CH03

THE GREEK SAILOR, “CONSTANTINE GERAKIS”

He lay in the sand, face down, and a voice came from far away.

“Wake up,” it called. ‘Wake up.” Slowly he awoke like one does when coming out of a trance. It was a pleasant dream and he didn’t want to wake up. He was a boy again, back in Greece, long before he ran away and went to sea. It was all peace and quiet. But, as he slowly recovered his senses, the dream became a frightening nightmare with terrible screaming in the night and the terrifying sounds of rigging crashing down and timbers splintering. The ship was going down. There was the hatch, with the line tied to his wrist. It all came back to him, except it was not a nightmare, nor a bad dream. It was real. He was shipwrecked, cast up on a forbidden shore. A shore but which shore? The voice he heard was Malay. The ship went down in Malay waters, pirate waters. He heard the voice again, and now he felt a nudge on his shoulder. “Wake up,” it demanded, and a hand forcibly rolled him over on his back. The sun had yet to rise and against the soft glow of the gray sky he brought into focus not one but two faces staring down at him. He gave a faint smile and a hand reached down to pull him up to a sitting position. The men were not Malay. They were Portuguese, two deck passengers he had seen from time to time aboard Putra Siamang.

He had fleeting glimpses of them in the storm, not together but singly, each at his own endeavor to save the doomed ship. The taller of the two, the older one, labored frantically to lash down the main boom to keep it from swinging dangerously out of control. The other man, with the wind tearing the shirt from his body, struggled at the wheel along with the helmsmen to keep the ship on course. His too, like his mate’s, was a losing battle. The Greek saw them, and then he didn’t, until now. The men must have thought he was Malay, or Javanese. The Greek was often mistaken for an islander. He was dark, not from birth but from his years under a tortuous tropical sun which had turned him the color of mahogany. He answered them not  in Malay but in Portuguese, a tongue he had learned while working with the East India Company out of Goa. He introduced himself “Constantine Gerakis,” he said. They shook hands. The older of the two men called himself Diego, and the other, Christoph. They too were en route to Ayutthaya, to cast their luck with the British there, rather than remain with their Dutch masters in Batavia from where  they came.

The  three men took stock of their situation. They were happy to have survived the storm and, like lost old friends, slapped one another on their backs. But their merriment was short-lived. They heard shouting coming from down the way. They stopped and turned in that direction.

All along the shoreline was the shattered wreckage of the ill-fated ship: bodies had washed up on the sand, along with the debris, bits of rigging and splintered masts, tangled with torn sails and lines. They then saw the soldiers, a patrol of about a dozen men, brandishing long lances. By their dress they knew instantly they were Siamese, for they wore wrap-around baggy breeches and leather hats, like skullcaps, except these hats extended down to their shoulders and covered their ears. As they worked their way up the beach, they prodded the bodies with the butt-ends of their lances, checking if any were still alive; they rummaged through the debris, lifting pieces of planks and boards with their lances, turning some of them over. They were delighted at their discovery of the wreck, as though it was their doing, shouting  and frolicking like victors after winning a sporting event. They suddenly turned solemn when they saw the three castaways up the beach, standing there, very much alive. It was too late for the three men to run and attempt to make good an escape. The soldiers bore down on them, swinging their lances like war clubs. They charged as wild animals charge, circling the three helpless men, knocking them down to their knees.

Gerakis attempted to calm them down by speaking to them first in Malay, next in Portuguese, and  finally in English;  but his endeavor only tended to fire their anger more and make the situation far worse. The soldiers turned upon him and mercilessly pounded him across his back with their lances, knocking him flat into the sand. Gradually the soldiers, finding their prey helpless, eased off and, after conferring with one another, blindfolded the captives and bound them with their arms secured behind their backs. They then herded the prisoners up the beach a few hundred meters to where an inlet of water flowed to the sea. When the men found it was fresh, they fell to their knees and began lapping  up the water, like craved animals, as the soldiers kept prodding them to move along. They kept stumbling through the shallow water until they bumped against the bulwark of a vessel.

Still blindfolded, Gerakis and the two Portuguese were forced aboard and made to sit three abreast in the bilge amidships. Gerakis reasoned the vessel was a longboat of sorts, large enough to be sea going. He had heard seamen talk about these boats, men who had sailed the River of Kings, or the Menam as some called it, to Ayutthaya. They spoke of them as remarkable vessels, some more than a hundred feet long, with finely carved bows and sterns that  rose high into the air. Gerakis surmised this was the same type of vessel, propelled not by sail power but by oars, or in this case, paddles.

As they sat in the bottom of the boat, water sloshed against their buttocks each time one of the crew came aboard or disembarked, causing the boat to heel to one side. Helpless, all they could do was listen to the sounds and wonder  about their fate. They heard the crew take positions along the port and starboard sides and then the thumping of their paddles against the hull. The boat backed down the waterway, and once free from the channel, turned and faced the onslaught of an incoming sea. The crew took up a chant to a cadence set by a drummer stationed somewhere aft, and in unison, they dipped their paddles and the longboat moved forward, slowly at first. But with each thrust of their paddles, and with an increase in tempo of the beat of the drummer, it gained momentum and was soon gliding over the surface of the water at what seemed to be above the waves. When the sun rose above the horizon, the sun’s rays fell on their starboard and Gerakis determined they were heading northward toward the River of Kings, the waterway that would hopefully carry them upriver to the Siamese capital. At last, he was going to Ayutthaya, not exactly by a method he had in mind, but, nevertheless, to Ayutthaya.

For three days and three nights the crew labored at their paddles.

Every few hours they changed relief with the boat constantly kept in motion. On the morning of the second day, a crewman freed their hands and removed their blindfolds. He handed them wooden bowls, and from a bucket he ladled out watery rice mixed with seaweed. When they finished that, he refilled their bowls with hot water floating with a few tea leaves. Once done, he blindfolded them again and bound their hands, and the voyage continued.

CH03

CH02

SURVIVED

Things began to fall apart on the fifth day when a man died-a Dyak from Borneo. The passengers thought his death was a curse, and they were convinced of it when they learned, while burying him at sea, that he was a bomoh, a witch doctor.

On the seventh day, a slight breeze from the northeast rustled the sails and with it came hope as the crew hurried to set the main. But hope turned to alarm by nightfall. The wind increased, not slowly, but with a sudden fury. The crew had to reef the main. By nightfall it had reached gale force strength and sails were lowered. By midnight it was blowing a full storm. By dawn much of the rigging and top sails had been carried away and still the force of the winds grew in strength. When night fell on the second day, the Greek knew the tossing little ship would not see another day.

While the terrified crew huddled in fright along the deck on the lee-side of the main cabin, the Greek was hard at work on the foredeck. Between bashes of lightning, he labored to remove the hatch from its hinges, and once it was free, he tied one end of a line to it and the other end to his wrist. And there he waited. He knew it wouldn’t be long. Water had begun entering open seams in the ship’s hull faster than the crew could bail. Finally they gave up in despair.

The captain, who lay drunk and passed out in his cabin, was of no help. The helmsman worked hard to save the vessel, keeping her close-hauled into the wind, but the closer he pointed her bow into the eye of the storm, the more violently she pounded. With each thrust of wave the bow rose up high, shuddering as it did, like a dog shaking water from its back, only to come crashing down into a deep trough, completely submerging itself once again. The helms man could fall off and ease the pounding but out there, somewhere to port in the blackness of night, was land, but not friendly land. It was inhospitable land of which he was well aware. To become shipwrecked on the eastern shore of the peninsula that jutted south from Siam was a fate worse than drowning at sea. Malay pirates waited in coves for ships in distress. Despite his effort to keep the tossing ship on its northern course, the gale, for certain, was blowing them toward land.

The doomed ship shuddered and groaned; their only hope now was that they might have sailed far enough to the north to be in Siamese waters, away from the pirate coast to the south. It was far better to be shipwrecked along a coast under control of Siamese, who wanted to take their captives alive, to make slaves of them to build their cities and great temples, rather than be taken by Malay pirates who wanted plunder, and whose Dyak crews wanted not riches but human heads for their prizes.

Then it happened! In one choking green sea, with white foam everywhere, the Greek, clinging to the hatch on the foredeck, had fleeting glimpses of splintered masts crashing down while bodies in tangled rigging flew by in blurred images that would forever haunt him. He had survived other wrecks, some terribly violent, but now they seemed to have been only tests for what was to come. It was terrifying, the cracking sound of the ship breaking up. Then, in one violent thrust, the hatch cover he was tethered to broke free from the vessel and he found himself clinging to it among the tossing debris of the wreck. Voices called out in the darkness, helpless voices, but he could offer no condolence, and give no help.

Relief came when he heard the surf breaking. In his dazed confused mind he knew enough to untie himself from the hatch and let the unrolling surf carry him ashore and deposit him on land. He had survived.

CH02

CH01

SHIPWRECKED

The passengers and crew of Putra Siamang had seen little of the Greek on deck before the storm. It wasn’t until the ship began to break up under them that they saw him rushing around the deck attempting to make some order out of chaos. The Greek had not been pleased with the trading schooner from the moment he stepped aboard in Batavia, nor was he in favor of the half-cast Portuguese captain and his dozen Javanese crew. The ship was terribly overcrowded and unseaworthy. The Greek knew it was a bad choice to book passage aboard the trader but he had no other option: there were no other vessels sailing to Ayutthaya.

In addition to her captain and crew, the supercargo and her six cabin passengers, Putra Siamang sailed under the Dutch flag with something like sixty deck passengers-Javanese, Malays, Chinese and Siamese, men, women and children, each with their sleeping mats, pandanus sacks filled with clothing, to say nothing of bundles of food stuff.

Nevertheless, it had started as a promising voyage.

Their first port-of-call after leaving Batavia was to be Songkau, a seaport in southern Siam. The King of Siam had opened Songkau to trade and, in less than a decade, she had grown rich and prosperous. Chinese merchants came down from the Chinese mainland, Arab traders from Muscat and Dubai, and Muslim immigrants from Java and other islands in the Dutch East Indies, all eager to engage in trade and, with some, desirous to make new homes for themselves. The Portuguese captain, seeing the chance to make a bit of profit for himself, overloaded the vessel in Batavia; all the same when they set sail, no one had cause for complaint, neither the regular cabin passengers nor the sixty-five deck passengers either. All had begun well and, at most, it was only a seven days passage to Songkau. There the deck passengers would disembark and much of the cargo would be unloaded.

But Putra Siamangwas overloaded, terribly. She was only seventy tons and the captain had no right to carry the mob on board that he did. Beneath her hatches she was jammed with trade goods for the Siamese market. Even the chart room was packed full with cargo. It was a miracle that the Javanese could work her. There was no moving around on decks, and to get about they had to climb back and forth along the rigging.

At night time they were forced to walk upon the sleepers who carpeted the deck, two deep. There were also chickens and a number of goats on deck, plus sacks of durians, while every conceivable space was festooned with strings of drinking coconuts and bunches of rambutans and bananas. On both sides, between the fore and main shrouds, lines had been stretched, just low enough for the fore boom to swing clear. From these lines at least fifty bunches of bananas were suspended.

The tiny ship was also pushing the southeast monsoon to its limit. The season was near its end and, once the northeast winds began blowing, it would be a difficult, if not an impossible passage to make. Sailing ships never fought the northeast monsoon. The loading of cargo in Batavia had taken longer than expected. Time was against them.

In the beginning the southeast monsoon had little wind and they could only ghost along. Then, after three days, the winds died away in a dozen or so gasping breaths. The calm continued for the next four days-with a glaring sun overhead and a glassy calm sea beneath-and thirst became constant with everyone aboard. But the very thought of drinking foul tepid water from leather goatskin sacks was nauseating. The drinking coconuts had long since been consumed.

CH01

FIRST BY LAND, THEN BY SEA

Once Europe tasted the spices of the East, felt the fine silks of India and learned of the might of the gunpowder of China, the continent was never the same. Europe was lured by fine silks and porcelain, elephant tusks of pure ivory, jade and rubies, gunpowder, sandalwood, and for their tables, unknown before, the spices of cloves and pepper, nutmeg and mace and more. A bag of peppercorns was worth more than its weight in gold. The quest was on. But the journey overland along the so called Silk Road across Asia was long and arduous, as Marco Polo had proved in the 13th century. Caravans were plagued by disease, and ravaged by hostile robbers and bandits. These caravans, often defenseless, moved slowly, could carry little, sometimes taking years, having to cross threatening mountain passes often blocked for months by fierce snow storms and on to suffer burning desert wastes. The route stretched some 8,500 kilometers from the shores of the Mediterranean to the ancient heartlands of the East, through the Territories of some of the great empires in world history-Persian, Arabic, Indian, Turkic, Tibetan and Chinese. Each took their share of the profits of the caravans and names like Samarqand, Turfan, Khotan, Niya, Miran and Dunhuang became household words.

Hazardous, costly, painstakingly slow, there had to be a better trade route than the one that existed between East and West. Perhaps not by land but by sea. And so from Europe set out the explorers, daring seafarers like Magellan and Vasco Da Gama. Their discoveries in the 1500s opened up new sea routes to the Far East and, with these new sea-lanes, trade prospered. The demand in Europe for Eastern goods became even greater than ever before. But it came at a great cost. European nations found themselves at war against one another, fighting to gain control not only of these sea routes but also of the kingdoms of the east from which these treasures came. True, these nations came to trade, but under their own terms, with guns and swords and crosses, to conquer, to spread their religions, grabbing what they could, driven by their insatiable Greed. They came, the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, French, British, and they battled one another for control, eventually conquering one Southeast Asian nation after another-except for one, Siam. Here stood a kingdom, defiant, of great wealth, the trading center between East and West, with its capital at Ayutthaya like a glittering jewel, lying far up a river as London is to the Thames and Paris to the Seine. What nation could resist not wanting to possess it? The quest of European powers grew even more intense and they now turned in an attempt to widen the door to Siam. Their pretense was trade and religion but the disguise was to conquer.

Surrounded by these warring European powers who had but one aim in common, the quest for Siam, how could this lone kingdom fend them off? What could one king, alone, really do?

To this day Siam, or Thailand as it is now called, is the only nation in Southeast Asia that has never been colonized by a European nation.

This is that story.