Voices in the Ocean Read online

  “How many dolphins do you think they’ve killed?” I asked.

  “Thousand plus,” he answered quickly. “They hunted today again, seventy more.” One of the methods the village used to lure more dolphins in, Makili explained, was to keep a small group alive in a sea pen where they would swim around making distress calls, “so the others in the pod will come back.” He sighed.

  “Can we go to Fanalei?” I asked. I knew it was a difficult trip, two days by boat and on dirt roads overland. But if Makili was up for it, so was I. “Ah, I’ll have to talk to Chief Willy,” he said. “Fanalei is a hard place.” Chief Willy, or Wilson Fileil, was the man who had been scapegoated after the Earth Island money went missing. I would meet him tomorrow, Makili told me, along with the chief from Bita’ama, Emmanuel Tigi. Both chiefs were in Honiara at the moment; Willy, in fact, was unable to return to his village until the matter was sorted out. “A bunch of ignorance!” Makili said, with disdain. “Wantoks.”

  “Well,” I said, still pushing for a road trip. “How about Gavutu? Can we go there?”

  Makili smirked. “Oh, we’ll get there.”

  “Will we go by boat?”

  “Yeah, by boat,” he said, and then burst out laughing. I wasn’t sure what was quite so hilarious and at the moment didn’t want to inquire. But I did want to visit Porter’s encampment, which he had named “Dolphins Paradise,” even though I knew the Canadian wasn’t there right now. Online, I had watched a promo video set to throbbing calypso music, featuring Porter, in surf trunks and a dolphin-tooth necklace, giving a tour of his imagined resort. “Currently, we are finishing renovations to what will be one of the most unique bars in the South Pacific, overlooking our dolphin lagoon system,” he said, as the camera panned across a group of bottlenoses clumped in the shallows. “We’re also finally completing the VIP bungalow…We invite everyone to come and visit and touch and feed the dolphins and learn more about them.”

  Makili stood up and began to pace. “You see,” he said, “I’m not comfortable here, because I feel like this is a nonsmoking area.”

  “Do you want to go get a beer?”

  “You still want to talk?” he said. “Okay, we go talk.”

  “This is my corner,” Makili said, as the decrepit taxi puttered up the steep hillside, pulling in at his house, a brown and white two-story with a flat roof, raised on pillars. Wild hibiscus silhouetted the driveway. A deck on the second floor offered a panoramic view of Honiara, the city lights hazy from the smoke of cooking fires. It was nightfall; the edges of the sky radiated cobalt blue.

  His place was only five miles from the hotel, but it had taken us an hour to get here. We had stopped at a corner store so Makili could replenish his Marlboro supply, and he had run into members of his extended family, then disappeared into the store for a small eternity. Finally, he emerged and climbed into the front seat of the cab, but not before conversing in pidgin for a while with an elderly man, to whom he handed a $100 Solomon bill. “There’s a boat going home tonight to my island,” he told me. “I bought rice and water and milk for all my cousins. It’s culture.”

  “Those are your wantok?” I said.

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  We sat outside at a wooden dining table, accompanied by a timid gray dog. Makili lit another Marlboro. “Anton—beer!” he yelled. In a second, a handsome young man appeared, flashed a smile, and set down two frosty cans of SolBrew. Anton, Makili explained, was his elder son, named after a Yugoslavian activist he’d worked with in the field. “To your first day,” he toasted. “I will tell you the real history of the Solomon Islands bullshit.”

  I drank to this. “So how did all the dolphin craziness begin?”

  Makili settled into his chair. Back in 2002, he told me, he had been hired to develop ecotourism ideas for the country. In the process, he’d stumbled across Porter’s foreign investment application to open a marine mammal education center. “Then, in the next few days, another application from Porter arrived,” Makili recalled, “for a company called Marine Exports Limited. And I knew exactly what he was gonna export.”

  If Porter had set out to make his pitch at a vulnerable moment, he’d succeeded. “He came at the height of the Tensions,” Makili said, his voice bitter. “To take advantage of the situation. There was no law and order.” During the country’s civil war, he explained, traditional dolphin hunting had all but stopped. It was only Fanalei that was rounding up pods: “It was a dying practice. But it started up again because Chris Porter came waving the flag of money!” As a result, Makili added, a half dozen villages had now revived their hunts, hoping to catch saleable dolphins. He took a slug of his beer and fixed me with a steely glare. “Porter is responsible for the escalation of dolphin hunting in the Solomon Islands. And he introduced the dolphin trade here.”

  Porter’s first dolphin shipment had occurred even before the RAMSI intervention, while the national violence was still seething. Recruiting Chief Satu was a smart move, Makili said. Satu was well connected. He was a fisherman; he knew how to catch dolphins. His village was located on a stretch of sea that bottlenoses frequented. Plus, he had unlimited access to heavyweight thugs. All of these things were useful for Marine Exports’ endeavors.

  But some expertise was missing. It’s one thing to net a bunch of bottlenoses in the Solomon Islands and keep them in a sea pen, hire villagers to fish from their dugout canoes for the eighty kilos of food that each dolphin requires per day—and another entirely to install the animals in a marine park halfway around the world. For Porter’s next dolphin delivery, another partner joined him: Ocean Embassy, a group of ex-SeaWorld employees who had formed a consultancy. They had the resources and veterinary know-how for international transport. Under their direction, Gavutu bristled with new buildings, and even plumbing and electricity. In October 2007, twenty-eight freshly captured bottlenoses were transferred from Porter’s Dolphins Paradise to Honiara, where they were loaded onto two chartered Emirates DC-10s for a thirty-hour journey to Dubai. Their future home would be Atlantis, The Palm, a $1.5 billion resort built on an artificial island made from ninety-four million cubic meters of sand, dredged out of the Persian Gulf.

  A Canadian documentary crew was able to film parts of the process, with Porter striding across the tarmac among Satu’s tribesmen and throngs of police, and Ocean Embassy staff in button-down shirts and mirrored sunglasses hustling around with walkie-talkies. Each dolphin was encased in a white canvas sling, with holes cut in the sides to allow for pectoral fins. The animals were draped with wet towels to keep their skin from burning in the sun or drying out, and they thrashed and cried shrilly. Nothing in their short lives had prepared them for this day, for being hauled out of the water and loaded onto a barge, then transferred to a truck, bumped across washboard roads, and forklifted into the planes; for the handling and the pressure changes and the grinding whine of jet engines and the crush of humans around them. As the trucks pulled up to the hulking DC-10s, security guards stretched a blue tarp across the cargo bays, blocking the view. No one involved in this operation—the largest, most expensive, most audacious dolphin sale ever undertaken—seemed too eager to have it memorialized on film.

  The outrage over this second shipment was even louder. no mercy, screamed the Solomon Star’s headline the next morning, a photograph of a dolphin immobilized in its sling spread across the front page. “This is appalling,” declared Australia and New Zealand, officially. In the press, Porter was referred to as a “dolphin-napper,” and a “dolphin slave trader,” and compared to Colonel Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. To activists’ dismay, no confirmation was provided that the bottlenoses had survived the trip. Upon arrival, the dolphins were swept into the Atlantis and never publicly accounted for, just another twenty-eight of the 65,000 marine animals collected for the hotel, including a fourteen-foot whale shark who served as the centerpiece of the lobby aquarium.

  Not everyone agreed this was a nauseating turn of events. “It is not only a
great day for [Marine Exports Limited],” Porter announced in a press release, “it is also a great day for the Solomon Islands.” The country’s fisheries minister bragged that each Dubai-bound bottlenose had sold for $200,000 U.S., with the government receiving a 25 percent export tax. Ocean Embassy’s vice president of international operations, Ted Turner, complained to the film crew that environmental groups had unfairly maligned his company’s efforts: “It’s a shame because it leaves the general public with the impression that something wrong has happened, when this couldn’t be more right,” he said, adding: “It cost millions—literally millions—to do a transfer of this magnitude. And the reason that doesn’t bother us is because these animals are worth it.”

  Turner spoke in an aggrieved, over-enunciated tone that brought to mind a fed-up boss lecturing to an especially slow employee. “These animals are generating profit,” he continued, as though the dolphins had just released their quarterly sales numbers. “And I wish every specie [sic] in the world would generate the level of profit these animals are for their companies. If that were the case we’d do more to protect them.”

  Makili, as always, was the loudest native voice. Right before the planes departed for the Middle East, he distributed photos he’d taken of three bloated, decomposing bottlenose carcasses being eaten by dogs at a dump site in Honiara. By now, Porter and Satu weren’t the only dolphin traffickers in town. Their widely publicized paydays had inspired several copycat operations, all vying to sell the country’s dolphins. Makili’s outspoken criticism of the dolphin trade was becoming increasingly risky; people warned him he was putting his life in jeopardy. They were right.

  Anton appeared with new SolBrews and I steeled myself to ask Makili about his attack. It had nearly been fatal, but I didn’t know much more than that. “What happened?” I asked. Makili inhaled slowly through his teeth. “It was because of my campaign to expose the dolphin trade,” he said, in a low, raw voice, as though the memory still scalded. “Because they wanted to keep it so very secret.”

  On the eve of the assault, a sultry August night, Makili was on his porch drinking beer—“I was drunk, you know”—when someone snuck up behind him and bashed him in the head with a bat. “I was knocked out,” he recalled, “and my senses slowly came back. Then I realized that I was in the boot of a car.” Though he didn’t know it at that moment, Makili was in the company of no fewer than nine abductors, the gang traveling in two vehicles and headed into the hills. Jackknifed in the back, regaining his bearings, Makili planned a surprise offensive. Feigning unconsciousness when they opened the trunk, he suddenly sprang at the nearest men. “I got two of them,” he said, with a wry chortle. “I really wounded them. If it had been three or four…but it was nine.”

  Makili was dragged away and severely beaten; again, he lost consciousness. He woke up in the hospital with a broken arm, cracked ribs, fractured skull bones, a busted eye socket, split lips, and an assortment of other injuries. He was saved, the doctor told him, by a rural dweller who’d heard the commotion and shined a flashlight onto the fray. The attackers fled in their cars, leaving Makili on the ground bleeding.

  “Do you have any idea who was responsible?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Makili said. He lit another cigarette.

  No one had ever been charged with Makili’s kidnapping and assault, although he’d filed a police report, identified some of his attackers, and often saw them on the street. “There was no investigation,” he said, “no nothing. The case has been buried.”

  He stood up and shouted to someone on the driveway below. “The taxi is here to pick you up,” he said. “I’ll go with you, drop you at the hotel, and come back.” When I said that I’d be fine on my own, Makili snorted with laughter. “I’m responsible for your safety,” he said. “If they’re gonna somebody kill—me, not you.”

  HUSBAND PRIME SUSPECT IN SORCERY KILLING, read the Solomon Star headline the next morning. I’d picked up the paper on my way to breakfast, but soon wished I hadn’t. There was no shortage of grisly news. Sorcery, apparently, was a sticky problem, not only here but in neighboring New Guinea, where twenty-nine people had just been arrested for participating in a sorcery-fueled “cannibal cult.” Popular types of sorcery included, according to the article, “A’arua, Pela, Vele, black magic, green leaf and so forth.” There were also stories about revenge killings, death by crocodile snatching, and rumors that a riot was brewing in Honiara.

  The morning was swampily humid. I sat outside drinking my coffee and gazing at the harbor. Naked kids played in fetid water near an outtake pipe; oil drums were unloaded onto a dock. I watched a man hurl the dark contents of a bucket into the ocean, allowing it to splash onto his legs and feet. At noon, Makili was due to pick me up so I could meet the chiefs. I found him in the parking lot, pacing and smoking. We got into the taxi and drove into the heat of Honiara, the streets dense with people, Makili barking directions to the driver in pidgin. The air tasted of overripe vegetables, diesel fumes, and rotting fish. Buses trundled by, with riders packed in so tightly some were hanging off the back. There was a grim fatigue in their faces, a major shortage of joy.

  We motored up the hill, leaving the city grit behind. The two chiefs sat waiting on Makili’s balcony, a dolphin species chart spread on the table before them. “This is Willy from Fanalei and Tigi from Bita’ama,” Makili said, introducing us.

  I recognized Tigi from a television series about the dolphin trade. His chiefdom was a clutch of nineteen villages in North Malaita, home to four thousand people. On the program, Tigi was shown negotiating an agreement with O’Barry for Bita’ama to stop hunting dolphins. In one scene, he appeared in his dolphin priest costume—a sarong, ropes of dolphin-tooth necklaces, a dolphin-tooth headdress, ceremonial armbands, and what looked like a set of raffia wings on his back—and announced that the villagers demanded $12 million U.S. a year to lay down their machetes. If the money was not paid, Tigi had bellowed, “We will slaughter the dolphins of the whole earth!”

  In the end Bita’ama settled for a lesser sum, and these days Chief Tigi was a happy man, thrilled with Earth Island’s contributions to his villages: fuel drums, machine parts, a portable sawmill, lumber for houses. He was a skilled spokesman, neat in Oakley blade sunglasses and a white golf shirt, outlining Bita’ama’s new dolphin-friendly philosophy with a politician’s air. “We normally kill and eat dolphins,” he began, “but now we want dolphins to be safe.” As proof, he showed me a photo of some tribesmen, standing waist-deep in the ocean snuggling dolphins in their arms like babies. When the agreement with Earth Island was signed, Tigi said, the villagers had 160 dolphins penned in their lagoon, ready for slaughter. Instead, as a gesture of good faith, they had released them.

  Willy was quieter, shy even. He wasn’t as sunny as Tigi, but then again, Tigi hadn’t been ejected from his village—Willy had. He wore head-to-toe black: black jeans, a black Nike T-shirt, and a black bucket hat. Both men were barefoot, even though Tigi was carrying something akin to a briefcase.

  Willy explained that Fanalei was much smaller than Bita’ama, with only three hundred residents. Until recently its population had numbered 1,000, but relentless sea-level rise had forced many families to relocate. Eventually, everyone would be displaced. The ruckus over the missing aid money clearly weighed on Willy’s mind, but it was Tigi who most forcefully denounced it. “What they are doing is criminal activity,” he said, jabbing his index finger into the air. “They steal the money and they try to cover it up by killing dolphins. That’s what it is—just a cover-up.”

  Willy nodded. “I can’t understand these people,” he said, looking dejected. “They are very complicated. Last Sunday they met about you. They know you, they know you are here…”

  “What!” I said. “Me? They know me? Why?”

  “They say you should not come to Fanalei,” Willy said, staring down at the table. Tigi cut in, statesmanlike, trying to smooth things over. “It’s okay,” he said, smiling broadly and waving
his hands as though conducting an orchestra. “You tell them, ‘I am a journalist. I work on an international body.’ Then, no confusion! Then we will all be peaceful.”

  “Today they disturb me too,” Willy assured me. “They are very angry with me. But they’re not gonna kill somebody. They just want to—”

  “We need each other,” Tigi inserted. “We need working together to solve problems. This dolphin issue is affecting even the whole world!”

  I was silent, digesting this, when Makili, who had been inside the house, came stomping out gripping his phone. “Fuck!” he shouted. “They just slaughtered nineteen melon-headed whales!”

  Willy nodded glumly. “Yesterday they catch more than one hundred dolphins.”

  “Nineteen!” Makili repeated. “Those are like killer whales but they live in tropical waters. Fuck!” The three men broke into an argument in their native tongue.

  Tigi turned to me. “You are the right woman to deal with this.” Before I could express more alarm, Makili quelched the notion of me as any kind of intertribal mediator. “Nah,” he said, and then leaned over the railing to spit out a big gob of betel nut juice. The habit was colorful, if disgusting: it produced a scarlet, tooth-staining cud. “If you are willing to talk to them,” Tigi pressed, “we will resolve all things and we will get our minds together and we will tell the world.”