Sea Hunters of Lamalera

Natural History, Oct, 2001 by Fred Bruemmer

In an Indonesian coastal village, boatbuilders and whalers follow ancient rules.

Their boats are sacred and, they believe, immortal. Their prey is gigantic and dangerous. They are the sea hunters of Lamalera, an isolated village on the tiny Indonesian island of Lembata, 1,200 miles due east of Jakarta.

To the 150 or so hunters and the rest of the village's 2,000 people, each of the fifteen boats that operate out of Lamalera (formerly known as Lomblen) is a living being that links them to their ancestors and their ancestral home. That home, as legend has it, was to the north, on an island destroyed centuries ago by a tidal wave. After a long journey, two boatloads of survivors landed on the harsh, volcanic coast of Lembata, where they built a village above a crescent beach facing the turbulent but rich Sawu Sea. One of the two boats that brought their ancestors to Lamalera was, say the villagers, the Kebako Puka.

In Lamalera I often traveled in a boat also called the Kebako Puka, which, according to its crew, was identical in every detail to the original (the model for subsequent boats). When a boat dies--in a storm, of old age, smashed by a furious whale--the villagers mourn for two months while a replacement is built. It takes eighteen trees to build one. Root ends are used to make the stern, so that their life force will flow toward the head of the boat. Planks are carefully adzed--never bent--to the correct curve. The planks are caulked with palm-fiber oakum. Hand-carved wooden pegs--never nails, screws, or anything else metal--are driven in with stone hammers. Carved crosspieces are lashed to the frame with rattan. Finally a sacred symbol is painted on the prow; a common one is eyes that search unceasingly for prey. On the prow of the Kebako Puka a snake coils around a mountain, symbolizing the tidal wave that destroyed the Lamalerans' ancestral home.

The boats are made by ata mola, highly skilled craftsmen from the village's nineteen boatbuilding clans. Robert Barnes, professor of social anthropology at the University of Oxford and an expert on Lamalera's history and customs, has noted that the term ata mola is also used to refer to a priest.

The finished boat is heavy and sturdy. Thirty feet long, six feet wide in the beam, tapered at both bow and stern, it has a false keel of softwood that can easily be replaced if damaged in rough landings, a frequent occurrence. Its huge rectangular sail is woven from the leaves of gebang palm and suspended from a twenty-five-foot-high bipod bamboo mast. Two outriggers give the vessel great stability. Beyond the bow juts a narrow, five-foot-long, bamboo-and-plank platform. This is the precarious place from which the boat's single harpooner will launch his kafes, harpoons at the tip of ten-foot poles.

In Lamalera, animistic beliefs in the sanctity and spirituality of hunted animals exist in syncretic harmony with devout Catholicism. (Jesuit missionaries began visiting the village in the 1800s, and a permanent Catholic mission was established there in 1913.) Custom and conduct are governed by an ancient oral code. With little agriculture -- villagers grow some corn and manioc--and no other industry, it is hardly surprising that the hunt is the center of life. Each May, after the priest has blessed the fleet and prayers have been offered to Kotekema, the spirit of the sperm whale, the hunting season begins. It will last until October.

Lamalerans hunt several species of whales, the most feared, most respected, most sought after of which is the sperm whale. The annual catches peaked at fifty-six in 1969. But then, say the villagers, they sold one of the sacred sperm whale skulls lining the beach to tourists from a passing ship. This offended the whale's spirit, and for years afterward, no more than ten sperm whales a year were harvested. Catches have increased since 1990, however.

Today the sea hunters take mostly young male sperm whales, twenty to forty feet long, which eat the abundant Sawu Sea squid. Crews are leery of the full-grown sperm whale bull (up to sixty feet in length), a rarer sight. In 1994 two Lamaleran boats sank after being struck by a whale that had towed them for miles, almost to the island of Timor. A third boat picked up the crews and drifted for days until it was rescued by a passing ship.

Rejecting spinner dolphins (too fast) and baleen whales (taboo), Lamalerans hunt several species of sharks, including the great white but most often the large and lethargic whale shark (known to them as the stupid fish). They also go after sunfish, marlin, and dorado, as well as manta rays (the largest of all the rays, these can weigh up to one and a half tons). The hunt is hard work. The crews are out all day beneath the burning sun--and often return with nothing to show for their day at sea. They rarely eat or drink on board, so I learned to fill myself with liquids, camel-like, before going out with them.

Weather permitting, the fleet sails at dawn every day except Sunday. On a slipway of hardwood logs, the heavy boat is slid from its palm-leaf-thatched shelter at the back of the beach down to the lethal-looking, pounding surf where the crew calmly waits for the highest wave. With one mighty shove from them, the boat rides out. The men quickly slide aboard, otter-smooth. They pole out beyond the breakers, settle on the thwarts, then row with all their strength to an ancient rhythmic chant, "Hilabe, hilabe, hela, hela/hilabe, hela, hela.... "Farther out, the chant changes into a song that translates as "We are the men from Lamalera/We are the hunters of the whale."