The Fabergé fish of Micronesia

The Sunday Times February 05, 2006

I heard tell of uncharacteristically bold mandarins off an obscure Pacific island Off the

remote Pacific island of Yap, Simon Rogerson goes in search of the most beautiful creature

on earth

What could be the most beautiful thing in the world — the Koh-i-Noor diamond? A sunset over

the Torres Strait? A rare sobralia orchid from Nicaragua? The Taj Mahal by moonlight? They

have their merits, but I once met a man who told me that the most beautiful thing he had

ever seen was a living thing, a tiny fish whose body was covered with patterns so

ostentatious that Fabergé would have considered it gaudy. The fish are shy and spend most of

their time hiding in coral, he told me, but they emerge briefly at dusk to perform an

extraordinary ritual. “They are mandarin fish,” he said. “Living jewels!”

For years, I heard rumours of divers finding these fabled fish at various locations around

the western Pacific, but most of the anecdotes were tinged with disappointment: the fish

were hard to find, hid under the coral or appeared just as a diver’s air was about to run

out. Then I heard tell of uncharacteristically bold mandarins off an obscure island in the

central Pacific.

Yap is one of the more disparate islands that make up the Pacific state of Micronesia. Most

of the attention goes to nearby Palau, with its dramatic patchwork of limestone islands.

(It’s actually about 300 miles from Yap, but “nearby” is a relative term in the vastness of

Micronesia.) Yap, by contrast, doesn’t seem to have any naturally occurring rock on its

shores — stone was once considered such a novelty there that it became the official

currency. Large round “wheels” of stone, known as Rai, were imported from Palau and used as

money; the tradition still persists in big transactions today, though US dollars are more

practical when it comes to luggage allowance.

Tradition is important in Yap, but it is interwoven with 21st-century savvy — the teenagers

I saw wearing grass skirts at a tribal dance wanted to talk internet connections and Eminem

when I ran into them later at the airport.

Yap’s outer reefs are known for their current-swept coral walls and clear water. A tempting

prospect, but I was going to explore the turbid waters of the inner lagoon, where hard coral

grows into long fingers, forming the preferred habitat of the mandarin fish. The dive site

was an enigmatic spit of land called O’Keefe’s Island. David O’Keefe was an Irish-American

who was shipwrecked on Yap back in 1871, and came to dominate the local coconut trade. Quick

to feed the islanders’ appetite for stone money, he imported his own stones in bulk. They

were worth less than traditional Rai, but for the first time, many people were able to own

money — O’Keefe effectively created a middle class. The Yapese gifted him the island as a

token of appreciation.

Today, O’Keefe’s house is unrecognisable rubble, and the island is home only to mangroves,

birds and insects. It is a short boat ride from the dive centre at the Manta Ray Bay Hotel,

a divers’ haunt on the Yap mainland. The hotel bar was filling up as our boat set off at

sunset — a party of helicopter-rescue specialists had just arrived from Hawaii, causing a

frisson among a group of young lady marine biologists who had arrived a few days earlier.

As our small skiff reached the island, I registered the familiar tropical scent of moist

earth and vegetation. The jungle had claimed all remnants of O’Keefe’s habitation; the air

was still, the surface of the water greasily calm. We rolled off the back of the boat and

entered a world of green. Outside Yap’s lagoon, the water is clear, blue and fed by currents

that cross thousands of miles of Pacific. Heated by the sun to 31C, the shallow lagoon water

was blooming with algae, an environment utterly removed from the dynamic waters beyond.

Continued faberge2