SEA GYPSIES

Otago Witness, Issue 3596, 13 February 1923, Page 40

SEA GYPSIES

HOW “THE SEA-DROWNED FOLK” LIVE. By Professor J. Arthur Thomson. Between Burma, with its peacocks and rubies, and the Malay Peninsula, with its Argus pheasants and pangolins, there lies off' shore the Mergui Archipelago, and there the sea gypsies are at home, or as much at home as nomads can be. We have been so much interested in Mr W. B. White’s recent book, “The Sea Gypsies of Malaya” (Seeley, Service, 21s), that we must pass on a little bit of the story. These quaint people live in boats made of palm trees, and they spend most of their time, night as weil as day, on the sea. Over .the boat there is a palm-leaf roof which can be rolled up when a squall comes; there are mats for sleeping on, but neither pillows nor blankets; strangest of all is the hearth, for _ the complete houseboat, or kab-ang, has its fire. The sea gypsies are short folk, averaging perhaps sft 4in; they have a richbrown colour and dark, straight hair. According to Mr White, which means according to themselves, the sea gypsies are refugees from the mainland who found safety for a time on the islands, but were persecuted thence into the sea. Just as some land animals have been forced by stress of circumstances to become’ aquatic, so the sea gypsies have become rovers on the sea. Every man’s hand has been against them—they are a frightened people —and the cyclones have been hard on them too. Pathetically they call themselves “Mawken, ’ which means “the sea-dro-wned folk.” —The Raison d'Etre of Bilge.— The chief drawback to the houseboat, after the slightness of its seaworthiness, is the smell. When the sea gypsies clean the fish for supper (they have two meals a day when things go well), they clean them' into the boat. Or if they wash out a pot in which they have been cooking, they pour the washings inside, not outside. “The result is that the bilge of the boat is awash with an evil-smelling slush.” And this in the tropics! What can be the meaning of such slackness? It is not far to seek. There are lots of sharks about, and if t-he refuse were thrown overboard they would soon get into the habit of following the craft about. What, then, would happen to the sea gypsies when they swim about to cool themselves, or when they dive for the pearl oyster? What would happen to the little children who dangle their feet into the water when the heat is overpowering? It has to he remembered that the Mawken have no buckets. —A Precarious Living.— The sea gypsies are self-sufficient to a degree that makes us ashamed. There are fish in the sea, crabs and molluscs on the shore, fruits and roots on the iand. They have no tailor’s bills, and only a few have huts. But this means iving very near the margin of subsistence, and just as solangeese and other sea-birds often die when a storm lasts for several days and the fishes have retreated far down into the waters, so the sea gypsies suffer from hunger in stormy seasons. We cannot wonder that they have begun to get supplies of rice and the like from outside—by barter with Chinese and Malayan traders. In exchange for food and a little cloth (unluckily more than a little opium too), they hand over the shells that furnish mother-of-peari, the dried sea-cucum-bers or bech-de-mer, the bark of certain trees, and the curious edible birds’ nests which the sea-swifts make of the consolidated juice of their salivary glands. To get the mother-of-pearl oysters (with an ocasional pearl of great price) they have to dive; to get the nests for the Chinaman’s soup they have to climb the cliffs or be lowered down the face. And after all their labour they get in most cases only a quarter, or even a tenth, of the right value of their goods. And then there’s the dope as part payment. In speaking of their meals—say of fish and papaw fruit—we should have mentioned that the Mawken eat with Adam’s forks, as our forefathers did as late as Tudor days. On a tramping holiday does one not sometimes relapse to this “savagery”? If there is a cool stream beside our wayside table it is easy and not unseemly to do without a fork. But we draw the line at dispensing with a knife 1 —A Dwindling Race.— The sea gypsies correspond to a dwindling species among animals—perhaps there are not more than 5000 of them altogether, but this is because their fellow-men have made their simple life too difficult. The death-rate is high. But they are fertile folk, monogamous, and wholesome. It is obvious that there cannot be many secrets on board the houseboat, and there is certainly no pruriency. “Mawken youths and maidens grow up with a nice modesty and an entire absence of that dangerous curiosity which comes of being kept in a state of blameworthy ignorance, stupidly confused in the past “with childlike innocence.” If their boat is dirty, their lives are clean! And they have filial piety too, taking care of the grandparents, not tumbling them overboard for the sharks to devour, as is the manner of some hardpressed islanders, like the Nicobarese. —A Race too Good to Lose.— The sea gypsies are healthy people, apart from malaria and skin disease and invasions of smallpox and cholera. The malaria is intelligible enough, since in their natural ignorance they take no precautions against the mosquito that carries the germ of the disease; the skin affections are partly due to the dirty boat; the smallpox and cholera are apt to be very deadly, for it is the instinct of a simple nomadic people to flee together from mysterious death. Mr White did not find a single instance of a Mawken with a cold, a cough, dr phthisis, though such things may possibly occur; nor did he come across any blind or deaf or dumb.

Where there is recouse to medical treat- • ment, as in some cases of fever, it is nearer to psycho-therapeutics than to physiology ! Many of the sea gypsies die a more or less violent death. Sharks may attack the divers in spite of all their wariness, and a sea-eagle may strike the eyes of a cliff-climber who is after the nests of the sea-swift. The fact seems to be that the Mawken attribute both the accidental deaths and the disease deaths to the same cause- the agency of evil spirits. They appear to be convinced that the spirit of man is liberated by the death of the body, and that it may be mischievous as well as kindly when the partnership is dissolved. It is interesting to find these simple people grasping the idea that death is a gateway to another kind of life, and the belief has the practical corollary that they .have no fear. 4he sea gypsies have, so to speak, almost instinctively accepted death, which is ever around them ; in any case, they face it with equanimity. —Tlie Women.— The women are pre-eminentlv mothers, but they prepare the palm-leaf ribbons and plait them into mats; they fillet and dry the surplus fish; they cut the papaw fruit into strips, clean out the seeds, and dry the slices in the sun; they also dry sliced bananas and the whole of the small lady’s-fingers variety; they used to make cooking utensils, but this‘art has decayed since the gypsies discovered that iron pots, obtained by barter, are much better suited than crockery for the bouncing and bumping of the houseboats. Under the pressure of the struggle for existence, the Mawken women seem to be beginning to forget how to dance and the men how to play an accompaniment. There is indescribable nathos in what they said to Mr White : “These are days of sadness. Mawken people seldom dance and play now. We do not make musical instruments as in the long ago.” But when the day’s journey is over the men still enjoy a frolic in the sea and the children on the sands. Till within recent times the sea gypsie® had no conception of God, nor name for a Creator. They have nothing in the • nature of worship. They also dispense with intoxicants: and the introduction of onium, like smallpox, is quite modern. They are clean livers and light eaters, and gifts of strange meats like tinned salmon they dispose of quietly but firmly—into the *ea, —Will they Die Out?— The picture Mr White gives us of the sea gypsies is on the whole a pleasant one, for the people have been successful against fearful odds. They have sought out a hazardous niche of opportunity and made it their own. They are strong and wholesome, and, if strangers would leave them alone, they have succeeded in the great task of happiness. They are good fellows, these =ea-drowned folk. The question is: Will they last? They know their archipelago and the resources of iis hundreds of beautiful islands; they are peaceful and plastic; why should they die out? They correspond, indeed, to a small and much persecuted species of animal, forced into a very difficult environment, where the chances of death are many. But man is not restricted to the tactics of Wild Nature, and it seems that understanding and sympathy, hand in hand, might still save the sea gypsies and the good qualities they embody. They live on the waters that, wash an Earthly Paradise. “It would be a delightful spot in which to make an experiment in development, in accord with the now known principles of evolution, and the sympathetic understanding of a primitive people which has resulted from the Science of Anthropology.”—John o’ London’s Weekly.