From Biswajit Basu:
An unusual story was once related to me by Mr Henk Pols, one of our Directors who was a ship's officer in the Dutch Merchant Marine at the end of World War-2.
He tells me his ship was bound for Batavia in Java which was a colony of the Dutch. While on the Indian Ocean they got a message from the Head Office (on radio and hence very cryptic) saying that they would now have to discharge the cargo in Djakarta and the captain told Pols to set course for Djakarta instead. Pols had no idea where this port was even after poring over the ship's charts for a couple of days. So finally he confessed this to the captain. The captain, it appeared, had no idea either and sheepishly admitted it.
They were getting frantic by the day when they spotted another Dutch ship and asked.
It so happened that while they were out at sea, Indonesia had got independence from Dutch rule and Sukarno had renamed their capital from Batavia to Djakarta. It is now Jakarta!
This was 1949 and the post-war world was unpredictably volatile. Life on ship was extremely lonely unlike today.
Batavia circa 1780
(Picture from History of Jakarta, Wikipedia)
No comments:
Post a Comment