Seven-Tenths

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  The Bajau were homeward bound from the island of Siasi, whose town was the nearest reliable source of fresh water. There was also an acute shortage there, to be sure, but at least water could be bought at a seasonal average of about 12p per jerrycan. At first light they had reached Siasi’s jetty with a load of fish, which the women’s husbands had caught the previous day and had kept alive overnight in rattan containers suspended in the tide beneath the floors of their huts. All the Bajaus’ transactions had been carried out by the one woman among them who knew how to use money. None of the four was literate, but she did understand coins. As long as everything was done in coins it was all right. She would have nothing to do with paper money. Not only could she never be sure of the denominations but it was all too evidently flimsy stuff. Drop it in the sea and it would be reduced to pulp and where were you then? For all her knowledge, though, she and her companions were happiest with barter. Barter, now, that was the proper way of doing things; taking into account all sorts of subtle variables like quality, whether there was a glut or a shortage that day, how much of a hurry you were in. Thus a basket of medium blue crabs might fetch two baskets of good cassava, while a ‘half-boat’ shark half the length of the bangka was worth quite an assortment of nylon line, fish hooks and petrol, plus (especially if the Chinese shopkeeper was buying jaws as well as fins) two pairs of children’s shorts.

  As the boat rounded an islet they could see Subuan in the distance with its detached clump of huts standing well offshore on legs anchored in the corals. The sea’s surface glassily collected the white clouds which, towards midday, might with any luck heap together and wring some precious rainwater out of themselves. The Bajau stared forward, reading the water. Probably no other people anywhere could gaze with such knowledge of what was happening below its surface. The sudden swirl of a tail, catspaws and dimples of wind, the alignment of the snapped blades of Thalassia sea grass whose floating debris threaded the archipelago like oil slicks, even passing smells: all carried information or stood for omens.

  No doubt the hammering exhaust and the mesmeric calm prevented the women and the boy from noticing the bigger and faster craft with double outriggers slipping out from behind the islet as they passed. It always would have been too late for them in any case. They would certainly have seen it as it drew level, matching their speed a few yards away. The boy at the engine would have turned, half stood, shocked but not really bewildered by the sight of a man steadying an M-16 across the bigger craft’s low roof. And thus, probably without shaping a clear thought, he took leave for ever of his sister and companions, of the glittering morning ocean, of his seventeen years. The shots carried away much of his head. His body must have fallen across the scorching engine, for when it washed ashore it was still possible to make out extensive blistering of chest and stomach. His dead finger slack, the engine would have slowed abruptly to tick-over. The little boat lost way at once, rocking gently out in the middle of the sunlit strait, steam rising as the boy’s blood hissed and bubbled on the cylinder head.

  It is unlikely the three women remained sitting mutely while men swarmed aboard across the outriggers. Being Bajau, their instincts would surely have been to put themselves into the hands of the sea and its spirits. But sooner or later, no matter how ably they swam and dived, they would have been wrenched from the water and tied up on the larger craft. A man aboard their bangka unwound the nylon from the boy’s finger, hauled his sizzling body off the engine and threw it overboard. Then the faster boat took the other in tow and, veering away from Subuan, probably headed south-west to Tapaano or even Sugbai, which lay on the horizon a scant forty minutes away.

  Once there, the pirates would doubtless have been joined in camp by their outlaw companions, taking it in turns to rape and beat the women unconscious. At length someone would have set off with all three victims’ sarongs (that all-purpose garment which serves variously as skirt, trousers and turban) and arranged to have them delivered to the respective husbands, together with ransom demands of just under £1,000 per head.

  Since everyone knew the Bajau were nearly all subsistence fishermen and the poorest tribe between Mindanao and Indonesia, it is not clear how seriously these ransom demands were intended. Maybe the pirates thought that if a poor Bajau could put an engine in his bangka he had a secret source of funds which might be further tapped. In point of fact the motor had been installed by a Chinese, a merchant keen to boost his trade in marine products which he periodically shipped to Manila. In any event he was not a man to throw good cash after a lost engine. After all, no one seriously thought a Bajau was worth … well, how could one put a figure on the lives of illiterate fishermen, gypsies who mostly lived outside any sensible economy? Still less on their wives.

  And so, after a week’s captivity, during which time no money arrived and their treatment no doubt reflected the pirates’ increasing anger, the three Bajau women were put to death in a way which can only be imagined. All that is known is that the body of one was chopped up into quite small pieces – diced, it would be called in a recipe – and piled in the bilges of their little bangka over the four bolts on which the Briggs & Stratton engine had been mounted. Then it was set adrift. The boat with its heap of meat wandered with the current for a while before being found, recognised and read as just one more awful warning in a region used to awful warnings and worse deeds.

  This small atrocity was still mentioned now and then by the island folk three months later, although by that time it had been overtaken by news of more recent acts of piracy. Such things were commonplace. The least advantage in material goods or business put anyone firmly in an extortioner’s sights. Uncharacteristically, these pirates had forgone a bangka, but they had gained a nearly new engine, some full containers of drinking water and a week’s fun. The world spun on.

  As for the Bajau themselves, they would not have forgotten. At least they were able to take the boy’s burned and headless body to their cemetery island and lay it with semi-pagan rites beneath a carefully painted wooden board, surrounded by gay little flags. Then, as is their custom, they probably raced each other back down the beach and into the water to wash, spurred on by the half-serious belief that ‘the last one in is the next to die’. Perhaps they instinctively felt the sea safer than the land. Maybe some distant tribal memory warned them that, like turtles, they were doomed to transact certain necessary rituals on dry land before they could once again return to the comparative safety of the ocean.

  *

  Such an anonymous event – which was never reported in any newspaper, nor formally to any military or civil authority – contained within it many of the well-worn coordinates of the Bajaus’ fate, not merely of three women and a teenage boy but of the whole scattered tribe. Come to that, it was characteristic of an entire region. Everything that had taken place was immemorial within its setting: the fetching of water, the bartering of goods, the being victim, the being pirate. So also were the lumps of land rising from the seabed haphazard of all demarcations, the shoals and atolls, sandbars and islets drugged with sun as the archipelago (a word whose beautiful syllables stretch themselves to the mind’s horizon) sprawled in its great tropic swoon while seething with violence. Many of Conrad’s best stories were set in this area. From southern Mindanao, from Sultan Kudarat and Zamboanga and Palawan down to Java in the south, from Sumatra in the west to the Moluccas in the east, certain things have changed little to this day. Some names are different. Celebes has become Sulawesi, Makassar is Ujung Pandang and Batavia is Jakarta. But the rest – Ternate, Surabaya, Kuching, Samarang, Timor – still exist and echo with the pungency that thrilled my adolescence until like Axel Heyst himself I could believe my life enchanted by a magic circle ‘with a radius of eight hundred miles drawn round a point in North Borneo.’*

  The way of living is still much the same for many in the Sulu archipelago. They have not stopped diving to eardrum-splitting depths for pearls and tripang (sea cucumbers); the blue highways of water are patrolled as
ever by sharks and criss-crossed by inter-island traffic of every kind. The pirates, smugglers and common cut-throats are very much in evidence. Even vestiges of the old sultanates remain, although the turbaned despot living in his fiefdom – a pocket trading empire defended by mangroves, a treacherous estuary and riverbank spies – tends nowadays to be a pretender who manages a grocery store in Jolo and writes long letters by candlelight to the United Nations, beseeching it to recognise him as rightful heir. Everywhere the kris has given way to the Armalite, while the great white sails of clippers and schooners have been supplanted by Isuzu marine diesels. Otherwise, Conrad might recognise these waters as having retained their archipelagic essence: seductive, dangerous, possessing above and below their surface a treacherous quality which leaves nobody untouched.

  He would certainly have been familiar with the Bajau, although in his day they were more exclusively boat-dwelling than they are now. Anthropology has still not decided where they originally came from, or why. The earliest European visitors, beginning with the Portuguese and Magellan in the first quarter of the sixteenth century, reported small groups of boat-dwelling nomads throughout the archipelagos of South-East Asia. It is largely a matter of guesswork as to how long they had been there. Opinion is divided, too, on whether they once all came from the same tribal stock – whether, for example, the sea nomads of the Mergui archipelago off the western coast of Burma share a common ancestry with those of the Riaw-Lingga archipelago in Indonesia and the Bajau of Sulu and North Borneo. Whatever their origin, it is always presumed that at some point far back in time they were all land-dwellers who for some reason decided to go and live, as far as possible, afloat. What is now to be seen is the final phase of this ancient way of life as the Bajau try to take up residence on land again. The difficulty they are experiencing in doing so is a measure of the thoroughness of their social adaptation to living on the sea.

  One of the theories as to why their ancestors left the land in the first place is that they were literally driven off it by stronger tribes. If so, it is ironic that similar persecution is now driving the Bajau off the sea. Three tribes predominate in Sulu: the Tausug, the Samal and the Bajau. For several reasons, principally linguistic, modern opinion tends to lump these last two together. The Bajau language is a dialect of Samal (properly called Sinama) and besides, they consider themselves to be Samals of a kind. ‘Of a kind’ is a reasonable qualification since the Samal of the southern archipelago are a heterogeneous bunch and can vary in dialect, attitudes and social customs from island to island. At one extreme they include illiterate, pagan, boat-dwelling Bajau and at the other sophisticated traders and teachers who have made the hajj to Mecca.

  Ranged against all of them are the Tausug. The Tausug have always been politically and otherwise dominant in the archipelago, with a reputation for pride, hot temper and general disdain for lesser folk such as Samal. As for the Bajau, they often refer to them as luwaan. Luwa is the Tausug verb for ‘to spit out’; ‘outcast’ would probably be the nearest English equivalent. No doubt a good deal of Tausug bigotry towards the Bajau is caused by – or at least explained as – a matter of religion. The Tausug have a generally high opinion of their own version of Islam, rather less of the Samal version, and can express serious doubts about whether the Bajau brand even counts as Islam at all. It would be impossible for a people living in a predominantly Islamic area not to have assimilated a great deal of Islamic culture, and the Bajau have done so, many of them being devout Muslims. But since they are traditionally a boat people they are perforce a people without architecture. Hence their mosques – for all the world dilapidated huts on stilts standing in the waves – do not fulfil the Tausug idea of what a mosque should look like. ‘How can a people without decent mosques qualify as Muslims?’ I was asked by some exceedingly hospitable Tausug on Siasi. What I should have countered with, had I not lacked the requisite nerve and discourtesy, was ‘How can a people drink as much as you do and qualify as Muslims?’, for drunkenness in this famously Muslim region is widely admitted even by imams to be one of the principal reasons for the extraordinary level of casual violence. It was, of course, Tausug pirates who killed the three Bajau women and the boy. Although it is quite certain their Bajau relatives could identify the men involved, they would have been much too frightened to report them even had there been any form of law in the area worth reporting them to. Seen from far enough away, of course, the Tausug and the Samal and the Bajau appear to have far more in common than not – seem practically indistinguishable, in fact, since they are all people whose lives are overwhelmingly mediated by the sea.

  Left to himself, the Bajau’s is a peaceful, shy, somewhat nomadic way of life which is as highly specialised as that of the Eskimos. It would be a mistake to romanticise it, though. Bajau living has always been extremely hard, often dangerous, lonely and beset with disease. The traditional family unit was a married couple and their children in a low-roofed boat. Depending on season, preferred fishing grounds, family events (mainly marriages and deaths) and sheer whim, the boats either formed parts of flotillas, floating villages or went their own separate ways for months on end. They tended to put ashore only for drinking water, firewood and cassava; otherwise it was a life at sea in all weathers. It was also a life largely spent crouching: squatting to cook, squatting to eat, squatting to fish. To this day older Bajau can still be seen who walk on land with a gait as characteristic and graceless as a duck’s, their lower limbs slightly atrophied from a lifetime’s hunkering down.

  The conditions in these boats, where they still exist today, can become squalid, to say the least. It is not merely that if there are infants and toddlers aboard the bilges soon give the craft the atmosphere of a floating urinal. All sorts of vegetable ends, cooking scraps and fish guts fester there as well, brewing up in the tropical climate so that the liquid, when glimpsed between plank and thwart, can be seen fizzing. This is baled out at anchor in shallows, but on the high seas is often allowed to build up, and for a perfectly good reason. Since Bajau men spend a good deal of time overboard cutting seaweed and diving for tripang and pearl oysters the last thing they want to do is lay a trail of offal and attract sharks. This would be a determining factor for any sea dweller in the tropics and, indeed, is noted in a curious account by an Englishman, Leopold Ainsworth, of trying to run a timber business in the Mergui archipelago in the 1920s.* The sea gypsies he knew there, and whom he tried to introduce to the idea of paid labour on land, called themselves ‘Mawken’, which he translates as ‘seadrowned’. The boats and habits of the Seadrowned People of the Mergui archipelago seem to have been not much different from those of the Bajau, which is hardly surprising given the similarity of the conditions. The Mawken, too, gave an account of their origins which told of persecution by Burmese hill tribes from the north and Malay pirates from the south squeezing them off the land and into the sea. They also offered this as an explanation of why they had no interest or skill in cultivation, merely picking up fruit or an occasional wild pig when passing an island. According to Ainsworth the Mawken seemed to exist on seafood, rice and opium. The Sulu nomads mostly eat cassava as their staple, only the wealthier tribes and classes relying on rice. I never saw opium, but marijuana is widely smoked.

  Malnutrition is a common consequence of this way of life, partly because the diet is unvarying but also because the choicest fish are mostly reserved for sale while the fisherman himself subsists on scraps, shells and the coarser varieties. Combined with the lack of sanitation this leads to a high incidence among the Bajau of tuberculosis, malaria, infant diarrhoea and infestations, to all of which their resistance is slight. This seems ironic, even contradictory, in view of the extraordinary physical fitness and imperviousness to cold needed by men free-diving to up to 100 metres for pearl oysters. Even greater depths are claimed, and although so far as I know nobody has ever bothered to measure them exactly, such dives have to be placed against the current world record of 105 metres,* especially since these are workin
g dives during which shells, lobsters or sea cucumbers are gathered. Before diving the men often swig a mixture of canned milk beaten up with little ‘native’ eggs and lemon juice and eat bananas. They say this makes them resistant to the cold.†

  Young Bajau, particularly children and adolescents, often have the bleached, tawny hair of people who spend their lives in and out of the sea. Some even approach a dusky blondness which, amid uniformly black Asian hair, is very striking indeed and a sure guide to that person’s way of life and social status. No doubt it is Western culture, and specifically cinematic images of Californian or Australian beach culture, which equates this with the very pinnacle of healthy living (or did before skin cancer was mentioned). In South-East Asia, though, it speaks of a life of poverty and often malnutrition lived beyond the least shadow of a classroom, with intestinal worms and scabies as constant companions.

  Even in the 1960s, when anthropologists like H. Arlo Nimmo were undertaking classic studies of the Bajau, their landward trend was obvious. The entirely floating life on houseboats was being relinquished for a tentative one in stilt huts which represented the placing of a wary toe on the very edge of land. Like their Samal cousins, certain Bajau always did build communities of huts on stilts in shallow offshore areas, each hut joined to the next by sagging walkways. The difference between them was that while Samal villages always had a gangway leading ashore, Bajau villages did not. There were other signs, too, of a culture becoming less isolate.