FOR someone who says he doesn't even like the sea, the Rev. Peter Ellis spends a lot of time there. As the Anglican priest at the Mission to Seafarers, he is a port chaplain in one of the world's busiest maritime centres in Hong Kong. Son of Megan and the late Ralph Ellis, who was also a churchman at Penally, several mornings a week 60-year-old Mr. Ellis navigates the throng of tourists and commuters at the Kowloon waterfront and jumps aboard a motor launch that ferries him to his seaborne flock. Instead of packing religious tracts and Bibles, he lugs an armful of newspapers in a babel of languages, a satchel bulging with prepaid mobile phone cards, and two wallets - one stuffed with Hong Kong dollars and the other with American dollars. His congregants are the crewmen and officers on any of the 400-plus ships that call at the port. Mr. Ellis thinks of himself as an 'anchor' for men whose jobs and lives are buffeted daily by the forces of globalisation. "Everything is changing around them. New employers, new regulations, about the only thing that's constant is the Seafarers' Mission," he explained. A boxing fan, Mr. Ellis's crooked nose, broken twice in childhood accidents, gives him a vaguely pugnacious look that has helped him over the years, he says, when he has had to break up fights between drunken sailors. "I think some people must have looked at me and thought - it looks like this guy's been in the ring, leave him alone," he joked. Mr. Ellis once thought he would be happy to be a small village churchman, as his father was. He says he doesn't even like the sea, but a stint as an assistant to the seamen's mission in Hamburg and a chance dinner with a Chinese tanker crew opened his eyes to the mariner's world. Impressed by the candour of the sailors he met and the multi-ethnic harmony of shipboard life, he began working full-time with ships' crews. He came to Hong Kong as an assistant port chaplain in 1974. Married and with two grown children, he has spent most of his time since then either in Hong Kong or Singapore. On shore he runs the Hong Kong Mission or 'Mish' as it was once commonly known. Housed in an 11- storey ocean blue building near Hong Kong's Victoria Harbour, the mission still provides those sailors who make it ashore with short-stay apartments and a bowling alley, swimming pool and bar. There is also a chapel, which Mr. Ellis shares with his Lutheran and Roman Catholic colleagues. If he can shore up a mariner's flagging faith or welcome a committed convert, Mr. Ellis considers that a bonus. "I don't just want to claim another scalp for the church, for me it's more important that people have a faith than no faith at all," said Mr. Ellis, who has ministered to men of the sea for 39 years.
