West from Singapore (Ss) (1987)

The stories in this collection and in a previous one, Night Over the Solomons, were written either just before World War II or after it had begun. It was not easy for a writer to get started then, and it is not easy now. The stories were a desperate effort to keep eating while working on a novel that, as a result of my going into the Army, was never completed.

During those early years I planned to write stories of the sea. The Pacific islands fascinated me, as did the coasts of Southeast Asia. Every island had its story. Already I had learned that a writer, if he expects to write much, must observe and remember.

Often there is no chance to return and look again, even if the place remains unchanged, which is rare indeed.

To observe and remember-these things were importantbut it was also important to listen well. The islands and seas of which I write were filled with color and excitement.

It was easy to be carried away with all of that and to forget what was necessary.

There were stories of shipwreck and mutiny, of blackbirding and pearl diving, of piracy and treasure. Captain Bligh had brought his open boat through these waters after the mutiny on the Bounty.

La Perouse had vanished somewhere down here. Magellan had been killed here after what Europeans consider the first crossing of the Pacific. But there were a thousand and one stories of only ,.,locally known people who had met the sea and the islands and survived.

Although I am considered a western writer, and although I grew up in the west, my first stories were these, of the islands of Indonesia and neighboring waters. Wandering from port to port I met adventurers, planters, gold and diamond seekers and pearl buyers, men who sought the far places of the earth for one reason or another, just as I was doing. They were not unlike men I had known in mining camps and on cow ranches in the American west. Yet their motivations were different, for western men came to build and to create, not just to get rich and get out. Only in the goldfields of California could one find the counterparts to the drifters out for the main chance I came to know in the Pacific.

The hero of the stories in this book is Ponga Jim Mayo, a sailor of fortune who was the master of the Semiramis, a tramp freighter he would sail up and down the waters of the Pacific islands in search of a living. He was an Irish-American who had served his first years at sea sailing out of Liverpool and along the west coast of Africa's Ponga River, where he picked up his nickname.

He's a character I created from having gotten to know men just like him while I was a seaman in my yondering days. I sailed on a variety of steamers, freighters, and schooners back then, but I didn't stay on any one for too long. I would sail from one port to another, drop one ship and pick up another to go on someplace else. One time I went to sea from Los Angeles and took a trip completely around the world, ending up in New York. From there I took a tanker and went around to the west coast of the Panama Canal. On my first long trip, I served as an ordinary seaman. By my third trip I had passed the examination to become an able-bodied seaman, or A. B., as one is called. For a while I shipped on a schooner as a second mate where part of my job was to keep track of everything bought and sold for a captain who was very bright but who could read and write only with difficulty.

The ships on which I sailed around the East Indian islands got into all kinds of small ports to which no steamships or freighters ever sailed. We had an outboard motor on a launch that enabled us to go to a lot of remote places to pick up cargo where the tramp freighters couldn't reach. So I was able to visit places other men only dreamed of knowing.

The master of a tramp freighter in Far Eastern waters, like Ponga Jim Mayo, had to have a wide range of experience and information to succeed, and connections were extremely important. Knowing who had something to ship, knowing the FOREWORD availability of seasonal cargoes and the people who delegated the shipments, could make business easier and success more certain. Much of this is handled by the ship's owners or their agents, but local knowledge was always important.

Much smaller, lighter cargo was handled by native-owned vessels, mostly sailing craft.

Anticipating the outbreak of war, both the Japanese and Germans had established undercover relationships in the islands, to prepare for invasion in the case of the Japanese and in cooperation with merchant raiders in the case of the Germans.

There were always dissident elements, and even more common were those who looked merely for profit, not caring who it hurt if they made a fat dollar.

Ponga Jim Mayo was simply a ship's master who fell into the path of history while just trying to make a living. Necessity as well as personal loyalties brought him into conflict with those who were preparing the way for invasion.

No other area on earth offers so many islands, so many small coves, harbors, and lagoons, so many rivers opening to the sea, and so great a variety of population, but to a seafaring man accustomed to those waters any vessel operating out of the normal pattern would arouse curiosity and, at such a time, suspicion.

There are few secrets in such areas. Shipping men are known to each other, and there is much rumor and gossip around the waterfront bars as well as in those more elaborate clubs further back from the sea. Nothing much happened that somebody did not know about, and such a man as Ponga Jim would have picked up all the scuttlebutt from along the waterfronts. Soerbaia, Samarang, Medan, Amurang, Makassar, Balikpapan, Port Moresby, Hollandia, and such places always had a few people who knew what was happening or about to happen.

Ponga Jim would have been familiar to all these people and would over the years have formed friendships or business relationships in all these places, including Darwin and Broome on the north coast of Australia.

The setting for Ponga Jim's adventures, Indonesia, known before World War II as the East Indies, is without a doubt one of the most fascinating localities on earth.

It consists of some 13,000 islanders scattered along the equator with a total land area of 735,268 square miles. In those years it was referred to as the Netherlands East Indies, and the administration was Dutch. The British had interests there also, but ships came from all over the world, picking up or delivering cargo. Only the K. P. M. boats, a Dutch line, worked the smaller ports. Otherwise the shipping was native craft, mostly under sail, often with auxiliary motors.

Long before the coming of European traders, ancient civilizations were here, and ships came often from India, Arabia, and China. A thousand years before Columbus sailed to America, ships had left the Sunda Strait (between Java and Sumatra) to sail the 3,300 miles to Madagascar, a voyage considerably longer.

Of this I knew nothing when I arrived. It was during my knockabout years, and I was taking jobs where and when they could be found, at sea or ashore. Nothing in my schooling had prepared me for what I was to discover.

On a day away from my ship I hired an Arab boy to sail me over to a nearby island where I wanted to see a ruin that looked interesting. As he spoke English quite well, I asked how long he had been in the islands. He told me his people had been there for nearly four hundred years!

A missionary to whom I spoke knew less than I. When I asked him about the boy's statement, he shrugged it off with the comment that one heard all sorts of stories. About 170 languages are spoken in Indonesia, but Malay was the tongue of the marketplace, and English speakers were not hard to find. Oddly enough, it was from that trading schooner captain who could barely read and write that I learned something of what I needed to know.

Although uneducated in the usual sense, he was an intelligent man who had spent fifty years in the islands. His curiosity had been aroused by ancient ruins, and he asked questions. Years of trading had built him a strong relationship with many of the peoples of the the islands, and they talked as freely to him as among themselves.

It was from him that I first heard of the extensive trade with India, China, and the Arabs beginning we do not know when but certainly flourishing in the first century after Christ.

Gradually, I traced the story of the great island empires of FOREWORD

Shrivijaya and Shailendra, to name but two. The earliest positive date for Chinese knowledge of Bali is A. D. 977, but Hindu culture had already established itself by A. D. 400 Ptolemy, the geographer from Alexandria, refers to these islands as early as A. D. 160 Fa-Hien, the Chinese pilgrim, was in the islands in A. D. 414.

Celebes, now called Sulawesi, is a large island in Indonesia (formerly the East Indies), lying just east of Borneo. It is about 550 miles long, with an area of 71,400 square miles. Four long arms extend from the central body of the island. The northern peninsula runs out into the sea for some 400 miles and is nowhere more than 60 miles wide.

Forty years ago, at the time of these stories, Celebes was ruled by the Netherlands.

The people fell roughly into two groups, the Muslims and the pagans, largely animists.

The largest groups were the Bugis (exceptional seamen), the Manders, the Makassars, and a more primitive people, the Toradjas.

Rivers are short, and a series of mountain ranges run largely north and south through the central part of the island. Mountains extend the full 400 miles of the northern peninsula. Gorontalo, a town of approximately 6,000 people, was located on the south side of the northern peninsula and was served three times a week by K. P. M. steamers.

Various native craft came and went, and occasionally British Blue Funnel boats would call.

The climate is hot and subject to tropical rains. The products were largely wax, skins, tortoise shell, and forest products. Europeans were predominantly Dutch, with a few Englishmen and the usual scattering of other nationalities. Around the waterfronts of this and other such ports are usually a few drifters, vagabonds of the islands, of various or mixed nationality.

It's been fun for me to go back over these stories in preparing this book for publication.

The world may have changed a good deal since I first wrote them, but a lot of those ports where the stories took place haven't changed a bit. And I'll be glad if they never change much.

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AUTHOR'S NOTE

The river is deep and the anchorage not very good. At the time of the story the town of Gorontalo had a population of about six thousand-a picturesque little port on the south side of a long peninsula. As in most of these small ports there was, aside from the local people, a certain number of drifters, adventurers, treasure hunters, ship's officers out of a job, and men tramping the island for one reason or another, most of them hoping to pick up an odd dollar here or there.

John Russell has written well of these islands, and so has Somerset Maugham.