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from flying fish, this was really the first unusual marine animal that I had
seen; more were, of course, to come.

Overnight the two large ships left, and we unloaded our cargo. Taking the
opportunity to wander ashore, I was much taken by the town. I took a rickshaw
(entertaining, if a trifle close to traffic – I saw no evidence of driving tests being
needed, nor experience a legal pre-requisite to controlling a vehicle) to the
Seamen’s Club (actually a rather pleasing place in which to pass some time away
from the hubbub of the ship) and bought a ‘Times’ (it was surprising how much
one missed the news, despite it being four days out of date and with an airmail
edition that was printed on the thinnest paper that I had ever encountered) and
the ‘Straits Times’, which was undoubtedly the world’s most uninformative paper
that I had to that time encountered (although my view soon changed). Returning
to the ship, I found that the small amount of cargo for northern Malaya had taken
little time to unload, but that again we were marooned without power … and in
a port with scant repair facilities, I was very glad not to be an engineer. I knew
very little about engineering, but I knew enough to know that replacing boiler
tubes was a very unpleasant task. It was at this time that thought of going to
Kaohsiung in Formosa (Taiwan) was abandoned, so much behind schedule had
the temperamental boilers made us, but the omission did not much concern me;
I knew that I would likely be back to see the place, perhaps many times (in fact,
I never made it to Formosa; its geopolitical role – Quemoy and Matsu had for a
long time been in the news – was of much interest to me, and I rather wanted to
see the geography).

The passage from Penang to Singapore was in many respects rather pleasant.
We were running on one boiler, the zephyrs were light and the traffic modest,
(only some decades later did traffic lane separation become necessary) and as
tanker behemoths had yet to be invented, we encountered no north-bound
shipping problems.

We arrived in Singapore on January 18th, and I was interested to see that as
soon as we arrived the unloading gangs arrived on board and commenced work.
Overseen by a Chinese foreman, I rapidly realised that this was a very efficient and
different sort of port. Lunch took minimal time, each gang split up into groups of
four and had bowls of rice and a fish dish between them, and little time was wasted
in getting back to work. Just as interestingly, while in Penang the divide between
the Chinese (who did most of the visible ship’s work), the Indians (who ran all the
business) and the Malays (who were in nominal charge and through whom the
ultimate authority seemed to have to flow) was quite apparent. But in Singapore,

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