Outcasts of the Islands: The Sea Gypsies of South East Asia. Sebastian Hope

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


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      HarperCollinsPublishers

      1 London Bridge Street

      London SE1 9GF

       www.harpercollins.co.uk

      Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2001

      Copyright © Sebastian Hope 2001

      Maps © Jillian Luff 2001

      The Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

      Source ISBN: 9780002571159

      Ebook Edition © DECEMBER 2013 ISBN: 9780007441099

      Version: 2016-07-19

      HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.

       For Lisa

      Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

       Four

       Within the Tides

       Five

       Six

       Seven

       Eight

       Nine

       Keep Reading

       Index

       Acknowledgements

       About the Publisher

       South East Asia

       East Coast of Sabah and the Sulu Archipelago

       West Coast of Thailand and the Mergui Archipelago (Myanmar)

       Singapore, the Riau-Lingga Archipelago and the East Coast of Sumatra

       South East Sulawesi

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      I know of no place in the world more conducive to introspection than a cheap hotel room in Asia. I had seen inside a score or so by the time I reached the Malaysia Lodge in Armenian Street. It was May and Madras waited for the monsoon. In the hotel’s dormitory, one night during a power cut, I saw Bartholomew’s map of South East Asia for the first time. I was eighteen.

      In other hotel rooms I have puzzled over why that moment made such an impression on me. My first response was overwhelmingly aesthetic; can a serious person reasonably assert that his motive for first visiting a region stemmed from how it looked on a map? Compared to the sub-continental lump of India, so solid, so singular, the form of South East Asia was far more exciting – the rump of Indochina, the bird-necked peninsula, the shards of land enclosing a shallow sea, volcanoes strung across the equator on a fugitive arc. It was the islands especially that drew me. From the massive – Sumatra and Borneo and New Guinea – to the tiniest spots of green, I pored over their features by candlelight.

      Thirteen years and hundreds of cheap hotel rooms later, in the spring of 1996, I was in the Malay Archipelago for the fourth time, studying my third copy of Bartholomew’s map spread out on a lumpy bed in Semporna. Its significations had changed for me; it had become a document that recorded part of my personal history.

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      The real discovery I made on my first trip to Indonesia was the language. I struggled with the alien scripts and elusive tones of the mainland, and progressed no further than ‘hello, how much, thank you’. I could ask, ‘where is …?’ in Urdu or Thai, but I would not understand the answer. I had become illiterate once more. Indonesian Malay was a


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