The Adelaide Star

The Adelaide Star

It was fitting that the Adelaide Star, the freighter on which I hitched a ride back to Australia in 1954, was named for my home town. She was a refrigerator ship, 12,000 tons burden, carrying general cargo from Tilbury Docks in London via Teneriffe in the Canary Islands, around the Cape of Good Hope to Adelaide, the first Australian landfall.  As the ship's surgeon, I had to continue beyond Adelaide to Melbourne and Sydney where I got my discharge papers and certificate of good conduct.

In previous posts on this blog I’ve waxed eloquent on the delights of long ocean crossings (see posts in July 2010).  This voyage in 1954 was undoubtedly one of the highlights of my life, rich in sensory experiences in climates ranging from cool temperate in the English Channel, balmy sunshine off the Canary Islands, baking hot, flat calm tropics as we crossed the equator, sunny and cool off Cape Town, then the cool to cold and blustery seas of the Roaring Forties deep in the Southern Ocean on the great circle route from the Cape of Good Hope to landfall off Kangaroo Island at the mouth of St Vincent’s Gulf as we approached Adelaide.  We had four weeks at sea without calling at any ports, long enough to get to know all the passengers and most of the crew of this small, closed community, long enough to read a great many books.

The Adelaide Star was a comfortable ship with a restful pitch fore and aft and little port to starboard roll, with a dining saloon forward, from which as we ate we could watch the bows plunging into heavy seas as they broke green over the forepeak. I’ve written about this in an earlier post so I won’t repeat myself. I got on well with the officers whom I met professionally and socially, especially the electrical engineer Gene Johnson who hailed from South Shields on Tyneside, John Mordecai, the chief steward who had been torpedoed several times, once spending a few weeks in a lifeboat in the Indian Ocean, and Jack Thomas the first mate, who sat at table with me. The passengers included Minna Lazarus, wife of a well-known Australian labour and criminal lawyer, Jack Lazarus; Miss Dunnett, the matron of the Royal North Shore Hospital, a wealthy pastoralist from Queensland, and several Brits on their way to jobs in Australia, or for three of them, New Guinea or Fiji. One of the passengers bound for New Guinea whose name I have forgotten, was a hard-drinking tough little man from Glasgow, who a couple of days after we had rounded the Cape of Good Hope, had a massive hematemesis, vomited up about a pint of bright red blood. That was when I discovered there was no drip chamber on board. I ordered him to stop drinking. If he’d continued to bleed he could have died but fortunately the bleeding stopped.

Before this, the day after we rounded the Cape of Good Hope, I took out the remains of one of the chief engineer's teeth. When I was a medical student, we had been required to do a great many procedures, getting each of them signed up in a document that resembled a larger and longer version of a school report card. Some of my classmates and I eagerly attended the dental clinic behind the Royal Adelaide Hospital, not because of the need to get signed up for the statutory number of dental extractions but because a remarkably beautiful young woman worked there as a chairside assistant to the dentist who taught us how to extract teeth. On hot days she worked wearing a white coat over her underwear but no dress, and some testosterone-laden medical students tried to invite her on dates.  No dates, but at least I learnt how to extract teeth, which one does by using the points of the dental forceps as wedges, pushing down hard on the tooth to loosen it in its socket. Since my student days I had used this skill once before in general practice at Angaston but that had been while the patient was under a general anaesthetic and a loose tooth threatened to choke her. This time it was different; the chief engineer was a curmudgeonly old man, and my life in this small closed and highly critical community wouldn't have been worth living if I had fluffed this simple operation, made necessary when he broke off the entire remaining cusp of a premolar tooth and was in agony with exposed nerve endings. Injecting local anesthetic around the gum was the hardest part, and luckily for me this worked well enough - with reinforcement from a stiff brandy or two. I gave the local and the brandy plenty of time to work, applied the forceps and pushed down as hard as I knew how. The remains of the tooth practically popped out into my waiting hand. Though I say so myself, it was elegantly done, and it established my reputation for competence among the ship’s company. It’s curious that the well-equipped surgery on the Adelaide Star had a whole kit of dental forceps, never before used by the look of them, yet lacked a drip chamber, because assuredly everything else imaginable was there, including a wide range of obstetric instruments, even the bizarre and horrific tools needed to perform a destructive operation on an undeliverable fetus.

It was frustrating to sail across the mouth of Table Bay without calling in, so close we could see the cables of the cable car that goes to the top of Table Mountain, could see people distinctly, see the colours of dresses the girls were wearing - several randy young officers said they could smell their perfume.

Deep in the Roaring Forties

I love the sea, and have many evocative sensual memories of life on ships. The smell of paint and tar pervaded the alleyways. The constant throb of the engines is like a heartbeat, overlaid by the creaks and groans of steel plates and rivets working imperceptibly like a living, breathing creature as the ship pitches and rolls. From time to time in a heavy sea, there is a crash and rattle as something that wasn't properly stowed slides from a shelf or cupboard to the deck, or a door bangs open and shut. In a really heavy sea, the ship shudders as she heaves herself out of the great waves that break over the deck, and the spray hisses against the portholes. I am a good sailor, and enjoy nothing more than a healthy spell of rough weather, of which we had plenty as we followed the great circle route from the Cape of Good Hope across the Southern Ocean in late winter. We went far enough south to see in the distance the high peaks of Kerguelen Island, and thereabouts we saw a rich profusion of seabirds, gannets, terns and the gracefully gliding albatross that accompanied us all the way from the Cape to Kangaroo Island as they hovered for hours at a time in the slipstream above the stern, not moving a muscle and staring inscrutably at us. One of the books I had with me was Apsley Gerry-Garrard's Worst Journey in the World which describes how to catch an albatross by trailing a line with a heavy weight on the end; the albatross thinks this is a fish as it bobs just below the surface in the ship's wake. It swoops to grab the fish, the line and lead weight tangle around the bird's leg, and the bird can be hauled on board.

We demonstrated to the captain’s anger that this system works. What upset the captain was that the albatross we hauled on board immediately loosened its bowels, making the most terrible mess. The captain ordered us to clean it up, so I and one of the junior engineer officers and the young English passenger who had shared this jape had to get buckets and brooms and spent several hours scrubbing before we had successfully disposed of this huge and smelly mess of guano. The albatross seemed bewildered by the experience and wouldn’t fly away, remaining perched at the stern, gazing balefully at us and occasionally loosening its bowels again - now leaving a trail of excrement down over the stern, out of the captain's sight. Eventually one of the deck officers launched it by running along the deck into the wind, as if launching a kite into a gale.

There was a rich profusion of other life in the sea in those high latitudes. We saw whales, and some huge basking sharks, one that was asleep or perhaps floating dead on the surface that we sliced up with the bows and the propellers, leaving a great mess of flesh and blood in our wake, that created a boiling, screaming quarrel of gulls fighting over the remains until they all dipped below the horizon.

This was a hard-drinking shipload, the passenger who vomited blood was just one of a dozen or more who overdid it. I didn't overdo it - I have very rarely used liquor on that scale; I am a cheap drunk, getting the worse for liquor all too easily. As on other occasions in my life, once bitten twice shy: I indulged once just out of Teneriffe, and felt so awful for several days afterwards that henceforth I had only one drink a day. My sobriety gave me good opportunities to observe others the worse for liquor. It was never a pretty sight.

I had plenty of reading along on this voyage, and was glad of it. I worked my way through translations of many of the Greek classics, through all six volumes of Churchill's history of the second world war, novels by Stendhal, Flaubert's Madame Bovary, and re-read Jane Austen and some Dickens.

It was also the occasion for me to think through what I had done so far with my life, and what more I might do in the future - but then as later, the future remained clouded. I had no clearer idea about what I would do with the rest of my life after pondering the matter for five weeks at sea than I had when we cleared Tilbury Docks. I assumed I would go into general practice but I had no money, no capital for a down-payment on a practice - not enough money even to buy a car; in fact I was coming home to Adelaide with no more money accumulated than I had when I set off three years earlier. All I had was many happy memories, an unsettling sense of the worth while places of the world all being far away from where I was heading, and a deep sense of detribalization, of alienation almost, from the former home town to which I was returning. It was a combination that boded ill for a stable future in general practice.