The junk shortage

David Warren, The Ottawa Citizen

Published: Sunday, May 27, 2007

I was 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 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, suitable for beaching. Bulkheads divide the holds into watertight compartments: it is very hard to sink. They also brace a wooden hull that is very hard to crack while tying in the footings of the masts, obviating the need for external stays. The rigging is kept childishly simple, and in an emergency the sails can be pulled right off the halyards. The sails are battened with bamboo, needing no yards. They can thus be made of cheap sheeting, and repaired with the humblest patching, without hurry.

Westerners giggle at the high, wide stern of a Chinese junk, the forward rake of the masts, and barn-door rudders. It seems to be riding down, into the sea. But the arrangement makes sense. It gives the steersman a better view. It allows the vessel to drift harmlessly in a gale, by turning its head automatically into the wind. And it will not be pooped in a following sea.

But all of these advantages -- aspects that 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 other informants.

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 at 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 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 are usually looking for cheap creature comforts, for the easy way out. They all want hot showers, all the time. 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.

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 lethal mistake.

I have no brief against high technology either, only against our dependence upon it. Well, everyone should be allowed to write a junk column now and then.

David Warren's column appears Sunday, Wednesday and Saturday.

© The Ottawa Citizen 2007

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