was on a shoal north of the island of Kaledupa. It was truly a kampong air, a “water village.” It was much more similar to the temporary stilt villages of the past. It was not built on land, but in shallow water. About a quarter mile of ocean separated it from the island of Kaledupa.
There was a main walkway through the village that was wide and sturdy. We wandered through rows of houses on stilts above the water, connected by narrow elevated walkways. Some houses were connected to it by a few precarious loose planks. Many of the houses had wooden ladders down to the water, where old wooden boats were moored. Dried fish and clothing and brightly colored fabrics hung from porches. Inside one of the bamboo huts, a young woman rocked a baby in a tiny hammock made of cloth.
Just outside the village in the open water I spotted a kapal, a traditional nomadic houseboat. One of the few remaining nomadic families had sought shelter from the monsoon for a few weeks in Mantigola.
Nowhere on earth is there a people whose lives are more deeply intertwined with the sea than the sea nomads of Southeast Asia—they eat, cook, hunt, sleep, and give birth at sea. In the past, they could be found everywhere from Australia to Burma to the Philippines. In Indonesia they are called the Bajau. In Thailand and Burma they are called the Moken; near the Philippines, the Orang Laut.
The village overflowed with the sound of voices, the high-pitched giggles of children, the clatter of cooking and hammering, the sound of ukuleles and singing. All of that mingled with the sound of the wind and waves. There were no car sounds, no Vespas or trains.
A man carefully descended a wooden ladder carrying his son, no older than two years old. While he balanced on the ladder, he carefully dipped his son waist deep into the sea for a bath. The Bajau are among the best free divers in the world—children start learning to swim when they learn to crawl.
The son of the village chief introduced me to a man named Lauda. He had the build of a competitive swimmer, lean with strong, wide shoulders. He was known in the village as an exceptionally good free diver. He showed me a pair of wooden diving goggles that he had carved himself. Two oblong pieces of glass were fitted inside them.
“Can I buy a pair of these from you?” I asked.
“Yes,” he smiled. He ran back to his house and brought me a pair.
“These,” he pointed to his own goggles, “I keep them for myself, because I carved them to fit my face exactly.”
At the edge of the village, a woman approached in a dugout canoe with a triangular sail. She steered the tiny canoe through windy seas with an easy confidence. The very first sailors and boat builders are believed to be the Austronesians whose origins date back to when there was a land bridge between Australia and New Guinea. They built the first boats—dugout canoes—some seven thousand to ten thousand years ago, around the time of the Agricultural Revolution. They predated the Polynesians. It was 3,300 years ago when Austronesians sailed east and settled in Fiji, marking the beginning of Polynesian culture, which flourished throughout the Pacific.
The nautical historian Robert Hobman told me how, thirty years ago, a Bajau fisherman pointed an arm to the west and explained to him that “in the old days” they went to “the Red Island,” which was very big. They stayed there for a long time, the fisherman said, and sometimes they came back. Bob thought the island might have been Madagascar, and the incident inspired his Sarimanok expedition. He and a team built an outrigger canoe to Neolithic specifications from a large hollowed-out log, without any nonorganic materials. Using a palm-woven sail, the canoe carried eight crew members thousands of miles across the Indian Ocean to demonstrate how Madagascar’s first human settlers arrived around 500 BC. They navigated only by the stars and a crude, wooden sundial.
The Indonesian government now wanted the sea nomads to settle on land—boats drifting in and out of Indonesian territory disrupted efforts to secure borders. But as the Bajau began living in stilt villages, they mined coral to fortify the foundations for their homes, gutting large areas of coral reef. Like the rest of humanity, their relationship with the sea was mired in destructive contradictions.
Rikardo and I paused on a walkway where a group of kids were playing. One of them cast a single line with a hook in the water, holding the end of the line in his hand. I looked down and watched a school of fish swim beneath the wooden planks and wondered what this spot might have been like a hundred years before. While this village had fewer concrete pilings and less garbage than other villages I’d seen, the water beneath it was murky brown—it was full of sewage.
“How can one live like this?” I asked myself. But then I imagined how people a century from now might look back into our time with disgust at how we pumped carbon dioxide into the air—another “commons.” We might view thousands of cars at rush hour with the same disbelief. New Delhi had recently exceeded Beijing as the world’s top “killer city.” Air pollution there was sixty times safe levels. Fourteen hundred cars were being added to New Delhi’s streets per day.
The village chief had invited us for tea. His son walked us to his house and introduced us. The chief, Arman, greeted us politely and gestured that we sit down. A lean young man wearing a sarong immediately came out with a tray of hot tea and a plate of teacakes. He knelt down adroitly and placed it in front of us and then silently vanished. The teacakes were carefully arranged on a round plate. I eyed them. My delicate Western gut had managed to get through nearly six weeks without getting sick.
Eat it! They’ve made this special for you.
Arman watched. I cautiously bit into a piece. It was delicious. Some kind of deep-fried green fruit. The crust was crumbly and laced with sugar. Arman smiled. I had no doubts he knew what had gone through my mind.
“When did you realize the oceans were in trouble?” I asked.
“Well, there were fewer fish,” he said “But it really began with questions.”
I reached for another teacake. Rikardo reached for one as well. We were famished.
“Simple questions,” Arman continued. “Why are there fewer fish? And I talk with scientists who come to study the ocean. They are worried that there are fewer fish too. Then I began to learn about the coral reef, about ecology, that the fish need the reef to live.”
“But when did you know that you had to do something? That you had to change?”
“When we began to be hungry. When it became hard to get enough to eat. The elders know it best, because they have seen the difference between now and many years ago. And we are divers, we see the life in the sea with our own eyes.” He pointed two fingers to his own eyes to stress the point. “In the past, fish were everywhere. We had special ceremonies of respect to the sea before we fished. We need to have that respect again, to care for the sea better.”
Before I said goodbye to Arman, I asked him if there was anything he would like me to tell people in the United States. “Please tell them that we are a proud people. We are great sailors and great boat builders and great fishermen. We need to take care of the ocean, because we have no land. The sea is our home.”
More information about Ocean Country is available at:
http://lizcunningham.net/ocean_country_the_book/
Twenty-one percent of royalties are being donated to the New England Aquarium’s Marine Conservation Action Fund. That percentage was chosen because it’s the percentage of oxygen in each breath we take. Over half of that oxygen comes from plants and algae in the ocean. The New England Aquarium’s Marine Conservation Action Fund (MCAF) aims to protect and promote ocean biodiversity through funding of small-scale, time-sensitive, community-based programs. www.neaq.org/mcaf
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58 - SEVENSEAS
Mantigola