Fishing for Stars (12 page)

When we were seated he came right to the point. ‘I like what you did at Guadalcanal, Nick. Navy Cross, eh? That ain’t for beginners. What can we do for you, son?’

I was somewhat taken aback – I hadn’t mentioned being decorated by the Americans – but then realised he’d been briefed by Moss,
who’d been briefed by Lewinski. ‘Well, sir, I was hoping to buy some equipment.’ I went on to explain to him that we wanted to get into the war salvage business, tidying up the islands.

He laughed. ‘Well, Nick, when can you start? Tomorrow?’

I explained that it might be a year or so yet before my two partners were finally demobbed from the US Navy and were able to return to the islands. ‘It’s my job to set things up, sir.’

‘Pity, I haven’t got a year, Nick. More like three or four months, and the goddamned Frogs and Limeys are trying to screw me!’

‘I beg your pardon, sir?’

General Urquhart explained that he’d offered the French and the British a twenty cents in the dollar deal for every US military item on Espiritu Santo. Lock, stock and barrel, the whole goddamned shooting match! ‘Those bastards came back with a counteroffer – they’ll take it off my hands for nothing, not even one cent in the dollar! Jesus H. Christ, what kind of bullshit offer is that!
They want a whole goddamned city, the whole shebang, for nothing!
’ he shouted, the cigar hanging on for grim death in the corner of his mouth. ‘Uncle Sam ain’t goin’ to stand for that kind of blackmail crap!’

‘Well, yeah, it does seem rather mean-spirited, sir,’ I said, not quite knowing how to react to his outburst.

‘It’s greedy, son, that’s what it is, greedy! Sons of bitches thinking they can exploit Uncle Sam! Battle of the Bulge, America’s saved their prissy Frog asses more than once, invasion of Normandy, Yankee know-how, the last time the goddamned Brits saw that coastline they escaped from it in dinghies at Dunkirk! I’m going to leave the four electricity plants for the island people, then give every island family anything they want. Put a refrigerator in every goddamned hut, diesel generator in every village! Then I’m going to dump the rest straight into the goddamned sea. Two hundred yards beyond the surf the island shelf drops near two hundred feet, that’s where it’s all going, son, off the point into Davy Jones’s goddamned locker!’ He’d said all of this seemingly without drawing breath.

‘You mean you’ll . . .?’ I wasn’t sure I understood. Surely he was just kidding, wasn’t he?

‘Trash the lot, every goddamned nut and bolt, groundsheets to grenades, shit paper to Sherman tanks. Nobody screws Uncle Sam, leastwise not a jerking-off Frog or a goddamn Limey swallowing his consonants!’

It was all so outrageous I thought General
Urquhart
must be drunk, but it was only a few minutes past nine in the morning and there was no smell of grog on his breath. ‘I guess it isn’t much of an offer, sir,’ I stammered.

‘Goddamn right it ain’t. We’ve already reduced everything. If they’d offered me one cent in the dollar, then maybe I’d have gone along. That would mean you could have bought a Jeep still in its goddamn packing case for three bucks.’ He removed the cigar from his mouth and, as if he’d pulled a cord from the plug, seemed to instantly calm down. ‘So, have you brought your list, Nick?’ he asked, smiling.

‘Well . . . er, yes, sir.’

He looked at me. ‘Navy Cross, eh? Well I reckon that deserves a small tribute. You’ve got two American partners did you say?’

‘Yessir, US Navy.’

‘Well that’s real nice, son, shows fraternity and brotherhood. I like that. Now you go into Sergeant
Moss’s office, sit yourself down real quiet and think. Think about every goddamn thing you’re going to need – 
everything!
You take all day, all week. Take a jeep, look around. Bill Moss
will give you an all-areas pass. Then give the sergeant your cheque for ten bucks . . . ’ He thought for a moment. ‘That’s five pounds, just so we can give you a receipt, make everything kosher.’

I wasn’t sure I understood. Was he asking me to give him five quid to look around and make a list or was he . . . ? No he couldn’t, surely not. ‘Sir, we don’t have unlimited finances, but I’ve worked out a budget, and we’d be happy to pay 20 cents in the dollar.’

‘Son, ten bucks, that’s the deal. Anything you want. You going to help me to kick Frog ass and British butt? Anything!’ he repeated, then added, ‘You put your life on the line at Bloody Ridge for our American boys. Marines don’t award a sailor the Navy Cross for picking his goddamn nose. Now Uncle Sam wants to show a little appreciation. Don’t be shy. Either you take it, or we dump it. The Frogs and Limeys can go screw ’emselves.’

I spent the following week in Luganville with my three skippers and ships engineers and the supercargo, a drunk from Auckland, to organise the loading. We ate in the officers’ mess and slept in a Nissen hut equipped like a luxury hotel with clean sheets and towels and hot running water, all of it compliments of General Urquhart.

By week’s end, with the help of Sergeant Moss and one of the engineers, who made sure I got the right gear in top condition, I had scored an almost new landing craft and sufficient equipment to run four separate salvage operations with an entire workshop and spares for everything we’d purchased. In one fell swoop we had become the best-equipped small salvage operation in the Pacific. Our equipment manifest, if it were to be bought on the open market, was worth at least one hundred thousand American dollars! Remember, this was 1945; in today’s money that would be over five million dollars.

We left for Rabaul with Gideon, a Gilbert Islander crew member from one of the other landing craft, handling the new one. The Gilbertese are the great seamen of the Pacific, undertaking major sea voyages on their
bauruas
 – large outrigger sailing proas – long before Europeans arrived on the scene. They had developed a unique navigation system over vast distances by not only using the stars, but also sitting naked and cross-legged on the deck to ‘feel’ the direction of the swell through the movement of their testicles (fortunately the weather is generally warm in the Pacific).

Gideon, who would be in my employ for the next thirty years and would eventually become a certified skipper in our fleet, told me a story that, given that he grew up in the islands, I was inclined to believe, even though it seemed incredible.

He had been working on an inter-island freighter moving heavy equipment to another island when a bulldozer and other heavy machinery broke loose during a sudden squall one night and shifted to one side of the deck, flipping the ship in less than a minute. By dawn he was alone in the water, where he stayed all day, flayed by the hot sun. That night, exhausted and ready to die, he closed his eyes and he believes he actually dozed off. He awoke suddenly to find that he was being lifted, and realised it was a large tiger shark buoying him up. He grabbed at the dorsal fin and was carried on. That night he was attended by three large sharks, one on either side to cling to and the other swimming beneath him. Every time he was too exhausted to stay awake or even to hang on and started to sink, the shark beneath him would hold him up. All night and the next day the sharks remained with him. On the morning of the third day he saw land, whereupon the sharks started to nudge and pull him towards the shore. Then, guiding him to the opening of the reef where he would be carried ashore by the current, they finally abandoned him.

I recall asking him, ‘Gideon, the sharks . . . did they not frighten you at first?’

‘No,’ he replied. ‘I am a member of the shark totem on my home island. When they first appeared I knew they were members of my totem, brothers who had come to help me.’

I readily admit that having been brought up for a part of my formative years in New Guinea I may well have picked up, almost by osmosis, a certain susceptibility to superstition. But this was only one of a number of strange stories I had heard over the years and found myself, in many instances, inclined to believe. Whereas we Caucasians tell untruths as easily as we breathe, this is not the case for islanders, who have little or no reason to conceal their motives. For instance, Gideon’s story would have been far more heroic had he struggled manfully and survived three days at sea on his own, rather than claiming to receive the assistance of three tiger sharks.

However, I later checked and discovered that the freighter had indeed been lost at sea on the date he had given me and that Gideon was listed as crew but was not the only survivor. Two women clinging to a wooden crate were picked up after twenty hours at sea. Of thirty passengers and crew only the three of them survived.

We eventually arrived in Rabaul and I organised four permanent moorings and a lock-up warehouse for our gear, leaving Gideon behind as caretaker.

General Urquhart
was true to his word. After allowing the islanders to take what they wanted, and under the direction of Sergeant Bill Moss, he dumped tens of millions of dollars of US Army ordnance over the island’s lip to the ocean bottom from what is still known today as Million Dollar Point.

As a postscript to what the
Paris Match
termed ‘The biggest act of vandalism in the history of the Pacific Islands’, the local French administration, calling it the property of the French Government, confiscated all the equipment given to the islanders, down to the last kerosene-powered refrigerator.

With all our equipment warehoused in Rabaul, the French couldn’t confiscate it, and besides, I had receipts to cover everything. So, in the nearly nine months before my partners, Kevin Judge and Joe Popkin, returned to this side of the Pacific, I set about negotiating contracts to remove the veritable mountains of valuable scrap left by the defeated Japanese and the victorious allies. We were ready to begin work by the time Kevin arrived in Australia to marry Brenda O’Shaunnesy, his wartime sweetheart, nicknamed Bren Gun because of her rapid-fire speech. Joe Popkin, an African American, was not permitted to live in Australia under the White Australia Policy, and came to work with me in the islands.

Kevin ran our business affairs from Brisbane. As usual he’d selected the cushy job while Joe and I did the blood, sweat and toil in the jungle. This was just as well. The slightly built Kevin was both physically and mentally unsuited to island life. Joe Popkin, on the other hand, had the ideal looks and personality for work in the islands. He was everything the white commercial expatriates and administrators were not. Not only did the colour of his skin match the local people’s, but the way he handled them soon earned their admiration and respect. He bore no grudges, took no bullshit and was generous to a fault. Eventually, as a sign of their respect, they named him Uncle Joe, even though he was still a young bloke.

When it came to leadership, Joe had no peer. His colour was an immediate advantage and his size precluded trouble among the workers. Joe Popkin could laugh and knock two kanaka heads together and the other workers would laugh with him. If I did the same thing, they might see the swift justice as fair, but I would still be a white man dishing out punishment. ‘Uncle Joe, hem blong mifella,’ they’d say about Joe Popkin. Then to emphasise the difference, they’d add, ‘Masta Nick, hem blong white masta.’

Joe would never ask any of them to do what he wouldn’t do himself. Usually he’d strip to the waist and help with the heavy loading, but he also ensured that the older and smaller of the island men were taught how to drive our bulldozers, cranes, winches, jeeps and forklift trucks, thus enabling them to be gainfully employed.

Joe loved the island kids and they followed him in a whirl of dust and noise whenever he went into a village. Sometimes he had some difficulty keeping their mothers, with or without the approval of their husbands, from taking him into the jungle for a bit of extra-connubial bliss.

There were literally hundreds of children named Joe on the islands, although this was almost certainly due to his popularity and not to his fecundity. We worked in a very big backyard and Joe was reluctant to piss on his own doorstep.

By the mid-fifties we’d largely cleared the islands of war-surplus scrap, and in order to switch to our long-term plan to run an inter-island shipping business we’d converted the original wooden vessel to general cargo and passengers and bought three more similar vessels for the same purpose. Despite Joe’s increasing education expenses, we were pretty cashed up. The three ex-US Navy vessels, now also converted, earned their keep shuttling general freight between Australia and New Zealand and the main island ports. Thus the Pacific Island Shipping Company, registered in Port Vila, was born and we seemed to have moved almost seamlessly from salvage to freight and then to carrying passengers as well.

We had earned a small reputation as reliable and fair employers in the war-salvage business. The way the various other scrap merchants conducted their labour relations had allowed the islanders to make comparisons very much in our favour. Now, contrary to our expectations, we were to learn that the advent of a reliable inter-island passenger and freight service that didn’t exploit the locals wasn’t going to reward us with the same loyalty.

We’d made a few enemies in the scrap-metal business, but this was nothing compared to the hostility we encountered from rival shipping companies. While we’d been shifting from salvage to freight they’d left us alone. We weren’t carrying passengers and there was plenty of freight available for all of us. When we refitted to take passengers as well, the shit hit the fan. Many of them were running ships that were barely seaworthy and in an attempt to put us out of business they dropped their ticket prices, then carried up to twice the numbers of islanders allowed on the ship’s manifest. Understandably every penny counted with the impecunious islanders and race relations and goodwill came a poor second to saving a quid. We still carried whatever white passengers were travelling between the islands, but there weren’t sufficient to make a difference. We couldn’t match the competition’s prices without resorting to the same tactics, and for Joe and me that simply wasn’t an option.