THE fury of the sea brought them to Sumatra centuries ago. And the fury of the sea destroyed their unique community in just a few terrible minutes.

Before December 26 there were more than 50 families of Putehs, white-skinned descendants of shipwrecked European sailors, possibly from Portugal, who had merged into the culture of Aceh over the generations but maintained their striking Western looks.

Now there is one man left.

The Putehs — the name means white in Acehnese dialect — lived in fishing communities at the edge of the ocean which suffered the worst destruction from the tsunami. Nearly all died and their villages were wiped from the face of the earth. The sole surving man from his tribe is Jallaluddin Puteh, a 42-year-old fisherman, who, together with his wife, lived because their home was at the landward side of the village and they had a head start running towards higher ground when the wave struck.

Mr Puteh believes that all of his extended family who lived around the town of Lamno on the west coast of Sumatra died in the disaster — about 500 souls in six villages. His immediate family, and a handful of women who had married and moved to the capital Jakarta, are probably all that is left of one of Indonesia’s most unusual communities.

“I just don’t know why God spared me and my wife although I have thought long about it,” said Mr Puteh.

Two of their children died in the wave, although two others, boys who were at school in the capital Banda Aceh, survived. Mr Puteh was washed about a mile by the force of the wave and dumped on a hill. His wife was washed up on another hill. Of the 1,300 inhabitants of the six villages the Putehs shared with dark-skinned Indonesians, only around a dozen people survived in total. His village is now under water.

Nobody along the beautiful tropical coastline of coves and jungle three hours drive south of Banda Aceh is quite sure how the Putehs originally arrived in the East Indies, but local legend has it that their descendants were shipwrecked sailors who converted to Islam and married local women. They had no European words in their dialect.

The men were fishermen, poor by Indonesian standards, but the Puteh women enjoyed famously exotic looks. Their dark skins and blue eyes made them prized as brides by would-be husbands from the regional capital Banda and from as far away as Jakarta.

The legends hold that the Portuguese ships, which were shipwrecked, were filled with gold as well as carrying the Putehs’ forefathers. Coins would occasionally wash up from wrecks after storms. Locals claim that French divers arrived after the tsunami searching for treasure although they do not know whether anything was discovered.

Mr Puteh admitted that the past few months have left him defeated. He said: “I have lost nearly all my friends and family. It is still hard to believe they are all dead and I am the only one left.” Now he lives in a tent subsisting off food handouts. A few others in the town with some Portuguese blood survived the wave because they lived inland.

The grandfather of Nur Hayat, a 25-year-old woman, was a Puteh. She said: “I lost uncountable relatives. It is so sad, they were such beautiful people. Their culture was 100 per cent Acehnese, they had the same religion, spoke in the same dialect, sang the same songs. The only difference was their looks. Men from Banda Aceh and Jakarta seeking wives would go there. The blue-eyed women were famous as the most beautiful in Indonesia.”

Campong Baro, one of the villages where Putehs lived, is now a muddy wasteland with the metal skeleton of a bridge lying amid the stumps of coconut palms where the tsunami washed it.

The handful of surviving fishermen find it hard to motivate themselves. Salahin, a 32-year-old fisherman from the village, said: “I would like to marry again but I have no money.

“It is hard to work now. Before it happened, when I came back tired there would be my wife waiting and my children to play with. But they are gone.”

Jamalludin Puteh said that he could not get his life back to any kind of normality, partly because most of the big fishing boats were destroyed in the disaster and there are not enough crews left to get the industry going again.

“I am unemployed with nothing to do except think about what happened to us,” he says. “I feel like our future was destroyed by the wave.”

LONG STRUGGLE WITH THE SEA

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