Adventure in the Sun
I. The Remora’s Kiss (Sunday Times, April 1, 1956)
Ten years ago Ian Fleming built a small house in Jamaica and every year he spends his holiday there. This is the first of a series of articles describing some of the extraordinary things that befell him during his latest visit.
Before the morning breeze came to ruffle the mirror of the bay, I walked through the palm trees and down the slope of pale gold sand and slipped into the sea. The water was even warmer than the nine o’clock air and I swam slowly out towards the dark shadow that marked the deep shoal where there might be something more to see than the sting-rays or flounders that inhabit the open plains of sand.
I was naked except for a Pirelli mask and I was equipped with a simple underwater spear-gun. After ten years of underwater fishing round Jamaica I have long since given up shooting fish except for the pot, but this was an expedition to a remote beach and we would be glad of a langouste or a jack or snapper for dinner. And this was unknown terrain, with the protecting reef at least five miles out, and while I pretend not to mind barracuda or shark, even the underwater equivalent of a catapult allows one to forget about them.
Secret Sands
The bay in which I was swimming is the most beautiful I have seen in the world. It is the classic back-drop of Stevenson and Stacpoole—a five-mile crescent of unbroken, soft, white-gold sand, fringed for all its dazzling length with leaning palm trees in whose shade an occasional canoe is drawn up between a thatched hut and a pile of discarded conch shells as tall as the hut itself. The great sweep of water is milky blue during the day and in the evening, when the sun—with its famous green flash—sets in your face, it runs through all the blues and greens in the spectrum.
The huge anchorage, sheltered even from the trades, was used by the pirates, and Nelson and Rodney used to anchor here and send parties ashore to hunt wild hogs. Walt Disney filmed part of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea here, paying the “cannibals” 25s. a day.
It is still the occasional haunt of the manatee or sea cow, those large and friendly mammals which are becoming rapidly extinct. They are supposed to be the origin of the mermaid. The female has two rudimentary breasts and occasionally rises out of the waves holding her young in her flippers, perhaps to teach it to breathe. (There are at present two in the London Zoo and the contemporary print entitled “Real and Ideal” reproduced here [omitted] was inspired by the first manatee shown in England in 1888.) One was caught in a fisherman’s nets in the bay in February and the inhabitants feasted on him for days, for as one of them said to me: “Them have all-meat—beef an’ mutton an’ pork.”
Only the most adventurous tourists know of this great secret beach and perhaps no more than five per cent. of Jamaicans have ever paid it a visit. For the time being it is one of the most beautiful hidden places in the world. One dreadful day this remote corner of Jamaica will be as famous a sunshine holiday resort as any in the world.
For the last ten years I have held a key to this paradise and the only white man I have ever met there is a bearded character straight out of Somerset Maugham called Dr. Drew.
Dr. Drew threw up his practice in Oxford forty years ago and somehow came half across the world to this secret place. He built himself a modest stone-and-plaster dwelling and beside it (believe me!) a fives court, which now has wild orchids growing out of the cracks in the cement. He is ninety-three and healthy and happy and if someone wants the bare bones of a mystery, there it is.
The Remora
On this particular morning, not many days ago, the great crescent bay was empty except for one sailing dinghy belonging to an employee of a sugar company. The dinghy, moored in about three fathoms, cast its wavering shadow on the edge of the long shoal to which I was swimming.
The fishing canoes had left at first light and were now specks on the horizon round the distant reef and behind me along the five miles of sand there were only a few children playing and an occasional lonely figure taking the morning walk to the little rum-shop and store that, with Dr. Drew’s bungalow, is the centre of the bay’s life. Below me the endless plain of marcelled sand was quite empty and it was a relief to the eyes to come to the first half-buried rocks and grassy seaweed of the acre or so of shoal.
I swam slowly over the shoal looking down for signs of life or even for those symmetrical patterns in the sand that betray the camouflage of Atlantic flounders or buried conch and helmet shells. There was nothing.
I “felt” a barracuda (one really does “feel” them) and looked behind me to see a big one, perhaps ten pounds, lying motionless near the surface, watching me out of one golden tiger’s eye. Its stripes were not showing (there is a theory that when the stripes are vivid the barracuda is hungry or angry) and I swam towards it. As barracudas do, it kept ahead of me exactly to its ten yards, but, as I finally put my gun off safe and took aim, it opened its mouth with what might have been a yawn and swanned off into the grey mist.
The barracuda had led me towards the moored dinghy, and I was suddenly surprised to see, swimming fast towards me in the great, empty hall of the sea, a small grey and black fish with a diamond-shaped head. The fish swam very busily, with a motion rather like an eel or a snake, and almost before I could take it in it had come up and bumped softly into me. This was as extraordinary as if, walking across a field, a flying pigeon had bumped into one.
Even more surprising, the fish then proceeded to flutter round me, prodding me with its blunt nose and easily dodging my free arm as I tried to shoo it away. Under my arms, between my legs, down my back, I felt the slithery exploration while I trod water and tried to parry these familiarities. And then suddenly the fish clamped itself firmly to my stomach and I knew with a touch of queasy dismay that this was a remora, the parasite fish of the sharks.
Off my own reef in Jamaica I once saw a shark quite close with two remoras attached to it, and I had watched the host and its parasite guests for some time. The remora has a suction area on the back of its flattish head and it attaches itself to the shark’s stomach rather like a small fighter plane beneath a bomber. It travels with the shark and feeds on the scraps that fall from the shark’s jaws, as do the little yellow and black pilot fish that are the companions of many big fish.
Parasite Guest
The remoras I had seen off my reef did not stay in the same position on the shark, but again and again detached themselves and executed a graceful game of tag with each other round the huge fish, flattening themselves against him at different points, then flitting to another spot as he cruised majestically through my reef. It had been a beautiful and fascinating sight, but there was something rather different in the idea of this eighteen-inch-long, hard, snaky fish clamping itself to my own pale, defenceless, and, it seemed to me at that moment, diaphanous skin. I banged hard on the remora’s head and it let go, and after a few more attempts to get a hold, snaked away.
I felt relieved but rather churlish, and I had the esprit de l’escalier reflection that it would have been extremely smart to carry for ever the marks of a remora’s sucker on one’s stomach—so much more chic than the claw scars of a tiger or even the fang-marks of a fer-de-lance (which I was to see a few days later on the leg of a distinguished American naturalist). So, hoping that my remora had not gone home to a shark, I swam hurriedly after him and soon there was a long shadow on the sand and the chains of the two anchors and I came up with the sailing dinghy and all was clear to me.
Mistaken for a Shark
There, under the hull of the boat, were two remoras, flitting from spot to spot as I had once seen them do on the shark, waiting in vain for scraps to fall out of the wooden jaws of the boat. I have no idea how long they had been attached to this dummy host, but there is no doubt that, when one of them caught a distant glimpse or sound of me, he hurried off to inspect the alternative “shark.”
I am sorry now that I shot one and took it ashore to examine. They are harmless and extraordinary fish and afterwards it was easy to sentimentalise the encounter so that the remora became some charming bird that had flown into one’s pocket to live with one and eat the crumbs from one’s meals. But later the fishermen told me that I was lucky he had not taken a firm hold. The sucker is extremely powerful (as mysterious a mechanism as the charge in an electric eel that is strong enough to kill a horse, and as the phosphorus lures carried by some fish), draws blood immediately, and can be detached only by pressing the remora hard behind the eyes.
Even so, now that I am back in London and the sunburn is fading, how dashing to be able to display, in suitable company, that dreadful stigma of the tropic seas—the bloody kiss of the remora on one’s stomach!
Next week Ian Fleming will tell of his quest for the elusive Solitaire bird on the Blue Mountain in Jamaica.