CAPTAIN PERCY JAMES GREEN MN
The memorials at the Auckland International Seafarers’ Centre draw us from the noise of the waterfront into a quiet space where names, dates and ships’ names speak more loudly than the traffic outside. They remind us that the goods we treat as ordinary—our food, clothing, fuel and household supplies—arrive here because seafarers have first faced the ocean’s uncertainty, sometimes in war as well as storm. In this corner of the Centre, each plaque stands for a voyage interrupted, a community bereaved, and a story that might easily have been forgotten if someone had not chosen to remember.
As visitors move slowly along the memorial wall, they encounter tragedies caused by fire, weather and hazardous coastlines, but also the stark cruelty of conflict at sea. Here, losses like the Capitaine Bougainville and Kaitawa sit alongside stories from distant oceans and wartime convoys, reminding us that the risks seafarers accept are not confined to one era or one coast. In this setting of contemplation and recollection, we are invited to honour those who died, to give thanks for those who survived, and to renew our concern for seafarers who even today sail through dangers that may never make the headlines.
Among these memorials is a plaque with a particularly personal story: the life and witness of Captain Percy James Green.
This plaque is dedicated to the memory of Captain Percy James Green, 1900–1963, whose name adds a human face to the story of wartime loss and survival. Captain Green was a master with John Swire and Co, a long‑serving merchant‑navy officer whose working life was spent among the ships that keep trade moving across the world’s sea lanes. In 1944 he was travelling as a passenger on MV Behar, taking passage from Melbourne to Bombay to join his own vessel, when Behar was intercepted and shelled by the Japanese cruiser Tone in the Indian Ocean.
Captain Green survived both the sinking and the subsequent massacre of Behar survivors, one of the most shocking war crimes carried out against merchant seafarers during the Second World War. He was among the small number of prisoners selected for interrogation and internment rather than execution, and he spent the remainder of the war as a prisoner of war until liberation in 1945. The plaque records his survival and later life, marking him not only as a victim of war but as a symbol of endurance, professional faithfulness and the long shadow such experiences cast over a seafarer’s family and colleagues.
In 2025 this memorial plaque – sponsored by Swire and Co and China Navigation Company, whom he had served as master – was unveiled by members of Captain Green’s family, Their presence at the Centre linked generations: those who lived through the war and those who gathered to remember, in a building dedicated to the welfare and spiritual care of today’s crews. By standing together in Auckland to honour him, they also honoured the many unnamed merchant seafarers whose stories parallel his in different oceans and different conflicts.
The Behar story – danger and deliverance
The sinking of MV Behar and the murder of many of her survivors is a difficult story to tell, yet it belongs alongside other memorials in this space because it shows how vulnerable civilian seafarers can be in time of war. Behar was a merchant ship on a trading voyage when she was shelled, set ablaze and sunk; those onboard were not combatants in the usual sense, but they were treated with extreme cruelty after the loss of their vessel. That night, on Tone’s deck, the calculated murder of 72 of them took place – 53 crew, 15 gunners and 4 passengers (though the women were spared) – by felling and beheading. Those remaining were landed at Tandjong Priok, to see the war out as prisoners of war, with all the privations that meant. The War Crimes trials brought some justice, but the Behar Massacre became yet another example of the many dangers, and horrors, faced by merchant mariners. (The Behar Massacre) That Captain Green and a few others survived to tell their stories does not remove the weight of what happened, but it does offer a thread of hope in a narrative marked by suffering.
For those who pause before his plaque, the details of the Behar tragedy may be unfamiliar, but the underlying reality is clear: merchant seafarers often face dangers far beyond storms and mechanical failure. They have sailed through minefields, submarine patrol zones and aerial bombardment; some have endured captivity or violence simply because they were part of the supply lines that nations depend on. Remembering Captain Green in the Seafarers’ Centre therefore becomes an act of recognition not only of one man’s survival, but of those who died in, or as a result of the massacred, and of the wider body of seafarers who have carried their professional responsibilities into war zones and never quite left those memories behind.
Placed among other memorials, this plaque gently invites us to respond in several ways. It calls us to remember: to acknowledge that behind every ship’s name there are families, shipmates and communities whose stories stretch far beyond the date of a sinking or the end of a war. It encourages us to give thanks: for those who survived and rebuilt their lives, for companies and families who continue to honour them, and for centres like that in Auckland that provide a space where such remembrance can take root. And it prompts us to pray: for seafarers currently at sea, for those who still carry hidden wounds from past voyages, and for a world in which maritime work might be carried out with greater justice, safety and peace.
In that sense, the memorial area at the Auckland International Seafarers’ Centre does more than look back. It invites each visitor — crew member, volunteer, family or friend—to see today’s ships and crews through different eyes, recognising that every arrival and departure holds stories as deep and complex as those etched into the plaques on the wall.