OTHER WORKS BY ROBERT F. JONES
Blood Sport
The Diamond Bogo
Slade’s Glacier
The Man-Eaters of Zamani
Tie My Bones To Her Back
Deadville
The Run to Gitche Gumee
Gone to the Dogs: My Life With My Canine Companions
Dancers in the Sunset Sky
The Fishing Doctor: The Essential Tackle Box Companion
The Hunter in My Heart: A Sportsman’s Salmagundi
African Twilight: The Story of a Hunter
Upland Passage: A Field Dog’s Education
Jake: A Labrador Puppy at Work and Play
Copyright © 2015 by Louise Jones
Originally published in 1990 by The Atlantic Monthly Press.
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.
Cover design by Anthony Morais
Cover photo credit by ThinkStock
Print ISBN: 978-1-63220-580-3
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-63450-019-7
For Leslie,
who sails deeper seas
On men reprieved by its disdainful mercy, the immortal sea confers in its justice the full privilege of desired unrest.
—JOSEPH CONRAD
Contents
Part One CULDEE
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Part Two MIRANDA
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Part Three LÁZARO
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Part Four THE DANGEROUS GROUND
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Excerpt from The Philippine Pilot, vol. IX
15. FLYAWAY ISLANDS
This chapter describes the Islas Efemerales, or Flyaway Islands, marked on some charts as Dampier’s Folly. From NE to SW the group includes San Lázaro, Balbal, Moro Armado, and Perniciosa, along with some three dozen islets and atolls that are seasonally inhabited, if at all. Lying in the Sulu Sea midway between Palawan and Mindanao, some seven hundred sea miles southwest of Manila, the group is rarely visited. (See “Caution.”)
San Lázaro, the largest island, is about twenty-seven miles long, NE to SW, and seventeen miles wide. The interior is mountainous, heavily wooded, and cut with deep ravines known locally as laberintos venenosos for the poisonous snakes, insects, plants, and Negrito headhunters inhabiting them. The highest mountain is an active volcano, Mount Haplit, with an elevation of 2,819 feet. Its smoke plume is often visible at a distance of fifty miles. Close to the coast are many seemingly fertile valleys interspersed with old lava flows and narrow strips of apparently cultivated lowland, from which the mountains rise abruptly. Beaches of red and black sand comprise the leeward shore of the island, supporting lofty, wind-tossed stands of coco palms. Attractive as they appear from the sea, the beaches are infested with hordes of disease-bearing sand fleas (pulgarenas in the local dialect) and should be avoided by visitors.
Balbal is similarly mountainous, with 1,699-foot Cerro Corsario rising in pyramid shape from its center, and thickly forested. Formerly a base for Dyak and Tausuq sea raiders, the island is now reportedly occupied only by a small band of animist indigenes related to the “gentle Tasaday” of Mindanao. Rare mouse deer, peacock pheasants, giant carnivorous flying squirrels (the balbal for which the island is named), and the small, fierce, V-horned wild buffalo known locally as tamarau are also present in delicate balance with the aborigines. To preserve that balance, Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos in 1978 placed Balbal off limits to visiting vessels. The ban, though rarely enforced, remains in effect.
Moro Armado is a hilly, scrub-grown, boomerang-shaped island twelve miles long by four miles wide. Surrounded by abrupt fringing reefs, its most prominent feature is a complex of salinas, or salt pans, at the S end into which the tide flows. These salinas are diked and controlled by sluice gates to permit the entry, entrapment, and evaporation of seawater, and are mined in rotation for the resulting salt. The labor was performed in the past by indentured mineros, who lived in coral-block huts the size of dog kennels. Currently the task falls to political prisoners and hostages whose plaintive cries and work chants can be heard far offshore, especially on a NE wind.
Perniciosa, flat, corralled, and uncharted, is visited only by snake hunters and malaria researchers. A Japanese submarine refueling depot was located here during World War II but abandoned in 1944 due to disease and guerrilla raids.
The sea bottom surrounding the Flyaways is rugged and rapidly variable. A “Dangerous Ground” of reefs, shoals, trenches, shifting sandbars, and submarine ledges (called putas in local parlance) girds and interpenetrates the main group, rendering approach hazardous even to the best-equipped vessels.
Wrecks abound.
History. Obscure, violent, mythic, and not yet written.
COLREGS Demarcation Lines. International rules of the road apply.
Vessel Traffic Management. Not applicable.
Anchorages. Variable, dependent upon wind, tide, current, and political developments. A good weather eye and a busy leadsman in the chains afford the best assurance against grounding. All anchors should be buoyed for quick slippage and an anchor watch maintained at all times. (See “Caution.”)
Tides. Probably semidiurnal on the South China Sea side of the group, diurnal in the Sulu Sea. Tide tables for these waters have not yet been compiled.
Currents. Little known, though a NW current of twelve to twenty knots may set directly through the islands and their outliers, at least during certain months.
Weather. Mild to severe, year around. The outstanding feature of the marine weather is its unpredictability. Trade winds and monsoons are frequently interrupted by cold fronts that reach the islands from as far away as Tibet and Mongolia. Gale-force winds, though unlikely, can drop with great suddenness from seemingly clear skies. These squalls are known locally as vientos azores, or “hawk winds,” for the swiftness and ferocity of their descent. Seas in the area usually run about ten feet, but have reached forty feet or more on occasion. Waterspouts are common.
Storm-Warning Displays. These are unknown in the Flyaways.
Pilotage. Unreliable. (See “Caution.”)
Towage. Hazardous. (See “Caution.”)
Quarantine. Not required. (See “Caution.”)
Customs. Ruinous. (See “Caution.”)
Immigration. No passport or visa is required of anyone seeking to enter the Flyaways.
Supplies. Bunker fuel, diesel, and gasoline are rarely available. Most fuel sold to visiting mariners has been purposely diluted with water or spiked with corrosives. Sugar is frequently added to gasoline so as to burn pistons and render visiting vessels inoperable. Fresh meat, fruit, and vegetables can be purchased, along with casks of supposedly fresh water, from local pump boats. A frequent, low-cost offering is the native rum, a potent drink called tuba asesina (see “Caution”). All such produce should be thoroughly examined, washed, strained, peeled, cooked, or otherwise tested (perhaps on the ship’s cat) before human consumption. Ice, yeast, and stationery are sometimes available in the bicycle shop above the Carniceria Cabrónes near Love Boat Wharf at Avenida Putissima.
Repairs. The Vela Vieja Sail Loft at Narr Lagoon on Moro Armado is equipped with a deep-throat (thirty-seven-inch) sewing machine. One-Eyed Balabatchi, a shipwright on San Lázaro, does excellent if expensive work in both wood and fiberglass (ask for him at the Millikan Shipping offices opposite the mosque on Dewey Square in Lázaro City). Though all Flyaway Islanders are competent mechanics, requests from visiting mariners for engine repairs are often construed as invitations for sabotage (see “Caution”).
Communications. Roads between principal ports and towns are poor, unpaved, rutted, and beset by bandits. Bridges over the many streams that drain the higher islands are few, flimsy, poorly maintained, and exorbitant in their toll rates. The islands have no air service. Though steamship lines from Manila, Puerto Princesa, and Zamboanga served the islands in years past, the looting and subsequent sinking of a Hong Kong cruise ship at dockside in Lázaro City in 1978 caused termination of passenger service. Only small, interisland vessels called kumpits now operate in the Flyaways (see “Caution”). Telephone, telegraph, and radio communications to the outside world have never been available, and probably never will be.
Currency. The monetary unit is hard cash (gold or silver) in any available coinage. No credit cards are accepted. Barter is widespread (see “Caution”).
Language. The common language of the Flyaways is a koine, an amalgam of Spanish, English, Tagalog, Dyak, Tausuq, Chinese, Annamese, and Palaweño Negrito. Most of the younger islanders speak English.
Ornithological Note. The Flyaways’ reputation for harboring devils, reported from the logs of its earliest visitors, is probably based on the eerie cries of the Barabbas erne, or gallows bird (Haliäetus galga), which Duvoisin’s Field Guide to the Raptors of Southeast Asia describes as thirty-five inches long, dark-backed, black-capped, and hook-billed, one of the world’s rarest seabirds. They are known to inhabit only certain small islands off the SW end of Isla Perniciosa, where they come and go at night. They feed on flotsam, including the corpses of the drowned, but have been implicated in attacks on chickens, pigs, and small children. Stiff-winged, they glide low over the water. Silent by day, they are extremely noisy at night, especially when breeding or feeding. The cry is said to be a prolonged and mournful weep-weep-wak-fungouuu.
Caution. Mariners are advised that the Flyaways have long been notorious throughout Southeast Asia and indeed the entire western Pacific not only for their myriad navigational hazards but for the ingrained and seemingly irremediable villainy of their inhabitants. The island economy is now and always has been based on piracy, smuggling, wrecking, barratry, mutiny, kidnapping, prostitution, slavery, arms manufacture, forgery, and the cultivation of controlled substances. Few vessels in Flyaway waters show running lights or observe rules of the road. Harbor vessels displaying a white letter P on their hulls are not pilot boats but pirates. Even the small, seemingly harmless outriggers of local turtlers and egg hunters should be given a wide berth: the boatmen, regardless of age, sex, or apparent degree of decrepitude, are invariably armed and dangerous.
Local fishermen commonly mark the position of their nets and traps with plastic bleach bottles. Care should be taken to avoid contact with these floating markers as they are often mined with high explosives.
All buoys and lights must be regarded with extreme suspicion.
Anomalous latitude and longitude computations are common in these waters. Mariners who manage to return from the Flyaways inevitably find that all navigational equipment, from the most sophisticated modern electronics to the simplest sextant, requires calibration at the next port of call.
Perhaps the final word of caution concerning the Flyaways should be left to William Dampier (1652–1715), the English freebooter and explorer who visited these islands nearly three centuries ago: “Avoide them at all Costes,” he wrote in his Voyages and Descriptions (1699). “Onlie a Foole or a Man of suicidall Despairation woulde ever willinglie shape his Course toward the Flyawaie Islandes.”
Part One
CULDEE
ONE
The Culdee place stood on a headland overlooking the fogbound sea. It was the oldest house on that bleak stretch of the northern California coast, and its timbers were even older. They had been salvaged more than a century ago from a vessel caught on the lee shore and driven aground below the bluff. From the sea, in the oddly canted light that precedes a storm, the house still resembled a ship, dismasted and hurled to destruction by conflicting currents, its bows pointing seaward, captain and crew whirled off in the storm winds and the hulk itself left derelict at the whim of the surf.
The nautical motif was appropriate, for the Culdees were inveterate seafarers. They had captained trading schooners along the coast since the days of the gold rush, clubbed seals on the ice of the Chukchi Sea, hunted sea otters in the inshore kelp beds, and harpooned whales on the blue water from the Line Islands to the Antarctic. More than a few of them had served in the navy, and Culdee bones lay encrusted in coral off beaches where palm trees swayed. Jim Culdee, the last male of the line, had almost added his bones to the pile. Often, now that he was on the beach, he wished he were down there with his kinsmen. Instead he lived here, a derelict, alone except for his daughter, Miranda.
Dogs loped along the beach in the early morning, wild dogs, skinny in the fog. From the bows of his house the old sailor could see them ghosting through the mist kicked up by the surf, pausing to sniff a clump of kelp or a slippery driftwood burl. Some mornings, especially after a storm, dead things washed up on the beach, half-buried in the clattering shingle. The dogs ripped them apart and bolted them down in angry, convulsive gulps. Heads buried themselves in a bloated belly, tails waving spastically in the fog, their salt-wet fur matted and dull in the sunrise. They emerged only to gasp for breath. Muzzles dark with blood, they ran off to bury the bones—gone till tomorrow.
When he was younger, Culdee might have felt disgust or outrage at their behavior. Death should have its dignity. But the dogs were fierce in defending their finds, and he would have had to fight them to liberate the carcass. Once, he was almost sure, he had tried. It was the body of a young woman, the victim of a wandering iceberg, or a gale, or perhaps an enemy torpedo. He saw her awash in the surf, turning gracefully toward the rocks, her dark hair spread like a sea fan until the next wave hurled her onto the stones at the high-water mark. Something in the way she moved—the toss of a slim, bare arm, a coquettish twist of her neck—gave him a momentary hope that she might still be alive.
He could save her yet, he thought, carry her up to the house, to the warmth of the fire, spoon brandy down her throat, watch her cold breasts slowly flush with color, her pulse quicken, her eyelids quiver and open . . .
He raced down the stone steps, vaulted the seawall, ran in long, eager strides across the slippery strand. But the dogs were there before him. Bristling, lean, foul smelling as the rot they ate, their black leather lips drawn back from yellow teeth, they growled even louder than the sea itself. Beyond them lay the girl. Already the crabs had broken her eyes.
It is a wild, rank place,
he thought, and there is no flattery in it.
The house, though, was snug and tight, secure against the sea’s cold indifference. In the entry hall yellow oilskins hung over ranks of sea-boots and hip boots clotted with drying marsh mud. Shotguns, rifles, and fishing tackle gleamed from pegs on the wall, dark with oil. Old duck decoys carved from swamp cedar and wayward hatch covers, austere in the flat, primary colors of house paint, lay coiled in their anchor cords—widgeon and gadwalls, shovelers and golden eyes, old-squaws, teal, a pair of harlequin drakes in their winter plumage. Crab pots and fish traps, awaiting new slats or wire, stood neatly stacked in one corner near a scarred and blunt-tined clam rake. All of these were now Miranda’s tools, for Culdee rarely went out any more.
The floors inside the hall door were of polished pine, lustrous with wax, the walls lined with books that bore the dog-ears and ripped jackets of heavy reading. There were shelves filled with curios from many forgotten voyages—soapstone sednas from the Beaufort Sea and coral formations from the Paumotus, faded pink conch shells and the fluted calcium of giant tridacnas, medusae, abalones, a chambered nautilus. Weapons from the wars—a kris from the Sulu Sea, a yataghan from the Caspian, a nicked sword stick from the coast above Lamu on the Erythraean Sea, a Zamboangan bolo, an imperial Japanese bayonet. But the muted gleam of brightwork and pewter and delicate china on the other shelves took the edge off this cutlery. Or so it often seemed to the old sailor, who preferred not to remember how his family had come by these weapons.
From the beamed ceilings in every room, turning slowly in random drafts from the many windows and fireplaces, hung the tiny ships that Miranda carved when she wasn’t sweeping, or dusting, or polishing, or cooking, or reading, or hunting, or fishing, or pulling the crab pots, or sailing her catboat into town for the mail. Ancient vessels, all of them, which she had found described or pictured in her sea library—nefs and cogs, shallops and gundalows, flutes, naviculas, five-masted barkentines and hermaphrodite brigs, a yard-long replica, complete to the last ratline, of Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s pinnace Squirrel, hell-bent for doom north of the Azores in 1583. At night, with the lamps turned low and the fires burned down to coals, tiny balls of Saint Elmo’s fire seemed to glow in the pinnace’s rigging, but Miranda would never say how she achieved that effect.
Blood Tide Page 1
