Preface

When I was young, I wanted to be Tintin. Now, as I read my father’s maiden voyage diary, written when he was 17, I realize 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 secured a job on a steam freighter, the SS Overijsel. He was chartered by the Vereenigde Nederlandsche Scheepvaartmaatschappij (VNS), a partnership of several Dutch shipping companies, to the Koninklijke Rotterdamsche Lloyd.

His maiden voyage took him from Rotterdam to Bremen, Genoa, the Suez Canal, Aden, Singapore, Hong Kong, Manila, Yokohama, Cebu, and back to Rotterdam in 1952, with Hamburg as a final assignment. This must have been a magical journey, filled with adventure.

At times, his convictions, rooted in Christian teachings, took precedence over his experiences with the ‘inlanders’ (natives). The political backdrop of this journey included the Chinese Civil War and the Korean War (1950-1953), during which China intervened, marking one of the initial conflicts of the Cold War. In Hong Kong, my father witnessed a significant influx of refugees from mainland China, leading to a dramatic population surge: from 1945 to 1951, the population increased from 600,000 to 2.1 million.

Without his diary, this journey would have been lost to time. I have digitized the original Dutch text, written in 1950s Dutch, while preserving the outdated spelling. For now, I will not translate the text into English. To properly scan his many drawings, I need to unglue the pages, which would destroy the diary in its original form—a dilemma. His diary was typed on a typewriter, and all the pages were glued together in a cover.