Voices in the Ocean

by Susan Casey

  When pods swam by their island recently, the men pushed off in their dugout canoes and captured about 900 bottlenose, spinner, and spotted dolphins, including 240 calves. Video of the hunts ended up on Al Jazeera, revealing the scene in gruesome detail. The villagers’ hunting method is primitive—banging stones underwater to disorient the dolphins and then running them to the beach—but deadly effective. Once the pods were driven into the mangrove shallows, the Fanalei women waded into the water too, wrestling dolphins into canoes, dragging them onto shore by their tails, grabbing them by their beaks and slinging them over their backs. While men whacked at the thrashing animals with machetes and women harvested the teeth, children played with headless dolphin carcasses, lolling in pools of blood.

  The next day the villagers hunted again, rounding up hundreds more, and the frenzied killing continued, with a tide of dead dolphins drawing flies on the beach. Far from subsistence hunting or cultural tradition, Fanalei was engaged in a massacre intended to provoke attention. INTERNATIONAL OUTRAGE OVER SOLOMON ISLANDS’ DOLPHIN SLAUGHTER, read ABC News Australia’s headline. DOLPHIN WAR HEATS UP, the Solomon Star reported. The Guardian also weighed in: SOLOMON ISLANDS VILLAGERS KILL 900 DOLPHINS IN CONSERVATION DISPUTE.

  To grasp the pitch of local hostilities, you have to consider the Solomon Islands’ history, and it isn’t a pretty tale. The Solomons existed apart from civilization until the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries arrived, bringing cruelty: European traders enslaved thousands of natives and forced them into labor on sugar plantations. Britain claimed the place, but it was on the far fringes of the empire. These islands played a key role during World War II: nearly forty thousand Allied and Japanese troops lost their lives here, and the fighting also took a steep native toll. Discarded live ordnance is still scattered across the landscape; in recent years, homegrown militias have dug up old shells and used them against their enemies. Vintage munitions are also picked up by fishermen and exploded on reefs. When the dead fish bob to the surface, they are easily collected; the coral is reduced to rubble.

  In 1978, the islands gained independence and struggled to find their footing amid clan violence. (It didn’t help the Solomons’ sense of unity that ninety different languages were spoken throughout the country, by a populace strung across a vast archipelago.) Logging companies from Asia poured in, bribed officials, and razed old-growth forests. Ethnic clashes and weak government led to a savage civil war from 1998 to 2003, a period known as “the Tensions.” It was a lawless time, people turning on one another with automatic weapons, World War II detritus, machetes, knives, and anything else they could get their hands on. It took an Australian-led, multinational peacekeeping force (RAMSI: Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands) to put a lid on the marauding; the soldiers are still in residence today.

  Unlike Japan, the Solomon Islands really do have a tradition of hunting dolphins that goes back centuries. In the past these hunts were sacred events, called by dolphin priests. They happened seasonally, and were modest in their take. Only spinner and spotted dolphins could be killed, as few as possible to serve the village’s needs; there were prayers and rituals to honor the dolphins who gave their lives. Then, it was a deeply spiritual endeavor; now, like so many pursuits, it’s mostly about cash. Dolphin teeth are prized as a currency, used in rural commerce. They are required, for instance, to buy cigarettes, a pig, or a bride—a woman costs at least a thousand teeth. During ceremonies in dolphin-hunting communities, both men and women will be decked out in dolphin-tooth necklaces, earrings, headdresses, belts: a lone person might be wearing twenty dolphins. Each dolphin tooth is worth between fifty cents and one dollar, depending on its size and quality. The more teeth a family displays, the higher its social status.

  Into this combustible mix came a Zippo lighter, arriving at the peak of the Tensions in 2002. Christopher Porter, a thirty-two-year-old former marine mammal trainer from British Columbia, Canada, stepped off the plane in Honiara and made his way to Fanalei and Adagege, another dolphin-hunting enclave on Malaita. Porter, a burly guy with a surplus of nerve, had a vision that he expressed to the villagers in pidgin, the Solomons’ lingua franca mash-up of English and Melanesian. The dolphins they were butchering for their meat and teeth, Porter told them, were extremely valuable in the outside world. If the villagers helped him catch them, they would receive great benefits. Porter wanted to sell dolphins from these waters, and then use the money from those transactions to build a luxury resort nearby where guests could “get closer to dolphins than they ever dreamed.” He seemed unconcerned that a country overrun by warlords was generally not a big draw for tourists.

  The Malaitans listened. If they had a talent, it was for snagging pods of dolphins. Their villages had nothing, and Porter was offering jobs, boats, cash. The tattered government granted Porter a 100-dolphin export permit and a lease on forty-acre Gavutu Island, two hours from Honiara by boat. Gavutu had a small harbor and was used by World War II Japanese forces as a seaplane base until the U.S. Marines wrested control in a mean fight on August 8, 1942.

  Porter partnered with a Malaitan chief named Robert Satu, and almost immediately ninety-four dolphins were hauled in and penned up in Gavutu, and at a grotty marina in Honiara. In July 2003, the two men exported twenty-eight bottlenoses to Parque Nizuc, a swim-with-dolphins facility in Cancún, Mexico. (Like most countries, Mexico has banned the capture of dolphins within its own waters.) One of the dolphins died upon arrival; the surviving twenty-seven swam in tight circles emitting high-pitched screams for several days. Within eighteen months, another nine were gone.

  Porter and Satu’s dolphin exploits, once they became known, drew international condemnation. When journalists tried to investigate the Honiara dolphin pens, they were met by armed Solomon Islanders—gang members hired by Satu, who looked on with a satisfied smile as tribesmen slapped the news cameras away. A reporter from the Sydney Morning Herald was hit in the head with a concrete block. Chief Satu was a small, flinty man who looked wizened beyond his fifty-one years; dolphin-tooth necklaces crisscrossed his chest like bandoliers. This business of shipping dolphins to marine parks was massively profitable, he said: “It’s big—bigger than gold or logging.” Satu mused about the possibility of every village having its own “dolphin farm.” “We’ve already created the market,” he said. “They could just follow.”

  Not long after the Cancún export, O’Barry and Berman flew to Honiara. O’Barry viewed video of the remaining dolphins in Porter’s pens, a number that was originally estimated at twenty-seven but had shrunk with each passing week; the remaining animals were so malnourished and dehydrated that some had developed a condition called “peanut head,” their skulls showing clearly beneath their skin. He discovered that some of Porter’s bottlenoses had died after being fed rotten fish; another environmental group reported that a dolphin had been eaten by a crocodile. Without notice, O’Barry showed up at Gavutu; his boat was chased away by testy guards. Later, Porter would admit that all of his dolphins had vanished while he was out of the country, fund-raising. He provided no explanation for what had happened to them.

  Porter seemed to court attention, but it was clear the antagonism rattled him. “Like the rest of the world, just blame Chris Porter,” he complained. “I’m the monster in activists’ heads. Everyone thinks I’m the worst man on Earth for dolphins. I’m the one who catches them all and I’m the greedy one and I’m the exploiter.” According to Porter, the opposite was true. “I love animals,” he said. “I cried during Old Yeller.” Few people, however, saw him as a friend to wildlife. Porter was dubbed “the Darth Vader of Dolphins,” a nickname that stuck.

  Porter explained to the media that he’d chosen the Solomon Islands for his operation because of the country’s dolphin-tooth fetish. If they were decapitating so many of the animals, he reasoned, it seemed unlikely the islanders would mind exporting some too, particularly if they profited from the sales. But one local man, Lawrence Makili, did mind. He minded a
lot.

  Makili was born on a remote atoll called Ontong Java, one of the farthest-flung bits of the Solomons, technically part of Malaita even though it is three hundred miles away. “I came up from nowhere,” he’d said, describing his roots. He had four brothers and two sisters, many nieces and nephews and cousins, two adult sons, and a fiancée. About half of his family lived in Honiara, while the rest had stayed on the atoll. In his youth, Makili made his way to Guadalcanal to attend college, at an institution run by the Anglican Church, but he was expelled during his third year after protesting the misuse of school funds.

  Above anyone else in his country, Makili was the face of opposition to the Solomons’ dolphin trade. He was a devout activist, confronting rapacious animal traffickers and slimy officials and despoilers of the natural world. Before he worked with Earth Island, Makili had worked with Greenpeace. He’d fought illegal logging—an issue that had gotten many dissenters murdered—and nuclear testing in the South Pacific, and wildlife poaching, and all manner of dirty dealings in the Solomons. His willingness to speak out had made him a target: in 2008, Makili barely survived an assassination attempt. In a land of tough people, he was one of the toughest. But he was one man against an avalanche of corruption, self-interest, and money, in a place where survival was far from assured. The odds were not in his favor. Makili had friends, but he also had plenty of enemies.

  When I heard about the Fanalei dolphin slaughter, I called Mark Palmer at his office in Berkeley. “It’s a long, complicated story,” Palmer said, with a sigh. The money had been stolen by the village’s urban faction, he confirmed, and what’s more, there was suspicion that dolphin traffickers had encouraged the theft. Since 2003, dolphins from the Solomons had been shipped not only to Mexico, but also to Dubai, China, and the Philippines, despite a global outcry against the practice. It was in the traffickers’ interest for the hunts to continue, Palmer explained, because then they could export the animals with less controversy, by claiming they were “saving” them.

  “Well,” I said, after listening to Palmer. “I think I should go there right now.”

  “Ahhh, that would be exceedingly dangerous,” he said, and then laughed sharply, as though astonished by the suggestion. “You’d need an armed guard for sure.” Heading to the Solomons was a terrible idea, he stressed. Things were far too volatile right now. Even Makili was laying low these days. “Being seen with Lawrence would taint you,” Palmer warned. “And they’ve tried to kill him before.”

  To poke around the country on the sensitive subject of dolphins would be like pressing on an exposed nerve, but that was the point. Where humans meet dolphins the result is a spectrum of extremes, and only in the Solomon Islands was every last one of them on display: dolphins were worshipped and abused, revered and gutted, valued and discarded. They were considered mystical, and they were used to buy women. While there were many places I would have preferred to visit, there was no place I needed to witness more. I let Palmer try to dissuade me for a bit longer, and then I hung up and began to search for flights online.

  I quickly discovered that planning anything in the Solomons demands persistence. The hotels answered their phones only rarely; flights into the country were sporadic. I made e-mail contact with Makili: he instructed me to rent a car, but I was quoted a price of $4,000 U.S. a week for a rusted-out subcompact. “Can you help me find a driver or a guide or a bodyguard or—something?” I e-mailed back. “I can recommend you a driver,” Makili replied, “but what is he going to drive if you aren’t hiring a car? Please inform me properly.” I wrote back, but Makili had vanished. I didn’t hear from him for days. Finally he resurfaced, ignored every one of my desperate queries, and told me flat-out to settle down. “Safety now is a bit risky,” he wrote. “But I can handle it. It’s okay, this is my country.”

  Somehow, I’d sort of arranged that someone might be at the Honiara airport to meet me and drive me to my hotel, the Kitano Mendana. When I spoke to Berman about my trip he warned that I’d be followed in the city, and that I should never venture anywhere alone. “That’s the way it is there, I’m afraid,” he said. “Please believe me.” My fears weren’t calmed by the eight-foot statue of a Malaitan warrior, lunging forward with a spear in one hand and a club in the other, that greeted arrivals in the one-room terminal.

  Rolling my bag out to the road, I noticed a smiling man in crisp slacks and a white button-down shirt looking at me. “Mendana?” he said, pointing to an unmarked van. “Yes,” I said. “Are you from the hotel?” He didn’t answer, but reached for my suitcase and flung it into the back. “Come,” he said. Lacking other options, I got in.

  We swung onto the main road, possibly the only road, two lanes in each direction split by a center median. It was high noon and the sun was hard and bright. Women trudged along the dusty shoulder carrying umbrellas for shade; a man walked by with a live pig slung across his back. Despite the poverty in evidence, the landscape was lush. Palm trees towered; grass grew exuberantly. The few buildings I could see were squat and crudely built, thatched or tin-roofed, wrapped with fencing and barbed wire. “How far is the hotel?” I asked, mainly to confirm we were actually headed there. The man glanced at me in the rearview mirror. “You are Susan,” he said, with a nod. “I have talk of you.”

  His name was Albert, he told me, and he was from Savo, a volcanic island just north of Guadalcanal. He was kind and educated and chatty, taking the opportunity to practice his English. The main thing he wanted to discuss, it turned out, was dolphins. “The people should cooperate to look after the dolphins,” he said, with conviction. “The dolphin is very like myself and yourself, Susan.”

  I wasn’t expecting to dive into the nation’s touchiest topic quite so instantly, and I wondered if it might be some sort of a setup. I had no sense of why the driver would connect me with the dolphin controversy, and this was worrying. For safety reasons, I needed to keep a low profile. Perhaps the average Solomon citizen, like Albert, wanted to protect dolphins, but to the villagers who were hunting the animals, or the individuals who were in on the live capture trade, anyone questioning either practice was an unwelcome guest. During O’Barry’s last visit here, a prominent Honiara businessman and dolphin dealer had sent a posse to attack him right in his hotel lobby. The list of beneficiaries from dolphin trafficking reportedly reached high in the government; its official response to Makili’s abduction and beating was to criticize him for, in the words of the fisheries minister, “trying to disrupt the country’s new multi-million dollar industry.”

  Then, of course, there was the dolphin-based currency system. “It’s part of our culture, taking the teeth,” Albert confirmed, as though attempting to teach a crash course in Solomon Island Dolphin Studies before we arrived at the hotel. “When you make a bride price for marriage. It’s very strong in Malaita province.” There, the rule was simple: No dolphin teeth, no wife. “They killed more than a thousand-plus dolphins last week,” Albert said, shaking his head. “That’s not good.”

  I didn’t know what to say. We had stopped at a light, pulling up next to a cement planter painted in a tribal motif, depicting a man straddling a dolphin and bending it painfully backward. The man had the dolphin’s beak in his mouth, as though devouring the animal headfirst. “I’m honest to tell you, Susan,” Albert continued, “we always swim on the sea, and the very young dolphins come and just play. It’s beautiful!” He smiled into the rearview mirror. “I think we have a dolphin cave,” he concluded, describing how the pods seem to materialize out of Savo itself, and then mysteriously disappear back into its bowels. As he turned into the hotel, an A-frame building shrouded in palm trees, he wound up with one last pitch for his home island: “We would never do any harm to the dolphins, never. Never!”

  The hotel was relatively modern, and located on what passed for a beach in Honiara, a muddy strip confettied with plastic. A man with ritual scars across his face checked me in with an absence of chitchat. My room was clean and equipped with double doo
r locks, so after I’d shoved my suitcase into the closet, popped my malaria pill, and washed it down with a swig of vodka, I crashed for a nap. I’d been traveling for thirty-two hours. It took only seconds for me to pass out in exhaustion.

  I woke to the phone ringing insistently; someone was calling from the lobby. This was unexpected. Who even knew that I was here? Makili had instructed me to buy a local cell phone, then text him when I had it. I’d figured I would do this in the morning, and then meet him in some out-of-the-way place, as instructed by absolutely everyone. It had been repeatedly emphasized to me: being seen with Makili would draw the kind of attention I didn’t want. I picked up the phone. “Hello?”

  It was the scar-faced man at reception. “Lawrence Makili here to see you.”

  Within seconds, I heard a knock at my door. I opened it and there was Makili, familiar because I’d seen photos of him, including some taken in the hospital after his attack, with both eyes swollen shut and both arms encased in casts. In person, as in pictures, Makili was not someone who would fade into a crowd. He was a substantial guy, solid as a barrel, with a corona of dreadlocks that fell past his hips. His face was kind and ferocious at once, framed by a mustache and beard that were just beginning to gray. Makili was only forty-two, but he had the careworn air of an older man. He wore slouchy pants and battered leather loafers and a T-shirt with a drawing of a crying dolphin on it.

  It quickly became clear that Makili didn’t share anyone else’s concern about keeping out of view. When I asked if it was okay for me to be seen hanging around with him, he let loose with a belly laugh, as though this were the most ridiculous question in the world. All the mutinous strife and ugliness, the accusations and counteraccusations, the lunacy of his country’s recent history with dolphins and his dicey role as the sole resident to stand up to it—all of this had left him undaunted. Makili seemed frustrated, perhaps, pissed off for sure, but not intimidated. He sat down as though ready to talk, but he was fidgety and uncomfortable in the wicker chair. Later, I would come to recognize this body language as a cue that Makili wanted a cigarette (Marlboro Blues) or a SolBrew (the national beer), or a mouthful of betel quid (a psychoactive nut chewed for its stimulant buzz), but at the time I chalked up his restlessness to angst about the Fanalei situation.