Tristan da Cunha - Isolation Station

27 November 2011 - 03:29 By © Stephen Gray
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Stephen Gray spends three weeks on the most remote inhabited island on Earth

'Sail-ho!" the children would cry, to awaken the settlement, if ever a vessel hove into view around their lowering shores. During the 19th century, that meant every few years, and in the 1920s this island went without contact with the rest of humanity for all of nine years. Even today, it is serviced by the icebreaker, SA Agulhas, only annually. And so on its September-October run I found myself cast away there, with only a couple of other tourists, like the driftwood islanders hoard for lack of trees. That was for three weeks in what is billed as the most remote inhabited island on the planet.

Sea sprayed and shaken, we are helicoptered off the trusty ship which over the past week has carried us south from Cape Town. We land on the field beneath their only schoolhouse, sending cowpats flying. The entire population (never more than 300) is lined up to witness this event: tourists arriving from the "houtside whirl". There are six of us, apart from a few technicians and engineers, and we are the only ones there will be all year.

So for us it's as the signboard says: "Welcome to the Remotest Island in the World." Two hefty islanders guard the much-photographed notice, then hide it away again. We "furriners" watch our transport, the SA Agulhas, sail off into the grey horizon.

Their destination is another part of the archipelago, Gough Island in the Roaring Forties. There is the South African weather station, due for its annual provisioning and change of staff. Meanwhile we are to be marooned on Tristan da Cunha for three weeks.

Now this is a very challenging place to be marooned, never mind that curious castaways are warmly welcomed by the Tourist Office. Note that it has the boldest address in the universe: South Atlantic Ocean, TDCU 1ZZ. The double Z is possibly because, on Tristan, unless one works in the packery when the boats are in, one sleeps a lot.

For a start, the island happens to be an old volcano that rises, covered in ice, out of the sub-Antarctic chill to twice the height of Table Mountain. Most of us knew that when it blew in 1961, the entire settlement on one slope had to be evacuated as the lava poured down.

Less well known is that these good folk turned their backs on civilisation, electing to return to their rocky outpost. Nowadays their descendants happily guide you in the great sport of clambering over the immense, porous lava beds. At their margin, a museum is being built out of fresh pumice, soon to display souvenirs of their famous catastrophe: half of the village gone, and the entire kreef-processing plant pushed off the rocks into the growlers and blinders.

Tristan seems always to have attracted news-making disasters. Recently on neighbouring Nightingale Island, a tanker was grounded, fouling one of the planet's most noted colonies of rockhoppers. So unfamiliar with people are these cheerful, plumed penguins that they waddle right up to you, wanting to know the time of day. With us was a lady researcher from Rhodes University, weighing and ringing them in their rookery. But that was before the big oil spill. Next, a huge industrial fishing vessel lost its rudder and needed rescue.

My own stay was without such life-threatening dramas. I admit my staunchest winter clothes were hopeless, so that I had to borrow an entire extra layer. This was covered in fish-scales, with fish-hooks left in the pockets, as if to hint that I should also be out in one of those rocking dories and earn my keep.

Instead, I volunteered to assist the caddy of the new administrator when he teed off into one of their gales and his golf ball came straight back at us. Alternatively, I could stomp off to help weeding in the salty potato patches.

We visitors merged into the locals soon enough. There are no hotels, or even guest houses so we were billeted with families. Thus the order of the day was checking out how one's neighbour was managing across the flapping laundry. And then on down one of the three tarred roads to catch the gossip in the next hunkered cottage behind a windbreak, with another cup of tea and muffin.

When the fog, sleet, hail and generally fluid pummel came down - and this was in September, which is meant to be spring - there was always the hearth to retreat to. With collie dogs and the fattest cats, spectacular ratters all, we huddled down with BF BS-TV. That means the British Forces Broadcasting Service, which, like all the weather, comes in from the Falklands - believe it or not, Tristan is a British Overseas Territory. It is dependent on St Helena at that, and when I was there their overall governor had not even managed to visit it yet.

The only supermarket is stocked almost entirely by Pick n Pay. Soon you learn to give up on sell-by dates. But then, what do you have served for dinner but the world's freshest rock-lobster tails?

It is South Africa that upholds the local economy. Some 300 locals, taking turns in six longboats, haul up their famous crop of kreef, or spiny rock lobsters, for the South African-funded packery, which results in the local salaries. We are talking of the gong belting out at dawn on only 30 or 40 days per annum, when fishing is declared safe in those raging, cobalt waters. Then the fathers and sons venture out, while wives and mothers wait patiently in the harbour with flasks and sandwiches. At the Albatross Bar thereafter, the favourite reward is Sedgwick's Original Old Brown. We are talking of hardy, stoical folk, who otherwise have to attend to their marshy vegetable patches out on the island's only level plain.

Historical links with South Africa also abound. Although the official version is that this desolate outpost had to be founded in the 1820s to prevent Napoleon from escaping his final exile, I discovered that the newly independent Americans were rather the real problem. Their privateers during their war of independence were pillaging and sinking the British East India Company's fleets only too efficiently. Hence the good old Cape Corps had to be despatched, 500 of them, and to this day the main run-off of snowmelt is named Hottentot Gulch. Then we have a chronicle of endless shipwrecked sailors, with slave-girls imported as wives.

The savage central peak (twice the height of Table Mountain) was not to be scaled until a radio team was established there during World War 2. Today the island is a listening post registering the illicit tactics of atomic miscreants and global warmers.

Meanwhile, the town still has only one cop. His holding cell has never been occupied.

My own special interest there was something no local would bat an eyelid over: their abundant and unique bird life, cob webbing over every corner of the heavens. Indeed, one of the star turns is their yellow-nosed albatross, with a wingspan wider than any human being may stretch. Once, when my intrepid American companion and I managed to land on the island's opposite rocky beach, the cry went up: "Molly, Molly, duck Tom!" Poor Tom was the tallest of us, and being strafed by not one, but about 100 of those patrolling, indigenous splendours.

The next big event had to be the new administrator's Public Notice. The whole community was invited to a dance, to welcome the new administrator, whom we had brought in with his wife. And this was not the first-ever crepe-streamered, cocktail-dispensing shindig in the Prince Philip Hall either, for likewise celebrated were weddings and baptisms, I thought rather suspiciously close together.

So when the cry went up from the school kids on the cliff-side, "Sail-Ho!", it was lump-in-the-throat time. For there, over the silver whalebacks and dolphin races came our fine service and rescue vessel, on schedule too. All the locals were lining up once again, in bright anoraks and homespun woollen beanies. Their single cop was keeping them orderly behind a lava rampart, their Union Jack flying high.

Our surveyors had made their estimates of how the harbour-wall should be repaired, our movie-maker had got his extreme landscape shots. And there were we cosseted interlopers being lifted up, sending the cowpats flying once again. Farewell then, until the next batch, a whole year later.

Before me, I discovered there was only one other professor of English actually to visit Tristan, although several have written about its quaint old use of dialect. He was Roderick Noble of the Cape Monthly Magazine - in 1873. His opinion was that, after all, the Tristans were probably better left to their tall tussocks, without any further intrusion from the "houtside worl", as they pronounce it. Agreed.

Quick Facts

The SA Department of Environmental Affairs runs a yearly working research and logistical supply voyage to Tristan da Cunha every southern spring, with the few passengers included handled by Table Bay Marine (at 0215314700). Prior permission to land must be obtained from the Island Council, who maintain the right to veto all applications. Accommodation with three meals a day is available only in private homes at £40 per diem, assigned by the cordial tourism officer. Prospective visitors should prepare with Peter Ryan's Field Guide to the Animals and Plants of Tristan da Cunha and Gough Island, published in 2007, or the updated Bradt Travel Guide. Day trips to the sanctuary of Nightingale Island may be arranged, weather permitting.

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