Seven-Tenths (30 page)

In its way this is a classic threnody, indulgently melancholic even to the furtive pleasure of ‘No one will see … what I saw'. It also sets out the biblical coordinates of a mode which survives to this day as a shadow between the earnestly secular lines of much conservationist rhetoric: ‘the Garden of Eden', ‘paradise', ‘vision', ‘profaned' and, of course, the Father. This is touching in its confusion between the child who could not always distinguish his father from God, and the adult writing a devastating biography who could see the difference all too clearly. Both personae are there in this passage, unconsciously revealed by Gosse the son in two scientifically conflicting phrases: ‘undisturbed since the creation of the world' and ‘centuries of natural selection'. The first represents his father's firm belief (he was a devout creationist) while the second is entirely his own, convinced Darwinian that he is. This identification of his father with the Creator, and the
ur
-landscape of his childhood in Devonshire with Eden, maybe gives an additional clue as to why we can feel so devastated by the disappearance of the place where we grew up. Landscape blurs easily into the parental.

This mourning for landscape, this apprehension of death without a proper body to grieve over, is one of our modern era's cruellest legacies. It has often been recorded but seems to have gone largely unremarked as a likely cause of common forms of despair and depression. For lack of any medically plausible origin these are presumably attributed to the usual domestic disorders, disappointments and jiltings; whereas in reality the sorrow may be far grander, more pervasive and unsolaced, its cause misunderstood by both sufferer and doctor.

It is said that the British reading public's nostalgia for the imagined certitudes of Victorian and Edwardian England accounts for the popularity of rural diaries and reminiscences. This may be so; but it is quite as likely that the nostalgia is as much for a lost landscape as for any vanished social order.
*

Frozen parrotfish imported from the Caribbean are for sale in south London fishmongers. The
Scaridae
are specifically reef fish: the beak-like fusing of the front teeth which gives them their popular name has evolved so that they can browse on corals. The parrotfish does indeed damage corals, just as a blackbird damages worms. What counts is the balance of such activities, especially in an ecosystem as delicate as that of a tropical reef. Pulling parrotfish out of reefs in quantities sufficient to supply an export industry cannot but have an unbalancing effect. Through a complex chain of relationships, the reef will inevitably suffer from their absence, as it certainly will from the methods used to catch them.

This is doubly exceptionable since the members of this family make indifferent eating except at the moment they are caught. Then the otherwise uninteresting meat is delicious raw, marinaded for fifteen minutes in lime juice, oil, tiny native onions and black pepper. Frozen into woody curves in a bin in a Peckham fishmonger’s, a parrotfish merely pretends to the exotic, its blunted colours ghosts of what they were. Who knows whether their corpses are there to satisfy the nostalgia of an immigrant population or the local consumer’s fickle desire for novelty. Either way, a reef off Barbados or Jamaica is now undergoing a change which will most likely be permanent.

The ocean’s emptiness appals the swimmer, but only because it can supply
nothing for his own survival. He cannot entertain flabby polemic about dolphins. His is the mind of a man lost in the sea. Yet even as he struggles to save himself he is hollowed out by despair.
What is it that he is saving?
The thought corrodes his every intention. In this wide salt
world which he treads he is nothing, has nothing but a face mask and a pair of trunks. Until one loses everything it is never clear what it was one had. Now, in a bleak inner glimpse, he finds he has dissolved. The landscape of his own past, his private history, seems to have vanished, leaving only a sense of attrition. As he glances down through the water his body dwindles whitely like a distant peg and sheds a small discoloured puff of urine which briefly unravels itself in thready convections like those of lime juice being diluted. Nothing but ocean. His entire body is dissolving, too. He only ever existed as three-tenths and that fraction is melting into water.

However, this 30 per cent contains an animal which does not want to die. A passive animal, maybe, but still perversely convinced that help will turn up as if by more than mere chance. Sooner or later someone surely has to pass within hailing distance of the psychic beacon he must have become, broadcasting his distress signal on all frequencies. He squints at the sun. Now that he no longer wants it to be stuck vertically at noon it seems reluctant to move at all. Night with its hope of fishermen is still many hours away.

The swimmer tells himself he need not bank only on them. He has been overlooking all the other sorts of boat which continually cross these waters. Besides tattered inter-island launches, there are all the craft which used to fetch up on ‘Tiwarik’: friendly gunrunners, wanderers from the south with their faces wrapped against the sun, poverty-stricken vagabonds neither peaceable nor violent but chance-takers of
 
more or less competence. Any of them might spot him from miles away with a vulture’s quick eye for a weakening beast. He tries to imagine into being a huge arch of cloud letters in the sky:
REWARD
!, and underneath a gigantic arrow pointing straight down whose tip balances on his sunburned head. It is a message aimed impartially at any of the seagoing mavericks who still inhabit this last corner of the ocean.

So hard does he will it that he soon thinks he hears, above the infuriatingly loud slop of wavelets, the faintest putter of an engine.

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.