My World of Islands

by Leslie Thomas

  Ownership of Santa Cruz has passed through many hands including that of a Scotsman, Dr Barron Shaw, who married a London girl called Helen Greene in San Francisco in 1861 and settled with her on the island. A Frenchman called Justinian Caire used the place for farming and ranching, employing French and Italians, and harbouring some scheme for starting a Little Europe there. He also established vineyards which produced, among their wines, something ominously called Dago Red.

  Today the verdant flanks of Santa Cruz are still grazed. From the aircraft we could see dirt roads winding up the sides of the incisive valleys, random roofs and, on the floor of one gully, an airstrip with a plane sitting still as a butterfly. ‘Didn’t know that was there,’ commented my pilot. ‘Might turn out to be useful sometime.’

  We flew away, now for Santa Rosa. The dividing channel is five miles wide, green choppy sea, crusty with white, punching against rocks, surging up beaches where hundreds of seals congregated in the April sunshine. This is the haunt of the sea-elephant also, a giant, bemused, creature with a comic proboscis and entreating eyes, and the sea-otter, once thought to have been made extinct by the ravages of hunters but now, protected by more enlightened men, making an infrequent return to the local seas. With the sharp eyes and whiskers of its countryside cousin, it is much bulkier and has a luxurious coat. It performs the same endearing family antics. Much of its time is spent swimming on its back, its portly belly protruding, its legs languidly paddling, a relaxed, vacant sort of smugness around its whiskers.

  Santa Rosa is also high and riven with deep clefts, the schisms of a volcanic age. Red earth and vivid green scrub fall into a disturbed blue sea. Elk, deer and feral pigs inhabit the winding and windy hills of Santa Rosa, but the mid-nineteenth-century hunters, the fierce Aleuts from Alaska, came for the seal and the sea-otter. There were fights, murders and desertions. A giant and gentlemanly black man called Allen Light lived on the island for years, having deserted from a ship called Pilgrim – the same vessel in which Richard Dana sailed before writing his epic Two Years Before the Mast.

  Later days were more pastoral. Sheep were farmed extensively and, according to an account in the San Francisco newspaper Morning Call, were rounded up not by dogs but by two hundred trained goats.

  As our aircraft followed the coastline, I saw below something for which I had been specially looking – the wreck of the cargo ship Chickasaw which ran into Santa Rosa in a howling rainstorm one February night some twenty years ago. She was homeward bound from Yokohama to Wilmington, California. There was no loss of life but passengers and crew had the unnerving experience of being trapped aboard for two days while the vessel broke up around them. Now I could see that she remains in separated pieces, like a wrecked toast rack – the bridge and the sagging funnel on the final section, the bow thrust in hopeless belligerence against the rocks ahead. Waves lick around her corroding walls. Within a few years she will be worn away, exhausted, and will quietly collapse into the ocean like the SS Crown of England which met a similar misfortune at the south of the island half a century before. She does not look like the crown of anywhere now. All that remains is a sad mast and some rusty remnants of machinery from her deck, which the seals gratefully use for scratching their backs.

  Of all the islands of the Santa Barbara Channel, San Miguel is the most solitary and mysterious. It is haunted by fogs, beaten by winds, exposed to all the ferocity of the ocean, for it lies at the extremity of the archipelago. As we flew the pyramid sand dunes below seemed to be moving in a solemn dance. Gales have whittled away at the hard sand making an eerie petrified forest of spectral sand-trunks, themselves ever-changing and, in turn, changing the notes of the wind itself.

  There is an islet, Prince Island, where a stone cross is said to mark the aloof grave of Cabrillo, the Portuguese discoverer of the Californian Channel Islands, but no one knows if he really lies beneath it. There are other suggested places on Santa Rosa and Santa Cruz. The man who spent his exiled life charting the Pacific coast has had his own resting place mislaid.

  Now there is no one living on San Miguel – except for the park ranger. It is left to the pelicans, the abundant seals and the little island fox. (‘So tame,’ reported one chilling scientific explorer, ‘it was easily caught and killed.’) Only a few people have lived on San Miguel’s frequently wild and cheerless shore and one family did so for twelve years in the 1930s to the early 1940s. Herbert Lester, an adventurer out of his time, married a sedate girl called Elizabeth Sherman who worked in a New York library, and carried her off to San Miguel to begin life all over again. They lived in a house built from the wreckage of ships, farmed and fished, opened a school (with a bell) for their two children, raised the Stars and Stripes and beachcombed, furnishing their home with the rich debris of the sea, including a fine safe from a ship called Cuba which came to grief off the shore. Herbie had a Model T Ford which he drove roughshod across the island. Much of his time was spent pursuing an unquenchable curiosity about his island and one day he came home with two tusks, each measuring six feet, from the skeleton of a prehistoric mammoth. He was altogether a remarkable man. He is buried on the island, at Harris Point, in a homemade coffin. In 1942, handicapped and ill, he killed himself having first asked his wife for some paper to write a note. She found the suicide note in the place where they kept all their private documents – the safe from the wreck of the Cuba.

  Sailing to Avalon on a shining spring morning would seem to be a suitable beginning for an idyll. It was strange for me to be doing so, because the Avalon of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King is said to be Glastonbury, still a spellbound place, near the village in England where I once lived. This was Avalon, Santa Catalina – although named from the same source – the place of the 1940s songwriter who left his love there beside the sea.

  From the San Pedro pier in Los Angeles harbour the chirpy two-funnelled ferry takes two hours. The sea on this April day was green and bumpy, but the sky was clear and whirling with gulls. Santa Catalina poses on the horizon throughout the voyage, a grey double-peaked mountain that gradually softens into green-flanked valleys descending to a white town by a bay. A committee of seals, with heads protruding from the water, met us outside the harbour, staring in comic disbelief as if they had never before seen a boat.

  For most Europeans the immediate recognition of Avalon is that it has more than a touch of the Mediterranean, and so it has: white, red-roofed houses rising up from the streets and alleys to the close hills; flowers flowing over walls and bursting from urns; restaurants and cafés by the pavements and the shore. But for me, also, it had that happy niffy smell of the English seaside: an aroma of breeze, and fish, and salt. And the pale sea, not blatantly blue, was gurling over rocks and into pools where children searched for crabs and other culvert creatures. If there is one thing missing in the Pacific and the exotic islands of the world it is that smell, that feeling.

  After the heavy breathing of Los Angeles, its gritty light, its packing-case buildings, Avalon affords a sweet surprise. It has more than a hint of recent yesterdays about it. On one reach of the bay is a great round building, like a Spanish bullring, quite out of proportion to the modest town. This was, and occasionally still is, one of the most famous ballrooms in the world. In the days when people danced to the big-sounding bands this was the place they came, crossing the channel in order to quickstep, tango and jitterbug on the immense circular floor to music played by men with legendary names. On special days they still arrive by excursion boats to relive the past. Now, appropriately, the ballroom also houses a museum.

  The earliest half-day excursion to Santa Catalina was made by its discoverer, Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo, who was Portuguese, although in the service of the Spanish government. He sailed out at dawn from San Pedro (just as I had), pacified the natives, claimed it for Spain, and departed by noon. It was named Santa Catalina after the patron saint of spinsters, and has since become a haven for honeymooners. The Chumash were quickly converted to the Spanish God and this int
elligent, handsome and peaceful people, who lived on an island of quiet beauty and who called their seashore the Bay of the Seven Moons, were ‘Told about Heaven’.

  Since that time Santa Catalina’s strategic position has made it an attractive proposition for Chinese pirates, Californian smugglers, fugitives, hunters, hopeful goldminers, garrisoned soldiers and the bootleggers of the Prohibition. It was once mooted as a prison camp for troublesome Apaches but the plan was dropped after protests. The Los Angeles Herald in 1886 grunted that it was ‘too good for the proposed occupants’.

  I found it soberly settled into the late twentieth century with the local cop eating an ice-cream on the corner, teenagers on motor-scooters and a lone ranger looking for a herd of buffalo who roam about the bumpy little interior. The buffalo are not indigenous. They were imported in the 1920s by Cecil B. de Mille who needed them for a film. He left them behind and the herd has remained there ever since.

  Walking the promenade of the town on this day in springtime was a slow pleasure. Palm trees and banks of bright button flowers. The Mediterranean feeling was once more, however, offset by a jaunty English pier with a fish-and-chip shop at its end. People queued for bus excursions to the few miles of interior on the route once run by stagecoach. This island was once the domain of the Wrigley family and was consequently unhappily known as Chewing Gum Island.

  I had lunch and a bottle of cold wine, went into the museum, talked to the policeman and then went by taxi up into the gentle, enfolding hills. I found the buffalo roaming a couple of miles from town.

  On Santa Catalina there is a story about a man called Prentiss, a Rhode Islander, who received from a dying Indian chief a map showing the concealment of a fantastic treasure on the island. He built a boat (from the pieces of a vessel in which he had himself been shipwrecked) and sailed from California for Santa Catalina. A storm swamped his boat and washed everything overboard – including the Indian’s map.

  Prentiss spent the next thirty years looking for the treasure which he never found. The headstone of his grave is still to be seen overlooking Emerald Bay at the remote northwest of the island.

  I stayed longer than Cabrillo but less time than Prentiss. In the evening the red-funnelled steamer took me back to mainland America. Santa Catalina merged with the sky of the gathering evening, taking itself away, somewhere apart. Such as it has always been.

  CALIFORNIAN CHANNEL ISLANDS situated between latitudes 33°20′–34°8′N and longitudes 118°20′–120°30′W; Channel Islands National Park – land area 194 sq. m (502 sq. km); population approx. 100. Santa Catalina – area 70 sq. m (181 sq. km); resort island (USA private ownership)

  Bermuda

  An Accidental Place

  We saw the island of Bermuda, where our ship lieth upon the rock, a quarter of a mile distant from the shore where we saved all our lives and afterwards saved much of our goods, but all our bread was wet and lost.

  SIR GEORGE SOMERS to the Earl of Salisbury, 1610

  Viewed in ocean sunshine the many islands of Bermuda present a pastel scene. On a cloth of turquoise water and pale blue sky they appear green and bright white: white beaches, white roofs, white hulls. The buildings glow pink, apricot, coral, blue, orange and yellow. When the Atlantic weather closes in they become the ‘remote Bermudas’, once the terror of sailors, the scourge of ships. Looking out across Hamilton Sound on a stormy day is to see everywhere white limestone roofs against grey, casuarina trees shivering like northern pines on a landscape cold and grim. It is just as if the sunny islands had been somehow transported to winter Canada.

  When seventeenth-century adventurers sailed the new voyages to the Americas, they came across the archipelago three quarters of the way over the ocean but avoided its frayed edges because it had taken on a perilous reputation. The disasters of Bermuda’s fabled Triangle have been nothing compared to the wholesale wrecks that occurred on the reefs and shoals of the islands themselves. In 1609 seven ships set out from Plymouth with supplies and new settlers for the infant colony in Virginia. The little fleet was commanded by Sir George Somers in the 300-ton Sea Venture. In his company were Sir Thomas Gates, the deputy governor of Jamestown, Virginia; John Rolphe, destined to marry the Indian princess Pocahontas; a priest, Richard Buckle; and various gentlemen and gentlewomen and two Red Indians who had been on display in England, Namuntuck and Marchumps.

  It was summer and they sailed the unfamiliar direct route across the Atlantic instead of the charted trade-way to the Caribbean and then north to Virginia. On the night of Tuesday 25 June, they knew they had made a mistake. A storm gathered like an army on the skyline and then advanced on the exposed fleet. For four days it ranted, scattering the small vessels through ugly seas. Personal belongings, cargo, even guns were thrown overboard to lighten the load of the Sea Venture.

  Then, with the crew and passengers spent, sprawling on the rolling decks, the other ships lost, Sir George Somers sighted a windswept land – the Bermudas. The vessel was coaxed around a headland and into a bay. Leaking through every rib it ran towards the shore, tore its keel on a shoal and settled with, no doubt, a grateful sigh into the shallow water. Its stumps remain to this day.

  It was thus by accident that the first English came to Bermuda. They survived on hogs and seabirds. There were no other people there. Henry Ravens, the master’s mate of the Sea Venture, set out in the ship’s longboat with a crew of eight, to sail for America. After a certain time a bonfire was built on what is now St David’s Head to guide the hoped-for returning boats to the anchorage. It burned blindly for two months. Ravens and his longboat men were never heard of again.

  Today, in the neat, showpiece town of St George’s, against the harbour, is a replica of the ship the wrecked English managed to construct from the debris of their original vessel.

  It is called the Deliverance, and is a stout vessel, today’s reproduction looking quite capable of making the same successful voyage as the original almost three centuries ago. While she was being constructed Sir George Somers explored the islands and realized how unjustified was their reputation, for he saw that within the rocks and reefs lay a huge and wonderful anchorage. He made an excellently accurate map which is kept today in the Hamilton town archives. The archipelago was called the Somers Islands, an unintentional, but appropriate, pun.

  Two of the marooned migrants, glancing about them in the sunshine, also perceived that the reputation of this place was far from the reality. They decided to stay and found a settlement, St George’s, which, after Jamestown, Virginia, became the second town to be established in the New World in 1612. One of the settlers, Christopher Carter, never again left the island and his descendants still live in Bermuda today.

  Sir George Somers returned to Bermuda from the American colonies and died on the island. His nephew took his body back to his native Dorset, but buried his heart in the place he had discovered. It lies now beneath the flowers of a garden in the centre of St George’s.

  St George’s town is perhaps a little too well preserved, the buildings, the harbour, the reconstructed oddities of the stocks and pillory, the old scold’s ducking stool, every wall a different pretty colour from its neighbour, flowers dripping over steps and doors and trees gathered in colonies of shade. But any suspicion that it is merely a tourist exhibit is dispelled by simply going into the church of St Peter’s, the root of the earliest colony and as full of memories as any museum.

  If you walk into the nave from the sunshine of the welcoming-arms steps outside you are at once cloaked with coolness and peace. It is a wide, white-walled church, raftered like a barn, the timbers amply provided from the cedars of the island and from the wrecks of its coasts. Memorial tablets to the forebears of the town patch the walls like pictures at an exhibition. There is one recalling Bridger Goodrich, one of an American family who, well-named, engaged in privateering. Wealth and craft got Goodrich into the Bermuda Governor’s Council, with the right to the word ‘Honourable’ before his name. The title is engraved on t
he tablet but, looking carefully, it is clear that someone at some time has attempted to deface the word ‘Honourable’. Why they did this, or who it was, is one of Bermuda’s untold stories.

  Another tablet records happier relationships. ‘To the memory of Mary . . . wife of Commodore Sir John Poo Beresford . . . An attractive person . . . with gentle manners and captivating mirth.’ She died aged twenty-three.

  Every niche and corner of the church has something to interest the visitor. There are pictures and wise sayings; a delightful railed gallery at one side; a model of a ship against one wall; brass tablets commemorate long-gone corporals and gunners. The church silver is touched with the London hallmarks of 1625. On the communion paten, however, are distinct knife marks, it having been used as a dinner plate by a rascal governor, Samuel Day.

  There is an extraordinary three-decker pulpit dating from the seventeenth century, the clerk occupying the bottom shelf (St Peter’s has a tradition of singing clerks), the middle section – the prayer-book deck from which the minister conducted the sevice – and the top deck from which he delivered his sermon. A turkey hen once got into the church and nested in the top deck. The minister was oblige to preach from the middle level until Easter when the bird emerged with a brood of thirteen.

  The churchyard of St Peter’s is like a stone furniture shop. Tombs and slabs stand haphazardly about like tablets, beds and benches among the palms and cedars. Here are buried the slaves from the early days, the pioneers, the sailors and soldiers and the families who fell to yellow fever. A sad little rank of small stones marks the graves of all the children of one house.

  By the back door of St Peter’s is a Bermuda cedar, now reduced to a frail stump, which was there when Sir George Somers and his people were shipwrecked in the bay. It had probably been there two further centuries beyond that. It is still called the Belfry Tree for the church bell was once suspended from its branches; it has been taken down now for the ancient arm could hold it no longer.