and Kiritimati, victim of an electrical problem. That it was overloaded with schoolchildren should have made this an international incident, but it is not the I-Kiribati way to proclaim Mayday. This is not due to excess pride, but to an unnerving combination of self-reliance and fatalism, a cultural attribute not to be confused with stupidity, which, frankly, is a mistake I sometimes made. How else to explain the monthly tally of fishermen lost at sea?
The numbers, truly, were astonishing. There is one radio station in Kiribati and most weeks it dutifully reported the number of boats that had failed to return. These are all open boats, typically about fifteen feet long, made of wood, and powered by a single outboard engine. They do not carry sails, or oars, or life preservers, or radios, or flares, or spare parts for the engine. They do not even carry fishing rods, just fishing line, some hooks, and some bait. The rest is done by sheer muscle. Imagine trying to pull in a fifty-pound tuna, a fish that clearly does not want to go where you are taking it, with a slippery line just a few millimeters in diameter. And now imagine that you are out of sight of land. And the engine dies. Imagine that awful silence, the only sound the Pacific Ocean, an ocean that with each passing hour is taking you far, far away from land. If you are a normal person, you panic and die. If you are an I-Kiribati, you say,
And here is the really astonishing thing. Very often, they do survive. I do not have the figures on who has the record for spending the longest time adrift in an open boat, but I would bet that the top ten positions are all held by I-Kiribati, which bespeaks of both the lunacy of I-Kiribati fishermen and their jaw-dropping capacity for survival. One day Radio Kiribati reports that three men failed to return from fishing, and you think, well, they’re done for, and then nine months later Radio Kiribati will announce that the fishermen have been found drifting off the coast of Panama, which is approximately four thousand miles away, and that they are reported to be in good condition. Good condition! If it were me, there would have been nothing left except the powdered remains of my bones.
Of course, not everyone lives and so you would think that when family members hear that one of their loved ones has gone missing at sea there would be worry, there would be vigils, there would be gnashing of teeth, but this is not so. When Abarao, a health education officer for the government who often worked with Sylvia in a collegial, professional kind of manner, which made him a rarity among government workers—not the collegial part, but the professional part—failed to return from Maiana, where he was sent to gather the family’s pigs for a celebratory feast, there was a notable lack of consternation among his family and colleagues. When I asked one of his cousins why this appeared to be so, he said; “In Kiribati, we don’t worry for the first two weeks.”
And after two weeks?
“Then we worry a little bit, but we keep it to ourselves.”
Two weeks passed and still no Abarao. Kiribati’s lone patrol boat, another gift from the good people of Australia, was dispatched to look for him. It returned to Tarawa several days later, listing strongly and belching long plumes of black smoke. They had not found Abarao. They had, however, encountered some excellent fishing off Nonouti, which was a considerable distance from where Abaroa was likely to have drifted, and in their enthusiasm for the excellent fishing, they had hit a reef, nearly sinking the boat.
And then, a week later, Radio Kiribati announced that a Korean fishing trawler had found Abarao off Nauru. He was reported to be in good condition. I wanted to hear how, exactly, does one remain in good condition after spending three weeks adrift in an open boat under the glare of the equatorial sun.
“Pig’s blood,” he said, when I met with him a short while later. I suppose desperation can lead one to think creatively about the uses of a pig, but I’m not sure it would have occurred to me. I see a pig and I see bacon, pork chops, pork tenderloin, ham, but not water.
Abarao was in his thirties, and though he was quick to laugh about his experience, he had a haunted air about him, as if the weeks drifting with the ocean current and all its attendant terror and tedium had led him to develop a knowledge of death that he did not wish to have. To find relief from the sun, he had spent much of his time in the water, hanging from the stern of the boat.
“What about sharks?” I asked. It is one thing to encounter a shark on a reef, where there are so many other tasty nibbles to choose from, but it is another thing altogether to meet a shark in the open water, where you are more likely to be treated as an unexpected meal.
“Yes, I saw sharks, but I couldn’t catch them.”
The I-Kiribati are different from you and me. They take their position on top of the food chain very seriously. Abarao’s answer reminded me of a story that John, an English volunteer, once told me. He was snorkeling in the lagoon when he noticed that he was being circled by a large shark. He popped up and spoke to his companions on a boat a short distance away. “There’s a shark here. Would you be so kind as to bring the boat over?” But it was too late. At the first mention of shark, his two I-Kiribati friends had leapt into the water to go shark hunting. Like I said, the I-Kiribati are different from you and me.
The cause of Abarao’s adventure on the high seas was the simple fact that halfway between Maiana and Tarawa he’d run out of gas. “I forgot the petrol,” he said sheepishly. This is probably the primary cause of adriftedness in Kiribati, but it wasn’t the most painfully dumb reason I’d ever heard for getting oneself lost at sea. This would belong to Epi and Joseph, two Catholic missionaries from Samoa and Tonga, respectively, who one day took the boat belonging to the Catholic high school out for a day of fishing. They got lost.
“We followed the birds,” Joseph told me when I spoke to him a few months later. “We thought that’s where the fish were, but then the birds flew away. We followed the birds again, but still we couldn’t find any fish. And then we noticed that we couldn’t see land anymore.”
“So what did you do?”
“We shut off the engine.”
It occurred to me that I would now trust Samoan and Tongan fishermen even less than I did I-Kiribati fishermen. They were not more than a couple of miles from Tarawa. A simple reading of the clouds would have told them what direction to go. Clouds reflect the color of the lagoon, and so when they drift over the atoll they take on a pale green hue, which means that while you cannot actually see the atoll you know where it is. But the missionaries were unaware of this basic island navigational technique, and so they began to drift.
“On the first night, there was suddenly a loud noise and the boat nearly turned over,” Joseph told me. “It was a whale and it had come up right beside us. I could see its eye.”
He was nearly quaking at the recollection. For a Catholic missionary adrift at sea, the appearance of a whale must be a fairly evocative thing.
“But that was the last fish we saw,” he continued. “We didn’t catch a thing. And then, one day, a bird landed on the boat and I was able to grab it.”
I asked him about water.
“It rained once, and we gathered about three liters.”
“And so that’s it?” I asked it. “One bird and three liters of water.”
“That’s it.”
The hapless missionaries were adrift for three weeks. They turned on the engine periodically when the sea ran high threatening to overturn the boat, but mostly they drifted silently across the largest ocean in the world. They prayed. A lot. Apparently someone was listening: They too were found by a Korean fishing boat, which took them to Papua New Guinea. Eventually, they made it back to Tarawa, where they have been feeling guilty ever since. Not only had the Catholic high school been forced to pay the exorbitant costs of their air travel from Papua New Guinea—there is not a more expensive corner of the world to travel in than the Pacific—but it had also lost its boat.
STILL, DESPITE MY very great fear of drifting aimlessly across the ocean, I thought that I should at least gather some ocean-oriented experience. I was on an atoll in the very middle of the world’s largest ocean, an ocean whose sounds were omnipresent, whose very sight was unavoidable, and because the atoll is a very small place to be, the ocean is the only option for expanding one’s world. I made arrangements with Bitaki, a teammate on the soccer team I played with, to go fishing with his brothers, who typically worked the waters off Maiana, the nearest island south of Tarawa. When I mentioned to Sylvia that I was going, she said: “No, you’re not.”
“And what do you mean by ‘No, you’re not’?”
I determined right then that I would go out fishing every week. No, every day. I would become a professional fisherman. I would become sun-browned and sea-weathered. I would smell like fish. I would be a Salty Dog.
“I mean,” Sylvia said, “that when the engine dies and you start drifting, which will happen, because things like that do seem to happen to you, you will not survive two days. Your skin will fry, you will collapse from
