that alien world. For a moment I watched the beads of water running off the polished bonnet of his midnight-blue diplomatic Jaguar.

I was about to escape from Pudding Island.

The original idea of sailing a copra schooner called Barracuda around the islands of Eastern Papua New Guinea in the spirit of Robert Louis Stevenson had faded, as do so many boyhood dreams. I. had always wanted to sail the old vessels of the past on those remarkable voyages of discovery. My friends at the Royal Papua Yacht Club laughed at the idea and told me that all the old ketches and schooners had rotted in the mud. The price of copra had collapsed and the corpse of the industry was barely twitching. No one would dream of wasting money building or even repairing an old copra schooner. There were no more sailing ships plying the islands. Traditional sailing canoes like the majestic lakatoi of Port Moresby with their towering crab-claw sails and multiple hulls had by now almost completely disappeared. Chartering a vessel as an individual was prohibitively expensive. Even if I had sailed my own yacht I could easily become a victim of unfavourable trade winds or worse, piracy. Unless I was prepared to wait for unreliable boats from Thursday Island in the far north of Australia, it was impossible legally to enter Papua New Guinea except by air through Port Moresby or Mount Hagen in the Highlands. I was disappointed but determined to sail at least part of the Australian coastline in the old style, completely dependent on the vagaries of wind and weather.

A rare opportunity arose to ‘take passage’ on the replica of Captain Cook’s ship Endeavour as a supernumerary member of the crew. That it was sailing in precisely the opposite direction to my intended destination did not disturb me. I would experience sailing a tall ship along the New South Wales coast for a week from Southport (near Brisbane) to Sydney. A suitably nautical frame of mind would then enable me to jet off to Port Moresby with equanimity.

Endeavour is a handsome vessel and a magnificent replica of the original ship. It was constructed as Australia’s flagship from 1988–94 in Fremantle in Western Australia. She is built of jarrah and has upper sides of varnished pine, finished in the Royal Navy colours of blue, red and yellow. I took Sir Joseph Banks’s cabin on the after fall deck – a small space that I later discovered was occupied not by Sir Joseph himself but by his dogs – a bitch spaniel called Lady used as gun dog, and a greyhound taken on board to run down game.

Joseph Banks was only twenty-five when word reached him on 15 August 1768 that Endeavour was ready to take him aboard on a great adventure to the South Seas. He was at the opera in London with Miss Harriet Blosset, a French ward to whom he was engaged and in love, but with whom he lamentably lacked the French language to communicate. Confessing himself to be of ‘too volatile a temperament to marry’, and unable to explain the meaning of his imminent departure, he drank heavily in a romantic funk the night before he left London for Plymouth. Poor weather delayed the sailing until 25 August.

Banks’s father was an MP and the family were wealthy and well-connected, living at Revesby Abbey in Lincolnshire. He had been to Eton (which trained him no doubt for the rigours of the voyage but not for the travails of love), spent seven years at Oxford studying botany, and worked at the British Museum in London. In February 1768, the Royal Society decided that observing ‘the passage of the Planet Venus over the Disc of the Sun … is a Phaenomenon that must … be accurately observed in proper places’. The Admiralty decided on Tahiti as a place of observation, and James Cook was appointed chief observer of the transit. He selected a Whitby ‘cat’¹ called the Earl of Pembroke as the most suitable vessel for such a voyage, refitted and renamed her the Endeavour.

As a Fellow of the Royal Society, Banks contributed ten thousand pounds to purchase a vast quantity of both practical and elegant equipment for the voyage, and transported a comprehensive library of some one hundred and fifty volumes. A party of nine made up his gentleman’s entourage, all trained in the techniques of collecting and preparing specimens. He became almost more famous than Cook himself, but remained dogged by the unfortunate repercussions of the ‘caddishly abandoned’ Miss Blosset (‘Miss Bl: swooned &c’, his journal coolly observes).

Cook had a complement of some ninety-four souls together with chickens, pigs, a cat and a milch goat that had already circumnavigated the globe. In a letter to Banks in February 1772, Dr Johnson included a Latin elegy for the celebrated animal, part of which runs:

In fame scarce second to the nurse of Jove,

This Goat, who twice the world had traversed round,

Deserving both her master’s care and love,

Ease and perpetual pasture now has found.

His adventurous friend James Boswell records that Johnson was sceptical of what a traveller might learn by taking long voyages, despite on one occasion when dining with the Reverend Alexander Grant at Inverness, divertingly ‘standing up to mimic the shape and motions of a kangaroo’ and making ‘two or three vigorous bounds across the room’.

By 16 August 1770, Cook had reached the Great Barrier Reef, courageously searching for the elusive passage between New Guinea and Australia. The passage had originally been discovered in 1606 by the great Spanish navigator Luis Vaes de Torres, but strategic secrecy was paramount for Spain and on many charts the two land masses appeared joined. Capricious winds drove Cook and his crew ineluctably towards disaster. ‘… a speedy death was all we had to hope for …,’ reiterated Banks. But by 21 August, the Endeavour had threaded its way around Cape York, the northern extremity of Australia, and passed through the Endeavour Straits or as it is now named, Torres Strait.

On 27 August they set sail for New Guinea. They voyaged past the south coast of the island, almost a year now after the visit to Tahiti where the officers had observed the transit of Venus and Mr Banks the slow and painful tattooing of a girl’s bottom. Two days later they came to a landfall fringed by dense vegetation and mangrove swamps. Banks wrote: ‘Distant as the land was a very Fragrant smell came off from it realy in the morn with the little breeze which blew right off shore …’ The water was warm, muddy and shallow, keeping them away from the coast until 3 September when they waded in to land. Banks collected a few specimens but remained curiously unimpressed. They found human footprints which caused them as much consternation as that felt by Robinson Crusoe. They proceeded with caution until they came to a hut in a grove of coconut palms. Three warriors suddenly rushed them from the jungle, throwing spears and incendiary devices, shouting hideously. A hundred naked Papuans appeared around a promontory. It was time to leave.

The following excerpts are taken from my voyage diary:

Endeavour, 7.30 p.m.

4 September 2000

Have come off Afternoon Watch and had dinner. A nerve-wracking and terrifying day. Rose early 6.00 a.m. Troubled sleep – excitement, nerves and information overload. Claustrophobia with the cabin door shut. Prolix talk of ‘bunts’, ‘clews’, ‘belaying lines’, ‘bracing the yards’ and generally hauling on any of the innumerable ropes in sight. Mind-snapping terms of the sea is assumed knowledge – understood absolutely nothing.

Time to ‘go aloft’. Terrified. My group designated Foremast Watch. Forced by bravado to climb the ‘ratlines’. Felt decidedly like a rat. The lines are angled up to a platform called the ‘tops’. Remainder of the thirty-three metre mast towers above. Palms sweating. Shuffling along the yard (to which sails are furled) on rope not much thicker than a garden hose. ‘Stepping on!’ is the brisk instruction. ‘Falling off!’ screamed as you crash to the deck. Managed that, then. Is this my future for the next seven days? Much preparation casting off.

Very calm day, brilliant sunshine with light NE wind.

‘Stand by for cannon!’ shouts the ship’s carpenter, a handsome, blond Cornishman, responsible for construction of the replica and loved by all the girls.

‘Fire in the hole!’ He lights the powder.

Boom! Replica four-pounder carriage gun recoils, acrid smoke rolls across the deck. A terrific report, too close to some nautical types sipping Pimms on the deck of their chromium cruiser. They fell backwards off their chairs as shredded paper and smoke engulfed them.

‘Haul on the halyards! Ease on the bunts and clews!’

Felt like easing myself but not permitted until further out. Hauled on lines until palms sore. Not seasick but a visit to the heads (mariners’ term for onboard toilet) could bring it on. Open grey valve, pump up water, do your business, keep your balance as you have a good look while you pump out, repeat three times, close grey valve under pain of castration. Voyage will be no picnic. Comforting smell of tar.

Came off Afternoon Watch at 4.00 p.m. and resume First Watch at 8.00 p.m. Ship glides slowly and is deeply restful. In perfect harmony with the sea. Progress about 3 knots – a stately speed which would have given Banks and his party ample time to draw, read, discuss and describe their collections. Sun setting through the stern sash windows of the Great Cabbin. Storm lanterns lit, secretive plashing of water at the stern and creaking of the ship. Absolutely magical and poetic.

Sailing at night on the Endeavour is like taking part in a Wagnerian opera, the Flying Dutchman, perhaps. On watch, time to gaze up at the moon through the swaying rigging, silhouetted against the myriad stars of southern latitudes. A shadowy helmsman guides us across the deep. Silence on deck. Ship groans quietly as it folds through the sea. Watching the phosphorescence at the bow I was suddenly transfixed by the appearance of silver tunnels and comet trails cut by porpoises as they dodged and played before the ship. Captain ordered us to ‘wear ship’ – rudely-broken reverie. Had to set the sails and belay lines (fasten the coils of rope around wooden pins) in the dark. After stress and furious activity, lying on my back in front of the helm watching the masts arch like giant pointers across the constellations. Dreamed of the discovery of New Guinea on a ship such as this.

Endeavour

6 September 2000

Morning Watch began at 4.00 a.m. Ungodly hour to be on deck. A still night with feathery winds and countless stars, the moon intensely bright. Silhouettes of the crew on watch float like wraiths. Dawn a glowing rind of orange before sun breaks the horizon. Red Ensign flies from the stern mast and stern lantern glints in the dawn.

Later in the morning a hump-backed whale breached – spectacular arch of patent-leather black and white. Barometer falling. ‘It’s coming all right,’ crackled Captain Blake ominously on the weather deck. During night watches he often comes on deck bare-chested in a maroon sarong. Seems to sense any unnatural movement of the ship through his sleep. Catapults from the companion to bark orders in eighteenth-century style.

Mainmast Watch took in sail at Trial Bay off coast of New South Wales. Landing from surf boats. Moving reconciliation ceremony with Aboriginal community. Exhausted from climbing and hauling – aching and stressed by vast quantity of strange sailing nomenclature.

Endeavour

7 September 2000

Oppressive lowering sky and ominous calm. Hardly slept for last three days. On watch and took the ‘brains’ side of the wheel.¹ Wind strength increased towards evening, gusting to 40 knots. Bow ploughed into the 1.5m swell but the ship felt strong. Sea a magnificent expanse of breaking waves, wind tearing the lashing foam. Shrieks rent the rigging. Wheel duty in this weather madly exhilarating. Maintaining course fraught with problems, arms aching, slow response to helm. Bow rises to frightening heights before ploughing back down into the troughs.

Lines lashed. Many seasick. Going aloft 25 metres in these conditions to take in t’gallant sails not for the fainthearted. Respect for the old mariners boundless – their achievement unimaginable until you sail a tall ship. Vessel utterly at the mercy of wind. So tired cannot sleep. Eating little.

Great Cabbin, Endeavour

8 September 2000

Physically impossible to write. Force 8 gales. Taking in all sail. On verge of throwing up. Gorge rising. Ship lurched and shuddered through night. Roped myself into the fixed cot.

Endeavour

9 September 2000

Wind sufficiently abated to write a journal entry. Warm sun as we sail along the coast of New South Wales and begin to set sails again after the storm. Activity everywhere.

‘Hauling on the halyards! Easing on the bunts and clews! Bracing the yards!’

‘Two, six … heave!’ we hauled on the lines.

‘Two, six … heave!’

‘Belay all lines.’ Signs of relief.

Leaned against the capstan and idly looked at a jetliner high above, slicing across the sky leaving a glittering trail of ice crystals; the eighteenth century contemplating the twenty-first century. The original exploration of the Black Islands of New Guinea was on ships such as this. My own journey to that fabled land would be on an aircraft such as that.

¹The English north-country vessel known as a ‘cat’ was a Whitby collier. This was the type of working vessel on which James Cook learnt his calling. In 1771 he wrote in admiration of her handling, ‘No sea can hurt her laying Too under a Main Sail or Mizon ballanc’d.’

¹Two seamen are normally at the wheel – the ‘muscles’ on the port side who only helps turn it, and the ‘brains’ on the starboard side who turns and maintains the course, calling out the setting and watching the instruments.