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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
May 27, 2007
The junk shortage
I was shocked (shocked!) to speak with someone, this last week, who had recently been in Hong Kong. He told me that he had seen a grand total of one (1) traditional Chinese junk in the Victoria harbour, while looking around.In Hong Kong in the early 1970s, the harbour was still crowded with these beautiful vessels, and as you worked your way around the other coasts of the Crown Colony (as it then still was), you could find dozens of types of hulls and rigging, at every conceivable scale, up to a freighter I once spotted with at least six masts. I had an American friend, who was living aboard one of them with his Cantonese mistress. It was more a moored houseboat than a sea-going vessel, but it could still limp around. Paradise aboard such a craft -- enginelessly rolling and pitching in the water. To be free of the noise of engines: think of that. A small, but passage-making junk would be, I have long thought, the perfect vessel to take solo not only around the world, but up canals and rivers. Not exceptionally fast, but I have never favoured rapid circumnavigations. (You miss so much cultural detail in the Space Shuttle.) It is a boat without a keel, with a fairly flat bottom, shallow of draft and suitable for beaching. Bulkheads divide the holds into watertight compartments; very hard to sink. (Rides like a cork up the combers; all you need is sea legs.) Ladle water into one of these compartments, and you can keep live fish slapping about inside. The bulkheads brace a wooden hull that makes a hard nut to crack, while tying in the footings of the masts, obviating the need for external stays. The rigging is thus kept childishly simple, and in a rush the sails can be pulled right off the halyards. These sails are battened with bamboo, needing no yards. They can thus be made of cheap sheeting, and repaired with the humblest patching; without hurry, for the battens confine the rips and holes. Westerners used to giggle at the high, wide stern of a Chinese junk, the forward rake of the masts, and barn-door rudders. The ship seems to be riding down, into the sea. But the arrangement makes sense. It gives a view from the tiller. It allows the vessel to drift harmlessly in a gale, by swivelling its head automatically into the wind, like an inerrant compass. And it will not be pooped in a following sea. But all of these advantages -- aspects of which Westerners studied and copied into their own sailing rigs over several centuries -- become either irrelevant, or disadvantageous, once a motor is installed, or all handling qualities are sacrificed for speed. Let me say again what I’ve said before: the whole world is going to hell. Now, in Hong Kong, you have essentially Western over-power boats, including harbour cruise ships decked out tastelessly to look chinoise, but with all the details monstrously wrong, and strictly for tourists. Same story up and down the China coast, according to my other informants. Junk-rigging itself survives and flourishes on some of the swankest yachts, but the ancient vessel was a whole creature, a perfect unity of its parts, quiet and at peace with itself like the dhows of the Arabs; and like a Micronesian proa, at one with its crew. A priest of my acquaintance sagely observed, of the now junkless China seas: “It is the universal and homogenous world state with its grasping tentacles again. Maybe that means old junks can now be had cheap.” Note, they used to be free. You could go to the South China Sea and feast your eyes on junks; to any Far Eastern port. You could insinuate yourself aboard one, by feigning a friendship that might deepen into truth. But now, although perhaps cheap if you can find one, you will have to pay, to put just one proper junk in the water. In other words: Everything that used to be abundant and free, we now have to pay to get just one! I am totally and unalterably opposed to socialism in any form. But I’m not very happy with capitalism, either, or the tyranny of “progress.” Humans are the problem behind all the systems. They yearn pathetically for cheap comforts, for the easy way out. They all want hot showers, all the time. They all want someone else to pay. I am not an environmentalist either, I carry no brief against comfort, per se, for my propensity is to moralism, not scientism. Beauty, truth, the good, do not come into the human view except on condition of simplicity of life. And this is the very condition the "universal and homogenous world state" is in the business of eradicating. Moreover, one becomes acclimatized to luxury, and one will never know the pleasure of a hot shower, or a full meal, if one has never done without them. So that even on grounds of sensuality, “modern convenience” is a mistake. A lethal mistake, when we lose the ability to cope with both major and minor inconveniences. I have no brief against high technology, either, when it can be isolated for a specific use; only against the technology that slips from our hands as a tool, and pulls us into its maw from dependency, so that we no longer rule the machine, and the machine first rules, and finally consumes us. I'm against machines with skills, and people without them. What is my solution for the drift of the age? I have no solution, better than to write a junk column from time to time. And to observe that we are creating a world, in which those who love liberty long chiefly for the past. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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