Seven-Tenths
Page 26
Since then, this process has accelerated so that today only the most purblind twenty-year-old could fail to notice a vanishing of things even since his own childhood. Those twice his age and more may have the vividest childhood memories of entire landscapes which are now gone, while people brought up in horsedrawn days before World War I can find themselves in alien terrain. This is a disturbing thing to have happened and leads to the ironic conclusion that it may often be easier to deal psychically with sudden disaster than with steady attrition. French and Belgian farmers whose fields were churned into wastelands by trench warfare knew they had only to wait a few years before most of the greenery sprouted back again. Conversely, those people who grew up to the rich, tangled hedgerows and small fields of the British countryside in the 1930s, 1940s and even 1950s know they will never see them again, nor many of the flora and fauna associated with them. The process is mostly irreversible, not because the species would not return if allowed to or – like a row of poplars – were replanted, but because roads and housing are never ploughed up but only proliferate.
Looking back, it strikes us as curious how seemingly unaffected people once were by the extinction of a species within their lifetime, as though they were isolated zoological events without particular consequence and foreboding nothing. Only now and then is it possible to detect misgivings beneath the breezy pragmatism, even sometimes a current of unease. ‘Last chance to see what Audubon saw,’ wrote an unnamed columnist standing in front of a cage in Cincinnati in 1913. This contained ‘Martha’, the sole remaining passenger pigeon in the world. This species, Ectopistes migratorius, had within living memory been the most familiar bird in the whole of North America and was prettily illustrated by Audubon in his Birds of America. Its wholesale slaughter by settlers peaked in the mid-nineteenth century with massacres involving entire flocks of tens of thousands of birds. The last flock of this handsome creature – it was somewhat larger than an English woodpigeon and beautifully marked – was sighted in Illinois in 1895. The last recorded wild specimen was shot in Quebec in 1907. ‘Martha’, meanwhile, had been bred in Cincinnati Zoo in 1885. She died at 1 pm on 1 September 1914, aged twenty-nine, and with her an entire species. ‘The main cause of their extinction is plain for all to see,’ wrote Richard Carrington some forty years afterwards. ‘Men cannot escape the moral responsibility for the callousness, the greed and the supreme irreverence for life that led to the passing of the passenger pigeon.’*
This particular bird had followed many other species, which included the dodo – hunted to extinction in Mauritius in the late seventeenth century – and the great auk. This last, the garefowl, was also flightless. It was hunted in the North Atlantic for its fat, sometimes being killed because it was associated with superstitious belief. One was burnt in Ireland in 1834 for being a witch. The very last specimen was killed ten years later. Today in New Zealand heroic efforts have been made to save the kakapo. This large green-and-yellow bird, something between an owl and a parrot, cannot fly, never attacks and never defends itself. When it can be encountered at all (for, scarcity aside, it relies on exquisite camouflage) the kakapo has a further claim to be remembered as an example of Nature’s diversity for it smells strongly of freesias. Aesthetics apart, the loss of a species has consequences which can never be entirely predicted. The extinction of the dodo eventually had effects on the very landscape of Mauritius, certain hardwood trees failing to seed themselves and beginning to die out. Only in recent years has it been established that the dodo played a central role in the seeding and distribution of these trees by eating their fruit. The bird’s digestive tract softened the seeds’ testa and assisted germination. Now turkeys are being imported from America in the hopes that they may act as substitute dodos.
While endangered species embody poignant reminders of our own mortality, it is the vanishing of entire landscapes that upsets us most. There is nowhere left to turn for solace and with which to recreate the continuity of our lives. Sights, smells and sounds may all vanish. I pretend not to mourn the wild profusion of the natty yellow-and-black striped caterpillars of the Cinnabar moth which once stripped to the bone the clumps of groundsel to be found on every patch of wasteland in southern Britain. Likewise, I miss the sheer variety of other butterflies and moths (including many rare species) which appeared even in the most suburban garden as late as the early 1960s. One knew where Yellow and Red Underwings would be and when in May to look for the Angle Shades moth just after it had hatched and its colours were at their freshest. The subtlest peach and brown and olive tints seemed to hover a fraction above the surface of its wings as if pure colour stood off its scales by the thickness of dust, glowing and velvety. It now seems both important and hopeless to wish for other people such pleasure and ravishment, whether of looking at moths or being frisked around by dolphins. It is true that after-comers can never know exactly what they have missed; but missing things in our own lifetimes sets in motion the inarticulate hollowings of loss, and in turn we apprehend how quickly ordinary beauty is being made to vanish as if the hand of man held a wand whose touch made some things disappear for good and turned all the rest to lead. Each generation adapts to an impoverished world, but for the first time people are conscious of having to make do with remains. This has its effects.
In 1918 a steamer was wrecked near Lord Howe Island, about 400 miles off the east coast of Australia. Its rats swam ashore and changed the landscape for ever. Two years afterwards one of the islanders wrote, ‘This paradise of birds has become a wilderness, and the quietness of death reigns where all was melody.’* Such events have become common on islands, where casually or accidentally introduced domestic animals (goats, rabbits, cats and dogs) as well as vermin can decimate native species and upset an entire ecology.
Of all the laments for a vanished landscape, perhaps that by Edmund Gosse tells Britons most vividly what they have done and what they may no longer see. No chance shipwreck caused the disaster. On the contrary, if anything it was caused by zoology allied to a strong religious bent. At the ages of nine and ten Gosse spent countless hours with his famous naturalist father examining rock pools on the Devonshire coast, ‘a middleaged man and a funny little boy’. His account was published in 1907 and refers to the years 1858 and 1859, immediately after the publication of Omphalos. In the intervening half-century the whole seascape changed. The passage is a beautiful description of a lost world, and one of the first examples of a sensitive and passible man fully aware of what has gone and how its going was part of a pattern destined to be repeated at ever-gathering speed. In its prescience, it is a warning of the possible consequences of scientific fieldwork, even of ‘eco-tourism’.
If anyone goes down to those shores now, if man or boy seeks to follow in our traces, let him realise at once, before he takes the trouble to roll up his sleeves, that his zeal will end in labour lost. There is nothing, now, where in our days there was so much. Then the rocks between tide and tide were submarine gardens of a beauty that seemed often to be fabulous, and was positively delusive, since, if we delicately lifted the weed-curtains of a windless pool, though we might for a moment see its sides and floor paven with living blossoms, ivory-white, rosy-red, orange and amethyst, yet all that panoply would melt away, furled into the hollow rock, if we so much as dropped a pebble in to disturb the magic dream.
Half a century ago, in many parts of the coast of Devonshire and Cornwall, where the limestone at the water’s edge is wrought into crevices and hollows, the tide-line was, like Keats’ Grecian vase, ‘a still unravished bride of quietness’. These cups and basins were always full, whether the tide was high or low, and the only way in which they were affected was that twice in the twenty-four hours they were replenished by cold streams from the great sea, and then twice were left brimming to be vivified by the temperate movement of the upper air. They were living flower-beds, so exquisite in their perfection, that my Father, in spite of his scientific requirements, used not seldom to pause before he began to rifle t
hem, ejaculating that it was indeed a pity to disturb such congregated beauty. The antiquity of these rock-pools, and the infinite succession of the soft and radiant forms, sea-anemones, sea-weeds, shells, fishes, which had inhabited them, undisturbed since the creation of the world, used to occupy my Father’s fancy. We burst in, he used to say, where no hand had ever thought of intruding before; and if the Garden of Eden had been situate in Devonshire, Adam and Eve, stepping lightly down to bathe in the rainbow-coloured spray, would have seen the identical sights that we now saw, – the great prawns gliding like transparent launches, anthea waving in the twilight its thick white waxen tentacles, and the fronds of the dulse faintly streaming on the water, like huge red banners in some reverted atmosphere.
All this is long over, and done with. The ring of living beauty drawn about our shores was a very thin and fragile one. It had existed all those centuries solely in consequence of the indifference, the blissful ignorance of man. These rock-basins, fringed by corallines, filled with still water almost as pellucid as the upper air itself, thronged with beautiful sensitive forms of life, – they exist no longer, they are all profaned, and emptied, and vulgarized. An army of ‘collectors’ has passed over them, and ravaged every corner of them. The fairy paradise has been violated, the exquisite product of centuries of natural selection has been crushed under the rough paw of well-meaning, idle-minded curiosity. That my Father, himself so reverent, so conservative, had by the popularity of his books acquired the direct responsibility for a calamity that he had never anticipated became clear enough to himself before many years had passed, and cost him great chagrin. No one will see again on the shore of England what I saw in my early childhood, the submarine vision of dark rocks, speckled and starred with an infinite variety of colour, and streamed over by silken flags of royal crimson and purple.*
In its way this is a classic threnody, indulgently melancholic even to the furtive pleasure of ‘No one will see … what I saw’. It also sets out the biblical coordinates of a mode which survives to this day as a shadow between the earnestly secular lines of much conservationist rhetoric: ‘the Garden of Eden’, ‘paradise’, ‘vision’, ‘profaned’ and, of course, the Father. This is touching in its confusion between the child who could not always distinguish his father from God, and the adult writing a devastating biography who could see the difference all too clearly. Both personae are there in this passage, unconsciously revealed by Gosse the son in two scientifically conflicting phrases: ‘undisturbed since the creation of the world’ and ‘centuries of natural selection’. The first represents his father’s firm belief (he was a devout creationist) while the second is entirely his own, convinced Darwinian that he is. This identification of his father with the Creator, and the ur-landscape of his childhood in Devonshire with Eden, maybe gives an additional clue as to why we can feel so devastated by the disappearance of the place where we grew up. Landscape blurs easily into the parental.
This mourning for landscape, this apprehension of death without a proper body to grieve over, is one of our modern era’s cruellest legacies. It has often been recorded but seems to have gone largely unremarked as a likely cause of common forms of despair and depression. For lack of any medically plausible origin these are presumably attributed to the usual domestic disorders, disappointments and jiltings; whereas in reality the sorrow may be far grander, more pervasive and unsolaced, its cause misunderstood by both sufferer and doctor.
It is said that the British reading public’s nostalgia for the imagined certitudes of Victorian and Edwardian England accounts for the popularity of rural diaries and reminiscences. This may be so; but it is quite as likely that the nostalgia is as much for a lost landscape as for any vanished social order.*
* Richard Carrington, Mermaids and Mastodons (1957).
* Quoted in Rachel Carson, The Sea around Us (1951).
* Edmund Gosse, Father and Son (London, 1907).
* Sooner or later this ailment will doubtless be officially recognised and accorded its own name – probably an inflated tag along the lines of ‘Topological Mourning Syndrome’ or even ‘TMS’. Actually, the condition itself is by no means always vague, and can present quite specific symptoms. ‘It makes me feel older,’ is how a middle-aged villager in ‘Sabay’ described viewing the Fantasy Elephant Club across an otherwise familiar strait.
III
MARGINALIA
Parrotfish
Frozen parrotfish imported from the Caribbean are for sale in south London fishmongers. The Scaridae are specifically reef fish: the beak-like fusing of the front teeth which gives them their popular name has evolved so that they can browse on corals. The parrotfish does indeed damage corals, just as a blackbird damages worms. What counts is the balance of such activities, especially in an ecosystem as delicate as that of a tropical reef. Pulling parrotfish out of reefs in quantities sufficient to supply an export industry cannot but have an unbalancing effect. Through a complex chain of relationships, the reef will inevitably suffer from their absence, as it certainly will from the methods used to catch them.
This is doubly exceptionable since the members of this family make indifferent eating except at the moment they are caught. Then the otherwise uninteresting meat is delicious raw, marinaded for fifteen minutes in lime juice, oil, tiny native onions and black pepper. Frozen into woody curves in a bin in a Peckham fishmonger’s, a parrotfish merely pretends to the exotic, its blunted colours ghosts of what they were. Who knows whether their corpses are there to satisfy the nostalgia of an immigrant population or the local consumer’s fickle desire for novelty. Either way, a reef off Barbados or Jamaica is now undergoing a change which will most likely be permanent.
The ocean’s emptiness appals the swimmer, but only because it can supply nothing for his own survival. He cannot entertain flabby polemic about dolphins. His is the mind of a man lost in the sea. Yet even as he struggles to save himself he is hollowed out by despair. What is it that he is saving? The thought corrodes his every intention. In this wide salt world which he treads he is nothing, has nothing but a face mask and a pair of trunks. Until one loses everything it is never clear what it was one had. Now, in a bleak inner glimpse, he finds he has dissolved. The landscape of his own past, his private history, seems to have vanished, leaving only a sense of attrition. As he glances down through the water his body dwindles whitely like a distant peg and sheds a small discoloured puff of urine which briefly unravels itself in thready convections like those of lime juice being diluted. Nothing but ocean. His entire body is dissolving, too. He only ever existed as three-tenths and that fraction is melting into water.
However, this 30 per cent contains an animal which does not want to die. A passive animal, maybe, but still perversely convinced that help will turn up as if by more than mere chance. Sooner or later someone surely has to pass within hailing distance of the psychic beacon he must have become, broadcasting his distress signal on all frequencies. He squints at the sun. Now that he no longer wants it to be stuck vertically at noon it seems reluctant to move at all. Night with its hope of fishermen is still many hours away.
The swimmer tells himself he need not bank only on them. He has been overlooking all the other sorts of boat which continually cross these waters. Besides tattered inter-island launches, there are all the craft which used to fetch up on ‘Tiwarik’: friendly gunrunners, wanderers from the south with their faces wrapped against the sun, poverty-stricken vagabonds neither peaceable nor violent but chance-takers of more or less competence. Any of them might spot him from miles away with a vulture’s quick eye for a weakening beast. He tries to imagine into being a huge arch of cloud letters in the sky: REWARD!, and underneath a gigantic arrow pointing straight down whose tip balances on his sunburned head. It is a message aimed impartially at any of the seagoing mavericks who still inhabit this last corner of the ocean.
So hard does he will it that he soon thinks he hears, above the infuriatingly loud slop of wavelets, the faintest putter of an engin
e.
7
Pirates and Nomads
Axel Heyst’s ‘magic circle’ would just have enclosed Manila, Saigon, Singapore, Surabaya and Ternate, as well as the Sulu and Riaw-Lingga Archipelagos. (The Mergui Archipelago lies somewhat outside.)
I
It was a morning of flat calm in the Sulu archipelago towards the end of November 1990. The sun in its early angle was both gentle and powerful, forcing a luminous violet into the water. The islands dotting the sea to the horizon stood clear and delicate, as though the same gentle power had hatched them out overnight and left them in their freshness to harden off.
A small boat with bamboo outriggers was heading back towards Subuan. In it were three young Bajau women and a double row of grey plastic jerrycans of water. Perched on these amidships was a seventeen-year-old boy, the brother of one of the girls, who understood the 10 horsepower Briggs & Stratton engine. He was controlling the speed by means of a length of nylon fishing line tied to the throttle. This ran over a rubber disc cut from the sole of a sandal and nailed to a thwart. The boy had wrapped the end of the line around his finger and was concentrating on holding the engine’s note at the same pitch. It was a nearly new motor whose exhaust was rigged in local fashion from an iron elbow bolted to the exhaust port with a foot of ordinary water pipe screwed into it and jutting up at an angle. From this unsilenced tube blared the fumes and racket familiar to those on board as a soothing part of a ritual which, before the coming of the engine, had been a much more laborious business involving paddles and a sail made from rice sacks.