Ring of Fire

by Lawrence Blair; Lorne Blaire

  We had loaded our fastest film and set our cameras for maximum exposure but we were still preparing ourselves for a disappointment when the glow suddenly began rising beneath our canoe obviously from a great depth. Increasing in size and luminosity as it rose, it broke the surface around us with such brilliance that it challenged both our credulity and our ability to keep our balance. It was distinctly unsettling.

  Like most schools of fish, the laweri moved as a fluctuating unit, but fibrillated with such intensity of light that it became difficult to keep our balance in the canoe, and quite impossible to film. Each fish moved so rapidly – though the school itself moved slowly – that it was impossible to focus on an individual before it had melted into something else. Lorne and I just sat there shouting at each other.

  The experience was comparable only to my first and only sight of the aurora borealis over Alaska many years before – except that, rather than being distantly and dispassionately overhead, this was alive, much larger than ourselves, very bright, and not only moving all around us, but also seeming to ‘contain’ us in some way, as if we were being ingested into the belly of a luminous whale.

  We were still shouting at the top of our lungs when the laweri ebbed back into their depths, leaving behind that feeling of having awakened from a very important dream which one cannot quite remember. Now, again, only the blessed immobility of the stars was reflected off its inky surface – and Ende and his elf-child were loudly laughing at our excitement.

  We were silent for a long time as we paddled home to Sinar Surya. Then suddenly we both burst into an enthusiastic and quite impractical discussion about returning some day with highly specialized state-of-the-art equipment, to film these beings, perhaps holographically, from underwater. But we knew this was just talk, and that a night encounter with the laweri of Banda was a numinous experience which could never be adequately captured on film.

  We were now keenly aware of how quickly the season of the west monsoon was drawing to a close, and with every day we risked losing the wind which could carry us to the islands of the Golden Bird. We were also painfully conscious of our diminishing film-stock. Knowing that our adventure could end abruptly at any time, we sought only to shoot footage which, if the worst came to the worst, could be cut into a coherent story of our voyage thus far. A vital ingredient still missing was footage of Sinar Surya under sail, shot from beyond her. And it was for this purpose that we had arranged to borrow the Bupati’s motorized launch so that we could cover Sinar Surya’s departure from Banda the following morning before climbing aboard her. This plan was nearly our undoing.

  We had agreed on a precise time and place, and even double checked that the launch was in the right spot on shore before we bunked down. We told Tandri and the crew under no circumstances to get under way until it was clear that we were in the launch and the motor had started. At dawn we had ourselves paddled ashore. An hour later we were still frantically lugging our equipment up and down the shore, searching for the now-vanished motor-launch and its promised pilot, when we happened to notice Sinar Surya sailing out of the channel towards the open sea.

  We almost stopped breathing as we remembered Tandri’s individualism, and Werner Meyer’s stories about the Bugis weakness for ‘losing’ their passengers, particularly if they happen to be the owners of the cargo being carried.

  Would they come around at the point, and tack to and fro waiting for us? Clearly not. She kept right on going, all sail pulling. The awful truth began to dawn. How easy it would be for Tandri to explain to the Tan family in Aru (if that is, indeed, where he was headed!) that the two Orang Ingeriss sent their regards, but had decided to go their separate way somewhere en route!

  We had only the clothes we quaked in, and all our cameras slung about our shoulders. Lorne planted himself like a furious concrete pillar, silently trying to hypnotize Tandri back through his monocle. I flapped back and forth like a chicken, not quite allowing myself to scream at the distant vessel. There were a number of fishermen readying their boats who fully took in our predicament. Without being asked, and with no mention of money, several of them immediately offered to paddle us out after our mutinous pirates.

  Now, Sinar Surya’s dugout canoe was 15 feet long and yet so precarious that we had always avoided carrying all our camera equipment in it at one time; rather, we had joked, as the royal family avoids travelling on the same aeroplane. The Bandanese canoes, such as the one we had chased the laweri in, are half that length, far slimmer, and people of our relative bulk require the equilibrium of parallel-bars specialists to stay upright in them. Just slinging a camera from one shoulder to the other caused these canoes to lurch violently.

  However, we thankfully accepted a canoe each, to spread the risk of camera loss, and lay quivering with anxiety in the sopping scuppers, while urging our Bandanese angels to paddle for all they were worth. I was powered by a frail 50-year-old and his perhaps 13-year-old but wiry assistant, and Lorne by two young bloods in their prime but paddling a less seaworthy canoe. With a light breeze behind her Sinar Surya was now rounding Bandaneira island and moving out of sight. The swell began building as we approached the same point, fully expecting to see Sinar Surya miles ahead of us, but she was still in view.

  Had Tandri’s nerves cracked? Had she hove to to wait for us? But, no, as our boatmen remarked, it was only a sudden lull in the wind which had stopped her.

  Our paddlers were fully aware of our distress and, if anything, needed encouragement to reduce their exertions. They were soaked with sweat and rasping deeply for breath when we finally caught up with our ship, but adamantly refused any of the rupiahs which we so thankfully thrust at them.

  The decks were lined with the grinning crew as we climbed stiffly and furiously aboard – but we were beginning to learn to conceal our anger. Tandri greeted us like long-lost friends, which he had certainly never done before, but in every other respect behaved as if nothing was amiss. Tooth was looking shaken and uncommunicative, as if finally crushed by the group soul. Some of the crew came up to touch us gently, as if to signify that they had only been following orders, and had played no part in the decision, but it was Amir and Mansur who later confessed that they had overheard the heated argument between Tooth and Tandri, and the final decision to abandon us if they could.

  Most of the crew appeared genuinely relieved that we had joined them again to share the long haul ahead, through the Banda, Ceram and Arafura Seas towards our still-distant destination of Aru. But all too soon they were to start muttering superstitiously amongst themselves again, for now we were dismally to confront the dwindling tail of the west monsoon. Was this already the start of the pancaroba – the ‘change of the monsoons’, when the winds die, or else fitfully revolve around the compass for one long month before the great east wind begins blowing from the opposite direction? The lull in the wind which had reinstated us as anak prahu, ‘children of the prahu’, and had come as a heaven-sent blessing, persisted until it began to seem a curse.

  A puff would come from any quarter for a short period, then release us again. Four dawns later the Banda volcano was still clearly visible on the horizon. When we lost sight of it we were still drifting helplessly far north of our course, close to the coast of the head-hunting island of Ceram.

  This was the deepest and emptiest quarter of the Banda Sea. For days and nights on end there was no wind to fill our sails, nor any fish to take our vertically dangling hooks. Morale and supplies quickly dwindled as we lay as still as a painted ship. After three days of eating only ground corn flavoured with salt, some of the crew went over the side to scrape barnacles from the hull to make soup with. It tasted like seawater. Our Bugis turned out to be appallingly unsuccessful fishermen, hardly landing a thing even when we had been at anchor.

  We donned our masks and fins, and swam uneasily in this deep sea, to taunts from the crew of ‘Big fish! Big fish!’ – they meant the man-eating variety. We dived along our hull, the centre of our universe, and were co
mforted to find it was also the home of other marine creatures: crabs nesting in the crevices, and tiny fish too agile to be caught.

  During the day there was nothing else to be done, except to throw buckets of seawater over the cracking decks to protect them from the equatorial sun. As time passed, the crew began murmuring and eyeing us from crouched groups on the foredeck, seeing us through narrowed eyes, as if for the first time, as harbingers of ill fortune and a blight on their habitual ways. In an attempt to defuse the tension we would play their favourites from our tapes: selections from Joni Mitchell’s Blue, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, and particularly the haunting strains of Neil Young’s track ‘Helpless, Helpless, Helpless’, which still reminds me of that first realization of just how vulnerable our seagoing ancestors were through those centuries of sail.

  We were getting hungry and anxious, and our will was being subtly weakened by knowing there was no feasible contingency plan in the event of a ‘worst-case scenario’ – which seemed already to be upon us with the pancaroba. The ship’s wildlife began getting totally out of hand. The rats which had so far only visited our tiny cabin singly and infrequently now took to visiting us regularly in groups, led by tour guides. Our inquisitive super-roaches surfaced by the score, and began marching over us in the daytime as well as at night. While the rulers at the top of the food chain wilted, and in my case began feeling as if they were on the way out, life at the bottom end, in numerous unsuspected forms, seemed to be bursting, parthenogenetically, from between the timbers. Living things were beginning to twitch and multiply in our drinking-water barrel at the foot of the mizzenmast.

  An exhausted seabird made an unwise touchdown, and disappeared down the forward hatch in a cloud of feathers and grasping brown hands. We got a foot each. Tandri, looking leaner and harsher, remarked: ‘Very good, Tuan! Still alive, eh! Many vitamins in foot bones, skin, under fingernails!’ Enjoying our discomfort, he went on to discuss the butchering techniques required for the rats which we would shortly be eating if this kept up.

  It was during this desperate languid emptiness one night that we saw something we couldn’t explain. Our shipmates could, but I still find myself completely at a loss.

  All hands were sprawled listlessly on deck, beneath our great dead sails which veiled half the Milky Way. Lorne and I were lolling aft, next to the ever-vigilant Tooth at the tiller.

  We were all familiar with orbiting satellites, which were clearly visible in these latitudes, and we had even become bored with pointing them out to each other shortly after leaving Makassar. But this was not one of those. I saw it reflected in the water first, and stood up just as Tasman and two others in the bows did the same. They pointed and shouted back to us all.

  ‘Look! Look! A number two!’

  Only a few other people bothered to get to their feet, but we all looked. High in the sky ahead of us a white light arced downwards, too slowly for a meteorite, too fast for a falling satellite, came to a halt, changed to a bright green, then ascended again in a different direction at immense speed before abruptly vanishing. On its final streak it was occluding, leaving the impression of a course of vivid green stitches covering a good third of the sky.

  ‘What’s that?’ I asked.

  ‘That was a good one, wasn’t it?’ Tasman replied.

  ‘A good what?’ I persisted.

  ‘Mericarocket,’ several of them chimed in (we had learnt it was their word for orbiting satellites). I hotly disputed that this was a ‘Mericarocket’, on the grounds that satellites do not behave that way. But Tasman was quite clear about it.

  ‘No. There are two kinds of Mericarocket,’ he said, raising one finger. ‘Number one is slow steady traveller, and number two’ – and he raised two rude fingers as if I were a three-year-old – ‘is very fast, wild traveller, like firefly, and sometimes changes colours, too.’

  ‘Yes, Tuan,’ Tooth assured us authoritatively from his cross-legged post at the listless helm. ‘That was a number two. Not so many as the number ones. My grandfather saw those, too, before there were any number ones to be seen. He called them good luck.’

  On the sixth day the wind did pick up again – with a vengeance. It drove us towards the Watubello reefs, through which we gingerly picked our way with the topmen shouting directions from the masthead. From here we ghosted into the Ke Islands, the last landfall before our destination. This was not the ideal port to find succour and sustenance. This was a rough and hardy community of isolationists, where Westerners seemed not to have set foot in living memory. We had further arrived during major political manoeuvrings for power amongst the various chieftains, with an angry jealousy prevailing against the very young and eccentric Bupati, to whom we dutifully tottered to pay our respects and to cadge a good meal, only to find ourselves his weakened and unwilling captives. Here, too, they dwelt in wooden stilt houses, eccentrically constructed of driftwood, on flat coral sand, thicketed with scrub and low forest, and we met the Bupati waiting for us at the bottom of his steps, surrounded by an unnervingly quiet but attentive crowd. To our amazement, and to the evident disapproval of the citizenry, he was a ‘sixties groover’ of the first water, a taste he claimed to have acquired while a student in Jakarta, where his father was evidently influential enough to have inflicted his son on this distant island as its government appointed top dog. He looked too young to have gone to university, and too insane to be on the streets. Instead of wearing the white shirt and peci hat characteristic of his office, he met us at the crowded foot of his steps in a coronation T-shirt emblazoned with the Union Jack, and a moth-eaten Beatles wig on his head. He was also quick to introduce us proudly to the mortally poisonous banded sea-snake which he kept as a ‘pet’ in his water-barrel.

  ‘But it’s dead,’ I impolitely pointed out.

  ‘Oh, yass! Oh, yass!’ the Bupati yelled. ‘The Grateful Dead, Year, Year!’ And he rocked and rolled for a few minutes, to the scowling disapproval of the none-too-friendly onlookers. Tandri, Tasman and Tooth, who had accompanied us thus far, now cannily chose this moment to slink back to the ship, without waiting for the almost universally accepted greeting gesture of a cup of coffee or tea.

  We had explained we were ravenous but, as time and talk droned on, and the Bupati revealed his roles of clown, man-of-the-world, excitable anglophile and power-wielding bully, it still remained out of the question to invade the kitchen, the sanctum of the women, and forage for a nibble.

  After many hours a bowl of tepid water and a brace of pop-eyed fish-heads were placed before us, and a handful of most welcome bananas. Our merciless host then refused to permit us to sleep anywhere other than as his guests that evening – an invitation accompanied by thinly veiled threats of what might befall us and our crew should we be so foolish as to refuse.

  Lorne and I were placed, protesting weakly, in the bachelor Bupati’s matrimonial bed of honour, which was infested with vermin and barely big enough for one of us. Throughout the night a throng of muttering onlookers pressed their faces against the mosquito netting, scrutinizing our every toss and turn. Our host, as far as I could make out, spent the night in a chair in the corner, constantly talking to the non-stop stream of visitors about his netted captives.

  The following dawn, pretending to take a wee walk, we scuttled uneventfully and unpursued back to the strand where (and here, for the first time, our shipmates really came through for us) Basso and Rasman were waiting with the dugout, paddles poised, ready immediately to push off. We reached and boarded our blessed vessel in one swift movement, just as her anchor was hoisted on deck. All the sails were frenetically close-hauled, and we were out of there like America’s Cup contenders, to make the remaining hundred-mile dash across the Arafura Sea to Dobu in the Aru Islands. The whole superlative operation was anticipated and commanded by young Tandri, our ‘Hood’ of the high seas, like a professional pirate. I thought I even detected a glint of pride – or was it companionship? – beneath his hard lively eyes as I leapt aboard.

  Th
e last gasp of the west monsoon proved to be a major exhalation which carried us before it almost as furiously as had the gale in the Banda Sea. We were trailing fishing-lines, as usual, baited with silver foil, when Tasman gave a great cry and hauled in first one magnificent dorado – the first we had caught during the entire voyage – then another! And at once, for no accountable reason, the crew were hauling in dozens of these great rainbow-hued creatures, which accumulated on the deck in far greater piles than we could consume. Many of them were still thrashing when we finally raised Dobu dead ahead. Aru was flat and jungled, unlike the Ke Islands we had just left, so that Dobu’s wooden and sago-thatched houses blended almost indistinguishably with the background, and it was only the sunlight glinting off the tin onion roof of its mosque which gave its position away. We had left Asia behind us and entered Australasia and the dorados seemed to know just where the borderline began.

  Our overwhelming relief at our arrival was tempered by the trifling detail that this was Friday, 13 April – just nine months after we had flown into Jakarta, and the very day that our Indonesian visas expired. From now on we qualified for a prison sentence. Although we had our plane tickets back to London from Australia or Singapore, we had been warned by Yong before leaving Makassar that there was no feasible way of getting out of the eastern end of the country, unless one could reach Port Moresby, 700 miles away in Papua New Guinea. Our mother in London, and our backers, Ringo Starr and Hillary Gerard (Ringo’s assistant and our co-producer), had heard nothing from us for nine months. We realized that by now our mother must be as interested in our welfare as the other two would be about their investment. More worrying still was that we had of course been unable to view a single foot of what we had been shooting, and there was the distinct possibility that our film was by now so exposed to heat and humidity that we would have nothing to show for ourselves but fogged frames and tall tales!