There were some lovely cargoes. My favourite was the circus. One day a monkey stole Mickey Bower’s woolly hat and had to be bribed with a hastily acquired banana to give it back. Thereafter, Mickey’s gang was always of the opinion that the hat had looked better on the chimp. Most of the circus animals were in stout iron cages that could be swung down gently to the dock but the elephants had to walk onto a cargo hoist.
You can sling a horse, because even if it struggles, it can’t actually get out of the sling, but an elephant is another matter. There was a three-inch gap between the ship and the platform at the top of that hoist and I saw the elephant’s trunk go down and feel along the gap. She clearly thought: not a chance. That’s empty air under there. A horse can be pushed but even with six men shoving, when an elephant decides she is staying put, then put is where she stays. That elephant wouldn’t allow herself to be transported until an astute handler led the baby elephant onto the hoist by its little trunk and it got down all right. Even then, it was a struggle to make sure she didn’t leap after the baby. Wharfies hated animal cargoes.
I used to love watching my father handle horses. The racehorses came over from New Zealand on our ships, the Union Steamship Company. My dad always got the job of soothing them so that they didn’t have the vapours and break something valuable, like their precious legs. A hysterical horse is a frightening thing, like a revolving chainsaw with hoofs that screams a lot. But they always behaved for my father because he had a secret weapon – a box of those XXX peppermints. They were round, flat, white tablets, so strongly flavoured that just licking one of them destroyed 55 per cent of your tastebuds and made your eyes gush water. Horses adored them. As long as his peppermints held out, even the stroppiest stud would follow my father anywhere.
Some racehorses gave no trouble. The beautiful grey, Baghdad Note, was as tame as an old farm horse. On the other hand, one of the most splendid chestnuts I have ever seen decided to improve his chances of another peppermint by biting off my father’s vest pocket with the box in, luckily not taking any of my father with it. I had been reading about those flesh-eating horses in Greek mythology and I was glad that the Union Steamship Company hadn’t had to transport them to Diomedes because I knew who would have been leading them out of their loose box.
Cargoes. Boxes and crates and sacks and bales and cases, all marked with their ports of exit and entry, all carefully stowed in the holds of the ship, so that they could be removed in order. Stowage was an art form then. A ship is not like a truck, with a low centre of gravity moving in one direction along a flat surface. It floats in an unstable medium and therefore it has to balance or the ship will cease to float. Unsecured loose cargo can punch right through the side of a vessel in heavy weather.
As a result, the position of cargo master was a skilled and responsible one, requiring a sound practical knowledge of statistics, meteorology and physics, and a talent for organisation. He kept the chart of the ship on which every stowage was marked. A cargo master has to be a concrete thinker. Otherwise, he and a lot of other people are going to get very wet. If Somerton Man was a cargo master, as my dad suspected, all of this would have been true of him. There is other evidence to suggest that he might have been a seaman of some sort and a cargo master, who would not do manual labour, might well have Somerton Man’s unmarked hands and unbroken nails.
Which brings us to the body itself and what everyone made of it.
Chapter Two
Somerton Man, in extremis, was five feet, eleven inches tall, which is 180 centimetres. He had grey eyes, also called hazel – admittedly a fugitive colour – and blond to reddish hair, greying at the temples. He was healthy, well-muscled and clean, with manicured fingernails and toenails. He was uncircumcised. His legs were tanned. His toes were unusual, forced into a wedge as though he habitually wore tight, pointed high-heeled boots, like a stockman or a dancer or a person willing to suffer to be beautiful. His legs were tanned, in the manner of someone who worked in shorts, and he had what they called ‘bunched’ calf muscles, as seen in people who walk a lot, run long distances, dance or bicycle.
I examined the calf muscles of many of my friends, in itself a fascinating if unscientific exercise. (None of them wear high heels, by the way. The definition of high heels in 1949 Adelaide appears to have been about two inches and a riding boot has a two-inch heel so the boot doesn’t slip through the stirrup iron.) The bunched calf muscles, which look so good in trunk-hose, belonged to a middle distance runner, three medieval dancers, five bicyclists, several inveterate hikers, a rock-climber, a mountaineer, a rider and one ballet dancer, who had calf muscles like rocks. Somerton Man may have followed one – if not all – of these occupations, although he was probably not a ballet dancer. (Only because he was too old, I hasten to add.) Of course, if he was a cargo master, he would have had to walk miles every day, around decks and up and down companion ways, all day.
His age was estimated as ‘about fifty’. He had only three small scars on his body – no tattoos, barcode or other marks. The absence of tattoos is significant because most working men at that time had tattoos. My father had lots. I used to call him the illustrated man, from a Ray Bradbury story he gave me to read when I was eight. My father’s first tattoo, a black cat was on his inner wrist, placed there when he was underage with a forged permission from his own father. There were two hula girls, one on each thigh. A full rigged ship on his arm. Jeannie (my mother’s name) on his other arm. A swallow, the navy’s good luck bird, which signifies land, and more on his chest. I thought they were bold and fascinating. As he grew old, the hair over the illustrations turned grey, making him look ancient and shamanic, blue lines visible through the silver fur.
The urge to decorate the body with ink has been with the male ever since poor Bronze Age Otzi, murdered on the way to Italy, his body only revealed when a glacier in the Otztal Alps melted. Any visit to a swimming pool in my youth yielded hours of tattoo watching. There is not a decorative mark on Somerton Man, however, and his ears were not pierced. Almost all sailors had a pierced ear, done when the seaman crossed the equatorial line, usually by the cook with a cork and a baling needle. Even my brother, who builds ships, has one pierced ear, as did my father. But officers usually did not have their ears pierced and Somerset Man’s ears were pink and perfect. In my view, he was not a working-class man.
His neat hands bear this out. There were three small scars inside his left wrist, a curved one-inch scar inside his left elbow and a round mark, possibly from a boil, on his upper left forearm. Those scars on his left wrist confirm my belief that he was a seaman. I have seen them before.