Crusoe's Island

by Andrew Lambert

  At least the big guns remained defiantly planted through the latest natural disaster, but the same cannot be said for the 57-millimetre armoured pill boxes. Built to be moved around on wheeled carriages, these pint-sized coastal defence batteries, effectively horse-drawn tanks, were caught out in the open by the tsunami, and redeployed across the two-acre debris field, pathetic upturned monuments to the real power on this island.

  NOTES

  1 T.W. Freeman, A History of Modern British Geography, Longman, London, 1980, pp. 19–20.

  2 Freeman, A History of Modern British Geography, pp. 56, 67, 186.

  3 H. Clout & C. Gosme, ‘The Naval Intelligence Handbooks: A Monument in Geographical Writing’, Progress in Human Geography 27(2) (2003), pp. 153–73, here p. 155.

  4 FO Handbook ‘prepared for the Peace Conference’, no 141b, June 1919: FO 373/7/14 editorial note.

  5 FO 373/7/14 no.141b.

  6 FO 373/7/14 no.141b, pp. 20–2 (a critical passage missing from the 1920 publication) & p. 23.

  7 Juan Fernández no. 143, 1920, pp. 33–60, bibliography at pp. 59–60. 1,000 printed, September 1920.

  8 Skottsberg’s article from the American Geographical Review (May 1918), pp. 363–83.

  9 FO 373/7/14 no.141b, pp. 22–4.

  10 1920 published handbook, p. 56.

  11 The Times (9 November 1926), p. 2. The Orduna survived both World Wars. Pacific Islands: Volume II Eastern Pacific, B.R. 519 B (Restricted) Geographical Handbook Series, November 1943, p. 46.

  12 Edmundson, A History of the British Presence in Chile, pp. 229–31.

  13 Anon., With HMS ‘Caradoc’ round South America, produced by the ship’s officers, foreword by Captain H. Moore, privately printed by Flood of Lowestoft, n.d. (but c.1930). I am indebted to my friend Ann Savours for this text.

  14 Skottsberg, The Natural History of Juan Fernández and Easter Island, vol. I, p. 190.

  15 Clout & Gosme, ‘The Naval Intelligence Handbooks’, is the best modern source; see ADM 223/444 for the typescript history of the project. See also Pacific Islands vol. II, p. 3, & vol. 1, p. 531.

  16 Esmeralda paid off in the 1930s. I am indebted to Captain Carlos Tromben Corbalen, Chilean Navy for this information.

  28

  Making Robinson’s Island

  In 1935 Juan Fernández became a National Park, largely as a result of a sustained public campaign by Swedish botanist Carl Skottsberg, who embarrassed the Chilean government into action by highlighting the ecological devastation wrought by years of occupation and mismanagement. Sadly, the change of status did not stop the appalling degradation of a unique, fragile ecosystem.

  Skottsberg had ample ammunition for his campaign, having visited the islands in 1908 and 1917. In 1956 he published The Natural History of Juan Fernández, a three-volume compendium on the unique biosystems of the Juan Fernández group and Easter Island. His detailed study recorded the devastating impact of human activity, slowly building up to a sustained explosion of disgust, blasting the reckless destruction of the island. He did not believe the ‘National Park’ had made any difference because, as he wryly noted, Mr Otto Rieggel had celebrated its creation by introducing six pairs of rabbits, ‘which, as everywhere else, will take what the sheep leave’. The island was now ‘being transformed into a cattle and sheep farm, a new and strange type of national park’. He hoped that a moderate increase in tourism to Robinson Crusoe’s island would encourage the islanders to abandon destructive attempts to raise cattle and sheep. Instead he wanted to impress visitors with unique flora and fauna, and repair the path up the mountain, because ‘everybody will want to see Selkirk’s Lookout, … read the memorial tablet and behold the grand views. And there is no point within easy reach where the endemic flora and fauna was, at least in 1917, – better displayed.’ In a savage, sardonic summary, Skottsberg pointed an accusing finger at the Chilean government: ‘If the responsible authorities do not change their attitude, Juan Fernández will become a … disgrace to an enlightened world.’1 His words bore fruit; Chile finally took the island in hand.

  The ongoing battle to ‘save’ the island’s unique ecosystem provides a striking study of the law of unforeseen consequences. Spanish visitors introduced the hardy Pyrenean goat to provide food for hungry mariners, no one stopped to consider the impact these alien creatures might have on an island where all succulent plants were vulnerable to voracious herbivores. Spanish attempts to eradicate the goats failed, leaving them, along with cattle, horses and even rabbits, to reshape the landscape. Modern efforts to restore the island to a pre-contact condition have been thwarted by the local population, who think that their interests take priority over the ecosystem. Notions of an Edenic Paradise remain flawed.

  Both Eden and Paradise are Middle Eastern concepts, filled with verdant spaces, trees and an ideal climate: the search for them was a key element in romanticism. The connection with gardens, the Edenic unspoiled version, or Paradise, the skilfully constructed man-made variety, should not be taken too literally. These places are about internal calm, not external vision. Gardens, and garden-like islands, may be used to represent Paradise, but the keys to paradise lie inside each human being.2 No sooner had the Europeans located ‘paradise’ in the Americas than they discovered how fragile such places were, how the very things they sought, mineral wealth, timber resources and agricultural land were destroying these unique locations. Soon the new colonial rulers were obliged to think about the impact they were having, and attempt to reconstruct the ecosystem.

  In many respects the isolated oceanic island, like the frail ships which carried scientific circumnavigators in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, stimulated the emergence of a detached, critical, self-conscious view of European origins and behaviour, of the kind dramatically prefigured by Daniel Defoe in Robinson Crusoe. As Darwin had demonstrated on the Galápagos, islands were ideal laboratories for full-scale experimentation and data gathering to check the impact of human activity on plants and animals, soil and climate. English/British critiques of Spanish and Chilean rule over Juan Fernández were invariably a question of inefficient resource management.

  Alexander von Humboldt linked these concerns with Indian holist philosophies, stressing the interdependence of man and the natural world. Humboldt’s great expedition to South America and his impact on Darwin provide an essential linkage between observation, philosophy and theory. Because uninhabited offshore islands were less risky to European invaders than the continent, lacking hostile peoples and lethal diseases, they were among the first places to be colonised, studied and ruined. Much early writing was produced by mariners and travellers, largely practical in approach, and impacted by the mental debilities that accompany scurvy. Sir Francis Drake gave the English a taste for oceanic exploits, which prompted a rapid expansion of print culture. These texts invested islands with Edenic qualities of fruitfulness, which were soon linked to Renaissance botanical gardens, man-made versions of Paradise. A century later islands were equally capable of becoming utopias, promised lands distant from the disorders of the old world, including the English Civil War. John Milton’s Paradise Lost was not unconnected with these precious, distant refuges, which took a prominent place in the escapist literature of the age. As literacy rates rose, the scale and variety of publications expanded, and took greater notice of market trends. Publishing crazes, already in full swing by the end of the seventeenth century, saw travel literature become the most widely consumed genre.3

  While islands were invested with quasi-religious significance international law emphasised that colonial annexation was only legitimate if the colonisers cleared and worked, or ‘improved’ the land. Man must dominate nature to earn title; if they left the land unused the colonists had no legal right to ownership. Introducing European livestock devastated semi-arid landscapes, the destruction of the grass and low scrub prompting extensive soil erosion. As the soil slipped into the sea paradise became desert. The British response began when Sir Joseph Banks pressed
the government to enact forest legislation to reverse the tide, like his French contemporaries Banks’s particular focus was the potential of tropical forests for shipbuilding. It soon became clear that deforestation and soil erosion reduced rainfall, especially on mountain areas, and that the key to regeneration was the restoration of high level tree cover. Scientific insight collided with the romantic cult of the tropical island when Rousseau developed Crusoe and Anson into the idea that an island of untamed nature would be an ideal redemptive space for Europeans. Natural gardens would help to restore virtue to modern society. Crusoe’s redemption through hard work, faith and good deeds, physical, rather than intellectual exercise, made him the ideal romantic hero. Rousseau himself came no closer to Crusoe than a two month occupation of the Swiss island of St Pierre on Lake Bienne, in the autumn of 1765, but that left him in raptures. This melding of paradise and utopia into an ideal society, prompted by islands of the South Pacific, took root in Britain almost as soon as it appeared.4 Island life was attractive to French and German readers, restricted to the European continent by wars and upheaval in an age of revolution and chaos, not least because Anglo-French conflicts made such places impossible to reach. The series of wars that raged across Europe between 1778 and 1815 made the Pacific an unattainable dreamscape for continental readers. That they chose to travel with Crusoe as well as Cook only emphasised the fact that all journeys combine exploration and imagination.

  Rousseau’s Pacific built on an older perception of this vast empty space, and the tiny islands that gave it scale and meaning. From the early sixteenth century, travellers’ tales such as those of Hawkins, Schouten and Le Maire provided utopian and paradisiacal dreams with a suitably exotic locus, a development that accelerated as Enlightenment science shifted man from the centre of the picture. The island became an ideal laboratory in which to examine the nature of society, the impact of difference, and of alternative societies but little removed from More’s Utopia or Bacon’s New Atlantis. The boundaries between purely imagined tales, invented scenarios set on real islands, often, like Gulliver, with real people in them, and apparently simple accounts of castaway existence blurred, refracting reality into a myriad of shapes and colours. The explosion of buccaneer literature around 1700 took Juan Fernández into the heart of this fluid mental world. The genre of island life carried potent religious, cultural, and moral meaning, the well-being of the island acquiring a moral dimension.5 Crusoe’s improving stewardship was rewarded by dominion over man and beast. In the late twentieth century Chile tried to combine environmental restoration of indigenous species with tourist opportunities.

  In the spring of 1965 American academic Ralph Woodward led a party of students to the island, still a serious expedition at that date, requiring a boat journey from the mainland, and lengthy, complex bureaucratic procedures. ‘Our principal desire was to see Selkirk’s cave’, he observed, paying a dutiful visit to Puerto Inglese, where cattle, goats and sheep were being raised, to see the much-frequented shrine of misguided American Robinsoniana. The expedition camped out at San Juan Bautista, climbed ‘Selkirk’s Mirador’, visited Blanca Luz Brum (the Uruguayan painter and hostel owner), and got to know the locals. Woodward was struck by the sincere and genuine hospitality of a community with limited resources. There were around 580 people living on the island, while a small, strikingly eccentric trickle of visitors came to search for things that did not exist. Woodward followed up the visit, recovering much of the history of the island from Spanish, English and American sources.6 Coincidentally, Blanca Luz petitioned the Chilean authorities to change the island’s name from Más a Tierra to Robinson Crusoe, with an eye on the emerging tourist industry. In 1966 Chile acted, renaming Más Afuera for Alexander Selkirk at the same time (‘Alejandro Selkirk Island’), forestalling a Venezuelan project to name an island in memory of Defoe’s hero. The irony that neither Crusoe nor Selkirk ever set foot on the islands named for them was overlooked, completing the bizarre collusion of fiction and fact that has dominated perceptions of the islands for centuries. While mass tourism has yet to hit the distinctly cool beaches of Cumberland Bay, the new names ensured no one need wonder where these great stories had taken place, or where to go to fulfil a childhood fantasy. Selkirk and Crusoe had made islands into places of magic and wonder, rather than the setting for grim, lonely death. They became places of redemption, utopian escapes from the world and all its wickedness.

  Three decades later, American travel writer Thurston Clarke arrived, seeking Crusoe and other castaways. Juan Fernández was only the first of many islands that became the subject of Clarke’s Islomania, a theme drawn from Richard Henry Dana’s richly interleaved vision of a childhood possession, a Robinsonian space rendered sacred by memory and lush, aromatic, fruitfulness. Characterising Juan Fernández as ‘King Kong’s Island married to a finger of Lawrence of Arabia’s Desert’ reflected the impact of technicolour cinemascope on travel writing. Clarke did not travel alone; indeed, his fellow travellers proved a particularly rich literary resource, as they drank in beachfront bars plastered with news cuttings about Hugo Wever. Clarke claimed he had seen Crusoe’s cave, although it was evidently the same place Woodward had attributed to Selkirk, and followed John Ross Brown’s account in Crusoe’s Island a century before. Such mismatches between fiction and fact had continued throughout the intervening century and a half. The odd rock formation at Puerto Inglese is still troubled by Americans looking for something that cannot be there. In such situations the locals have always been willing to fill the void. When the first excursion steamers arrived from Valparaiso early in the twentieth century they encountered islanders dressed as Crusoe and Friday, paddling about the bay in log boats to earn some cash.

  The downside for any modern traveller, as Dana noted in the 1830s, was the indolent lassitude of the islanders. Their quiet, temperate paradise made only limited demands on their time and effort, offering no obvious occasion for great exertion of body or mind. While Clarke avoided explicitly concurring in that judgement, he did cite James and Mayme Bruce’s highly censorious article in The Explorer’s Journal of 1992. The article missed the point; if the locals evinced ‘no curiosity or interest’, living at an agonisingly slow pace, these were the very qualities that had endeared them to Joshua Slocum. Air travel denied modern tourists the opportunity to acclimatise, they arrive still thinking in the western clock time of flight schedules, an error that persists for at least a week, unaware of the deeper rhythms that dominate isolated fishing communities around the world. Clarke’s local guide offered a telling insight, fearful that cruise liners might arrive, overwhelming the fragile way of life and the equally vulnerable ecosystem of a place ill-suited to modern tourism. At a deeper level the guide feared mass tourism would generate a cash economy, exacerbating divisions within the community. Clarke noted an extensive barter-based trading system at work, while locals ‘feared development more than isolation’ and were desperate not to leave. This was a constant trope of islander life. Such sentiments were reinforced by an eccentric bunch of incomers. Many were romantic dreamers, looking to drop out of the race. The island was a self-contained world, one where incomers could disappear after life-changing events. An Argentine couple reflected, ‘this island slowly takes over the conscious mind, burying it in its soil’. Clarke concluded no one who had lived on Juan Fernández could ever truly escape. Some islanders reported that Selkirk haunted the famous Mirador, and they were taken very seriously. Richard Halliburton climbed the romantic viewpoint every day for a whole month, hoping to commune with the spirit of the monosyllabic Scot. Had the old man turned up Halliburton might have been surprised by a foul-mouthed rant, in a thick accent followed by an invitation to fisticuffs. Clarke concluded by describing Juan Fernández as a place ‘where people come to find, or lose, themselves’ where dreamers were often disappointed. Despite a sequence of island-hopping travels he found this one simply too remote to be attractive and, like most modern visitors, left with much the same sense of relief
that islanders display when they return from the mainland.7

  Clarke’s enjoyable incomprehension reflected a deeply continental perspective. Describing the island as surrounded and cut off by the ocean, when in reality the ocean was the key to the island, itself a marginal space where land and sea interact in a strikingly unusual way, said more about him than it did about the location or character of Juan Fernández and its people. A community that lives by fishing can hardly be ‘cut off’ by the ocean.

  Another recent visitor, author Diana Souhami, arrived in December 1999, high summer on Juan Fernández, to research the Selkirk story. Soon ‘The Island’ became a critical character in her story, a mysterious, volcanic place forever being invaded, abandoned, reinvented and reimagined. Here the islanders lived in a curious mix of ancient and modern, including cash payment and intermittent access to the worldwide web. They had a school, a doctor, a dentist and a midwife, but no pharmacy, hospital or vet. Secondary schooling involved leaving the island for the year, after which more boys than girls came home. Despite strict rules, including a ban on tethering livestock to the goalposts on the football pitch by the harbour, the ‘gendarmes’ had little to do. Local taxes funded the water supply and maintained the jetty. The dirt strip airfield provided an intermittent service to Santiago, exchanging live crayfish for medical cases and the odd tourist. The main link to ‘the Continent’ was the monthly supply ship Navarino, curiously named for a famous naval battle in a Greek bay. Supplies of fuel, building materials, tools, toys and trinkets shared space with vegetables and fruit. The island remained fertile, but rarely has anyone worked the land with serious intent. De Rodt’s cattle-ranching ambitions created a gaucho culture of herding and pastoralism, wrecking the fragile soils to produce a little stringy beef. Several islanders confessed that anyone growing vegetables was sure to have them stolen, or trodden into the earth before they were ripe. They wait for tired vegetables to arrive by boat, and serve them with the freshest of fish.