The china voyage, p.1
The China Voyage, page 1
The China Voyage
Tim Severin
© Tim Severin 1995
Tim Severin has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published in 1995 by Abacus
This edition published in 2018 by Lume Books.
Table of Contents
PART ONE - ASIA
1- ANCIENT RAFTS ACROSS THE PACIFIC
2 - BUILDING IN VIETNAM
3 - LACQUER AND BAMBOO BEETLES
4 - TRIALS AND DEPARTURE
5 - A CROSS THE TAIWAN S TRAIT
6 - SWEPT AWAY BY THE BLACK STREAM
7 - ALONG THE RYUKYU CHAIN
8 - Hsu Fu’s JAPANESE SHRINE
PART TWO - OCEAN
9 - INTO THE WIDEST OCEAN
10 - FLOATING BIRDNEST
11 - SUNFISH AND DOLPHINS
12 - ACROSS THE DATE LINE
13 - THE GREAT GARBAGE PATCH
14 - LOSING BAMBOOS
15 - A THOUSAND MILES TO GO
16 - FAREWELL TO HSU FU
EPILOGUE
PART ONE - ASIA
1- ANCIENT RAFTS ACROSS THE PACIFIC
The pirate ship came at us out of the darkness. All we could see were the lights, green, red and white, of a small vessel steering straight at us from astern. The lights approached very quickly until we could hear the rumble of the engine over the sound of the waves, and see a white bow-wave ahead of the darker shape of what looked like a small fishing vessel. It was a black night with no moon, just a few stars and a gentle sea. Only Nina, the Japanese artist, and I were on watch. The rest of the crew — Mark, Joe, and Loi were in their sleeping bags in the cabins. The strange ship must have spotted us on radar, because it was clearly interested in us. It drew level, then cut back its engine, and came wallowing close alongside. The bright beam of a floodlight sprang out and flickered up and down the length of our vessel, examining us. What they saw was very odd — a slightly curved bamboo platform barely emerging above the water and carrying two thatched cabins, like huts deep in some tropical jungle. Above, like great fans, were the distinctive shapes of three Chinese junk sails. We were barely moving through the water, an easy prey. For a few moments the light continued to search us, then abruptly the engine note increased and the boat moved off.
‘I wonder what they wanted?’ I asked Nina in my ignorance. ‘Look! They’ve stopped, and are turning back.’ Sure enough, the half-seen vessel had swung round and was heading back towards us, this time on the opposite side. Now it passed even closer and made a circle, so tight that the wash slopped on to our deck. I shone a torch at our inquisitive visitor, and saw a green hull with a broad white band painted around it. A cluster of men, dimly seen as black shapes, was gathered in the waist of the vessel. ‘Perhaps they are thinking of giving us a tow’ I muttered to Nina. ‘That would be very useful. We’re in Japanese waters now. Try giving them a shout.’ But before Nina could call out an enquiry, the strange vessel again decided to leave us. With the water churning in its wake, it accelerated into the darkness, swung across our bows and headed off into the darkness. Three days later, when we had reached the nearby Japanese island of Miyako, we learned the truth. An officer of the Japanese Coastguard was interviewing Nina about our voyage from Hong Kong, when she mentioned the visit of the strange fishing boat. Immediately the officer came alert.
‘Can you describe the boat? What colour was it?’ he asked. Nina told him. ‘That boat,’ said the Coastguard officer bluntly, ‘is a known pirate vessel. We’ve been trying to intercept it for some weeks. Usually pirates stay out of Japanese waters, but that particular vessel is so bold that it even came to one of the islands and gave trouble. You were very lucky. They probably decided your raft was not worth attacking.’ And, I thought to myself, we had nearly asked the pirates to give us a tow.
Pirates had not been very high on my list of concerns when I began to prepare the China Voyage expedition nearly three years before. Then my thoughts had been about more obvious matters such as the risk of typhoons, how to raise enough money to finance the project, or whether a raft of bamboos would stay afloat long enough to carry five or six people across the vastness of the Pacific Ocean from China to America. Above all, I had to be sure that such a dangerous journey was justified. Ever since studying the history of exploration at Oxford University, I had been aware of the theory that long before Columbus reached the New World, mariners from Asia had visited America and influenced the early High Cultures there, notably those of Central America like the Mayans. But I had set aside the idea as impractical. The Pacific is twice the width of the Atlantic, and can breed storm systems which are 3,000 miles in diameter. I was sceptical that early sailors could have crossed that gale-swept expanse except on very rare occasions, if at all.
Also the evidence for cultural contact between early America and ancient Asia was inconclusive. For more than two centuries some unorthodox scholars had claimed to see similarities between early Asian and American architecture, art forms, calendars, language, and so forth. The evidence they quoted ranged from the highly scientific — for example that there were similarities between the DNA structure of native Americans and Asian peoples — to the highly subjective and slightly bizarre. In a sensational case in the 1920s an eminent anthropologist-traveller Sir Grafton Elliot Smith asserted that an eighth-century Mayan stone carving, found in Honduras in Central America, depicted the heads and trunks of two elephants ridden by mahouts. Elephants had been extinct in the New World for thousands of years, so it was claimed that the stone carvers could only have known about elephants if they had been in contact with Asia. A blazing row broke out between those who claimed to see long-nosed elephants in the carving, and their opponents, who scoffed that these were representations of long-beaked macaws, a perfectly normal American bird. The arguments kept flaring up and fading again over decades, and in the meantime the carving itself was so badly eroded by the weather that today it would be difficult to see either macaws, elephants or anything else cut in the original stone, and the debate depends on early sketches made of the mysterious sculpture.
So the long-running argument about whether there had been trans-pacific contact rumbled on and on. Nothing was definitive, and there was such a mass of evidence that the detail was bewildering. Then I read the opinion of one scholar whose reputation towered among Orientalists. Professor Joseph Needham of Cambridge University was acknowledged as the greatest twentieth-century authority on the history of Chinese civilisation and science. His seven-volume book on the subject, published in no less than twenty-five parts, had been described as the single most comprehensive work of scholarship of modern times. In it Professor Needham announced firmly that he believed there had been cultural exchange by sea between America and Asia in ancient times. What is more, he proposed — and this is what really caught my attention — that the most likely vessel the Chinese would have used for any transoceanic trips was the bamboo sailing raft. Needham believed that rafts were so ancient in Chinese culture that they were the true ancestors of the Chinese junk, whose design still copied the rafts distinctive curve and blunt ends. Thus, a tiny drawing of what looked like a raft was one of the earliest Chinese pictograms for a boat.
I was intrigued, not just about the bamboo rafts, but about Needham himself. Thirty years earlier I had been a university student preparing my very first expedition, which was to follow Marco Polo’s overland route to China on a motorcycle. Already Joseph Needham was one of the most eminent Oriental scholars of the day, and I had written to him asking for advice. To my surprise he had replied to my letter and invited me to call on him at his Cambridge college. There, as a very junior student, I met a tall, imposing man, who was courteous and helpful, finding time to encourage a novice historian to go travelling and do field work. His kindness had made a profound impression on me, and after my Marco Polo expedition had turned out well, I had been happy to send him a book as thanks.
Now, thirty years later, it seemed almost unbelievable that the same Joseph Needham should still be alive. But he was: ninety-two years old, white-haired and frail, his big frame now bowed over with arthritis and confined to a wheelchair, but as courteous and shrewd as ever. This time I explained to him that I was proposing to test the idea that a bamboo raft could cross the Pacific, and my method would be to build a replica using traditional materials, and set out from Hong Kong to sail by way of Taiwan and Japan to see if the vessel would reach the coast of California. Did he consider that my idea was worthwhile, and that it could add usefully to the debate about possible trans-Pacific contacts? Once again Joseph Needham offered encouragement. He still held his view that mariners from Asia had reached the New World long before Columbus, and indeed he had published a large monograph volume on the subject. ‘The voyage,’ he stated, ‘is extremely important, not only in the study of exploration but also in the study of civilisation in general.’
Obviously my next step was to find out whether bamboo sailing rafts were still to be found in Asia and, if so, to try to learn how they were built and handled. When Needham had done his research for his magisterial study on Chinese nautical technology published in 1971 thousands of bamboo rafts were to be found on the west coast of Taiwan, facing the Chinese mainland. There they were used for fishing and coastal transport, and they seem formerly to have been sailed across the ninety-mile-wide Taiwan Strait to the mainland, because Needham cited Chinese historical records which spoke of sea raiders from Taiwan landing on the coast of main land China from boats made of bundles, which they could lash together and use for their escape. And in the nineteenth century a Japanese traveller, Mr Hata, had been aboard a steamer passing Taiwan and drawn a sketch of a bamboo raft far out to sea, sailed by an old gentleman sitting in what looked like a bamboo hut on the stern. But that was all the pictorial evidence I could find, and when I went to Taiwan to do my research it seemed that I was too late.
Taiwan had rafts all right, many hundreds of them, and still operating in the same section of coast facing across to China. But in the past twenty years there had been two far-reaching changes. Firstly, the rafts were now propelled by engines. Masts and sails were no longer used. Second, the rafts were not made of bamboo but from large plastic drainage pipes carefully curved to imitate the shape of the traditional bamboo raft. Bamboo, I was told by a cheerful Taiwanese raftbuilder on the beach, was too difficult to obtain, rotted quickly, and was not strong enough to carry large engines. Indeed some of the plastic tube rafts were fitted with engines so powerful that I suspected they did duty as very good smuggling platforms, low-slung, fast and difficult to detect on radar as they ferried contraband to and from the fishing fleet in the Strait. But at least I was encouraged by the fact that the shape of the bamboo raft was good enough to have been copied in modern material, even down to the characteristic upcurve of the bow. What I needed was to find somewhere that still used genuine bamboo rafts, and the people who knew how to make them.
Then came a lucky coincidence. Another friend, the curator of the Exeter Maritime Museum in England, happened to telephone to tell me about his plans for the museum’s collection of traditional native vessels. He had recently visited Vietnam to purchase a bamboo basket boat, a strange little basin-shaped vessel like a large pudding bowl. Had he seen any sailing rafts? I asked him on the off chance. To my astonishment and delight he answered, Yes! He had seen them still used for fishing at a small coastal town called Sam Son about one hundred miles south of Hanoi in what was once North Vietnam. He also warned that it might be difficult for me to get permission to visit the area, because Vietnam still had very little contact with the non-communist world. On his visit the authorities had been suspicious of Western visitors who asked to travel outside the main tourist spots. Undeterred I wrote off to the Vietnamese Ministry of Culture, explaining that I wanted to see traditional Vietnamese boats, and after a two-month wait received a visa. Thus in October 1991 I found myself flying from Bangkok up to Hanoi aboard an aging Russian-built airliner of Vietnam Airlines, not knowing what to expect in a country that was one of the poorest in Asia. Sitting next to me was an earnest Japanese about thirty years old. He explained that he worked for a large Japanese company but studied insects as a hobby. Vietnam interested him as the entomology of the country had really not been looked at since it had been a French colony in the 19^os. He had saved up his money and his holiday time to make a visit. As he finished speaking, a large cockroach fell from the luggage compartment above his head, and plopped on to his lap. ‘Your first genuine Vietnamese bug’ I could not resist noting.
At Hanoi’s airport I stood in line with the other passengers, mostly diplomats and their families and, here and there, Vietnamese returning from foreign delegations and dressed in the cheap cotton raincoats and incongruous pork-pie hats favoured by nationals of the Eastern Bloc. We waited to have our visas minutely examined by security police with green uniforms and humourless expressions. The airport building was shabby and unimpressive, so functional that it was obvious that Vietnam had no spare cash to smarten up its impression on arriving foreigners. My gaze wandered to the glass partition separating the incoming passengers from the dusty baggage area where we would pick up our luggage. Standing just the other side of the grimy glass was a short, chubby Vietnamese man of about thirty-five years’ age. He was dressed in a wrinkled yellow plaid shirt which hung outside ill-fitting trousers. On his feet were flip-flop sandals with no socks, and in one hand he held a cigarette which dripped ash on the floor. He had a thin straggly moustache, slight acne, and his bulging eyes gave him a somewhat frog-like expression. He was scanning the incoming queue. With a sinking heart I noticed that he was holding up a piece of torn cardboard with my name scrawled on it. I waved to him, and the chubby face broke into a smile of welcome that revealed a mouthful of brown and irregular teeth. His name, I learned as soon as I had cleared the formalities, was True, and he had been sent by the Ministry of Information — disconcertingly he always pronounced it Military Information — to be my guide. Few people could have made a less favourable impression or turned out to be such a stalwart ally. Over the next eighteen months True was to evolve from being my official guide and minder for the Ministry into my colleague, ally, Mr Fixit, and firm friend. In a society still shackled by regulations and bureaucracy he was astonishingly impudent. He was afraid of nothing and nobody. He bullied, sweet-talked, cajoled, or brazened his way through every situation. And his sense of humour was never far away. We could be tired, exhausted, dirty and fed up after some particularly gruelling episode trying, say, to obtain an official permit, and True would see the funny side of the situation, throw back his head, and give a great chuckle, exposing those dreadful teeth. As he ushered me out to a ramshackle Russian-built car parked under a straggly tree with the Ministry driver asleep across the back seat, he explained to me that True was the name of a species of bamboo. How suitable.
We trundled off on the forty-mile drive from Noi Bai Airport to Hanoi itself, more than an hour’s drive southward across the alluvial plain of the Red River. It was then about five or six o’clock in the evening, and it was obvious that the road was a main highway even though it was badly potholed and only one and a half lanes wide. It was busy with bicycle traffic and an occasional truck grinding along at much the same speed as the cyclists and belching out black fumes. The trucks were so ramshackle that it was amazing they could move at all. Their chronically dilapidated state was emphasised by the frequent broken-down vehicle at the side of the road, propped up on piles of stones that gave the breakdown a permanent appearance. Sometimes the driver or a mechanic could be seen hard at work hammering, bending or welding some makeshift repair in place. It was very evident that there were no supplies or spare parts available. Vietnam, I knew, was still subject to an economic embargo imposed by the United States, and it was obvious that the country was desperately short of even the simplest materials. Yet the first impression was how everyone seemed to be getting on calmly and industriously with their work, even though they had very little in the way of tools or material. The road was raised up on an embankment, and on each side the rice paddy-fields stretched away, precisely divided by their little earth dikes. On the land the peasants were working steadily, hoeing clods of earth to break them up, or using a scoop like a large shovel suspended on a tripod to bring up water. The operator, usually a woman, swung this device backward and forward, rhythmically dipping up the water from the irrigation ditches and throwing it up on to the field. All was orderly and neat. There was no rubbish on the sides of the road, no bad smells, and when we drove through the little villages of the neat brick-built two-storey houses, the roadside stalls were carefully set out with displays of cooked foods and snacks, vegetables, piles of bamboo mats, and even some consumer goods — at one spot was a gleaming white display of lavatory pans.
Meanwhile True chatted amiably, though his English was sometimes difficult to follow. He had a wife, he told me, who was a translator in a government statistics office. They had met at English language college, and had a three-year-old son, on whom True clearly doted. But it seemed that True was not quite clear why I had come to Vietnam. No one at the Ministry had informed him. I said that I was interested in seeing bamboo sailing rafts, and had been told they could still be found in a place called Sam Son. Trues face brightened. Yes, yes, he knew exactly what I meant. By chance he, his wife and child had spent their summer holiday at Sam Son. We had reached the city, and True directed the driver to his own house. Wait a minute, he told him, and dashed inside. Moments later he reappeared holding the souvenir he had brought back from Sam Son for his small son — it was a small, crudely made model of a bamboo sailing raft with two masts and red sails. It seemed that I was on the right track.
