The Gully Gully Man

Written by Roland Blackburn

©RN Communications Branch Museum/Library

MEN OF THE SEA know him well. He plies his trade at all ports between Gibraltar and Hong Kong. He is tolerated by some H.M. ships but shunned like the plague by others. He is so cunning, flattering, and such a judge of human nature that he would make any high-powered salesman look like an amateur. Invariably he is dirtier than last year’s dhobeying, and if he is once allowed on board he never leaves the ship without successfully operating some ingenious swindle and making a huge profit on sales.

He is known as the bumboatman, who, in his dinghy, surrounded by an assortment of weird and almost invariably worthless goods, drifts hopefully round every ship that puts into harbour, waiting for permission to come on board.

The ways of the bumboatman are more devious than all the roads that lead to Rome. He is the finesse of subtlety. His name has a Dutch origin, for the term “ bumboat ” was originally applied by the Hollanders to a shore-boat that sold provisions to vessels at anchor. Today the bumboatman will not only sell you almost anything to be obtained in almost any country, but he will purchase whatever you have to dispose of—be it the Kohinoor diamond or a dead body. Scruples he has none, and conscience he has never known. He can be an Albanian or Turk, a Greek or an Italian, but more often he is an Egyptian or a Muslim Indian.

The moment a ship is sighted he puts off in his boat. In the boat are piled glorious selections from all the bazaars east of Gib. He usually has an assistant, for there are certain swindles that cannot be worked without help.

If he is allowed on board he begins his fleecings by exhibiting what past experience has taught him are the most costly of his wares when conveyed to England—little Turkish mats, small Persian rugs, all kinds of leather-work, shawls and the like. These are genuine, and worth even more than the startling price he asks, but they are only decoys with which he would not part at double the figure he puts on them. As bait, their value is twentyfold to him.

After sorely tempting his audience with these goods and lowering the price every few minutes—yet never allowing them out of his own hands or out of his sight—he will, when near the price already offered him, throw them into his boat and declare that he cannot sell for so ruinous a figure. Usually the would-be buyer now raises his offer, and the bumboatman instantly springs to the side of the ship and tells his mate to hand up those things again. The trick is older than Egypt. Worthless facsimiles of the goods , are passed on board, sold, and the man nets from two hundred to two thousand per cent profit.

While he is so engaged, his humbler brother is retailing fruit—usually oranges that have been boiled in water to make them swell to double their normal size.

In Bombay and other Indian ports where ships have to lie off at anchor, the fraudulent things an Indian bumboatman will sell to a gullible European are past belief. They offer imitation Benares ware at fantastic prices, very inferior Indian silk and Indian cotton fabrics for which the prices asked are ruinous. Kashmir shawls and rugs appear, together with carved woodwork alleged to have come straight from Srinagar, but in actual fact made by their own wives and families in some dingy back room.

If the ship happens to anchor in the Madras Roads, the king of bumboatmen, the Madras jeweller, is certain to appear. He will wait all day in his velvet-lined boat, attended by his two slaves, until he is given permission to proceed on board. His unwashed appearance is misleading, for with the profits he has already made from selling his wares to ships’ crews he could probably buy the vessel he is boarding and still afford to run his luxurious forty-horse-power Packard which waits for him ashore.

In his coloured sash and his copious pockets, he carries his collection of precious stones and jewellery : Trichinopoli chains, rubies, emeralds, agates, topaz, zircons, cat’s eyes, blood-stones, moon-stones, amethysts. They are set in rings and brooches of the most elegant pattern and flash colour as an Aldis lamp flashes light. Placed there, upon a black velvet cloth, with the slanting rays of the sun playing upon them, they look as though they were worth a fabulous fortune. You are amazed when he quotes prices which are only half those you would have to pay in England for such jewellery. You decide to buy one or two trinkets and on first examination they seem to be perfect. But you will be uncommonly lucky if the setting holds together for a week after the day of purchase, preventing the glass from rolling out and revealing the skilfully glazed paper of many hues which gives each glass bauble its colourful lustre.

By far the most audacious villains in this profession are the bumboatmen who cruise off the coast of Spain, ready to pester the crews of small merchant ships about to enter Spanish ports. These men are outlaws in every sense of the word. If you will not buy the wines, perfumes and cosmetics they have smuggled off at the risk of their own lives and liberty, they have no scruples about firing a parting shot with a rifle or revolver at the first object that offers itself to their aim as they drop astern.