The Indian Ocean - Michael Pearson [196]
One way to get into the subject is to consider the journey of the English journalist Gavin Young, who set off in August 1979 with the aim of travelling from Europe to Guangzhou by sea. It took seven months and was a very difficult task. He had to travel by land quite often, for he found that on some sectors of his route there were only cargo ships now, whereas before World War II, or even ten years previously, he could have done the whole route by passenger ship. It is revealing that he used the ships of Swire and Sons line sometimes, but by 1979 they had almost no passenger-cargo ships, as airlines had taken over. This shipping company, significantly, at that time also owned the Cathay Pacific airline!14
Somerset Maugham in the late 1920s travelled on a typical humble cargo-passenger ship from Bangkok.
I left Bangkok on a shabby little boat of four or five hundred tons. The dingy saloon, which served also as a dining-room, had two narrow tables down its length with swivel-chairs on both sides of them. The cabins were in the bowels of the ship and they were extremely dirty. Cockroaches walked about on the floor and however placid your temperament it is difficult not to be startled when you go to the wash-basin to wash your hands and a huge cockroach stalks leisurely out. We dropped down the river, broad and lazy and smiling, and its green banks were dotted with little huts on piles standing at the water's edge. We crossed the bar; and the open sea, blue and still, spread before me. The look of it and the smell of it filled me with elation.15
Fifty years later Young had a similar passage, one that brought back to him the same Maugham. He was on the 1,400 ton Perak, going from Singapore to Kuching. He found his cabin.
Somerset Maugham would have been satisfied; a bunk, a dressing table and mirror, a wardrobe, two armchairs covered in white leatherette and a stool. The two portholes were square wood-framed windows with curtains; a thermos of ice water hung in a wall bracket, and on the ceiling a large fan rotated inside a cage designed to protect abnormally tall passengers like myself from a scalping. I took my copy of Maugham's Short Stories out of my bag and laid it on the dressing table, where it looked at home.
Young was the only passenger, therefore rather a relic, as also the 'Information for Passengers' on his cabin door, which said 'There is normally a quiet period at sea when passengers, and also officers off duty, may be resting. If parents would be kind enough to aid in maintaining this atmosphere, it would be very much appreciated.'
This was part of a dying trade. Young had earlier gone from Chennai to Port Blair, in the Andamans. He went on a substantial Shipping Company of India boat of 10,300 tons, with 950 passengers. Young got breakfast in the spacious dining room, 'cornflakes, eggs, bacon, Madrasi cakes with curry sauce.' After Port Blair he went on to Kolkata, again on a modern Shipping Co. of India ship, and enlivened a very pleasant voyage by checking the complaint book, finding such gems as 'I am glad to certify that the service given me by the staff is really good. I feel just homelike comfort and this is due only from their sweet association.' Others complained of 'certain indecent and unruly passengers in drunken condition' and that 'Stewards attend cabins at their own whims and favours. Passengers boarding ship should be instructed about correct methods to use heads, and socio-economic conditions keep some in dark.'16 Today Port Blair can only be reached by air from either Chennai or Kolkata. So also in the Arabian Sea, where the regular Mombasa–Mumbai route has vanished in favour of air travel. Western travellers used to end their odysseys with voyages on precarious passenger ferries in Indonesia. These continue to ply their way from island to island, a reflection obviously of the fact that Indonesia,