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THE LOST FOREST

  John Francis Kinsella

  Copyright © 2014 by John Francis Kinsella

  All rights reserved

  Cover design Vincennes Books

  www.johnkinsella.net

  In Pohjola there are thick, dark forests that dream wild dreams, forever secret. Tapio’s eerie dwellings are there and half-glimpsed spirits, and the voices of twilight.

  Jean Sibelius

  Chapter 1

  THE WRECK

  “In science the absence of proof is not the proof of absence”

  The wreck lay four hundred metres off the shore, close to the edge of a reef at the easterly point of the bay, at a depth of about ten metres. The site was directly exposed to the north-east monsoon, its winds often generating heavy waves, which, as they moved into the shallower waters increased in force and height making diving difficult.

  Fishermen in the small nearby village of Tanjong Lumut, in the Beliat District of Brunei, had discovered the wreck. Brunei, a small oil rich sultanate, is situated on the north coast of Borneo, facing the South China Sea. From the archaeological team’s first dives it was clear that there had already been some attempts at looting. Several deep craters had been blown in the sandy seabed surrounding the wreck, and some of the cargo had been looted. There would have probably been stacks of ceramics loaded to the same height as the heavy bronze ware objects in the cargo, too heavy for unequipped divers to lift. Between the bronze ware only broken pottery and shards could be seen in the bottom of craters.

  The Department of Archaeology had issued a search and inspection permit to the Swiss based company Archaeological Research and Exploration Inc. The terms of the permit allowed the company to investigate an historical site within a specified area and thereafter decide whether or not to commence full-scale underwater archaeological excavations. If this option was declined, the permit would revert to the Brunei Museum, which officially supervised the expedition. The exploration vessel, a barge complete with equipment and a diving crew, hired from a Malaysian based company, had arrived at the site of the wreck two weeks following the issue of the permit.

  The archaeological firm worked closely with the museum, though supporting all costs linked with the exploration: investigation, excavation and recovery of the cargo. The agreement stated thirty percent of all artefacts recovered would go to the museum and the remainder to the Swiss company, which would sell or auction them after a public exhibition in Bandar Seri Begawan, the Sultanate’s capital.

  Archaeological Research and Exploration Inc. was also attributed the responsibility of locating and reporting illegally salvaged ceramics from the wreck on sale in the markets and antique shops of the region.

  The team was housed in a group of temporary wooden bungalows set up near the fishing village, situated just a short boat ride out to the diving barge. The shallow waters permitted the divers to spend longer periods of time working on the wreck than was usually possible on such sites, though it was partially buried under a metre or so of fine sand. The spot had been known to the villager’s fishermen for generations, who had on more than one occasion snagged their nets when storms had uncovered the vessel’s timbers and cargo, scattering broken porcelain and pottery across the seabed, and from time to time shards carried by the currents were washed up onto the shore.

  The authorities had been alerted when antique ceramics started to appear on the local market and when villagers reported seeing unknown fishing boats with hose-diving gear in the bay.

  The wreck, a Chinese junk, according to first estimates, dated from the early Ming epoch, a dynasty that had reigned over China spanning the period from the 17th to 19th centuries. The museum’s archaeological experts had identified pieces of the ship’s timber as being cedar, indicating it had come from a temperate region, thus confirming the junk had been built in northern China.

  It appeared to have foundered on the coral reef and rocky outcroppings that lay just below the surface of the sea at the point and no doubt sunk almost immediately. Divers had located the remains of the keel over an area of about fifty square metres. The undersea site was flat and the surrounding seabed littered with pottery shards over a large area of its surface.

  The divers had discovered a quantity of bronze objects covered by a layer of sand, scattered about the seabed and between the rocky outcroppings. They identified a number of brown-glazed kendi and teapots not previously found in Brunei. Most of the ceramics were identified as being of Chinese origin.

  Amongst the bronze objects were incense burners, ritual food vessels, statuettes and a number of bronze gongs. According to Robert Guiguilion, the undersea archaeologist and head of the excavation team, it was a rare cargo and the bronzes were probably amongst some of the earliest exported to South East Asia by China. These indicated the presence of Chinese settlements in the region at that time as such bronzes were used for ritual offerings by the Chinese to their gods.

  There were also a great number of large storage jars. However, apart from the bronzes, the most interesting and valuable find consisted of a quantity of high quality blue and white porcelain vessels.

  They calculated the ship to have been around thirty metres long and eight wide and it appeared to carry no ballast other than its cargo. The expert from the Brunei Museum, Dato Seri Yusof, explained that its relatively narrow width may have been one of the factors that had contributed to the disaster, making the vessel unstable and thus causing the cargo to shift in the storm making the ship unnavigable until it finally foundered on the treacherous reef.

  The operation was planned to last two months, at the maximum three, to complete the salvage of the ship’s cargo, but that depended on the weather. Robert Guigulion had told Ennis that winds in the South China Sea varied considerably with the monsoons. The stronger, the north-easterly, had just come to an end, normally lasting from mid-November to early March. The second was the south-westerly monsoon that blew from July to September. The weather in between the monsoons mainly consisted of light to variable winds with mostly calm periods but there were also short and often violent tropical storms.

  Ennis was pleased with the initial work in Brunei, estimates indicated that there were several thousand saleable items worth in total around two to three million US dollars. However that was not his only concern, at another site five hundred kilometres inland to the southwest, in Indonesian Kalimantan, the situation was becoming dangerous. The Asian economic crisis was irreversibly deepening and news from Jakarta was not good, angry mobs had attacked shops owned by ethnic Chinese businessmen in West Java. Hundreds of people had been stoned and shops were ransacked following accusations of extortionate overpricing by the Chinese owners.

  In Pontianak, on the west coast of Borneo, crowds had attacked and set fire to a hotel nightclub after a protest against vice, cars were burnt and shops looted. The press reports that the police had fired warning shots to disperse the enraged crowd.