Radio Script #446

Little Talks on Common Things

February 7, 1960

At the close of our program last week we left young William Heath on board a ship far out in the Pacific, in the spring of 1850. As May turned into June the ship passed the Ladrones and the Marianas, islands about which we would hear a lot nearly a century later in World War II. On June 7th he wrote: “It is now evening. We are about a thousand miles from Hong Kong. How I hate the suspense I am in, but it will soon be over. I think I shall go home on this ship when she returns.”

Two days later he wrote: “We are nearly in the China Sea. I must buy some books in Hong Kong to brush up on my Latin and Greek. I have not read much the last few days except Byron’s letters. Who would not be a poet? We are entirely becalmed with no prospect of wind. Since I did not go to bed until after one last night and got up at four this morning, I feel pretty stupid today. Oh, if I could only go home! If in San Francisco I had looked into my innermost heart, as I do now, my course would have been different, and instead of writing this dull, stupid journal, I would be murdering Latin and Greek wholesale.”

The calm on the sea continued for several days. On the 12th William wrote: “We are still basking under a vertical sun in a dead calm. The water is as smooth as a millpond, and the sails seem too lazy to flap against the mast. I had just decided to go swimming when I saw a big shark circling around the ship. Accompanied by his inevitable attendant, the pilot fish. The sailors put over a hook and line baited with salt pork. The old fellow swam slowly up to the bait, smelt of it, then retired a little way, turned on his back, then like a flash darted and grabbed it. It was not easy to land him, but finally a bowline twisted round him did the job. He was a savage looking creature, eight feet long. Even after they cut off his head and tail, the body stayed alive for half an hour.”

It was the very next day when William Heath experienced that horror of Pacific navigators, the typhoon. Let us see how William described it: “Last night a pretty wind sprang up, ending our becalmed stay. We scudded before it all night. Suddenly this morning, when we were under full sail, a terribly black cloud appeared to the windward. The Captain called both watches and took in sail as fast as possible. The speaking trumpets bellowed, everybody was shouting, and the whole ship was a perfect Babel. The captain yelled that if they did not get in all sail before the wind struck, the squall would save them the trouble. Just as they had everything furled except the fore and main topsails, the squall struck. Down came the rain in torrents, and it was as dark as night. The waves rolled over the deck and everything was afloat. The thunder and lightning were incessant. I enjoyed every bit of it and stayed on deck to the end. I got wet through. I do indeed like storms.”

The Captain told young Heath that what he had seen was only a brief squall, not a real typhoon. He told William that if a real typhoon hit them, they would be mighty lucky to come through it alive. But he didn’t scare William Heath, who wrote in his diary: “I care nothing for all the typhoons that ever blew over the China Sea and made widows of the daughters of Canton. I think I shall go home on this beautiful ship if fortune is propitious. But whatever consequences shall ensue, typhoons or no typhoons, there is nothing that will either grieve or surprise me.”

William tried his hand at art. On June 15 he wrote: “Here we are in the China Sea and the monsoon is laying the old ship on her side. I have been sketching a little, but my pencils are bad and a bad worker always quarrels with his tools.”

The next day they sailed close to Formosa, and William turned from art to poetry, writing some rather tolerable verses on “Sunset at Sea”. The poem is too long to quote tonight.

William Heath was certainly learning a lot about the sea. He found that the barometer always gave notice of a storm; that the Chinese fishermen can tell a storm is coming two days before it breaks upon them. Before a storm William noted that the sun shone redder, the sea appeared to boil though there was no wind, and the air became oppressively hot. They passed a wrecked schooner and met a full rigged ship bound out from China.

Even without the books he intended to buy in Hong Kong, William was brushing up on his Greek for he still carried the Greek New Testament he had brought across the plains in a covered wagon. He now wrote: “This is the first Greek I have read in 15 months. I got through three chapters of the Greek Testament. It came easy to me and I think I can read Greek as well as ever I could. Though I couldn’t be sure of the meaning of all the words, the conjugation came to me as natural as soft soap to a cat.”

After that plunge into Greek, William turned to his English Bible. The sixteen year old boy had become quite a free thinker in those Puritanical times. Listen to this: “How could the Lord of Israel approve of so much bloodshed and of all sorts of sin? In that treacherous business of Saul and Bathsheba, she is called ‘blessed among women’. If I thought I should be blessed among men by such behavior, I might become even a Judas Iscariot. Then I turned to reading the ‘Songs of Solomon’. How can our pious ministers and deacons interpret it as they do when the Bible itself tells about Solomon’s numerous wives and concubines? Those interpreters are either fools or knaves. I think I will try to render this song into rhyming poetry and will send my version to some paper liberal enough to print it. How I will astonish those pious folk back in Maine.” By “song” William meant the Song of Solomon.

The ship’s mate was meanwhile preparing young Heath to meet the Chinese people. He told William that he would find the Chinese industrious but treacherous, in feelings and passions little above the brute beasts. They would do anything for money. There was one lone Chinaman on William’s ship, about whom the mate informed Heath: “Sam Sing has been in Honolulu for 15 years. He took a native woman to live with him and they had two boys. As soon as one of them was old enough, he sent him off to relatives in China. Now he has abandoned the woman and is taking the other boy with him to Hong Kong. That woman is a human being with feelings. Sing should either have provided for her or taken her to China with him. But what can you expect? He is just like all Chinamen.”

William was not entirely convinced. He wrote: “Is it not possible there are one or two persons out of the hundreds of millions of Chinese who have noble sentiments and decent behavior?”

William Heath took occasion to gather knowledge about the Philippines, although his ship did not stop at Manila. His principal informant was the ship’s second mate, a man named Santa Cruz. He told William that there were less than 2,000 Spanish soldiers on Luzon and that three men of war could soon take the whole island. Remember this was half a century before the Philippines came into possession of the United States. Santa Cruz told Heath that Luzon was bigger than Spain itself and was one of the richest islands in the whole Pacific. He said that boards from the Philippine coffee tree, the only known substitute for mahogany, were sometimes 20 feet wide. Sugar and coffee were raised with little labor, but the government took almost no interest in agriculture. As to the whole Philippine economy, Santa Cruz assured William it amounted to less than $5 million a year and came almost entirely from the monopoly of cigars, a monopoly held personally by the Queen. William wrote: “Manila cigars are first rate, as I can testify, having one in my mouth right now.” William compared the Spanish Philippines with British India. No stranger could enter without strictest scrutiny, and the European possessor of each land took every precaution to see that it did not get away from him.

On June 24 William saw his first Chinese junk. He wrote: “How strange were those eyes painted on the stern. A Chinaman would not go to sea unless his vessel had eyes to find its way home again.” On the next day the pilot came aboard to guide them into Hong Kong. Let us see how William tells it: “The mate says that most of those pilots are actually pirates, who act as pilots only when they are sure a vessel is well armed. Otherwise they simply seize the ship. When our pilot came aboard, he went forward, looked at each side of the ship, and asked if we had no guns. The Captain told him we had four down in the hold, all loaded and ready to fire. When the pilot heard that, he went aft and gave some kind of order to the men down in his boat which still lay hooked to our ship. We had no trouble, and at about 11 P.M. we dropped anchor in the harbor of Hong Kong. It was a beautiful sight. Lamps were lit allover the place, on the hills and down in the valley. We had barely dropped anchor when we were surrounded by a legion of junks and sampans. Soon out came the Harbor Master’s boat with all the dignitaries of the place. I have never felt so homesick since I left Maine. I even envied Sam Sing, for he had friends ashore who would be glad to see him. It seemed as if my heart would burst.”

The next day William took in the sights of that strange Oriental port. He wrote: “Hong Kong is situated right at the foot of a steep hill which seems to overhang the town. The houses are very handsome, made of stone. Chinese women seem to have more motherly love and affection than any other people under the sun. I witnessed a beautiful instance of it this morning. There was a woman in a small boat fastened to our vessel. She had a little infant in her arms, and while we were all looking over the side the child began to cry. Almost any other woman would have hushed the child with words, but that mother deliberately presented her breast to the baby, who seized it with a vigor that would have done credit to a rat trap. There the woman sat unabashed and unblushing. It only shows how much more she thought of the child than of herself, being willing to expose herself rather than have the infant suffer a little privation.” William seems not to have considered the different customs of different peoples. It apparently didn’t occur to him that the woman sensed no immodesty in her act.

We know that this conclusion was naive of William Heath, but it was no more so than many of our own conclusions today. Part of the trouble with the Anglo-Saxon peoples, wherever they went allover the world, was to judge other people by themselves.

Immediately William did take an interest in Chinese writing. He mastered a few of the characters and into the diary he transcribed those for horse, dog and cat. Then he launched into a description of something Chinese. He wrote: “A little while ago I was looking at the waters of Penobscot Bay, then of the rushing Mississippi. the muddy Missouri, and the turgid Platte~then the golden waters of the Sacramento and the waves of San Francisco Bay. Now I am looking at the China Sea and the shores of Asia, on people who know not when their empire was founded and have no expectation of its termination — people who are just as far advanced as they were 5,000 years ago or will be 5,000 years hence. If Confucius could today return from the tomb, he would find people just the same as those who listened to him in the academy at Peking or in the groves of Shin lei. Immutability is stamped on the character. The same lessons their fathers studied, the same businesses their fathers followed, and the same graves their fathers lie in are for them and their sons, generation after generation. Yet this empire may well continue to exist when every other empire, monarchy and republic now powerful will have vanished away. Obedience to his father is the Chinaman’s first and only virtue. The father can kill a child at any time and not be accountable to any judge or jury; but if a son should ever strike his father, nothing can save him from the direst punishment.”

As for William Heath’s prediction about the permanence of the Chinese Empire, he could not possibly foresee the revolution under Sun Yat Sen, nor the even more drastic sweep of the Communist victory in China. William was no prophet of course. He was just a 16 year old boy from home.

Year: 1960