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

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
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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
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