Voices in the Ocean Read online

  I tried to imagine myself landing at Fanalei, stepping over the dolphin carcasses strewn up and down the beach, strolling into a village where the chief had been exiled under threat of violence, and announcing in my Canadian-accented English that I was there to help them sort everything out. Somehow, I couldn’t see it.

  We went inside for lunch, a spread of chicken, rice, cooked greens, and SolBrew. I was quiet because the conversation was in pidgin. After a while, I asked the chiefs about their lives. “I myself was a dolphin caller at Bita’ama,” Tigi said, outlining the ritual by which the animals were summoned to their doom. He spoke fast, inserting words I couldn’t recognize, but as far as I could tell, the process involved combining thunder and lightning and rainbows to create an irresistible magnetic field that pulled the dolphins toward shore. “We’re born of the tribe of dolphin,” Tigi said. “We have a spirit that will call a dolphin out from the whole planet. No one knows about this.”

  “Do you do this too?” I asked Willy.

  “In Fanalei, no, we are not calling the dolphins,” Willy said. “We just hunt.” Long ago, there had been special dolphin ceremonies, he said, “but now Christianity is with us so we use that in the killing. We pray for dolphins to easily come, easy to see and easy to drive to the shore.”

  “Does the village see the hunt as a blessing?”

  “Yeah,” Willy said, then corrected himself. “Well, some people think it’s a blessing. But for me—the dolphin, it’s a creation. A creation by God. And we just kill. We kill that mammal that is created by God. For me, for my understanding, for my opinion, that’s not a blessing. It’s just a form of stupid.” He looked at me. “It is true that dolphin hunting is our culture. But it’s time to change.”

  Tigi nodded. “We love dolphins! We love the teeth and meat. It taste like beef. But after the agreement with Earth Island I say, ‘Hey, it’s a mistake to kill these—it is wiser than a human being.’ So we will build houses and income generate and the dolphins will be saved.”

  “We can do something different,” Willy agreed, “like tourism.”

  “The problem is that nobody wants to come here,” Makili said, unconvinced. “It’s a crap country.”

  Tigi lit up with an idea. “We will give you land,” he said, pointing at me. “You can come and develop it. You bring people here. We will work on it together!”

  “So, are you ready for a very long trip in a very small boat?” Makili laughed hard, then bent over and spat out a stream of betel nut. All around his feet were vivid crimson splotches, a patina from years of betel nut chewing here, as though the entire country were engaged in a furious paintball match. Willy, standing beside him, grinned. We were ankle deep in garbage, waiting at the water’s edge for our captain to gas up his forty-horsepower outboard engine by pouring fuel in with a plastic cup. Our boat was twelve feet long, basically a steel rowboat. It had no shade, no radio, no GPS, no lifejackets. As for oars in case the motor quit, it had one.

  Vessels like these, known as “banana boats,” were a main method of transport in the Solomons. That didn’t mean they were safe. Behind us, the husks of other, wrecked banana boats lay tipped on their sides, sunk into a geological strata of litter. Plastic bottles and bags, crumpled containers, scraps of metal and decaying fish guts made up the top, most visible layer. Below that was a layer of muck soaked with effluents I couldn’t identify and didn’t want to. As I stood there, wondering what I was in for, a black flip-flop floated by. “Whatever you do, don’t get into one of those banana boats!” Berman had stressed, at least twice, before I’d left.

  It was one o’clock in the afternoon and we were headed to Gavutu. We’d planned to leave four hours earlier, but Makili had been AWOL all morning, not answering his phone. I figured the trip was off, but then he and Willy showed up at the hotel with a sack of betel nuts and cigarettes, bleary, but ready to go. The sky was faintly overcast; there was a light chop on the water. It didn’t seem like the worst day in the world for a boat trip, but Gavutu was two hours away.

  Makili steadied the boat while I got in, clutching a bag that contained my notebook, camera, and a bottle of water. Willy followed, and then Makili shoved us off and jumped in too. The captain, a sinewy guy in his forties sporting a bushy mustache, started the motor. The deckhand, a silent, beetle-browed young man, raised a flag, and then we putted away from the shore in reverse.

  I settled in front on a metal bench; Makili and Willy sat in the middle. The captain was at the stern, driving the outboard. The deckhand crouched at the bow, scanning for debris: accidents from hitting drifting junk were common. After we cleared the harbor, the captain opened the throttle and I realized, with some horror, that this was the boat ride from hell.

  The ocean was rougher than it looked, and the boat went airborne off the troughs, landing each time with a sharp bang. The motion was worse near the bow, where I sat. On every wave, I felt my butt lift off the bench and then slam down hard. It was like being dropped, ass-first and repeatedly, onto a steel floor. Frantically, I cast around for something to cushion my seat—a towel, a sweatshirt—but we had nothing of the kind on board. I wore shorts and a long-sleeved shirt; idiotically, I hadn’t even brought a jacket. I could see Makili watching me out of the corner of his eye, wondering how I was taking the abuse. The boat bucked and whammed its way across Ironbottom Sound. Four hours of this just might kill me, I thought. Then, the monsoon started.

  I was so wrapped up in my misery that I hadn’t noticed the livid clouds on the angry horizon. We had driven for an hour and were out of sight of land when the first bolts of lightning forked from the sky and hit the water, followed by growls of thunder that could be felt in the solar plexus. Fat raindrops spattered us, becoming torrential sheets. I glanced at the captain, who had pulled on a windbreaker but looked unconcerned. Makili and Willy sat stoically in their surf trunks and T-shirts, chewing betel nut amid the deluge. Lightning flashed again. Apparently, we were not turning around.

  The storm hammered us for thirty minutes then began to lift as we neared the Nggela Islands, leaving creeping tendrils of fog. The wind had ebbed and the ocean had stilled. It was warm out, thank you God; hypothermia would have been the breaking point. I wiped the water off my face and pulled out my notebook.

  We steered into a maze of undulating shorelines, all of them brooding and eerie and smothered in vegetation. At first, as we glided through channels, I could see only trees. But then my eyes adjusted and I began to make out traces of habitation: a half-sunk dugout canoe pulled onto the shore, a rickety hut on stilts overhanging a misty lagoon, just a minute from being reclaimed by the forest. This was a somber landscape: there was no mistaking its haunting past.

  We pulled alongside a crumbling concrete pier, and the captain cut the motor. “Where are we?” I asked Makili, because the place was deserted. “Gavutu!” he said, gesturing with both arms toward the emptiness. I looked at the shoreline, puzzled. Where were the buildings I’d seen in the documentary? The fish houses, the sleeping quarters, the tiki bar, the floating docks? Where was the VIP bungalow? None of it was here now—and certainly, there were no dolphins. “It’s all gone,” Makili said, stepping out of the boat. “Ah man, it was really a great setup. But when Porter left, all the workers, they ripped everything. Do you know why?”

  I took a not-so-wild guess: “Because they wanted money?”

  “Yeah!” Makili guffawed. “And they took everything! Every last piece of wood! Every last nail!”

  From what I could gather, Porter’s last days here had been bad ones. After one or two more dolphin exports, bound for a resort in Singapore, Ocean Embassy had broken off with him and switched its allegiance to another local dolphin dealer. Although it was unclear what caused the rift, one thing was sure: Porter’s last captives, a pod of seventeen bottlenoses, had been caught in the middle. Instead of shipping them to some far-flung marine park—which would have been difficult without his partners—Porter had attempted to raise money for a project h
e called “Free the Pod,” a fuzzily detailed initiative that challenged activists to buy from Porter the seventeen dolphins that Porter himself had captured, in effect paying a ransom for their freedom.

  In the end, the campaign did not succeed and all of the dolphins died. Porter was left with debts and no way forward and he’d recently returned to Canada. It was at that point, I supposed, that Gavutu had been ransacked.

  I climbed out of the boat and walked down the pier. Rain dripped from the palms onto a carpet of fallen leaves and branches. Cement slabs spiked with broken rebar stuck up here and there and some junk lay about, but Makili was right: every scrap of Dolphins Paradise was gone. I did a lap of the premises, searching for signs of its former ambitions. There were none. Even the lagoon was empty: I stared into the water and couldn’t spot a single fish. All I could make out below the surface were broken pilings, snarls of wire and rusted chains. Everything was still, even the birds. Gavutu would be known throughout history for its small, nasty part in World War II, but on this drippy day it played its latest role to the hilt. It was a sad and spooky dolphin ghost town.

  For the next few days I stayed on my feet as much as possible, nursing the grapefruit-size, blackberry-colored bruises on my ass, souvenirs of my banana boat trip. I became bolder, too, venturing to the market and a nearby expat café, the Lime Lounge, which catered to aid workers and entrepreneurs bravely trying to do business here. That was how I found Anthony Turner, a rugged Australian who had sailed to the Solomons on his boat, a fifty-five-foot catamaran that he’d built by hand.

  Turner, an avid surfer, had guessed the country’s untrammeled coastlines might be a wave hunter’s paradise, so he’d gathered a crew and set out on a reconnaissance mission. By the time I met him, he’d been meandering through these islands for two months. He found great waves all right, but his dream of running surf charters here had been dashed. Over espresso, Turner told me how he had dodged thieves, hijackers, shakedowns, tsunamis, and saltwater crocodiles; he’d met another sailor who had his fingers chopped off by tribesmen, and a group of do-gooding dentists, here to fix villagers’ teeth for free, who were robbed of all their equipment. Fanalei’s dolphin slaughter, he said, had extinguished any last hopes of establishing an ecotourism business: “That was the nail in the coffin.” At the moment, Turner was in Honiara awaiting a visa for one of his crew so they could sail to the Philippines or Indonesia—anywhere but here. “Life’s too short to sleep with a knife,” he said.

  Given Turner’s willingness to visit inhospitable places, I decided to ask him for a favor. I wanted to visit the Kokonut Café, a harbor-front bar, but I was hesitant to go alone: along with SolBrew, egg sandwiches, and unfiltered cigarettes, the bar’s owner, a local man named Francis Chow, sold dolphins, keeping the animals on display in squalid conditions. Chow was affluent, with close ties to the government: at the Kokonut Café’s launch celebration the previous year, the country’s prime minister had cut the ceremonial ribbon. Chow made no secret of his participation in the dolphin trade, and was known to be hostile to those who opposed it. If activists wanted to stop his dolphin exports, Chow told an Australian reporter, they should be prepared to give him $10 million.

  Turner knew the joint, and winced as he described the dolphins’ bleak holding pen: “They’re in an institution. It’s just imprisonment. That’s all it is.” He didn’t think anyone would threaten us if we stopped in, provided we didn’t pull out a camera. Most of the Kokonut Café’s patrons, he told me, were zonked out of their minds on kava, a psychoactive root that is brewed into a drink.

  We decided to go in the early evening. Turner picked me up in the dinghy he used to shuttle to and from shore, running the inflatable craft up on the beach. I hopped in; from the hotel, it was only a two-minute ride. The Kokonut Café’s bar was built on a cement jetty, next to a dock where we could tie up. Far from being “an amazing project,” to quote the Solomons’ minister of culture and tourism, Chow’s establishment was a patchwork of slapped-together structures with a sea pen gouged in the middle. Ratty wire fencing stuck up eight feet above the surface, buckled in places and gooey with scum at the waterline. Piles of rocks, hunks of concrete, discarded construction materials, and half-finished buildings added to the junkyard ambience. Music blared from loudspeakers, bouncing across the water. If there was a more wretched place for a dolphin to live, I couldn’t imagine it.

  As Turner secured the dinghy, a man sidled up next to us, glaring through bloodshot eyes. Without breaking his gaze he spat betel nut into the water. His lips were stained reddish-brown, as though he’d been drinking muddy blood, and his teeth were almost black. More surly men, maybe a dozen of them, sprawled in plastic chairs at tables arranged haphazardly under a tin canopy. Crumpled beer cans littered the dock; through the filmy water I could see more trash lying on the bottom, nestled in the murk. Turner grabbed my elbow and steered me away.

  We walked down the dock and across the property to a raised platform that overlooked the sea pen. Climbing the flimsy stairs nervously, I thought I heard the bang of gunshots, but it was just kids popping balloons. From this perch we could see directly into the dolphin enclosure. While Turner went to get us drinks, I counted the bottlenoses floating listlessly in the water. There were seven.

  Not a single dolphin moved; they hung vertically and motionless, with only their beaks and the tops of their heads visible. I sat down and took in the scene. By this point in my travels I had encountered a lot of dolphins. I had seen them in their element and I had seen them in captivity, but I had never seen dolphins in such a dire state. It was a miserable spectacle of cruelty, the net result of a cascade of grasping interests. To anyone with eyes, it was obvious these bottlenoses were dying.

  Turner came back with two SolBrews and sat down. His face looked strained. “I’m gonna swim in there one night and cut the nets,” he said, in a low voice. We watched numbly, “La Bamba” braying in the background. Below, a gang of kids leaned against the chicken wire fence. Every so often, one of them would pick up a stone and throw it into the enclosure. The dolphins continued to hang at the surface, bunched together and staying as far as possible from the people.

  Evening proceeded and the falling light cast moody shadows across the water. A young man in a black shirt that said SECURITY squatted on the dock holding a pail. It must have been feeding time, but the dolphins made no moves toward him. We watched as he tried to coax them over, without success. None of the bottlenoses even turned their heads; they huddled against the wire, facing the open water. It was the first time I had ever seen dolphins turn down fish. His only taker was a vigilant pelican.

  Turner and I stayed until the dusk was gone, not saying much, just watching the dolphins floating inertly in their pen. After a while, a band started up on the dock, the din of electric guitars yowling into the night. The kava drinkers were still there, slumped at their tables. One man lay on the floor, out cold, with his pants partway off. As Turner started up the dinghy, I took a last look at the seven captives. Their plight was heartbreaking, infuriating—but I knew that tomorrow might hold even more distressing visions. In the morning, Makili and I were going to Fanalei.

  “Okay, so we’re checking out the coastline for tsunami damage. That will be our story.” Our pilot, Glenn Hamilton, was making his final check of the helicopter before we lifted off. He seemed nervous, which wasn’t comforting. Makili and I sat in the four-seater bird wearing headsets and bulky orange lifejackets; him in the copilot’s seat, me in the back. The sky was a low gray ceiling, tinged acid-yellow by the sickly light of garbage fires.

  At the airport I’d told Hamilton, an Australian who resembled Tom Cruise, the details about what we hoped to achieve; that we wanted to swoop down over Fanalei, getting a good look at the village and checking for signs of dolphin hunting. We would circle a bit, enough to document the scene—then we would scram. Hamilton had not taken this plan well. “We have a lot of trouble with Malaita,” he said, frowning.

  �
��About what?” I asked.

  “About everything.”

  In particular, he balked at the idea of repeated tight passes over any villages. Whenever helicopters surveyed the island too intently, he told us, village chiefs bombarded the pilots with demands for compensation. Anyone traversing their airspace without payment, they claimed, was trespassing.

  Makili explained the dolphin situation—at least 1,500 animals gone during the past two weeks—and eventually Hamilton settled into the idea of flying over the area, using a recent tsunami as a cover. He was shaken by the dolphin news: “I heard something about that on the radio,” he said, wiping his brow. “But I didn’t believe it. I mean, to kill a thousand dolphins in one day seems impossible.”

  “Nah,” Makili said, shaking his head. “They can do more than that.”

  It was O’Barry who had suggested the flyover, describing the alternative—an overnight boat ride—as a never-ending ordeal. Having already endured a four-hour cruise in these waters, I wasn’t eager to repeat the experience at length. Though air travel around the Solomons is patchy in general, it hadn’t been hard to find a helicopter company here, because of the mining and logging interests. Booking Hamilton, I’d felt, was the right approach. I didn’t want to hang out with expert dolphin-killers, much less listen to their grievances. To date, I’d managed to avoid malaria and dengue fever and I preferred to keep it that way. I was completely fine with buzzing Malaita rather than hacking across its hinterlands. One backpackers’ guide had cautioned even the most intrepid adventure seekers to think twice about that island, referring to it as “the world’s end.” I had also read that in some Malaitan settlements it was a grave insult for women to show up wearing clothes: females had to visit naked. This didn’t sound overly appealing.