Outposts

by Simon Winchester

  It was upon us within seconds. The sun was blotted out. It became strangely chill and damp. The silence on deck was broken by the furious lashing of halyards against stanchions, and the crack of pennants. And the ship, until now so still and level, began to move, slowly at first, as though waking from a deep sleep. She was starting to roll, and her bows plunged into a wave and threw a curtain of spume over the foredeck. And then the rain began to spatter down, and most of the passengers ran inside, bewildered that the benignity of the ocean had so suddenly turned to malice. ‘Welcome,’ said one of the deck officers, as he dived for cover, ‘to the Southern Ocean.’

  The next morning four birds were gliding beside and behind us. Three were mollymawks, and the fourth, aloof and higher than the rest, was pure white, with wings each as big as a man: the wandering albatross, guiding us with stately precision on to Tristan.

  We made our landfall at dawn on a showery, windy southern autumn morning. At first, there was a patch of settled grey cloud on the far horizon; then, as we rolled nearer, a shape became distinct—a huge cone, its flanks soaring out of the depths with an abruptness that looked almost unreal, as though a child had daubed its idea of an island on the canvas. It had all the appearance of exactly what it was—a vast submarine volcano, poking up from the mid-Atlantic cordillera, and so tall that its summit pierced the sea and rose 6,000 feet into the sky. There was a ring of cloud 3,000 feet up, which girdled the cone like a starched white collar; and then the slope continued, up to a peak that was dusted with early-season snow, and which gleamed in the rising northern sun.

  We radioed the island. ‘Hello, St Helena,’ said a voice, neither awed nor surprised by our arrival. ‘You’ll have be waiting a whoil. Harbour’s closed. Swell too bad. Might take a day or some. We’ll let you knows soon as we can.’

  A wave of disappointment swept the ship, and for the first time I began to wonder if the damnable ‘Tristan luck’ they had told me about might keep me off the island still. But no, I reasoned: we had the Colonial Governor of the island of St Helena aboard, making an official visit to his tiny southern dependency; we had the rams; we had a new island doctor; and we had the World’s Most Traveled Man, who had a look of acute anxiety about him, and seemed quite unable to tackle his breakfast. He even swore at his bloater, and ordered the waiter to remove it. No, I decided, we would land, sooner or later. I would get to this outpost, now so tantalisingly close.

  As the ship neared the northern coast so the island’s only settlement, and thus the Tristan capital, Edinburgh-of-the-Seven-Seas, swung into view. It was just a hamlet, sprawled on a wide expanse of grass at the foot of sheer walls of rock. It looked a neat and tidy place, the houses gaily painted, the little gardens full of flowers. I could see two Union flags streaming south in the breeze—one was over the Administrator’s office, someone said, and the other flew over his house.

  But there was no great monument to might or power here. No castle stood in Edinburgh, nor any battlement or cathedral or cenotaph or statue—not that I could see through my glasses, at least. Tristan was first settled by British soldiers stationed here to prevent any French attempts to free Napoleon from St Helena: but they seemed to have left no obvious relic of their stay, visible from the sea. This was the gentler side of Empire and if our motto was ‘What we have we hold’, it was more strongly stated in the guns of Singapore and the forts of old Bermuda than here, where we had just built an English village, and had come to live in peace and quiet comfort.

  No one seemed to be around. From here Edinburgh looked a ghost town, as though its people, who had all been evacuated to England when the volcano erupted in 1961, had never returned. (In fact all except five did come back, and more islanders live in Edinburgh today than before the eruption.) The illusion was reinforced when a rain squall swept across the island: two twin cones of the new volcano, which sits brooding on the hamlet’s eastern edge, began to steam and sputter. Wisps of smoke began to blow from a yellow-lipped crater, and I half-expected a stream of magma to snake down towards the sea, and a shower of red-hot boulders to thud down on the terrified villagers, just as it had done all those Octobers ago. The new lava field, under which the old crawfish cannery had been quite buried, and beneath which lay the longboats’ old landing place, stretched black and ugly towards us, ending in a sudden line of cliffs.

  The breeze was blowing steadily from the north, and the captain was a little uneasy, lying off these cliffs now less than half a mile to the south. He decided to look for the island’s lee—logic dictated it was around on the southern side—and so we set off, engines half ahead and ship’s head turned to the east, to work our way clockwise around the colony.

  The tannoy squawked the strange names of the little headlands and cliffs and bays we passed: Pigbite, Noisy Beach, Deadman’s Bay, and sites that commemorated noted events, and which the ordnance surveyors and the naval hydrographers engraved on their maps without demur—Down-where-the-minister-land-his-things, Down-by-the-pot and Ridge-where-the-goat-jump-off. There was a pine forest at Sandy Point, and we could see a tiny hut in a clearing. It belonged to the island’s agriculture department, and was used by Edinburghers when they wanted to go on holiday. It was four miles away from the capital, and you went there by dinghy.

  Back in Cape Town, when we had been contemplating sailing to Tristan, the old mariners had warned us severely of one stark fact: the weather can change in an instant. Never, never leave the yacht unmanned, they all said. If a north-wester blows up it may do so without any warning at all, and a yacht lying off the island’s northern coast would be dashed to pieces on the lava within minutes. I had good cause to remember the advice as we were passing Sandy Point Gulch, and the wind suddenly rose, and all the world went mad.

  It had been blowing a steady Force Six—thirty knots of half-gale that kicked up a moderate swell. But, with a rumbling howl that rose steadily to a shriek, the wind began to blow more and more strongly, Force Eight within five minutes, then Force Ten, and then, before a quarter of an hour was up we were in a Storm Force Twelve and the ship was blinded in a rage of white spray, the anemometers had blown off scale and the barograph was recording the pressure dropping a millibar a minute—all the characteristics of a Pacific typhoon, or a West Indian hurricane. None of the deck officers had seen anything like it in their careers—the gale slammed and battered the little ship, heeling her hard over into the sea, pounding her with mountainous green seas which poured over her decks in thunderous eddies.

  Bows down and shoulders hunched, St Helena rammed her way around the island, which was illuminated by sudden shafts of sunlight, instant rainbows, and over which streamed veils of cloud. We reached the southern edge—a cape where the three-masted barque Italia had been wrecked in 1892, bringing the surnames of Repetto and Lavarello to the island, where they still survive—but the wind refused to calm. In fact, as we pummelled our way further and further around, it became clear that this, unique among all islands I have known, is a place without a lee—there is nowhere to shelter. The gales either blow around the island in some devilish spiral, or else pour as a katabatic torrent up and over the mountain, striking anything below, no matter at what quarter of the compass.

  Without doubt the little green schooner in which I had been planning to make the voyage would have suffered terribly in the storm. Had we been under sail, and north of the island, we could barely have escaped destruction; had we tried to run downwind we would have been blown miles away, quite possibly dismasted, probably overwhelmed. The only escape would have been to hack the halyards with knives and get the sails down in an instant, and run before the weather under bare poles. But I fear we would have reacted too slowly: Tristan weather has a speed and a force to it that is terrifying, and even the old master of our ship, well-found and solid though the vessel was, scratched his head in disbelief and wonder as the winds began to die and the barometer to climb back. Even he had never seen anything like it.

  We spent the remainder of the day tacki
ng gently to and fro off the Edinburgh coast—coming in to the anchorage, steaming ten miles out to sea, returning to home waters, and back again. We had a couple on board, the Robinsons, who were hoping to see how their son David, the island doctor, lived, but who now knew they would never be allowed to land, since Mr Robinson was too old, and his wife had her leg in plaster. The islanders had radioed across that only those who were fit and fleet of foot could hope to make it safely to shore, if the swell ever did die down; the couple called their son on the radio, and he promised to stand and wave to them from the green in front of the Administrator’s house. But they never saw him: whenever he was waving, the ship was steaming the wrong way, and during those moments the ship was close enough and pointing in the right direction their son was on the radio, or dealing with a patient. ‘Everyone here’s got a cold,’ he explained. ‘It must have come from the QE2. Some of our people went aboard her, and once one brings a germ ashore it goes round like wildfire. So I’m pretty busy, like it or not. I sometimes wish ships didn’t call at all. They may bring the mail, but they bring all sorts of illness, too.’ But he added that he was, after all, being paid to deal with illness, and a good epidemic kept him from being bored.

  The replacement doctor, Paul Kennaway, with whom I was sharing a cabin, had brought along the Medical Research Council papers with the results of the detailed studies of the islanders that had been made during their exile in Britain after the eruption. Nearly half of them had asthma—‘hashmere’ being the local word—and almost as many had a plague of parasitical worms. There were signs of inbreeding, too—there had been no new blood injected into the island stock since the early part of the century, and there were problems with eyes, for instance, that owed much to the too limited genetic pool. Asthma was still a serious illness on Tristan, it seemed. Few of the men left home without a Ventolin ‘puffer’—even the hardiest of seamen were afflicted—and when the wind was from the east, and sulphur fumes from the volcano were wafting over the settlement, the sound of wheezing and coughing drowned out even the crash of the surf and the howling of the gales.

  The night passed quietly, and the wind dropped to the merest breeze. The settlement was a cluster of lights until ten o’clock exactly, and then the generators at the crawfish factory were switched off, and every light died. I thought I could make out a few windows lit by flickering oil lanterns and by candles, but it might have been imagination: the community seemed to have been snuffed out of existence, and all around was the impenetrable blackness of an overcast night at sea.

  Next morning the surf was still running high between the tiny moles of Calshot Harbour—great breakers would regularly crash between them and wash right over the masses of concrete dolosse blocks (said to have been shaped after the design of a sheep’s anklebone, and at the core of all new harbours constructed in the southern hemisphere, and to have made their South African inventor millions of rand). But the islanders seemed to think a landing might be possible later in the day, if the weather held. By nine, with the wind now just a gentle and fitful wafting from the south-east, we heard the putter of an old Lister engine, and a blue-and-white boat, flying the Union Jack defaced with the great seal of the colony of St Helena, made its way out towards us. A few minutes later the Colonial Administrator, and the first seven Tristanians to be permitted out of harbour, were standing on our foredeck.

  The islanders were tall and tough-looking, with long-jawed faces and olive skins, tanned by years of exposure to the winds and the sea. They wore identical blue boiler suits, and though some were blond and Nordic, and others dark and Mediterranean, their faces all had a strangely similar look, as though they might be close cousins. Their similarity—of dress, of face, of mannerism—they were all given to broad smiles, to courtly politeness, and to an air that managed to be at once proud and deferential—was vaguely frightening, as though these were aliens from a different planet, making their first contact with what they called ‘the houtside warl’. One, an immense man who was known to all as Lofty, had an oddly deformed left eye; but he had an almost childlike air of fun about him, and was joking and laughing with all around so that I was minded to compare him with Lenny, in Steinbeck—a gentle giant, slightly out of step with the rest of humanity.

  All these islanders, indeed, seemed to step to a subtly different drum—they spoke a pure, though oddly inflected English, they flew the colonial flag, and they carried pictures of the Queen and her children. But there was a difference about them, as though they were detached by more than mere distance and stormy sea from the mainstream of human society. They were British in name alone: before all else they were, without a doubt, Tristanian.

  The Administrator, in sharp contrast, looked as though he had stepped out from the members’ enclosure at Cheltenham racecourse. Roger Perry, a naturalist, a writer, a specialist in llamas, the flora of the Falkland Islands and the animals of the Galapagos, had been on Tristan for six months. He had come out for the morning’s journey, and the first formal greeting with his Governor, in classical British dress: a brown trilby, a tan suit, stout and brilliantly polished brown shoes, a silk tie and a silk pocket handkerchief. He needed only a pair of binoculars and a form guide to complete the picture.

  The Governor stepped into the waiting boat, was joined by two Whitehall officials, the Administrator, the seven Tristanian boatmen, and I climbed in just as Lofty cast off and we were whirled out on to the waves. We chugged towards the harbour and waited, the boat turning in small circles until one huge wave raced in towards the land: the steersman, his jaw set firm, his hand clamped on to the tiller, gunned the engine, rode on to the crest of the wave and shot through the harbour entrance six feet above the levels of the moles.

  It was all over in five seconds. The water was still and calm inside, and there were dozens of helpful hands reaching down to haul us up. A minute later and, my legs unsteady from all the days at sea, I was standing on Tristan soil, watching an Imperial ceremony of great familiarity, played out in touching miniature. The Tristan Boy Scouts and the Tristan Girl Guides, dark youngsters in the brown and blue uniforms sent down from Buckingham Palace Road, stood at attention. A bugle was blown, a banner was raised, a salute was made, an anthem was played—and the Colonial Governor of St Helena was formally welcomed on to the tiniest and loneliest dependency in the remanent British Empire. I found I was watching it all through a strange golden haze, which cleared if I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand: the children looked so proud, so eager to please, so keen to touch the hand from England, from the wellspring of their official existence.

  They all looked as though they were trying so very hard to be British, out here in the middle of nowhere. I found it deeply affecting. I wasn’t alone. I looked around, and saw a young woman behind me, wiping her eyes with a tissue. She was a teacher’s wife, she said later: she had never seen anything quite so touching in all her days. It was proof positive, she said, that there was some good in the old country yet, if the youngsters were still so keen, and had arrived on the quayside without being told, or ordered. ‘They just knew they had to come down and salute him,’ she explained. ‘They’ve been looking forward to it for ages.’

  Ahead of me stretched the village—a cluster of houses, some roofed with tin, some thatched, all with gable ends of soft basalt. All of them had a split front door, the upper half open, the lower half shut to keep out the chilly breeze. The small number of expatriates sent out to help run the island—two teachers, the doctor, the South African padre, the Colonial Treasurer and the Administrator—lived in wooden prefabricated houses, painted black with creosote. There were hedges of flax on all sides, which helped break up the wind, though the Union flags fluttered briskly, and it was better to keep walking than to stand around in the cold.

  But the village was clinging to the edge of a monster. Behind, like a stage set, was a sheer wall of grey, the great basalt cliffs rising to the island summit. The wall was 2,000 feet high, and it was evident that stones were falling with te
rrible regularity—indeed, one massive section of the cliff had broken away at the time of the eruption, and the pale grey scar, with millions of tons of debris spilled in a fan below, served as a potent reminder of the power of the land, and the weakness of those who dared cling to it. Wisps of cloud floated along the upper reaches of the cliff, and all above was invisible, cloaked in thick grey mist, wet and inhospitable. A few sheep clambered up the crags, and cows wandered on the village outskirts. Once I saw an old woman sitting sidesaddle on a donkey, riding back along the colony’s only road from the Potato Patches, two miles from Edinburgh to the west.

  I walked through the village towards the new volcanoes, towards the house I had been told was home to a middle-aged lady named Emily Rogers, about whom I had once read a touching story. Derrick Booy, who had served on Tristan as a naval radio operator during the Second World War, and who has written perhaps the most sensitive of all the few accounts of Tristan, fell briefly, but hopelessly under the spell of a girl then called Emily Hagan:

  The night air was an enveloping golden presence as we stood at the break in the wall. I was conscious of bare, rounded arms, and the fragrance of thickly clustered hair. The lingering day was full of noises. As the sky darkened to a deep umbrageous blue, speckled with starlight, and the village was swallowed by darkness at the foot of the mountain, from somewhere in that blackness came the throaty plaint of an old sheep, like a voice from the mountain. From that other obscurity, silver-gleaming below the cliffs, came the muttered irony of the surf.