Hammond Innes - Solomons Seal

I finished the bottle, slept the night on board and in the morning drove home, closed up the house and took an afternoon train to London. The following morning I was breakfasting at over 30,000 feet and looking down on the bare arid hills of Muscat and Oman.

It was July 2 that I arrived in Sydney, a southerly buster blowing and low cloud obscuring the harbour as we came in to land. It was Australia’s winter, so no problem in finding the people I needed to contact in their offices. I saw little or nothing of Sydney the first two days, moving from office block to office block in the central part around George Street, so that my first impression was of a rather drab, modern, dollar-hungry city full of scurrying raincoats and umbrellas. It took me those two days to decide on Kostas Polites amp; Co. as the estate agents I wanted to handle Rowlinson’s Munnobungle station. They were an old-established firm of Greek origin commonly referred to as Castor amp; Pollux, and they had a branch office in Brisbane, which would enable the sale to be pushed locally with the farming community in Queensland, as well as with the institutions in Sydney.

It was lunchtime on Thursday before I had settled all the details. I had a word on the phone with Cooper, the manager of their Brisbane office, told him I would be flying up to see him the following day, and having booked out on the Ansett flight, I took a taxi to the Ferry Terminal. It was only a short walk along Circular Quay to the sail-like complex of the Opera House, and I had lunch there, looking out to the Harbour Bridge and the bustle of ferries coming and going. The wind was still kicking up little whitecaps in the broad expanse of Port Jackson, but it had stopped raining, and the clouds were broken. I should have been in a buoyant mood, everything fixed and fleeting glimpses of sun through the plate-glass windows. But now that I was on my own with time to think about my own future, I found myself depressed by all the stories I had heard of large properties that had broken the backs of their owners. No doubt the estate agents had exaggerated to emphasise the difficulty of disposing of a place like Munnobungle, but the cases they had quoted were undoubtedly true, and I was beginning to realise how huge and hostile the outback of Australia was.

I had intended having a look round the docks on the off-chance I might pick up information about the Holland ships, but then I remembered the stamp dealer Josh Keegan had asked me to visit. The slip of paper on which he had written Cyrus Pegley’s address was still in my briefcase where I had put it the night I had packed my things. I paid my bill and walked through the Botanic Gardens and The Domain to the crowded streets of Woolloomooloo.

In just over half an hour I was in Victoria Street, in a narrow-fronted shop packed with stamps and coins, talking to a little wisp of a man with an untidy mop of black hair and bright birdlike eyes that peered at me from behind steel-rimmed spectacles of extreme magnification. When he heard why I had come, he handed the counter over to a plain young woman with pebble-thick glasses who might have been his daughter and took me through into an office at the back, where two more girls were busy sorting stamps.

Yes, he remembered the cover. He also remembered the lettering on the seal ship label. ‘It was a blue label, deep blue to be exact. The vertical lettering HOLLAND SHIPPING. SOLOMONS at the top and at the bottom a space for the amount to be inked in and the word PAID. I’ll show you.’ He picked up a pencil and began sketching it for me. ‘A smudged postmark, I remember, the clerk in a hurry presumably and cancelling it when he should have hand-stamped it with a capital T and the amount due of ten centimes. Instead, it was left to the Post Office clerk in Cooktown to slap a Postage Due twopenny red and green on.’ And he added, ‘I was reminded of that cover only the other day, something I read in the Herald. A Holland ship in for engine repairs. It hadn’t occurred to me the company was still in existence.’

‘How long ago was this?’ I asked.

‘Last week, I think. It was only a short paragraph, and it caught my eye because it was headed “War Hero’s Grandson Sails In”. I read anything about the war. I caught the last two years of it, finishing up at Darwin.’

‘What sort of ship was it?’

‘An old warship. Landing craft, I think it said.’

‘Is it still here?’

‘Couldn’t tell you. It was only mentioned I think because of the name and the association with old Colonel Holland. He was one of the coast watchers on Bougainville. Stuck it there until the Americans arrived.’ He turned the piece of paper round so that I could see the sketch he had made. ‘There you are. That’s what it looked like.'

‘Unusual, isn’t it? And the way it came to me was unusual.’ He turned to a filing cabinet and began rummaging through a thick wad of letters.

‘You don’t happen to have any more of those ship labels, do you?’ I asked hopefully.

He laughed and shook his head. ‘Wish I had. I did well out of that sale. But if I’d had any more, I’d have probably sold them anyway. A man came here two or three months ago … Ah, here we are.’ And he handed me a letter written on cheap paper with a Mission address stamped on it in purple.

I am writing on behalf of Mr Minya Lewis , it began, and a little further down I found the information Keegan wanted … his mother died in Cooktown on February 16 of last year. Being her only son and his father not having been heard from since 1911, I am satisfied that he has right of possession to anything that was hers, and particularly to this letter which was in his father’s writing. She was apparently a very old woman and he found the letter in a box under her bed. As I believe there is some value in old stamps …

Lewis! Was this the same Lewis that Chips had talked about, the half-breed aborigine who had killed a man named Black Holland? ‘Can I have this photocopied?’ I asked.

He hesitated, then gave a little shrug. ‘You can keep it if you wish. I can’t see that it’s any use to me now.’ He asked me about the collection I had mentioned, and when I had satisfied his curiosity, he insisted on showing me some of his recent purchases. In the end I came out with a real bargain, a superb mint pair of the first issue Turks and Caicos Islands 3s. purple showing salt-raking against the background of a ship under sail; also a used set of the Papua New Guinea first issue of 1952, which attracted me because they were line-engraved and all of them different, the full set of fifteen stamps conveying a vivid picture of the strange primitive world that lay less than a thousand miles north-east of where I would be in two days’ time.

I must have been in that shop over an hour, for the evening rush hour had started when I reached the Ferry Terminal, intent on checking the docks to see if Holland’s ship was still there. But though the ferry I boarded gave me a good view of the docks, I saw nothing that resembled a landing craft, the ships all too big to be trading in the islands. It was dark by the time we docked at the quay again, a cold, blustery evening. I took a taxi across Pyrmont Bridge to Union Street, found a way into the docks and began searching the wharves on foot. My mood was quite different now, despite the wind and the bitter cold. Chance had presented me with a priceless opportunity, a ship I understood was bound for the Pacific islands. What more could I ask? I felt she must be there, and in the end I was proved right. I found her at last, up in the northern end of the docks, lying with her square stern close against some dilapidated sheds in a part of the docks that hadn’t been modernised, one of the Mark VIII LCTs, and she had HOLLAND LINE slapped across her rusty side in red.