Brian
I share your feelings about the South Seas and with your connections I therefore share with you and those who may be interested what I have written as part of my memoirs. Richard.
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"We set out across the Pacific Ocean; within days I was so seasick I thought I would die. Then, worse still, I thought that I wouldn’t. I had a bucket for scrubbing the pantry deck and another just in case there was anything left in my stomach. Whatever nature threw at the ‘Lowlander’ or any other ship or boat I later sailed on, I never ever got seasick again.
Early into the voyage those who joined just prior to sailing from Newcastle were vaccinated and inoculated for yellow fever, cholera and smallpox by the ships doctor. As the doctor did his work on my left arm, next to me on the sick bay bunk was a pile of clothes that were removed from the body of the ship’s baker who had dropped dead in the sweltering galley a couple of days earlier. Chippy, the ship’s carpenter had sewn the body into a canvas sheet along with some iron bars. The weight of these bars meant it would sink rather than float about after the captain had conducted the burial service and ‘committed his body to the deep’. All the available crew were assembled. The bosun (boatswain) and his deck crew had had the body placed on a plank resting on the ship’s rail and as the last words were delivered they gently raised the inner end of the plank and the body slipped into the sea and sank immediately.
We headed in a generally East by North direction into the tropics. A couple of weeks into the voyage and we were gliding through water that shimmered like iridescent blue silk. Ahead of us in the distance, rising from the shimmering blue water were the jagged peaks of a tropical island framed by an azure sky. It was Tahiti, the main island of the Society Islands group of French Polynesia. Rising on our port bow was that magical island, Moreea.
Within a couple of hours we came alongside the wharf at Pape’ete and the tropic air was filled the scent of frangipani blossoms. Those austere little French cars; Citroen’s Deux Chevaux, scampered around the narrow streets and there was great interest in our arrival. It was, of course, just after the Second World War and the tourist droves were yet to descend on and change this Eden forever.
After washing a great pile of dishes and cleaning up the pantry I went ashore with some shipmates. There was a rather obese man of mixed race in a flowery shirt sitting outside the waterfront Quinn’s Bar offering to let me take his photograph - for a price. He was Emile Marae a Tai, born in Tahiti in 1899 and the son of the artist Paul Gauguin and his Tahitian mistress Pau’ura. That was one photograph I should have taken. That night we went to a French bar on the beach at Lafayette, just out of Pape’ete and danced on the beach sand floor with some of the local girls. One was singing “symphonie, symphonie d’amour” into my ear-hole and I could well imagine why the crew of the “Bounty” mutinied. We didn’t, but co-incidentally our next stop was Pitcairn Island, where the “Bounty” was scuttled by Fletcher Christian and his fellow mutineers.
Pitcairn Island is the only inhabited island of a group of four and was chosen by Fletcher Christian for its isolation, being a huge rock in the vast Pacific Ocean. The other three islands of the group are Henderson, Dulcie and Oeno Islands each being remote from each other over several hundred miles of ocean.
As there is no harbour, Pitcairn Islanders ‘parked’ their whale boats on racks perched by the cliff-side. These open boats were rowed out to visiting ships to collect provisions and mail and to take the opportunity to sell their sought after postage stamps and ‘cottage’ handicraft. The open whale boats were used to visit the other distant islands from where depleted supplies of timber on Pitcairn were augmented. The quaint language, a mixture of “Olde English” and Tahitian was carried over to Norfolk Island, north of New Zealand, to where some of them emigrated in the 19th Century. For example, their greeting “What the way?”, short for “what the way are you?” and “Oi gwen nawee in the hot sun” “I’m going swimming…”.
Leaving Pitcairn there was a “Crossing the Line” ceremony as we crossed the Equator into the Northern Hemisphere. Our young women passengers were enthusiastically encouraged to take part as “King Neptune” arrived on the scene in fancy dress with a Trident. Lathering a face as if to shave and dunking in a large wooden framed canvas bath on the deck brought great guffaws from the spectators........
