Seven-Tenths

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  A consumer-based cultural uniformity is still some way off but is already advanced enough for certain grim futures to be imagined. At the same time, utterly various ways of experiencing the planet still do survive, though tenuously and in scattered fashion. The Bajau looks up, and the sun crossing the sky tells him any number of things, among them his place, his time, and how the sea creatures on which his living depends will be behaving. In another world entirely, one spanned with satellites and a global money market, the sun is just a noun, a hot and dazzling object rising with the Nikkei and setting with the Dow-Jones.

  * Joseph Conrad, Victory (1915).

  * Leopold Ainsworth, A Merchant Venturer among the Sea Gypsies (London, 1930).

  * See p. 115.

  † For this and many details of Bajau life I am indebted to Dr Saladin S. Teo, a native of Laminusa Island, Siasi. In addition to being a superintendent for schools in Sulu, he has made a particularly sympathetic study of the Bajau over many years. His book The Lifestyle of the Badjaos (Manila, CEU, 1989) is a useful addition to the literature, but even more valuable to me was his friendly and courteous company on visits to Siasi and Laminusa.

  * H. Arlo Nimmo, ‘Reflections on Bajau History’, Philippine Studies 16, no. 1 (1968).

  * V. R. Savage, Western Impressions of Nature and Landscape in Southeast Asia (Singapore, 1984).

  * BBC World Service, Meridian, 11 November 1989.

  * To forestall any moral posturing we should remember the wreckers who within living memory were still active around Britain’s shores. Their behaviour was arguably even worse since they were occasionally known to lure ships onto rocks by means of false lights. (For an outstanding recent account see Bella Bathurst, The Wreckers, 2005.) It is also salutary to go back sixty years or so to when London was mostly behaving gallantly during the Blitz. On the night of 8 March 1941, two bombs hit the crowded Café de Paris beneath the Rialto cinema in Coventry Street. One exploded, killing 33 outright and wounding 60. In the semi-darkness, choking fumes, dust and general carnage, two men posing as members of a rescue squad went round calmly removing rings from the fingers of the dead and unconscious and turning out handbags. In fact, there were organised gangs who had an elaborate telephone network keeping them up to date on where bombs had fallen and which places might present the best opportunities for looting.

  * The evidence comes from laboratory experiments during which subjects’ ability to distinguish North gradually improved, which ‘suggests that orientation in humans is a latent sense, which in some people can be recalled very successfully after multiple challenge’ (Mary Campion, The Journal of Navigation, 44, no. 1 (January 1991).

  * Such flares are not uncommon. A few years ago, the electromagnetic energy of a solar storm induced currents in landlines which caused widespread power failures in Canada, blacking out entire cities. Recently, a similar surge of solar radiation was enough to slow several GPS satellites, altering their orbits and hence the accuracy of their information.

  II

  Poems to Tecla

  From time to time, one notices around offshore corals, and sometimes even far out to sea, small insects skating on the water’s surface. Usually they are to be seen in flotillas which mill frantically at the advance of a hand, but lone specimens can be found. They are water striders of the genus Halobates (‘salt treader’), the only insects out of roughly a million described species to inhabit the open sea. There are thirty-seven coastal and five oceanic species of Halobates, and relatively little is known about their biology. Unlike most intertidal animals they have colonised the sea from the land, and face a seemingly hostile environment. They cannot fly; they cannot dive; and to watch them skimming the surface one would imagine they would be crushed by an eddy, let alone by a wave.

  The more one examines them, lying in the water or uncomfortably draped over a boat’s sharp prow, the more one wonders. It is known they eat the debris of smaller insects: midge corpses, and so on. It is known some of them lay their eggs on the blades of sea grasses and coralline algae. The mating behaviour of a couple of species has been studied, as well as their way of avoiding predators.* But much remains mysterious, not least how a land insect has found enough in its favour on the sea’s surface to make its home there. If such a living can be made, why is Halobates the only known insect to have discovered it? And, infinitesimal speck on a liquid desert that it is, how does it ever find the tiny fresh corpses on which it feeds? What is its relationship with salt, and how does its physiology handle the salt economy? What happens to it in the torrential downpours which smash the sea’s surface into foam and can put a drinkable layer of fresh water on top?

  These are the sorts of questions which time and zoology will no doubt answer. In the mean time, one is left with constant surprise at how well forms of life adapt to conditions that seem impossibly harsh or daunting. The dislikeable neologism ‘extremophiles’ has recently been attached to them, though to describe an animal as a lover of extremes is an obvious anthropomorphism. Varieties of life colonise any place or set of conditions that will support them; they do not rate them in terms of human comfort. It was precisely these sorts of argument which helped the ‘azoic’ theory last as long as it did. Since then, of course, there have been abundant discoveries of life forms which have adapted to extreme conditions, including bacteria in active volcanoes; hydrothermal vent communities of crabs, worms and fish living next to ‘black smokers’ on the deep seabed with metabolisms attuned to near-boiling temperatures; lichens and mosses in the Antarctic; desert snails and extraordinary plants like Welwitschia mirabilis whose two curling, strap-like leaves winnow so much life out of blazing heat and nightly fogs in the Namib Desert that single plants may live to be over 1,000 years old.

  ‘Extremophilic’ even seems a not inaccurate way of describing certain members of the genus Homo. It is difficult to see a culture like that of the Eskimos or Bedouin as founded on timidity. Where nomads are concerned, it is clear there are certain cultures, as there are individuals, to whom wandering is a necessary part of the economy of living, not merely of survival. Just as people may grow up loving the most nondescript homes and surroundings, so cultures develop which are deeply attached to apparently unpropitious landscapes and conditions. ‘Attached to’ implies both love and dependence, in which it is not possible to distinguish between a living and the place where it is lived. Deserts and oceans, which to an outsider seem to share great similarities in that both appear virtually featureless and both are life-threatening without specialised knowledge, are places which transcend their own conditions to the point where some people consider them spiritual entities. To wring a living – still more a livelihood – out of them requires skill and courage but also love. In this case, a word like ‘extremophilia’ seems, if still graceless, quite appropriate. It is beyond understanding why governments and their agents should imagine that cultures which have taken millennia to attune themselves to such ways of life might cheerfully renounce them in as little as a generation. The world is dotted with groups of demoralised tribespeople, drunk in shacks and shanties at the margins of the societies that have disinherited them. Exasperated and not always unsympathetic officials complain about the inertia and fecklessness of Aborigines or American Indians, how pathetically they connive at their own degradation. Similar officials throw up their hands over the Bajau, baffled by their lack of interest in education or modern health care. But why would a Bajau wish to become assimilated or strengthen his ties with land when his entire history is based on the knowledge that in the long run life on land means nothing but trouble? The sea is not something he can turn his back on to order. To assume he can, or would want to, betrays the origins of the social science that expects it. Western, and particularly American, society thinks little of moving hundreds of miles to take up a new job; but to equate nomadism with mobility is a gross mistake.

  When presenting Homo with an environment for living, the ocean strips away inessentials other than skill, knowledge and a
ttention. It is a life which requires its own intensity and exacts its own discipline. Many people who are not tribal nomads by birth live lives as remote from ordinary society as that of the wandering albatross. This bird, electronically tagged, has been recorded as making single flights equivalent to the distance of Australia to Britain before returning to a particular island.* (In view of a life spent mostly on the wing it would be too cosy to call this place ‘home’.) Among their many human counterparts would be the seamen who spend three or more years continuously afloat. One sunny afternoon on board Farnella I watched crewmen painting the deck around pink-and-white geologists as they sunbathed. Middle-aged men, they swapped a few Hull syllables with each other and painted as carefully as if the ship were a house they had clubbed together and bought with a mortgage. They paid no attention to the scientists, not even to one wearing a bikini and no top. They gave off an aura of austere contentment, as if they were pleased the Farnella was going nowhere while doing so along the most precisely navigated paths. In this way they combined seagoing professionalism with perpetual non-arrival. How trim the ship was! At three in the morning one would come across a man humming to himself, kneeling with a scrubbing brush in a lavatory in a cloud of bleach vapour. Val did not think of himself as one of that sort, however, since he admitted to being at sea just for the money. He had lost his woman and sold his house and now wanted to rebuild his finances.

  ‘How else would I make £200 a week?’, he wanted to know. ‘But it’s no fun, I can tell you. Be honest, I loathe the sea. Why won’t the bugger keep still? It doesn’t seem to bother them. They’re a funny lot. Some are here because they’ve got broken hearts. Ah, didn’t know that, did you? True, though. Some because they’ve got no other home. Really, they’re only happy at sea. Beats me. They dread going back, and that’s true. A couple of days and they don’t know what to do.

  ‘It’s obvious why they’re here, isn’t it? Course, it’s to avoid responsibility. No mortgage, no insurance, no tax, no car, no electricity bills, no gas bills. Free board and lodging. Those deck hands specially. Been at it since they left school, if ever they went, that is. They don’t know any other life. Very ignorant. Very narrow minds, if you ask my opinion, though I don’t mean that as criticism. The sea’s all they know. They’re mostly terrible people when they’re ashore. They can’t handle it, so they just get pissed. You never see them drunk on board, do you? Bit tiddly, maybe, but never falling-down drunk like they get ashore. No, they must really like the life. I’ve caught one or two of them sometimes, up on deck, just staring at nothing like a normal person’d watch telly. Mesmerised.’

  All ocean drifters, ‘salt treaders’, lone yachtsmen, mystics, island-hoppers, wanderers and hermits have a degree of impatience with, and ignorance of, the greater world. A further characteristic of nomads, which many of them share, is an absolute vagueness about geography combined with a precise knowledge of orientation. There is a sense in which no beautifully drawn chart can be made to coincide at any point with the inner maps they carry with them. The two do not relate to one another. I have met tribespeople deep in the western Egyptian desert who had no remote idea whether they were in Egypt or Libya. Nor, so far as they knew, did they hold any particular citizenship. The distinctions they made were linguistic and tribal, and the elaborate kinship tables each carried in his head amounted to maps. I would not be surprised to learn that some Eskimos are much the same, and while always knowing exactly where they are may not know if others happen to call that place ‘Greenland’, ‘Canada’ or ‘Russia’.

  There is something irresistible about this since it affirms the ancient homogeneity of land or ocean, a unity of human experience that transcends temporary political boundaries. As for the seas, those vast tracts, seven-tenths of the planet’s surface, of course they are mysterious and haunting. Time and again they draw people back to them: mad mariners, adventurers, solitaries, very often misfits on land who are transformed once they are afloat. Their keels cut tiny scratches on the face of an abyss of creatures and terrains which mostly will never be seen by human eye. Something satisfactory wells up from this deep and nourishes them.

  There are extremophiles everywhere, and the adaptations they make to solitariness or small groups are various and strange. By no means all men forced by a sudden change of weather to spend five months’ isolation in an Antarctic research station turn out to be either raving or overjoyed when the relief team arrives with thunderous bonhomie and promises of an unbroken year’s leave. I was told of one of the last victims of le bagne to be released from prison on the Îles du Salut in 1954.* He had been there twenty-two years and had benefited from ‘the cucumber solution’ until his fellow convict and lover had died some years previously. The freed man, about to be repatriated to Grenoble, appeared unwilling to leave the island because ‘he did not know how Tecla would manage without him’. Indeed, he begged to remain in Cayenne and to be allowed to go back to his prison island as a caretaker. This was refused. Sadly, he permitted himself to be dressed in a cheap suit and put aboard a steamer. He took with him a manuscript, ‘very illegible, a poem of many thousands of lines, all written in pencil on different scraps of paper. I saw it myself, monsieur. It was a poem to Tecla, about Tecla, and for all I know by Tecla. And who was Tecla, you ask? Tecla, monsieur, was a gull with one leg. His companion of six years, or so he asked us to believe.’

  A good example of a highly specialised social group living in extreme circumstances is that of seventeenth-century English pirates in the Caribbean. It was described by a scholar who, in default of extensive documentation (for they were not great diarists) elegantly deduced by a series of negative proofs how their lives had to have been. His thesis is that these buccaneers were practically all homosexual and that their piratical activities were sustained by their sexual relationships, much as the Spartans’ valour was. He cites as determining factors the generally lenient prevailing attitudes to homosexuality in England at the time and the way in which apprentices were drawn or press-ganged extensively from the bands of boy vagrants (‘great flockes of Chyldren’) who roamed the country and whose group identification, for their own protection, was exclusive. Furthermore, the population of the British West Indian islands was then almost entirely male, an imbalance enhanced by transportation. ‘The single certainty is that the only non-solitary sexual activities available to buccaneers for most of the years they spent in the Caribbean and for almost all of the time they were aboard ship were homosexual.’* Very few pirates ever married, it seems, and those who did were uniformly unlucky with their women (and vice versa, one would imagine). Blackbeard, William Dampier, Bartholomew Sharp and other pirate captains jealously guarded their favourite boys, while all aboard took advantage of a form of male bonding discreetly named matelotage. It is a great pity there is such a dearth of contemporary documents, of poems to Tecla even, although vivid details do emerge. Captain John Avery was known as Long Ben, ‘not because of his height’. Add to all this the occasional bouts of derring-do and the frequent orgies of drinking when every soul aboard from captain to ten-year-old powder-monkey was stone drunk, and by contrast with the solidarity of outlaw life afloat, the prospect of ‘straight’ life (in both senses) ashore would likely have appeared dreary indeed. It is strange to think that, but for the lack of a few hundred women in the West Indies, piracy might have assumed quite different patterns or even have been suppressed entirely by privateers.

  Nomads have a need to wander in a world they understand. Like Halobates, many tribes and individuals are very specifically adapted and cannot resist gross change. Take away their habitat, their rovings and solitudes, and they go to pieces. Because of the prevailing cultural pressures in Sulu the Bajau are mainly Islamicised and have become or are becoming Muslim. It is an appropriate religion because Islam contains a statutory requirement for pilgrimage. Perhaps since Islam itself evolved from nomadic cultures it made pilgrimage one of the four chief ritual and moral duties incumbent on all Muslims. In Christia
nity it is a tradition which has long since faded, except in occasional re-enactments. There is a psychological accuracy in this insistence that a proper life cannot be lived without pilgrimage, a journey, a great excursion and abandoning of town, village, hearth. Only in this way is the unsuspected majesty of the world revealed. Only by travelling in danger and discomfort along arduous forest paths, desert routes and sea lanes may a truth be approached.

  *