Page 181 - Michael Frost-Voyages to Maturity-23531.indd

On the whole, the stay in Tanga was idyllic. The weather was wonderful, hot
but with balmy breezes. The pace of life (which is to say, discharging and loading)
was languid and not disturbed by any night shifts. We had to keep a watch on the
bridge – the anchors could have dragged – but we had four cadets on board to
fulfil that need. It was with some reluctance therefore that we departed this piece
of Nirvana, though we anticipated being back for some supplementary cargo on
our final run up to the Red Sea. Unfortunately, upon leaving we found that quite a
lot of numbers had been added to our bar bills; we had been insufficiently diligent
in writing the numerical entries.

However, there was absolutely nothing wrong with the next port, this being
Mombasa. This again was on a low-lying coastal strip, but this was of no moment;
as soon as we moored, we saw that the city was decked out for the visit of H.M.S.
Eagle, Britain’s largest aircraft carrier. Naturally the several thousand young men
on board were a considerable boost to the local economy, not to say especially so
to certain professions. Our berth was close to the port area, so we enjoyed some
of the benefits of all these extra visitors, including the fact that all the restaurants
were open the entire day. We three caballeros decided to go to a nightclub, where
of course, certain ladies could be entertained with bottles of champagne at twenty
pounds a pop; they seemed to be doing pretty well. Unfortunately, Andrews
seemed a bit taken by the charms of one of these overweight ‘ladies’. This not
being to the taste of either myself or Chris, we left the jollity and returned to the
quiet of the ship, there to have a scotch together.

The issue that Chris and I set out to discuss was, of course, the fact of
Andrews’ behaviour. Chris was about my age, but a bit of a babe in the wood,
despite having been at sea for a few months. I myself found Dick’s earlier activities
rather inappropriate, but all he had really done was pay for something that others,
like the two of us, would accept ‘for free’; was his having so acted therefore in
any sense ‘right’ or ‘wrong’? Chris took the view that the whole escapade was
completely repugnant in and of itself. I found little guidance from ‘Ethics’; “…
if we speak of conflicting moral attitudes as ‘contradictory’ we run the risk of
unconsciously assimilating moral disputes to empirical ones and of inventing in
the logic of moral discourse elements analogous to those which are bound up
with the notion of contradiction in empirical discourse …” to which one can say
little other than ‘hallelujah!’ (So it goes for several pages; I understand the words,
but not what they mean). In fact, the issue did not disturb our friendship, but to
Chris and me it made us a bit uneasy in our own certitudes.

Next day, a gentleman appeared on board looking for someone to accompany
him on a trip to the Tsavo National Park for a day’s tour. He was a photographer
and sought out from ships those who would like to see animals in their natural
environment and cover his expenses, and it took only ten minutes to find six of
us who would be most pleased to take such an excursion. Two of those were our
passengers, whose final destination was to be Mombasa, but who were happy to

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