Ring of Fire

by Lawrence Blair; Lorne Blaire

  Beneath the point lies Krander’s whirlpool, a notorious navigational hazard, powerful enough at times to drag down the smaller prahu, so most sailors steer well clear of it. For the people of Bira, however, it is a point of honour to scythe through the troubled gap between the whirlpool and the rocks.

  The monster was at its most mellow that day, but still energetic enough to toss Sinar Surya’s hundred tons around in an alarming manner. Lorne was dangling over the bowsprit filming as I firmly held his legs, when he was taken off-guard by a violent lurch and dropped our wide-angle lens cap overboard. He howled with dismay at the loss and was to curse the incident many more times over the months to come. Old Ladjang, however, nodded his approval.

  ‘That was a fine offering you made to Krander and Sampanena,’ he remarked. ‘Now our voyage is sure to be a safe one.’

  We were part of a scattered fleet of Bira prahu. Two were headed south to Flores, one south-west to Bali and Java, and another west to Borneo. We watched them disappear into the dusk as we anchored at the little island of Likangloe, where we had witnessed our first python hunt. Both wind and current were still unseasonably favourable for Makassar, but Tandri decided, probably wisely, that we would need more ballast from the beach at Likangloe. The cliffs of Sampanena were still in sight, but the required auspicious departure had been made.

  The sun came onstage for its evening display of vulgar wealth, and Ladjang turned towards Mecca in prayer. I found a quiet corner of the deck to gaze up at the moonless sky. Those who have only seen the northern stars may not realize how much more dramatic are those of the southern hemisphere. I was absorbed by their brilliance, embraced by them, lost in them, and I slept.

  From Lorne’s Diary:

  Our cabin is barely large enough to accommodate both us and our equipment. We cannot fully stretch out in it, nor sit upright without cracking our heads on the decking above. It is four foot six inches wide, extending to a princely six foot six, but the forward end is so packed with our gear that there is barely enough room for our legs.

  We share it with an unwelcome assortment of fellow travellers. Some are there to suck our blood, while others are content to compete with us for our meagre stash of private food. This morning a rat poked his nose in, but they usually seem to prefer the main hold. It’s the insects that enjoy travelling cabin class. We don’t see much of them in the daytime, but at night the bedbugs crawl out from under our mats, and we listen to the cockroaches munching away merrily in the food-basket between our heads, and to the brittle scrabbling of their feet on the ceiling a couple of feet above us. They haven’t found their sea legs yet, and a sudden lurch can bring several of them raining down on our faces. It’s hard to sleep with a panic-stricken cockroach clawing its way out of one’s eye-socket!

  At dawn we set sail due west along the southern coast of Celebes. The east wind, which had held all night, chose this moment to reverse itself, and the west monsoon blew relentlessly into our faces. At the end of every clawing tack we found ourselves back at almost the same place we had started; we began to learn the realities of life aboard a Bugis prahu.

  Raising our anchor from the coral in Sulawesi without benefit of winches is no mean task. (LAWRENCE & LORNE BLAIR)

  Downwind or on a broad reach they are magnificent craft, but upwind sailing is definitely not their strong suit. Lightly laden, as was Sinar Surya, they are a disaster. Pointing, at best, some 60 degrees off the wind, and drifting downwind at an alarming rate, we made little or no progress during the next three days. The crew were kept occupied completing the many jobs that should have been finished before putting out. Nobody appeared to give orders, and everyone performed the tasks which most suited his mood of the moment.

  There were only two whose work seemed never to end, and they bore the brunt of an endless string of the only direct orders we ever heard aboard. Amir and Mansur must have been about eight and ten years old. They were the cooks, washers-up, barbers, lice-pickers, deck-swabbers and general gofers at the bottom of a subtle pecking order that slowly revealed itself. This was their first voyage, and their labours were complicated by severe bouts of seasickness, through which they soldiered on valiantly.

  At the peak of the hierarchy stood Tandri. Ah, Tandri! The very sound of his name makes my sense of humour evaporate. Every encounter became a challenge, a test of strength. For hours at night he held court immediately over our hatch, inches above our heads. His audience was the crew, and the language, their own, but he knew we sensed the content of the canisters of venom dropped into our claustrophobic sanctum. Old Ladjang remonstrated with him quietly, but the others were silent, and we realized that our captain was infecting them with a subtle but poisonous hostility towards us. It was the beginning of what was to become the greatest and most dangerous hardship of our voyage.

  Our immediate conflict was over navigation.

  On the fifth dawn we hurried on deck to confirm my certainty that at last we had rounded the south-western point of Sulawesi, and had a clear run north to Makassar. The previous night we had been well on course for it. I checked and then rechecked our position before slumping down in despair. We were in precisely the same place that we had been in three dawns previously! My despair was caused not so much by the frustration of not reaching our destination as by the final shattering of my most cherished illusion about the Bugis.

  Once amongst the world’s greatest blue-water navigators, guided by wave patterns and the clues in seaweed and bird droppings, the Bugis had now lost so much confidence in their old ways that they had been reduced to coast-hugging, on the principle that if their ships sank they at least had a chance of making it ashore alive. It was a reminder of the early days of European seamanship, when captains discouraged their crews from learning how to swim so that they were more likely to sink with their ship than abandon their posts and struggle for shore.

  Sinar Surya carried only an antique compass whose oil was so clouded with age that we could hardly read the rose. I doubt if it had ever been correctly swung, and even our little hand-compass was more accurate. The only chart was more symbolic than effective. Dated 1910, it extended from Singapore to northern Australia, so many of the islands on our route – let alone the hazards – did not even figure. The Bugis had fallen between two sciences, forgetting the old before they had mastered the new.

  ‘Christ, these characters are bloody hopeless! We’ve got to do something,’ I fumed.

  ‘I still think we should let them try it their way and see what happens,’ Lorne ventured. It was an argument that had been simmering for two days, and it was clear he was beginning to waver.

  ‘Even you must be getting a pretty clear picture of what happens. Look at that bastard – there he goes again!’ It was the bus that we had seen twice every day for the last three days, making its regular coastal run between Bulukumba and Makassar. We had both come to hate it and its invisible driver, whom we visualized as a smug glutton sleeping in a comfortable bed each night and stuffing his face with three square meals a day. So crazed were we becoming that I was sure that even at that distance we could spot the fiendish grin he directed at Sinar Surya floundering on the horizon each time he passed!

  Lorne tried feebly to stick to his final defence. ‘But, hell, they’ve been navigating safely to Aru for centuries.’

  ‘Aru? You can forget about Aru. At this rate we’ll be lucky to make it to Makassar before the next monsoon!’

  We went below to plot our rebellious strategy. While waiting for them to reach the outer limit of their seaward tack, we fished for our enormous aviator’s chart which was larger and more colourful, if little more useful, than theirs. Protractors, compasses, rulers, and any other impressive props we could think of – even a film-footage chart and the monocular (or half a pair of binoculars) inherited from our stepfather.

  Judging the moment, we exploded on deck with all our navigational ‘tools’ and I, usually the smooth talker of the family, went into action. Lorne tells me it was my fi
nest hour – and my most shameless. Our objective was simple. It had become obvious that the east-setting current swirled strongest close to the headlands. We had to keep them heading out to sea as long as possible, so that we could fully clear it on our return tack.

  I talked utter rubbish for hours, and on the few occasions that I faltered Lorne would break in and take over until I had recovered my strength. We never did persuade them, but for six valuable hours we managed to hold them on that course far out into the Flores Sea, until finally they came to their senses, noticed the distant and almost invisible shore, and hurriedly tacked towards it again.

  We hadn’t gone as far as we would have liked, and it was touch and go until the very last moment, but we just squeezed past the point between Tanakeke island and the mainland.

  To us the white sands of Tanakeke looked inviting, but our crew were filled with apprehension the closer we got. Tasman, with the face and physique of a circus strong man, brought his largest parang on deck and glowered warily at the passing island.

  ‘This is a bad place.’

  ‘Spirits?’ I asked.

  ‘No, the people. They try to murder everyone who sails too close. Six years ago they attacked my uncle’s prahu, killing him and everyone on board for their cargo.’ Tasman understood such things. He had spent several years amongst the small Indonesian islands off Singapore. It was a period of his life that he would never talk about.

  We left Tanakeke behind without loss of life, and spent the rest of the day on our well-earned broad reach northwards.

  The next day we ghosted into Makassar on the faintest breeze. Amir and Mansur hung rapt from the rigging, transfixed by the slowly growing image of their future. Neither of them had ever seen proper shops, nor ice nor electric light – other than the bulbs which we had used with our generator to illuminate the Keraing’s house in Bira. I looked over towards the Pasanggrahan Hotel, and the balcony from which we had longingly watched so many prahu which we could not sail aboard. It was a good feeling.

  We were not even properly docked before Lorne and I leapt ashore and headed for our favourite Chinese restaurant. The solid ground rocked and heaved beneath us, but we were soon gorging ourselves on rich noodles and spicy chillied crabs and lobster – forbidden fruit while amongst our Islamic Bugis.

  It was a busy four days. Yong had already put his cargo together, and we helped him supervise its loading aboard Sinai Surya. At his home his mother earnestly tried to fatten us up for our adventure ahead, as only the Chinese know how.

  Yong lent us a precious scuba tank and a regulator to take with us, saying: ‘Use it as you like, but please keep some air in it for Aru. You may need it to film my pearl-divers underwater, and to show them how it works. I’ve told them that I’m hoping to replace their old hard-hat helmets with this new scuba equipment, but they think I’m joking when I tell them they won’t have any hoses to the surface,’

  There would be no chance of refilling it; and one tank for four months through some of the world’s most spectacular coral seas would call for superhuman restraint.

  The cost of the charter to Aru had long since been settled: Yong would pay them half the sum now, and his relations would pay the balance once we and the cargo had safely reached Aru. But Tandri now came up with the bright idea of charging an exorbitant additional fee for every island we needed to call at en route. After a marathon round of negotiations, lasting almost a whole day, we managed to whittle it down, with Yong’s expert assistance, to the equivalent of about 20 American dollars per island visited.

  Neither Tandri nor Yong knew – and we were not about to tell them – that we no longer had enough money left to make a single call. Here, at the very beginning of the voyage we had come to Indonesia to make, we were completely broke. Werner came to our rescue with the loan of a hundred dollars, which would have to see us through the three or four months it might take us to reach Aru. Just how we were to get out and home once we had arrived there was a problem we still refused to think about.

  We paid a final courtesy call on General Aziz, Werner’s friend who had lent us Abu and his jeep to film the Toraja. He received us wearing a sarong and bouncing a six-month-old grandson on his lap. He gave us an official letter to show the military commanders we might bump into along the way, and sent one of his high-ranking aides down to the dock to see us off.

  The immaculate officer stepped gingerly aboard Sinar Surya and failed to conceal his astonishment at our living conditions. He informed a grovelling Tandri that we were expected to reach Aru alive, and that if anything unfortunate befell us, Tandri and his crew would find their lives very uncomfortable. It was of course pure bluff, and rank-pulling on a vulgar scale, but from then on the crew was to become almost irritatingly attentive to our safety, if not to our general well-being.

  Our next port of call would be Bira again, which anyway lay directly on our course back eastwards, and where some unfinished business remained to be settled. Sailing conditions were perfect all the way, and we were back there again an unbelievable 36 hours later. The crew had one last night with their families, and the opportunity to share with them some of the advance they had been given by Yong. A good deal of Yong’s salt, we also suspected, was off-loaded secretly that evening, to help tide the waiting families through the subsequent nine months without their menfolk.

  The Keraing and his family came to wave us farewell from the clifftop, and we sailed east into the Gulf of Bone, and an empty blue sea. It was the last time we were ever to see him alive. Years later we returned to Bira to learn that the shaman’s prediction that he ‘would die by water’ had come to pass in rather too literal a sense. He was hacked to death by one of his own people as a result of a long-standing territorial vendetta over water rights – on the very strand where we were to see him waving us off. His assailant did not come out of the affair unscathed. Having badly underestimated his victim’s popularity, he had fled with his family to Makassar and boarded a large inter-island ship for Java. Two days out the ship foundered in a storm, and sank with everyone aboard.

  Next day we were visited by a pod of dolphins which behaved as if they had escaped from a circus. They amazed us by leaping high out of the water and somersaulting two or three times before nosing beneath it again without missing a beat. We were only later to learn that these were the Spinner Dolphins, the most acrobatic of all their family.

  Our ship’s most vulnerable spot was the first four feet of her mainmast, which was heavily eaten by rot. This was considered serious enough by the Keraing to have supplied Tandri with the cost of a new mast which he had promised to have cut from the forest of Bouton, an island we knew nothing about on the south-east of Celebes, a two-day sail across the Gulf of Palopo.

  The Bugis step their masts directly on to the deck rather than through it on to the hull floor beneath. A dismasting often means the dominoing of one mast into the other, down through the decks, cannoning the cargo through the hull below, and sinking the ship very quickly. This apparently not uncommon event provokes much mirth, but very little change in mast-stepping techniques.

  Not even Wallace had been to Bouton, and we were unable to find any reference to it in the literature. Bau-Bau, the island’s main town, revealed itself as a collection of neatly kept white stilt houses, nestling beneath jungled mist-shrouded hills. It even had a creaking dock at which we could tie up directly alongside.

  Our crewmates warned us about the Biranese girls’ reputation as practitioners of a dangerous form of magic which could trap a man on their island forever; then they disappeared ashore into the backstreets. Going ashore ourselves, we soon realized that the girls’ magic was of a very straightforward kind. Almost without exception, they were breathtakingly beautiful; their every movement a languid dance, and their smiles open and confident – so different from the shy tittering behind shawls that we had seen amongst the Bugis girls. Bau-Bau was infinitely more friendly than Makassar, and far less desperate than Bira.

  It did not ta
ke them long to inform us that we had arrived with their traditional enemies, the Bugis. In the days when the great Bugis kingdoms had ruled the seas all the way to the Spice Islands they had been unrelenting in their determination to conquer Bouton. Each year the west monsoon would bring a fleet from Makassar, each prahu bristling with as many as a hundred warriors. No sooner had they been fought off than the east monsoon brought a fresh invasion from the kingdoms of the Moluccas. This constant cycle of warfare, involving fleets as mighty as the Spanish Armada, had kept Bouton in isolation up to the present day.

  Despite our unsavoury choice of shipmates, our arrival was cause for celebration, and on the very first afternoon we were whisked away from Sinar Surya to stay in the comfort of the sultan’s guesthouse, which was far more impressive than anything we had seen in Makassar.

  We were surprised that the sultan had even noticed our arrival, but the young courier who had taken us up to the guesthouse laughed.

  ‘Everyone in Bouton has noticed your arrival. Since World War Two only four other Westerners have been here before you.’ He told us we would meet the sultan at his palace that evening for dinner.

  Dinner turned out to be a royal welcome-banquet in the great hall, and it was quite literally a glittering affair. The sultan and his court wore locally woven sarongs and turbans shot through with threads of real gold and silver. The belts holding their ceremonial ivory-handled daggers were all of beaten gold, as were the jewellery and headdresses of the women. The walls were hung with elaborate textiles, and a small orchestra of metal gongs and drums played surprisingly watery music.

  ‘I don’t want you to think that we eat like this every night,’ said the sultan with a smile; indeed, we had seen him earlier in the day wearing well-cut Western clothes. ‘But I hear that you Europeans have very romantic ideas about the East, so I thought this might please you.’