Brent Bateman

The Last Voyage of the New Guinea Trader Brent Bateman

The author writes about his true life adventure as a young traveler aboard a mystical old coastal freighter, bound from exotic Papua-New Guinea, through the Philippines, to Hong Kong, supposedly for a refit. Her original crew reused to sail on her ? she was ?tambu?, doomed to a watery grave. An eerie warning secretly whispered from the Trader?s former skipper, the ghostly Captain Rodney McKay. A dubious skeleton crew was hastily recruited: a rum-loving Captain who had spent the last 15 years on a dredge in Sydney Harbor and boasted that he could ?navigate by the color of the water?; a madman First Mate, waiting to be tried for the murder of the captain on a prior voyage; a 5-stone, half-Maori Chief Engineer who marginally survived between the colors of desperately-needing-a-drink green to a deep blue, just before passing out. The rest included three hap-caste New Guineans, a Brisbane surfer, an all-out diabetic philosopher, and a bull-shitting Aussie heavy-equipment operator ? none of whom had ever set foot on a sea vessel before. And then the author, who had lied about having gone to college and somehow became the 2nd Mate ? the Navigation Officer. Suspicions ran high that the owners did not intend for the Trader to complete her journey. Enter the pirate, Bobby Mundee, and the Trader becomes part of the legend of the Templar Knights of old and the lost ?Treasure of Solomon?. A story to touch on many sensibilities ? all highly entertaining ? and it is a true story.