A Sydney Morning Herald story excellently begins:

As the P&O cruise ship Aurora neared Circular Quay in [February 2012], a British national sent a message to a mysterious Sydney man named David Smith, saying, “About one hour.”

More than an hour later on the morning of February 17 last year, “Mr Smith” replied to say: “Any news?” and “You OK?”.

But Ronald Fletcher was not OK.

He wasn’t okay because a drug-sniffing dog had taken a powerful interest in him, enthusiastically sniffing far more than his crotch. Customs officers asked what those bulges were under his clothes. Supports for his bad back, said the 60-year-old Fletcher. The dog disagreed.

Fletcher’s ship, the P&O Aurora

Officials put more faith in the dog than in Fletcher’s story, perhaps because the dog is named Sherlock. Fletcher said Sherlock might be interested because he had been “playing with himself” the night before. Like that would be so thrilling to the dog. They made Fletcher disrobe, revealing that he was wearing a wetsuit under his clothes, with 5 packages of cocaine tucked into it. There was more cocaine in his suitcases. Oh, busted.

(They estimated that the 66 pounds of cocaine had a street value of $11 million, but estimates of street value are often inflated. It’s always easier to say “This is worth ten thousand dollars!” than to find someone who will actually give you ten thousand dollars. Don’t you find? I leave the calculation as an exercise for the student.)

P&O’s SS Indus, in 1882. This is what Kipling was talking about.

They arrested Fletcher – they couldn’t find “David Smith” – and charged him with importing a commercial quantity of a border-controlled drug.

At trial Fletcher had an explanation. See, back in the UK, he had borrowed £35,000 from loan sharks. Part of which he spent on a vacation in the U.S. When he couldn’t repay the sharks (despite owning a house valued at £200,000), they threatened his family. But they said he could work it off by doing them a little favor, and so he found himself on a round-the-world cruise.

The cruise wasn’t bad at first. He had “a reasonable time.” He went to the spa, the bar, toured Alcatraz when the ship stopped in San Francisco.

The prosecution cast doubt on the loan shark story. Wasn’t sending him on the cruise a rather expensive way of doing things? “To be honest, everything in Australia is expensive,” Fletcher beefed.

When the ship reached New Zealand, a couple called “Pete” and “Sheila” gave him some “contraband” and instructions on how to turn it over once he got to Sydney. He said he assumed it was something like hashish. Of course.

But he said he wasn’t proud of himself. He told the court, “I’m dreadfully sorry and remorseful that I ever got involved in anything as ridiculous as this. In hindsight, I wish I’d just taken a beating.”

He was found guilty. The judge believed in the loan sharks. “I’m satisfied he was a courier and… this… places him lower in the hierarchy,” Judge Leonie Flannery said. “I accept that he became involved because he thought he or his family would be hurt by loan sharks.” On May 3, 2013, he got 5 to 9 years for being such a little dupe-fish.

The beaches of Socotra

What about that apology? It’s amusingly worded, but it’s not a good apology. It’s all about Ronald Fletcher and the trouble he got into. There’s no awareness that bad things happen to anyone but Ronald Fletcher in the international drug business. Yet Ronald Fletcher didn’t, for example, get addicted. He didn’t get shot by a drug dealer. He didn’t see his country’s government corrupted by drug cartels.

But I’m self-involved too, and the thing in this story that made me sit up was that Fletcher was on a P&O ship. I heard about the glamorous P&O (Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company), when my father read me Kipling’s story, “How the Rhinoceros Got His Skin,” which included a poem about the island where the Rhinoceros, Strorks, was punished for stealing a cake from a Parsee. A poem that I learned so early that I was able to recite (most of) it on the spot:

THIS Uninhabited Island
Is off Cape Gardafui,
By the Beaches of Socotra
And the Pink Arabian Sea:
But it’s hot–too hot from Suez
For the likes of you and me
Ever to go
In a P. and O.
And call on the Cake-Parsee!

Apparently the cruise ship line that carried Fletcher was a spinoff of the original P&O. He was living my childhood fantasy, and he only had a “reasonable time”?

Yes, throw that fool in jail.