Mergui Archipelago

Myeik or Mergui Harbor Andaman Sea Myanmar Burma

Myeik or Mergui two Novices Myanmar Burma

The Salone or Moken are a tribe inhabiting the Mergui Archipelago. These sea gypsies live in their small boats or in houses built on stilts located not on land but in the sea along the coast. At one time they were notorious pirates. They are expert divers and make a living searching for pearl oysters, snails , mollusks, holo thurians or sea cucumbers, and mother-of-pearl. Pearl diving and the development of a cultured pearl industry on some of the Mergui Archipelago or Myeik Archipelago islands, particularly Pale Kyun (Pearl Island) 85 miles south of Myeik have been encouraged by the. Joint venture agreements with Japanese firms have been signed in recent years for the collection of oysters, pearl culture and production as well as oyster breeding, and work has been successfully in progress for 4 or five years. Some of of the Mergui Archipelago or Myeik Archipelago islands are being developed for tourism as the setting is ideal. A five-star hotel, the Andaman Club Resort Hotel ( mainly for gambling , since gambling is officially banned in Thailand - but most Thai do it) is on Thahtay Kyun Island just 10

Mergui or Myeik

Today the only western foreigner there are scuba diving tourists on life aboard trips out of Phuket , Thailand.

It is a natural transition from the pearl divers town in the Mergui Archipelago or Myeik Archipelago with its notable past, to the island country beyond it, far into the the sea. Of all that has happened amongst the islands of the Mergui Archipelago or Myeik Archipelago since men first came to live and move amongst them, there is no record. Here and there only the curtain of the unknown is lifted for a moment. 

Piracy has in short ever found the archipelago a happy resort.

In later days King's Island, was bestowed on the French by the King of Thailand and might have become, with its ample bay, an important settlement. But it was never used, except in later days by French ships of war, during the wars between England and France, as a place from which to attack and capture British merchant vessels ; and as a place of refuge, when British ships of war were abroad.

On Our Way

The launch, with loud heart beating, drives a pathway through the narrow strait. Turning our backs upon Mergui, now hidden behind Patit, we reach a space of green sun-touched water, with low mangrove swamps upon our larboard bows. Upon our starboard the mountains of King's Island, cloven to a third of their height by dark lines of swamp forest, reach into the heart of the swooning clouds. We arc steering south by west for the island country, and the most notable object in view is the pyramid of Merghi Island, sixteen hundred feet above the sea. Nearer, several others lie in our way, outlined in solid forms against the misty blue of their lofty companion. Away under the opal sky, there is a narrow mirror-like calm, which makes the islands in its compass seem unreal ; mere phantoms of the vision suspended between earth and heaven. In striking contrast, the sailing-boats of the coast fishers are cut in black patterns against the clouds.

No two consecutive moments present the same spectacle. The clouds melt from one ecstasy of beauty into another ; the sea, played upon by the wind, is one instant billowy and placid as oil, another crimped with laughter, a third a meadow of diamonds in the sudden sun ; and the brave launch, leaping forward, overcomes space, so that the dreamiest island becomes a reality, the most palpable one of woods and precipices a dream. The sailing-junks, with their double diamonds of black sail suspended above their small hulls, fill the eye with the spectacle of their grace ; saying that man has never invented anything more in harmony with nature than a sail.

And presently we fall into company. The junks driven by the wind, come up in a great flight, with the swell of a bevy of portly matrons, all ribbons and bosom ; the wrecker, very surly and dirty, overtakes us to starboard, flinging silver from his bows ; and in the offing there is the first Salon boat moving to the impulse of a small white sail. The wrecker looks evil enough for any trade, and as he leaves us behind him in spite of all our pace, is like a big cur in a run after Jack, outpacing some gallant little panting fox-terrier, all heart and pluck, but too short dear fellow, in his legs to keep ahead. No matter ; we will come in yet.

Beautiful as is the day, there is a subtle and deeper fascination in the dark.

The world closes in and leaves us the centre of a new universe. I seem by some miracle to have been brought here into the midst of these lonely islands, and the panting dauntless engine that has brought me is like another carpet of Solomon magically put at my service. For, a month ago, I was afoot in the greatest of cities, a straw on the driving tide of its life ; this morning I was ashore, near a court-house, a prison, and a town ; and now, in the company of nameless shadowy islands, I am being swiftly borne away upon the bosom of the dark. A star shines out on the horizon like a beacon or a lighthouse, larger than any star I have ever seen ; grey clouds drift like phantoms in the wake of the departed sun, and each moment the constellations grow in multitude and splendor.

Steering by instinct through the pitchy night of the Mergui Archipelago or Myeik Archipelago, we cast anchor at last in the wake of the wrecked Amboyna ; and the speculative salvage-man in blue garments, his feet naked, comes on board to tell me how he has fought with Chinese and Malay, been prisoner and escaped ; how he has lived for three and thirty years in the East, and has a wife and children in Scotland, but finds folk at home cold and indifferent to one who has spent his life abroad. The cry of all old wanderers.

I pass the night on the floor of the launch with nothing between my vision and the stars. The sea is but a yard below, the roof shelters me without shutting out the sky. All my world for the time is about me ; the gunner, the sea-Gunny, the engineer, and the crew. And here on the trackless seas, the sentiment of our common humanity surpasses all lesser considerations. The same conditions affect us all alike.

Some time in the night I wake, and my eyes arc dazzled by the lustrous moon hung up in the firmament above me. I sleep again, and wake to find the messengers of day abroad ; lictors with their faces, who fling themselves upon the world and hid it prepare in beauty for the coming of their lord. Strung along the east there is a chain of islands each link a mountain pyramid, the pale sea between crinkling with the first breeze of the dawn.

The first familiar object that greets me is the Marguerite's gig in the wake of the golden dawn ; the crew in her fishing with lines. Far away in the distance a ship is passing silently, a phantom amidst the Mergui Archipelago or Myeik Archipelago islands.

Turning to look about me I find that we are at anchor in a small bay, which lies but half awake in an arm of Bentinck Island. As the sun climbs, the island turns a rich and golden green, its beauty reflected in the olive water. But for a wisp of yellow sand along the sea-edge, its entire face is covered with woods of the noblest character. Little valleys run down it to the sea, a thousand birds are singing their un­familiar matins to the day, and trees with long white trunks shining in the light, break up the mass of foliage into aisles, and make the island seem like some Gothic cathedral wrought in an Oriental texture. A few paces off lies the dishevelled Amboyna, her funnel once black, now rust-red in the sea air.

I make my way on board, climbing with some effort through the trenchant air to the upper deck. Mr. McPhairson in blue clothes cut all of a piece like the garments in which infancy is wont to pass its nights, is on board, tanned and ruddy, grizzled, large and weighty of hand and foot, smoked glasses veiling his small blue dogged eyes.

" You don't notice a smell ? " he asks—" a kind of effluvium ? " Candour and courtesy conflict in my mind.

I admit at last that I do.

" Ah," he replies, a little troubled upon the matter, " I was just wondering if it was away, or that I was growing accustomed to it a bit."

Half of her is under water. The fore-end of her is out of the wet, and a Chinese carpenter is at work drilling holes in a plank. On the hurricane ­deck—the Captain's walk—the pumps arc busy, and the glass face of the indicator, like a ship's clock, shows the pressure under which a man is working twenty feet below the level of the sea. A long tube of gutta-percha leads away across a hoarding built of planks, over the sunken middle of the ship. At the edge a'strange man in blue with a Chinese hat is standing acting as a human pulley for the tube. Another sits holding a rope connected with the diver's helmet. Yet another holds the tube of air—the life-line—and lets it slowly slip through his half-closed hand. With head bowed down and hands outstretched, he is, I can see, absorbed in the delicate work that is his. There is something electric in the slow rustle of the rope through his nervous hands. And he has in his keeping the life of the man below in the blind water.

To my unaccustomed eyes there is nothing visible but a hoarding below the surface, and a tube let into the water of the Mergui Archipelago or Myeik Archipelago, but the silent men clustered in the daylight above know well what is afoot below. Old McPhairson, the speculator, interjects occasional remarks. " He is walking now, along the lower deck," as the line suddenly runs out.

" Eh, but he is in the hold away below now, lifting the cargo," as a few bubbles rise to the surface.

"He would be about there now," pointing to a white stanchion out of the water ; and then quickly, "here she comes," as a sudden turbulence in the water and a rush of air bubbles herald the approach of a sack of cargo.

" Chilies," he observes sententiously, as a party of red skirmishers rise up and spread out in a fan upon the water, to be followed by a black and rotten sack, which a waiting man with a large pole thrusts away to sea. In this way rice, chilies, prawns, and tobacco come up and float away, the bay becoming alive with them.

McPhairson, who goes down frequently himself, says the prawns cut his skin, and he points to his red scarred feet.

Silently a diver comes up, has his iron helmet lifted off his collar­bones, and sits dazed and dull in the sunlight, shivering in the gills. Another takes his place.

" They get mortal cold down there," says McPhairson.

" It's a warm day," I remark.

" And may it continue so," he replies ; " for the water takes all the heat out of you down below, and the wind cuts you when you come up.

The other day now, when it was a bit cold, every time I came up I had to get them to wrap me in a blanket."

All this time there is an anxious manner about the man. His launch, the wrecker, and Captain Le Fevre has not yet come in.

" And the Lord," he says, " knows what has become of her. Oh ! hut, if she is wrecked, there will be a shindy at home when her owners come to hear of it."

At last the laggard comes in sight.

"There she is."

" Time she was," he cries out. " I have passed but a poor night because of her. If I am so fortunate as to get this job through success­fully, I will never again undertake another like it. I am fifty-five the day," he adds, mopping his strong face, " and not the man I was." Yet he looks a man of iron.

The wrecker comes up ; the captain with unkempt hair, and blue shirt flapping outside his trousers, blowing his last anxious instruction through a speaking tube to the engine-room below. The mate, with a big hand which he uses with emotion, and bare feet in white canvas shoes, out at toes and heels, steps on the hurricane deck of the Amboyna. He speaks, encouraged by McPhairson, with anger and contempt of his captain. Clearly in this triumvirate Le Fevre is in a minority of one.

" Hect," says McPhairson, " he is that sort of man who can neither lead nor follow. A coward, Sirr, always on the look-out for what he don't want to see ; a-dreamin' of rocks ten miles inside his course. Phew ! " he adds, sweeping his ruddy face with a blue bandana, " and to think of the night I've spent."

McPhairson by his venture stood to lose two thousand pounds, or win a competency. Long after, I heard with regret that he had lost.

The Pearl Diver of the Mergui Archipelago or Myeik Archipelago

Steaming along by South Passage Island we come suddenly upon a Salon camp. There is a fan of white sand with some boats and huts upon it, and I can see a few men and women moving. By the time I can step ashore—and it takes no more than five minutes over the transparent water—they have all effaced themselves in the primitive woodland, and only one man remains looking ill at ease. The sea-cunny goes with him, shouting to the woods, in the hope of inducing the others to return. The encampment consists of three boats and three huts ; but to call them huts is to misname them, for they arc of all human habitations the slightest. They consist of a few thin sticks—I can count six upright and three laid horizontally, in one—and a frail pleated mat laid over the top. A mat of bamboo strips is spread on the white sand within. Some of their few possessions are scattered around ; bags, baskets, and bedding of mat, and other articles showing some contact with civilization ; large Pegu – Bago jars, Chinese bowls and plates, a knife or two, an old beer bottle full of wild honey, a couple of wooden boxes—that is all. The spectacle that spreads beyond is of a purple lake, studded on its circumference with blue islands. The sunlight dances on the water, the sea hurtles very gently against the white sand, bees hum in the motionless air, and a bird pipes in the brake. From the deep recesses of the woods comes faintly the voice of the sea-cunny, calling to the trembling hidden people without avail. It is a dreamy soft and beautiful corner of the world, oceans away from this morning's bay and the Scotchman with his divers at work. The Marguerite lying at anchor in the offing, and puffing clouds of white steam against the purple seascape, looks like the denizen of another world. The shimmering heat plays a fugue before my drowsy eyes. . . . I turn with an effort to the realities about me.

The white sand is marked with the footprints of the colony. Its only representative stands half-cowed with fear, a deep, dull, suspicion linger­ing in his eyes. He is a short, strong, black-skinned man, with a sparse moustache and no beard, a loin-cloth and a bandana, both red. He tells the sea-cunny that they came here yesterday, and that they will leave as soon as they have collected enough of a palm with which to renew the upper portions of their boats. It is fiercely hot, and the sea-cunny says the heads of the Salon infants grow red in the sun. They live rough lives, and die hard.

Leaving Bentinck Island in the Mergui Archipelago or Myeik Archipelago and the Perforated rock, we steer directly for the Sisters. Islands bare as Sark lie upon our right, of fantastic form. One is like a Japanese eagle, another like a palace, a third is like a cathedral in the distance.

For the first time now we come upon a pearl diver, sweeping slowly with long oars along a line of shadow, under the precipitous flanks of Maria, most northerly of the Sisters. These islands nearly all stand clean out of the water, and look as if they had no interiors but only summits to be climbed with difficulty. The first of the boats I see is the property of Olpherts the little clerk ; the second of the German Hertzog. The sea is placid as blue marble swaying with the first beat of life. Black rocks show their fangs in the sun, and deep pacific harbors lie between the islands. Between Maria and Elizabeth, where the rocks are strung in a line across the strait, there is a wonderful blaze of sea.

The pearl diver, more numerous now, are scattered like islands on the sun-steeped ocean, and with the aid of a telescope I can tell if they are at work, from the dark figure of the life-line man erect at the stern.

As we gradually approach I find that four men are working at the pump wheel, two with their hands and two with their feet. A man at the oar is slowly propelling the boat in sympathy with the buried diver below, and two men stand silhouetted against the sky, one at the life, the other at the head-line ; the latter the tender and leader of the boat.

For a little space of time we wait, listening to the monotonous screeching of the wheel ; then the rope tightens, the tender hauls, a burst of bubbles is borne up in tumult to the surface, the tenders run swiftly together, and the diver, like a strange beast hooked up from the sea-deeps, emerges and clings to the ladder over the side of the boat. And there he lies, bent over, the type of exhaustion. The crew hasten to raise his helmet, and lightened of its burden, he steps on deck, his startled Japanese head showing out of his monstrous clothes, his eyes blinking with the change from the deep sea floor to its sunlit surface. In a small brown net, like those which old ladies use in England when they go a-shopping, lie the shells he has found. Anything from sixpence each to a thousand pounds.

We move on and I find Allingham in the midst of his boats, a pile of shells about him. He uses a big flat blade and peers as he opens the shells into their lustrous depths ; flinging the meat with its food of live red prawns into a bucket of water, which he afterwards searches with fingers skilled with usage. When he has gone tragically through the entire pile finding nothing, I descend with him into his cabin, garnished with bottles of sauce, a rusty tin containing a few pearls, an iron safe, an open shell with the mark on it of a rifled pearl, a pipe or two, a tin of " Navy Cut." Enters the German Hertzog, brusque, keen, intelligent, curiosity written large in his eyes. For the coming of the Marguerite is a riddle to be solved. Meanwhile we lie at ease on the cabin roof, and get the launch to tow us to the Bertha at anchor in the shelter of an island. They talk of a Salon camp assembled in the neighborhood, and as we go, I see their fleet of boats making away across the water, in the wake of a double-sailed Chinaman, who has come to trade and barter.

It is evening, the closing hour, and there is a general movement on the seas of the Mergui Archipelago or Myeik Archipelago. The pearl diver-boats are coming in to their rendezvous beside an island, the home of the edible-nest builder, which from its strange picturesque outline is a landmark to them all. It is nearly bare rock, but at its corners trees droop over the sides, like parasols, and it is so much like a Japanese picture, that I give it, in emulation of the worthy Captain Forrest, the name of  Mimosa San. The last pink of the sunset turns the space between the islands into sea-ways of exquisite color. Cliffs and precipices rise up about us, and in their shelter we anchor for the night.

I spend an hour in the Bertha listening to the pleasant German talk of the pearl collectors wife.

" Ach," she says, speaking of the islands, " when I came here, I did think I could never wonder enough. Oh, but they are so beautifully."

While we talk the pearl diver cleans and searches his shells by the lantern-light ; in all he does a man of character. It was he who wrecked the Amboyna ; he has a master's certificate ; but he sits here undaunted in spirit, and he holds on while the Englishmen go, one by one, because he knows how to make an income in many ways. He takes photographs of the islanders, and sells their skulls and skeletons to anthropological institutes in Berlin. He took home a pair of orang-utangs for which he asked 20,000 francs. One died on the way, and the other, as his wife says, " did sigh with his head in his hands ; oh ! so sad, for one of his own nation." A year ago they found a pair of dwarfs, and took them away to Germany, where they are now famous and a source of unascer­tained income to the pearl diver and his wife. He has sent for whaling tackle ; and is, in short, a man of ability. His wife is a plump, bright-eyed, brown-faced girl, with some English which she has learnt since she came to these seas, and many pretty Germanisms. She talks well, and is full of appreciation of every kind of beauty, and what she calls " the Nature.",it is so beautifully. It do make such a theme for the letters home."

Allingham, a red man, sad and bashful, sits on a stool offering a word only now and then.

They talk of ambergris, and whales, and divers' risks ; of two recent deaths from the snapping of the tube (the life-tender hauled hand-over­hand, but not quick enough to save his man, who came up dead and black in the face) ; of divers half-paralyzed and scarce able to walk, who still dive ; of one who tired of life as a cripple, shot himself ; of the man whose helmet being unadjusted let in the water (he signaled, but was kept down, being supposed nervous, and ultimately came up, dead) ; of one whose head swelled up, so that they could scarcely remove the helmet. The diver's life in these seas is risky, short, riotous, lucrative, and there is no lack of apprentices to the trade. And so as we talk, the German finishing his work, falls back into a long armchair ; the poultry in the hen-coop cackle and fill the air with the scent of feathers ; the schooler's dog still wet with the sea, dozes under the lantern's light ; a kettle boils on the hob in the cabin below, and oars splash in the dark­ness, as boats go to and fro. From the distance there are borne upon the swaying sea the voices of the assembled crews, in song, in laughter, in the telling of strange tales before they sleep.

" Well," says Allingham mournfully, " I haven't given up hope yet. From now till April there are still four months to run, and who knows what we may find."

She.—" Oh, but England is already—what you say ?—internatsio ; but in Shermanie they do think much of a tiger-claw necklace. Nicht Mark ? " and at intervals she says soothingly : " So " . .. " So."

With The Salon of the Mergui Archipelago or Myeik Archipelago

During the night the launch and the schooner Bertha developed an intimacy, and the dawn as it came stealing over the seas, found them linked in an embrace of their anchor chains. When at length we got away, day had broken, and we steered into the lake of water between Jane and Charlotte, and thence across the sea to Bushby in the track of the departed gypsies. In the far distance I could trace the smoke of their moving fires, and the gleam of an oar blade as it caught the sun. Skate were flapping about in the sea, and a shoal of small fish leaped and plunged, pursuing and pursued ; the war of nature incessant under the smiling surface of life. The Sisters, all blue and green now, lay strung in a line upon the western sea, and 0 Mimosa San was fading out of sight. Father and Son, a solemn couple, greeted us on the south. I hailed the Chinaman as we came up to him, and he sent off a present of green-snail shells, and a polite message to say that the Salon would rendezvous in his neighborhood in the evening after the day's work.

The green-snail shell is a beautiful object, deep sea-green without, white and iridescent within. All the beauty of the sunset is by some miracle of nature caught and imprisoned in the mould of this deep-sea dweller. And so as we went on, I came upon the Salon in the clear green water, under a rocky coast. There were several boats, and from one a man with a Burman air about him, a very merry fellow, signaled to us to come up that he might look upon us. In the boats before me there were men and women, children and boys, but the young unmarried girls must have hidden themselves away, for I could sec none. The children were of a fairer complexion than their parents, and all but the very youngest were at work with oar or punting pole. The most attractive child of all was a girl almost grown up, bedecked with beads, and swathed in a single garment of blue cloth. She had brown eyes and dark ringlets, and was so frightened at being photographed, that she broke into tears, and was with difficulty reassured. As it was, the tears lay in a rim about her eyes long after she had ceased to cry ; and she could not be persuaded to resume the pole, which she used at the prow of her father's boat with an admirable grace. Behind her in the recesses of the boat crouched her grandmother, a midnight hag—type of the terrible old age of the Salon woman. I do not suppose that there is anywhere in the world any one more ugly than an old woman of the Salon.