[Click through to the site to listen to the audio]

See also: this previous post, again inspired by an item on You And Yours¹, on Birkenhead Park, complete with lively debate in the comments about its claim to be the first public park in the world.

1. Yeah, I listen to You And Yours quite a lot: proof, if proof be need be, that my Radio 4 addiction is completely out of hand. Just be thankful that I’m not posting excerpts from The Archers (which has been quite exciting lately, what with Owen’s rape trial).↩

Last week, I received an email from Bob Fore, wonderfully titled ‘I Am The Helicopter Pilot In The North Sentinal Rescue’ and telling of Bob’s role in the rescue of the sailors of the Primrose, who were stranded on a coral reef off North Sentinel Island, and under attack by the Sentinelese tribe.

Mr. Mottram,

It was with no small amount of interest that I read the article (while surfing the internet) that you wrote on the 9th of February, 2006 concerning a helicopter rescue in the Andaman Islands located in the Bay of Bengal. You see, I was one of the helicopter pilots that flew the three trips to the M.V. Primrose to rescue the crew after it ran aground off the north shore of North Sentinal Island.

For the most part, [the] description of the incident was correct, thought there were several points that were in error, almost certainly because they were of no major import. One of the inconsistencies was that the helicopter which performed the rescue was in fact a civilian helicopter belonging to P.T. Airfast Services, Indonesia, which we worked for. We were supporting an Oil And Natural Gas Commision (ONGC- Indian Govt. Agency) contract, which provided off-shore helicopter support to an oil exploration rig (if memory serves, it was the Gettysburg) located off the northwest shore of Andaman Island. Robert Fore (myself) and Vic Wiersba) were the two pilots which flew the mission on August the 2nd, 1981.

We had a developed a friendship with Admiral Sawnhi, the Indian Naval District Commander, during our stay at Port Blair. We were approached by his office on the morning of the rescue with the information concerning a grounded ship with crew still aboard on North Sentinel Island. There had been a typhoon which forced the ship aground on the island in the preceeding week. We were asked if we could provide rescue services for the crew, since the Indian Navy had no ships or helicopters in the immediate area, and it would take several days for them to arrive.

We agreed to attempt the rescue, but had little in the way of concrete information to work with in the preparations for the attempt. We did construct a rudimentary rope ladder in the event we would not be able to land the helicopter on the Primrose’s deck. Also, an Indian Naval aviator (fixed-wing) Lt. Gadhok, who was assigned to the Naval District Command, volunteered to accompany us. It was hoped he might provide valuable support for organizing the crew for rescue, once he was on-board the ship.

The aircraft was an S-58T Sikorsky, a modified twin-turbine design helicopter, which could hold a max of 16 passengers and 2 pilots. We flew to the site of the shipwreck, and saw that the vessel had been driven far up on the reef, more than a 1/4 mile, and that while there was still large 15 or 20 foot waves pounding the vessel, there was no chance that it would sink, or for that matter ever see service again.

The deck had several cranes spaced approximately 50 feet apart, with cargo hatches in between. It was felt that we would be able to land the helicopter with a couple feet of clearance on both sides of the rotor system to the sides of the helicopter. We accomplished the first landing with 30 plus knot crosswinds, and touched down our wheels on the hatch covers. Due to loading, and weather conditions, it was decided to take off equal numbers of crewmen on each of 3 trips. I believe the total was 33 crew, and the mascot dog. We did not take any personal gear, because that would have meant extra trips, and under the poor weather conditions we did not have any desire to push our luck any more than was necessary for the savings of lives.

It was well known that the ship was aground on a very dangerous island, and that they had come under the threat of attack from the native tribe. Their first attempt to reach the Primrose had failed when the rudimentary boats they had tried to construct had foundered in the heavy surf. But the situation was becoming more dangerous because of gradually improving weather conditions. This could allow the native to get much closer to the ship. As it was, the natives had not even learned the art of placing feathers on the several foot long arrows they had, which only allowed a practical effective range of perhaps 30 or 40 meters. The ship was more like 100 meters from shore.

A previous attempt to reach the crew of the Primrose was attempted by a Indian Navy (Cutter) which had no helicopter. The ships doctor and a crewman had attempted to reach the ship from just beyond the drop-off offshore, but the inflatable nearly foundered, and they were lucky to get back to their vessel. I assume they were the ones that called for assistance once they realized they could not do anything.

When we made our approach for the first landing with heavy cross-winds, it was very difficult to determine clearance on the rotor blades from the derricks. After the first landing we found we had about 2 feet of clearance on each side of the aircraft. On the subsequent approaches, Lt. Gadhok provided ground assistance for clearnace of our rotors from the obstructions. The rope ladder idea was discarded as unnecessary, even though the weather conditions were not ideal. The thought of hovering for extended periods above deck, with people climbing a rope ladder did not appeal to us. We did not at any time during the morning see any island natives. They were almost certainly there observing, but whether from fear of the helicopter, or whatever other reason, theey did not make themselves known to us. After the third trip, all aboard were rescued, and our part in the mission was concluded. A couple days later, a Indian Navy cruiser, with a Alouette helicopter arrived, and the helicopter evacuated the personal effects of the crew, I believe by using a rescue hoist.

I just thought you might find the account of interest, since you had been intrigued enough to write about this event. I do have some photographs of the ship run aground taken from the air, and during our apporach to the ship, as well as some taken on-deck after our first landing. But the photos are in storage in my household goods in the Philippines, and it will not be until later next year before I could get access to them.

Sincerely yours,

Bob Fore

INSERT_MAP

Good, eh?

In The Mersey Seat, Self waxes poetic on the Wirral, dubbing the insular peninsular ‘a spatulate tongue licking the Irish Sea’. But, in a column devoted to Debordian psychogeography, it is susprising to see that Self seems not to have noticed the difference between Hoylake and West Kirby.

As far as I can tell, Self rode his folding bicycle down Meols Drive, past the Royal Liverpool Golf Club, probably bypassing Bank Street and cutting down Riverside Road or another of the streets that lead to the Marine Lake, from where one can walk to Hilbre, as Self planned to do. I can’t remember whether there’s a welcoming sign along Meols Drive, but as a former local, it seems unimaginable that Self could have passed over the invisible line between Hoylake and West Kirby without feeling it in his bones—the two townlets are as different in character as Glasgow and Edinburgh, or Liverpool and Manchester.

Still, at least he didn’t confuse West Kirby with fucking Heswall.

Shortly before midnight on August 2, 1981, a Panamanian-registered freighter called the Primrose, which was traveling in heavy seas between Bangladesh and Australia with a cargo of poultry feed, ran aground on a coral reef in the Bay of Bengal. As dawn broke the next morning, the captain was probably relieved to see dry land just a few hundred yards from the Primrose’s resting place: a low-lying island, several miles across, with a narrow beach of clean white sand giving way to dense jungle. If he consulted his charts, he realized that this was North Sentinel Island, a western outlier in the Andaman archi-pelago, which belongs to India and stretches in a ragged line between Burma and Sumatra. But the sea was too rough to lower the lifeboats, and so - since the ship seemed to be in no danger of sinking - the captain decided to keep his crew on board and wait for help to arrive.

A few days later, a young sailor on lookout duty in the Primrose’s watch tower spotted several people coming down from the forest toward the h and peering out at the stranded vessel. They must be a rescue party sent by the shipping company, he thought. Then he took a closer look at them. They were small men, well-built, frizzy-haired, and black. They were naked except for narrow belts that circled their waists. And they were holding spears, bows, and arrows which they had begun waving in a manner that seemed not altogether friendly. Not long after this, a wireless operator at the Regent Shipping Company’s offices in Hong Kong received an urgent distress call from the Primrose’s captain, asking for an immediate airdrop of firearms so that his crew could defend itself. “Wild men, estimate more than 50, carrying various home-made weapons are making two or three wooden boats,” the message read. “Worrying they will board us at sunset. All crew members’ lives not guaranteed.”

If the Primrose’s predicament seemed a thing less of the twentieth century than of the eighteenth - an episode, perhaps, from Captain Cook’s Cook’s voyages in the Pacific. - it is because the island where the ship lay grounded had somehow managed to slip through the net of history. Although its existence had been known for centuries, its inhabitants had virtually no contact with the rest of humanity. Anthropologists referred to them as “Sentinelese,” but no one knew what they called themselves - indeed, no one even knew what language they spoke. And in any case, no one within living memory had gotten close enough to ask. Whether the natives’ prelapsarian state was one of savagery or innocence, no one knew either.

The same monsoon-whipped waves that had driven the Primrose onto reef kept the tribesmen’s canoes at bay, and high winds blew their arrows off the mark. The crew kept up a twenty-four-hour guard with makeshift weapons - a flare gun, axes, some lengths of pipe - as news of the emergency slowly filtered to the outside world. (An Indian government spokesman denied reports in the Hong Kong press that the Sentinelese were “cannibals.” A Hong Kong government spokesman suggested that perhaps the Primrose’s radio officer had “gone bananas.”) After nearly a week, the Indian Navy dispatched a tugboat and a helicopter to rescue the besieged sailors.

The natives of North Sentinel must have watched the whirring aircraft as it hovered three times above the great steel hulk, lowering a rope ladder to pluck the men safely back into modernity. Then the strange machines departed, the sea calmed, and the island remained, lush and impenetrable, still waiting for its Cook or its Columbus.

More on the Sentinelese, and other Andaman islanders, here.

These images remind me of Death Watch, the completely wiggy, borderline-unwatchable 1980 Bernard Tavernier film starring Harvey Keitel, Romy Schneider and, fleetingly, Max von Sydow, which was shot in Glasgow, then the ideal location to evoke a dystopian futurescape.

Here’s a quote from Tavernier, explaining his choice of location, cribbed from erstwhile Submit Responser Len’s piece on the film:

Glasgow is a city of infinite possibilities. Everywhere you look, with the eye of a film director, there are fascinating shots, angles and juxtapositions, such as the lines of a new, modern office block contrasting with its next door neighbour, a Victorian church. Your freeway looks like something out of a modern American city, yet it leads directly on to 19th century streets.

(The subway photographs are via bonaldi’s post on MetaFilter, which I suspect may in turn be via my links, in which case this post neatly closes a subway-like loop.)

Parallel Wales - Simon’s visual survey of US locations with Welsh place names - is really rather wonderful:

Place names transcend their status as identifiers of geographical location; they become inextricably associated with hundreds of years of history, of cultural references, stereotypes, childhood memories, news items, myths, commercial products, weather systems.

After the Welsh Quakers left their homeland towards the end of the 17th century in search of religious and economic freedom, the new settlements founded in the Americas were often named after the settlers’ point of origin. It was one familiar link in an otherwise strange new world, fostering a sense of community among the displaced. This practice continued into the 20th century, when Welsh miners crossed the Atlantic to develop the rich Pennsylvania coalfields.

Parallel Wales is the result of two weeks spent in Pennsylvania, Maryland and Delaware in October 2005, visiting locations with Welsh namesakes. Many have, in the time since they were settled, become distinctly un-Welsh. Others have been abandoned altogether, simply becoming areas of wasteland. I’m fascinated by visual incongruities. The images, although they may be familiar to us from TV and cinema, conflict with our normal associations of the place names. A re-evaluation must take place - a certain image is of Llangollen, or Brynmawr, but not the Llangollen or Brynmawr that we know. These are parallel places, places that we might normally have no particular feelings for, but become surreally linked with our personal world; we derive a sense of kinship through a shared label.

YOU have built flatpack furniture – now you can live in a flatpack house. Ikea, the Swedish furniture giant, is to create a series of prefabricated homes, for sale or rent, in Glasgow.

The company will build up to 100 easy-to-assemble homes in Drumchapel as part of the area’s £100m renaissance.

The prefab BoKlok homes, which roughly translated means smart living, are hugely successful in Scandinavia and are lauded for their flexible open-plan layout, high ceilings and large windows.

Ethnophysiography is a new field of study that examines the categories that people use when conceptualizing and communicating about the landscape. Ethnophysiography is an ethnoscience, similar in its aims and scope to ethnobotany or ethnozoology (Berlin, 1992; Medin and Atran, 1999). It studies how people conceptualize the natural landscape, especially landforms and water bodies. Ethnophysiography relies heavily on ethnography as a method for obtaining information through interviews, description, and community participation. It focuses on kinds of things in the landscape, and aims to document in detail what things in the world are referred to by each term, and why.

From David M. Mark and Andrew G. Turk’s Ethnophysiography (PDF).

Fascinating stuff.

(Via, or, rather, stolen from Angermann2)

In lieu of a proper posting about the city, here are some telephone snaps for viewing on Flickr:

• All images from Zagreb, also available as a slideshow
• Images from the Tehnički Musej
• Images from the Hrvatski Muzej Naivne Umjetnosti