Preface

When I was young I wanted to be Tintin. Now I am reading my father’s maiden voyage diary, which he wrote when he was 17, and I understand I didn’t get that idea from a stranger. My father was very much his own man from an early age. Growing up during the Second World War and coming of age in the late 1940s, he longed for the warm tropics, or any place far away. In 1951 he successfully got a job on a steam freighter, the ss Overijsel. He was chartered by the Vereenigde Nederlandsche Scheepvaartmaatschappij (VNS), a partnership between several Dutch shipping companies, to the Koninklijke Rotterdamsche Lloyd.

His maiden voyage brought him from Rotterdam to Bremen, Genoa, the Suez Canal, Aden, Singapore, Hong Kong, Manilla, Yokohama, Cebu and back to Rotterdam in 1952 with Hamburg as a final assignment. This must have been a magical journey, and not without adventure.

At 17 my father was already a deeply moral person. At times his convictions, based on Christian teachings, overruled his experience with the ‘inlanders’ (natives). The political backdrop of the journey was the Chinese Civil War and the Korean War (1950-1953). China had intervened in the Korean War making it one of the first conflicts of the Cold War.
What my father witnessed in Hong Kong was a large influx of refugees from the mainland China, causing a huge population surge: from 1945 to 1951, the population grew from 600,000 to 2.1 million.

Without his dairy this journey would have been lost to time. I have digitalised the original Dutch text, written in 1950s Dutch. I have preserved the outdated spelling. For the moment I will not translate the text into English. To properly scan his many drawings I have to unglue all the pages, which will destroy the dairy in its original form. A dilemma. His dairy was written on a typewriter, then all the pages were glued together in a cover.