Ring of Fire

by Lawrence Blair; Lorne Blaire

  An hour later, we had already been waiting in the Zodiacs for 20 anxious minutes before we heard the steady drone of Lorne’s approach.

  ‘Anyone need a lift?’ he announced, and we spread the load with some of the other near-mutinous passengers. ‘I’ve got a good story.’

  Our train of rubber pods, laden with blanched explorers, puttered slowly down the winding estuary. We were escorted, but only for a short distance, by the still boisterous canoe-loads of Lower Otjanep’s farewell committee. Lorne dallied at the back of the line, exchanging news for a few precious moments with the friends who kept up with him in their canoes. There were tearful goodbyes on their part when they stopped, watched us, then, suddenly swift and silent, headed back to their village. We reached the rivermouth and set our course for the long haul over a glass-calm sea towards the steel dot on the horizon. When I looked back, the Etwa rivermouth had already vanished into the drawn ranks of the mangroves; there was not the slightest sign that another soul might live beyond them, or ever had. We had moved through a chink in the space-time continuum, like Alice through the looking glass, and the door had vanished behind us as we headed for our floating cocoon of time present.

  The full impact of Rockefeller’s fate only came home to us several years later in New York, when Lorne and I met the director Pierre-Dominique Gaisseau, who in 1959 had been filming the carving of bis poles in Otjanep when he was ordered out by a nervous Dutch police officer.

  ‘You know,’ Gaisseau told us, ‘it almost happened to us. I’m now sure that the poles they were carving included those intended to avenge the war-leaders massacred by the Dutch. Who knows what would have happened to us if they had been completed while we were still there?’

  He then astonished us by remarking that he and his team had managed to buy and take away the unfinished poles! This was a most significant missing clue in the chain of events.

  Rockefeller had reached Otjanep on his brief buying expedition two years later, and recorded in his diary that he found there no less than 17 spanking-new bis poles: ‘…these poles’, he wrote, ‘resulted from a bis pole ceremony which appears to have taken place some time after P.D. Gaisseau visited the village in 1959 [my italics]’.

  There is no record that Rockefeller was aware of the outstanding blood debt existing between the Asmat and the white tribe, so he could not foresee that perhaps included amongst the 17 poles he arrived to bargain for were some which still harboured the unavenged spirits of the war-leaders killed by the Dutch. These spirits had simply vacated the poles which were bought by the French team, and had taken up residence in these newly carved ones to await their liberation to the land of ancestors.

  The irony is that Michael Rockefeller had bought, and half-paid for, the omens of his own destruction. From the heights of millionairedom on the other side of the world, he had been lured by these totems to the swamps of New Guinea to become the sole sacrifice on behalf of the white tribe of Steel to settle a score with the People of Wood.

  14. The collection is now housed in the Michael Rockefeller Room at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

  An Island of Dragons

  For millennia the Komodo Dragon slumbered on its secret volcanic island protected by dangerous seas, breathing only in dream and myth, before finally awakening to science in the early years of this century.

  The story goes that a pioneering Dutch aviator was attempting to island-hop in an early aircraft down the Indonesian islands to Australia, when engine trouble forced him to land on the desolate beaches of Komodo. He ultimately succeeded in repairing his engine and taking off again, but was to report that his efforts were seriously hampered by large prowling reptiles, unlike anything he had ever seen, which repeatedly forced him to retreat to the safety of his cockpit.

  This, together with other stories from local pearl-divers, filtered back to Java, a thousand miles further west, and inspired an adventurous Dutch military officer named Van Steyn to reach the island in 1912, shoot a couple of specimens, and bring their putrid remains back to the Bogor Zoological Museum in Java, for the eager scrutiny of its curator, Van Ouwens, who was the first person to identify it correctly as a type of monitor lizard which had grown absurdly big for its boots. He named it Varanus komodoensis, or the Komodo Dragon. With 20 wickedly splayed, griffin-like talons, and layers of serrated backwards-slanting teeth like a shark, the lizard is a land-dwelling amphibious carnivore, fast on its feet, and reaching 11 feet long with a weight, fully fed, of over 500 pounds. Though also found on the eastern tip of Flores, and on a few neighbouring islets such as Rinja and Padar, the Dragon’s central domain is the island of Komodo.

  Though separated from her larger neighbours of Flores and Sumbawa, to the east and west, by straits sometimes less than a thousand yards wide, the fury of those waters renders Komodo as isolated as if she were in mid-Pacific. For it is just here that the deeply shelving Indian Ocean which stretches uninterrupted to Antarctica meets the sprawling shallower waters of the South China Seas.

  My first of many subsequent, more solitary, visits to Komodo was aboard Lindblad Explorer where for several consecutive years Lorne and I were employed as staff lecturers and guides during the vessel’s annual six-week cruises through Indonesian waters. Owned and operated by a Swedish travel company based in New York, the vessel was a luxuriously appointed 200-footer, which carried high-paying passengers and scientists to inaccessible parts of the world for brief encounters with peoples and creatures so off the beaten track that they would otherwise require a special expedition to reach. The ship sailed continuously around the world, unloading and renewing her complement of passengers at international airports along the way. People for the Indonesian cruises were usually taken aboard in Bali, and deposited again in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea, over 2,000 miles further east. It was a total contrast to our usual way of exploring the islands, immersed in the environment, cut off from our roots and unconstrained by time. But aboard Lindblad Explorer we were now in the ambiguous position of experiencing the contrast between East and West far more dramatically than we might have done on our own, for she was a floating microcosm of everything Indonesia was not, where the world of the present was rigidly ruled by the chronometer, and divided from that of the distant past only by a two-inch hull of steel.

  Luxuriously appointed, with laboratory facilities and an impressive library of films and reference books, her galley was stocked with the finest international foods and wines. The passengers included the nobility of the Western world, scientists and Vanderbilts, diplomats and captains of industry.

  We were immensely fortunate with our staff colleagues, who were the pick of the world’s experts in their respective fields. At the nightly lectures they would enthrall us all with their encyclopaedic knowledge of the natural world. There were the celebrated wildlife cinematographers Des and Jenny Bartlett, the couple with an almost supernatural ability to locate and anticipate the behaviour of wild animals. There were Ron and Valerie Taylor, the Australian shark and underwater specialists, who blithely finned their way amongst creatures which most of the rest of us would rather observe only from a helicopter. There was also Sir Peter Scott (son of the Antarctic explorer, and Founder/President of the World Wildlife Fund) who came along as a world authority on birds, lectured us on the Loch Ness Monster, but actually revealed himself to be a ranking expert on tropical reef fish, and would bubble for hours along previously undived reefs with our ichthyologists, happily scribbling long Latin names for each other with their wax pads and pencils.

  The dark horse amongst us was the inscrutable Sutan Wiesmar, the only Indonesian aboard and our official government ombudsman for smoothing our way, where necessary, with local chieftains. Although he had certainly travelled more widely in Indonesia than Lorne or myself, we had the edge on him when it came to knowing the general background information, and the approaches to the wilder islands in the Moluccas. Thus finding ourselves the privileged one-eyed kings, we were disproportionately influent
ial on the course the ship took, and we sometimes felt almost as if we were in command of our own high-tech super yacht, replete with the finest company and cuisine, cruising the world’s most fascinating waters.

  There was a night when we were purring down into Indonesian waters from Hong Kong, bound for Bali, while our passengers slept peacefully below, and the phosphorescent waters glowed down our sides. Lorne and I joined the Swedish captain and his first officer on the bridge, which glowed like the cockpit of a 747, as Lorne unfolded his photocopies of the antique maps he had so assiduously collected over the years in maritime museums ranging from Greenwich to Manila.

  ‘I’d rather you kept it under your hat, Captain,’ he announced.

  The captain scratched his bald head. ‘Sure, sure. Go on. Where do you think this wreck is, then?’ And we began comparing the photocopies to our ship’s modern hydrographic charts.

  It had been a long-cherished project of Lorne’s to locate and dive on a singularly richly laden 16th-century galleon which had foundered during a typhoon somewhere off the island just 12 miles to the east of our present course, and which we believed no one else was aware of. He had discovered the first clue by sheer chance, amongst the disintegrating parchments in the deepest vaults of the Philippines National Library. But it was only with the technology of a vessel such as this that we stood a chance of actually locating the site of the wreck.

  ‘See, Captain’ – Lorne now flourished photocopies of elegant but almost illegible calligraphy – ‘middle Spanish. It’s a bitch to read. They’re the only eight existing reports by survivors of what happened and where. If we can match their reports to the actual island, rather than the charts, we might be able to nail the wreck’s location.’

  The captain pondered through his magnifying glass. ‘A lot of these underwater surveys haven’t been repeated for 60 years, and weren’t too reliable in the first place – but let’s go and have a look, shall we? But keep it under your hat. The ship’s owners in New York would go bananas if they knew of a little jaunt like this.’ Lorne and I exchanged triumphant glances.

  In the small hours, while our important personages dreamt below, we veered off course by a good 10 miles to cruise slowly down the 15-mile shoreline of the suspected island, using our sophisticated sonar and radar equipment to plot each rock, and variance in distance between the shore and the edge of the reef, comparing them to the descriptions in the survivors’ reports. One spot emerged which matched all the co-ordinates, and the captain neatly pencilled it into his chart with a tiny cross, and we marker-penned it on our old photostats with an overt skull and crossbones.

  By the time our five-course breakfast was being served in the dining-saloon, we were back on course for Bali again and making up for lost time, with no one any the wiser – except, of course, for the four of us, who now suspected ourselves as being the only people in nearly 300 years to know the probable location of perhaps the most spectacular sunken treasure-galleon in the Eastern Seas, and lying in only two hundred feet of clear water.

  Aboard Explorer I also doubled as the ‘zoo curator’ and sheltered creatures which the naturalists deemed fit (or sometimes not) to bring aboard as instructive props to our nightly lectures. At one point I simultaneously shared my eight-by-twelve-foot cabin with a bucket of bizarre fish with unpronounceable names, a jar of coral with a blue-ringed octopus (which promptly gave birth to about 5,000 minute and perfect replicas), a punctured hat-box of several rare and colourful spiders and beetles and a hideously large, but common, centipede which quickly ate his companions to remain the sole (and none too popular) star of our ‘Entomological Evening’. There was also a splendidly red Bandanese parrot which quacked, and a Cuscus from Celebes, a marsupial, teddy-bear-like, fiddly-fingered charmer, much in demand for the pot. Being, like myself, both arborial and nocturnal, we got on well together, and after I had smuggled him triumphantly back home to Bali with the Bandanese parrot he lived contentedly for many years in our rafters, frightening the geckos. Being indigenous to islands only east of the Wallace Line, they attracted great attention for miles around, and Cuscuses and Red Parrots became part of the painting and sculpture of the region. The Red Parrot made an even deeper impression. It quickly snipped its way to freedom, and for weeks reports would filter back from miles around of sighting its red flash and hearing its distinctive mocking quack. Then nothing for months, until the word began circulating that a new type of parrot, a pinkish colour, was now inhabiting the forests near Bedugal – and adding to Bali’s rich repertoire of sounds an increasing orchestra of plaintive quackings.

  It was not all exotic piracy aboard Explorer, however, and we were both kept very busy. In addition to having to give our nightly lectures our duties included writing the log, navigational assistance, diving instruction, and piloting Zodiac boat-loads of people with expensive cameras over uncharted reefs on to wave-swept beaches, and safely back on board again. In addition to guiding the ship to islands we already knew it was a unique opportunity to take her to places entirely new to us all – a gamble which was not always a success.

  In one instance we lobbied for Explorer to pay an unannounced visit to a small island in the Watubella group at the north-eastern corner of the Banda Sea, about which none of us knew anything except that it was supposed to be populated by the descendants of former master boat-builders and animists.

  The island was craggy and dramatic, and at the foot of its jungled cliffs we could see what appeared as an elegantly built little town, glinting with tin roofs, and lorded over by the great burnished and dented balloon of the inevitable mosque. We had no sooner anchored than I headed for shore in the Zodiac with Wiesmar and Lorne, to check out the scene, alarm the Bupati and ask if 80 odd foreigners could put ashore for a few hours to snoop around.

  Weismar carried a revolver in his belt on such occasions, more as a symbol of authority than of murder, but he nevertheless displayed an embarrassingly bossy attitude towards the cowering Bupati and his elders when we surprised them on their porch gambling with dominoes.

  ‘I come from the government,’ he shouted at their blanched faces. ‘These are important friends of the President,’ he went on, pointing magnanimously at Lorne and me. ‘They’re the first of many tourists who may come here. Make you all very rich. Then you can gamble. Now, what can you show us? Why would these rich people want to visit your miserable island? We’ll be coming ashore in one hour to find out.’

  The leaders of the community crouched in shocked silence, and I began shifting my weight from foot to foot and making placatory sounds, which Wiesmar instantly froze with a fierce glance.

  When the Bupati finally regained his power of speech he stood up, bowed, and used it eloquently.

  ‘Yes, General. Our island is at your, the President’s and the rich foreigners’ disposal. Come back in one hour and we shall treat you to our traditional welcome.’

  Wiesmar strode back to the Zodiac; we shambled uncomfortably after him. ‘Got to get these types moving,’ he said to us, ‘put a python up their arses, or they’ll never make it to the 20th century.’

  ‘Yes, but what are they going to show us? Shouldn’t we go back and find out?’

  ‘No, never go back, lose face. We’ll come back in two hours which is what one hour means. Don’t worry. Greeting ceremony better than nothing. It gives a chance for other people to sniff around.’

  We returned aboard to announce that after our elegant lunch and a small siesta we would be received on an island which had never seen a Westerner in living memory. Two hours later we dutifully ferried our passengers ashore and were conducted with them to the village’s broad square in front of the mosque. It was neatly arranged with benches to accommodate all 80 of us, which were surrounded by a silent throng of unsmiling citizenry – elegant, angular, sharp-faced people, tightly saronged, rather pop-eyed women, oddly hushed children with pinched, scrubbed faces. The event itself was to prove more disturbing.

  The Bupati opened the proceedings with a
long and obsequious welcoming speech in Indonesian, which was followed by a few dozen neatly attired young men in peci hats and white shirts assembling in quiet ranks before us and closing their eyes. A young leader stepped forward with his eyes open.

  ‘What do you reckon, a dance or a speech?’ I whispered to Lorne.

  The Bupati then formally handed the front-man a glass of water.

  ‘Probably another boring speech,’ Lorne replied.

  But with a loud shout and a triple pirouette he tossed the water in the air, and began munching on the glass and swallowing it. His companions now began shaking and shouting too – entering what we suddenly realized was a full-on trance. Several were actually breaking Coca-Cola bottles with their teeth, and chewing and swallowing the pieces. Others were sticking slivers of bamboo through their cheeks and pectoral muscles. A few were darning their mouths closed with needles and thread, while vibrating with a sort of St Vitus’ Dance.

  Our assembled protégés in their straw hats and Hawaiian shirts were aghast. Some fainted, others began staggering indignantly down towards the Zodiacs. I approached the Bupati as tactfully as I could. ‘The visitors aren’t really understanding this,’ I said. ‘They don’t like the blood. Is there any way you can stop it and do something else for us?’