Ring of Fire

by Lawrence Blair; Lorne Blaire

  They have fallen much from their early splendour, and are today really just roving gypsies of the Eastern seas, though they ply their various trades in the only true ‘tall ships’ still sailing for a living – for even the giant dhows of the Arabian Gulf are now powered by Perkins, Mitsubishi and Rolls-Royce engines. The Bugis’ prahus are a magnificent hybrid between the original island boats and the 17th century Portuguese spice-trading galleons. When Wallace embarked in one of these in his search for the Greater Bird of Paradise, he described it as far preferable to travelling in a first-class steamer of the time:

  ‘…how comparatively sweet was everything on board... no paint, no tar, no new rope (vilest of smells to the squeamish), no grease or oil or varnish; but instead of these, bamboo and rattan and choir rope and palm thatch: pure vegetable fibres, which smell pleasantly, if they smell at all, and recall quiet scenes in the green and shady forest.’ 10

  It was in these and these alone that we were determined to reach our goal, for not only was our finance conditional on such a journey, but also it might be the last opportunity for anyone to make this historic voyage before the Bugis’ prahu were gone for ever.

  We returned to Makassar from the Toraja highlands with dangerously diminished funds, realizing that we had been in Celebes for two months and that the chances of finding a prahu which could carry us the nearly two thousand miles to the Aru Islands were remote. We had failed to locate a single prahu master, or nakoda, who had been anywhere near them, or had the slightest interest in doing so, and it was now so late in the west monsoon that there only remained another six weeks before we would no longer be able to depart without risking the winds dying and starting to reverse themselves before we had reached our destination.

  From our base in our waterfront digs, we spent many harrowing weeks combing Makassar’s harbour, interrogating the scowling seamen of every arriving prahu, and exploring the coastal villages with Abu. Here we saw our first knife-fight which was clearly to the death, and Abu hustled us away from the milling throng which surrounded the two furious young combatants who rolled around like snakes in the dust attempting to stab each other with their badiks, the seaman’s dagger which few of the locals went without.

  It was during these anxious weeks of searching that Halim, our grave-robbing friend, took us to another of his Ming-porcelain burial grounds, located several hours from Makassar and about half an hour’s march from the nearest hamlet. On our way back to the main road, at the end of the day we persuaded the reluctant Halim to investigate with us the loud festivities issuing from an isolated group of stilt houses. It was to be our first encounter with the Bisu, a bizarre peripatetic sect of transvestite and largely hermaphrodite Bugis priests who, it later transpired, were performing the traditional trance rite to accompany rice-planting. Immediately we could sense a rough and rather unpleasant atmosphere, but we allowed ourselves to be swept up the steps of the first house into a howling throng of excitable spectators. In their midst about eight Bisu, ranging from 14 to 60 years old, were ‘performing’. They were drenched in cheap perfume, and draped with gaudy women’s clothing and costume jewellery mixed with talismans and ritual power objects.

  ‘Let’s get out of here,’ Halim hissed at us. ‘This can get nasty.’

  I was prepared to second that, but Lorne was overcome with delight at finding a sect which had officially long since died out.

  Though shoved and pinched and taunted unmercifully by the spectators, the Bisu quietly drummed themselves into a glassy-eyed state, drew their kerises from their sarongs, and proceeded to whirl furiously about the room while trying to twist the blades into their own throats and stomachs. There were certain crescendos when a particularly macho spectator would sweep a Bisu off his feet and kiss him furiously before roughly throwing him back into the circle again. It was an alarming and not very attractive event in which the Bisu were treated more like circus whores than like priests, yet retained a touchingly self-possessed dignity, despite the ragging they received from their ‘flock’ and the abuse to which they subjected themselves with their own blades. We questioned the elder of the group – a soft-faced grandmother of a man with wise and watery eyes – who explained:

  ‘These people, our people, don’t know who we are any more. They treat us worse than their women. Our job has always been to stand just between heaven and earth – to be neither pain nor joy, man nor woman, but to stand beyond the dualities which rule this world. We can remain sensitive to the voices of spirits, and can dream of events to come, though few people listen to us now.’

  The adolescent Bisu were coming out of trance, and now sat bruised and perspiring together, simpering and repairing each other’s damaged make-up.

  ‘How do you become a Bisu?’ I asked. ‘I thought it was illegal now.’

  ‘Illegal? Ha! You don’t become a Bisu,’ the elder said. ‘You’re born one, and you usually realize it very soon. You dream and feel things like a girl as well as like a boy, and you desire to dress and behave like both. It is then that you find and join the Bisu to learn the old ways of magic. Sometimes you make a mistake, and you are not a Bisu at all, but simply what they’ – he gestured resignedly at the howling spectators – ‘call us all anyway, just “lady boys”!’

  He looked away, embarrassed. ‘At least,’ he finished quietly, ‘if you simply have a woman’s soul, but are not potentially a priest, you can still find a place of peace and acceptance amongst us, away from the community.’

  Peace was hardly the reigning atmosphere when Halim and I managed to haul Lorne and his equipment out of there. Chaos was prevailing, in which part of the ritual was to douse everyone who emerged from the Bisu’s hut with buckets of water. We were particularly tempting targets and, bombarded with jeers and gallons of water, we finally fled the hamlet clutching our sopping equipment to our bosoms like hysterical mothers – little comforted by the thought that these were the spiritual mediators of the people we intended to sail with over the months ahead.

  During our daily rounds at the harbour front contacting the nakodas, we had met a young, strongly built Chinese man supervising the loading of cargo for Java. Next to Werner, Tan Hans Yong was to become one of our greatest friends and benefactors. He shared with us a singular fascination for tropical waters and everything in them, and had acquired the franchise for scuba equipment for the whole of the Moluccas.

  In his spotless home, amongst his large and benevolent family, we were fed enormous meals, shown their exotic collection of shells and sponges, and pumped for all we knew about the outside world. The Tans were international traders, in partnership with family members based in Dobu in the Aru Islands, of mother-of-pearl shell and tripang – the highly priced sea-slugs which are such a delicacy for the Chinese. Yong and his father were the first people we had met who had actually been to Aru. Getting there by the orthodox method of a succession of highly unreliable inter-island launches was a sufficiently bad experience, they claimed, let alone making the journey with the Bugis.

  ‘Tell you what,’ said Yong in his excellent eager English. ‘If you can’t find a prahu in the next few weeks, we’ll tell you how to set about getting there the “modern” way via the inter-island ferry launches. It may not take you via many of the islands which Wallace visited, but at least you’ll arrive. And we’ll have lots of letters and little presents for you to take our family if you do decide to go!’

  It was a week later, and feeling increasingly more desperate, that at the suggestion of Werner Meyer we visited the isolated hamlets of Bira and its neighbour Kasuso, on the south-eastern tip of the peninsula. These proved to be the isolated buccaneer haunts we were looking for, and the hidden source of most of the nation’s sailing prahu and their mariners. It was a good seven-hour jeep-lurch, even with Abu at the wheel, and for the last two hours we drove over a tire-tearing track down a parched spit of land. We finally emerged on smiling white beaches, fringed with palms and the largest fleet of prahu we had ever seen. They hung at anchor,
suspended over brilliant reefs, or lined the strand side by side, in preparation for departure.

  Malaria was hyper-endemic by the beach, so the village had been built on the cliffs above it, near the fresh water springs. A few brightly coloured pony-drawn traps, on twisted bicycle-wheels, meandered down the white-sand streets. The houses were meticulously painted and rose on ten-foot stilts above the ground. Their roofs were decorated with exotic pre-Islamic symbols of dragons and flying creatures, and even included wooden aeroplanes with wind-driven propellers. This was ‘Bugisville’ all right, and our arrival was accompanied by the usual howling horde of kids and adults who jostled us up the steps to the house of the Bupati, the government-appointed chief, where we had arrived to pay our respects.

  ‘Get the hell out of here, you miserable wretches!’ came a loud shout from inside. ‘Be gone. Scram. Remove your horrible faces from my property immediately!’

  It was a tall, thin, almost clownlike man with large destroyed teeth in a long mobile face who was the unlikely source of so commanding a voice; and it was a relief to find that it was directed not at us, but at our surrounding mob.

  ‘Ha. Ha!’ he exclaimed on seeing us. ‘Englishmen! Ibu! Come and have a look at this, will you?’

  Although he was the Keraing, the local hereditary chieftain, the government title of Bupati actually belonged to his wife, who was the first woman in Celebes to hold the position. A broad and kindly lady of noble birth, Ibu (meaning ‘mother’), as she was simply called, indulged her husband’s eccentricities, constantly tidied up after him and clearly ruled the household and the village.

  ‘Perhaps they’re not Englishmen,’ she said; then, shaking us warmly by the hand: ‘Please, don’t be offended if you’re not.’

  The Keraing was a humorous, somewhat foppish extrovert, in complete contrast to Ibu, who stayed mainly in the background, signed the papers that mattered, and was acutely observant of everything that went on around her. But they got on famously together – and were to become our stalwart allies in a maelstrom of conflicting vendettas which were to unfold around us.

  This seemed a far more promising environment, and we quickly accepted the couple’s invitation to abandon our base in Makassar and move in with them in Bira, since it would clearly take many more weeks of negotiating before we could be sure of coming up with a prahu, and a crew, reliable enough to carry us eastwards.

  That night, with our generator and four lightbulbs, we illuminated the Keraing’s house and electrified the village for the first time in the 30-odd years since the invading Japanese had withdrawn from Indonesia. As we sat down to the first of many repetitive meals of salted fish and ground corn, I broached the question of finding a prahu which might carry us as far as Aru.

  ‘I own four prahu,’ the Keraing stated by way of an answer.

  ‘Three prahu!’ his wife corrected him.

  ‘Oh, yes, one of them sank. Well, I still own it, don’t I, even if it is underwater off Java somewhere? Anyway,’ he continued, ‘two of them are in Borneo – and where’s Sinar Surya?’ he asked the general assembly of eavesdropping elders in the corner. They shrugged at each other.

  ‘Laid up on the beach,’ Ibu answered from behind. ‘It will need a lot of work – beginning with a new mainmast!’

  ‘If you can find someone who needs to send cargo to the Aru Islands,’ the Keraing announced, ‘then we can get the boat and a crew ready for you in a month, which is the last possible time for heading eastwards!’

  Since there was no question of us being able to invest in a cargo ourselves, let alone afford to charter the empty vessel, our only solution lay in returning to Makassar and attempting to persuade our Chinese friends to raise the merchandise themselves and to send us along as its stewards and guardians. Yong’s father was appalled at the idea, but was finally persuaded to invest in 50 tons of raw salt, to be used in the curing of the venison which abounded in the Eastern islands, as well as several hundred plastic chairs, and a quantity of spare diving equipment for the pearl-shellers who worked for the Aru branch of the Tan family.

  We were ecstatic as we returned to Bira with the good news, but a closer look at the grounded Sinar Surya and the motley bunch with whom we might sail made it clear that our troubles were far from over. There was still an immense amount of work to do on the boat, not the least of which, it seemed to us, was replacing her rotting mainmast. The Keraing, however, had put the wheels in motion, and while Sinar Surya was being prepared for the sea, and the pirates were still arguing about where she might go, and with whom, Lorne and I spent the following weeks suppressing our impatience by exploring our surroundings.

  In the coconut groves by the beach scores of men were building prahu from scratch, some over 150 feet long. Their only tools from the outside world were the parang, the broad-bladed machete of the East, and a hand-drill resembling an oversized corkscrew, with which they could make all the other tools they required to produce these spectacular Noah’s Arks.

  Prahu-building is ruled by ancient deities, mediated by specialized shamans who choose the timbers by ‘calling’ to the trees and cutting only those which ‘reply’. The boats thus grew from no clear design – but emerged organically, with asymmetrical spars, as if barely freed from the forms of the forest.

  Precisely chiselled pegs of a different wood from the rest of the ship, which swelled and secured the timbers once they were immersed in the water, were used instead of nails or screws. At night the beaches flamed with bonfires lit to extract lime from the coral, which was then mixed with coconut oil to form the white cement with which the hulls were caulked.

  Wherever we had been in the Celebes lowlands people would call out to us, ‘Hello meester!’ – but in Bira it was always ‘Hello Inggeris!’ which we assumed was simply because news of our true nationality had got around. But it was an elderly shipwright on the beach who explained that all foreigners were called that here, since the only other outsider to have lived in the village was an Englishman named Collins who, it turned out, had spent many months here during the 1930s. He had had his own small prahu built, and finally sailed eastwards, leaving a strong imprint on the group psyche. There were even rumblings that we might represent a sort of Karmic return of this man – who had apparently shared our obsession for their sailing craft, as well as for Bira’s surrounding wildlife.’ 11

  Fortunately, Collins was remembered with much affection, which, according to the old shipwright, was the only reason why the Keraing was going out of his way to help us.

  ‘Ibu and the Keraing are good people,’ he told us unexpectedly, during one of our many conversations sitting on the beach. ‘Listen only to them. There are many bad people here, too.’

  It was certainly true that now, when at last it looked as if we might have our prahu, an increasing number of extremely sinister nakoda were approaching us with offers to take us to the Aru Islands. Some already had their boats fully rigged and ready to go – but the temptation to leave immediately was easily outweighed by the transparency of their predatory motives, and our allegiance to the Keraing and his wife. It was Ibu who told us that her husband was terrified of the water.

  ‘He can’t swim,’ she said. ‘He used to travel in prahu as a young man, then a guru told him that one day he would die by water. Now you will hardly ever see him in a canoe. That’s fine by me. He stays behind now with the old men, women and children while the rest of the village puts to sea for nine months.’ For that was how long it took before the monsoon carried these men back home again. The odds on returning at all were fairly poor by the sound of it; for, according to Ibu, of the 90 prahu which had left Bira the previous year, five had still not returned, and no word had been heard from their crews.

  There was no doctor in the region, and Ibu reckoned that the three major causes of mortality were shipwreck, malaria and being killed by a python. This seemed rather extreme to us until we discovered that Bira was indeed one of the most heavily python-infested regions in all Celebes. We h
eard numerous stories about the pythons even entering the houses at night during the arid seasons when game is scarce. Nearly all our crew were to tell us harrowing anecdotes of personal encounters with hungry pythons – some of which had been measured at over 28 feet long. They all wore serpent-like black coral bracelets as special protective amulets against snakes. Laba, who was later to become one of our shipmates, had been a fruit farmer and had only recently taken up sailing on the advice of the local shaman after a string of close calls with pythons.

  Laba was quite a celebrity in the village, and from him we learnt just what it is like to be embraced by a really big snake. His fruit plantation had been a good four-hour walk from the village, and he was used to visiting it alone. He had found there the stinkingly obvious lair of a large python, a cave mouth which he stuffed with kindling which he then ignited. He was standing back to admire the conflagration when the full weight of its rightful resident landed on him from a bough above, where it had been watching. Flattening him to the ground and knocking the wind out of him, it had begun its killing process by throwing a few coils around the tree to anchor itself, and a few more round Laba, pinning his arms to his side. It doesn’t squeeze very hard, Laba explained, but tightens its grip each time you exhale, making it increasingly harder to draw the next breath. It made no attempt to bite, but held its face close to Laba’s, intently watching him while its forked tongue flickered around his nose.

  ‘They just look at you very closely,’ he told us.

  It was at this point that Laba had effected the only feasible escape procedure for such circumstances, although it required a good deal of luck. In the coils adjacent to his wrists he located the python’s cloaca and managed to give it one hell of a goosing. The astonished reptile released its grip just long enough for Laba to break free and stagger off down the track – with the serpent in hot pursuit apparently loudly vocalizing with the same sibilant barks which we were later to hear ourselves while filming a python hunt. The snake caught him again savagely round the legs – with its jaws, but he managed to tear himself away and keep running until he finally passed out from shock and blood loss. It was after dark when he finally regained consciousness with the jolting realization that the snake should have caught up with him. But it had not, and he managed to make his way home to safety.