DISTRUST OF AI AND HATRED OF DATA CENTERS

 

Sixty-five percent of New Zealanders DO NOT WANT data centers

This, according to a recent news item in Wellington's Stuff, is out of synch with the rest of the world, where an average of 49% of measured populations is reasonably happy with them.

As the very pertinent article goes on to state, data centers are the most visible part of the AI goldrush, and Kiwis are, to put it mildly, sceptical of AI.

Kiwis are environmentalists, on the whole.  The wonderful landscape of the country is to be treasured, and to be kept as pristine as possible. AI and the attendant data centers are viewed as resource greedy and environmentally destructive.

There is plenty of evidence for this. AI gobbles whole libraries, turning millions of books into degradeable bytes (or whatever the right word might be), while data centers chew up enough power to keep a whole town alight, and demand rivers of fresh water. 

There are about 20,000 of these greedy beasts worldwide, and currently New Zealand has fifty-six of them.  More are planned, and the backlash is growing. When a conference of data center leaders was held in Auckland this past week, a protest was mounted.

The Green Party has called for a twelve-month moratorium, in imitation of what is already happening in New York (which already has a moratorium in place) and Texas, where a hold is being put on 1800 sites.

The argument for data centers is that there is a huge global demand for the kind of computing that AI can provide, and New Zealand should hop on the gravy wagon to get a share of the profits from selling data created here.  The problem is -- will the profits stay here, or land in the techbros' pockets?  The dire suspicion is that the second option is what will happen. 

So the other argument is that they are needed for our economy and national security.  But are those vague goals a good excuse for domestic power bills lifting by at least six percent?

And how do we make sure that our personal data does not flow out on the same current? When it is considered that AI companies use pirated books and casual written conversations to build up their databases, the suspicion becomes a valid one. 

As the founder of a local tech company observes, these huge data centers are not being built for New Zealand or New Zealanders. Instead, we are effectively giving away renewable energy, and driving New Zealand businesses and New Zealand workers away. The more we and our government depend on giant AI companies, the more we send our data and money offshore, for little return.  So why feed the monster?

Americans, take note. Over forty percent of data centers, plus leading labs, like Anthropic and OpenAI, are sited in your country.

TINA - THE UNMISSABLE FILM

 

Somehow, I missed this wonderful film when it was in the theaters

But luckily, I was able to pick it up on Netflix.

I haver never seen a Samoan made or inspired film without loving it.  Thus, I expected a lot when I started watching Tina, (with a macron over the A, it being a Samoan word that means "mother"), and was not disappointed in the slightest.  Instead, I was enraptured.

Written and directed by the talented Miki Magasiva, the story features a Samoan music teacher, Mareta Percival, played by the equally talented Anapela Polataivao.  She works at a decile one school in Christchurch, New Zealand, where decile one is the lowest grade, staffed by dedicated teachers who are working with often disadvantaged children, who often come from the poorest homes.

Stricken with grief when her daughter is killed in the 2011 Christchurch earthquake, trapped in the CTV building when it collapsed, Mareta becomes incapable of work, or any kind of normal life. Then, when her unemployment benefit is threatened by her failure to apply for any jobs, she is forced to turn up for an interview at a prestigious Christchurch secondary school, for the position of substitute teacher.

To her disgust, she gets the job. To have a sturdy, middleaged Samoan woman in puletasi (lavalava or sarong with matched top) walk into a white, upperclass, snobbish college is hilarious, and with typically impish Samoan humor, the writer makes the most of it. 

"You must be the first Polynesian to enter these prescincts," comments the loftily superior senior teacher

"Well," says Mareta after an eloquent pause. "Congrats."

The atmosphere threatens to descend into mutual contempt - but then Mareta discovers a musically talented girl, Sophie (played by newcomer Antonia Robinson), who suffers from depression and scarring, evidently from the same earthquake.  Mareta's motherly instincts surface, as to her surprise she finds that these teenagers are as desperately in need of guidance and love as the children in the decile one schools.  To get Sophie to sing, she founds a choir, though very much against the school's traditions and rules.

The evolution of the choir is simply wonderful  Despite the opposition of the school board, the teachers, and the school rugby team, it flourishes, while at the same time the teenagers learn Samoan ways and traditions.  They wear white to sing at a Samoan church, and they learn (most reluctantly) to wear a lavalava.

The singing, mostly in Samoan, is sublime. Off-screen, it was led by Tuilagi Dr Igelese Ete, who was the choirmaster for the Lord of the Rings and Moana. The last item, the choir's entry in the finals of the "Big Sing" competition, is utterly awesome, as the students themselves would say.

The film debuted at the 2024 Hawaii International Film festival, to an ecstatic reception, thoroughly deserved.  Released in New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Fiji, the Cook Islands and (of course) Samoa, it continued a run of huge success.

If you haven't seen it, do.  Highly recommended

AI and book destruction

 

New Zealand bookstore receives mysterious orders

The store is in Newtown, Wellington, and is called "Bookhaven."  It stocks mostly New Zealand books, many of them non-fiction dating from the 1970s and 1980s, and some of them Maori editions.

Business was as usual until suddenly massive, multiple-copy orders for outdated non-fiction books came racing through from a Canada-based operation. The owner, Annemarie Thorby, smelled a rat, as the cost of shipping alone would make the purchases cost-ineffective.  So, was it a AI enterprise, aimed at data-mining?  Where the actual books were destroyed? She feared so, and cancelled the orders.

Interviewed, she said:

"One order was for 71 books, and we physically can't handle that.”

The buyer wanted books with ISBNs (a unique code used to identify a specific book, edition, or format) from the 1970s and 1980s, she told RNZ’s Midday Report.

“They were local non-fiction niche books, so New Zealand local history, a tourist pamphlet on Waitomo Caves, Māori language books, New Zealand cookbooks, biographies, political cartoons, very niche - the local anglers club.”

With postage and tariffs there was no way the buyer could turn a profit, she says.

“A $10 book could end up costing $40, so ridiculous. It had to be something else. That's when we did some sleuthing and contacted AbeBooks, their little online forum.”

These kinds of odd orders were happening around the world, she says.

“Tens of thousands of books being bought by this one company to go to a warehouse in the USA. It was India, it was Europe, it was us, and it wasn't just us in New Zealand, there were other bookshops.”

AI companies are buying these books and training their large language models, sometimes destroying books in the process. It's the only way for them to do it, she says.

“They're not recycling, they're devouring them, they're destroying them. One of the quotes from the Anthropic court case was, Project Panama - so this is from the company, from Anthropic - Project Panama is our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world.”

Annemarie Thorby, according to Techspot, is perfectly correct.  This massive buying of non-fiction books from that era is going on all over the world.  AI firms are buying up these older books -- ones that can be guaranteed free of any AI content, which apparently degrades over time -- to train their models, and destroying the books in the process. 

The outfit that is creating this immense database is known as "ISBNdb" and is employing firms such as ABE books to make purchases ranging from 1000 to a million books from secondhand bookstores.

And these books are often rare.  Yet they are treated with no respect at all.  The spines are ripped off and the loose pages run through scanners, then shredded. 

What are the AI companies carrying out this wholesale process?  The names are kept secret in an atmosphere of strict confidentiality.  But the name of Anthropic crops up all the time

TAKE SHELTER

 

This film is billed as a psychological thriller ... but I don't quite agree

For me, it was partly a window into what it is like to endure the agony of mental illness. Insanity is usually something to be observed, with pity but little understanding.

In Take Shelter a young husband, father and drill operator  -- Curtis LaForche, brilliantly played by Michael Shannon -- experiences terrifying nightmares.  The son of a committed paranoid schizophrenic, he comes to the conclusion that he is mentally ill, yet is still driven by a mad, uncontrollable compulsion to build a shelter from an oncoming catastrophic storm. The confusion Curtis is enduring is portrayed so vividly that it is impossible not to share his pain.

His awful dreams always begin with a storm, heralded by thunder and forked lightning. The rain is greasy, like oil. Birds scream in strange patterns and clusters in the darkening sky. His beloved dog attacks him, so violently that the pain in his arm persists long after he wakes.  There is a zombie, too, so horrifying that when he wakes he finds he has wet the bed.

His wife, played with tenderness by Jessica Chastain, loves and supports him, despite her growing fear. There is a small daughter, Hannah, deaf and beautiful, in need of constant supervision and protection, portrayed by a talented child who is actually deaf, Tova Stewart.  While adored, she adds to the pressure on the little family.

The film is also a commentary on the state of health in the United States -- consulting a psychiatrist is too expensive, while the free counseling clinic has too few clinicians, men and women who are well motivated, but are shifted around to fill gaps in the ranks. Curtis is trapped in his job because of the good medical insurance involved, and when he is fired it means that Hannah does not get the cochlear implant she has been promised.  Nor does he get the psychological help he needs.

There is loneliness, too. Christian inlaws are distant and unsympathetic. One friend and his one brother ask him if he is all right, but are helpless.  When Curtis loses self-control and screams a warning to a dinner crowd that an epic storm is on the way and that it is imperative to find shelter, the reaction is silent, uncomprehending hostility. He is a good worker, but when he borrows a backhoe from his work site to dig out his own shelter, his boss refuses to try to understand the strange situation, and fires him, instead.

A tornado does come.  The shelter he has built (at a cost he cannot possibly afford) does seem to serve its purpose.  But when morning dawns the world is bright, calm and sunny, with very little evident damage.  It was just a regular twister that has gone on its way.  It is this that persuades him that he has indeed gone mad

But has he? The real message is, of course, about global warming. And the remarkable and unexpected ending makes the strong, final point -- that perhaps Curtis LaForche was not insane at all, just eerily prescient. 

HISTORY AND FICTION

 

I am a big fan of Andrea Barrett.  She always makes me think.

This latest outing of hers certainly made me think -- made me rethink my stance as a historian who writes history. Do I approve of fictionalized history?  I am not sure that I do -- but this collection of introspective essays certainly made me ponder deeply about it.

First, let's have a look at the book.  It is small, just 194 pages including index, endnotes and acknowledgements, and is divided into seven papers. All of them deal with how fact is incorporated into fiction. But, where I expected thoughts on how writers of historical fiction rely on fine historical research, it is more about how she, Andrea Barrett, used historical research to bring her characters -- both real and fictional -- alive.

First, there is an introduction, explaining how a woman from a non-reading family somehow became immersed in books, with descriptions of the books that particularly inspired her.  Then comes the first essay, provocatively titled "The Floating Pants." It was one that I particularly liked because it was about voyages in the Arctic, replete with unfortunate seafarers trapped in boats and ships that are carried helplessly in slowly floating ice.  This, of course, led to the novel, Voyage of the Narwhal. 

A novel, where I would have written a non-fiction account of these strange arduous adventures. Which is better?  To bring the brightness of life to a character, perhaps a novel is better. Perhaps not. That is the question.

Then comes "The Sea of Information," an essay I particularly liked, as it was about her Fellowship at the New York Public Library.  The descriptions of her fellow researchers there were brilliant, as I could relate to them so well, having been a research fellow (though not at that wonderful library) myself.  It contained one sentence that probably describes best her reasons for choosing fiction rather than non-fiction, built around the one word "emotion," and following her description of her impressive research into the topic she was following at the time. 

Slowly I began to relearn something I'd once grasped but lost sight of: that emotion -- that central element of fiction -- derives not from information or explanation, nor from a logical arrangement of facts, but from powerful images and from the qualities of language...

Facts, she came to understand, can "wall off emotion," and take life out of the story.

Do I agree with this?  I certainly do not -- but it certainly made me think about it.  

This progress of thought continued with the fifth paper, "Traveling Corpse."  A great story, this one, about a strange litte war in Russia in 1919, when a corps of unseasoned American recruits was sent there in the Arctic winter to fight the "on for the Boche" Revolutionaries.  Two sergeants arrive in a tiny village.  One takes his own life with his service revolver.  The other carries the frozen corpse on a sled to Archangel, on an almost unendurable four-day trek through blizzard conditions, for no apparent reason.

Barrett found three published versions of the story, during a search that is vividly described. This was a triumph -- but then came the problem that the three versions were all a little different.  Which one held the actual truth? The essay describes how she sorted out which little variation felt better -- or more right -- than the others, and which one suited her purposes. 

This struck a chord with me that resonated loudly.  When I researched Island of the Lost I was in the same position.  To explain: in the 1860s two ships wrecked about the same time on the desolate and uninhabited Auckland Islands, in the sub-Antarctic. There were two castaway parties separated by impassable ravines, and unaware of each other.  One party -- the Grafton castaways -- worked together to build a cabin and live off the bleak land to keep body and soul together. All five survived the ordeal.   The other party -- the Invercauld castaways -- descended into a state of apathy and chaos. Of 19, only three lived to tell the tale.

Like Barrett, I had three accounts, two written by Grafton castaways, and one the memoir of an Invercauld survivor.  I had the same problem of sorting out what was the best echo of what really happened: what could I reliably believe? How plausible was the detailed account of building the cabin, for instance?  It was a huge relief to get photographs of remains of the building from a friendly archaelogist who was recording the site. How self-serving was the account of the survivor of the Invercauld disaster? Again, it was reassuring to find the logbook account of the ship that followed up the first report of the castaways, and sent a government party there.

My success, I felt, was that I was able to write an accurate account of what happened, complete in all details possible. What I wonder is what kind of novel Barrett would have written from the same material.  The conclusion she come to in that essay is very pertinent:

Another writer, given the same material, would have felt entirely different imperatives and written an entirely different story; which is one of the reasons historical fiction is so different from history. 

YANKEE ADVENTURERS

 

I have been stalled for a couple of years

The apartment building I live in, in earthquake-prone Wellington, New Zealand, had to be earthquake-strengthened, and as I am on the Board of the property, it has been a busy time. It included a newsletter, HG Newsflash, to keep the shareholders informed, so I have been writing, but nothing maritime, and nothing for Old Salt Press.

But now the work is done.  The project is virtually over, so I am back to my love for books about the sea.  Hopefully, they will keep coming.  The first is just out, and tells the story of the first American capitalists, the men who quarried the seas and the coasts in the search for profit, their eyes fixed firmly on making a fortune for themselves and the owners of their ships.

It is called Yankee Adventurers, the Rousing Story of Americans in the Early South Pacific

And of course it is published by Old Salt Press.  Herewith the blurb:

They were flamboyant, grasping, and incredibly brave. 

They were seafarers who dared to challenge the storms of the Cape of Good Hope and Cape Horn and burst into the Pacific. These amazing characters sailed where few others dared to go, in search of trade and profit.

China tea was worth big money in New York, Salem and Boston, but could only be bartered for silver, aphrodisiacs … or furs. So foraging for bêche de mer – sea cucumbers harvested from tropical lagoons, and then dried into a tonic for virility – or enduring terrible conditions on icy beaches in a brutal quest to harvest seal furs, was considered just part of the deal.

For a brief period, less than half a century, these adventurers succeeded brilliantly, but then history overtook them. Their markets and their prey dried up. But, in the meantime, they had altered the landscape of the South Pacific, for better or worse.

And this is their story.

SUMMER '36

 

This six-part Netflix series in French (with subtitles, of course), is loosely based on Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express.  English "cosy" mysteries of the Midsomer Murders type don't usually adapt well to foreign versions, but in this case it works very well indeed.

The series is set in Nice, and as the title suggests, in the year 1936, when the shadow of Hitlerism and fascism is spreading over Europe.  Despite the growing menace - and the surreptitious appearance of German secret police -- the festivities go on as usual, with wonderful costumes, and plenty of cheerful effects.  I really enjoyed the sights of abbes and nuns in traditional garb in the crowded streets.

The story revolves around four young women, related in various ways, plus two older ladies, the mother and aunt of two of the young ones. They are equivalent to the passengers in Christie's train, but it is impossible to tell just how they are involved in the series of murders, each of which happens at the end of an episode.

Nice is particularly cheerful in the summer of 1936, as workers are celebrating their first legally paid holiday, and are (sort of) finding their feet in the swanky resort. One of the workers is married to one of the four young women, Eugenie Berthier, who is the heiress to a factory, and is visiting her estranged father for the first time in 17 years. Naturally, there is conflict, particularly when her 16-year-old niece falls in love with her worker husband's working young brother.  Her sister, Blanche, is involved in a very tawdry love affair, while her husband (though unknown to her) is secretly saving Jews from the Nazis.

And then there is Leonie Morel, an apprentice detective, who is working for the Nice police surreptitiously, as she is really trying to clear the name of her father, who is due to meet the guillotine for a murder he did not commit.  And her sister, Guilia Vincent, is also in Nice, working in a high - and very vulnerable - position at the luxurious Riviera hotel -- where a famous prosecutor is murdered in episode number one.

It is wonderfully complicated, and compulsive viewing.  The actors are all amazing, but I have to admit the one I liked best was the policeman in charge of the cases, Inspector Raven.  For a start, he is not dumb.  He actually solves the case -- but in an unusual kind of way.  The actor, Francois-Xavier Demaison, is so very good that I will be watching out for his name in the future.

Highly recommended.

TEASING AI

 

Some people love to tease cats or dogs (neither seem to mind, but play along with enthusiasm), but my current hobby is giving AI a hard time.

It began when I was annoyed by wrong answers.  I needed to register my plan with my new pdf program, and appealing to AI for help turned out to be useless.  I was advised to log in, and when that did not work, to do all the usual things like reboot the computer, clear my browsing cache, fiddle with the modem, and so forth and so on.  Finally I did the sensible thing, and appealed to the program's help desk.  I got a reply, and that right away, and apparently from a human.  Logging in was wrong.  I simply had to open the website, and look for settings. Voila!

So, what a blessed waste of time.  AI is simply Google on steroids -- and Google is now Meta AI, anyway -- and human understanding is beyond it.  For instance, when I asked for a suitable cartoon to put at the head of this blog, I got this answer:

'The viral AI cartoon trend' (which I had not asked for) 'involves users uploading selfies to generative AI platforms like ChatGPT and prompting the model to generate exaggerated, cartoon-style caricatures of themselves at work.'

Good lord and crikey dick, why don't these people get lives?

Instead, I have fun teasing the system.  One advantage of AI, I found is that you can ask long and complicated questions.  For example:

What was the lading of the trader brig Tybee when it arrived in Salem from Sydney on 20 October 1833?

Well, the little word 'Searching ...' came up, and after that I could almost hear the whirring as the question filtered through miles and miles of stratosphere to a multitude of data servers that were gobbling fresh water and electricity as they pondered.  Then a list of sources came up, mostly to papers and books I had written myself, plus a recommendation to consult 'the maritime collections and archives specific to the New England shipping trade.'

In a word, it was telling me to research it myself.  Personally, if a researcher came up to me with the same question, I would recommend searching Salem newspapers through the website 'Chronicling America' -- or else go to Wikipedia.  But that is by-the-by. The obvious conclusion is that AI is not going to replace people any time soon.

WITH ONE MIGHTY LEAP

 

My brother and I were not allowed to read comics

I'm not sure whether my mother thought they were bad for the eyesight, or bad for the morals, but it was a very strict regime.  So, though we were both voracious readers of "real books," whenever we visited friends, we dived into their comic collections with huge delight.

And a definite favorite was the English boys' comic book, The Eagle.  Though we didn't know it, the Eagle was a Christian response to the popular American comics, which the founder of the English  production, an English vicar, John Morris, thought were "deplorable, nastily over-violent, and obscene." So he had envisioned a comic book that was replete with action stories that were fun to read, but also conveyed respectable moral standards.  No foreigners would be depicted as villains or enemies, and in every group there would be at least one from an ethnic minority.

The Eagle, however, was not preachy at all.  In fact, it was exciting.  It introduced me to science fiction.  It's hero, Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future, was inspirational.  He could be relied on, in any situation, to get out of trouble with amazing feats.  The feats felt authentic -- one of the writers was a very young Arthur C. Clarke. And the drawing was of very high quality.

Years later, when I had children of my own, to my amazement I met one of the men who had written for the Eagle -- not Arthur C. Clarke, but a fellow who could tell very amusing stories.  When he worked for the magazine, he said, he had been one of the two writers of the Dan Dare stories.  And he and the other writer had a private contest - each had a six (or so) week with the stint, and then handed Dan over to the other writer, having left their hero in a very tricky situation. 

Which the other writer had to solve.

Well, the other writer was in France, one time, and so, as my raconteur confessed, he thought he would create a situation that was utterly and absolutely impossible.  He dropped Dan into a 40-foot deep hole with sheer sides, with snakes and scorpions swarming at the bottom, and then headed off to France himself.

When he got back to London, he grabbed the comic with glee ... to find that WITH ONE MIGHTY LEAP out Dan had jumped, to carry on with his mighty deeds.

So Dan Dare was what we call today an action hero. 

I was reminded of this the other day when I picked up the second in the Orphan X series of books, The Nowhere Man, by  Gregg Hurwitz.  Orphan X, also known as Evan Smoak or the Nowhere Man, is definitely an action hero.  Taken out of an orphanage at the age of twelve, he was metamorphosed into a world-class assassin by dark forces in the US administration. Breaking away from this grisly business after a career of offing a large number of nasties, he now operates alone, and on the side of good.

Well, in The Nowhere Man, Hurwitz places his hero into all kinds of impossible situations. Somehow, X gets out of them, only to be recaptured and placed into yet another impossible situation.  In one, he is trapped in a kind of plastic cube, ready to be auctioned off to a large crowd of nasties who all hold a grudge because of what he has done in the past, and contemplate terrible things to do to him if they win the auction.

But, with the equivalent of ONE MIGHTY LEAP, he escapes yet again.

Marvelous stuff. Worthy of all the action heroes that went before him -- Superman, Batman, James Bond, the Saint, Robin Hood, and a personal favorite, Modesty Blaise.  They were not just in comics, but also on radio and in film, depicted by such flamboyant actors as Douglas Fairbanks, Errol Flynn, Roger Moore, Sylvester Stallone, and that Arnie fellow whose name I have trouble spelling.

The world definitely needs action heroes, complete with their liberal standards. Right now, in fact, it seems imperative. An action hero or two could solve of lot of current problems. Watching one at work would be really nice.

Unfortunately, they do not exist.

A HISTORIC VOYAGE -- THE LANYU BOAT RIDES AGAIN

 

Over ten years ago, I had the privilege of spending a couple of weeks in Taipei, and spent much of it exploring amazing parks and museums.  One was the Evergreen Museum, where I found a Lan Yu "canoe".  It's a cherished memory.

And, turning on CNN this morning, I was riveted to find that a Lan Yu boat has set forth again, on the traditional path to the Philippines.    You can see it HERE

Well, for background, here is the post I wrote for Old Salt Blog, in March 2015, describing my encounter with these 'canoes' and the remarkable people who are bringing back tradition.

Lan Yu “Canoes”

Posted on March 25, 2015 by Joan Druett

We are very pleased to have a guest post from Joan Druett, who recently visited Taiwan. Joan is the multi-award winning author of more than 20 books, including her latest, Lady Castaways and Eleanor’s Odyssey.

A priority for anyone from the Pacific who visits Taiwan is the Shung-Ye Museum of Formosan Aborigines.  After all, it is now both scientifically and popularly believed that the greatest migration of seafarers in history — the discovery and settlement of the islands of the Pacific — began in Taiwan.  It was from the east coast of this mountainous island off the coast of mainland China that the people we now call Polynesians set out on their epic voyages.  Our New Zealand Maori are distant cousins of the Formosan Aborigines, with a great deal in common, both in appearance and in personality. There are echoes of the local language in Maori te reo.

So here I am, gazing at a local canoe with some bemusement.  Called a “balangay, it is not a canoe at all.  As you can see from the following photos, taken at the marvelous Evergreen Maritime Museum in Taipei, a balangay is equipped with what could be called “row locks,” and is equipped with oars. The crew sit on small spreaders, or thwarts, and row in what we think of as the European fashion. It is not built on a dug-out keel, but entirely planked. There is not a single piece of metal in the carvel-built craft. The planks are fixed with wooden pins, and rope — probably sennit, originally — secures the rest.

These are fascinating craft.  I had the privilege of meeting Syaman Rapongan, a native of Lan Yu (Orchid) Island, an islet off the southeast coast that is inhabited by his people, the Yami.  As he says, building fishing boats is the most important craft of the Yami people, being essential for survival and livelihood, and also a way of proving one’s manhood. For a Yami youth, building his first canoe is a rite of passage.

Syaman Rapongan had his father as his mentor. Together, as he wrote, they went into the hills to choose and cut the fourteen different trees that each provide a part of the craft.  The trees have names — Apnorwa, Isis, Pangohen, Cyayi.  Each one provides timber for a certain part of the hull. Cyayi provided the keel.

Syaman’s father first prayed to the tree, and then said more prayers as he cut into the trunk. He says, “Trees are the children of the mountains. Boats are the grandchildren of the sea.” It is especially important to come to terms with the spirits of the hills during the felling of that first tree, for the keel of the boat. Then the cutting of the next 13 trees follows. The wood is cut into planks of three or four centimeters in width, of varying curves and shapes, and then everything is brought down from the hills to the beach, where the boat is assembled.

The decorations, I gathered, are equally traditional, each village having its own patterns. Final decorations are the rooster tails at the prow and stern, made of real feathers.

But what are they like in the water?  Syaman Rapongan has some hair-raising tales of sudden storms, and overwhelming waves, of long hours where his crew rowed like madmen, only to get nowhere. So, were balangay anything like the craft in which the first voyagers set out at the start of the great migration, five thousand years ago?

Very unlikely, says Liao Hong-Ji, the founder of the Kuroshio Ocean Educational Foundation.  Through an interpreter, he theorized that it was most likely a drift voyage, perhaps on a raft. The Kuroshio (Japan) Current flows past eastern Taiwan at different rates according to the season of the year. There are variations according to the moon, as well.  From the hills, the current looks like a twisting river. But, at the right season, a man could drift to the Philippines on the breast of it, he said.  And in fact, he went on with a serene smile, he is going to try it this year. By himself, on a solitary drift voyage.