Metz didn’t go up country because he was ill in hospital with fever and other troubles, and visiting him one day he pointed out to me a dark, grey-haired shrivelled up little Eurasian who looked just like a coolie. ‘That man,’ said Metz, ‘is one of the richest men in Sumatra. His name is Lorenzo. He speaks very good Malay. And if you like, I can arrange for him to give you and Mr Scott a series of talks. He is very interesting.’

So we formed a circle once a week that met to listen to Papa Lorenzo. Colonels and ornaments of the M.C.S. and even a few Dutch officers came along to listen. He became a sort of institution, and people placed orders with him for after the war, and one man started to write short stories about him.

Lorenzo dismissed as uninteresting Sago and Eucalyptus tree estates in Ambon – they only brought him in clothes money. But he told us a lot about his 5,000 acre estate of coconuts near Medan, in Sumatra, and he described in detail the processing of the copra that was carried on in his spick-splinter new factory there. It was very technical but most absorbing, and we learnt that this rather dirty mummy of a little man had a lovely house outside the town and used it occasionally to fly over the Straits of Malacca to do a little racing in Singapore. Certainly his Sumatra holdings were profitable!

But that was still small fry. For his real business was in pearls, and he was a pearl king from an old pearling family. He worked himself only three months a year, and that was when he went out on his 1,500 ton flagship to watch the work of his fleet of over a hundred pearling vessels as they worked in the seas and among the islands of the Moluccas. The normal ship was small, only about 250 tons, and they worked in teams to cover various areas yearly.

The divers all came from old diving families and passed the art on to their children, receiving high pay and a regular scale of compensation to their families if they were maimed or killed by sharks or barracuda. He laughed at the idea of a diver killing a shark in deep water – he’d never heard of it – but he lost on average thirty men a year! But if we were interested in giant fish, there were seas on his charts marked where his tiny vessels were forbidden to go because the water was comparatively shallow and haunted by enormous octopi. He had actually lost two of his boats which had been capsized and pulled under by these monstrous brutes that in size went up to 10 metres long in the body, and had tentacles of eighty metres; these two ships were sucked down in full view of about twenty other vessels in the area! Sometimes they had been able to shoot some of these creatures, because at night they floated on the surface, apparently sleeping.