Seven-Tenths

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  ‘Paganism’ and the boat-dwelling habit have always been identifying marks of the Sulu Bajau. With the full acceptance of Islam and the abandonment of the nomadic boat-life, these sea folk will cease to exist as a ‘pagan’ outcast people, and become amalgamated into the general Muslim Samal population of Sulu. Probably within another decade full-time boat-dwellers will disappear completely from the Sulu waters.*

  This was what Nimmo wrote a quarter of a century ago, and since then the drift to land has become almost total, except for a few isolated cases. Yet his prediction of ‘amalgamation’ has certainly not come about, if this means the adoption of land-based social habits and values. To this day the whole problem of how the Bajau can be integrated remains unsolved. They are mostly unconvinced by the idea of education, so are often unwilling to send their children to school. Nor do they seem keen to learn new skills. And as for taking part in any social or political activity, it has proved almost impossible to interest them. They suffer, in short, from an admirable lack of ambition. Their relationship with the sea is so strong they give the impression of being only flimsily attached to land, and might leave again tomorrow if conditions became any worse. Maybe the sea itself is by the way; perhaps what they have in their blood is a nomadic indifference to roots. This might explain their amiable remoteness, their strange innocence. Since they have never owned property ashore they have always remained free of contaminating land squabbles, battles with landlords and developers, crippling rents and tribal annexations. At the first sign of trouble an entire settlement of Bajau may be discovered to have left overnight, in silence, their abandoned huts creaking slightly in the tide and their low craft already invisible over the horizon.

  What has done most in recent years to change the Bajau’s way of life is violence. No anthropologist writing in the 1960s foresaw that persecution would increasingly drive them ashore and that the shore with its press and clutter of people, its social cross-currents and complexities would prove a very mixed blessing. Nobody guessed they might have to inhabit a strange no man’s land, an intertidal zone. But then, nobody realised to what an extent the Sulu archipelago would become a battleground. In 1974 Ferdinand Marcos sent in the armed forces of the Philippines against the MNLF. In the fighting of early February that year, most of the town of Jolo was destroyed and its population forced to take to the hills. Henceforth, the best that reigned in Sulu was armed stalemate broken by violent guerrilla and military engagements, until today’s state of undeclared anarchy was reached. The great influx of weapons into the area, together with financial support for the MNLF from abroad as well as the money brought by lucrative smuggling and trade links with Malaysia, meant that the dominant tribe became more dominant still.

  In recent years anyone has been able to acquire an M-16. If all else fails, one can easily bribe one’s way into the army and acquire the weapon that way. M-16s are constantly ‘lost’ as soon as they are issued, and often the new recruit only waits until the weapon is in his hands before defecting. Armed with an M-16 it is simple to steal a boat. Anybody with an M-16 and a bangka can go straight into business on his own account as a pirate. It is a vilely dangerous living, to be sure, and the sharks must have grown very fat in the straits between the islands, but it is a way of life sanctioned by tradition and facilitated by the times.

  The result for the unarmed, peaceable Bajau has been disaster. Whereas once they could fish at night using hurricane lamps and Coleman lanterns, they now dare not for fear of attracting pirates. A further disadvantage is that the pirate craft frequently have engines powerful enough to outrun the Philippine navy and coastguard patrols and whereas once the Bajau might have used superior seamanship to avoid trouble they are now helpless. So if anything has reconciled some of them to land and its unfamiliar ways it is the need to defend themselves. It is not Islam, nor free education by the Oblate Fathers, nor offers of health care, nor any amount of blandishments and promises which have changed the Bajau’s horizon in Sulu. It is violence, and the necessity of earning enough to buy an M-16 and an engine in order to counter it.

  *

  Presumably, nomadism – whether of Bedouin or Eskimos or sea gypsies – is everywhere in decline. In order to survive, nomads need large tracts of unoccupied territory where there is no serious competition for their source of food, and such areas must be growing fewer. Besides, modern governments increasingly dislike ‘floating populations’ who seem ignorant of their control and who drift uncaringly across their borders and frontiers as if they did not exist. All centralisation is a threat to the periphery, and minor tribes which fall outside even the periphery tend to become fair game. It is a short step from being a minority to becoming marginal and then officially outlawed.

  Even under average conditions, nomadic life is harsh, while a single stroke of ill fortune such as drought, epidemic, civil war, an oil spill or volcanic eruption can bring a people to the edge of extinction. To sentimentalise nomads is not a patronage they need. With an Armalite at last in their hands and deep memories of catalogues of injustice, they do not necessarily behave better than anyone else. What they retain, though, is priceless: a genuine remnant of the knowledge which has served the various species of Homo throughout his history. This knowledge is already lost to industrialised man and in this present century will be lost to the human race for good. It is a particular way of being in a landscape, of coexisting with ocean and land which takes account of minutiae we no longer know how to observe and maybe now cannot see at all.

  There is a link between nomads and pirates and even smugglers. It has partly to do with living in a world beyond boundaries, but also with a detailed knowledge of that world which goes beyond mere geography. Pirates are simply seagoing versions of highway men or brigands; each calculates that his knowledge of the locality will be superior to that of any forces officialdom sends out to capture him. But in between moments of intense danger and excitement must be stretches of considerable solitude, and some sea pirates must themselves have a near-nomadic existence. After all, piracy need only be a sideline. At its lowest level, such as that which has all but driven the Bajau to land, it is a matter of rat-poor fishermen preying on other rat-poor fishermen for the simplest things, like a day’s catch or a dugout boat. I am sure that half the wanderers who landed on ‘Tiwarik’ when I was there were neither particularly fishermen nor pirates nor smugglers but all three as occasion demanded. They might be best described as opportunistic nomads, and what characterised them all was that they were highly self-sufficient. It was not a luxurious life they led, but they were utterly at home in it. First and last, they were born boat people. All had that adhesive agility common to those who grow up barefoot on very small craft. Most had the tawny streaks in their hair, the bleached expression and frown lines of those who have squinted constantly at glaring horizons. All were skilled with dynamite, hook and line or woven fish traps. None was scared of man or beast but they were truly frightened of mumu, sea spirits and omens.

  In its immense navigational complexity and its lavish range of hiding places, a tropical archipelago is ideal pirate territory, and piracy has been established for centuries in insular South-East Asia. Some pirates achieved fame and most Filipinos know the story of Lim Ah Hong, the Chinese pirate who in 1574 even raided Manila itself and came close to unseating the fledgling Spanish colonial administration. His name lives on, less for nationalistic reasons than because of a vast treasure he allegedly hid and which has been looked for ever since. (A treasure is, of course, any proper pirate’s true legacy.) Down in Sulu, in Borneo and the East Indies, piracy always flourished well. This was partly because it was Muslim territory, with a complex assortment of fiefdoms and sultanates never brought under full control by any colonial power. When various Sulu potentates made alliances with their counterparts in Mindanao, the entire Philippine archipelago became prey to Islamic pirate junks. The more regular the colonists’ shipping and trading became, the better the pickings, until by the nineteenth century piracy
had reached epidemic proportions. ‘From Mindanao to Sumatra, countless White travellers recorded their fears of, and warnings about, the savage marauders of the archipelago who thrived on massacre, violation and rapine.’* In 1830 Stamford Raffles himself had found ‘no vessel safe, no flag respected’.

  Today’s predominantly Tausug descendants of those pirates who infested Sulu are merely carrying on a long ingrained tradition. Naturally, piracy can hardly thrive without victims, and in default of galleons carrying Spanish gold from Mexico there are interisland launches carrying people with wallets and cargoes of goods for Chinese traders. There are also the boats which run regularly between Jolo and Labuan Island in Malaysia, taking advantage of barter trade agreements under which copra and handicrafts are swapped for electronic goods, textiles and canned food. It may sound small-time, but each round trip can be worth up to £100,000, and certainly those concerned take it seriously enough. At the very end of January 1991, pirates killed twelve Sulu barter traders in a single concerted raid. As for smuggling, there is a brisk trade out of Sulu in marijuana, which also goes to Malaysia. This seemed unlikely enough, given that country’s famously draconian penalties for drug dealing; but as I was succinctly told, ‘Malaysia’s a big place.’ In return, ‘blue seal’ American cigarettes are smuggled back and are on open sale throughout Sulu and Zamboanga.

  These are not romantic businesses to be engaged in, and certainly not to fall foul of. The treatment of the Vietnamese ‘boat people’, the refugees who fled Vietnam after 1975, was a case in point, and those victims who lived to testify to pirate attacks – often by well-equipped Thais – gave horrendous accounts. The earlier waves of refugees were largely Chinese middle classes from the Cholon district of Ho Chi Minh City, lately Saigon, and were often wealthy. They brought what concentrated valuables they could with them, usually gold, hidden about the overcrowded boats with great ingenuity, sometimes suspended by brass wire beneath the keel. Maybe the earlier pirates were satisfied by good hauls, but as time passed and the Chinese were replaced by ordinary Vietnamese political refugees their savageries began to be mentioned in the world’s press. All in all, it was a far cry from the behaviour of the Bangladeshi pirates who in November 1989 were reported as singing their victims a little choral medley before asking them to turn over their valuables.*

  Instances of horrible and immensely daring opportunism abound among the archipelagos of South-East Asia and are frequently evidence of a nomadic understanding of the sea. Less than a year after the Doña Paz disaster another overcrowded Sulpicio Lines vessel, the Doña Marilyn, sailed for Manila out of Cebu despite the coastguard’s warnings of the imminent arrival of typhoon ‘Unsang’. On the night of 26 October 1988 the Doña Marilyn sank while trying to shelter in the lee of Guiguitang and Manok-Manuk islands off the north coast of Leyte. On this occasion, at least, there was land nearby. The seas were very heavy and many survivors who managed to swim in the right direction were pounded against the jagged offshore reefs and died there. And yet while dozens of brave Manok-Manuk islanders formed a human chain far out into the surf to pull exhausted swimmers in, other villagers who had heard the ship’s radioed distress signals and had seen her lights had long since launched their flimsy bangkas and were far out in the storm, hauling survivors aboard, stripping them of any valuables, and throwing them back in. Had they been rescuers, their courage could scarcely have been overpraised. Yet as plunderers their bravery was actually no less. They displayed a true piratical streak that night, amoral and enterprising.*

  To make a living from smuggling, as from piracy, one needs to know the territory with a precise and local eye. This must be true whether on land or sea. In regions where particular trade routes run or particular economies have grown up, smuggling activities will develop their own skills, lore and traditions. The bootleggers of West Virginia who ran illicit corn liquor through the Allegheny Mountains developed driving and engineering skills for outrunning the law which in turn nourished the entire sport of American stock car racing. Mountain boys drove as soon as their feet could reach the pedals, and apart from learning a repertoire of tricks (such as the ‘bootlegger’s turn’) they also acquired great sensitivity to details of road surface, weather conditions, and a car’s balance and handling depending on how full the hidden tank of liquor was. The archipelagic people of South-East Asia have analogous skills, but they have others as well which make land-based versions look coarse and two-dimensional. Above all they are prodigious navigators.

  The Bajaus’ ability to go back to a particular patch of ocean without reference to land seems uncanny. Stories are told of their being able to sail unerringly to a single lobster pot on an overcast night out of sight of land. I have never seen this, but certainly such things are habitually said about other sorts of nomads, whether Aborigines in Australia or Kababish camel herders on the fringes of north-western Sudan. They are peculiar to any people whose entire living depends on a knowledge of their natural surroundings and who are themselves largely bound into the ecology of the area. The Bajau’s knowledge of the sea comes as much from living in it as off it and extends to its every aspect.

  *

  Anthropology has confirmed what was self-evident long before Thor Heyerdahl and his Kon-Tiki venture in the late 1940s. That is, that sea nomads have always been serious navigators. Fifteen hundred years ago the Polynesians were sailing around the Pacific in big catamarans using the stars, frigate birds, sea conditions, smells and their own stick maps to tell them where they were. (It would be interesting to know if these stick maps, whose intersections marked islands, shoals and currents with considerable accuracy, also marked imaginary islands which, over the centuries, gradually disappeared.) Recent research concludes that Homo, like many other species, does have a built-in sense of direction, no matter how atrophied it may have become from disuse.* Apart from navigation, though, a sea gypsy’s knowledge of the ocean is scientific in its detail, yet his is very far from being a scientist’s eye. For one thing, it tends to be holistic to a degree, whereas the impression given by most of the geophysicists aboard the Farnella was one of extreme specialisation.

  The question finally asks itself: What order of knowledge do we stand to lose if and when such people as sea nomads finally abandon their way of life, and does it matter? Perhaps one can say with more than mere intuition that certain innate skills and faculties do atrophy through not being used, that an increasing reliance on electronics to mediate our apprehension of the world does lead to the loss of certain sensitivities and that to lose any sensitivity or awareness is limiting and unwise. Again, extreme examples are sometimes advanced in favour of retaining ‘old methods’. In the case of navigation, for instance, it might be said that with increasing reliance on satellite-based positioning and guidance systems, the old skills of stellar navigation may no longer be taught even as a ‘manual backup’, and will in time be lost altogether. ‘What happens,’ the argument runs, ‘if something puts all electronic navigational systems out of commission at once? Suppose there is a massive solar flare whose radiation disrupts the GPS satellites?* Or one of those sudden reverses of Earth’s magnetic polarity which would make it necessary to recalibrate all compasses? What then?’

  Of course, this is not quite the point, though there is a poignancy in watching the old and new technologies meet. In the early 1970s I found myself flying from Recife in Brazil to London Gatwick in a VC10 of British Caledonian. The aircraft was virtually empty. I was one of eleven passengers, and after the others had settled in for the night (they were mostly elderly) I was invited to spend as long as I liked in the cockpit. Such innocent, pre-terrorist days they were; casual in the economic sense, too, which is no doubt why the airline no longer exists. In the middle of the night the navigator, who had been getting radio fixes from Dakar and Cape Verde, stood up and opened a tiny hatch in the cockpit roof which he called the ‘smoke ventilation hole’. This exposed a perspex bubble through which he shot the stars with a sextant. Today there are no more
navigators in airline service, the last having flown on VC10s and Boeing 707s. The crew on the flight deck of a modern airliner consists only of the captain and the first officer. Neither has been trained to navigate by the stars. Nor has the cabin crew. If an aircraft is forced to ditch and its passengers and crew manage to haul themselves into the rubber dinghies they will not, unlike Captain Bligh and his fellow officers, be able to make a dogged landfall weeks later nor even, like downed World War II aircrews, know which direction to paddle in. All they can do is sit impotently bobbing up and down, waiting for rescue.

  The point is not only what will happen if and when stellar navigation becomes a lost art but who, apart from astronomers will remain attentive to the heavens? And who apart from scientists will remain attentive to the sea? Even when it happens before our eyes it is hard enough to accept that species become extinct, that they always have and always will since without extinction there is no evolution. But the idea of bodies of knowledge becoming extinct seems quite as shocking, and it is difficult to see how it can be avoided when they are so inseparable a part of a rare and specialised way of life. It is too late now to save many a tribe – of Amazonian Indians, for example – who might have spared us years of suffering and expensive research had they been consulted in time about the medicinal properties of the plants they knew best. (This, of course, is the utilitarian approach to conservation.) Maybe after all, bodies of knowledge peculiar to a tribe should, like species, be allowed to become extinct once circumstances have changed and they can no longer adapt themselves.

  Apart from rebelling instinctively against it, it is not an easy argument to counter. If in fifty years’ time most Bajau are stockbrokers, what will the sea be to them except somewhere for family outings and expensive water sports? Of what use to future generations their present intricate understanding of the ocean? If there is a scientific rather than a sentimental answer it might be one analogous to that which sees the paramount importance of maintaining the diversity of species, of the gene pool. The more the world becomes politically, economically and culturally centralised, the more homogenised its ways of living, so the dangers of sameness become apparent. To take a notorious example, the EU regulations restricting the varieties of seeds permitted for sale within the union have for years been viewed as potentially disastrous by botanists and agronomists. A real threat is concealed in the preferencing of a handful of crop varieties chosen only according to marketplace (mainly visual) criteria. Once the genetic bank is depleted the chances of calamity caused by a single unexpected virus or pest become much greater. When in the nineteenth century the Irish potato crop was lost, creating mass famine and emigration to the New World, the potatoes were almost entirely of a single strain, uniformly susceptible to blight. In future, no amount of genetic juggling or selective pesticides will be as effective as growing the widest possible variety of fruit and vegetables, keeping unfashionable strains alive even if the immediate benefits are not obvious.