A tale of two worlds
Retired mariner questions the generosity of Victorian philanthropy
When I was a teenager I read avidly books by Margaret Mead, anthropologist and Quaker, and others on the ways of life of people in far off parts of the world. They prompted a passion within me to travel and to see for myself the places, and the native peoples, written about.
Margaret Mead’s books, especially, interested me. Stories of her travels and life amongst the natives of Papua New Guinea (PNG) were bolstered by my meeting the bishop of PNG, who gave me lots of encouragement to travel there. In 1959, at the age of sixteen, I gained an apprenticeship with a shipping company. At that time it had some fifty-three ships and most of their world wide trading voyages usually culminated in collecting the wealth of PNG, the Bismarck Archipelago and the Solomon Islands in particular, and bringing it back to the United Kingdom to help feed, wash and powder the noses of the people of these islands.
I joined my first ship at Surrey Commercial Docks, in Rotherhithe on the south bank of the Thames. We sailed to Mexico and USA, loading mostly the agricultural needs of the farmers of Australia. After delivering these goods we then sailed around the north coast of Australia to Port Moresby for a ‘pilot’ to the island of Samarai. Samarai is situated off the south eastern tip of PNG. While there we commenced the collection of copra and other coconut products that were destined for the factories of the Lever Corporation and Port Sunlight on the Mersey.
So, as an adult, I managed to reach the same destinations that I had read about years before as a teenager! I also saw how folk who had virtually no experience of western ways were employed. They had been ‘collected’ from the interior of PNG, where their tribal chiefs had been convinced by presents of plug tobacco and steel implements – such as machetes and so on – to allow their young ‘warriors’ to travel to the coast to work. They were then employed, without any training or protection from accidents, for a few more plugs of tobacco! We saw how poorly treated these workers were by their Australian ‘overseers’ and felt that if they had been permitted to have whips, they would have used them ferociously! The coastal people we saw lived in squalid and very poor conditions.
Some time later we got the opportunity to visit Port Sunlight, the subject of a recent article in the Friend (19 November 2010). We were taken on a tour of that wonderful village built by Victorian Christian Philanthropy. What a difference from the villages of PNG. The factory workers of the Wirral enjoyed wonderful facilities compared to the abject poverty of those in PNG.
Presumably their employers wound their way to their Congregational Chapel on the Sabbath Day while the natives of the Pacific concerned themselves with the ‘Cargo Cult’ philosophy of the islands: waiting for their ‘treasures’ to be returned one day. 1959 was still 1880 for these poor folk!
