For its size, the Banda Sea is one of the world’s deepest. It lies on the same tectonic fault-line which runs from the Aleutian Islands of Alaska, down past the profound ocean trenches off Japan and the Philippines, to the South China Sea. Far beneath our keel and the tropic heat meandered what oceanographers call the ‘psychrosphere’, that inky realm which permanently borders on freezing, and where we knew as yet uncatalogued creatures of the deep still swam.
Close to the centre of this luminous body of water lie the Banda Islands, which rise 22,000 feet sheer from the ocean floor to crest the surface with smoke and jungle. The 10 islands are so small that they appear only as specks, if at all, on anything but a hydrographic chart. Their total land area is barely 17 square miles, and the tallest mountain, forming one of the only three inhabited islands, is the 2,200-foot cone of the still-active Banda volcano. The unique conditions of climatic and volcanic alchemy make this the probable source of nutmeg, the ‘gold’ of the spice trade.
An early mariner had written: ‘… from far out to sea, we could detect the scent of paradise wafting from the hills of Banda.’
Since Banda’s original discovery by the Portuguese in 1512, it has changed hands constantly between European powers vying for the nutmeg monopoly. Christopher Columbus had been looking for a shorter route to Banda when he had stumbled upon America! Even Oliver Cromwell scrawled his signature on a Treaty of Banda in 1654, and after the Napoleonic Wars the island was exchanged for New Amsterdam, in the New World, which is now better known as Manhattan Island. But, since the Dutch withdrew from Indonesia, Banda has abdicated from history, and time moves past her as she lies forgotten, like a sleeping princess, gradually reverting to her primordial state.
On the dawn of the second day we discerned the smoke-wreathed cone of the Banda volcano perched on the horizon like a veiled Egyptian pyramid. The following morning it was close enough for us to begin worrying about our approach. While Lorne and I had been sparring with the officials in Ambon, our crew had been exchanging navigational gossip about Banda with the sailors on the waterfront, and they now produced three scrawled maps of the entrance to the island. On comparison each proved to advise a different approach, and despite the light breeze and calm sea we felt the tension mounting as we came to within two miles of the island without seeing a sign of habitation or a harbourage.
Suddenly a 30-foot lombok – a sailing sloop resembling the Chinese sampan – emerged from behind the island and disappeared into the trees.
‘There! There! That must be it!’ we all shouted in chorus, and Tooth recklessly committed us towards what we sincerely hoped was a hidden entrance that would accommodate a vessel three times the size of the lombok. A channel appeared which divided the now awesome volcano on our right from a narrower island on our left called Bandaneira. Slightly curved, it meant that shortly after entering the channel our horizon was cut off behind us, as it was ahead by yet a third island, Lontar, and it gave us the impression of being not so much in the middle of a sea as in a glassy landlocked lake high in some mountain range.
The wind was now blowing some 15 feet above the surface, catching our sails and pushing us through a water so unruffled that only our bow-wave disturbed it. Often mentioned in sailing literature, this experience is like being drawn through the water by an angel, giving the impression that the ship is no more under a mariner’s control than the path of his destiny.
Nobody spoke. All of us were standing, Amir and Mansur wide-eyed and grasping the corners of the wooden stove on the foredeck. Apart from the sporadic cries of parrots which left flashes of the spectrum across the towering forest, there was nothing to be heard but the murmuring of our weigh against the hull. The light was eerily refracted through the wreaths of smoke curling from the volcano which plunged into its own reflection barely 100 yards to our right. We had read that the depth and steepness of this bay were so great that the destroyers of the occupying Japanese had been able to tie up directly alongside the town. It was hard to believe that the bottom was still several thousand feet beneath our keel, while we could practically pick the fruit from the jungle on either side of us. With the thin strands of black volcanic sand, and flecks of what looked like gold-dust flashing in the pristine water, it was like slipping into paradise over a polished surface of obsidian quartz.
As we curved along the channel, the town of Banda came into view on our left, a nestling patchwork of white-walled colonial buildings with red-tiled and sago-thatched roofs. Draped above the town and half-consumed by forest, were the magnificent crumbling remains of early Dutch and Portuguese fortresses, their cannons still balefully eyeing us from the ramparts. The strand was zebra-striped with black and white sand, where a number of brightly painted local fishing boats and lombok lay side by side. The only incongruity marring the scene was a large rusting motorized research-vessel anchored just off-shore, and flying a Pertamina flag to show that it belonged to the national petroleum company. It was the sole rather dour reminder that we had not entirely left the twentieth century behind us. Although it was clearly deep enough to moor directly alongside the town, Tandri, owing to innate Bugis caution, chose to anchor near the research ship, where a rising coral bank came to within 50 feet of the surface.
We immediately dressed in our rumpled best and had ourselves paddled ashore to make our obeisances to the Bupati, the local government official. We found him playing table tennis in the echoing ballroom of the former colonial governor’s residence, which now served as the site of perpetual ping-pong tournaments. He was a stocky curly-headed man in shorts and shirt-sleeves, his fine features suggesting Arabic or Indian ancestry. He blushed with the astonishment of seeing us, and unhesitatingly gave us carte blanche to film whatever we liked. This was thankfully the most informal Bupati we had yet encountered.
‘Where’s your friend?’ he asked us. ‘I thought you were leaving today.’
‘What friend?’ Lorne replied. ‘And we’ve only just arrived.’
He found it hard to believe that we had actually arrived in the prahu, and not in the rusting Pertamina ship which had also apparently brought the only other Westerner to visit the island in more than 10 years just the day before.
‘This is a year of coincidence,’ said the Bupati. ‘The first prahu to anchor here in five years arrived at the beginning of this year Pertamina ships never put in – and now three Orang Putihs on the same amount of tides!’ We gathered that the ship was due to depart at any moment and felt compelled to satisfy our curiosity concerning this other foreigner who had dared to trespass on Banda. After leaving the Bupati to finish his game with his barefoot opponent, we hurriedly returned to the strand and persuaded Mansur and Amir to paddle us over to the rusting vessel. A few yards from the gang-ladder we found the stranger wallowing in the sea surrounded by naked water children. He was the first Westerner we had laid eyes on for several months. He had very blue eyes, and water-droplets festooned his bushy hair and beard, giving him something of the appearance of a Japanese Snow Monkey emerging from a bath in the hot springs.
I accosted him from the canoe with barely polite demands as to who the hell he was, and what he thought he was doing there – and discovered him to be the intrepid Lyall Watson, biologist, explorer and prolific author-to-be of books about the nature of mind and discovery.
His ship was due to depart in 15 minutes, which gave us just enough time to accept his offer of a refrigerated drink on his afterdeck, and to hear his surprising explanation that his presence was due to the inspirational writings of one Alfred Russel Wallace. Lyall had been lent this vessel by the Indonesian government to reconnoitre the islands along the Wallace route to the Aru Islands, with a view to bringing the international cruise-ship Lindblad Explorer on her first Indonesian voyage here the following year. The difference was that Lyall had begun his journey at Wallace’s destination, Dobu, and was heading westwards for Makassar, whereas we were doing the reverse.
There was barely enough time to exchange information abou
t the islands each was about to visit, to learn that he had just completed his book Supernature12 which drew on very much the same obscure source material that I had used in my doctoral thesis at Lancaster University. Independently, via our separate disciplines of biology and comparative religion, we had each been pursuing the same Ariadne’s Thread of connections which led, we felt, to a radical re-examination of ‘rational science’. It was only many months later, back in England, that I read the first review of Supernature and realized that the author was the same Snow Monkey that we had met in Banda Bay. A year later, after Supernature had become a bestseller, Lyall was to write a generous foreword to my own book – which helped it find a much wider market than it might otherwise have had. It seems strange that Banda – at the midpoint of the Wallace route – should have been the nexus at which our life-paths crossed. We were the first Westerners to reach the islands for many years; we had arrived independently and unknown to each other, and our stay here had overlapped by an hour!
Although with Lyall we had barely had time to shake his wet hand and exchange zoographical titbits, it was with a sense of excitement that we watched him steam out of Banda in his rusty vessel.
The following dawn we paddled ourselves from our prahu half a mile across to the island of Lontar, famed for its nutmeg, mace and cloves. The once neatly cultivated plantations had run wild, and now produced barely 5 per cent of what had been harvested at the peak of the Dutch colonial days, yet it was richly beautiful. With our inevitable Pied Piper’s gaggle of pursuing children, we explored the aromatic forests of nutmeg and kanary trees, amongst whose roots we found the scattered gravestones of early Dutch, French, Arab, Malay, Portuguese and Chinese mariners. After the children had finally left us in solitude, we began to see the lilac-blue flashes of the nutmeg pigeon, Carpophas concinna, unique to the region and lovingly described by Wallace. A giant amongst pigeons, and with a voice like the horn of a Model T Ford, the vividly blue bird feeds exclusively on nutmeg – which reportedly gives its flesh a delicious flavour.
We befriended a young boy who was gathering nutmeg with the tool which has remained unchanged since long before Banda’s discovery by outsiders: a lozenge-shaped basket of woven rattan on a long pole with a non-return valve, and twin fangs for hooking the fruit into the basket without having to lower it to the ground each time. He showed us how nutmeg provides two spices: the nut itself, about as big as an oval apricot, and mace, the blood-red filmy membrane which coats it.
The Cuscus makes a good meal but a better pet. (LORNE & LAWRENCE BLAIR)
The Bandanese are a very tidy people, beautifully dressed in some of the better imported Javanese batiks. Every household sported exotic pets, and especially brilliant and highly talkative parrots perched, often untethered, on carefully constructed parrot-stands with little roofs over them. Children carried pet Cuscuses on their shoulders, the morose arborial fluff-balls with pouches and prehensile tails: now we had well and truly entered the domain of the Australo-Pacific fauna.
Apart from fruits and spices, Banda’s main export now is tropical birds of numerous gaudy varieties which, like the fish beneath the sea, made one ponder again on the gaps in our understanding of the evolution of species. The fact that such baroque variations in design in no way overtly contribute to the survival of an individual is often ignored when discussing the ‘survival of the fittest’ theory. Such ‘design above necessity’ points to aesthetic or fanciful forces operating in the development of species quite independently of their need to survive.
This was shown most vividly beneath Banda’s waters. For, as Wallace had correctly remarked (even without the benefit of mask and flippers), Banda’s bay contains more species of fish than are found in all the rivers, lakes and seas of Europe. So astounding was the sight which greeted us beneath the surface that we decided to breathe half the compressed air in the single tank which Yong had lent us in Makassar, ostensibly to film his pearl-diving operation in the Aru Islands.
The black volcanic sand was ribbed with drifts of white, from which rose multicoloured castles of coral, with surreal turrets over 30 feet high. All our focal planes were shot through with drifts of fish interweaving with the tidal flow like the autumn fall of countless varieties of leaf. The coral crags were wreathed in plants looking like animals, and animals looking like plants, and with every grasp we could pick up the shells for which the Moluccas were famous, and which from Renaissance times have been sought after by the shell-collectors of the world. On a dive such as this – in waters probably never previously dived with scuba equipment – a high degree of fear is constantly counterbalanced by a kind of sacred awe. Life, in forms as beautiful as it was grotesquely unfamiliar, was everywhere, above, below, within and without.
Apart from her living reefs and forests, the only surviving testament to Banda’s place in history now lies in the disintegrating battlements of her fortresses and the crumbling splendour of her architecture. Perhaps the most nostalgic example was the palace building, where we had met the Bupati playing table tennis. It had been built by the French, as a magnificent governor’s residence, during the brief Napoleonic period that they had colonized the island. It was an exact replica of the famous Opera House of Naples. Its floor and support columns were of white marble imported all the way from Italy, and it had been appointed with the European luxuries of the time. Now it was echoingly empty of all but the giant chandeliers, a battered ping-pong table – and a memorable piece of graffiti.
Scrawled on a window-pane with a diamond ring was the suicide note of Charles Rumpley, the last French governor of the island. I copied it down as faithfully as legibility allowed:
Quand reviendra t’il le Temps qui formera mon bonheur?
Quand frappera la cloche qui va sonnet l’heure
Le moment que je reverais les bords de ma Patrie,
Le Sein de ma famille que j’aime et que je bénis?
- Charles Rumpley, 1 September 1834
When will my happiness return?
When will the bells toll the hour
Of my return to the shores of my country,
And the heart of my family, whom I love and bless?
Immediately after writing this, Rumpley blew his brains out beneath the crystal chandeliers.
The note was visible only by focusing closely against the refracted light, as when examining a scroll of frost under a microscope, and we wondered if Wallace had noticed this poignant testimony to one soul at least who found the solitude of such strange beauty unbearable. In his darkest hour, Rumpley must have remained immune to the consolations of his surroundings, the rich and effortless harvest of life for its own sake, born through adaptation and survival of the fittest. He alone had failed to adapt, to release himself from memories of his past, to the dance of the present. This message, symbolizing all human loneliness, had so far survived for 138 years.
In the old Dutch church we found another, more personal message – and a hint that our own present, too, should be danced to the fullest. Although Banda is nominally a Christian island, the church is attended only by its verger, who opens its doors each day, and keeps it clean and bright. Lorne had been walking past it alone when the verger ran down the steps to ask him to translate the inscription written on a flagstone embedded in the church floor.
Lorne was in a strange mood when he returned to the prahu to tell me about it. The flagstone turned out to be written in English, and commemorated the death of a John Leod, an English midshipman who had died here in 1900. He had been exactly Lorne’s age, to the month, and the same monsoon had been blowing.
Lorne took this very hard and, although he didn’t talk about it further, he was so withdrawn that evening that several of our crew asked if he was unwell. He was furious when I told them what had happened. They took it as an obvious omen for our immediate departure, and we might well have sailed on the tide, except that it remained for us not only to complete the repairs to our sails, but also, if we possibly could, to find and film the extra
ordinary laweri fish.
Unique to the Banda Islands, the laweri was reportedly only eight inches long, but had eyes as luminous as five-watt bulbs. The Bupati had confirmed that two years previously a Japanese ichthyological research vessel had spent several months in the outer islands exclusively studying this anomalous creature, though they had never once set foot on shore. Since its eyes continue to glow fiercely for days after it has died, the locals use them as bait for night fishing. They were also used as bedside night-lights for Bandanese children afraid of the dark. How consoling, we thought, to awaken from a nightmare to the soothing gaze of luminous eyeballs drifting in a drinking-glass next to one’s bed.
Just as Bira had its small syndicate of specialist python-hunters, Banda had its handful of laweri experts. We were introduced to one of these by the Bupati: a slender upright old man called Ende, who was barely five feet tall. He agreed to meet us at the strand shortly after nightfall. We’d expected a slightly more elaborate expedition, but it was only Ende, his elflike young son, and their fragile and tiny canoe which awaited us. It was a moonless and cloudless night as we paddled precariously out in search of the laweri.
We retreated from the glow of the town into obsidian waters which vividly mirrored the stars above us. The dark cone of the volcano exactly matched its shadow in the water, so that we appeared to move into a great black diamond suspended in the spangled sky. For a long time we sat, adjusting to the night-blooming aromas and the roar of insects which poured to us from the shore. Then the child shouted to his father from the bow, and we began following what at first appeared as the faintest glimmer beneath the surface, and which quickly dissolved again into stellar reflections. We pursued this shimmering phantom for some time, to the left, to the right, disappearing completely, then reemerging behind us again, leading us in circles like an Irish bog-fairy.
Ring of Fire Page 14
