Vanuatu’s patriarch of the sea

Press, 31 August 1989, Page 13

Vanuatu’s patriarch of the sea

MAVIS AIREY

meets a celebrated New Zealand-born Vanuatu diver and salvager

Z/f]H HE THRILL I FELT was a like an explorer finding A a new land,” wrote Reece Discombe after he had discovered the wreck of the Boussole.

The French explorer Laperouse had left Botany Bay in 1788 with his frigates the Boussole and the Astrolabe, and disappeared. Expeditions by Dillon and d’Urville in the 1820 s had located what was thought to be the wreck of the Astrolabe off the coast of Vanikoro, one of the southernmost islands in the Santa Cruz group. But of the other boat nothing had ever been found. For Discombe, a New Zealandborn Vanuatuan diver, the wrecks became an obsession. He made a series of expeditions to Vanikoro, the first in 1958, when he relocated the Astrolabe, doing in only four hours diving what the French had been trying unsuccessfully to do for more than a century.

“I’d done a lot of homework and underwater swimming,” he says. “In my experience, when a ship clouts a reef, it breaks up. As it gets lighter, it is carried inside the reef — so that’s where I looked.”

Going back to the area to salvage a modern wreck for scrap metal, he spent his weekends searching for the Boussole. From native stories referred to by Dillon, he believed that, unlike the Astrolabe, it had gone “straight down.” He finally found the Boussole on what had been known as Astrolabe Reef, and is now known as Dillon-Discombe Reef. He would never have succeeded, he says, without his years of diving experience in tropical waters. “You have to know what you’re looking for. A 200-year-old anchor is no longer an anchor when 10 feet of coral has overgrown the entire area,” he told Russell Shelton, the author of a book on the lost frigates of Laperouse, “From Hudson Bay to Botany Bay.” After being towed back and forth over the reefs in all kinds of weathers and at all sorts of depths,, his eye was caught by what appeared to be an anchor in a chasm about 12 metres deep. It was a “10 footer,” similar to one recovered from the Astrolabe. Then he made out more anchors, a cannon, wheels and ballast blocks, all covered in coral.

Out of air, and with an appointment in Port Vila the next day, he had to give up, but he returned on several occasions later, dynamiting away the coral and recovering everything that was removable.

He kept quiet about his find until he was absolutely certain that the wreck was indeed the Boussole. In 1964, he showed it to the man in charge of the historical department of the French Navy, Admiral Maurice de Brossard. “The French thought I was a good guy and gave me a gong,’’ he says, with gruff pride. President Charles de Gaulle presented him with the National Order of Merit, the civilian equivalent of the Legion of Honour, in 1967. Other honours followed, culminating in an 0.8. E. in 1980. When Vanuatu became independent the same year, Reece Discombe and his wife, Jean, were the first two expatriates to be granted citizenship. Relaxing on the balcony of

their Port Vila home, with its stunning view over the harbour, Discombe looks back over his busy life. There is a constant stream of phone calls; visitors pop in; the sun goes down in a brief, but brilliant, flush of red behind Iririki Island, and the lights go on in a cruise ship anchored nearby.

The Discomes met in New Zealand at a wartime dance, when he was based at Hopahopa camp. “It was a disaster,” Jean jokes. “There were seven or eight of us in a party. The handsome chaps walked in — and I got the short, fat one.”

“I’m built for comfort, not speed,” Discombe agrees. Born in Cambridge, he had gone to Hamilton Tech, and worked in the sawmills around Taupo in the days of steam. He was manpowered out of the Army to repair ships which had been hit by torpedoes. During that time he took on car racing, becoming New Zealand’s champion midget car racer two years in a row. The Discombes moved to the New Hebrides, as Vanuatu then was; in 1947. Some New Zealanders had been stationed there during the war, when the Americans had 250,000 troops based on Espiritu Santo, with 250,000 more passing through. James Michener’s experiences there inspired him to write "South Pacific.”

At the end of the war, the Americans bulldozed all their surplus equipment into the sea, at a place now called Million Dollar Point. “A lot of guys who’d been stationed here thought you could make a lot of money salvaging,” Discombe says. He was invited to do maintenance with one such syndicate.

The move was traumatic for his young wife. “I didn’t know

where we were coming to — I didn’t even know where it was,” she says. It took them two days to fly what is now a five-hour journey, travelling via Australia. “Had there been another plane out the next day I would have taken it. There was only one other Eng-lish-speaking lady here. We had no home. We lived in quonset huts. You had to shower in the open,” she says. “But by the time the next plane arrived, six weeks later, I had got used to it.”

A memento from one of Reece Discombe’s salvaged wrecks: The bell of the President Coolidge which sank off Espiritu Santo during World War 11.

They lived in Santo for two years. “Santo has all changed now. Then there were hundreds and hundreds of quonset huts, and some Americans were still there mopping up and selling stuff.”

Million Dollar Point has now been declared a national park, but in the early days, Discombe did very well out of it. “I shipped ■ out $2 million worth of equipment left by the Americans — bulldozers, you name it.

“I took 14 bulldozers out of the water there in two years, got them all going and sent them to Australia,” he says. “No-one ever bothered to get a new tyre; they just went for a dive and got one from there.”

One reason for the dumping, he says, was that a lot of the equipment had been made very cheaply on the understanding that it would be destroyed after the war and not allowed to flood the home market. There is also a more colourful version of what happened. New Hebrides was ruled at the time as a condominium jointly by the British and the French. “One of the best stories is that the Americans offered it to the condominium at a cent for every dollar it was worth. But the authorities turned them down. They said, ‘Why should we pay for it? It’s here, you’re not going to take it away.’ So it was dumped,” Discombe says.

“The condominium days were mind boggling; you just wouldn’t believe it. You had to learn to manipulate the system, to play one authority off against the other.”

From light switches working opposite ways in French-built and British-built houses, to coping with three different justice systems — French, British and native — the stories of colonial rivalry are legion. At one time, the story goes, the British resident commissioner lived on Iririki Island, while the French resident commissioner lived on a hill opposite in the centre of the town. When the flags were raised each day, great care had to be taken that neither flew higher than the other. After a cyclone in 1949, in which 40 ships went down, Lloyd’s of London appointed

Discombe as a surveyor. He has been doing it ever since. The work has involved surveying hundreds of boats to see if they are worth salvaging. To get it repaired, he points out, may cost more than its insured value.

“It depends on the policy. If your boat is on the reef and you’re only insured against total loss, it pays you to burn it because otherwise some guy like me comes along and gives it back to you.” One lot of surveying in New Caledonia is still particularly vivid in his mind. “The sharks gave me hell,” he remembers. “You could’nt see your hand in front of you.”

Discombe still has an old diving suit from the hard-hat days. It looks like a cumbersome astronaut’s outfit. When Jacques-Yves Cousteau, in collaboration with an engineer from Air Liquide developed the world’s first aqualung and sent people to the French territories to sell it, Discome was an eager customer. He believes he was the first person in the Pacific to use an aqualung. The life may have been exciting for him, but it cannot have been much fun for his wife and four children, he acknowledges. Some trips would take him away for as much as four months at a time.

The house is crowded with mementoes of the wrecks he has salvaged. Pride of place, naturally, goes to a three-inch brass cannon from the Boussole, beautifully restored externally, its barrel still encrusted with coral.

In the living room are four gleaming compass binnacles from different ships, the bell from an old Russian sailing ship, a complete set of shell cases, and a hand-beaten copper toilet from an old paddle steamer, complete

with porcelain bowl decorated with willow trees. On the balcony are mounted brass plaques from various boats, and the bell of the President Coolidge, the 33,000-ton luxury liner-turned-troopship which sank off the coast of Espiritu Santo during the World War 11. Among Discombe’s more unusual salvage operations was retrieving the anti-malaria drugs which went down with the ship, part of which now lies at a depth of 200 feet. While he was in the medical rooms, he found a large drip bottle — “good as the day it was made” — which he has added to his collection, along with some phials of drugs and a porthole. The wreck is now a popular spot for amateur divers, as are the many other accessible wrecks in the area. Next door to the Discombes is a scuba diving holiday operation, run by some New Zealanders from Rotorua.

Although Reece Discome retired from diving in 1970, "retired” in no way describes his present lifestyle. He is still heavily involved in salvage companies. He is a director of Salvage Pacific, the company which surveyed the wreck of the Mikhail Lermontov, which sank in the Marlborough Sounds.

He also built Vila’s first motels. “It was boom time. You could sell a blade of grass for two-and-sixpence in those days. “Then I got involved in building the new hospital — Miles Warren was the architect. Then I got involved in the roofing business — corrugated iron — and engineering. Up till a few years ago we built every steel building in Vanuatu,” he says. As if that were not enough, he learnt to fly at the age of 63 and bought two aeroplanes. But after Cyclone Uma devasated large parts of Vanuatu, including the roof and upper storey of his house, he found himself too busy rebuilding to fly, and let his licence lapse. Now 70, he admits, “I don’t suppose I will ever retire, but we plan to go walkabout,” he says. The fact that three of their children still live in Vanuatu — the other has moved to Christchurch — binds the Discombes to the place. So does Reece’s consuming interest in the islands’ European history. “I’ve made quite a study of it,” he says. “People write saying ‘My grandfather came to Vanuatu and died. Can you find out where?’ Often I can.” Downstairs in the archive that Discombe has been told surpasses Canberra University’s, are 16 cartons of old photographs and “every book which refers to the New Hebrides. Lots of books are over 150 years old, some are pretty rare. They’re all catalogued.” His exploits have brought him some interesting visitors. “I taught David Attenborough to water ski just down here,” he says. "And Alan Whicker did me once. He was very sarcastic.” On Geoffrey Palmer’s recent visit to Vanuatu, Discombe took him on a tour of Santo, including the flying boat base where the New Zealanders were stationed during the war, flying Corsairs for the Americans. "It’s all covered in jungle now,” he says. But fame has its drawbacks.

“I don’t mind being married to Reece Discombe, but I can’t stand being married to Laperouse,” Jean Discombe sighs.