Sea of Fire

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There were three things that swarthy, dark-eyed Singaporean Lee Tong knew very well.

One of those was the sea. The lanky but muscular Lee was the son of the late Henry Tong, a hardworking mate on a timber carrier. The elder Tong's vessel, the 100-ton capacity Lord of the Ocean, was a container ship. It took regular runs of hardwood cargo from their home port in Singapore to India. On the return trip it would carry teak logs that had been shipped from the Ivory Coast to Bombay. These were bound for Hong Kong and Tokyo. Lee's mother had died of food poisoning when the boy was five. Rather than live with his grandparents in Keluang, on their inland farm, Lee often traveled with his father. By the time Lee was thirteen, he was working full time as a cabin boy for the first mate.

Traveling the timber route, Lee learned the different moods of the waters. The clean smell of the Andaman Sea was different than the tart, oily smell along the coast of the South China Sea. The currents of the East China Sea caused a sharper rocking than the heavier, lofting swells in the Pacific Ocean. The storms were different, too. Some were sudden and ferocious. Others came from afar with enough warning that the pilot could steer around them. Lee also learned about men on these odysseys. What pleased them, what bothered them, what bothered them enough to kill. He learned that money, undemanding women, cigarettes, drink and the camaraderie of drink, and the loyalty of friends were the only things that really mattered to him. By the time the elder Tong died of liver failure, Lee had only managed to get a lot of smoking and drinking done. He would never get much more as long as he worked on the Lord of the Ocean or a vessel like her, which was why Lee Tong took up the next profession he did.

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