few carefully arranged yellow flowers and a few leaves. He placed this
in a niche above the driver’s seat and stuck a stick of burning incense
into a holder on the dashboard. (There’s an extra that American models
don’t have!) We wondered if he was exorcising whatever demons may have
gotten aboard with us.
A little later the people began to get on. Soon the bus was full, but
still we waited. Down at the waterfront another prau came in. This one
was loaded to the gunwales with large turtles and Barbara scrambled out
with her camera.
“Don’t let them go without me!” she warned, stalking her photographic
prey.
She didn’t have to go to the shore for her pictures, however. Her
subjects were being brought to her, each turtle borne upside down on the
shoulders of a man who walked with it easily up the sloping ladder to
the top of the bus and there deposited it neatly.
The last two turtles were too large to be carried by a single man. These
were slung from poles and brought up to the road by two men each, who
shoved them inside the bus where they just filled the aisle and made an
excellent footrest for the passengers, who sat in long seats facing one
another. At last we started.
Once we were rolling, we passed beautifully irrigated rice fields,
villages with walled compounds, and temples which looked centuries old,
with carved elephants or boars guarding their narrow gates. Everywhere
we saw evidences of the rice harvest: rows of workers in the fields,
seemingly bowed over beneath the weight of huge mushroom-shaped hats as
they cut the ripened grain; men and women carrying sheaves to be
threshed, the men with two full shocks swinging from each end of a pole
across the shoulders, the women with a single, larger bundle balanced on
the head.
Throughout the Balinese countryside women apparently have not heard of
the regulation, promulgated in Java, that they must be “properly
clothed” or, if they have heard of it, they pay it the same attention
that the Balinese, through the centuries, traditionally have paid to the
directives of their alien rulers: they ignore it. In the dooryards the
lovely bodies of the women, clothed only in a sarong of patterned batik,
moved in graceful rhythm as they bounced an upright pole first with one
hand, then with the other, to thresh the grain which had been spread on
mats to dry.
In Den Pasar we got off at the wide dirt lot which is the bus terminus
and transferred to a doh-ka, the pony-cart-for-two which is the
picturesque means of travel through the city streets. The driver whipped
his tiny horse to a gallop, the plume of bells on its head jingled
merrily, and in no time at all we were deposited in front of the Bali
Hotel, where Minnetta was waiting on the porch.
She was far too travel-wise to be living at the Bali Hotel, however.
Already she had found lodgings, at one-fifth the tourist rate, at a
small Balinese hotel on a side street. That night Barbara stayed with
her there and, on the way back from seeing the rest of us off at the bus
terminal, she managed to get herself completely lost. Through this happy
accident she made the acquaintance of Igusti Rai Suwandi, a charming
young Indonesian of Ted’s age who had been studying English in school.
Rai (Igusti, we learned, is a title of caste and not a proper name) was
happy to show Barbara back to her hotel and practice his English.
“Tomorrow I come again,” he promised. “I will meet your son. I will show
him many things. If he will come by me for two days I will show him fete
of young girl who become big.”
This event, which took place _in_ two days, turned out to be the
coming-of-age ceremony for a young cousin, and Rai invited our whole
family to attend. At the appointed time he took us to the outer
courtyard of his “oldest brother’s wife’s father’s home.” We found it
overflowing with milling tourists from the Bali Hotel who were busily
taking pictures of suckling pigs turning on a spit and lovely girls
passing through from the street to the inner courtyard with trays of
food on their heads.
Our hearts sank. We had hoped for more than this, colorful as it was.
But we needn’t have worried. Rai led us through the crowd, up some stone
steps, through a narrow doorway in the brick wall, and down to the inner
courtyard—and another world. All about us were open buildings with
thatched roofs, their floors raised above the ground. Each of them was
gaily decorated with lengths of bright cloth, flowers, and woven palm
leaves. The guests, sitting cross-legged upon the floor of each
pavilion, were all wearing native Balinese costume—magnificent sarongs
of red or green or blue cloth with designs of gold thread and turbans of
batik. They eyed us with curiosity and reserve and, for one horrible
second, I wondered if Rai had brashly invited us without consulting his
elders. Almost immediately, however, we were greeted warmly by Rai’s
brother, who told us to make his home our own and led us to one of the
detached buildings which had been, apparently, assigned to us for our
own use.
In one of the houses, discreetly curtained off with gay hangings, the
young girl for whom the ceremony was being held was being adorned for
the main event of the day: the ritual of filing down her canine teeth.
The reason for this operation was cheerfully given us by Rai: “So she
not be like animal.”
When all was ready the maiden—a pretty, frightened-looking girl of
seventeen—was borne out on the shoulders of two men, for on this day her
feet must never touch the ground. She was clothed in a sarong of green
and gold lamé, with a gold scarf bound around her breasts and wearing a
tall crown of beaten gold, heavy with ornaments.
In the center of the courtyard was the most gaily decorated pavilion of
all and here she was deposited on a raised couch in full view of all the
family and guests. Women attendants removed her headdress and helped her
to lie down. A priest then took over, intoning prayers and throwing
petals of flowers around and over her with a ceremonial gesture. Having
induced at least semihypnosis, he began the task of filing down her
teeth. Throughout the proceedings, the chants of a dozen handmaidens
provided a moaning background, in which the girl herself joined at times
as if in fear or pain. Several times she sat up long enough to rinse her
mouth and spit into a yellow coconut shell. The business had just enough
of a suggestion of the dentist’s chair to lend it a slightly incongruous
note.
When all was over, she was again lifted to the shoulders of her bearers
and carried, wan and red-eyed, back to the privacy of the dressing room.
“Soon,” Rai promised Jessica, who was visibly upset, “she be more happy,
_you_ see. This afternoon, many food—everything play.”
For us, too, there was “many food”: trays heaped high with molded rice,
both plain and highly seasoned; a wide variety of curries and
condiments; succulent roast pork; sate—bits of spicy meat on thin
skewers; bananas, mandarin oranges, and various other dishes that I
preferred to eat without identifying.
In the afternoon, as Rai had promised, the girl—now a marriageable young
lady—was again carried among us, glowingly triumphant. Dances and a
Balinese puppet play were presented for the assembled guests.
Also thanks to Rai—and because it was an auspicious time on the Balinese
lunar calendar for ceremonial occasions of any kind—we had the
opportunity of viewing a cremation. The remains of a number of deceased
persons had been “saved up” for months, waiting until the bereaved
families could prepare, and afford, a properly grand celebration. I use
the term “celebration” advisedly, for a cremation in Bali, coming many
months after the sorrow of death has faded, is not a time of mourning
but a joyous release: release of the soul of the departed and, one
presumes, release of the family from a heavy burden of obligation.
The procession accompanying the crematory tower itself was long and
colorful. It included groups of musicians who played on the melodious
Balinese drums, gongs, cymbals, and flutes; men who carried bundles of
rice straw and others with cords of firewood; and a lengthy file of
women with offerings of all kinds which they bore upon their heads.
Everyone, it seemed, contributed food or goods, according to his means
or ambition, and everything was to be consumed—by fire.
The main attraction, naturally, was the tall and elaborately decorated
cremation tower, which carried the mortal remains of the dozen or so
individuals who were being honored. This was borne upon the shoulders of
some eighteen or twenty men, who plunged it from one side of the road to
the other, splashed it with water from the drainage ditches along the
way, or spun it about in erratic, zigzag patterns. This, we were told,
was to confuse the spirits of the dead so they could not find their way
back to haunt the living.
At the cremation grounds all the carefully wrapped bundles of bones were
removed from the tower and placed, each in its own wooden coffin,
beneath a long shed. The offerings were piled, as if for lavish display,
upon a low platform covered with mats, nearby, and then the whole was
set ablaze.
Only one development marred our enjoyment of this happy island. This was
an illness which laid Jessica low for several days. On the night after
the cremation—which had been a swelteringly hot day filled with
excitement and topped off by a meal of strange and exotic foods—Jessica
complained that she “didn’t feel good.” I wasn’t too surprised, but we
decided to spare her the long bus ride back to Benoa and arranged for
Barbara and Jessica to take a room at Minnetta’s hotel for the night.
Gradually Jessica’s vague symptoms seemed to localize in a stiff neck
and I set off for Benoa with Ted, sure that all she needed was a good
night’s sleep to put her back on her feet.
Early the next morning, however, Barbara turned up at the boat, having
left Jessica with her grandmother and caught the first bus from Den
Pasar.
“She must be running a high fever,” she told me, with a slightly wild
look in her eye. “It was like sleeping with a hot pad, but I didn’t have
my thermometer or even aspirin with me!”
She dived below to consult her medical bible, _The Ship’s Medicine Chest
at Sea_, which she had not, so far, been called upon to use. Now,
however, she was in no way reassured to discover that both polio and
meningitis may start with the symptoms of “stiff neck and fever.” Armed
with thermometer, textbook, and an overnight case stuffed with every
medication she thought she might need, Barbara set off again for the
hotel.
By the time she got back Jessica’s fever had turned into a chill and
Minnetta, finding no blankets available at the hotel, had commandeered
every coat and sweater she could lay hands on and piled them all on top
of her shivering charge. Jessica insisted that she had no headache, so
Barbara gratefully scratched meningitis as a possibility but the dread
of polio still lingered. Rai, as deeply concerned as the family, had
been hovering around anxiously and Barbara now dispatched him on his
bicycle to look for a qualified physician who could speak English.
Jessica, meanwhile, slept fitfully. Occasionally she woke up to report a
new symptom or a change in one of her old ones, whereupon Barbara flew
back to her “do-it-yourself” medical text and started her diagnosis all
over. The stiff neck turned out to be “more of a sore throat, really”
and the “buzzing in the head” was tracked down to a vagrant bluebottle
fly.
The climax came when Jessica, her temperature soaring again, began to
toss off sweaters and shawls and disclosed a stomach covered with bright
red spots! “Sore throat ... fever ... and a rash!” At last Barbara felt
that she had it pinned down. “Scarlet fever!”
She began the indicated medication. It was getting dark now, and
Jessica, in delirium, began to talk wildly. Barbara’s nerve was just
about to break when Rai returned to report that he had “heard of a
doctor” who could speak English. The women bundled Jessica up, summoned
a doh-ka, and off they started across town, escorted by Rai on his
bicycle.
Dr. M. Muhamad Angsar Kartakusuma left his supper to see them. He
listened gravely as Barbara outlined the symptoms. Then he took a tongue
depressor (the one item Barbara hadn’t thought to bring) and made an
easy diagnosis—tonsillitis.
“A shot of penicillin”—he administered it almost before Jessica had time
to flinch; “and these pills every four hours”—he handed an envelope to
Barbara—“and I think you have nothing more to worry!”
“But—what about the rash?” Barbara protested.
Dr. Kartakusuma examined it briefly. “From heat,” he said, and added a
box of medicated powder to relieve the itch.
The charge: nothing!
As Dr. Kartakusuma expressed it, “You are strangers in my country—and in
trouble.” He shook hands all around and returned to his supper.
After several days of medication—complicated by the discovery that she
had a penicillin allergy—Jessica was recovered enough to pour into her
Journal a hundred pages of impressions of Bali, which she has since
epitomized in a single word: eerie! The street noises outside her hotel
room; a flute and the weird cadence of a gamelin; an old sow who
splashed her way up the drainage ditch every morning; the startling cry
of a gekko lizard in the night—these apparently had merged in her
delirium with distorted memories of ceremonies she had seen, such as the
tooth filing and the cremation. Most haunting of all, she and her
grandmother had had an experience the rest of us did not share. One
night, escorted by a fellow guest at the hotel, they had ridden many
miles into the country to witness a kris dance at a village temple. The
dancers had gone into trance and ended by plunging the twisted blades of
their daggers into their own bodies “right up to the handle!” as Jessica
insisted. People near her had fallen to the ground, “invaded by
spirits,” and Jessica could actually feel the ground shaking.
As she summed it up, “It was enough to make _anybody_ get tonsillitis—or
something!”
We could have spent much longer in Bali, but if we were to get another
sampling of Indonesia, the capital, we had to push on. In Jakarta,
Marjorie Harris—a childhood friend of Barbara’s—and her husband Mike, of
the Ford Foundation, were waiting for us, and Jessica was looking
forward to meeting their thirteen-year-old Susan.
Remembering our violently rough entry into Benoa, I put my foot down
firmly on Minnetta’s proposal that she return to Jakarta on the
_Phoenix_. No matter how indomitable the spirit, the bones of a woman in
her seventies are liable to be brittle and the ways of the sea,
especially in interisland channels, can be rugged, as we had cause to
know. And so, using my authority as captain, I sent her back to Java by
plane, to wait for us there.
Actually our passage out through Lombok Strait was gratifyingly easy
and, once in the Java Sea, we had fine sailing. Jessica, contentedly
convalescent, was busy getting caught up in her Journal or sunning in
the cockpit while Ted reeled off fabulous stories on his watch. I, tired
for the moment of serious reading, turned to a tale of high adventure at
sea. So overloaded was it with drama that I fell to considering the
whole difficult problem of trying to communicate a very meaningful
experience. How, for instance, could I convey to a reader the wonderful
adventure of just _being_ at sea; the thrill I sometimes felt, lying in
my bunk and listening to the whisper of water flowing past, in thinking,
I’m _doing_ it! I’m actually sailing around the world, just as I planned
and dreamed! This is my ship, my life, my adventure, and nobody can take
it away from me! Perhaps it is necessary to “juice up” a story, or
nobody would ever read it, but although I felt sorry for the hero on the
night he _crashed_ into a reef—my _own_ memory of a similar mishap was
that it is more like a sickening crunch. And yet, _crash_ or _crunch_,
how is it possible to get across a _feeling_ to one who has never been
there? More and more I was grateful to Barbara because she had known
instinctively that this experience was one that we had to share, since
no words of mine could ever have made this vital part of my life real or
meaningful to her if she had stayed behind.
That night on watch, still struggling with the problem that
confronts any writer, of trying to capture and share an experience
through words, I was led to speculate on the subject of sounds at
sea. Some are ominous, such as the snap of a jerking anchor chain
at an uneasy anchorage or the wind rising and beginning to whistle
high in the rigging; others are merely annoying, like the slapping
of halyards or the banging of a block on a quiet night, if one is
restless. While musing over sounds, it occurred to me that by now
I had classified every sound my boat made (I had spent hours
tracking down each one in the first months when every noise was a
possible harbinger of trouble). At that precise instant, from the
darkness of the cabin below, I heard what can only be described as
_thump_—pause—_plump_—pause—_plop_—pause—_thud!_ That was a new
one! I shone a light below. Nothing. Now I did have something to
occupy my mind throughout the rest of my watch.
The next day, during lunch, there was a lull in the conversation.
Suddenly Manuia appeared at the porthole. She leaped lightly down to
Jessica’s desk—_thump_—then across to the table—_plump_—then down to the
plastic-covered couch cushion—_plop_—and finally to the floor—_thud_.
At least one mystery of the sea had been solved!
All along the coast we passed numerous praus. I was always conscious of
the possibility of being hijacked by pirates, and whenever one changed
course and came over to take a look at us, we mustered all hands—and a
couple of rifles—and waved heartily. Invariably, they waved back and
shouted cheery greetings and we each went on our way.
A more real danger turned out to be that of running down, at night, an
unlighted prau at anchor. On the night of the 29th we had two narrow
escapes from such a collision, the second one literally by inches. This
shook us quite a bit and I debated following the local example and
simply stopping for the night to anchor in the shallow water along the
coast. Finally I decided to carry on, stationing a man forward with a
searchlight in addition to the man at the helm. Naturally, having made
the decision, I began to question my own judgment, with the result that
there was still another man on duty for the rest of the night—me!
The next day we were far enough along the coast to hope to reach Jakarta
before dark, but the day was misty and, although we were close to shore,
it was difficult to tell where the water met the land. We could find
nothing that looked like a harbor of the size we knew must be at
Jakarta.
At last we spotted a channel through which small-boat traffic was moving
toward shore and we worked our way in, sounding as we went. At four
fathoms, while still fairly well out, I gave orders to drop the anchor.
“Why we don’t go in until eight feet?” asked one of the crew with sweet
reasonableness. “Then anchor?”
Since we draw almost eight feet, that would hardly have left enough
margin for error, tide, or rapidly shelving bottom.
“We’ll anchor _here_!” I repeated firmly.
There was such obvious dissatisfaction with my decision and so many
allusions to “toi”—with the emphasis meaning _very_, _very_ far, that I
picked Ted alone to accompany me in to the shore. We started up the
channel, but were quickly hailed by a soldier at a guard station. He
spoke no English, but had an efficient-looking gun which spoke an easily
understandable language. We rowed over and struggled with a Malay
dictionary but were unable to communicate. Finally, soldier-plus-gun
piled into the dinghy with us and waved us on up the channel. We started
rowing again.
On the way we passed several hundred seagoing praus, brilliantly
painted, all very real and all very much lived on. In this corner of the
world, at least, the age of sail is far from over. As we toiled up the
narrow canal, several of these ships passed us on their way in. It was
truly thrilling to see them drive boldly for the entrance, fly up the
channel, shedding canvas as they came, to reach their berths with sails
neatly stowed and just enough way on to come snugly up to their dock.
Such skill, however, doesn’t come from sailing even ten times around the
world, but from generations of experience in a vessel which is not just
an avocation but one’s whole life.
In the course of an hourlong trip we passed several check points before
we reached the inner sanctum and were taken in hand by an
English-speaking official. We explained the situation, showed our
credentials, and blessed the lucky day that had given us the director of
the Ford Foundation in Indonesia as a character reference. We were given
permission to telephone Mike, who further cleared up the difficulties
and gave us an explanation of what we had done.
We were, it seems, in Jakarta, all right—but in _old_ Jakarta, formerly
known as Batavia. Only sailing ships were permitted in here, many of
whose crews were not entirely sympathetic to the existing government.
During their stay in port all these ships were made to observe a rigid
curfew and were kept under close observation. It seemed that _our_
proper port was Tanjung Priok, the large new harbor for overseas
vessels, five miles along the coast. Now we could understand the reason
for the suspicious treatment, the guards, the frequent check points, and
the barbed-wire fences. For all they knew, we were the vanguards of a
revolutionary force, come to overthrow the regime.
By the time we got back to the _Phoenix_ it was well after dark and
Barbara was frantic with anxiety. Jessica was already asleep and Nick,
Mickey, and Moto, quite unconcerned over our prolonged absence, also had
retired. Had we been set upon and carved up by pirates? Were we
languishing in some moldy Malay jail? Or were we having dinner with
President Sukarno, as honored guests of the government? Any of these
might have explained the delay, and I’m not sure which possibility
caused her more anguish.
Actually, the only danger we ran was on the return trip when, with no
flashlight, we were in constant danger of being run down by belated
praus charging past in the dark to reach the channel before curfew.
The next morning, under power, we moved to Tanjung Priok in a foggy
calm, groped for the entrance, and were met and escorted to a dock
within easy rowing distance of the Tanjung Priok “Jachtclub,” one of the
few holdovers from the colonial Dutch regime. There the Harrises,
Minnetta, and cold drinks were waiting to welcome us, and we were made
to understand that all the facilities of the club, including _free_ use
of restaurant and bar, were at our disposal!
The location at Tanjung Priok had little beside the hospitality of the
yacht club to recommend it. It was steamingly hot, noisy, and odorous.
The nights were made miserable by mosquitoes and by the hourly clangor
of the night watchman, who punched his time clock every hour by beating
a length of pipe upon a metal ring.
Thanks to the Harrises, some of us were spared this discomfort for all
or a part of our three weeks’ stay, for they whisked Barbara and Jessica
off to Jakarta. Barbara shared the guest room with her mother and
Jessica moved in with Susan and began to gain back a bit of the weight
and color she had lost during her illness.
I did not feel the same compulsion the girls apparently felt, to desert
ship at every opportunity; in fact, I always felt uneasy when I did not
sleep aboard. Yet in Java I, too, took a holiday from the sea by
accepting the Harrises’ offer of their mountain retreat as a place to do
some very necessary writing. (Unless Barbara and I mailed off a couple
of salable articles before we left Java, there would be no checks
awaiting us in Durban—and no Christmas for the _Phoenix_.)
Our trip into the pundjak, the pass through the mountains of Central
Java, was an invigorating change from the fetid city. Each morning we
awoke in the crisp, cool air of the hills and were greeted by a
magnificent vista of twin mountain peaks thrusting against the sky.