Seven-Tenths (33 page)

What is it that a Bajau sees? In one sense, more than any oceanographer; in another, less. In that his vision is peculiar to his living conditions, it constructs a set of knowledge about the sea and the world which in the long run must be doomed, although it could be partly resurrected by anyone taking up that life. Much of this vision derives from a literal and daily view of what goes on under the sea. It is informed by the two major characteristics of the tropical waters he inhabits: clarity and phosphorescence. By day, the water’s transparence declares its emptiness; at night it is filled with blazes of
cold fire. This powerfully strikes even those who can talk about phytoplankton.

In the coastal towns and settlements of Sulu the outermost stilt huts of Samal and Bajau may stand 100 yards offshore, extending landwards in a dense maze of duckboards and walkways and pilings. Having landed on the rickety wharf it is often impossible to determine exactly where the shoreline is. Gradually the gangplanks between hut and hut sink lower and turn into paths made of embedded lumps of coral the size of babies’ heads, damp causeways below floor level with the glint of water on either side. One can often suppose oneself well ashore and then glimpse sumplike pools beneath the huts littered with a floating debris of rotten thatch, splinters of bamboo, boatbuilders’ wood shavings, plastic bags, bobbles of excrement, a dead kitten. One would expect these pools to be foetid, miasmic, black. Anywhere else they would be. Yet a muddy bottom is generally visible, often startlingly clear between the bits of flotsam. Perhaps this is simply because the daily tidal creep is just enough to prevent the water stagnating, although any rise and fall is imperceptible.

Rather, it is as though the seawater here contained a particular natural ingredient,
transparency
, which is proof against the cloudy, the dank and the foul. One imagines the water so vibrant that everything in it is strongly polarised. Things are either abundantly alive or else they are whitened bone and shell. There is hardly time for any intermediate stage of decay and it darkens the water not at all. Away from the huts, out over the reefs and shoals, the water is a huge lens focusing light and embalming everything in purest blue glass.

We would say this extreme clarity actually testified to a deficit not of impurities but of nutrients in the waters of the tropics. These seas are relatively stable compared with the colder, stormier oceans. Hence in their euphotic zone the nutrients tend to sink straight down, and photosynthesis is correspondingly slower. The deep blue of tropic water is the sea’s equivalent to the ochre colour of deserts and, likewise, signifies an absence. It is hard to believe that cold grey northern seas should be more
nourishing than pellucid tropical oceans with their teeming reef life; yet it is so.

After dark, however, these apparently thin waters are rich with the lights they contain. One moonless night, I watched some Bajau, scared of lighting a lantern for fear of attracting attention, dive in total darkness for a lost saucepan. The pot had sunk in shallow water, only two or three fathoms, but it still appeared a hopeless task.

I have never seen phosphorescence as bright as on that night. Leaning over the edge of the
bangka
I could follow every move of the searchers below. Only, the whirligigs of sparks, the flashings and showers of cold fire were at depths which could not be determined. Just as the glints and refractions in the best opals can appear deeper than the thickness of the stone itself or else closer than its surface, so the divers’ movements excited discharges of light which were either a few feet away or in a universe beyond. It was vertiginous to gaze down because the view was more what one normally expected to see overhead. On nights as dark as that, it is anyway hard to define the horizon, to separate black sky from black sea. Now it was as if the cosmological figures of Sagittarius and Orion had come to life in a firmament beneath the boat. Legendary men outlined in stars swam among clouds of dark matter, galaxies and nebulae swirled in the eddies of their passing. In that moment, I could have glimpsed a figure of the Bajau’s own believing, the
sama sellang
or ocean gypsy who lives in the depths and sometimes leaves his kingdom at night to walk the beaches, a black and shining giant 12 feet tall. He is King of the Fishes, and any Bajau wanting to fish in his domain should have the courtesy and sense to ask his permission first or risk having his boat turn turtle without warning. It was while I was leaning over and watching that one of the outriggers inexplicably sheared off, tipping the
bangka
over and myself into the sea in a sheet of flame. In only a minute or two the Bajau had found their pot on the seabed by the light of their own hands. They emerged with it, laughing, and we all hauled ourselves from the ocean running with greenish fire.

Such are the nights when it is hard for a swimmer to resist heading downwards, trailing constellations in a fading dust, and simply go on swimming into the fathomless, sparkling spaces below. It does not feel suicidal in intention, nor like an attack of calenture.
*
Rather, it is more akin to something which might also have played a part in the Bajau’s ancient renunciation of land: a momentary expression of yearning for oceanic roots.

It is one of those days when everything we do feels final. The sea is stained with cloud and veined white with its own collapse. It is as if we were having to bid farewell to an entire set of knowledge, to a lifetime’s habits. Nothing will come in their place, not epiphany, not even a proper death. Nomads, too, keep track of the seasons, the stately heeling of the stars. So an anxious internal creature (oh modern man!) is forever flicking over its left wrist in a gesture unknown before the invention of the wristwatch. This brisk flip of the knuckles encodes a world of power and – by implication – of powerlessness before a constant anxiety. No doubt there was once an equivalent gesture for a man of the world, perhaps a particular straying of the right hand as towards a sword’s pommel, half unconscious, the weapon (no more than an article of dress) forever undrawn, just as the time remains unmemorised, somewhere between a fossil gesture and a social tic.

One need not wear a watch to feel an imaginary arm bend and a wrist turn. We glance at the sun. Even that looks final, seen through the haunted lens of unease. Something is coming. Something is on its way to break things up. We are vaguely prepared for it, unable to settle to anything, as on the day before a journey, knowing it is out of our hands. When it finally arrives it will happen to us, willy-nilly. On a day like this, look up at the sun and the clouds. Look at the sea. It is all written there.

Meanwhile, what of the swimmer who lost his boat at the beginning of this book and was left all alone with his panic in the middle of the ocean? That he is here to write the question means the sharks did not get him. Nor pirates, nor fishermen. The engine he heard was another figment. After a long, long time his sight cleared or light rays unkinked and there, no more than 80 yards away, sat the boat.
It was solid and unmistakable. It had the air of never having moved, of being practically nailed to the sea, while the swimmer immediately felt his limbs achingly heavy as though he had been on a long and wilful excursion and had returned to his senses in the nick of time.

More mysterious still, regaining the boat was like putting on a pair of spectacles, for the low palm-fringed coast became visible exactly where it ought to have been. Ever since that day the swimmer has been unable to account for what happened other than by using a cryptic phrase such as that he fell out of one gaze and into another. He had made the visible a little too hard to see, even though his life depended on it.

Later, he decided the sensation had been less of being lost in the sea, or lost to the sea, than of the sea’s
being lost to him
. He was surrounded by water which could have engulfed him; yet at the same time it was a sea which had receded in a way not immediately obvious, taking with it whatever was essential – knowledge, perhaps – for survival. For a long moment there was a boundary fixed around him, an exclusive zone of taint, while perhaps monsters did swim up unseen from the deep, sadly, to stare at a pair of tiny white limbs cycling high in their skies on the very edge of space. Even had they eaten him, the time of their dominion was past. Eventually the legs vanished and the swimmer made off, leaving silvery paddle pocks like fading footprints. The long subsequent journey, of thinking about the sea and the oceans, showed him he was treating them as something which had already been lost.

The gaze of the nineteenth-century explorers and oceanographers was emphatically not the same as our own. They still saw through the eyes of mariners, wary and respectful, as well as with the awed curiosity of intellectual men to whom the ocean was a vast leftover from Creation, a divine challenge which could be met only with the right degree of humility, bravery and methodical amassing of facts. Raw nature was often fearsome. Wild animals were mostly a menace, and even if killing them was not strictly necessary for survival, their deaths spoke of a proper relationship between man and nature, sanctioned by Scripture. ‘It will not be denied, we presume, that
animals were created for the use of mankind.’
*
In this clear light, landscapes, too, were a threat. Many mountains were first climbed in the nineteenth century as much to tame them as anything else. Nearly impenetrable areas of Africa were explored and named and dragged on to the map, into the domain of ‘civilised’ man (the native gaze of those already living there, and especially the nomadic gaze, did not count). Such was a colonist’s view with acquisition on his mind. As for regions like the Antarctic, ‘Great God,’ exclaimed Scott, ‘this is an awful place.’

But now, and mostly within the space of the past few decades, this view has vanished, and modern eyes see an utterly different, less awesome, world. Apart from the fact that nothing a modern oceanographer could discover in the ocean would be likely to precipitate a spiritual crisis and that technology has made ‘mariners’ in the old sense obsolete while removing a good deal of science from the domain of humility and bravery and dumping it instead into the frankly humdrum – apart from all this, we can now only ever look at the natural world with the anxiety of conservationists. It is all falling away, becoming lost to us. No longer are the wilds and unoccupied spaces of Earth things to be tackled and subjugated. Rather, they are to be cherished and protected because on them depends our survival. The view through our sunglasses and snow goggles and diving masks is suddenly of last things. The midnight chorus of a reef filling our ears as we clutch in darkness 20 feet down is the voice of the sea rehearsing its own eschatology.

Conrad dated the beginning of the end of the old sea from the building of the Suez Canal, completed in 1869.

That was first published in 1896, and its jeremiad tone is similar to many other laments over industrialisation. Over a century later, only vestiges remain of the sea Conrad described, let alone of the one he mourned.

Yet even this is not quite the reason for the swimmer’s conviction that the sea was lost to him. The oceans have long been, and will long be, subjected to ruthless exploitation and even, in places, to ruin. It is not really the sea which is in recession, though, but wildness itself. Wildness is everywhere but it can no longer be seen; and its apparent vanishing is a direct consequence of the new conservationism. ‘The Wild’ is nowadays a concept ringing with the overtones of patronage, of collections by schoolchildren on its behalf. The present generation is as much contaminated by its own reverential and placatory attitude as the older was by domination. There is something ignoble about it, compounded as it is of urban sentimentalism, virtuous concern and sheer panic at having irrevocably fouled the nest while so comfortably lining it. Above all, the self-interest shows through. Luckily, there is a chasm properly and forever fixed between the non-human and the humanist biospheres, between wildness and
caring
. It is seldom visible to modern eyes. Virtue and the wild share no common universe.
*

If the sea always was a rich source of melancholy, there is in any case a new melancholy to go with the new view. Conservation is only
ever a rearguard action, fought from a position of loss. It is ultimately unwinnable, and not least because there are few recorded victories over population increase, as over the grander strategies of genetic behaviour such as the laws of demand, political expediency, sheer truancy and refusal to relinquish a standard of living once it has been attained. There can only be stalemates, holding actions and truces uneasily policed. A few affecting species will be saved, a few million hectares of forest, a few tribes of Indians; but the world will never return to how it was when this sentence was written, still less to how it was when reader and writer were born. This has always been true and will continue to be so. The mistake is to extend this sequence backwards in time and imagine it leads to a lost paradise. It is a safe bet that as soon as the earliest protohominid could think, it invented a legend to account for its sense of loss.

But the
swimmer
…

The hypocrite swimmer has himself lost all interest in these arguments. He is intently reaching the shore in his little boat, paddling carefully among familiar corals, following the narrow channel in towards the beach. He has already forgotten his panic and is merely tired as from a long journey. Cool in the bilges lie half a dozen mackerel: two for supper, two to smoke for tomorrow and two to give away. He looks up as the prow grinds into the sand. There in the palms’ ragged shade is his lopsided hut, there the tangle of thorn shrubs concealing a mahogany-coloured brackish lagoon, in the distance the spit of mangroves walking on water. He sees it all not through the eyes of an oceanographer, still less of a conservationist. Only in a nomad’s or a wanderer’s gaze is the sea not lost to him, nor any less wild. So affectionately does the scene bound towards him and leap into his eye that he knows this private way of looking reveals a landscape he must have inherited, or which was somehow fixed for him as a child, before he ever saw it for the first time.