Free Endangered Species by Richard Woodman Page A

day’s paperwork. Mackinnon hoped that he would not have to deal out summary justice this morning and there were no drunks to log. If there were his reading of the newspaper would go hang.
    He became aware that he felt an anticipatory sensation of resentment against anything that threatened to upset the tranquil passing of this voyage. It was a rather selfish indulgence, his conscience chid him; perhaps it was nature’s way of telling him it was time he retired.
    He grunted his objection to the uncomfortable thought and put it down to a touch of alcoholic remorse. A second later he had remembered the cause of his private binge and the vague, premonitory feeling that had disturbed his equanimity the previous evening: the boat people.
    He sighed and gazed out over the Lion City. How different it appeared, with its tower blocks rising in white columns above the old, colonial-period architecture, dwarfing the once massive structures of the
tuans
, visible evidence of the triumph of largely Chinese capitalism.
    How different to its appearance when, in those first weeks of peace, the
James Cook
had berthed in the Empire Dock and the pomp and circumstance of British reoccupation had taken place. For Uncertificated Third Mate John Mackinnon, eighteen years of age, the bugle-blowing had a hollow ring. He remembered the pictures of General Perceval’s surrender when the unthinkable occurred and now he was here to witness its aftermath. The lorries arrived at noon, a convoy of them, and the crew of the
James Cook
watched as their pitiful cargo was unloaded. It was a cargo that was to occupy the vacant ’tween decks of the
James Cook
, fortuitously fitted out at the ship’s building by an opportunist Sir James Dent with a view to transporting Indonesian and Malay Muslins on their annual pilgrimage to Mecca. The ship had never been employed on this hadji run, but today the ’tween decks were filled with a human cargo of another kind.
    After several months’ service with the Fleet Train based at Manaus, the crew of the
James Cook
had heard of the Burma Railway and of Changi jail. They had heard, too, rumours of Japanese atrocities matching the revelations of Belsen, Auschwitz, Ravensbruck and the rest, but they had seen nothing. For them the war had been between their inadequately armed ships with their over-stretched escorts and the unseen U-boat. Then, in the Pacific, they had conveyed stores, fuel and ammunition to the British PacificFleet, raising to an art form the replenishment and subsequent efficiency of the great aircraft carriers with their screen of long, lean destroyers.
    But they had seen little of the enemy apart from the desperate, doomed and incomprehensible heroics of the pilots of the Emperor Hirohito’s divine wind, the
Kamikaze
. Those old hands among the
James Cook
’s company who remembered Japan before the war talked not of politics, of the invasion of China or the rape of Nanking. Instead they remembered nights ashore in Shimonoseki or Kobe, Nagasaki and Yokohama, of the gentle giggles of the knocking-shop girls, whom they gallantly termed
geisha
but who were nothing of the kind. They complained, seeing in it perhaps a manifestation of that arrogance that was but a flatteringly sincere imitation of the white man, of the indignity of the ‘short-arm inspection’, when the port doctor publicly examined the penises of the crew for signs of primary syphilitic lesions. Even this formality had its admirers, who contrasted it with the head-in-the-sand hypocrisy of ‘homeside’.
    In liberated Singapore, however, they saw something else as those trucks set down the released prisoners of war.
    Mackinnon remembered it so well. The staring eyes, the shrunken limbs and cadaverous bodies, the uncertainty and fear in their faces.
    â€˜They don’t realise they’re safe,’ he remembered one hard-bitten able seaman observe in a wondering tone. ‘Yer okay now,