Outcasts of the Islands: The Sea Gypsies of South East Asia [Paperback]

This book is something special, for the author actually manages to become part of a nomadic sea-gypsy family--living, fishing, eating and sleeping under the tarpaulin of their tiny rickety boat for some two months. Malay land dwellers are disbelieving, "You can eat cassava? You can stand lice?" Yet his relationship with his hosts becomes so emotional that he will end up desperately searching for them again years later.

"We throttled back as we passed the lead boat, dropped the anchor, killed the engine and became part of the floating community," writes Sebastian. "It felt unnerving no longer to have a destination." However, Sebastian's story is no happy-go-lucky traveller's tale. He becomes deeply involved with tribal-chief Sarani's family and their troubles and tragedies. These include a lack of nationality and ID papers, the competition pump-boats illegally "bombing" fish with home-made explosives, depleting fish stocks, fatal diseases and the lack of modern medicine. He finds a people so disenfranchised from modern land-life that such things as contraceptive pills, antibiotics and condoms are only rumours. Instead, they rely on a mysterious ceremony called Mbo' Pai.

The Bajau Laut are people beyond time, with little clue of their ages or of, "clocks and calendars, border controls and exchange rates". Their lives are measured by "two tides a day, a full-moon every twenty-eight nights, and a change of prevailing wind every six months". Travellers to Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines will find in this book an inspirational "other" world. --Sarah Champion --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

An enchanting tale of travels among South East Asia’s Sea Gypsies, scattered groups of semi-nomadic fisher people who occupy the spaces between the islands.

A glance at the map of South East Asia reveals more blue than green, more sea than land. By separating the islands of the Malay Archipelago the sea has created diversity; by joining them together it has enabled trade and laid them open to influences from China, India and the Middle East. All Malays were sailors once – their ancestors reached the islands by boat – and the sea holds a central place in the Malay experience and imagination.

The Sea Gypsies who still occupy this realm seem to live still in the hidden world of Conrad’s tales. They form social co-operative groups, each with its own territory, and move between established anchorages within that range, following the changing currents, seasons and fishing opportunities, and are specialists at exploiting the coral reefs. They have an oral tradition which accounts for their origins with myths of floods and tidal waves. Their hunter-gatherer lifestyle and a belief system that is at root a blend of animism, ancestor worship and sympathetic magic are characteristics they share with the early Malay cultures.

Sebastian Hope travels and lives with groups of Sea Gypsies in both the east and the west of South East Asia, experiencing their subsistence lifestyle, unchanged for centuries. Travelling to fish and fishing to live, like the Sea Gypsies themselves he relies solely on his skills as a sailor and fisherman to survive.