By the Tale of the Dragonfly

BY THE TALE

OF THE

Dragonfly

Vincent Hancock

AuthorHouse™ UK

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© 2019 Vincent Hancock. All rights reserved.

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Published by AuthorHouse 07/12/2019

ISBN: 978-1-7283-9058-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-7283-9059-8 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-7283-9064-2 (e)

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I am an old man now, and I have nothing to leave to my children except the story of my life—but it is a remarkable one. Thus, I will write my book so that all may know me well. I must be true to myself, and so I write only when I am inspired and never only because someone expects me to. People have said, No one will remember me. I have sung, and I was both the singer and the song. I’ve walked the hills and mountains, spent much time in rainforest jungles, hunted and been hunted! I’ve travelled far on land, sand, and sea. But most of all, I have loved and been loved! If you are reading this private journal now, then I am no longer in this life but in that of the next, with my ancestors, on my greatest adventures.

Rex

30-05-1924 to 10-05-1989

RIP

Foreword

Having spent much of my school years between 1966 and 1973 living in Malaysia, I find this book strikes a chord. My father was a senior officer at RAAF base Butterworth, involved in Australian operations during the Vietnam War. My mother was a child of Dutch colonials in Indonesia during the Japanese occupation and could therefore speak Malay quite well. We did feel at home there.

One of my father’s best friends there was a Scotsman who had been serving with the British Army in Malaya before independence (when Malaya became Malaysia). He had served during the Malayan Emergency prior to transferring to the RAAF as an officer, and he returned while his memories were still fresh. He would chat about it with my parents, and I would often listen in. Even as a kid, I was aware of the recent history and ongoing communist insurgency. I remember having time off school because the security risk to buses full of Australian kids was too great. However, the memories of that time and place are generally fond ones of a relaxed and vibrant multicultural society, with a multitude of religions and religious holidays to celebrate. We always felt welcomed by the local people.

Reading this book, I can hear the strains of Indian and Chinese music competing for attention, the constant heat and humidity of the tropics, and the exquisite, exotic, and confronting smells—the mouth-watering aroma of rendang at midday, and the ambivalent perfume of durian in the relative cool of the night market. The book is redolent with memories of a bygone age. On the other hand, The Tale of the Dragonfly reminds us of the courage and vigilance required from the few to secure peace and freedom for the many. It was a weird, yet fitting, twist of fate that the author and I both ended up serving in the Royal Engineers in Northern Ireland during the troubles.

Stephen Plowright

Forensic Examiner, IBM

Author of Learning Logic: Critical Thinking with Intuitive Notation

Contents

Chapter 1:   The End of Colonialism in Malaya

Chapter 2:   Living the Dream

Chapter 3:   Dirty John Hedges

Chapter 4:   The Lady Enlightenment

Chapter 5:   Captain William Carr

Chapter 6:   The Island of Bali

Chapter 7:   Grandfather Ng

Chapter 8:   In a Previous Life

Chapter 9:   Guns for Burma

Chapter 10: Special Intelligence Far East

Chapter 11: The Flying Boat

Chapter 12: Kasim the Fortunate

Chapter 13: The Berstanding

Chapter 14: The Bugis Rendezvous

Chapter 15: The Double Cross

Chapter 16: A New Day

I was educated by French Canadian catholic missionaries and grew up during the last days of British colonial rule in her Far East colonies. I gave up my dual nationality and relocated back to the United Kingdom when I turned sixteen years old. I shortly afterwards enlisted with the Corp of Royal Engineers as a boy soldier serving six years as a professional soldier with the British army on tours in Northern Ireland, Central America and Europe. I now spend my semi-retirement writing with a view to improve my work further and catch up with more research into my favourite subject areas which are ancient civilisations, magic and mythology.

And I dedicate this book to my mother Roffina.

Introduction

The author grew up during the ebbing days of British colonial rule in her Far East colonies. Educated by French Canadian Catholic missionaries, he grew up with the romance of empire. As a young man, the author relocated to Great Britain with his parents. He enlisted with the Corp of Royal Engineers as a boy soldier with the British Army, serving six years as a professional soldier in Central America and Europe. He experienced active service in Ulster during the troubles there in the seventies. Educated at the degree level, he now lives with his wife in the West Midlands and works in information technology. They have a son who is currently a serving military officer for the Royal Air Force.

This book is a true-to-life account based on five existing journals of my late father. He was born to a poor mining family in a small village called Ebbw Vale, South Wales, during the Great Depression of the early twentieth century. His family moved to Staffordshire in search of better employment opportunities when the Second World War broke out. His father was a police special constable during the blitz, but he enlisted with the Corp of Royal Engineers and was sent to Normandy, France, on June 4th, 1944, landing at Gold Beach, Arromanches. The battle for the port of Antwerp was his last European battlefront from Normandy.

Rex was then posted across to India to fight the war against the Japanese. After the Japanese surrender, our protagonist decided to opt for a life of high adventure by applying his scuba diving skills as a mercenary of the high seas in the South Pacific. Missing information to connect the dots comes from my teenage memories of fond conversations with Rex, my father, and remaining scraps of notes he loosely jotted down, breaking up some of the timelines. By the Tale of the Dragonfly is the summation of the first two of five journals, based around the period of 1947 to 1952.

Chapter 1

The End of Colonialism in Malaya

The year is 1947, and it seems a relatively short time, like yesterday, since the cessation of hostilities from World War Two Japanese Imperialists in the Pacific. But many war survivors still remember and have recurring nightmares, the brutal legacy of their former Nippon occupying conquerors! Post-traumatic stress disorder was not well known back in the late 1940s; the upper-level, nonchalant civilian personnel hiding in their safe Home Offices within the corridors of power might have called it shellshock or even cowardice.

I often ponder how many white feathers were given out undeservedly during the First and Second World Wars to these broken young men. They had witnessed first-hand the brutality, large-scale execution of prisoners of war and civilians alike, and the indiscriminate targeted rapes of white nurses and local females—things that no young man or woman should ever have to experience. The Imperial Japanese military forces during World War II made a mockery of bushido—the code of honour developed by Japanese samurai—savagely killing indiscriminately throughout their war campaign in China, South East Asia, and the Pacific.

The Japanese military forces of that period refused to recognize the Geneva Convention and treated all prisoners of war with much contempt for surrendering instead of fighting to the death or committing suicide. The occupation forces also brutalized and killed with fervour a great number of innocent civilians through orchestrated mass murders carried out on behalf of their High Command. General Tomoyuki Yamashita, referred to as the Tiger of Malaya, authorized his men to cooperate with the Japanese Military Police or Kempeitei.

Under the brutal command of Colonel Tsuji Masanobu, a purge of Chinese anti-Japanese elements who were likely to undermine the Japanese occupation was carried out. The British island colony of Singapore capitulated on 15 February 1942, with the surrender of some 120,000 British Commonwealth and Allied troops under Lieutenant General Arthur Ernest Percival to only 30,000 Japanese soldiers following the Battle of Singapore. Then the Sook Ching massacre began. These mass summary executions, in two phases, were carried out under Japanese General Yamashita’s directive, from 18 February to March 4, 1942, at various isolated killing fields throughout the island of Singapore. All Chinese men above the age of 18 were ordered to respond to a Japanese mass registration on the island. Failure to do so would be at their own peril, warned the Japanese order. Some quarter of a million Chinese men and women attended the mass registration, but several thousand were randomly routed after failing a very brief and bogus anti-Japanese filtering interview. They were considered a threat to the Japanese occupation, Chinese young men in particular.

These men and some women, along with their children, were sent on trucks to remote sites such as Changi, Punggol, Blakang Mati, and Bedok for immediate execution by drowning at sea or machine-gunning. The whole killing operation was overseen by the Kempeitei. High-secrecy protocols placed by the Japanese occupation forces limited accurate records surrounding these summary executions of innocent civilians. During later exhumations of the many mass execution sites, estimates suggested between 70,000 and 100,000 Chinese souls lost their lives.

General Tomoyuki Yamashita was branded as a war criminal. He took the blame for Pacific region Second World War atrocities, although he was not the only Japanese officer executed. Yamashita, through his legal team, attempted to deny the charges against him, but he was unanimously found guilty by the Allies in Manila, the Philippines Islands, and executed by hanging on 23 February 1946.

Colonel Tsuji Masanobu, in charge of the Kempeitei and leader of Sook Ching, fared better; he managed to escape justice. After Japan surrendered, Tsuji escaped to Japan via Indochina and China, disguised as a Buddhist priest. Arriving in Japan in 1949, after the Far East Tribunal had completed the trials of the major war criminals, he escaped attention from Allied occupation authorities. The Chinese term for the massacre, Sook Ching, is defined as a purge through cleansing. The Japanese called it Daikensho, suggesting the great inspection. It became known as the Shingapōru Kakyōgyakusatsujiken, or the Singapore Chinese massacres. Sook Ching was the systematic indiscriminate extermination of perceived hostile elements, mainly Chinese, and the makeshift British local militia called Dalforce, who disappeared after putting up a fierce battle at Bukit Timah (Timah Hill).

The survivors of this Dalforce most likely went underground, along with the communist guerrilla fighters, later called the Malayan People’s Anti-Japanese Army. They continued the war with hit-and-run tactics against Japanese forces. The communist guerrillas learned from Malayan aboriginal tribes how to disappear deep in the jungles of Malaya. They even hid out in leper colonies, where they knew the Japanese pursuers would not follow them. The Chinese-led communist resistance had planned well ahead, with weapon caches hidden all over the country for guerrilla war.

When the British in Malaya and Singapore finally surrendered to the Imperial Japanese forces, all that was left to oppose them was the Malayan People’s Anti-Japanese Army, who were mainly Chinese communist guerrilla fighters with some Malay sympathizers. These freedom fighters, who modelled themselves on the example set by Josef Stalin, set aside their differences during the war against the British colonialists to focus on their common enemy, the Japanese. The old leaders of the resistance fighters were routed out by the Kempeitei.

A young Chinese Marxist revolutionary called Ong Boon Hua, better known to the British as Chin Peng, took over command of the Japanese resistance army, with the help of Special Operations Executive Far East. SOEFE was a highly classified Second World War British commando unit known as Force 136. They re-armed these Malayan communist fighters on provision that after the war against the Japanese ended, the British-supported resistance army would disband and relinquish all such weapons back to Britain. When the war ended, the Malayan Communist Party, along with their military arm, the Malayan Peoples’ Anti-Japanese Army (MPAJA), refused to disband after failing to win influence politically.

Instead, they started an insurgency to gain power in Malaya as Chinese communists within the Malayan Communist party, believing they had a right to rule the colony because of their sole guerrilla-war efforts against the Japanese occupiers during the Second World War. The Malayan Communist Party embraced the Malayan Nationalist Liberation Army (MNLA) in bloody armed conflict towards their former British colonial masters. Choosing to continue the struggle to rid Malaya of British rule via the gun instead of the ballot box, they killed and mutilated innocent civilians. The MNLA, formerly MPAJA, was essentially a communist-inspired uprising that began with many brutal murders of colonial expatriate rubber plantation owners and their families.

The communists also targeted the families of British colonists in Malaya, including their children. They set fire to their properties, buses with innocent children still inside them, and rubber plantation estates, as well as murdering local policemen and policewomen. Bloody violence flared up in the streets and then escalated, becoming a problem for British rule in Malaya post-Second World War and kicking off a large-scale communist terrorist insurgency—better known today, for insurance purposes, as the Malayan Emergency (1948–1960). A new kind of soldier was needed, as the cream of British veterans had disbanded after the war.

The National Service men of post-war Britain were no match for the experience-hardened veteran jungle fighters of the new communist insurgents. These—under a renewed second insurgency in 1968, long after the British had left the conflict in Malaya—renamed themselves the Malayan National Liberation Army. To deal with the new threat, the decommissioned Second World War Special Air Service of David Sterling’s North Africa group was reborn, under the command of ex-Chindit veteran jungle fighter Brigadier Mad Mike Calvert.

General Sir John Harding, commander-in-chief for the Far East, decided he needed independent advice and brought in an expert on jungle warfare to fight these hard-core battle-seasoned Chinese terrorists. They were later called communist terrorists or CTs. Mad Mike Calvert was a veteran leader of the controversial Chindit long-range penetration groups. Major-General Orde Charles Wingate masterminded long-range operations in Burma during the Second World War. But after Wingate’s death in an untimely air crash, Michael Calvert, who also had considerable experience of hard jungle-terrain fighting behind enemy lines, carried on leading the Chindits. Mad Mike Calvert was notorious for getting the job done. He knew how to fight the Japanese and defeat them.

Charles Wingate (centre) with Michael Calvert (third from left) and Chindits, Burma, 1944

The term chindit is an English corruption of the Burmese word chinthe, describing a mythical lion. The name was adopted by a legendary band of irregular British-Allied troops during the war in Burma. Calvert was also one of the prime movers in ensuring the Special Air Service (SAS) ethic didn’t die out at the end of the war. Calvert set up his own special force, a jungle fighting unit he called the Malayan Scouts SAS. This was intended to operate only for the duration of the emergency, under Far East Command. The Malayan scouts wore shoulder titles on their olive-green jungle uniforms, and under the titles were the green patch and yellow kris fighting knife. The basic training of British National Service men or regular soldiers was not enough to counter a brutal guerrilla war. An elite counterterrorist jungle warfare group was required to meet with the new growing communist threat in the Malayan colonies.

This eventually led to the jungle-warfare school being set up at Kota Tinggi, Johore, in Malaya. The original British jungle-fighting school was set up by the Malayan Scouts Special Air Service and operated from 1948 until 1971. There are those even today who sympathize; they were once a part of treason against their own nation or bought into the idea of a great people’s revolution against the British Empire of the Far East. In my opinion, our colonies fared a great deal better than many others who came before us. They should have remained under British control. Dissenters who sought to get rid of British rule in her colonies did so through a policy of large-scale murder of innocent civilians.

All those loyal to the British also became targets of the communist terrorists. It started with the random killing of plantation owners and rubber tappers, along with kidnapping and gang-raping their daughters. The brutality extended to killing innocent schoolchildren by setting fire to their buses. Our not-so-noble enemies in the colonies got what they had coming to them. These murderous thugs needed to be eliminated; they were not freedom fighters but brutal killers who adopted a policy of intimidation, protection rackets, and sheer terror to raise funds, along with beheadings and disembowelling of their enemies.

Those who remained loyal to the British they contemptuously called running dogs. For the most part, the Malayan Emergency was one of many forgotten wars that the British and her colonial forces fought after the end of the Second World War in our Far East colony. I watched Bache, a loyal Malay friend and fellow security forces police officer, bleed out and die horribly on me. I tried to rush him to hospital on rough jungle roads after he was shot in the stomach; he had taken the bullet meant for me in an ambush by communist terrorists.

Members of my jungle Q squad, 1952

We also changed tactics, using the officially denied Q squads to great effect, and achieved what could not be done otherwise. Q Squads were British officer-led guerrilla warfare infiltration operations, wherein highly motivated locally trained and recruited jungle fighters dressed up as the enemy to engage them on their own terms. These were a kind of officially denied search-and-destroy kill teams akin to American Special Forces A teams, whose principal operating methods fell outside the rules of engagement. British Q squads often came across regular British Army or local security forces jungle patrols but pulled back into the bush when they did. But of course this never happened, at least not officially.

Historians have argued that the fall of Singapore was the greatest British military defeat during the Second World War, citing that a smaller force of just 30,000 Imperial Japanese forces had defeated the 120,000-strong British and Allied forces in Malaya and Singapore. Winston Churchill had failed to reinforce her weaker Navy, Air Force, and ground forces in Malaya with any credible effective military deterrent, scavenging all that he could from Malaya to bolster the war in Europe. The sinking by enemy aircraft of two British capital battleships of Force Z, namely HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Repulse, which reportedly sank off the isthmus of Kra, sealed the fate of Malaya.

HMS Indomitable, a 35,500-ton aircraft carrier intended to give air cover to Force Z, ran aground off Jamaica. Force Z was a British naval squadron hurriedly put together during the Second World War to halt Japanese aggression on the British colony of Malaya and the naval base of Singapore. It consisted of the battleship HMS Prince of Wales, the battlecruiser HMS Repulse, plus four accompanying destroyers. Yamashita, the Japanese commander for the attack on Malaya, was not short of men. To maintain his logistics, Japanese forces of around 30,000 troops amassed in the jungles of Johore for the final attack on Singapore, which by then was running low on drinking water.

The fact that the 30,000 Japanese forces were undersupplied and low on ammunition at that time would not have changed the outcome of the attack on Fortress Singapore, as huge battalion-strength reinforcements were not far behind. What is missed out by later day historians was that the Japanese forces also had several thousands of battle-hardened Manchurian campaign troops held in reserve, including tanks, planes, and armour that could be brought into play. Allied forces in Malaya and Singapore on December 1, 1941 were as follows: 19,000 British, 15,000 Australian, 37,000 Indian Army (including the eleventh division), plus 17,000 local Malay troops.

Approximately 7,500 Allied soldiers were killed; 10,000 were wounded, escaped, or were listed missing in the Battle of Malaya. On January 29, 1942, approximately 20,000 green troops of the eighteenth division arrived in Singapore, bringing the actual rather than reported total Allied forces strength up to around 85,000 men—not 120,000 as previously claimed. After Singapore fell, a tally of Allied losses revealed 5,000 killed and wounded or missing. In retrospect, on the Japanese side, more than 10,000 were killed in Malaya and Singapore, with some further 25,000 wounded or missing in action. Historians and military strategists regard the fall of Singapore as the greatest British military disaster—or clusterfuck—of the Second World War.

After the battle of Singapore, many thousands of British prisoners of war were taken as slave labour for the Japanese Burma railway. They subsequently perished there, from brutal beatings by their Japanese guards, malnutrition, exhaustion, or tropical diseases. British and colonial Far East troops in Malaya were inexperienced at jungle warfare, generally being considered untested or green. Soldiers lacked the discipline of battle against a well-trained, determined enemy. The British officers in command led them poorly, with no real effective coordination of ground or air movements. Inaction against the initial Japanese landings in Siam, as well as poor intelligence regarding Japanese movements, was a factor. Without any real air support or naval aircraft carriers, the colony of Singapore was known to be doomed by her commanders.

Despite the propaganda that led the colonial British to believe themselves invincible early on during the Malaya campaign, I suggest there were greater losses at stake and that their Far East colonies of Malaya and Singapore were sacrificed by the British to focus on fighting and winning the war in Europe. A 1939 COS Subcommittee Report known as CAB 53/50 stated that to effectively defend Malaya, Britain would have had to deploy at least eight capital ships.

That should have been the minimum British Naval Task force mustered to counter the threat of nine Japanese battleships and battlecruisers. The fact that we needed battleships and heavy cruisers with at least two modern aircraft carriers to defend our Naval Task Force is incidental, as none materialized nor existed back then in the region. The British Empire relied heavily instead on the bullshit propaganda that Britain ruled the waves. Using her untested and poorly led large colonial army—more suited to keeping public order than fighting an all-out war—was a serious mistake. She had at the time neither the resources nor strategic military naval assets to fight a major world war on two fronts.

The defeat of the British in the East Indies, culminating with the fall of Singapore, had more far-reaching consequences post-war. A humiliating military defeat by a nation considered to be an inferior military power at that time was politically catastrophic. The belief that Britain was technologically and militarily superior to their Japanese counterparts was misguided. What did not help was an acute lack of any immediate military action by the British commanders, such as bolstering Malaya’s northern border defences or taking the war to Siam, where the Japanese landed on neutral territory. Britain’s defence strategy was based on outdated WWI modules.

Incorrect deployment of limited and obsolete aircraft and the ground forces clusterfuck by British commanders contributed to the huge military defeat that was the invasion of Malaya on 8 December 1941. The Japanese navy, army, and air force, especially with their Mitsubishi Zeros, were far superior militarily, very well coordinated, and a formidable fighting force compared to any British forces in the region at that time. The loss of their strategic island colony, Fortress Singapore, and her newly upgraded British naval base had also damaged prestige for Britain as a protector of her colonies; it also aided the Japanese.

This eventually triggered the quest for independence from British rule that signalled the beginning of the end for the British Empire. For the first time ever, the inhabitants of British colonies in the Far East realized that Britannia was no longer invincible, and that British imperialism could be beaten. Losing the war in the Far East British colonies changed the way the local people viewed their former imperial masters. In the days of British imperialism, if a white British man or woman was walking along a street, local Chinese or Malay peoples would automatically cross over to the other side so as not to run head-on into white British people. All this ended when local-population politicians decided to press for independence from British rule. They no longer crossed over the street to give way to the British colonials.

The Japanese lost some 10,000 men in Malaya and Singapore, and more than 25,000 Japanese soldiers were wounded or missing. So, contrary to all that has been said, the Japanese military did not walk into Malaya without cost.

There must at this stage be no thought of saving the troops or sparing the population. The battle must be fought to the bitter end at all costs. The eighteenth division has a chance to make its name in history. Commanders and senior officers should die with their troops. The honour of the British Empire and of the British Army is at stake.

—Winston Churchill, to the eighteenth Division, 1942

Chapter 2

Living the Dream

Wednesday, 1 January 1947 (New Year’s Day)

Most people simply daydream without end; others wishfully think What if? But as Thomas Edward Lawrence once said,

All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make them possible.

Do you moralize the ideal, or do you remember these atrocities committed against humanity in the name of idealism? I am not very good at subterfuge. When I was young, I looked at people and saw that I had a decision to make. I could run with the pack or go it alone. I decided that I would be in advance of the others and throw myself into the winds of fortune. There are some things in life of value, and these you may strive hard to achieve or acquire. But whatever you choose to do with your life, do so honestly and with integrity. This I did with varying degrees of success and failure during my time as an itinerant soldier of fortune.

My journey began on a small vessel somewhere out in the Savu Sea, sometimes called Sawu Sea, located within the Indonesian archipelago and named after the island of Savu. The post-war era was a time for new opportunities, with great adventures for daring entrepreneurs willing to take risks in the game of life. But it was also a time of many fractured post-war families and broken military men looking to start afresh. Not all wounds are visible, and nightmares persist. I decided to make a better life for myself, out in the colonies, redefining who and what I was on the other side of the world.

Language is a public affair which no one really controls. The Saxon word worm, for instance, can also mean dragon. The word for dragon in Germanic mythology is worm in Old English: wyrm. In Old High German it’s wurm and in Old Norse ormr, suggesting a snake or serpent. A word is just another sound and the written word merely a series of marks. We live in terms of language, which is, when properly considered, a history of words and rules that determines their use. I have always kept a journal, odd disjointed jottings and anecdotes of my thoughts at the time. I note these quickly on pieces of paper but write them up fully later when I have a few spare moments. In this sense, my journals are a record of my disjointed thoughts at the time of their writing.

Roy is a wally and Cecil a gallah (an Australian bird). Wally is Aussie slang for an idiot. They both took off in a hurry, leaving me high and dry in the boatyard at Fakfak, a significant port town in West Papua, New Guinea. Apparently they were heading for Foochow on the South China coast in their pearl lugger. It is New Year’s Day! We are three days out of Fakfak, in New Guinea, heading for Ndao in the Java Sea. Ndao is one of the southernmost islands along the Indonesian archipelago. It is a picturesque, pacific, oceanic blue sky today, with my crewmen, Abu and Idris, who are sat on the planks of the deck, weaving tiny, delicately coloured momi and kaheleani shells into a necklace.

We are running a month late, but have you perhaps never chased a rainbow or gone off in pursuit of a dream? Divers are notably notorious for not wanting others to know about their underwater finds, and if we are honest, we can’t blame them. Some very spectacular finds have been made, several of which have been worth a great deal of money. Perhaps their attitude is not unreasonable, for after all, many of them have spent quite some time searching for that something special in life, their dream of discovering lost gold or buried treasure.

We have just concluded a five-month trip through the South Pacific and spent Christmas in Fakfak, Dutch New Guinea. Our cargo is rather a mixture now, most of which we will trade off at various ports of call on our way home to Singapore. We have kappa, the bark cloth made by the women of the South Pacific from mulberry bark. After being pounded, the scrapings are left fermenting in seawater before being sun-bleached. After that, the fine gauze-like cloth is printed with designs using vegetable dyes. As well we have pearl shell, which the Chinese use to inlay and ornament their furniture, and mother-of-pearl, which could fetch a good price in Singapore.

We also have one or two white and blueish-grey pearls of the size and type approximately five points between ruby and diamond. But although the pearl-oyster seabeds were good to us, we did not find those precious tear-tooth black pearls we came in search of, the mythical lost treasure of King Kamehameha. Cecil called us on the radio this morning, but for the time being we are maintaining radio silence. This is not because there is any animosity between us. We are currently en route to a shipwreck in Dutch Rotinese waters. Pulau Rote (Rote Island) lies 500 km (311 miles) northwest of the Australian coast and 170 km (106 miles) north of the Ashmore and Cartier Islands, southwest of the larger island of Timor.

I don’t relish the possibility of a Dutch gunboat turning up out of the blue to catch us in the act of making profit. After all, there is quite an insurrection going on in the Dutch East Indies around Java, and of course the Dutch authorities keep an eye open, especially for gunrunners.

I think it was Anton Chekhov who said, The task of a writer is not to solve the problem but to state the problem correctly. I have yet to write up my 1946 journals from the notes I made during that busy time. This 1947 journal will overlap briefly and commence in Hawaii, moving quickly to Fakfak. China must have been quite a place, all things considered.

The Kuomintang under General Chiang Kai-Shek were fighting bolshevism in the south, and the tuchuns—self-styled warlords little better than bandits operating on a large scale—were making war on one another, plundering the impoverished and war-weary peasants. Now, the poor of China had a rather nasty habit of leaving unwanted baby girls on a mountaintop, where they would die of cold or be taken in by one of the monasteries. My Chinese emissary female was one such case. Luck must have been with her back in 1920, because the Taoist monk who found her as a baby later became the clan master of the Green Dragon Mountain Society.

We will leave her story for the moment, while I get my 1947 journal into its correct sequence. My business partner, Roy, and I left Singapore for Hawaii in search of some fabulous treasure he had learnt of during his enforced stay in a Japanese prisoner of war camp at Changi, Singapore, during the Second World War. Myth or not, this story helped keep Roy alive during that very trying part of his life, so that seeking to recover it became a compulsion for him. This was the lost treasure of King Kamehameha.

When Kekuiapoiwa II, a Hawaiian chieftess and the mother of King Kamehameha, was pregnant back in 1758—a notable year during which Halley’s Comet was visible over Hawaii—she had a strange craving for the eyeball of a chief.

It is said that instead she was given the eye of a man-eater, the tiger shark. The kahuna (Hawaiian for a priest, sorcerer, magician, wizard, minister, or expert in any profession) immediately prophesized that her unborn child would be a rebel and killer of chiefs. As a remedy against this prophesy, Alapainui, the old king and then ruler of Hawaii, made plans to have the child killed secretly. According to legend, the baby, Kamehameha, was carried to safety by a local chief named Naeole, at a place called Awini, on the north coast of the island. The child was carried hidden in a basket covered with olona fibres, which are used for making fishing nets.

Kamehameha grew up and later became a very powerful war chief and then king, during a long and bloody campaign of conquest across all of the Hawaiian Islands. Some say that his treasure of black pearls was lost during a battle at Morotai, in the Halmahera, Indonesia. Others say that he himself tossed those black pearls into the fire of Kilauea, as his tribute to the Hawaiian goddess Pele. Yet another story suggest that the pearls were lost during a battle in Tahiti. But his last battle was at Pitu.

Oyster-bed girls in Hawaii

Wailana—Peaceful Water—is chanted in Hawaiian on the slopes of Waia to evoke the uplands. Olelo no ke ola, I ka olelo no ka make. She (the goddess Pele) speaks the language of life and death, here amidst the falling white ash of Kilauea, one of the world’s most active volcanos. The kahuna say that this is the home of their goddess Pele.

Hokule’a. Follow the stars to Tahiti. "Aloha."

We took the garlands of ti leaves and delicate ohai ali’i and ilima blossoms and went our way, following the path of Kamehameha to Tahiti. Of course, the location of the oyster bed was to all intents and purpose taboo. We were never permitted near them. To break the taboo would have invited the full vengeance of Kukailimoku, the appointed guardian and war god to whom the local chiefs sacrificed animals, criminals, and