The SS Shanghai is in harbour again. I spotted her as I drove past the Star Ferry and recognized her immediately, though it is more than a year since I saw her here last. Then I had been sitting in this very room and she had been waiting to start me off from Hong Kong on the second stage of a ship-hopping adventure round the world. The adventure is over now. It is all in my head. I have come back here to write it down.

The second stage of that adventure, like the first, had its roots in my boyhood yearning to Run Away to Sea. It was a yearning born, as I have written elsewhere, during days spent lying on clifftops watching Atlantic breakers pound the rock-bound bays of North Cornwall’s Wreckers’ Coast, and dreaming – awake or asleep – of tall ships and thrilling places at the end of the horizon. The attic of my grandmother’s ugly old house on Ocean View Road was full of dusty books by authors who had been my father’s favourites when he was a boy – R. M. Ballantyne, Captain Marryat, Robert Louis Stevenson, and a dozen others. From the attic’s high round window I could see a green, thrusting headland – it bore the Stevensonian name of Compass Point – that resembled the prow of a great ship riding up into a sky full of clouds like the billowing crests of giant waves; and beyond the headland the hypnotic glitter of the ocean itself, the mysterious, irresistible highway to Robinson Crusoe’s cave … cannibal islands … the South Seas … the remote, forested domain of the bird of paradise. Many years later, when the boy who had lain dreaming on those clifftops had long since ceased to be a boy, the opportunity came. I had finished a book about the Marsh Arabs of Iraq and was free. ‘Now, I shall go,’ I said to myself. ‘If I don’t go now, I never shall.’

There was no question of weeks on a cruise ship. I would take a series of ships at random – big ships, small ones, tankers, dhows, junks, whatever I could find – to take me wherever they happened to go. Well, not quite wherever – eastward, for choice. That was my decision, but decision was not enough. Was this kind of ship-hopping actually possible in these days of universal air travel and group tours?

The first London travel agent I approached to see if such a thing could be arranged by passenger ship threw up his arms and said, ‘No can do,’ quite snappishly, and even the Thomas Cook’s men, though friendly, were no help. As I had suspected, the few passenger vessels that have escaped the breakers’ yards are usually cruise ships carrying groups. You can control a group. Individuals are unpredictable, and so too much trouble. All the same, I managed to complete the first stage of what I came to think of as my private game of Traveller’s Roulette, although it was eight months after leaving Piraeus, not the three or four I had imagined, before I found my twenty-third vessel that sailed me up the Pearl River to Canton for my last landfall.

The journey that completed my circle of the globe – the one I am about to describe – took even longer: exactly a year. The tangible relics of it that lie about me now would baffle the most experienced beachcomber were they all to be washed ashore in one place. A goose wing from the Falkland Islands; a whale-tooth dagger with ‘Beagle Channel’ inked on it; cowrie shell necklaces from Apia and a Bible in Samoan; a stuffed woodcock from a back alley in Hong Kong; an illustrated scroll from Shanghai; a set of Russian dolls; two ceramic vases from a ship’s captain on Robinson Crusoe Island. The torn flag in the frame hanging on the wall flew on Cape Horn Island, the southernmost tip of the earth; it is signed by eight Chilean marines and a dog called Tony. The lump of obsidian like black glass comes from Ascension Island; the Gospel according to St Matthew is written in the pidgin language of the Solomon Islanders…. Enough to jog my memory of a good many places and people in the unlikely event of my forgetting. And then there are thirty-six notebooks that surround me now; big or pocket-sized, lined or unlined, somehow they managed to avoid what I always feared – obliteration by waves or rain squalls or the loss overboard of the bag in which I carried them.

The room I am in now is the one I set out from just over a year ago to join the Shanghai. It is a large room on the fourth floor of the Luk Kwok Hotel in Hong Kong, and I am fond of it. It is not in the least glamorous, but it is friendly and the hotel knows nothing of race or class; rather like the Shanghai herself. A homely old thing, ex-P & O, and before that Belgian, she used to transport Flemish colonial officials and their wives from Antwerp to the Belgian Congo, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. What a different world she has found here on the China coast.

The sun is shining, the harbour gleams and is full of life; a freighter carrying containers slides in from the eastern approach, bright as a freshly painted toy, and the Kowloon ferries move briskly back and forth. The sunshine makes the angular outlines of Kowloon softer and white, and seems to have brought the background of green hills closer. Below me, sunlight washes over the footbridge that spans Gloucester Road, on which a bow-legged old Chinese in baggy trousers is shuffling along carrying a tiny songbird in a cage. A boy overtakes him, running beside a small, happy dog with a curly tail; a plump little dog, the kind some Chinese like to eat – but these two are friends. The dog smiles up at the boy, and he, smiling back, flicks the dog’s tail affectionately with the lead.

I had made up my mind early on that Hong Kong would be my starting point. It was the obvious place to complete my circling of the globe: Europe – China – Europe again, this second journey would take me across the Pacific, round the Horn, and the length of the Atlantic from the Falklands to England. But first, I wanted to take ships up the coast of China, if possible all the way to Dairen (Port Arthur in the days when the tsars of Russia owned it) at the head of the Yellow Sea. Hangchow was a port I particularly wanted to visit on the way. As a very small boy I discovered the name Hangchow one day in a heavy old atlas, full of must and weevils, that I dug out from the back of a cupboard in my grandfather’s farmhouse in South Wales. The name was appealing in itself but there was more to it than that for me. It happened that my grandfather owned a large chow dog, a laughing, black-tongued specimen called Cheeko, with a curving fluffy tail and a most regrettable impulse to chase sheep. That impulse confined Cheeko to the neighbourhood of the house – he had to be restrained – and, thrown together thus, we became close friends. Childish illogic told me that Hangchow must be a chow’s family home, and I made a vow to Cheeko as I gazed at that exciting name among the fly specks on the map of Cathay. One arm round his neck, I pressed my forefinger onto that big yellow patch and, with the force of every determined nerve in my body, I swore: I shall go there when I grow up!

All these years later I might reach Hangchow at last – but what then? Japan? Korea? First things first – although everyone seemed to be going to China these days I had no idea if the Chinese Government in Peking would permit a single traveller from the West to leapfrog between Chinese ports on Chinese vessels, leave alone from a Chinese port to a foreign country. Someone who knows China and me said, ‘Don’t go to the Chinese Embassy in London. Write direct to something called the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries. It might do some good.’ I still don’t know if he was right or wrong; in any case, I wrote to the president of that organization asking permission to visit the ports of Xamen, Fuzhou, Shanghai, Quingdao and Dairen, on my way to Japan. Then I prepared for the long wait for a reply. A reply that never came. Instead, after two weeks – a remarkably short time, I thought – a friendly letter arrived from an Englishman, Mr David Crook, working in the Foreign Language Institute in Peking. Somehow he had seen my letter, and he advised me that the China International Travel Service might be a more useful organization for me than the Friendship Association, which ‘is rather more politically inclined’. Accordingly, he had passed my letter on. ‘I think that’s about the best I can do,’ he wrote. ‘Good luck.’

I could do nothing without Peking’s permission – and a visa. But it was pointless to write more letters from London or to wait for any. In any case, I was impatient to get away.

In the preceding months, there had been sudden deaths in my family, and the swift, successive shocks had thrown me into what now seems to have been an absurdly selfish sense of desertion. Unconsciously you trust those you love to last you out, and when one morning they are as lifeless as the black print in an obituary column, you feel betrayed. That, at least, was my experience. I happened to be reading Graham Greene’s Travels With My Aunt, and I felt deep sympathy for poor Henry Pulling, the retired bank manager, as he coped with the disposal of all the trappings of his newly dead mother, the furniture and unwanted pictures, the unfashionable underclothes of an old lady, the half-empty pots of old-fashioned creams – and the dragging business with undertakers, estate agents, tax inspectors, solicitors…. I had had the same coping to do.

Eager to escape the Laocoön’s coils of Lincoln’s Inn Fields – and the circumjacence of death – I gave urgent thought to my departure for Hong Kong. I decided to visit in person the China Travel Service people...