Free Seven-Tenths by James Hamilton-Paterson

an empty stretch of water was full of small craft ferrying groups of labourers and materials. Even as I sat, a bangka carrying a large cylindrical water tank crawled heavily out of the difficult shallow channel off ‘Sabay’ beach, its outriggers ploughing the waterinstead of skimming its surface. Elsewhere along the beach were long heaps of sandbags. Clearly, two of the disadvantages I had wishfully imagined would guarantee the island’s immunity to change were being remedied almost with disdain. No drinking water? Fetch it over in huge tankfuls. No beach? Take ‘Sabay”s across in sacks. What, then, is an island? The author of The Island Within surveys his kneecaps sticking up out of the water in his bathtub and considers them very much part of his personal mainland. * The image has a geological aptness. ‘Tiwarik’ is as much a part of the mainland as ‘Sabay’ is. It just happens to look like an island because the land between was low-lying enough to have been invaded by the sea. Its flora and fauna are scarcely affected by the intervening strait. The weather is that of the mainland, birds and seeds fly to and fro. From time to time people had made efforts to cultivate small patches of its total 13 hectares, though lately this amounted to little more than occasionally cutting the cogon for thatch. The island’s crown of virgin jungle is a miniature version of those vestiges still surviving in gullies and ravines high up Mount Malindig opposite.
    ‘Tiwarik’, then, is a crumb fallen from the mainland, made of the same dough and nourishing the same plants and animals. At the time I built my first hut on it the island had no economic function of its own. Yet it did form a casual part of several economies. Locals fished there and, especially when caught by sudden squalls or currents, would hole up on it until conditions improved. On ordinary days they might land and build a driftwood fire on the coral strand, toasting a fish for lunch. It was also used by travellers. The archipelago is full of migrants undertaking long and dangerous journeys in frail craft with ropy engines. Some of these travellers are landlubbers apprehensively trying as cheaply as possible to reach a city like Cavite or Batangas or Manila where they have heard jobs are to be had. But most are born boat people who give the impression of being refugees from dry land. Visayan fishermen spend weeks away from home, drifting from province to province, from one favourite fishing ground to another, catching and selling. Some of them claimto have no particular home but, gypsy-like, roam these central seas often with only a language, a dialect and a place of birth to give them geographical identity. Any of them at any time may haul their boats on to ‘Tiwarik”s little shore for a few hours to mend nets, cook a meal, calculate how much rice and fuel they will need to buy across the strait before pressing on again. Still other maritime vagrants are smugglers and pirates. Why else would a big, 30-foot bangka from Romblon be carrying at least six boxes of grenades and a .50 calibre machine-gun hidden beneath a nylon sail? They were the most affable of all, catching me mending a plywood flipper. I gave them cooking oil and a disposable butane lighter and in return they offered me a grenade for fishing. When I declined, saying I would rely on my speargun, they said ‘For self-defence, then. There are a lot of bad characters around these parts. Us, for example.’ We all laughed, I a little uneasily; after an hour or two they left, waving.
    Since ‘Tiwarik’ had no population and nothing to offer except a bit of dry land in the middle of a lot of water it was on nobody’s itinerary and was no one’s port of call. It lay at the crossroads of no particular routes, it formed no conceivable milestone in anyone’s journey. Yet it was there to be used, to provide refuge or shelter, sticks for fires, corals and boulders for fishing. Or, for the reflective, it