Silas Goes to Papua New Guinea

My name is Parks, Silas E Parks to be precise! I've been at sea for forty, nay fifty years if a day, mostly good, some bad and I can remember all as crystal clear as if it only happened yesterday!

I started to write my memoirs some time ago, an ongoing record of my past as and when events relive themselves, the aim being to record my life on paper before the lights in my head start to dim and I can no longer see the lighthouse through the fog! Not just yet you young scallywags!

I'm a Captain still! I'm not quite so active today and perhaps I don't get the cream of the Merchant Navy that I used to navigate around the world but I am still able and fit! Once I used to hop all over the world, wherever jobs demanded, the more remote the more adventurous - "parachute old Silas in" they would say!

Once I was sent out to the jungle in Papua New Guinea! The last outback of the world they called it and deep into the heart of the country I journeyed to join this research vessel working up the Fly River.

Shocks and surprises where a daily occurrence, many not welcome and others hard to swallow but all part of the situation that I found myself in then. I was certainly on my own during the six months that I spent on a boat hardly big enough to stretch two waves on the ocean. Alone in the middle of the jungle, well not quite alone but it certainly felt that way the with assorted crew of misfits that they called sailors! A crew of unskilled and mostly ignorant seafarers (able bodied my a***) that had been collected from the trees and swamps that surrounded us and who knew less about navigation than a first trip cadet on the big ships that I had worked on. I must admit that they tried hard and for the most part pulled together as a team, a team that I was never apart of. I directed and navigated that ship on my own and to the orders of the company or scientists that frequently descended upon the aluminum can like locusts on a field of corn.

It was thus I, my occasional thirst quencher and my thoughts that took me through the multitude of surprises, shocks and attacks against my person and authority! That was before the finale, the event that had me chased out of the country by two half-naked, machete-wielding and extremely drunk savages who would have sliced my head off had they caught me!

Our reason for being on the river was to study the effects of mercury (deposited downstream by the copper and gold mine at the top of the river) and to find out were all the sediment and poison ended up! So we would travel slowly up and down a 500 mile stretch of the river, day in day out - dark, hot and miserable, hauntingly quiet at times as the mosquitoes planned and plotted to find a way inside to wreck havoc on my skin!

One evening we ran aground, a common occurrence I fear, as the sand banks shifted! Some ships had to wait weeks if not months for the river level to rise! Up river from us were other ships, vessels that traded up and down the river carrying copper from the mines to the large storage vessels at the river mouth and who returned with the food and machinery that kept the Ok-Tedi Gold (copper) mine ticking over!

Three ships aground that day, nothing to do but sit it out - what else could we do but have a barbeque. A meeting of ships that pass in the night - an opportunity that deserved a bottle or two!

I broke open what had become my personal bond locker, a drawer underneath my bunk and various other bottles appeared from the bush! We lit up the briar sent a message across to the other vessels to join us if they could and so we dove into fried scarecrow chicken, jungle sausages, some unknown meat and a large swig of rum from the bottles that I passed freely around! I ended up smoking Irish Tobacco rolled-up in last year's edition of the local rag - heady stuff chaps!

The company told me later that they had clearly warned me before joining that alcohol was not a good idea and that its distribution should be avoided at all costs. The occasional beer maybe but as they put it "you will not be able to stop the seafarers drinking the local coconut toddy, allow this to happen but do not instigate drinking sessions onboard and certainly never allow them to drink fortified spirits".

They never sent that message to me! I think they were just trying to cover themselves after the event!

Anyway, back to the story in-hand! I remember that evening so clearly! It was a lovely night and the mosquitoes were for once having a break, thirty or so people chatting away jovially and not a care in the world to be had! This was what life at sea was all about. The food was good, the drink excellent and perhaps we missed some female company but two out of three isn't bad!

Not everybody looked back on the party with such fondness! An Indian Captain from the other vessel supposedly had some troubles upon his return home. I heard that his crew, then heavily overdosed with rum, decided to attack him. He managed to lock himself in his cabin and despite the crews attempts at bashing down his door with a fire extinguisher he survived intact, alls well that ends well! Somebody also decided to set fire to the rescue boat at some point, I can't quite remember what happened but suddenly the upper deck exploded into a shower of burning rubber particles, all that remained was the outboard motor and even that looked worse for wear! I can't quite remember what happened after that!

Two of my crew went missing! They just vanished into the trees!

I really don't know what everybody was complaining about! The party was excellent!

I was certainly surprised the next day to find that my bond locker was empty! It was all worth it though I'm sure! Trouble was I needed something to keep me going for the next few days until we reached port or at least got off the sand bank. I decided then and there to go ashore (land is never far away when one is stuck on a sand bank in the river) and buy something locally! And so, without undue haste I set off! I was going to use the rubber boat but that was now a molten heap of rubber with an outboard motor attached so I simply jumped over the side and waded the last little bit to dry land.

I found some local juice in a wooden hut without walls, looked fresh from the coconut tree! It came in a coca cola bottle but who was I to complain! Upon returning to the bank near the vessel I was accosted by the two missing crew members! I'm not sure who had rubbed them up the wrong way but I was certainly at the receiving end of their current angst! They stopped me in my tracks by waving large machetes around and shouting unintelligible gibberish in my direction. I attempted to open my mouth but this caused increased volume and cutting motions of the large knives!

I could see two basic choices at that moment, stay to fight it out or run! I chose the latter! With a rapid swivel I legged-it out of there as fast as I could possibly go with these two knife-wielding apes chasing me through the underbrush!

To cut a long story short the sequence of ensuing events led to me finding myself in a local hospital covered in what looked like millions of mosquito bites - took me weeks to get home from that open-air hovel! They said I was lucky to survive! Anyway, supposedly whilst I was being chased through the bush the river rose, the vessel came off the sand bank but because everybody onboard was still sleeping off the hangover nobody was there to notice. The boat ended up drifting down river to lodge on another sand bank 30 miles down from the original position. A shame really but this sand bank was in the middle of the river and as the river was at its highest for years it took a tug to pull them back off!

I never heard about this till later! I was still delirious in some hut in the jungle. As I said they got me home eventually and the company decided that it would not be advisable to send me back that way for the next twenty years at least!

Shame really! I never did get to drink that bottle of coconut toddy! I've always wandered what it tasted like!