Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [83]
Just before sundown, Owen came to another village and met a young man, well dressed in a linen coat and a black and orange sarong, who pointed the way to Labuhan. The man said he had worked as a schoolmaster in Batavia before the Japanese came. He warned them of armed bands of Javanese who had looted and burned Labuhan’s Chinese-owned shops. They could be relied upon to do worse to white men, he said, adding that there had not been any Dutchmen in Labuhan for some time, and that transportation to Tjilatjap was unavailable.
Marching into a sparsely developed fishing outpost, Commander Owen’s party saw out in its bay a modest fleet of small gondolas painted green and scarlet and yellow. One boat among them looked decidedly out of place. It was the lifeboat carrying Lieutenant Thode’s party. Owen called out and waved to them. As he led his men toward the beach, a score of parang-armed natives picked up their stride and started trailing them. The Australians began running. They passed through a coconut grove and reached the water. They sloshed quickly through the coral-bottomed shallows until the water was deep enough to swim. Reaching Thode’s lifeboat, they were pulled aboard and were reunited with their shipmates from Sangiang.
Discouraging though Owen’s experience ashore might have been, he held on to his wish to go over land to Tjilatjap. He pressed the issue again with Thode, and the lieutenant finally had no choice but to stand firm. The disagreement endured. Thode returned his superior to land with some two dozen others. As Owen’s men vanished among the huts of Labuhan, Thode and his nine castaways, including Gosden, rowed their lifeboat back to sea. It was then that their mini-epic adventure truly began.
They ran south with the currents, rowing mostly and taking whatever help the light winds could blow into the split canvas bag they used for a sail. Always within view of Krakatoa’s cone, looming in the northwest, they made the thirty-five-mile run from Labuhan to Princes Island in the southwestern end of Sunda Strait in one day. On that rocky beach they found five dozen crates that had been shoved around and scattered by the tides. Dreaming of canned asparagus, steak, beans, and beer, they tore into them but found only two types of loot, and lots of it: ammonia and bundle upon bundle of paper currency. Since the latter proved to be Japanese occupation money, and since the sailors aimed to avoid that jurisdiction altogether, they cursed the treasure and tossed the bundles into the surf. But one last box of the trove had not been opened yet. One of the sailors found it wedged in some rocks where the beach ended. He smashed it open with a pair of rocks and was dumbfounded to find what they needed even more than food: sails, a full set of them—mainsail, foresail, and jib. “Boys,” said Lieutenant Thode as the group surrounded the find, “this definitely means we’ll get home.”
Before departing they used a piece of iron binding from one of the boxes to saw down a coconut tree and feasted on its eight fruits, garnished with some periwinkles pulled from the rocks. The next morning, Friday, March 6, they set course for Tjilatjap. They would need twelve days to cover the three hundred miles to the friendly port. From there, the optimists calculated, reaching Australia would mean five more weeks at sea.
They rowed all day in shifts. The absence of wind caused their muscles to burn as surely as the sun did their oil-stained skin. When the heat became oppressive, the castaways could dip themselves in the sea,