Fishing with a lure

She was loaded with five hundred pigs on deck housed in bamboo cages four below and four on top with palm leaf roofs. They were bound for Hong Kong from Bangkok in the days before such names became travel agents hook words.

These swine were not the polite European type of porker they were huge black hairy beasts with flinty malicious eyes and large yellow protruding tusks.

During the voyage pig runs occurred when a pig broke free of its cage, rows of seamen's hats could then be seen chasing up and down the rows of cages and sometimes the hats about turned when a cornered porker turned nasty, at such times the first mate would shout encouraging words from the bridge, mostly for the pig.

After eight days at sea the drinking water was reduced to two pints per man per day the rest going to the pigs. Officers were reduced to cleaning their teeth with gin and spitting it out, other ranks did not spit.

Although the pigs on the top level of the cages were hygienically better off than their mates below, feeding and watering the penthouse porkers was difficult because the Thai cage builders had tied up the cage openings, inevitably there was a daily burial of pig, it was carried by the crew on a special bier made by the ships carpenter and tipped, hats off, into the China Seas.

The health authorities should have taken the ship's Captain to court for bringing into their safe harbour enough sharks to eat every living Hong Kong man woman and child who stuck a toe in the water and they would have done, had it not been a fact, that the Chinese love shark fin soup as a starter with roast pork, crispy crackling and noodles as a main course…