by David Eimer
Scattered like green pearls across a 250-mile stretch of the Andaman Sea running south from Myeik to Kawthoung, the Myeik Archipelago is the last untouched island paradise in Southeast Asia. With just a few military bases and a handful of villages in the archipelago, most of the 800-odd islands are uninhabited and undeveloped. Thickly forested limestone formations edged with white sand beaches, they see only fishermen, a few passing yachts and a dwindling number of sea gypsies, the maritime nomads known in Burma as the Salone people.
Until White showed up in Myeik in 1677 the Salone were the pirates in the area, using the remote bays of the islands as hiding places from which they emerged to pounce on small vessels plying the local trade along the Tanintharyi coast. White’s arrival ended the buccaneering days of the sea gypsies, their boats no match for ships armed with cannon and manned by crews with muskets.
Employed by the East India Company as a ship’s pilot, White was sent to Madras initially. The Company was already enforcing its monopoly on trade between India and the Far East and the UK, despite challenges from individual British merchants known as ‘interlopers’. Some of those rogue traders specialised in the commerce between India and Thailand. White joined forces with them and soon received an offer to skipper one of the King of Siam’s ships ferrying elephants, betel nut and tin from Myeik to Madras.
He parlayed that position into a far more lucrative one as the king’s representative in Myeik. In 1683 White was put in charge of all trade out of the port, responsible for arranging the despatch of goods sent from Siam to India and collecting the revenue they generated. Instead of a formal salary, White received a percentage of the profits. Sitting in his Ayutthaya court on the other side of the Tenasserim Hills, Siam’s King Narai might not have realised the potential for corruption, but White did and quickly set about enriching himself.
Making his home on the hill above the harbour and surrounding it with a stockade, White recruited English sea captains and fitted out ships as men-of-war, before sending them out to seize prizes from the kingdoms along the south-east coast of India. White and his minions lurked also in the Myeik islands, many of which White mapped, hijacking ships sailing close to the archipelago and bringing them in to Myeik, where their captains were told they could leave once they had handed over a fee and signed papers saying nothing had been taken from them.
This was simple piracy, even if White did remit some of his ill-gotten gains to Ayutthaya. But he was also robbing King Narai blind, falsifying the figures of the legitimate trade between India and Siam. It was his accountant, a Boston navigator named Davenport captured by White and then put in charge of his financial affairs, who left the only personal record of White from this time. Davenport described him as being suave and cunning, able to switch from moments of gentility to extreme anger in seconds, and noted his fondness for strong drink.
Davenport was more fortunate than the Indian sailors who fell into White’s hands, many of whom ended up as slaves in Myeik. White’s ships began to hold whole towns on the Coromandel Coast ransom, threatening to burn them to the ground unless they paid up. But by now the East India Company was after their former pilot, as ships under their protection fell victim to his pirate crews. The Company petitioned London to send a navy ship out to detain White and bring Myeik under their control.
Typically intractable, White was in no way cowed by the prospect of arrest. ‘Dost thou think I’m to be scar’d with the sight of a king’s flag on a boats bow?’ he raged at his press-ganged accountant Davenport. ‘If ever a king’s captain comes ashore and tells me that I must go to Madras, I’ll be the man that will pistol him upon the place and wipe my arse with his king’s commission.’
Fortunately for White, the Royal Navy arrived just at the time that Myeik’s local population decided to rebel against his despotic rule. The British residents of the town were attacked and the men mostly slaughtered, White’s house went up in flames and he, along with the navy, was forced to flee Myeik. Taking to his ship, Resolution, White convinced the navy captain that he had simply been acting under the orders of the King of Siam and promised to follow his ship to India.
Of course he didn’t. Instead, White made his own leisurely way back to England, his arrival coinciding with the confusion of the Glorious Revolution, in which James II, the last Catholic king of England, was overthrown by the Protestant William of Orange. James had been a keen supporter of the East India Company and its trade monopoly. William was not. Samuel White escaped all punishment, despite returning home with an estimated £5 million in today’s money from his nefarious activities. But he didn’t get to enjoy it. The 39-year-old White died of an unknown fever in April 1689.
Six years later, Henry Every, another West Country boy turned pirate, caused the East India Company more trouble than White ever did by seizing one of the Grand Mughal’s ships as it sailed from India to Mecca for the annual pilgrimage. It remains the largest haul in the history of piracy, worth over £50 million. The Company had to promise to pay compensation to the unimpressed Mughal emperor.
Like White, Every never stood trial for his crime. White would have been jealous of his loot. But White was a much more sophisticated pirate. He was a nautical version of his old boss the East India Company, which was plundering India to line the pockets of its shareholders, with every employee eager to gain a private fortune and get back to England before disease carried them off.
Thailand no longer makes any claims on Burma’s territory, but Myeik continues to rely economically on its neighbour. Much of the catch brought in by the fishing fleets of Myeik and, farther south, Kawthoung goes to Thai kitchens, or ends up in the fish-canning factories staffed by some of the three million migrant workers from Burma thought to be in Thailand. And under a deal made in the junta era which will last until the late 2020s, almost all of Burma’s natural gas stocks in the Andaman Sea are bought by Thailand.
‘You can’t buy a fish in the villages around Myeik,’ I was told at the harbour. ‘You go into a shop and they say they haven’t got any. Then you see a crate and ask them to open it and it is packed full of tuna, barracuda or red snapper on ice. You ask to buy one and they say, “No, it’s already sold to Thailand.” And what fish is left for us is too expensive for many people to buy. Twenty years ago, we used to say, “I can’t eat another tiger prawn.” Now, we can’t afford to buy one. They’re 2,500 kyat [£1.35] each.’
Boat crews were unloading plastic drums and crates that held the previous night’s catch. Groups of women on the quayside were busy gutting the fish. Ice trucks were arriving, and suitcase-sized chunks were being pushed up wooden runways onto the boats preparing to go out again. Some of the vessels were small, no more than large long-tails with a simple awning near the stern for the crew to shelter under. Others were industrial trawlers, with dozens of blue drums for the fish lashed to the top of their superstructure.
That afternoon I took the ferry to Kadan Island, which Samuel White had sometimes used as a hideout. I was keen to see one of the legendary Myeik islands, and Kadan is the only one which has public transport travelling to it. The ferry was crowded with shoppers returning home. Two young women sat next to me, arranged their bags around them and proceeded to take a series of selfies with me without ever saying a word.
Docking at a jetty above which a pagoda loomed, I followed the other passengers to Kyunsu, the main settlement. Kyunsu is built above one of the mangrove swamps that cover much of the island, the houses in the lowest sections on stilts over pools of stagnant water. Signs warned of the risk of malaria and I thought that I wouldn’t want to be here in the rainy season, when the mosquitos double their efforts.
There was no hint of piracy, except for the motorcycle taxi drivers with their special rates for foreigners. Nor were there any of the dreamy white sand beaches untouched by human feet that I had heard so much about. I returned to Myeik, a journey enlivened by the ferry breaking down in sight of the harbour. A coastguard boat came to the rescue. Burmese ladies in
their htamein aren’t the nimblest of people, but they scrambled up the ladder that was lowered for us, bags, umbrellas and all.
It is the islands that lie west and north of Kawthoung, Burma’s far southern point, that are the real jewels of the Myeik Archipelago. They are the most stunning and least visited and also the ones where the remaining Salone, the sea gypsies, mostly roam. But no public boats run to any of those islands and hardly any are populated. Only fishermen and live-aboard yacht tours travel through this part of the archipelago, catering to a few thousand well-heeled foreign tourists a year. I set out to hitch a lift on one of them.
Fortune was kind and I made my way south to Kawthoung. Almost directly opposite the Thai town of Ranong, where the local fishermen unload all their catch, Kawthoung is an undistinguished transit point for migrant workers heading to Thailand. The harbour was crowded with the long-tails that run people to and from Ranong. A market, one street back from the waterside, offered Thai goods and alcohol at duty-free prices for the shoppers who come across from Thailand on day trips.
Waiting at the harbour was my ride, Sea Gypsy, a sturdy wooden vessel in yellow and green, its two-storey design reminiscent of a Chinese junk. There were no sails on its single mast; an engine would keep us moving. The crew were a mix of Bamar and Karen, the passengers mostly middle-aged Europeans combining a holiday in Thailand with four days of island-hopping in Burma. I boarded to be told that I would be sleeping on the deck in front of the wheelhouse, where the impassive skipper, eyes hidden behind sunglasses, steered the ship.
We departed Kawthoung in the early afternoon, heading north-west at eight knots across a flat sea the colour of royal blue. The cook strung a fishing line off the back of the boat, hoping for a bite from mackerel. An hour out of port, mobile phone signals disappeared and lumpy outcrops of limestone began to rise abruptly out of the water. The islands were small, some no more than islets, green forest erupting out of them, leaving room only for slender beaches of smooth sand, the sea off them turning turquoise over the coral reefs.
By the colonial era the pirates had been driven out of the Myeik Archipelago and some of the islands and the channels between them began to gain names, often those of the mariners who first identified them. But the archipelago remained largely unknown even after Burma’s independence, with foreigners prevented from travelling here and only a scattering of permanent settlements.
Even now a permit is required to visit and the southern islands feel particularly remote, despite the most distant being only sixty miles off the coast. Many of the smaller islands don’t have names, just numbers to identify them on the charts. The archipelago’s obscurity is why the villain in the James Bond movie Thunderball chooses it as the place where his $100-million ransom of diamonds is to be deposited. Captain W. E. Johns, the creator of the flying policeman Biggles, a British schoolboy staple from the 1930s to 1960s, set a number of stories in the islands, too.
As we sailed on, the boat’s motion barely perceptible, sea kites and eagles with bulbous bodies, broad wings and curved beaks soared overhead searching for their next meal. Occasional fishing boats were our only other company, passing either side of us or anchored off beaches which led to freshwater springs. We were never far from an island. They lay in wait ahead, or faded to indistinct shadows behind our stern, sometimes alone in the sea but more often two or three of them clustered close together.
Before dusk we moored a couple of hundred metres from a beach to catch the breeze that disappears closer to shore. A skinny ellipse of a new moon appeared after dinner. Beyond it the stars congregated in bright constellations. Arching over the island was a faint layer of green light indicating the presence of squid boats on the other side, their halogens mixing with the black of night. The new moon brings the fishing fleet out in force. A full moon is too bright, keeping the fish away and the boats in Kawthoung.
Late at night the breeze grew stronger, rustling the awning above the deck and rousing me from shallow sleep. A rope creaked as Sea Gypsy swung on its anchor and turned into the wind. They were sounds I would barely have heard on land, but which are as loud as a breaking window in such a hushed place. The green glow of the fishing boats was the only hint of human life around us. I understood why these islands were so attractive to Samuel White and his fellow pirates, slipping from bay to bay, readying themselves to take another ship, or for a raid on the Indian coast.
Awake by first light, I saw we had company. A couple of hundred metres away was a kabang, the traditional Salone boat, a ten-metre-long wooden vessel with a thatched roof covering the rear. For the sea gypsies, the kabang is the ‘mother boat’, their floating home, behind which smaller dugout canoes are towed and used for fishing. Two of the canoes were setting out, each crewed by a lone woman, a small boy in the bow of one, standing up and leaning on the oars to propel the craft forward.
Both kabang boats and the Salone are an increasingly rare sight. There are thought to be no more than 3,000 of these waterborne itinerants left in the Andaman Sea, found either in the Myeik Archipelago or, in smaller numbers, the Thai islands around Phuket, where they are known as the Chow Lair. As recently as ten years ago there were 8,000 of them, moving from island to island, fishing for squid, sea slugs, sea urchins and pearls, their children able to swim before they could walk, living on land only in the monsoon season.
Now the Salone struggle to survive by fishing. Their spears and hand-thrown nets can’t compete with the trawlers that drag the seabed sweeping in the fish, while there are fewer Salone men these days. Seafaring is a dangerous enough existence – and there are no hospitals in the islands – but with more vessels coming to the area the Salone have taken to dynamite fishing to increase their catch. Many have perished while doing so. Others have fallen victim to drugs and alcohol.
Traditionally a toke, a patron, provided the Salone with all their needs – rice, clothes and other essential goods – in exchange for their squid, shells and pearls. But Maurice Collis noted in the 1930s how the Salone were often part paid in opium. Today, activists working with the Salone claim that as many as 40 per cent of the surviving men use either heroin or methamphetamines. There is no lack of narcotics in the region. Some of the fishing boats passing through the archipelago are also smuggling methamphetamine pills to Thailand.
Originally, the Salone lived far from Burma. They are an Austronesian people, perhaps from Taiwan, who migrated east and south to the Pacific and west to the Malay Peninsula, arriving in the Myeik Archipelago around 500 years ago. These days they are far less nomadic with many living in villages and no longer maintaining kabang boats, fishing instead close to the shore in their dugout canoes. And with the shortage of Salone men, the women are increasingly marrying the Bamar who have settled on a few of the islands.
A day later we dropped anchor in the north-west bay of Jar Lann. Home to a rare pagoda in the archipelago, manned by just two monks, and a small Tatmadaw base, Jar Lann is one of the bigger islands and now has a permanent settlement of about two hundred people, a mix of Salone and migrants from the mainland. It was squalid in the sunshine, a line of mostly one-room shacks on stilts along the shore, discarded plastic bags, packaging, cans and bottles floating in the water underneath them.
Shelves of alcohol were prominent at the village’s best-stocked shop, where I found 21-year-old Cham Myae, a slim, pretty girl, her long hair reaching almost to her waist. Her parents moved from Myeik ten years ago. ‘It’s better business here. We get a lot of fishing boats stopping to make repairs and they stay a while,’ she said. But Cham Myae didn’t like island life. ‘It’s boring. There’s nothing to do except play computer games at night.’
Nor are there any potential suitors. ‘It’s hard to find a husband here. It’s only Salone men and fishermen and they are not handsome,’ she told me with a giggle. ‘But I prefer the Salone to the Burmese here. They are natural and simple people and quite polite.’ Did she socialise with them? ‘Sometimes I hang out with the Salone women, the ones wh
o speak some Burmese. We go swimming, although I can’t really swim. And we celebrate festivals together.’
Separated by their different languages – the Salone speak an Austronesian tongue known as Moken which has a number of different dialects – hardly any of the Salone children go to the primary school in the village. ‘The school teaches in Burmese,’ said Cham Myae. ‘But the children of the Salone who marry Bamar people learn to speak Burmese and they go to the school. When they’re older, some go to school on the mainland like I did.’
Intermarriage is why the number of Salone is dropping so fast, and the reason why they will probably be assimilated with the Bamar in another generation or two. At a house in the village I found five Salone women, a grandmother and her sister, two daughters and a granddaughter with her baby son. Three of them were widows, their husbands dead from either fishing accidents or drugs, and one had split from her partner.
All but the baby boy, who was suffering from a disability, his eyes vacant, mouth stuck open and dribbling constantly, were born at sea on kabang boats. None of them had been to school or knew how old they were. The one woman still married had a Bamar husband. ‘That’s why I can speak some Burmese. But I can’t read or write,’ she told me. We sat in a circle on the porch of the house, the ladies dipping frequently into a small bucket holding betel nut. They all reached for cigarettes when I offered them.
Up close, their Austronesian ethnicity was apparent. They were darker than the Bamar, their noses broader, with thick and wiry hair. Their teeth were stained and their htamein were worn and filthy. The house, which they shared, the married woman apart, lacked furniture. A cooking pot, fishing gear and a few clothes hung on nails driven into the walls were their only visible possessions.
Their friend Ta Aye joined us with one of her kids. Married to a Bamar fisherman, she didn’t know her age either. Ta Aye looked forty-something, but I knew she was probably ten years younger. Like her friends, she spends her days fishing. ‘Sometimes we fish all day or all night and maybe catch one or two squid,’ said Ta Aye. ‘There are many more fishing boats now and every year there are less fish.’
