As we approached the harbour we spotted a people-crammed motor-launch putting out to greet us. We suspected it might be the full contingent of the local constabulary, already forewarned of the arriving criminals, but it was the much-relieved welcoming party of the Aru contingent of the Tan Hans family, which had been anxiously expecting us for a number of weeks. They even greeted our astonished crew with affection, though they did have a quick rifle through the hold to see what was missing. Apparently there was a good deal missing, but they were very inscrutable and polite about it at the time. We were taken back to their sprawling wooden home, where a brand-new room had been freshly added just for our arrival, and for several days Tans of all ages nursed us back to strength with enormous meals of their greatest delicacies: antler-marrow stew; the basted claws of the giant Cassuari bird; shark’s fin soup; and tripang, or bêche-de-mer, the gelatinous protein-rich sea-slug with which, together with pearl-shell, the Tans were to make their fortunes.
Aru was a perfectly integrated society of numerous ethnic groups. Most of the population were dark-skinned frizzy-haired Papuans, like the New Guinea and Australian aborigines to the east and south of us. They were a much more self-revealing people than the Bugis: quick to laughter, extrovert and far easier for us to communicate with. The local Bupati, whom we now had legitimate reasons to fear, was extremely pleasant when we formally presented ourselves to him as illegal aliens.
He seemed a man of the world, yet his office and home were the simplest of timbered huts, again raised on stilts, and his desk a rickety driftwood table, perforated with shipworm holes and stained with ink.
He went straight to the visa expiry date in our passports, and asked with a grin: ‘Not only are you illegal, but how do you propose to get out of here?’ To which Lorne mumbled something about our having indeed pondered this problem at length over the previous three months, but had failed to come up with a solution. There was an uncomfortable pause, and I launched in with my best Bugis-accented Indonesian.
‘It was the Cendrawasi, sir, the Bird of Paradise, which drew us here. For years she has haunted our dreams. Her glow, like the sun, has been too bright for us to think of how we might leave her island afterwards.’
‘You have two weeks,’ the Papuan Bupati replied, ‘before the next inter-island ferry-boat arrives which can take you west again to Ambon and then Makassar, where you can catch your plane to Jakarta and out of the country to Singapore.’
This was financially and legally out of the question, of course, but we thanked him all the same.
The pancaroba would now last a good four to six windless weeks before Sinar Surya could head eastwards for home again, and even then she might not reach it for a further couple of months! There had to be another way out.
We walked back to the Tan Hans family through sandy streets glistening with shards of mother-of-pearl shell. Tethered in people’s yards was the occasional tame Cassuari bird, looking like a nasty version of one of Jim Henson’s Muppets. Amongst the more exotic of the local pets was a species of tree-dwelling kangaroo – no larger than a fat tabby – which hopped about the branches and came when their owners called them.
Tandri and the crew were draped along Sinar Surya’s deck, looking sleek and contented, having been paid by Yong’s uncle, our host, Tan Hans Chui, the balance of the money they had been promised on delivering us safely to Aru. Basso and Tasman were flirting with three Aruese girls, and finding themselves distinctly out of their depth, for these forthright amorous Papuans were a far cry from the demure and male-oppressed womenfolk of home. Mansur and Amir were goggle eyed at the wealth of new experiences, and Tooth sat crouched in his usual position by the helm. Moored next to Sinar Surya was the Tan Hans family’s bright orange and yellow African Queen-type pearling lugger to which we transferred our belongings to embark for the north of the islands to survey the pearl reefs and, if we could, the haunts of the Birds of Paradise. It was captained and crewed by Tan Hanses, and carried three Aruese divers.
With such ancient equipment, pearl diving in the waters of Aru is a hazardous career. This diving helmet was made in 1910. (LAWRENCE & LORNE BLAIR)
The divers were still using a compressor and dented copper helmets clearly marked as made in Boston in 1910. Lorne had planned to make his maiden descent in this hard-hat equipment to film the pearl-shellers at work, but he changed his mind on discovering that the compressor ground to a halt at least three times a day, exposing the divers to the hazards of the bends as they were rushed to the surface from an average depth of 100 feet. Many of the old professionals we had seen in Dobu were doubled over with this crippling curse of the pearl divers, and there was a high annual mortality rate. We were glad to have nursed Yong’s scuba tank across the Moluccas, and to have breathed but half its precious air in the waters of Banda. We now lovingly attached it to its regulator and turned on the valve – but there was only a brief hiss of air, then silence. We were appalled to find it completely empty, having probably been tampered with by curious rodents in the hold. Once we had overcome our indignation, it was clear that Lorne would be obliged either to twiddle his thumbs or to free-dive.
Of Lorne’s various accomplishments, his efforts on this occasion rank high on the list. Our knotted plumb-line confirmed that the divers were walking the reef all of 90 feet down. The teeming organisms from the rivers of New Guinea – just 80 miles further east – make these waters amongst the richest pearl-shell reefs in the world, but they are murky and current-torn. Yet Lorne somehow managed repeatedly to pan past the divers at their own level simply on desperate lungfuls of air, while I remained on deck opening, emptying and resealing our leaking underwater camera housing every time he burst to the surface with it, his eyes popping like a gargoyle’s and water sloshing ominously against the inside of the housing window.
His footage shows the shadowy forms of the divers running a desperate slow-motion race, dragged behind the fast-drifting lugger and buffeted by the current. They must grab whatever pearl-shells come within their reach in their headlong rush along the bottom. Should they lose their footing, they are mercilessly dragged through the coral, until hoisted upright again like marionettes by the linesmen above.
They hunt the Gold-Lipped Oyster, provider of the finest nacre, but with a yield of only about one pearl in every 50,000 shells. That pearl, however, can be a pink, black or golden-yellow monster. Whereas the salaried divers turn the shells over to their employers, any pearls they may find belong to them alone, and can make them disproportionately wealthy overnight. This arrangement adds the spice to what is otherwise a gruelling and hazardous pastime.
We spent five or six days diving off the reefs, and exploring the mangrove-shrouded tidal inlets for the tiny stilt settlements to enquire about the Birds of Paradise. We were told that their mating season was unusually late that year and that few birds had yet been sighted in full ‘coat and tails’. But we also realized how slow the locals were to talk about the birds at all, and particularly about their special ‘dancing trees’ where the birds came to show off. For, though the birds were now strictly protected by law, their careful harvesting had for centuries been the prerogative of the Aruese, whose expertise in such matters was self evident; otherwise the birds would have long since become extinct.
Captain Tan later explained that their reluctance to talk was due to many of them still pursuing their hereditary profession of carefully culling the birds for the international black market.
‘We’ll have better luck with our trading friend Achmed, further up the coast,’ the captain said. ‘We can pearl-dive in the morning and spend tomorrow night with his family ashore.’
Achmed was a bristly-headed Falstaff of Arabic-Aruense extraction. He ruled over a splendidly rustic hamlet, and joyfully welcomed us up his gang-ladder to his tilting tree house of a home. The community thrived off a magnificent monument to eco-technology which they had built in their tidal estuary. It was an intricate fishing trap about 100 yards long, of vertically planted
stakes interwoven with different fibrous grids for selectively filtering the catch by size and shape. Its fruits were surely more impressive than any fisherman could hope for. In addition to the usual gaudy cornucopia of tropical fishes, the trap regularly revealed sawfish, shark, manta ray, crocodile and even dugong, the Asian sea-cow whose protuberant breasts first inspired the mermaid myths, and whose tears are collected throughout Indonesia in special little bottles as powerful love potions.
The captain, Lorne and I were to spend the night with Achmed, listening to animal and bird stories until the lamp-wicks died. We slept after he had agreed to send us the following morning with two of his Aruese forest guides on the six-hour hike to a ‘dancing tree’ and back. It was also apparently nonsense that the mating season was late that year, and a number of the birds had already been seen in full plumage. This overwhelmingly good news was tempered by the titbit that the birds only danced at dawn or sunset, for about 10 minutes, before evaporating back to not even the Aruense knew where. This was fine from the technical standpoint of lighting, but it meant that half the journey, either there or back, would be along wild game trails through dense forest in total darkness.
It seemed we had barely slept for 10 minutes before the two Aruese guides arrived. On sea-weakened knees we lurched after their dim shadows padding ahead with their bows and arrows slung over their bare shoulders. On a number of occasions they repeated their advice about showing no lights. A disobedient illumination of my torch revealed why, for I was instantly surrounded by clouds of chittering insects, quickly followed by bats swooping in to eat them, and found myself the centre of a vortex of unpleasantness.
‘Quicker and quieter by dark, you see,’ our guides said smugly.
It was the Greater Bird of Paradise, symbol of transcendence and immortality – to say nothing of plain good luck – which had drawn Chinese mariners to the Aru Islands in antiquity. The Aruese would sell the bird skins by weight – minus their legs. So the first specimens to reach Europe were legless, and it was assumed that the bird never landed, but mated and hatched its eggs on celestial clouds beyond the firmament, and thus came straight from heaven. Carolus Linnaeus therefore named it Paradisaea apoda, the ‘footless bird of paradise’.
The Birds of Paradise generally are most remarkable for their sexual inventiveness, of which their plumage, which made them the objects of such human desire, are only part of the story. The Bower Birds, for instance, construct such astonishingly intricate ‘casas chicas’ to attract their lady-friends that early ornithologists refused to believe they were not man-made. Other species go to the trouble of stripping a strategically placed hole in the forest canopy so that they can dance in their own personalized shaft of sunlight.
Echoes of all I had read or heard of this bird family moved through my numbed brain as I sweated on through the darkness.
Of the Greater Bird, Wallace had written:
“…at the time of its excitement ... the wings are raised vertically over the back, the head is bent down and stretched out, and the long plumes are raised up and expanded till they form two magnificent golden fans, striped with deep red at the base, and fading off into the pale brown tint of the finely divided and softly waving points. The whole bird is then overshadowed by them, the crouching body, yellow head, and emerald-green throat forming but the foundation and setting to the golden glory which waves above. When seen in this attitude, the Bird of Paradise really deserves its name, and must be ranked as one of the most beautiful and most wonderful of living things.” 13
Not just a pretty face, the Greater Bird of Paradise is, paradoxically, both similar in size and closely related to the crow – with which it shares much of its inventive precocity, as well as its raucous voice. We had always been amused by Wallace’s transliteration of its mating cry: ‘Wank-wank-wank-wok-wok-wok-wok!’
When we actually heard it with our own ears calling through the darkness ahead we were totally unprepared for the accuracy of Wallace’s onomatopoeic description. The sound was loud, urgent and hauntingly plain – with a hint of self-parody and something of the Disney Road Runner character’s nasal ‘Beep beep’. But these voices utterly belied the quivering fragility of the beings themselves. For when we actually saw them they were so sensationally exquisite that we forgot our professionalism for a long moment and simply gaped upwards. We knew they were going to look good, because even dead, stuffed ones were pretty splashy, but it was the way they moved and vibrated and flirted with the light that was so hypnotic.
The birds always return to mate in the same tree in which they were conceived, and it was to one of these secret ‘dancing trees’, guarded by the family for generations, that we had been led. The bark of the great tree glowed a birch-tree silver as the light gathered, and when the first shafts knifed through the canopy the highest boughs suddenly ignited with what seemed to be a kind of St Elmo’s fire of shimmering gold. There were perhaps 16 birds, about 80 feet above the ground, and barely visible through our telephoto lens which by now had become wall-eyed with internally growing fungus.
And they danced, in this gathering dawn in a distant jungle. They danced, fibrillating their tails, then freezing like open flowers of sunlight, before quivering again and hopping about their drab hens, enticing them with simulated ravishings of handy gnarls and protuberances on the branches.
We even got a few blurry shots, and eyed the surrounding climbable trees for possible locations for building a blind where we could film them from their own level, hopefully the following day. For now that we had found what we were looking for we planned to visit this ‘dancing tree’ as often as was required to get the birds really in the can.
The Greater Bird of Paradise is found only in the remote jungles of Aru. (DR G. KONRAD)
The hike back was through the first real jungle I had actually seen since being a teenager in southern Mexico, and it was a wonder of iridescent beetles, moths and science-fiction flora. There were giant ferns and fan palms, and trees which towered from roots which arced out of the ground, as if growing upside down from their branches. We could walk beneath them like ants beneath the legs of monstrous spiders whose racinous limbs bristled with orchids and bromeliads. We were astonished to see enticing sea-shells of numerous sizes and varieties festooning the branches high above us. Had they been transported there, we wondered, and nailed down as love-bait by some inventive and uncatalogued Bird of Paradise? It was only later that we learnt that these fine shells are inhabited by Aru’s singularly athletic and fussy species of arborial Hermit Crab!
I remember returning through this magic forest effortlessly buoyed by an immense sense of well-being, and overflowing with gratitude to Achmed for allowing us to glimpse his Family Tree, and to the Tan Hanses, all the way back to Makassar and beyond, and down through their generations.
Several hours later, when we staggered back to the hamlet, Achmed and Captain Hans took us aside.
‘Look,’ Achmed said, ‘come down to the strand and you’ll see. Shortly after you left an Australian fishing boat anchored just 500 yards offshore here. We’ve sent the crew over to tell them about you.’
‘You see,’ our pearling captain added, ‘a glimpse of the Cendrawasi’s golden tail always brings good fortune. This may be your very lucky day. Very sad you may leave so soon, but perhaps it’s safer this way, if it works.’
Within half an hour, two Australians had put ashore in their Boston whaler, and were striding up the step-ladder into our host’s wooden hut to sniff us out. Though strongly built, they seemed barely out of their teens, but they warmly boomed their names at us, and clasped our hands with the grip of crocodile jaws.
‘Well, gooday, gooday!’ the skinnier one observed, taking in our general appearance. ‘Yer not missionaries, and yer not anthropologists, or you’d be fatter and cleaner on both counts! So what are you wingeing poms doing so far from home?’
‘Desperately trying to get out!’ I replied feebly, and went on to explain our predicament.
&n
bsp; Their craft was the last of a handful of foreign boats, the first in years to have been granted experimental prawn-fishing rights in the region for a limited period. They explained that they had finished their survey, that their visas expired in a few days’ time, and that they had simply been putting in for some coconuts before scarpering back home to Darwin, 500 miles south-south-east across the Arafura Sea.
Certainly they would take us with them, they told us, but only if we could leave immediately.
‘Right now?’ we enquired.
‘Yes, immediately!’ the fatter of the two said, making me wonder whether perhaps their visas had not also expired.
‘What about your captain and crew? Shouldn’t we settle it up with them first?’ I asked.
‘We are the captain and crew, mate,’ the other one explained. ‘Oi’m the crew, ‘e’s the captain and officers.’
Sure enough, these two owned and operated what to our rustic eyes was a spectacularly futuristic vessel. Between them they handled the 70-foot, steel-hulled, diesel-powered deep-sea trawler, ranging with her for many hundreds of miles beyond the nearest shipping lanes or navigational radio beacons. To us these beer-drinking warm-hearted Aussies were the wizards of their time, ‘push-button’ piloting their Star Ship Enterprise deep into unknown waters.
In Dobu we had the briefest opportunity to take our leave of the Bupati and the Tan Hans family, who had treated us as their own children, and whose effusive farewells were no doubt partly fuelled by their realization that they would not have to do so indefinitely.
We pulled slowly out of port, and purred past Sinar Surya. She lay low in the water with her new copra cargo, looking her sleekest best. A brand-new if slightly twisted mainmast was in place, Tandri having evidently learnt that purse-pinching was the lesser part of valour (when it came to prahu phinisi sailing). Amir and Mansur crowded out from below decks to dance and shout their goodbyes. Tooth stood up and waved. Tandri and most of the rest of the visible crew remained listlessly in position, coldly observing the waving foreigners on their departing space-ship. Was there no honour amongst thieves? I thought, distressed that one should be so abruptly regarded as enemy aliens again, having shared so much together. We were only to learn the true story, and the outcome of their voyage home to Bira, many years later, when it was confirmed that our shared adventure was very much a part of the tales they were telling their children and grandchildren.
Ring of Fire Page 16