The Sea Inside

by Philip Hoare

  They may be the biggest animals that ever existed, but the blue whales of Sri Lanka have no place in the island’s culture. Roman maps depict a promontory on its south-east coast named Cetcum Promotorium, the Cape of Whales; Pliny, in his Natural History, written in the first century AD, described Ceylon as ‘banished by nature outside the world’, and therefore free of the vices of other countries. But beyond the influence of the West, the whales lived on in unhunted innocence. This island was a kind of Eden – it was also said to be the place where the whale spat out Jonah – just as whales were monsters at the edge of the map, islands in themselves in medieval myth, gathering roots, shrubs and trees on their backs as they aged: ‘As if the greatest mass of sea-weed lay/Beside the shore, with sand-banks all around.’

  It took a thousand years or more for the blue whales to resurface in these waters, in human sight, at least. My brother-in-law, Sampath, first told me about the whales which seemed to have miraculously appeared with the ending of the civil war and the lifting of military restrictions on the coastal waters in 2009. Until then the whale was regarded, if at all, as a stealer of fish or a destroyer of boats. Now they have become a sight to see, rather than fear, although later, when I asked a school assembly in Galle if they’d ever seen a whale, only half a dozen hands went up, despite the fact that such stupendous creatures swim only a few miles off the beaches on which the children play.

  That day, our first at sea, one blow was joined by another, then another, and another. We rushed this way and that, as whale after whale appeared in every direction – two dozen, maybe more. Their plumes shot up all around us like watery fireworks. Not far beneath the surface, the whales were busy scooping up the millions of krill they need to eat each day. I could even smell it, a definable change in the air – the characteristic scent of dimethyl sulphide gas given off by the phytoplankton on which their prey feed – and with it, the possibility of whales.

  All around us were mothers and calves, the young coming close to see what we were. No one has yet identified where these whales go to mate and calve, but Asha de Vos, a young marine biologist who has been studying this population, believes it is close by. She speaks passionately for the animals, which, as a Sri Lankan, she sees as her responsibility. They have their own specific, Balaenoptera musculus indica, and may even be a subspecies of their own, a resident, rather than a migratory population, which has developed to exploit this fertile territory. With the continental shelf so close to the tip of the island at Dondra Head, the upwellings created by the meeting of deep cold and shallow warm water provide the perfect environment.

  ‘He is seldom seen,’ Ishmael wrote of the blue whale, ‘at least I have never seen him except in the remote southern seas, and then always at too great a distance to study his countenance. He is never chased; he would run away with rope-walks of line. Prodigies are told of him. Adieu, Sulphur Bottom!’ he said, employing the nickname that referred to the parasites which often coat its belly like mustard-yellow paint. ‘I can say nothing more that is true of ye …’

  The display board in the Natural History Museum in London, in the shadow of its own illusory blue whale, seeks to prove Ishmael wrong. It tells the story of the twentieth-century cull: from almost nothing to tens of thousands in 1939 – the year in which the museum’s model was first displayed – when forty thousand were taken in the Southern Ocean.

  Until then they’d been too fast for humans. That was why the colonisers of Sri Lanka – the Dutch, the Portuguese, the English, all whaling nations – did not even try to hunt these whales. It was another reason for their absence in the island’s history: their sheer size and speed eluded human contact, as if they were too fast and too big to see. For a Buddhist, the sense of being there and not being there would have been perfectly understandable; for others, the distance was a challenge to be closed, by explosive harpoons fired from high prows. New factory fleets from Norway and Japan and the Soviet Union did their work. By the mid-twentieth century, the hunt was at its height; hundreds of thousands of hunted whales were under-reported by the Russians. Under Stalin’s Five Year Plans, each harvest had to be better than the last, and whales became part of that relentlessly expanding demand.

  Great fleets of whale-catchers scythed through the seas, one of them, the Storm, captained by a woman, Valentina Yakovlevna Orlikova. Her photograph, published on the cover of a 1943 magazine, Soviet Russia Today, shows Orlikova with high cheekbones, dark hair and svelte figure in uniform, gold braid on her cuffs and a collar and tie at her neck. An even more glamorous photograph of her appeared in Harper’s Bazaar, causing Anaïs Nin to fall in love with this ‘Hero of Social Labour’, a Soviet Ahabess armed with a missile-harpoon. In forty years’ hunting in the Antarctic, Orlikova’s superiors reported a total of 185,778 blue, fin, sperm, right, grey and other whales; the true figure was 338,336. In a cold-war world of misinformation and opposing ideologies, whales were the ultimate losers.

  In 1963 the first ‘International Symposium on Cetacean Research’ was held in Washington, DC, attended by scientists from many different disciplines. The Symposium sought to gather the latest knowledge about whales, and present the case for the fragility of their species. It marked a new awareness and urgency; its chairman, L. Harrison Matthews, appealed for ‘some friend of science’ to supply the means to fit out a vessel of discovery, to fund a search for answers to these questions before it was too late. ‘The cost of one long-range missile would cover the whole project,’ he added. It was a telling comment, one year after the Cuban crisis and its threat of nuclear war. By the time Remington Kellogg, director of the Smithsonian, came to unveil his museum’s own life-size blue whale in 1969, he could deliver to the assembled audience an updated toll, accurate to that precise moment –

  329,946 blue whales dead

  – most of them on his own watch, as the half-life of whales ticked away to doomsday. It was only now, now that it was too late, that this well-meaning scientist and instigator of the International Whaling Commission, who had devoted his career to collecting data, realised that he had spent most of his life ‘working for the enemy’, as D. Graham Burnett, the historian of science, reflects. It was a neat, horrific formula for hip-booted scientists standing knee-deep in the gore of whaling stations as they traded whisky for foetuses:

  Collecting data while animals died + animals dying so that they could collect data = science as self-fulfilling prophecy.

  Even now, in the bright new era of modern cetacean science, we insist on assimilating the whale. We may have instituted less violent means of investigating their physiology and movements, yet we endeavour to dart or tag them, tracking them by satellite with GPS to provide us with neat data sets although these techniques can be deleterious to the animals themselves, causing infection or even restricting movement. In effect they become remote-controlled models to our will, mapped, suborned and co-opted into our world, rather than left alone in theirs.

  Out in the Indian Ocean, we watch as a huge vessel looms into view. The grey-painted, block-like ship with shuttered windows was previously used to transport troops during the war. Now it has been commissioned to take passengers out to see the whales. ‘Big sound, very bad – whale diving,’ Rasika observes pithily, as the navy boat steams ahead. Later, we learn that one of the passengers on board its first voyage was Vladimir Putin, who some months before had been photographed in the Barents Sea, darting a whale with a crossbow in order to tag it.

  No sooner have I plunged into the water than the whale has gone. I hang there, alone, suddenly aware of how vulnerable I am, open to anything that might approach, from any direction. My rising fear is hardly calmed by the knowledge that the ocean’s bottom lies a mile beneath me.

  As I look down through the windscreen of my mask, I see a snake-like animal curling and writhing. Its spine seems luminous, repellent, as it twists about in the water column. Powering with my fins, I return to the side of the boat, turning my back to it as I bob just below the surface, as if its fl
imsy hull might shelter me from the unknown. After a few more minutes scanning the darkness below, I’m glad to give up and haul myself back into the Kushan Putha.

  The ancient name for Sri Lanka is Serendip, from which came our serendipity, coined in 1754 by Horace Walpole after reading a translation of the sixteenth-century Italian fairy tale The Three Princes of Serendip, whose characters ‘were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of’.

  ‘What is your name? Where do you come from?’ say the boys on the beach. After a while, I invent my own story. I’m married, with five children; I’m a French soldier; I don’t understand. Men here stand with their arms around each other, almost more beautiful than the women; everything is about display. Giant blue-and-red kingfishers skim over the river. Peacocks perch in trees like outrageous, overgrown pigeons.

  At Weligama, a tiny island lies a few hundred feet offshore, little more than a palm-topped rock. To reach it, there’s no need to take a boat: the water that separates it from the land is seldom more than a few feet deep. Clustered on its summit is an eccentrically shaped villa, barely visible through the trees. Invited there one evening, we waded through the warm water, flaming torches spiked in the sand to guide us across. Reaching the white-painted jetty on the far side, we passed up a ferny path and into the house. Off an octagonal hall lay eight doors; each room might have opened on eight others. Around the whole building ran a wide verandah. Entertainment appeared to be the entire function of the place; it was a fantastical confection, not unlike Walpole’s own gothic villa, Strawberry Hill, on the banks of the Thames.

  The house was built in 1927 by the self-styled Count de Mauny-Talvande. Son of a banker, rather than an aristocrat, he was born Maurice Maria Talvande in 1866 and was educated by Jesuits at St Mary’s College in Canterbury, Kent, where he met George Byng, the son of the Earl of Strafford. In 1898, Maurice married George’s sister, Lady Mary. It was a splendid occasion, attended by the Princess of Wales, to whom Mary was lady-in-waiting, along with other European royalty whose houses were to fall in the coming decades.

  The marriage was not a happy one. Having established what he called a university in a château on the Loire in France, teaching the sons of the British aristocracy, Maurice was accused of making advances to Oliver Brett, the son of Viscount Esher. His hasty departure was seen as an indication of his guilt; it was said that his wife would send out remittances to her estranged husband, effectively paying him to stay away. Lured to Ceylon by the sight of a flame lily growing in a Bournemouth garden, de Mauny looked for ‘the one spot which, by its sublime beauty, would fulfil my dreams and hold me there for life’. In 1925, at Weligama, he found it: ‘a red granite rock, covered with palms and jungle shrub, rising from the Indian Ocean – an emerald in a setting of pink coral’.

  Having bought the island for two hundred and fifty rupees, de Mauny named it after the Greek name for Ceylon, Taprobane, meaning ‘garden of delights’. It was a suitable retreat for a self-invented man. But it also had a darker reputation, as a dumping ground for cobras, put there by Buddhist monks forbidden from killing them. If Sri Lanka was the original Eden, then Taprobane was its estranged scion.

  The house de Mauny built on this two-and-a-half acre site was extraordinary, even for this extraordinary place. Hanging gardens tipped over its terraces, surrounding the octagonal villa which acted as a kind of compass in this improbable coordinate. To the north was Ceylon, to the east the Bay of Bengal, to the west Arabia and Africa. To the south was the Indian Ocean, and beyond, the South Pole. All the world might be seen from such a place, while its prying eyes were excluded. The setting only encouraged de Mauny in his ambition. He sought to evoke a grand tour, as Christopher Ondaatje wrote, with ‘echoes of the Italian lakes, the isle of Capri, some details of the Kandyan style, Alhambra styled carved wooden pillars and even some elements of the Vatican gardens’.

  At the heart of this exquisite palace lay its Hall of the Lotus, open to the skies and lined with panels of blue and gold. It was entered through a theatrical arch dressed with blue silk curtains in the art nouveau style (there were no doors); its dome rested on eight sky-blue pillars. The entire house resembled a magical lantern set down on the tiny island, illuminated by golden light pouring through amber-coloured glass blinds. Even the iron gates that admitted the chosen to this artificial paradise were surmounted with brass-headed peacocks through whose turquoise eyes, it was said, one could see the vast Indian Ocean sprawling through time.

  To fill his house de Mauny designed his own furniture, made in Colombo to a French style, some pieces of which survive even now, despite floods and hurricanes. Work proceeded slowly, and it was not until 1931 that de Mauny took up residency in his lavish abode. Throughout the thirties, European nobility called on Taprobane – the same society that had rejected the would-be aristocrat back home was lured to his island, as if what was taboo in Western circles could be allowed far from its salons and drawing rooms. But de Mauny had only a few years to enjoy his grand entertainments; he died of a heart attack in 1941, and with his death his vision seemed to slip back into the sea. A year later his son, a naval commander who lived in Hampshire, sold the island.

  ——

  One afternoon in 1949, in his country home near Salisbury, Wiltshire, where his family had occupied the great mansion at Wilton since Shakespeare performed his plays there, David Herbert, second son of the Earl of Pembroke, was showing his family albums to his friend, the American writer Paul Bowles. Turning the pages, Bowles happened on a photograph of Taprobane, taken when Herbert had visited Ceylon in the 1930s.

  Bowles was transfixed. He saw the ‘tiny dome-shaped island with a strange looking house at its top, and, spread out along its flanks, terraces that lost themselves in the shade of giant trees’. Bowles was an inveterate wanderer in exotic places; he was also the newly successful author of The Sheltering Sky, a nightmarish story set in Morocco, where he and his wife Jane were at the centre of a group of bohemian expatriates. But Bowles, who was naturally reclusive, had begun to find their company claustrophobic, and seeking to escape, determined to go to Ceylon. He sailed from Antwerp that December, on the freighter General Walter. As the ship drew nearer to the island, he found himself recalling Kafka: ‘From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back. That is the point that must be reached.’

  Bowles was referring to the book he was trying to write, although he might have been addressing his psychological state. When he finally saw Taprobane, the black-and-white photograph he had glimpsed in an English stately home became reality, and it exceeded his expectations, ‘an embodiment of the innumerable fantasies and daydreams that had flitted through my mind since childhood’. Two years later, Bowles bought the island for five hundred dollars. It became his version of Cuthbert’s Inner Farne, albeit rather more worldly and sensual.

  Bowles relished his retreat. ‘The maid polished the furniture and filled bowls with orchids. The gardener fetched things from the market in the village on the mainland. Another man, a Hindu, came twice a day to empty the latrines, as there was no running water on the island. Life moved like clockwork,’ he claimed, ‘there were no complications.’ In the evening, Bowles and his lover, Mohammed Temsamany, would wade across the water in their bathing suits, their servants carrying their masters’ clothes in bundles on their heads. On the other side, they would dress and set off in the direction of the devil dancers whose displays had come to obsess the writer. To him their convulsions seemed a kind of shock therapy; the masked figures in the darkness, lit by their flaming torches, driving out ‘demons of pain, psychosis and bad luck by inducing such terror in the subject that he will automatically expel them’.

  At night Bowles lay in bed, listening to the waves crashing on the island’s seaward cliffs, contrasting them with the softer sound they made on the sandy bay. It was the greatest luxury he could imagine. He was untroubled by the sharks that swam around the reef, or by the enormous turtle that
haunted the rocks, rising to the surface occasionally like ‘a floating boulder’, its great domed back an indication of its age, so the gardener said. During the hours of darkness, flying foxes hung in the trees, to be chased away at daybreak by flocks of crows. ‘Once they had done that and remarked about it with each other for a while, they flew back to the mainland. But the bats never returned before dark.’

  Sitting at one of the Count’s desks, cigarette holder in his mouth, fingers poised over his typewriter, Bowles wrote his novel The Spider’s House. It was set in Morocco, but its title might have applied to his current refuge. His wife Jane was much less enamoured of the island. She took to drinking, hard, and particularly objected to the flying foxes – they seemed to be leathery demons to her – and couldn’t wait to leave. Perhaps she sensed a place haunted by its past. The dark island of Ceylon itself may have been where all the devils were. As a young boy growing up near Colombo, my brother-in-law Sam saw a burning light at the end of the garden one night. As he watched, the apparition zoomed closer and closer towards him, taking on the shape of a human head engulfed in flames.

  With the arrival of the high seas of the monsoons, and the high taxes levied on foreigners, Paul Bowles was also driven out. According to one writer, Richard Hill, he became unpopular with the locals, not least on account of his use of hashish; at night they came to whistle and throw stones at the island and its unwelcome tenant. After only two years on Taprobane, Bowles sold up and retreated to Tangier, from where I received polite replies to my enquiries, neatly typed on cigarette-paper-thin sheets, as well as an invitation to visit which I never took up.

  Nor did I see any devils on Taprobane, although for all I knew there might have been hundreds hiding in the lush vegetation. Guests drifted under the thirty-foot-high cupola of the Hall of the Lotus from which the villa’s rooms radiated like the hands of a clock, and where any manner of other lives might be being lived out. De Mauny’s elegant furniture still stood against the walls. In the darkness, I swam around the rocks, the light from the torches flaring on the lapping waves. Only when it was time to leave did we realise how far the tide had risen. Wading across the water, which was now above thigh-height, I had to support an older lady, elegantly clad in an immaculate gold-embroidered sari, as she picked her way through the swirling cocoa-coloured sea like a waterlogged bird-of-paradise. I wouldn’t have been surprised, looking back over my shoulder, if the entire island had disappeared behind us, sinking into the Indian Ocean.