It was a morning of flat calm in the Sulu archipelago towards the end of November 1990. The sun in its early angle was both gentle and powerful, forcing a luminous violet into the water. The islands dotting the sea to the horizon stood clear and delicate, as though the same gentle power had hatched them out overnight and left them in their freshness to harden off.
A small boat with bamboo outriggers was heading back towards Subuan. In it were three young Bajau women and a double row of grey plastic jerrycans of water. Perched on these amidships was a seventeen-year-old boy, the brother of one of the girls, who understood the 10 horsepower Briggs & Stratton engine. He was controlling the speed by means of a length of nylon fishing line tied to the throttle. This ran over a rubber disc cut from the sole of a sandal and nailed to a thwart. The boy had wrapped the end of the line around his finger and was concentrating on holding the engine’s note at the same pitch. It was a nearly new motor whose exhaust was rigged in local fashion from an iron elbow bolted to the exhaust port with a foot of ordinary water pipe screwed into it and jutting up at an angle. From this unsilenced tube blared the fumes and racket familiar to those on board as a soothing part of a ritual which, before the coming of the engine, had been a much more laborious business involving paddles and a sail made from rice sacks.
The Bajau were homeward bound from the island of Siasi, whose town was the nearest reliable source of fresh water. There was also an acute shortage there, to be sure, but at least water could be bought at a seasonal average of about 12p per jerrycan. At first light they had reached Siasi’s jetty with a load of fish, which the women’s husbands had caught the previous day and had kept alive overnight in rattan containers suspended in the tide beneath the floors of their huts. All the Bajaus’ transactions had been carried out by the one woman among them who knew how to use money. None of the four was literate, but she did understand coins. As long as everything was done in coins it was all right. She would have nothing to do with paper money. Not only could she never be sure of the denominations but it was all too evidently flimsy stuff. Drop it in the sea and it would be reduced to pulp and where were you then? For all her knowledge, though, she and her companions were happiest with barter. Barter, now, that was the proper way of doing things; taking into account all sorts of subtle variables like quality, whether there was a glut or a shortage that day, how much of a hurry you were in. Thus a basket of medium blue crabs might fetch two baskets of good cassava, while a ‘half-boat’ shark half the length of the bangka was worth quite an assortment of nylon line, fish hooks and petrol, plus (especially if the Chinese shopkeeper was buying jaws as well as fins) two pairs of children’s shorts.
As the boat rounded an islet they could see Subuan in the distance with its detached clump of huts standing well offshore on legs anchored in the corals. The sea’s surface glassily collected the white clouds which, towards midday, might with any luck heap together and wring some precious rainwater out of themselves. The Bajau stared forward, reading the water. Probably no other people anywhere could gaze with such knowledge of what was happening below its surface. The sudden swirl of a tail, catspaws and dimples of wind, the alignment of the snapped blades of Thalassia sea grass whose floating debris threaded the archipelago like oil slicks, even passing smells: all carried information or stood for omens.
No doubt the hammering exhaust and the mesmeric calm prevented the women and the boy from noticing the bigger and faster craft with double outriggers slipping out from behind the islet as they passed. It always would have been too late for them in any case. They would certainly have seen it as it drew level, matching their speed a few yards away. The boy at the engine would have turned, half stood, shocked but not really bewildered by the sight of a man steadying an M-16 across the bigger craft’s low roof. And thus, probably without shaping a clear thought, he took leave for ever of his sister and companions, of the glittering morning ocean, of his seventeen years. The shots carried away much of his head. His body must have fallen across the scorching engine, for when it washed ashore it was still possible to make out extensive blistering of chest and stomach. His dead finger slack, the engine would have slowed abruptly to tick-over. The little boat lost way at once, rocking gently out in the middle of the sunlit strait, steam rising as the boy’s blood hissed and bubbled on the cylinder head.
It is unlikely the three women remained sitting mutely while men swarmed aboard across the outriggers. Being Bajau, their instincts would surely have been to put themselves into the hands of the sea and its spirits. But sooner or later, no matter how ably they swam and dived, they would have been wrenched from the water and tied up on the larger craft. A man aboard their bangka unwound the nylon from the boy’s finger, hauled his sizzling body off the engine and threw it overboard. Then the faster boat took the other in tow and, veering away from Subuan, probably headed south-west to Tapaano or even Sugbai, which lay on the horizon a scant forty minutes away.
Once there, the pirates would doubtless have been joined in camp by their outlaw companions, taking it in turns to rape and beat the women unconscious. At length someone would have set off with all three victims’ sarongs (that all-purpose garment which serves variously as skirt, trousers and turban) and arranged to have them delivered to the respective husbands, together with ransom demands of just under £1,000 per head.
Since everyone knew the Bajau were nearly all subsistence fishermen and the poorest tribe between Mindanao and Indonesia, it is not clear how seriously these ransom demands were intended. Maybe the pirates thought that if a poor Bajau could put an engine in his bangka he had a secret source of funds which might be further tapped. In point of fact the motor had been installed by a Chinese, a merchant keen to boost his trade in marine products which he periodically shipped to Manila. In any event he was not a man to throw good cash after a lost engine. After all, no one seriously thought a Bajau was worth … well, how could one put a figure on the lives of illiterate fishermen, gypsies who mostly lived outside any sensible economy? Still less on their wives.
And so, after a week’s captivity, during which time no money arrived and their treatment no doubt reflected the pirates’ increasing anger, the three Bajau women were put to death in a way which can only be imagined. All that is known is that the body of one was chopped up into quite small pieces – diced, it would be called in a recipe – and piled in the bilges of their little bangka over the four bolts on which the Briggs & Stratton engine had been mounted. Then it was set adrift. The boat with its heap of meat wandered with the current for a while before being found, recognised and read as just one more awful warning in a region used to awful warnings and worse deeds.
This small atrocity was still mentioned now and then by the island folk three months later, although by that time it had been overtaken by news of more recent acts of piracy. Such things were commonplace. The least advantage in material goods or business put anyone firmly in an extortioner’s sights. Uncharacteristically, these pirates had forgone a bangka, but they had gained a nearly new engine, some full containers of drinking water and a week’s fun. The world spun on.
As for the Bajau themselves, they would not have forgotten. At least they were able to take the boy’s burned and headless body to their cemetery island and lay it with semi-pagan rites beneath a carefully painted wooden board, surrounded by gay little flags. Then, as is their custom, they probably raced each other back down the beach and into the water to wash, spurred on by the half-serious belief that ‘the last one in is the next to die’. Perhaps they instinctively felt the sea safer than the land. Maybe some distant tribal memory warned them that, like turtles, they were doomed to transact certain necessary rituals on dry land before they could once again return to the comparative safety of the ocean.
*
Such an anonymous event – which was never reported in any newspaper, nor formally to any military or civil authority – contained within it many of the well-worn coordinates of the Bajaus’ fate, not merely of three women and a teenage boy but of the whole scattered tribe. Come to that, it was characteristic of an entire region. Everything that had taken place was immemorial within its setting: the fetching of water, the bartering of goods, the being victim, the being pirate. So also were the lumps of land rising from the seabed haphazard of all demarcations, the shoals and atolls, sandbars and islets drugged with sun as the archipelago (a word whose beautiful syllables stretch themselves to the mind’s horizon) sprawled in its great tropic swoon while seething with violence. Many of Conrad’s best stories were set in this area. From southern Mindanao, from Sultan Kudarat and Zamboanga and Palawan down to Java in the south, from Sumatra in the west to the Moluccas in the east, certain things have changed little to this day. Some names are different. Celebes has become Sulawesi, Makassar is Ujung Pandang and Batavia is Jakarta. But the rest – Ternate, Surabaya, Kuching, Samarang, Timor – still exist and echo with the pungency that thrilled my adolescence until like Axel Heyst himself I could believe my life enchanted by a magic circle ‘with a radius of eight hundred miles drawn round a point in North Borneo.’*
The way of living is still much the same for many in the Sulu archipelago. They have not stopped diving to eardrum-splitting depths for pearls and tripang (sea cucumbers); the blue highways of water are patrolled as ever by sharks and criss-crossed by inter-island traffic of every kind. The pirates, smugglers and common cut-throats are very much in evidence. Even vestiges of the old sultanates remain, although the turbaned despot living in his fiefdom – a pocket trading empire defended by mangroves, a treacherous estuary and riverbank spies – tends nowadays to be a pretender who manages a grocery store in Jolo and writes long letters by candlelight to the United Nations, beseeching it to recognise him as rightful heir. Everywhere the kris has given way to the Armalite, while the great white sails of clippers and schooners have been supplanted by Isuzu marine diesels. Otherwise, Conrad might recognise these waters as having retained their archipelagic essence: seductive, dangerous, possessing above and below their surface a treacherous quality which leaves nobody untouched.
He would certainly have been familiar with the Bajau, although in his day they were more exclusively boat-dwelling than they are now. Anthropology has still not decided where they originally came from, or why. The earliest European visitors, beginning with the Portuguese and Magellan in the first quarter of the sixteenth century, reported small groups of boat-dwelling nomads throughout the archipelagos of South-East Asia. It is largely a matter of guesswork as to how long they had been there. Opinion is divided, too, on whether they once all came from the same tribal stock – whether, for example, the sea nomads of the Mergui archipelago off the western coast of Burma share a common ancestry with those of the Riaw-Lingga archipelago in Indonesia and the Bajau of Sulu and North Borneo. Whatever their origin, it is always presumed that at some point far back in time they were all land-dwellers who for some reason decided to go and live, as far as possible, afloat. What is now to be seen is the final phase of this ancient way of life as the Bajau try to take up residence on land again. The difficulty they are experiencing in doing so is a measure of the thoroughness of their social adaptation to living on the sea.
One of the theories as to why their ancestors left the land in the first place is that they were literally driven off it by stronger tribes. If so, it is ironic that similar persecution is now driving the Bajau off the sea. Three tribes predominate in Sulu: the Tausug, the Samal and the Bajau. For several reasons, principally linguistic, modern opinion tends to lump these last two together. The Bajau language is a dialect of Samal (properly called Sinama) and besides, they consider themselves to be Samals of a kind. ‘Of a kind’ is a reasonable qualification since the Samal of the southern archipelago are a heterogeneous bunch and can vary in dialect, attitudes and social customs from island to island. At one extreme they include illiterate, pagan, boat-dwelling Bajau and at the other sophisticated traders and teachers who have made the hajj to Mecca.
Ranged against all of them are the Tausug. The Tausug have always been politically and otherwise dominant in the archipelago, with a reputation for pride, hot temper and general disdain for lesser folk such as Samal. As for the Bajau, they often refer to them as luwaan. Luwa is the Tausug verb for ‘to spit out’; ‘outcast’ would probably be the nearest English equivalent. No doubt a good deal of Tausug bigotry towards the Bajau is caused by – or at least explained as – a matter of religion. The Tausug have a generally high opinion of their own version of Islam, rather less of the Samal version, and can express serious doubts about whether the Bajau brand even counts as Islam at all. It would be impossible for a people living in a predominantly Islamic area not to have assimilated a great deal of Islamic culture, and the Bajau have done so, many of them being devout Muslims. But since they are traditionally a boat people they are perforce a people without architecture. Hence their mosques – for all the world dilapidated huts on stilts standing in the waves – do not fulfil the Tausug idea of what a mosque should look like. ‘How can a people without decent mosques qualify as Muslims?’ I was asked by some exceedingly hospitable Tausug on Siasi. What I should have countered with, had I not lacked the requisite nerve and discourtesy, was ‘How can a people drink as much as you do and qualify as Muslims?’, for drunkenness in this famously Muslim region is widely admitted even by imams to be one of the principal reasons for the extraordinary level of casual violence. It was, of course, Tausug pirates who killed the three Bajau women and the boy. Although it is quite certain their Bajau relatives could identify the men involved, they would have been much too frightened to report them even had there been any form of law in the area worth reporting them to. Seen from far enough away, of course, the Tausug and the Samal and the Bajau appear to have far more in common than not – seem practically indistinguishable, in fact, since they are all people whose lives are overwhelmingly mediated by the sea.
Left to himself, the Bajau’s is a peaceful, shy, somewhat nomadic way of life which is as highly specialised as that of the Eskimos. It would be a mistake to romanticise it, though. Bajau living has always been extremely hard, often dangerous, lonely and beset with disease. The traditional family unit was a married couple and their children in a low-roofed boat. Depending on season, preferred fishing grounds, family events (mainly marriages and deaths) and sheer whim, the boats either formed parts of flotillas, floating villages or went their own separate ways for months on end. They tended to put ashore only for drinking water, firewood and cassava; otherwise it was a life at sea in all weathers. It was also a life largely spent crouching: squatting to cook, squatting to eat, squatting to fish. To this day older Bajau can still be seen who walk on land with a gait as characteristic and graceless as a duck’s, their lower limbs slightly atrophied from a lifetime’s hunkering down.
The conditions in these boats, where they still exist today, can become squalid, to say the least. It is not merely that if there are infants and toddlers aboard the bilges soon give the craft the atmosphere of a floating urinal. All sorts of vegetable ends, cooking scraps and fish guts fester there as well, brewing up in the tropical climate so that the liquid, when glimpsed between plank and thwart, can be seen fizzing. This is baled out at anchor in shallows, but on the high seas is often allowed to build up, and for a perfectly good reason. Since Bajau men spend a good deal of time overboard cutting seaweed and diving for tripang and pearl oysters the last thing they want to do is lay a trail of offal and attract sharks. This would be a determining factor for any sea dweller in the tropics and, indeed, is noted in a curious account by an Englishman, Leopold Ainsworth, of trying to run a timber business in the Mergui archipelago in the 1920s.* The sea gypsies he knew there, and whom he tried to introduce to the idea of paid labour on land, called themselves ‘Mawken’, which he translates as ‘seadrowned’. The boats and habits of the Seadrowned People of the Mergui archipelago seem to have been not much different from those of the Bajau, which is hardly surprising given the similarity of the conditions. The Mawken, too, gave an account of their origins which told of persecution by Burmese hill tribes from the north and Malay pirates from the south squeezing them off the land and into the sea. They also offered this as an explanation of why they had no interest or skill in cultivation, merely picking up fruit or an occasional wild pig when passing an island. According to Ainsworth the Mawken seemed to exist on seafood, rice and opium. The Sulu nomads mostly eat cassava as their staple, only the wealthier tribes and classes relying on rice. I never saw opium, but marijuana is widely smoked.
Malnutrition is a common consequence of this way of life, partly because the diet is unvarying but also because the choicest fish are mostly reserved for sale while the fisherman himself subsists on scraps, shells and the coarser varieties. Combined with the lack of sanitation this leads to a high incidence among the Bajau of tuberculosis, malaria, infant diarrhoea and infestations, to all of which their resistance is slight. This seems ironic, even contradictory, in view of the extraordinary physical fitness and imperviousness to cold needed by men free-diving to up to 100 metres for pearl oysters. Even greater depths are claimed, and although so far as I know nobody has ever bothered to measure them exactly, such dives have to be placed against the current world record of 105 metres,* especially since these are working dives during which shells, lobsters or sea cucumbers are gathered. Before diving the men often swig a mixture of canned milk beaten up with little ‘native’ eggs and lemon juice and eat bananas. They say this makes them resistant to the cold.†
Young Bajau, particularly children and adolescents, often have the bleached, tawny hair of people who spend their lives in and out of the sea. Some even approach a dusky blondness which, amid uniformly black Asian hair, is very striking indeed and a sure guide to that person’s way of life and social status. No doubt it is Western culture, and specifically cinematic images of Californian or Australian beach culture, which equates this with the very pinnacle of healthy living (or did before skin cancer was mentioned). In South-East Asia, though, it speaks of a life of poverty and often malnutrition lived beyond the least shadow of a classroom, with intestinal worms and scabies as constant companions.
Even in the 1960s, when anthropologists like H. Arlo Nimmo were undertaking classic studies of the Bajau, their landward trend was obvious. The entirely floating life on houseboats was being relinquished for a tentative one in stilt huts which represented the placing of a wary toe on the very edge of land. Like their Samal cousins, certain Bajau always did build communities of huts on stilts in shallow offshore areas, each hut joined to the next by sagging walkways. The difference between them was that while Samal villages always had a gangway leading ashore, Bajau villages did not. There were other signs, too, of a culture becoming less isolate.
‘Paganism’ and the boat-dwelling habit have always been identifying marks of the Sulu Bajau. With the full acceptance of Islam and the abandonment of the nomadic boat-life, these sea folk will cease to exist as a ‘pagan’ outcast people, and become amalgamated into the general Muslim Samal population of Sulu. Probably within another decade full-time boat-dwellers will disappear completely from the Sulu waters.*
This was what Nimmo wrote a quarter of a century ago, and since then the drift to land has become almost total, except for a few isolated cases. Yet his prediction of ‘amalgamation’ has certainly not come about, if this means the adoption of land-based social habits and values. To this day the whole problem of how the Bajau can be integrated remains unsolved. They are mostly unconvinced by the idea of education, so are often unwilling to send their children to school. Nor do they seem keen to learn new skills. And as for taking part in any social or political activity, it has proved almost impossible to interest them. They suffer, in short, from an admirable lack of ambition. Their relationship with the sea is so strong they give the impression of being only flimsily attached to land, and might leave again tomorrow if conditions became any worse. Maybe the sea itself is by the way; perhaps what they have in their blood is a nomadic indifference to roots. This might explain their amiable remoteness, their strange innocence. Since they have never owned property ashore they have always remained free of contaminating land squabbles, battles with landlords and developers, crippling rents and tribal annexations. At the first sign of trouble an entire settlement of Bajau may be discovered to have left overnight, in silence, their abandoned huts creaking slightly in the tide and their low craft already invisible over the horizon.
What has done most in recent years to change the Bajau’s way of life is violence. No anthropologist writing in the 1960s foresaw that persecution would increasingly drive them ashore and that the shore with its press and clutter of people, its social cross-currents and complexities would prove a very mixed blessing. Nobody guessed they might have to inhabit a strange no man’s land, an intertidal zone. But then, nobody realised to what an extent the Sulu archipelago would become a battleground. In 1974 Ferdinand Marcos sent in the armed forces of the Philippines against the MNLF. In the fighting of early February that year, most of the town of Jolo was destroyed and its population forced to take to the hills. Henceforth, the best that reigned in Sulu was armed stalemate broken by violent guerrilla and military engagements, until today’s state of undeclared anarchy was reached. The great influx of weapons into the area, together with financial support for the MNLF from abroad as well as the money brought by lucrative smuggling and trade links with Malaysia, meant that the dominant tribe became more dominant still.
In recent years anyone has been able to acquire an M-16. If all else fails, one can easily bribe one’s way into the army and acquire the weapon that way. M-16s are constantly ‘lost’ as soon as they are issued, and often the new recruit only waits until the weapon is in his hands before defecting. Armed with an M-16 it is simple to steal a boat. Anybody with an M-16 and a bangka can go straight into business on his own account as a pirate. It is a vilely dangerous living, to be sure, and the sharks must have grown very fat in the straits between the islands, but it is a way of life sanctioned by tradition and facilitated by the times.
The result for the unarmed, peaceable Bajau has been disaster. Whereas once they could fish at night using hurricane lamps and Coleman lanterns, they now dare not for fear of attracting pirates. A further disadvantage is that the pirate craft frequently have engines powerful enough to outrun the Philippine navy and coastguard patrols and whereas once the Bajau might have used superior seamanship to avoid trouble they are now helpless. So if anything has reconciled some of them to land and its unfamiliar ways it is the need to defend themselves. It is not Islam, nor free education by the Oblate Fathers, nor offers of health care, nor any amount of blandishments and promises which have changed the Bajau’s horizon in Sulu. It is violence, and the necessity of earning enough to buy an M-16 and an engine in order to counter it.
*
Presumably, nomadism – whether of Bedouin or Eskimos or sea gypsies – is everywhere in decline. In order to survive, nomads need large tracts of unoccupied territory where there is no serious competition for their source of food, and such areas must be growing fewer. Besides, modern governments increasingly dislike ‘floating populations’ who seem ignorant of their control and who drift uncaringly across their borders and frontiers as if they did not exist. All centralisation is a threat to the periphery, and minor tribes which fall outside even the periphery tend to become fair game. It is a short step from being a minority to becoming marginal and then officially outlawed.
Even under average conditions, nomadic life is harsh, while a single stroke of ill fortune such as drought, epidemic, civil war, an oil spill or volcanic eruption can bring a people to the edge of extinction. To sentimentalise nomads is not a patronage they need. With an Armalite at last in their hands and deep memories of catalogues of injustice, they do not necessarily behave better than anyone else. What they retain, though, is priceless: a genuine remnant of the knowledge which has served the various species of Homo throughout his history. This knowledge is already lost to industrialised man and in this present century will be lost to the human race for good. It is a particular way of being in a landscape, of coexisting with ocean and land which takes account of minutiae we no longer know how to observe and maybe now cannot see at all.
There is a link between nomads and pirates and even smugglers. It has partly to do with living in a world beyond boundaries, but also with a detailed knowledge of that world which goes beyond mere geography. Pirates are simply seagoing versions of highway men or brigands; each calculates that his knowledge of the locality will be superior to that of any forces officialdom sends out to capture him. But in between moments of intense danger and excitement must be stretches of considerable solitude, and some sea pirates must themselves have a near-nomadic existence. After all, piracy need only be a sideline. At its lowest level, such as that which has all but driven the Bajau to land, it is a matter of rat-poor fishermen preying on other rat-poor fishermen for the simplest things, like a day’s catch or a dugout boat. I am sure that half the wanderers who landed on ‘Tiwarik’ when I was there were neither particularly fishermen nor pirates nor smugglers but all three as occasion demanded. They might be best described as opportunistic nomads, and what characterised them all was that they were highly self-sufficient. It was not a luxurious life they led, but they were utterly at home in it. First and last, they were born boat people. All had that adhesive agility common to those who grow up barefoot on very small craft. Most had the tawny streaks in their hair, the bleached expression and frown lines of those who have squinted constantly at glaring horizons. All were skilled with dynamite, hook and line or woven fish traps. None was scared of man or beast but they were truly frightened of mumu, sea spirits and omens.
In its immense navigational complexity and its lavish range of hiding places, a tropical archipelago is ideal pirate territory, and piracy has been established for centuries in insular South-East Asia. Some pirates achieved fame and most Filipinos know the story of Lim Ah Hong, the Chinese pirate who in 1574 even raided Manila itself and came close to unseating the fledgling Spanish colonial administration. His name lives on, less for nationalistic reasons than because of a vast treasure he allegedly hid and which has been looked for ever since. (A treasure is, of course, any proper pirate’s true legacy.) Down in Sulu, in Borneo and the East Indies, piracy always flourished well. This was partly because it was Muslim territory, with a complex assortment of fiefdoms and sultanates never brought under full control by any colonial power. When various Sulu potentates made alliances with their counterparts in Mindanao, the entire Philippine archipelago became prey to Islamic pirate junks. The more regular the colonists’ shipping and trading became, the better the pickings, until by the nineteenth century piracy had reached epidemic proportions. ‘From Mindanao to Sumatra, countless White travellers recorded their fears of, and warnings about, the savage marauders of the archipelago who thrived on massacre, violation and rapine.’* In 1830 Stamford Raffles himself had found ‘no vessel safe, no flag respected’.
Today’s predominantly Tausug descendants of those pirates who infested Sulu are merely carrying on a long ingrained tradition. Naturally, piracy can hardly thrive without victims, and in default of galleons carrying Spanish gold from Mexico there are interisland launches carrying people with wallets and cargoes of goods for Chinese traders. There are also the boats which run regularly between Jolo and Labuan Island in Malaysia, taking advantage of barter trade agreements under which copra and handicrafts are swapped for electronic goods, textiles and canned food. It may sound small-time, but each round trip can be worth up to £100,000, and certainly those concerned take it seriously enough. At the very end of January 1991, pirates killed twelve Sulu barter traders in a single concerted raid. As for smuggling, there is a brisk trade out of Sulu in marijuana, which also goes to Malaysia. This seemed unlikely enough, given that country’s famously draconian penalties for drug dealing; but as I was succinctly told, ‘Malaysia’s a big place.’ In return, ‘blue seal’ American cigarettes are smuggled back and are on open sale throughout Sulu and Zamboanga.
These are not romantic businesses to be engaged in, and certainly not to fall foul of. The treatment of the Vietnamese ‘boat people’, the refugees who fled Vietnam after 1975, was a case in point, and those victims who lived to testify to pirate attacks – often by well-equipped Thais – gave horrendous accounts. The earlier waves of refugees were largely Chinese middle classes from the Cholon district of Ho Chi Minh City, lately Saigon, and were often wealthy. They brought what concentrated valuables they could with them, usually gold, hidden about the overcrowded boats with great ingenuity, sometimes suspended by brass wire beneath the keel. Maybe the earlier pirates were satisfied by good hauls, but as time passed and the Chinese were replaced by ordinary Vietnamese political refugees their savageries began to be mentioned in the world’s press. All in all, it was a far cry from the behaviour of the Bangladeshi pirates who in November 1989 were reported as singing their victims a little choral medley before asking them to turn over their valuables.*
Instances of horrible and immensely daring opportunism abound among the archipelagos of South-East Asia and are frequently evidence of a nomadic understanding of the sea. Less than a year after the Doña Paz disaster another overcrowded Sulpicio Lines vessel, the Doña Marilyn, sailed for Manila out of Cebu despite the coastguard’s warnings of the imminent arrival of typhoon ‘Unsang’. On the night of 26 October 1988 the Doña Marilyn sank while trying to shelter in the lee of Guiguitang and Manok-Manuk islands off the north coast of Leyte. On this occasion, at least, there was land nearby. The seas were very heavy and many survivors who managed to swim in the right direction were pounded against the jagged offshore reefs and died there. And yet while dozens of brave Manok-Manuk islanders formed a human chain far out into the surf to pull exhausted swimmers in, other villagers who had heard the ship’s radioed distress signals and had seen her lights had long since launched their flimsy bangkas and were far out in the storm, hauling survivors aboard, stripping them of any valuables, and throwing them back in. Had they been rescuers, their courage could scarcely have been overpraised. Yet as plunderers their bravery was actually no less. They displayed a true piratical streak that night, amoral and enterprising.*
To make a living from smuggling, as from piracy, one needs to know the territory with a precise and local eye. This must be true whether on land or sea. In regions where particular trade routes run or particular economies have grown up, smuggling activities will develop their own skills, lore and traditions. The bootleggers of West Virginia who ran illicit corn liquor through the Allegheny Mountains developed driving and engineering skills for outrunning the law which in turn nourished the entire sport of American stock car racing. Mountain boys drove as soon as their feet could reach the pedals, and apart from learning a repertoire of tricks (such as the ‘bootlegger’s turn’) they also acquired great sensitivity to details of road surface, weather conditions, and a car’s balance and handling depending on how full the hidden tank of liquor was. The archipelagic people of South-East Asia have analogous skills, but they have others as well which make land-based versions look coarse and two-dimensional. Above all they are prodigious navigators.
The Bajaus’ ability to go back to a particular patch of ocean without reference to land seems uncanny. Stories are told of their being able to sail unerringly to a single lobster pot on an overcast night out of sight of land. I have never seen this, but certainly such things are habitually said about other sorts of nomads, whether Aborigines in Australia or Kababish camel herders on the fringes of north-western Sudan. They are peculiar to any people whose entire living depends on a knowledge of their natural surroundings and who are themselves largely bound into the ecology of the area. The Bajau’s knowledge of the sea comes as much from living in it as off it and extends to its every aspect.
*
Anthropology has confirmed what was self-evident long before Thor Heyerdahl and his Kon-Tiki venture in the late 1940s. That is, that sea nomads have always been serious navigators. Fifteen hundred years ago the Polynesians were sailing around the Pacific in big catamarans using the stars, frigate birds, sea conditions, smells and their own stick maps to tell them where they were. (It would be interesting to know if these stick maps, whose intersections marked islands, shoals and currents with considerable accuracy, also marked imaginary islands which, over the centuries, gradually disappeared.) Recent research concludes that Homo, like many other species, does have a built-in sense of direction, no matter how atrophied it may have become from disuse.* Apart from navigation, though, a sea gypsy’s knowledge of the ocean is scientific in its detail, yet his is very far from being a scientist’s eye. For one thing, it tends to be holistic to a degree, whereas the impression given by most of the geophysicists aboard the Farnella was one of extreme specialisation.
The question finally asks itself: What order of knowledge do we stand to lose if and when such people as sea nomads finally abandon their way of life, and does it matter? Perhaps one can say with more than mere intuition that certain innate skills and faculties do atrophy through not being used, that an increasing reliance on electronics to mediate our apprehension of the world does lead to the loss of certain sensitivities and that to lose any sensitivity or awareness is limiting and unwise. Again, extreme examples are sometimes advanced in favour of retaining ‘old methods’. In the case of navigation, for instance, it might be said that with increasing reliance on satellite-based positioning and guidance systems, the old skills of stellar navigation may no longer be taught even as a ‘manual backup’, and will in time be lost altogether. ‘What happens,’ the argument runs, ‘if something puts all electronic navigational systems out of commission at once? Suppose there is a massive solar flare whose radiation disrupts the GPS satellites?* Or one of those sudden reverses of Earth’s magnetic polarity which would make it necessary to recalibrate all compasses? What then?’
Of course, this is not quite the point, though there is a poignancy in watching the old and new technologies meet. In the early 1970s I found myself flying from Recife in Brazil to London Gatwick in a VC10 of British Caledonian. The aircraft was virtually empty. I was one of eleven passengers, and after the others had settled in for the night (they were mostly elderly) I was invited to spend as long as I liked in the cockpit. Such innocent, pre-terrorist days they were; casual in the economic sense, too, which is no doubt why the airline no longer exists. In the middle of the night the navigator, who had been getting radio fixes from Dakar and Cape Verde, stood up and opened a tiny hatch in the cockpit roof which he called the ‘smoke ventilation hole’. This exposed a perspex bubble through which he shot the stars with a sextant. Today there are no more navigators in airline service, the last having flown on VC10s and Boeing 707s. The crew on the flight deck of a modern airliner consists only of the captain and the first officer. Neither has been trained to navigate by the stars. Nor has the cabin crew. If an aircraft is forced to ditch and its passengers and crew manage to haul themselves into the rubber dinghies they will not, unlike Captain Bligh and his fellow officers, be able to make a dogged landfall weeks later nor even, like downed World War II aircrews, know which direction to paddle in. All they can do is sit impotently bobbing up and down, waiting for rescue.
The point is not only what will happen if and when stellar navigation becomes a lost art but who, apart from astronomers will remain attentive to the heavens? And who apart from scientists will remain attentive to the sea? Even when it happens before our eyes it is hard enough to accept that species become extinct, that they always have and always will since without extinction there is no evolution. But the idea of bodies of knowledge becoming extinct seems quite as shocking, and it is difficult to see how it can be avoided when they are so inseparable a part of a rare and specialised way of life. It is too late now to save many a tribe – of Amazonian Indians, for example – who might have spared us years of suffering and expensive research had they been consulted in time about the medicinal properties of the plants they knew best. (This, of course, is the utilitarian approach to conservation.) Maybe after all, bodies of knowledge peculiar to a tribe should, like species, be allowed to become extinct once circumstances have changed and they can no longer adapt themselves.
Apart from rebelling instinctively against it, it is not an easy argument to counter. If in fifty years’ time most Bajau are stockbrokers, what will the sea be to them except somewhere for family outings and expensive water sports? Of what use to future generations their present intricate understanding of the ocean? If there is a scientific rather than a sentimental answer it might be one analogous to that which sees the paramount importance of maintaining the diversity of species, of the gene pool. The more the world becomes politically, economically and culturally centralised, the more homogenised its ways of living, so the dangers of sameness become apparent. To take a notorious example, the EU regulations restricting the varieties of seeds permitted for sale within the union have for years been viewed as potentially disastrous by botanists and agronomists. A real threat is concealed in the preferencing of a handful of crop varieties chosen only according to marketplace (mainly visual) criteria. Once the genetic bank is depleted the chances of calamity caused by a single unexpected virus or pest become much greater. When in the nineteenth century the Irish potato crop was lost, creating mass famine and emigration to the New World, the potatoes were almost entirely of a single strain, uniformly susceptible to blight. In future, no amount of genetic juggling or selective pesticides will be as effective as growing the widest possible variety of fruit and vegetables, keeping unfashionable strains alive even if the immediate benefits are not obvious.
A consumer-based cultural uniformity is still some way off but is already advanced enough for certain grim futures to be imagined. At the same time, utterly various ways of experiencing the planet still do survive, though tenuously and in scattered fashion. The Bajau looks up, and the sun crossing the sky tells him any number of things, among them his place, his time, and how the sea creatures on which his living depends will be behaving. In another world entirely, one spanned with satellites and a global money market, the sun is just a noun, a hot and dazzling object rising with the Nikkei and setting with the Dow-Jones.
* Joseph Conrad, Victory (1915).
* Leopold Ainsworth, A Merchant Venturer among the Sea Gypsies (London, 1930).
* See p. 115.
† For this and many details of Bajau life I am indebted to Dr Saladin S. Teo, a native of Laminusa Island, Siasi. In addition to being a superintendent for schools in Sulu, he has made a particularly sympathetic study of the Bajau over many years. His book The Lifestyle of the Badjaos (Manila, CEU, 1989) is a useful addition to the literature, but even more valuable to me was his friendly and courteous company on visits to Siasi and Laminusa.
* H. Arlo Nimmo, ‘Reflections on Bajau History’, Philippine Studies 16, no. 1 (1968).
* V. R. Savage, Western Impressions of Nature and Landscape in Southeast Asia (Singapore, 1984).
* BBC World Service, Meridian, 11 November 1989.
* To forestall any moral posturing we should remember the wreckers who within living memory were still active around Britain’s shores. Their behaviour was arguably even worse since they were occasionally known to lure ships onto rocks by means of false lights. (For an outstanding recent account see Bella Bathurst, The Wreckers, 2005.) It is also salutary to go back sixty years or so to when London was mostly behaving gallantly during the Blitz. On the night of 8 March 1941, two bombs hit the crowded Café de Paris beneath the Rialto cinema in Coventry Street. One exploded, killing 33 outright and wounding 60. In the semi-darkness, choking fumes, dust and general carnage, two men posing as members of a rescue squad went round calmly removing rings from the fingers of the dead and unconscious and turning out handbags. In fact, there were organised gangs who had an elaborate telephone network keeping them up to date on where bombs had fallen and which places might present the best opportunities for looting.
* The evidence comes from laboratory experiments during which subjects’ ability to distinguish North gradually improved, which ‘suggests that orientation in humans is a latent sense, which in some people can be recalled very successfully after multiple challenge’ (Mary Campion, The Journal of Navigation, 44, no. 1 (January 1991).
* Such flares are not uncommon. A few years ago, the electromagnetic energy of a solar storm induced currents in landlines which caused widespread power failures in Canada, blacking out entire cities. Recently, a similar surge of solar radiation was enough to slow several GPS satellites, altering their orbits and hence the accuracy of their information.