Free Golden Earth by Norman Lewis

and then collapsed. When the final twilight of decrepitude is reached, a ring of dogs forms and closing in upon the snapping, snarling victim, they devour it. In Upper Burma the only service the Japanese did the people was to eat most of the pariah dogs; which the Burmese will in no circumstances bring himself to kill. Perhaps even the Japanese stomach was turned by the dogs of Mergui.
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    The main street was Moulmein all over again. English had retained its prestige as the advertising medium. The Oriental Gents Smartman Tailors were there. You could buy an Ideal Leisure-time hat, or observe a cobbler at work under a tiger-flanked ‘Shoe to repair invisible’. The pharmaceutical trade was shared by Messrs. May and Baker, and Maclean, and the anonymous house responsible for that familiar Burmese specific composed of newly-hatched crocodiles in a black unguent. Misguided effort had gone into the manufacture of quaint miniatures, bullock-carts and peacocks, from the mother-of-pearl obtained from the giant conches which litter local beaches.
    There was one product of Mergui, famous in the old days, which I could not locate. ‘There is a village called Mirgim,’ said Caesar Fredericke, ‘in whose harbour every yeere there lade some ships with Verzina … which is an excellent wine … whose liquor they distill, and so make an excellent drinke cleare as christall, good to the mouth, and better to the stomake, and it hath an excellent gentle virtue, that if one were rotten with the french pockes, drinking good store of this, he shall be whole againe, and I have seene it proved, because that when I was in Cochin, there was a friend of mine, whose nose beganne to drop away with that disease, and he was counselled of the doctors of phisicke, that he should go to Tanasary at the time of the new wines, and that he should drinke of the nyper wine, night and day … This man went thither, and did so, and I have seene him after with good colour and sound.’
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    In those days Mergui was a port of Siam, as it was a hundred years later when it was the scene of the activities of the English pirate Samuel White, who got himself appointed harbour-master by the Siamese government. White was a latter-day De Brito, but a man of lesser calibre since whilst De Brito set out to turn Lower Burma into a Portuguese possession, all White hoped to do was to fill his pockets as quickly as possible and get back to England. The difference between common piracy and empire-building is a matter of scale and success. If White could have held on to Mergui and facilitated its ultimate annexation to the British crown he would have been an empire-builder but, as it was, his enterprise failed; although, by robbing all who fell into his clutches he put by enough to enable himself to set up as a squire when he finally reached home.
    The massacre by the Siamese that put an end to White’s dictatorship at Mergui resulted in the declaration of war upon Siam by the East India Company. This was a period when the interests of a commercial faction could be openly identified with those of the nation, and a declaration of war upon a friendly foreign power need be no more than a matter of resolution taken at a board meeting of directors. Fortunately for both nations, the company had another war on its hands at the time – withAurungzeb – and could not spare men or ships to avenge the White debacle. The thing was allowed to fizzle out.
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    As the Menam would be continuing its voyage from Mergui down to Penang and Singapore, I had arranged to fly back from Mergui. In Rangoon the importance had been stressed of organising the return trip so as to avoid staying a night in Mergui. Outside Rangoon, hotels as Europeans understand them do not exist. Before the war, most towns had ‘Dak’ bungalows, or Circuit Houses for the accommodation of officials on tour. Although equipped with monastic simplicity, they were kept clean by a caretaker, and the traveller’s