BIGGLES - CHARTER PILOT

by Captain W. E. Johns

XII THE ADVENTURE OF THE GOLDEN SHIRTS (Pages 108 - 118)

“Under half a dozen pairs of curious eyes, Flying-Officer “Ginger” Hebblethwaite, with a pair of nail scissors, carefully cut a small paragraph from a newspaper that lay open in front of him and put it in his wallet”. When Ginger is asked what he is collecting, he explains that ever since he had the pleasure of travelling with Dr. Duck, he goes through the papers every day, looking for odd items of news that might be useful at some future date. If clippings are carefully filed, and cross-indexed, it is surprising how often they link up. “Disjointed, they may mean nothing”. Ginger asks “Did I ever tell you about the Golden Shirts?” “They must have been awkward garments – what?” murmured Flight-Lieutenant Lord Bertie Lissie. Tex O’Hara says they have an hour to kill before dinner and asks Ginger to give them the “low-down”. This is the story he told:

“About ten years ago, long before I knew Dr. Duck, a small item appeared in the press”. (This story was published in “Boy’s Own Paper” in May 1942, so would have been written about 1941/42. It appears to be set around 1940/41, so we can establish that the Dr. Duck stories are all supposed to be set in the 1930s). Ginger says the item was about a man eating-shark being found with what appeared to be ancient armour inside its stomach, made out of pure fine gold metal plates. Five years later, a British destroyer operating in the Indian Ocean came upon a native canoe containing the body of a white man wearing a gold shirt comprised of the precisely the same material. Dr. Duck wanted to investigate, using the position the canoe had been found and Admiralty charts. As the main ocean currents are constant it was possible to work out roughly the general direction the canoe had come from. The plan was to fly back along that line. Biggles & Co. plan to spend three months on the quest and they make Rangoon their first base. After a month flying over thousands of miles of ocean, they move to Penang and spend five weeks there. Then in Surabaya (Surabaya is the capital of the Indonesian province of East Java and the second largest city in the country after Jakarta) in Batavia (Batavia, also called Batauia was the capital of the Dutch East Indies, the area corresponds to present-day Jakarta, Indonesia), Biggles buys an old gold coin dated 1717 marked "V.O.C", the mark of the old Dutch East India Company. When Biggles hammers the coin flat, to a disc the size of those that made up the golden shirt, the resemblance is too strong to be accidental. “The gold shirts were made of coins, once the property of the old East India Company”. The Chinese trader whom Biggles bought the coin off said it came from Gelden Island (which means gold) and he found it on the beach after he had landed for water. Biggles makes enquiries with the Dutch record office and discovers that in 1718 a Dutch vessel called the 'Van Husen' had left Holland bound for the Far East with eleven barrels of freshly minted gold coins dated 1717 to pay the Dutch East India garrisons. It was never seen again. Our heroes go to Gelden Island and Ginger takes a swim in the sea. He sees an old barnacle-encrusted cannon. Later, when out collecting firewood, Ginger discovers in a tiny cove the skeleton of an old wooden ship. After supper, Ginger is “putting down my bed under the old Wanderer’s wing” when he sees a glint of gold in the vegetation and realises that a man in a golden shirt is watching them from the bushes. They approach the area and Biggles shouts “Does anyone there speak English?” When there is no reply “he tried them in all the languages he knew”. Biggles half turns “as an enormous fellow broke cover. Biggles has had some close squeaks in his time, but he’ll never have a closer one than he had then”. The man swings an enormous cutlass at Biggles narrowly missing him. (This is the picture on the cover of the May 1942 issue of 'Boy's Own Paper' that featured the story). Biggles hits the man on the head with his gun and they capture him. He was “nearly encased in home-made armour – of gold plates”. “We discovered later that he was, in fact, the local Big Bug, a sort of dictator. We also learned that he was no more loved than any other dictator, which probably accounts for the fact that no attempt was made to rescue him". They take the man to the Dutch Authorities and later return with three Dutchmen who are able to make contact with the castaways on Gelden Island. They discover that the forefathers of the castaways on the island had bolted with the ship and the money but had foolishly ran aground. There were women on board and so they formed a colony. The only use they had for all the gold was to make armour out of it to protect themselves from attacks by cannibals from other islands. In more recent times, the colony had tried to establish contact with the outside world and three fellows had gone off in canoes, with long intervals between them, but none had managed to reach the mainland. One must have been eaten by a shark, one died in his canoe and the third disappeared, presumed drowned. “The castaways had never mixed with savages so they were still pure Dutch. We filed a claim for a percentage of the gold – which didn’t belong to us, of course – and I must say the Dutch authorities behaved generously. They were still dealing with the islanders when we left”. The Dutch Government sent out a lot of equipment and put in a resident expert to advise on coconut and vanilla production. Ginger says "As a matter of fact, we looked in, in passing, a couple of years later and found quite a thriving colony". “That’s the end of the yarn. Now you know why I’ve started a little reference library of my own. It may come in useful when the war’s over, and we’re wondering what to do next. But that sounds like dinner- I shall have to pack up”.