Ring of Fire: An Indonesia Odyssey

by Lawrence Blair

We anxiously resigned ourselves to a long wait, and as the weeks passed we gradually got to know the handful of long-term foreign residents in the town, all of them eccentric survivors from days of former glory. Hans Weber, a frail, piercingly blue-eyed Swiss, had been a sea-captain here in the early 1900s specializing in smuggling Bird of Paradise feathers back to Europe when they were all the rage for ladies’ hats. There was the redoubtable Mary O’Keefe – daughter of the famous sea-captain who became known as King O’Keefe of the South Seas. We also found Karl Bundt, born of an incestuous union of titled aristocrats who had fled the opprobrium of European society for the Moluccas before the First World War. This bespectacled bear of a man was born here and had lived here all his life, and was now Makassar’s sole expert and international exporter of the rare shells and orchids for which the archipelago had once been so famous. We were to spend many long hours exploring his meticulously catalogued treasury, practising the identification of species from our slim reference books on flora and malacology.