Two centuries ago, the heirs of a long-fallen empire commanded the passages of the Singapore Straits, exacting a bloody toll on junks, dhows, schooners and other merchantmen laden with the fruit of the region's forests. The marauders and their swift, stern perahu are long gone, seduced by the rewards of inland grabs and the royal legitimacy conferred by mercantile overlords. Thus transformed from buccaneers into allies of the British, a prince of pirates and his entourage secured the rights to a vast hinterland and a new dynasty fuelled by jungle sap and the sweat of riverine farms.
Since then, the backbone of a maritime army has lost its purpose, retreating to the swamps, coves and muddy inlets that had nursed them for centuries. Many surrendered their nomadic spirits for orthodox identities and the sons of the seas around Singapore, hemmed in and ruled out by the growth of civilised shores, had no choice but to give in to life on solid ground. But even their outposts on isles a world away from the lion city gave way in living memory to the hunger of a leviathan who devours the past and hoards the future with no inkling of loss or that one day there might be no more room to grow.
Today, a people at home on the sea and at heart alive only when bound to the rhythms of the tide still survive in high flats, where they dream of village life and the void of urban existence. Their former haunts, reclaimed and ravaged or reserved for grander developments, no longer suffer the craft of men who sailed to feed their families or face the market power of mainland fishmongers. Then, children, or the poorest of bachelors with no means to acquire a boat or bubu, resorted to hook, line and sinker. Others built traps of mangrove poles and wire mesh to pen schools seeking to escape the tide. Larger nets were placed by tidal creeks and flats, and their owners planned their hunts according to the moon, currents and weather, for they pursued a living reliant on optimal yields and could scarcely afford the loss of fresh catches.
A different class of seafarers now dog the remains of reefs that once sustained a minor industry. They still heed the call of the tide, but there is no longer any sense of urgency or drive to make the most out of a line at the very end of providence. The nets are made to last, but their wielders have attention spans that crumble at a wave and, more often than knot, foresake their harvests long after the mesh has embraced a body of fins, legs and flippers who endure a slow, smothering death. Some victims thrash about until they succumb to exhaustion or cuts from the net or surrounding rubble. Others squirm and swim their way to a greater mess, dying as a bundle of flesh in still wool.
Bottom dwellers, with their stiff forms and instinct to dash for the deep, are particularly apt to perish in drift nets. Cephalic spines, bony ridges and stiff dorsals are suckers for punishment and useless against a polyester foe with no plan or purpose other than the entanglement of every pelagic marine creature. Similarly, flatfish with venomous stings find little room for manouervre once they have blundered into a suspended mesh, and soon die with their pectorals upturned and cartilage frayed.
Instead of men happy to waste their hoard, the throes of the trapped and their chemical distress signals draw the reef's clean-up crew, who welcome the chance to sample meat on the bone and still pulsing with blood. Long pincers allow portunids to reach in and pluck out their pound of flesh. But the crabs' serrated claws, lateral spines and half-score of jointed legs are also exaptations for entrapment and not a few make a false move that turns opportunity into calamity. Menippids and xanthids, too, have no defence against a device that get their knockers in a twist and offer no gain to boot, for their captors would find an animal that has shed its legs in vain, and in the case of egg and mosaic crabs, a meal with warning colours.
The nets also snare other creatures with little to offer hungry men but pretty shades and odd shapes. Copperbanded butterflyfish, yellowtail angelfish, feathery filefish, rare rabbitfish and tusked wrasses with the intelligence to use the tools of primitive men were among the collateral damage of a half-hearted effort to reap an aquatic harvest that resulted in two deadly phantoms at Big Sister's Island. Laid out by the gaps that flank the central seawall of the island's larger lagoon and anchored to chunks of living coral, the drift nets formed walls of doom with no sign that their owners cared that these nooses would catch, kill and consume a host of reef dwellers, the surplus to requirements of a labour of loaf and malignant neglect.
A few were fortunate enough to undergo the discomfort of an unravelling and the snips of closely held cutters. The rest remained on the mesh in varying degrees of decay. The ends of the nets were located and unwound from their living footholds, and the grand schemes of itinerant fishermen reduced to luggable bits and dragged to bins by the pier. It was a minor tragedy of not uncommon circumstances in these southern shores where the baseline will continue to shift as long as memories falter and faith sustains the notion that the sea will never run dry and the earth will never run short.
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