Ring of Fire

by Lawrence Blair; Lorne Blaire

  We were sitting cross-legged on either side of him with a vast array of tiny dishes on finely worked brass trays stretching before us, and entirely lit by Aladdin lamps on specially wrought stands.

  I wish I could describe the sultan’s appearance but my eyes were elsewhere, for on my other side sat Sadria, one of his radiant daughters. In an island where most of the girls looked like princesses, the princesses looked like goddesses – and Sadria was no exception.

  She dipped her fingers delicately into a dish and, to my astonishment, popped a morsel of food into my mouth instead of into her own. Sadria leant back on her heels, smiling at me expectantly. I shot a nervous glance at our host. He, too, was smiling, but with sardonic ambiguity, and my eyes shifted to his ceremonial dagger.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘if you don’t feed the poor girl soon, she’ll starve.’

  Not at all sure that I was doing the right thing, I fumbled towards the nearest dish for a finger-load of food, and turned to Sadria. The sight of those slightly parted lips was almost my undoing but, with the hollow feeling of a gambler who has laid out far too much on a horse, I plunged the titbit firmly into her mouth before my resolve could falter.

  She chewed, oh, so delicately and reached towards another dish.

  ‘This’, said the sultan, ‘is how we customarily feed our guests. It shows we trust each other enough to have no fear of being poisoned.’

  Trust me enough! My God, I wasn’t at all sure I could trust myself!

  So the evening went. Each of my hand-fed morsels tasted different; indefinable combinations of spices and textures which were quite new and delicious to me. But my judgement may have been clouded.

  Over the days that followed their hospitality knew no bounds. They drove us as far as the mud roads would allow in the royal landrover, and down to the bay where a pearl-oyster hatchery was being tried for the first time; and at night there were more festivities, and endless delectable maidens vying for our attentions.... On the fourth day they took us up to Wolio, the old fortress that sprawled across two hill-tops overlooking Bau-Bau. We had often seen its crumbling ramparts from a distance, and had assumed it was Dutch, but now learnt that it had been built by the islanders, long before the Europeans.

  Only once we were inside did we appreciate the immense scale of Wolio. Its 15-foot walls, with occasional gun-embrasures and rusting cannons, extended a full five miles around the old palaces of Bouton, the great mosque and a vast and excited crowd. All of Bouton was there, while far below us small sailing craft packed with more celebrants were still arriving from the outlying islands.

  The former chief of the Boutan royal bodyguard, who had personally defended his sultan's life in hand-to-hand combat. (LAWRENCE & LORNE BLAIR)

  Drums began pounding, and several seemingly frail old men launched into a frenzied war-dance, prancing and stabbing at each other with their kerises. At any moment I expected to see one drop with a cardiac arrest, but the sultan told us not to underestimate their power. They had been his father’s personal bodyguards, ready and able to defend him with their lives, and once a year they still performed this fierce dance inside the mosque from sunset to sunrise without pause.

  A more melodious music engulfed us as eight girls floated down the steps of the old palace. Their hair was entwined with golden cords, and their dresses, richly embroidered with beads, pearls and precious metals, flowed almost to the ground. With impassively inward-turned faces, they performed a languorous dance of infinite restraint.

  ‘They have been in seclusion for eight days,’ said the sultan, ‘learning the secrets of womanhood. Today they resurface as adults, ready for marriage.’ He chuckled. ‘My grandfather was something of a scholar. He brought all his power to bear to force the women of his household to reveal these secrets. Despite his most terrible threats, he could extract nothing about what went on during those eight days.’

  We asked the sultan what all these festivities were in aid of and he said: ‘Didn’t you realize this is your welcome ceremony? I’m sorry we couldn’t do it the day you arrived, but it took a little bit of organizing.’

  Every dance we saw that day had the flavour of a different influence. Some tasted of the parched winds of the Arabian Gulf; others of the exuberant tribal animism of the South Pacific; while others again echoed the ancient Hindu courts of Java and India. Even Europe was represented, in what was almost identical to a traditional flag-dance I had once seen in rural Portugal. I realized also with a jolt that the dancers were wearing a motley of costumes representing centuries of brief encounters with the West – from 17th-century Portuguese ruffles round their throats, down to modern trainers on their feet.

  The sultan showed us the royal regalia which were secreted in the palace. The centrepiece was an exact replica of a Portuguese explorer’s helmet. Finely made of solid silver from the local mines, it must have weighed 20 pounds, and was adorned with a shimmering cascade of golden plumage which Lorne at once recognized.

  ‘The Greater Bird of Paradise feathers symbolize courage,’ the sultan told us. ‘Those who returned from Aru and New Guinea alive brought these as proof of their valour.’

  We left Bau-Bau very, very slowly.

  The dock groaned beneath the combined weight of the town waving and singing goodbye to us in full ceremonial dress. Although a fair breeze was picking up from the south-east, the harbour was aquarium calm, and the poignancy of this departure from a fairytale kingdom in our pirate prahu was marred, alas, by making so little headway that an hour and a half after cast-off we were still within spitting distance of the dock.

  Everybody hates a bad leaver but, whereas in the West you can usually close the door on a guest who has finally reached the garden gate, in the islands it is impolite to stop waving and chanting until he is either round a corner and out of sight, or else too distant to be able to see the whites of his eyes. Whether the people were assembled by order of the sultan or simply from the hospitality of their hearts, they gave barely a sign of diminishing the ardour of their farewell.

  Only, perhaps, in the eyes of the sultan’s exquisite daughters was a hint of boredom betrayed. Since our first arrival here, their Seductive Highnesses had flirted with us as consistently as had their father ensured that we were together only during public occasions. Now, from the instant a hawser no longer connected our prahu to their island, they had cast us unrestrained looks which said: ‘At last, I’m all yours. Come and get me!’ But, as time wore on, and the whites of our eyes were still clearly visible, the girls, without missing a beat, subtly modified their glances as if to convey: ‘God knows we’ve tried, you heartless bastards.’

  It took us eight very wet and almost windless days to inch our way up the 90 miles of the Bouton Straits before we could turn eastwards into the Banda Sea. Throughout the entire journey we saw perhaps six tiny fishing villages and one ugly landslide scar whose remarkable story we had all heard various times in Bau-Bau. Only four months previously the land had suddenly plummeted into the straits, taking with it a village of some 80 souls. The only survivors were one family who had been visiting relatives in Bau-Bau at the time. They returned in their outrigger at night to find no welcoming lights.

  With just the ghost of a headwind, our only method of going about was either by dragging our bows round with 10 men furiously paddling the dugout canoe, or simply by drifting into the opposite shore and poling our bowsprit off whatever fulcrum presented itself.

  The Bouton Straits became progressively more narrow and sinister. Their dark waters, in places only a few hundred yards across, were met by vertically plunging forest, wreathed in mist, and for the most part deathly quiet. Only during the occasional bursts of sunshine did they begin to sing with birds and bugs. Once, they exploded with a sound so terrifying that it brought all of us below instantly out on to the rain-drenched deck. We had just cleared a jungle overhang, and slipped beneath it like a snail under a mushroom, when we awakened an enormous colony of giant fruit bats – the ‘flying foxe
s’ with a wingspan of over four feet. The first sound was a chilling quadraphonic chitter. We looked up to see the tree limbs rippling with leather and fur. The bats then erupted from their roosts like all the demons of hell, screaming, whirling and excreting partly digested fruit over the full length and height of the ship. Some caught in the rigging and thudded to the deck, spitting and baring their fangs at us before being hurriedly kicked overboard. Even our Bugis, quite familiar with flying foxes, paled at the encounter, but Tandri was not deterred from his hazardous method.

  The drawback to poling a 100-foot schooner with 90-foot masts off vertical jungle was that there was no guarantee of reaching the tree trunks with our bowsprit before reaching their branches with our masts. To be locked inextricably in the overhang would have been nearly as disastrous as a dismasting.

  When we finally reached the top of the Bouton Straits the rain had ceased as completely as the wind and it was only the current which carried us eastwards into the luminous open sea. For days we drifted within sight of land, beneath a high bright overcast sky which was mirrored perfectly in the polished water.

  It was no longer so easy to remain an island of reason when every timber surrounding us had been magically selected; when our departure had been synchronized not with the weather, but with inner portents of another kind of time. Even the black goat and the white cock sacrificed in our hull for a safe and speedy passage now began to haunt us every bit as solemnly as did the ghosts of our investors in London.

  As a parting gift the Keraing had given me a scale model of the prahu we were sailing in, which I had lashed to the hull walls facing backwards. One night I had a vivid dream that to correct this error would bring us the wind. The next morning Lorne filmed me cutting the model free and lashing it down again, facing forwards. The wind came so swiftly that within half an hour we were reducing sail, taking water over the deck, and beginning to lumber into a building seaway.

  The wind we had waited for so long quickly rose to gale force, and drove us on a desperate roller-coaster ride for five days and nights. Our rotten mainmast began whipping sickeningly to and fro and required five men constantly clinging to its lee mainstay to cushion the strain. The prahu’s very short timbers – designed to give flexibility – were now moving so violently against each other that the water pouring between them required the hand-pumps to be manned round the clock.

  Four men were needed to hold down the steering oars, which bucked in their harnesses like panicked elephants. Their supporting beams ran through our tiny cabin, and we could put our feet up on them and feel the entire ship squirming and stretching like the spine of a fish. Sails began splitting with the sound of gunfire, and with no spares they were sewn up in situ – an incredibly dangerous task in a full gale.

  Our Bugis performed astonishing feats of skill and bravery. Unlike the clipper ships of the last century, our prahu had no guard-rails on the deck, and no rigging harnesses or proper ratlines, yet our crew scaled the masts barefoot to cling to the spars with their legs alone, like lemurs. From these thrashing heights, they would then shin 90 feet down to the decks again on single, frayed and rusting wires.

  Despite the dubious seaworthiness of our ship, for the first few days of the storm my sense of danger was eclipsed by the exhilaration of at last thundering in the right direction. My first real fear came only when I caught sight of Tandri’s face watching his five strongest crewmen hanging miserably to the mainstay of our rotten mast. It was the first time I had seen him reveal any emotion in his face, and it had something of the intensity of grief. My fear was further sharpened when Tooth, the only practising Muslim aboard, stiffly emerged from below wearing his black peci hat, and proceeded to prostrate himself towards Mecca at hours not prescribed by Islamic doctrine.

  Finally we limped into Ambon, former jewel of the Spice Islands, written of so glowingly by Wallace, but now all but denuded of trees. In the harbour lay enormous foreign freighters for carrying the timber away, exuding oil over the graves of what had once been the most famous coral gardens in the Far East.

  It was normally polite, and expedient, to pay respects to the military commander of an area on first arriving, but this was the only time when we were actually frog-marched off to meet him before we had time to draw breath. He sat, rheumy-eyed and suspicious, behind an enormous desk in a crumbling office. He reviewed our ship’s papers and letters from General Aziz at length, and then, finding that our passports were almost new and empty, he began rubber-stamping them viciously.

  We were eventually released and returned to find some of the crew busily repairing the mainsail on the dock, while the rest, with Tandri and the officers, were being bullied by lesser officials who were nosing around the hold and demanding to see their personal possessions. Although we were terrified that they would find where we had hidden our film equipment, it was easier for us than for our crewmates to express our anger, and we blustered the officials off the ship.

  That night we had a conference with Tandri for the first time.

  ‘I told them three days before we can finish repairs,’ he told us, ‘but we can do enough tomorrow to hold us to Banda, if weather is good.’

  It was an uneasy night, pondering the risks of leaving illegally, with a barely seaworthy vessel, from an island of which we had read so fondly in Wallace and had come so far to see.

  The next dawn we had a better look. During the night two more timber tankers had arrived and anchored. It was the closest we had come to the outside world in nearly four months – yet they were responsible for the oil which glossed the harbour and had killed the coral. Behind the town, where Wallace had ecstatically rambled with his butterfly-net through glowing forests, the hills were bare.

  Not yet halfway to our appointment with the Paradise Bird, each island was already proving to be a kingdom unto itself, and the power of our permits was clearly waning the further we travelled. Of our ship’s company, only Tooth and Tasman had ventured as far east as this, and the waters ahead were equally unknown to all of us. Even if we could escape from Ambon with our cargo and wallets intact, none of us much cared to think about what receptions might lie ahead, as we approached the isolation of New Guinea.

  10. Wallace, Malay Archipelago, p. 311.

  11. We were later to track down two books written by Collins of his intriguing experiences: G.E.P. Collins, East Monsoon and Makassar Sailing (London: Jonathan Cape, 1937).

  To Haunts of Birds of Paradise

  The night comes quickly. This sudden land

  Never lends us a twilight strand

  ’Twixt the ocean shore and the daylight night,

  But takes, as it gives, at once, the light.

  - Punjabi Love Poem

  As soon as it was dark we slipped gingerly out of Ambon and sailed softly south into the solitude of the Banda Sea. Any minute we expected to see an official powerboat bearing down on us with demands to return to harbour, but as the stars grew more brilliant and the glow of the town receded we were gradually suffused with elation and the closest thing to comradeship we had so far experienced with our Bugis crew.

  The night was very gentle, and the dark transparent sea was cleft at our stern into two long green curtains of gossamer where our steering-oars ignited the bioluminescence. With our sails and psyches barely repaired from their ordeals, we now felt ourselves released into an ocean of unknown delights.

  It was time to celebrate. With a light breeze behind us, the mainsail was at a 90° angle to our hull, and provided a perfect light-screen for the projection of our slide-show.

  The photographic image, even in newspapers and magazines, was as rare as electricity in the Moluccas at the time, and none of our crew had seen such a display of coloured light as we threw on Sinar Surya’s sail that evening. They all came to huddle aft of the mizzen, leaving only Tooth at the steering-oar and Tandri remaining aloof but nevertheless fascinated by what we might reveal of our world.

  With our pocket-sized slide-projector, powered by the Hon
da generator purring away in the hold, we cast up the incongruous images we had hurriedly bought on our departure from Heathrow months before. There was Queen Elizabeth Trooping the Colour with the Coldstream Guards; the royal family waving pinkly and benignly from their balcony at Buckingham Palace. There were cockney barrow-boys in the markets of Soho, and their pearly kings and queens – the ‘rajas of the poor people’ – we explained to their satisfaction.

  ‘Those buttons’, Tasman remarked, ‘look like the mother-of-pearl shell which used to reach Makassar from the East.’

  I agreed. ‘They might even have been brought by your great-great-grandfathers from the Aru Islands, which once provided the world’s finest mother-of-pearl shells.’

  We had thought the photos of the Apollo moon landing would be our trump card, but they were greeted with the mildest interest. In our earlier attempts to introduce our crew members to the proportionate distances which separated Europe from Indonesia, they had become indifferent to the distances which separated the stellar bodies.

  ‘So men go to the moon in rockets the way you two came from England in rocket planes?’ someone asked.

  ‘Why go to the moon?’ Tasman enquired.

  ‘Did the Queen go to the moon?’ asked Amir.

  ‘What’s on the moon to go there for?’ continued Tasman.

  Some of them turned to regard the sickle moon which was rising over the Banda Sea.

  ‘Are there still people living there?’

  ‘Well, if no one lives there and there’s only stones to bring back, why go there?’ Tasman persisted.

  Answering these questions taxed our ideologies as much as our grasp of Indonesian, and we hurriedly projected more slides of the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace, until the show was interrupted by a shift in the wind, and our screen was close-hauled to keep us placidly moving towards the Banda Islands, barely 100 miles to the south-east.