"ORIGINAL DARKNESS"
MALAY WATERS, by H. M. Tomlinson; Hodder and Stoughton. English price, 12/6. [Tt is a commonplace that British people take insufficient interest in their Merchant Navy. What they do show is naturally enough given mostly to the ships that ply from home ports. These can be seen and their seamen are fellow citizens. Ships that work entirely in distant seas are out of sight and out of mind. This latest book by one of our foremost writers on the sea is "the story of little ships coasting out of Singapore and Penang in peace, and war," and in particular the record of the Straits Steamship Company.
The development of this comp business is part of the story of Si pore’s rise. Trading round tropi seas, taking cargoes and passengers and out of ports known only to specia ists in England, they were good ships and gave good service? When the second war came they were taken over by the Navy and put to many kinds of jobs. They went as far afield as the Mediterranean and the west coast of Africa, but the tragedy of their saga lay in the Indies. Under Japanese attack their position was well-nigh hopeless, but their behaviour was in line with the best traditions of the two services, Writing with personal knowledge of the Straits Company’s trade in peace time, Tomlinson tells in detail some of the endurance and tragedies of those dreadfyl days of 1942. "The original darkness had fallen once more over the face of the deep," but the spirit of man displayed selflessness "as if no calamity could extinguish the spark of nobility in him." Malays and Chinese were one with European in being "able to forget their own peril while helping others out of it." Tomlinson writes with the distinction one expects. For those who. through fiction and drama traffic in the. white man’s alleged degeneration in the tropics, he has a rebuke. It would be fair, he. says, to note that "administrators, doctors, geologists, botanists, engineers, mariners, planters, teachers, journalists and directors of ships and commerce, all of them anonymous, and without a word of cheer for their simplicity and devotion, must have done pretty well, in general, for our Commonwealth to have held together the way it did when the world blew up in
anarchy."
A.
M.
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZLIST19510608.2.23.4
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 24, Issue 623, 8 June 1951, Page 11
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390"ORIGINAL DARKNESS" New Zealand Listener, Volume 24, Issue 623, 8 June 1951, Page 11
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