"WEST FROM SINGAPORE" - читать интересную книгу автора (L'Amour Louis)

CHAPTER V: In a Tomb 166
CHAPTER VI: Mystery Leader 172
CHAPTER VII: Ponga Jim Takes a Chance 177
CHAPTER VIII: The Convoy Is Safe 183
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,FOREWORD
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
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FOREWORD
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