Drawn to the Sea, to Tradition, to Danger : Indonesia: Life in a remote village revolves around whaling, which is still legal there. Little has changed in 500 years, but tourists and technology are creeping in.

Across the blinding seas the wooden boat lumbered, its crew of old fishermen shriveled like beef jerky from decades of sun and work.

Today, like all other days, these men were hunting whales--in the same way their ancestors did 500 years ago.

With paddles chopped from the trunks of palm trees and faces scrunched from squinting, the fishermen stroked across the water, scanning for signs of life. After hours of searching, one sinewy fisherman, Francis Bole Beding, saw a black fin pop through the surface.

“Di sana! Di sana!” Beding yelled, shaking his fingers at the sea. “Over there! Over there!”

Paddlers yanked on their oars. Beding, a harpooner, scampered to the bow, a crude spear in his hands. He coiled himself, preparing to leap down onto the prey and drive his harpoon deep into its flesh.

Focusing on Prey, Not Politics

In this remote Indonesian village, life revolves around the pursuit of big game. One of the last places on Earth where international law still allows people to hunt whales for food, Lamalera is so steeped in its whaling traditions that it has escaped the tumult sweeping through Indonesia as the country caps its yearlong transition from authoritarian rule to multi-party democracy.

Even Indonesia’s first free elections, won by opposition parties, created little stir. To people here, who rules the country has little bearing on what comes out of the sea.

But the long era of isolation may be coming to an end, even for this village perched above a frothy cove. Like many other places in the developing world, Lamalera faces the encroachment of technology, commerce and change.

For centuries, villagers used whale blubber as currency. Many didn’t even know what money looked like. Now there’s cash at the market, confusing some of the older women who can’t read numbers.

Lamalera also has been discovered by aid workers, anthropologists and tourists. Some fishermen have hung up their harpoons to open small guest houses. Others want to leave.

“It used to be that everyone would want to follow whales,” said Peter Kroya, a 25-year-old laborer with the only ponytail in the village. “But not me. I want to live in the city.”

Lamalera and its 2,000 people are about as far from a city as you can get. There are no cars, roads, phones, electricity or TV. Located at the tip of Lembata Island, 1,000 miles east of Jakarta, Indonesia’s capital, Lamalera is one of those time-capsule places left to its own gracious rhythms.

At dawn on a recent day, the crunch of heavy wooden boats scraping through the sand cut the moist tropical air. Five to a side, fishermen sank their shoulders under the gunwales and drove the 30-foot boats down the beach like bobsleds. Some wives, mindful not to openly express too much affection, squeezed their husbands’ hands before they paddled away.

The work is incredibly dangerous. To kill a sperm whale, which can be as long as 60 feet and weigh 60 tons, several fishermen jump on it, using their body weight to thrust harpoons into the animal’s back.

Since the 1500s, Lamalerans have been hunting whales with basically the same technology--or lack of it. Fishing boats are built piece by piece without blueprints or even rough plans. Harpoons are hammered out from the crudest of metals, usually rusted iron.

Some men have lost arms or legs in the coils of rope connected to the harpoons. Others have drowned. Four years ago, a wounded sperm whale dragged three boats to East Timor, 200 miles away.

Weighing Their Dangerous Legacy

The old men dismiss these risks. The younger generation considers them.

“You can make more money on a big ship, and it’s safer,” said Stannis Sina, 27, who left Lamalera a few years ago to be a deckhand on a freighter.

The harpooner remains a position that only the son of a harpooner can fill. On sunny days when the whaling boats are out at sea, the young heirs, naked and shiny, practice spearing flotsam as it washes up in the surf.

Routine is unswerving. Each night a throng of people carries a painting of the Virgin Mary through the village, singing softly, as if someone died. Ever since Dutch Catholics brought Christianity to Lamalera in the late 19th century, Mary has been the village’s patron saint. The painting stays at a different hut each night of the year to ward off evil spirits.

Every afternoon, after the boats return, the fishermen gather on their black sand beach to roll cigarettes and swap stories. Gazing off at the steep, forested volcanoes that rise out of the sea like emerald icebergs, the men lament the absence of whales this summer. They hadn’t caught one for months, though they had harpooned a few dolphins, manta rays and sharks.

On Saturdays, women trudge to a market to trade whale blubber--or strips of manta ray if there isn’t any blubber--for basic provisions like salt and bananas. Some also use cash, despite occasional arguments over its value.

Indonesia’s currency, the rupiah, has fluctuated wildly over the last year, pushing up the price of fuel and food and sparking riots--and ethnic violence--in major cities like Jakarta.

Lessons in the World of Economics

Though economic crisis has missed Lamalera, people here are beginning to learn what it means to be tied to the outside world.

Under an international aid project, fishermen carry pipes for a water system in exchange for a 110-pound bag of rice, which they can eat or sell for cash. Villagers support the project, launched by a nongovernmental organization last year, because it will make it easier to get drinking water. But it also takes paddlers and harpooners away from their normal line of work. Some mornings only a handful of the two dozen whaling boats head out to sea.

Tourism is another distraction. Ten years ago, there were 20 tourists a year. In 1998, there were more than 200, with four guest houses to choose from, all run by former fishermen.

Tourists come to Lamalera to observe one of the last communities in the world allowed to hunt whales. Along with a handful of Inuit communities in Alaska and Canada, Lamalera is exempt from whaling limits because fishermen use traditional methods to kill whales and the village needs them for food.

This basic lifestyle is what draws three sunburned Americans each morning to the beach, where they pepper the fishermen with questions. The anthropologists from the University of Buffalo even plan to install global positioning devices on the boats as part of a study on whaling rituals. Some fishermen didn’t want the electronic boxes and had to be paid the equivalent of $50 to agree.

The scientists said the little village is among the last hunter and gatherer communities around.

“Lamalera is a glimpse of our evolutionary past,” said graduate student Eric Fink of Rochester.

The fishermen are deeply superstitious.

“Last year we had many whales by now,” mumbled one sun-dried fisherman, Benedictus Leto. “The spirits have been turned against us.”

Some said the chief of a rival village had cursed them because he hadn’t been invited to a banquet in May to usher in the sperm whales’ migrating season that runs until August. Others thought the recent arrival of anthropologists had jinxed them.

Moving In for a Quick Strike

But during the recent day of hunting, the sight of a fin cutting through the water focused all minds on what swam below. Beding saw it was a manta ray, not a whale, and since the giant rays are swift swimmers, he had to attack quickly.

Beding leaped. The rope tied to the end of his harpoon spooled furiously out. The boat careened to the side as the 10-foot-wide manta tried to bolt, a harpoon driven deep into its back. Beding fought the creature in a cloud of red water until two other men plunged overboard with heavy iron hooks to finish it off.

The paddlers dragged the limp, 300-pound fish up on deck. Beding and the other men wiggled back into the boat.

No, the manta was not a sperm whale that could feed 2,000 people and whose oil could light all the lanterns in the village. Nor would the killing, however traditionally done, slow the march of modernity. The men in the boat are likely to be among the last generation of Lamalerans to subsist solely on what they can drag out of the sea.

But at the bow of the boat, Beding glowed. The thrill of combat coursed through his body and made his sinewy, wet muscles look big. A moment later, he ran back up on the gangplank, a bloody harpoon in one hand, the other cupped over his eyebrow as he scanned the life-sustaining seas.