The next few seconds, as the canoe settled lower into the ocean, were a blur that I can’t reconstruct in detail. I was now scared that I would be trapped under the canoe’s plastic awning as it sank. Somehow, I and everyone else managed to get out of the canoe into the ocean; I don’t know whether some of us towards the rear jumped out of the open rear space not covered by the awning, or whether we instead crawled out under the awning’s sides, and whether the passengers in front of us crawled out under the awning or scrambled to the open space in front or to the rear of the awning. Malik told me afterwards that the crew got out of the canoe first, then I got out, then Malik.
The next minute was even more of a panicked blur for me. I was wearing heavy hiking boots, a long-sleeved shirt, and shorts, and found myself in the water several yards from the canoe, which had capsized and was now bottom up. The weight of my hiking boots was dragging me underwater. My initial thought was a vivid, frightened “what is there that I can hold on to to keep myself afloat?” Near me, someone was clinging to a yellow life preserver, which I tried to grab in my panic, but the other person pushed me away. From my position now floating in the water, the waves seemed high. I had swallowed some water. While I can swim for short distances in a calm swimming pool, I wouldn’t have been able to swim or float for many minutes through waves. I felt overwhelmed by fear that there was nothing to keep me afloat: our luggage and the canoe’s gas tank floating nearby weren’t buoyant enough to support my weight, the inverted canoe hull was now low in the water, and I feared that even it would sink. The island from which we had set out appeared to be several miles distant, another island seemed equally distant, and no other boat was in sight.
Malik swam over to me, grabbed the collar of my shirt, and pulled me back to the canoe. For the next half-hour he stood on the submerged upside-down engine and clung to the canoe’s stern, while I clung nearby to the rear of the canoe’s left side, with Malik keeping a grip on my neck. I stretched my arms out over the hull’s round smooth underside, merely to steady myself, because the hull offered nothing for my hands to grasp. Occasionally I reached out my right hand to grip a submerged part of the engine, but that kept my head low above the water, which splashed into my face. Instead, for most of the time, my only grip holding me to the canoe was with my feet, which were somehow inserted in or hooked onto the left side’s sunken gunwale. Now that the canoe was upside down and my feet were on the gunwale, the gunwale’s depth below the water was such that my head was not far above the surface of the water, and occasionally a wave washed over me. Some piece of wood or awning was loose on the gunwale and rubbed and hurt my knee with each wave. I asked Malik to hold me while I untied my boot laces with one hand and then took off and threw away the heavy boots that were dragging me down.
From time to time I turned around to look at the waves coming towards me, and to brace myself for especially big waves. Often, one of my legs lost its grip on the gunwale, leaving me to rotate helplessly on the other leg that was still on the gunwale. Several times I lost my grip with both legs, was swept loose, paddled back or was pulled back by Malik, and in panic tried to regain my leg grip on the gunwales. During the entire time since the capsizing, the struggle to survive from one wave to the next had been all-consuming. I had the sense that there was no pause in the struggle. Each wave threatened to shake me loose. Each time that I did get shaken loose, there was a panicked struggle to get back to the canoe and to get a grip again. I was often gasping from water in my face.
Because Malik’s stance on the engine seemed more secure than my foot grip on the gunwales, I eventually moved from the canoe’s side to its stern and stood with one leg on the submerged engine next to Malik, leaning forward and resting my arms on the round hull. Then I found and grabbed with my right hand some wooden bars attached to the hull, probably a partially broken piece of gunwale. This was the first good handhold that I had had since the canoe capsized. Standing on the engine and leaning forwards over the hull had the advantage that it kept my head higher above the waves than when I had been standing on the more deeply submerged gunwale, but it had the disadvantage that it placed more strain on my leg and was more tiring.
We didn’t seem to be drifting any closer to the two islands visible in the distance. I knew that I wouldn’t be able to stay afloat for more than a minute if the canoe, already floating low in the water, sank. I asked Malik if the canoe was just being held up by trapped air under the hull and was at risk of sinking if that air somehow came out, but he answered that the canoe timbers themselves would float. There was nothing that I could do except to hold on, react to each wave, wait (for what?), and watch. I kept asking Malik whether he was OK—probably just to assure myself that I was OK.
Luggage floated out from underneath the canoe. Some of it had been lashed to the canoe and stayed floating near the prow, including my own three suitcases. But other luggage was loose and drifted away, including my red rucksack, my green duffel bags, and Malik’s luggage. It flashed through my mind that the most important thing was to save my life, and that what happened to my luggage was trivial by comparison. I nevertheless found myself slipping into my usual what-if mode of mulling over how I would deal with problems that arise in the course of travel. If I lost my passport, I thought, I could always get another one, though it would be a big mess to have to go to the nearest American embassy in Indonesia’s capital 1,600 miles away. If I lost all my money and traveler’s checks, I wasn’t sure if I had a separate record of my traveler’s check numbers, and that record would be in my drifting or floating luggage anyway. If we did get rescued, I would have to borrow a lot of money in order to fly to Indonesia’s capital and get a new passport: how and from whom could I borrow money? My most important possessions—that passport, money, and traveler’s checks, plus my bird notes from the whole trip—were in my yellow knapsack, which I had been holding in my lap in the canoe and didn’t see now. If I didn’t succeed in retrieving my knapsack, perhaps I could at least reconstruct from memory the bird lists for the main sites that I had visited. Then I realized that it was absurd to be thinking about my passport, money, and bird lists, when I didn’t know if I was going be alive an hour from now anyway.
The scene of our struggles was paradoxically beautiful. There was a cloudless blue sky overhead, lovely tropical islands were visible from afar, and birds were flying. Even with the distraction of my struggle for survival, I continued to identify the birds: there were Lesser Crested Terns (or were they Greater Crested?), possibly a smaller species of tern, and one Striated Heron. But, for the first time in my life, I was in a situation where I didn’t know if I would live. I couldn’t acknowledge my own feelings about the prospect of death. Instead, I reflected on how upset my mother and my fiancée would be if I died. I recited to myself the telegram that I imagined my mother receiving: “We are sorry to have to tell you that your son Jared drowned in the Pacific Ocean yesterday.”
At some point I told myself that, if I did survive, I should stop obsessing about things in life less important than survival. What would I do differently with the rest of my life if I did survive this accident? One thought was to devote myself to having children, about which I had been uncertain. (Afterwards, I did decide to have children.) Would I ever return to New Guinea if I survived? The risks of New Guinea—risks associated with boats like this, with crashes of the small planes on which I depended for travel, and with injuries or illnesses that could leave me physically incapacitated in a remote mountain range—all those risks weren’t worth just obtaining a list of birds for yet another previously unexplored mountain. Perhaps this would be the end of my New Guinea career, even if I did survive.
But I then reminded myself that I had more immediate problems than to figure out what I would do if I survived. I recalled that one of my locked suitcases floating lashed to the canoe’s prow contained two folded-up air mattresses and two air pillows, which would be excellent life preservers if inflated. I asked Malik to ask one of the men perched on the
canoe’s prow to open the suitcase and extract the mattresses and pillows. I dug the suitcase key out of my pocket and passed it to Malik, to pass on to one of the men on the prow. But no one did open my suitcase, for reasons that I never learned.
The canoe’s other seven people besides Malik and me—the other four passengers and three crew—were now all sitting on or clinging to the front of the canoe’s upside-down hull. The Ceram passenger made several dives under the canoe to look for anything useful, and he succeeded in pulling out the canoe’s three life preservers, which he gave to the seven people at the front. No one did anything to help Malik and me. The Ambon passenger was weeping and repeating, “I can’t swim, we are going to die!” The Javan passenger was reciting prayers. The Chinese fisherman said that he was afraid of rain and big waves if we were still afloat and alive after sunset; “God help us then!” he added. Malik said that, if we were not rescued within the hour or so remaining before sunset, there would be no hope for us, because the direction of the ocean currents was carrying us out to sea away from land, and we would not survive the night. I didn’t think seriously of what would happen to us if we were not rescued before sunset, except to reflect how hard it had already been to be wet, shivering, and clinging to the rolling hull for an hour in daylight, and how much harder it would be to continue to do so for 12 hours at night in the dark. But the three crew and the Ceram man seemed secure and relaxed. One of them was singing, one or two of them occasionally swam near the hull, and the Ceram man sat on the hull eating a big fruit called a durian, of which passengers had brought several and which were now floating loose.
We kept looking around us for other boats. None were visible, except for some sails far off towards the New Guinea mainland. After around 5:30 P.M., an hour before sunset, we saw three small sails of sailing canoes coming from the mainland on a course that would carry them past us but in the distance. One of my fellow passengers took a stick, mounted a shirt on it, stood up on the canoe’s hull, and waved the stick and shirt to catch the attention of whoever was in the sailing canoes. The Ceram man asked me to take off my blue shirt, which Malik then mounted on another stick and waved while he too stood up. All of us kept shouting “Tolong!” (Indonesian for “help”), but we were far out of hearing range of the sailing canoes in the distance.
I was still standing on the upside-down engine underwater at the stern. It at least offered a secure platform for my feet, whereas the other seven people sitting or standing on the smooth round hull in front of me, and now joined by Malik as well, had nothing to grip. But I knew that I was not going to be able to stand uncomfortably on the engine all night, because my leg was already starting to cramp. I shouted out to Malik to ask him whether he thought that I would be more secure sitting forward on the hull with him and the other passengers than standing on the engine, and he answered, “Yes.” For me to get from the stern to the front of the boat meant traversing an area of hull much more insecure than either the stern or the front: it required walking along the round hull of the pitching canoe. I climbed from the engine onto the hull, stood up, and tried walking forwards. I quickly fell off into the sea, scrambled back onto the hull, eventually reached a position just behind the Chinese fisherman, and sat astride the hull immediately behind him. This had some disadvantages: there was nothing for either my hands or my feet to grip, I had to shift my body as the hull rolled, a few times I fell off into the sea and had to scramble back on, and I began to shiver because my body was now completely in the air rather than partly in the warm sea. It was ironical to be at risk of hypothermia in the tropical lowlands: while I would have felt hot if I had been dry, being instead constantly splashed and wet and wind-exposed left me chilled. But my head was now high above the waves, I was not standing on the engine and developing leg cramps, and I thought that I could maintain my new position for longer than the position in which I had been standing at the stern.
As the sun dropped lower towards the horizon, two of the three crew took two of the three life preservers and swam off towards the island, miles in the distance, from which we had set out, saying that they were going to fetch help. It still wasn’t clear whether the three sailing canoes in the distance were on a path that would pass far ahead of us, where they couldn’t see or hear us, or whether any of them was getting closer. The remaining men on our hull pointed to the sun, concerned with how many minutes remained before sunset, and with whether we would be visible into the sun or back-lit by the sun from the sailing canoes. Besides the sailing canoes, we saw a motor launch and possibly one other boat, but they were very far away.
Now, the sail of the nearest sailing canoe seemed to be getting bigger. Enough of the canoe was now visible to make it likely that the canoe must also have seen us and was actually getting closer. When it was about 100 yards away from us, the canoe stopped and dropped its sail. In the canoe there was just one man, who paddled towards us. We could now see that the canoe was a small one, only about 10 feet long, riding very low in the sea, with perhaps only six inches of freeboard. As the little canoe came alongside us, without discussion the two men on our capsized hull nearest the canoe, the Ambon man who couldn’t swim and the Javanese, jumped into it. The little canoe couldn’t safely hold anyone else, and its boatman paddled off. As it did so, it became clear that the second of the three canoes was approaching, and it too dropped sail at a distance of 100 yards. It was larger than the first canoe, and in it were two men, who paddled towards us. When it came close, this time there was discussion between those two men and our group, and among the people in our group, as to how many people the sailing canoe could hold, and who they would be. At first, the two men in the sailing canoe proposed to take only two or three of us, because they were concerned about their own canoe’s low freeboard and risk of being swamped, but they finally agreed to take four of the five of us left on our hull. We agreed among ourselves that the person to remain on our hull would be the third crew member, who retained our remaining life preserver.
As I stepped into the sailing canoe, Malik asked me where my passport was. I replied that it was in my yellow knapsack, possibly still in the airspace under our hull. The Ceram man who had already dived repeatedly under the hull to retrieve the life preservers now dived again, came out with my yellow knapsack, and passed it to me. The sailing canoe then pushed off from our capsized hull, with six people in it: one of its two crew members in front and the other in back, and behind the front crewman the Chinese fisherman, me, Malik, and the Ceram man in that sequence. I had periodically looked at my wristwatch, which to my surprise was still working despite its immersion in seawater. The time was 6:15 P.M., 15 minutes before sunset. We had been in the water or on our capsized canoe for two hours.
It soon grew dark. Our two rescuers paddled towards the nearest land in the distance, which happened to be the island from which we had set out that afternoon. The sailing canoe rode very low in the water, with just a few inches of freeboard, and one of the men sitting behind me bailed constantly. I reflected that this little, heavily loaded canoe could also tip over, but that we probably were safe now. I didn’t feel any relief or strong feelings; this was all just happening to me, as if I were an emotionless observer.
As our canoe paddled on, we heard voices in the water to our left. I guessed that it might be the voices of our motor canoe’s two crew members who had swum off with life preservers. However, one of my companions could understand better than could I what the voices were shouting in Indonesian. It turned out that the shouts were from the three people in the first rescue canoe (its pilot, and our Ambon and Javan passengers), which was sinking, having taken on too much water from being overloaded. The freeboard of our own rescue canoe was too low for us to pick up another person. Someone in our canoe shouted something back to the three men in the water, and our rescuers paddled on, leaving them to their fates.
I don’t know how long it took us to return to the island: perhaps an hour. As we approached it, we saw big waves breaking and a fire on the
beach, and we wondered what the fire meant. In front of me I heard a conversation in Indonesian between the Chinese fisherman and the canoe paddler in the prow, including repeatedly the Indonesian words empat pulu ribu (meaning “40,000”). The Chinese fisherman, who had retrieved a small bag of his from our overturned canoe, opened his bag, took out money, and gave it to the paddler. I assumed at the time that the paddler was tired and wanted to land us at that nearby beach with the fire, and that the fisherman was offering him 40,000 Indonesian rupiah as an inducement to take us further to the island’s main dock. But Malik told me later that what the paddler actually said was this: “If you don’t give me 10,000 rupiah [about $5] for each of the four of you now, I will take you back to your capsized canoe and leave you there.”
Our rescue canoe rounded a point of the island and came into a sheltered bay where campfires were burning on the beach. Behind us in the dark, we heard a motor and saw a motorboat with a bright light come up slowly behind us. Our little canoe stopped in shallow water, and Malik, the Chinese fisherman, the Ceram man, and I stepped out and waded to and climbed into the motorboat, which by coincidence turned out to be a fishing boat belonging to the family of the Chinese fisherman. It had been out fishing, happened to see our two crewmen who had swum off with the two life preservers, picked them up, searched for and found our capsized canoe, and picked up the floating luggage still attached to the canoe (including my suitcases but none of Malik’s luggage). We stayed in the motorboat as it slowly headed towards the New Guinea mainland. We told the motorboat drivers about the three men from the first capsized rescue canoe whom we had heard shouting in the water. However, when we reached the approximate location where we had heard them, the motorboat went straight on and did not circle or shout. Malik told me later that the drivers explained that the three men from the capsized rescue canoe had probably somehow reached shore.
The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn From Traditional Societies? Page 31