Seven-Tenths (32 page)

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.

From time to time, one notices around offshore corals, and sometimes even far out to sea, small insects skating on the water’s surface. Usually they are to be seen in flotillas which mill frantically at the advance of a hand, but lone specimens can be found. They are water striders of the genus
Halobates
(‘salt treader’), the only insects out of roughly a million described species to inhabit the open sea. There are thirty-seven coastal and five oceanic species of
Halobates
, and relatively little is known about their biology. Unlike most intertidal animals they have colonised the sea from the land, and face a seemingly hostile environment. They cannot fly; they cannot dive; and to watch them skimming the surface one would imagine they would be crushed by an eddy, let alone by a wave.

The more one examines them, lying in the water or uncomfortably draped over a boat’s sharp prow, the more one wonders. It is known they eat the debris of smaller insects: midge corpses, and so on. It is known some of them lay their eggs on the blades of sea grasses and coralline algae. The mating behaviour of a couple of species has been studied, as well as their way of avoiding predators.
*
But much remains mysterious, not least how a land insect has found enough in its favour on the sea’s surface to make its home there. If such a living can be made, why is
Halobates
the only known insect to have discovered it? And, infinitesimal speck on a liquid desert that it is, how does it ever find the tiny fresh corpses on which it feeds? What is its relationship with salt, and how does its physiology handle the salt economy? What happens to it in the torrential downpours which smash the sea’s surface into foam and can put a drinkable layer of fresh water on top?

These are the sorts of questions which time and zoology will no doubt answer. In the mean time, one is left with constant surprise at how well forms of life adapt to conditions that seem impossibly harsh or daunting. The dislikeable neologism ‘extremophiles’ has recently been attached to them, though to describe an animal as a lover of extremes is an obvious anthropomorphism. Varieties of life colonise any place or set of conditions that will support them; they do not rate them in terms of human comfort. It was precisely these sorts of argument which helped the ‘azoic’ theory last as long as it did. Since then, of course, there have been abundant discoveries of life forms which have adapted to extreme conditions, including bacteria in active volcanoes; hydrothermal vent communities of crabs, worms and fish living next to ‘black smokers’ on the deep seabed with metabolisms attuned to near-boiling temperatures; lichens and mosses in the Antarctic; desert snails and extraordinary plants like
Welwitschia mirabilis
whose two curling, strap-like leaves winnow so much life out of blazing heat and nightly fogs in the Namib Desert that single plants may live to be over 1,000 years old.

‘Extremophilic’ even seems a not inaccurate way of describing certain members of the genus
Homo
. It is difficult to see a culture like that of the Eskimos or Bedouin as founded on timidity. Where nomads are concerned, it is clear there are certain cultures, as there are individuals, to whom wandering is a necessary part of the economy of living, not merely of survival. Just as people may grow up loving the most nondescript homes and surroundings, so cultures develop which are deeply attached to apparently unpropitious landscapes and conditions. ‘Attached to’ implies both love and dependence, in which it is not possible to distinguish between a living and the place where it is lived. Deserts and oceans, which to an outsider seem to share great similarities in that both appear virtually featureless and both are life-threatening without specialised knowledge, are places which transcend their own conditions to the point where some people consider them spiritual entities. To wring a living – still more a livelihood – out of them requires skill and courage but also love. In this case, a word like ‘extremophilia’ seems, if still graceless, quite appropriate. It is beyond understanding why
governments and their agents should imagine that cultures which have taken millennia to attune themselves to such ways of life might cheerfully renounce them in as little as a generation. The world is dotted with groups of demoralised tribespeople, drunk in shacks and shanties at the margins of the societies that have disinherited them. Exasperated and not always unsympathetic officials complain about the inertia and fecklessness of Aborigines or American Indians, how pathetically they connive at their own degradation. Similar officials throw up their hands over the Bajau, baffled by their lack of interest in education or modern health care. But why would a Bajau wish to become assimilated or strengthen his ties with land when his entire history is based on the knowledge that in the long run life on land means nothing but trouble? The sea is not something he can turn his back on to order. To assume he can, or would want to, betrays the origins of the social science that expects it. Western, and particularly American, society thinks little of moving hundreds of miles to take up a new job; but to equate nomadism with mobility is a gross mistake.

When presenting
Homo
with an environment for living, the ocean strips away inessentials other than skill, knowledge and attention. It is a life which requires its own intensity and exacts its own discipline. Many people who are not tribal nomads by birth live lives as remote from ordinary society as that of the wandering albatross. This bird, electronically tagged, has been recorded as making single flights equivalent to the distance of Australia to Britain before returning to a particular island.
*
(In view of a life spent mostly on the wing it would be too cosy to call this place ‘home’.) Among their many human counterparts would be the seamen who spend three or more years continuously afloat. One sunny afternoon on board
Farnella
I watched crewmen painting the deck around pink-and-white geologists as they sunbathed. Middle-aged men, they swapped a few Hull syllables with each other and painted as carefully as if the ship were a house they had clubbed together and bought with a mortgage. They paid no attention to the scientists, not even
to one wearing a bikini and no top. They gave off an aura of austere contentment, as if they were pleased the
Farnella
was going nowhere while doing so along the most precisely navigated paths. In this way they combined seagoing professionalism with perpetual non-arrival. How trim the ship was! At three in the morning one would come across a man humming to himself, kneeling with a scrubbing brush in a lavatory in a cloud of bleach vapour. Val did not think of himself as one of that sort, however, since he admitted to being at sea just for the money. He had lost his woman and sold his house and now wanted to rebuild his finances.

‘How else would I make £200 a week?’, he wanted to know. ‘But it’s no fun, I can tell you. Be honest, I loathe the sea. Why won’t the bugger keep still? It doesn’t seem to bother them. They’re a funny lot. Some are here because they’ve got broken hearts. Ah, didn’t know
that
, did you? True, though. Some because they’ve got no other home. Really, they’re only happy at sea. Beats me. They dread going back, and that’s true. A couple of days and they don’t know what to do.

‘It’s obvious why they’re here, isn’t it? Course, it’s to avoid responsibility. No mortgage, no insurance, no tax, no car, no electricity bills, no gas bills. Free board and lodging. Those deck hands specially. Been at it since they left school, if ever they went, that is. They don’t know any other life. Very ignorant. Very narrow minds, if you ask my opinion, though I don’t mean that as criticism. The sea’s all they know. They’re mostly terrible people when they’re ashore. They can’t handle it, so they just get pissed. You never see them drunk on board, do you? Bit tiddly, maybe, but never falling-down drunk like they get ashore. No, they must really like the life. I’ve caught one or two of them sometimes, up on deck, just staring at nothing like a normal person’d watch telly. Mesmerised.’

All ocean drifters, ‘salt treaders’, lone yachtsmen, mystics, island-hoppers, wanderers and hermits have a degree of impatience with, and ignorance of, the greater world. A further characteristic of nomads, which many of them share, is an absolute vagueness about geography combined with a precise knowledge of orientation. There is a sense in which no beautifully drawn chart can be made to
coincide at any point with the inner maps they carry with them. The two do not relate to one another. I have met tribespeople deep in the western Egyptian desert who had no remote idea whether they were in Egypt or Libya. Nor, so far as they knew, did they hold any particular citizenship. The distinctions they made were linguistic and tribal, and the elaborate kinship tables each carried in his head amounted to maps. I would not be surprised to learn that some Eskimos are much the same, and while always knowing exactly where they are may not know if others happen to call that place ‘Greenland’, ‘Canada’ or ‘Russia’.

There is something irresistible about this since it affirms the ancient homogeneity of land or ocean, a unity of human experience that transcends temporary political boundaries. As for the seas, those vast tracts, seven-tenths of the planet’s surface, of course they are mysterious and haunting. Time and again they draw people back to them: mad mariners, adventurers, solitaries, very often misfits on land who are transformed once they are afloat. Their keels cut tiny scratches on the face of an abyss of creatures and terrains which mostly will never be seen by human eye. Something satisfactory wells up from this deep and nourishes them.

There are extremophiles everywhere, and the adaptations they make to solitariness or small groups are various and strange. By no means all men forced by a sudden change of weather to spend five months’ isolation in an Antarctic research station turn out to be either raving or overjoyed when the relief team arrives with thunderous bonhomie and promises of an unbroken year’s leave. I was told of one of the last victims of
le bagne
to be released from prison on the Îles du Salut in 1954.
*
He had been there twenty-two years and had benefited from ‘the cucumber solution’ until his fellow convict and lover had died some years previously. The freed man, about to be repatriated to Grenoble, appeared unwilling to leave the island because ‘he did not know how Tecla would manage without him’. Indeed, he begged to remain in Cayenne and to be allowed to go back to his prison island as a caretaker. This was refused. Sadly, he
permitted himself to be dressed in a cheap suit and put aboard a steamer. He took with him a manuscript, ‘very illegible, a poem of many thousands of lines, all written in pencil on different scraps of paper. I saw it myself,
monsieur
. It was a poem to Tecla,
about
Tecla, and for all I know
by
Tecla. And who was Tecla, you ask? Tecla,
monsieur
, was a gull with one leg. His companion of six years, or so he asked us to believe.’

A good example of a highly specialised social group living in extreme circumstances is that of seventeenth-century English pirates in the Caribbean. It was described by a scholar who, in default of extensive documentation (for they were not great diarists) elegantly deduced by a series of negative proofs how their lives had to have been. His thesis is that these buccaneers were practically all homosexual and that their piratical activities were sustained by their sexual relationships, much as the Spartans’ valour was. He cites as determining factors the generally lenient prevailing attitudes to homosexuality in England at the time and the way in which apprentices were drawn or press-ganged extensively from the bands of boy vagrants (‘great flockes of Chyldren’) who roamed the country and whose group identification, for their own protection, was exclusive. Furthermore, the population of the British West Indian islands was then almost entirely male, an imbalance enhanced by transportation. ‘The single certainty is that the only non-solitary sexual activities available to buccaneers for most of the years they spent in the Caribbean and for almost all of the time they were aboard ship were homosexual.’
*
Very few pirates ever married, it seems, and those who did were uniformly unlucky with their women (and vice versa, one would imagine). Blackbeard, William Dampier, Bartholomew Sharp and other pirate captains jealously guarded their favourite boys, while all aboard took advantage of a form of male bonding discreetly named
matelotage
. It is a great pity there is such a dearth of contemporary documents, of poems to Tecla even, although vivid details do emerge. Captain John Avery
was known as Long Ben, ‘not because of his height’. Add to all this the occasional bouts of derring-do and the frequent orgies of drinking when every soul aboard from captain to ten-year-old powder-monkey was stone drunk, and by contrast with the solidarity of outlaw life afloat, the prospect of ‘straight’ life (in both senses) ashore would likely have appeared dreary indeed. It is strange to think that, but for the lack of a few hundred women in the West Indies, piracy might have assumed quite different patterns or even have been suppressed entirely by privateers.

Nomads have a need to wander in a world they understand. Like
Halobates
, many tribes and individuals are very specifically adapted and cannot resist gross change. Take away their habitat, their rovings and solitudes, and they go to pieces. Because of the prevailing cultural pressures in Sulu the Bajau are mainly Islamicised and have become or are becoming Muslim. It is an appropriate religion because Islam contains a statutory requirement for pilgrimage. Perhaps since Islam itself evolved from nomadic cultures it made pilgrimage one of the four chief ritual and moral duties incumbent on all Muslims. In Christianity it is a tradition which has long since faded, except in occasional re-enactments. There is a psychological accuracy in this insistence that a proper life cannot be lived without pilgrimage, a journey, a great excursion and abandoning of town, village, hearth. Only in this way is the unsuspected majesty of the world revealed. Only by travelling in danger and discomfort along arduous forest paths, desert routes and sea lanes may a truth be approached.