Outcasts of the Islands: The Sea Gypsies of South East Asia - Hardcover

Hope, Sebastian

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0002571153 ISBN 13: 9780002571159

Publisher: HarperCollins, 2001

Synopsis

An enchanting tale of travels among South East Asia’s Sea Gypsies, scattered groups of semi-nomadic fisher people who occupy the spaces between the islands.

A glance at the map of South East Asia reveals more blue than green, more sea than land. By separating the islands of the Malay Archipelago the sea has created diversity; by joining them together it has enabled trade and laid them open to influences from China, India and the Middle East. All Malays were sailors once – their ancestors reached the islands by boat – and the sea holds a central place in the Malay experience and imagination.

The Sea Gypsies who still occupy this realm seem to live still in the hidden world of Conrad’s tales. They form social co-operative groups, each with its own territory, and move between established anchorages within that range, following the changing currents, seasons and fishing opportunities, and are specialists at exploiting the coral reefs. They have an oral tradition which accounts for their origins with myths of floods and tidal waves. Their hunter-gatherer lifestyle and a belief system that is at root a blend of animism, ancestor worship and sympathetic magic are characteristics they share with the early Malay cultures.

Sebastian Hope travels and lives with groups of Sea Gypsies in both the east and the west of South East Asia, experiencing their subsistence lifestyle, unchanged for centuries. Travelling to fish and fishing to live, like the Sea Gypsies themselves he relies solely on his skills as a sailor and fisherman to survive.

About this title

Review:

Sebastian Hope's book Outcasts of the Islands proves that while the world's tribes, from Amazon jungle-dwellers to Kenyan bushmen, appear to have been so documented that they've become a clichés, there is still unknown territory. The life of Southeast Asia's Bajau Laut "sea gypsies" remains enigmatic. They exist in the ocean nowhere-land between Borneo's Sabah and the Philippines, a place harder than most for the prying curiosity of tourists and anthropologists to reach. The closest most visitors get are Malay kampung air, water villages "on stilts over tidal flats", or diving trips to coral reefs around Pulau Sipadan (where visitors marvel at exotic sea creatures that are in fact everyday sustenance for the sea people).

This book is something special, for the author actually manages to become part of a nomadic sea-gypsy family--living, fishing, eating and sleeping under the tarpaulin of their tiny rickety boat for some two months. Malay land dwellers are disbelieving, "You can eat cassava? You can stand lice?" Yet his relationship with his hosts becomes so emotional that he will end up desperately searching for them again years later.

"We throttled back as we passed the lead boat, dropped the anchor, killed the engine and became part of the floating community," writes Sebastian. "It felt unnerving no longer to have a destination." However, Sebastian's story is no happy-go-lucky traveller's tale. He becomes deeply involved with tribal-chief Sarani's family and their troubles and tragedies. These include a lack of nationality and ID papers, the competition pump-boats illegally "bombing" fish with home-made explosives, depleting fish stocks, fatal diseases and the lack of modern medicine. He finds a people so disenfranchised from modern land-life that such things as contraceptive pills, antibiotics and condoms are only rumours. Instead, they rely on a mysterious ceremony called Mbo' Pai.

The Bajau Laut are people beyond time, with little clue of their ages or of, "clocks and calendars, border controls and exchange rates". Their lives are measured by "two tides a day, a full-moon every twenty-eight nights, and a change of prevailing wind every six months". Travellers to Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines will find in this book an inspirational "other" world. --Sarah Champion

From the Back Cover:

A glance at the blue map of South East Asia reveals more than green, more sea than land. Sea Gypsies – tribes of semi-nomadic boat people – continue to live in the spaces between the land, following a hunter-gatherer lifestyle based on the changing currents, seasons and fishing opportunities.

A chance meeting on the east coast of Sulawese leads Sebastian Hope to set out in search of the elusive sea nomads. He is taken into the family of Panglima Sarani, a chief of the Bajau Laut tribal group. Over the course of three months the two men so widely separated by age and culture, form a unique bond, becoming not only friends but also partners in the fishing enterprises by which the Bajau Laut live. They share laughter and companionship and together face the troubles of hunger and sickness that visit their floating world.

Three years later the author returns to look for the Sea Gypsies in other parts of South-East Asia, visiting Myanmar's Mergui Archepelago and Thailand's Andaman coast, the swampy eastern seaboard of Sumatra and the Riau-Lingga Islands, Sulawese and the Sulu Archipelago – Sarani's home waters. Along the way it becomes apparent that the true motivation behind his wanderings is the slim hope of finding Sarani and his family once more.

Sebastian Hope's enchanting tale of his travels among the sea Gypsies reveals a culture clinging to a precarious existence in the modern age. He recounts both his frustration and his delight in their simplicity, as he immerses himself in a way of life both alien and irresistably alluring.

About this edition

• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0002571153
• ISBN 13: 9780002571159
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304