My World of Islands Read online

  Contents

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Map

  Author’s Acknowledgements

  Introduction – One Man and Many Islands

  North America and the Caribbean

  Saint-Pierre et Miquelon – The Last Outpost

  Nantucket – The Far-Away Land

  The Californian Channel Islands – California Dreaming

  Bermuda – An Accidental Place

  Sanibel and Captiva – A Hurricane is Coming

  Saba, St Maarten, St Barthélemy – The Surprise Isles

  St Kitts and Nevis – First of the Caribbees

  Antigua – A Tale of Nelson’s Bed

  St Thomas and St John – A Visit to Two Virgins

  Europe

  Gotland and Bornholm – Treasures and Battles

  Ameland – A Touch of Winter

  Borkum – The Last Serenade

  The Lesser Scottish Islands – Isle of My Heart

  Isle of Man – A Picture from Childhood

  The English Channel Islands – A Family of the Sea

  Capri – An Island in Autumn

  Corfu – The Green Eye of Greece

  Madeira – The Ocean Garden

  Australasia

  The Queensland Islands – Within the Reef

  Lord Howe Island – Betwixt and Between

  Philip, Churchill and French Islands – Three in the Bay

  Great Barrier Island – The Great Small Place

  The Indian Ocean, The Orient and The Pacific Ocean

  The Seychelles – Round and About Paradise

  Mauritius – Long Live the Dodo!

  Lamma and Lantau Islands – ’Cross the Bay

  Ōshima – Among the Seven Isles

  Kauai – High in the Rainy Mountain

  Tahiti – Slightly This Side of Heaven

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Leslie Thomas’s odyssey is a vivid, personal account of the most fascinating islands at the furthest reaches of the globe: to islands as distant and diverse as Saint-Pierre et Miquelon off Newfoundland and Great Barrier Island off New Zealand, and to places more familiar by name, including Nantucket, Fair Isle, Tahiti, and Capri, this journey voyages to the world’s smaller places.

  Descriptive, evocative and liberally sprinkled with anecdotes, the book weaves together a tapestry of impressions. Beachcombing for local legends, geography, colonial history and maritime lore, Thomas’s search for the mystique of these islands gives the reader a unique insight into an extraordinary and beautiful world of islands.

  About the Author

  Born in Newport, South Wales, in 1931, Leslie Thomas is the son of a sailor who was lost at sea in 1943. His boyhood in an orphanage is evoked in This Time Next Week, published in 1964. At sixteen he became a reporter, before going on to do national service. He won worldwide acclaim with his bestselling novel The Virgin Soldiers, published in 1966, since when he has written numerous works of fiction.

  Leslie Thomas is celebrated not only for his novels, but for his previous travel books, Some Lovely Islands (about a few of the small islands of Britain) and his lyrical book The Hidden Places of Britain. He has also made two television documentaries about islands.

  MY WORLD OF ISLANDS

  Leslie Thomas

  For my son Gareth

  Author’s Acknowledgements

  At the conclusion of this long and, I believe, unusual journey I wish to thank all those many people who helped me to accomplish it; too many to mention individually. Especially I would like to thank those islanders who gave me their knowledge, their friendship and the comfort of their island homes.

  L.T.

  Introduction

  One Man and Many Islands

  Tales, marvelous tales

  Of ships, and stars, and isles . . .

  JAMES ELROY FLECKER

  The world is strewn with islands. Clusters of islands, strings of islands, single lonely specks scattered through the oceans of the earth. Islands with their mountain-heads in the clouds; islands low against the sea; sunlit, windswept, populous, deserted. They mean different things to different beings – to one a paradise, to another a prison. But they have one common ingredient – romance. To people everywhere, and especially those who live in overcrowded cities, there are few more evocative words than ‘island’.

  Bouvet, in the South Atlantic, is the world’s most isolated island. Beset by gales, ice and fogs, it is 1,500 miles from the nearest point of land. Few men have ever seen it and far fewer have set foot there. For years it was lost from the charts of mariners. There once was a story that it did not exist at all: that it was a legend, a dream, a mirage. Ross, the great explorer, reported that he could not locate Bouvet, ‘that child of the mist’.

  At the other extreme, the Scottish isle of Seil can be conveniently reached by a pretty stone bridge which arches across an ocean, or at least a small channel of it. It’s called the Atlantic Bridge. On the island there is an inn where the men from the Hebrides used to change their kilts for trousers before venturing across the bridge to the mainland.

  Between these two is a whole world of islands, each one different. It is many years since I first felt the fascination, the call to journey to them below their capes, in their achipelagos and bays or taking their solitary chances far out in the oceans.

  It all began with the now-famous Falkland Islands. When I was a boy I spent a number of years in an orphanage where there was (I don’t know why) a framed photograph taken long before at Port Stanley in the Falklands. I spent some time studying that worn old picture since wrongdoers were obliged, as a punishment, to stand facing the wall on which it hung. It showed a whalebone arch and some wild-looking buildings; it made me begin to wonder where the Falklands were and what people lived there. At the local library I found the information and there began an interest in islands which, over forty and more years, has grown into a fascination.

  Synonymous with the world ‘island’ – and, for me, this has not diminished since boyhood – are ‘treasure’ and ‘castaway’. Treasure Island must be the most evocative title ever penned by an author (who himself lies buried under ‘the wide and starry sky’ in Samoa in the Pacific).

  Robert Louis Stevenson’s epitaph is, curiously, a misquotation. The original version of his poem ‘Requiem’ has the line ‘Home is the sailor, Home from sea’ which on his grave has become ‘the sea’.

  Treasure islands have, more often than not, proved disappointments to the seekers. The stories of sea captains who buried valuables on islands after a shipwreck only to have mysteriously ‘mislaid’ the place when it came to recovering them, are repeated many times. Years have been spent on half a dozen islands from Anguilla, in the Caribbean, to Gardiners Island, New York, seeking the fabled treasure of Captain Kidd. On Oak Island, in Canada, a century and a half have been devoted to futile attempts to reach supposed billions lying at the bottom of a hole now called the Money Pit. No one has yet worked out a method to prevent the pit from flooding when it is excavated beyond a certain depth.

  Treasure has been found on the sites of known wrecks, notably in the Dutch Frisian Islands, where the gold-loaded La Lutine sank, and among the Isles of Scilly in Britain, where the golden remnants of Sir Cloudsley Shovell’s fated fleet are still occasionally brought from the bottom. Cocos Island in the Pacific has yielded much pirate treasure over the years, but so many people have tried their luck that Costa Rica, which owns the island, has forbidden further searches. In any case the treasure appears now to have vanished under a landslide.

  Throughout this book I have related the fortunes – or more usually misfortunes – of
many treasure hunters. It should not be forgotten, however, that even the thwarted hunter may have quite a comfortable, and certainly interesting, life if he is backed by a syndicate to provide him with funds, perhaps long after his own faith in the project has vanished.

  Castaway stories are rarely as uplifting as Robinson Crusoe (Defoe’s story is based on Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish sailor marooned on Más á Tierra in the Juan Fernández Islands for five years). Most are tales of dire privation, hardship and sometimes courage. I have always thought that the saddest of all is the story of the castaways of Clipperton Island in the Eastern Pacific – they were not shipwrecked but merely forgotten. Twenty people were sent to the island to work the guano deposits in 1913. Every four months a supply ship would arrive, for the island was too barren for self-sufficiency. It failed to appear in June 1914, and it was three years before another vessel visited the island. The company in Ecuador employing the workers had gone bankrupt and overlooked Clipperton and its castaways. Some of the men built a boat and died in an attempt to reach the mainland, and the rest succumbed to scurvy and starvation. A mad lighthouse keeper had to be killed by the women and when the USS Yorktown appeared in 1917, a sorry party of three women and eight children was left.

  On 4 June 1963, exactly 334 years to the day after she sank, the wreck of the Dutch ship Batavia (from Texel, in the Frisian Islands) was found among the coral islands of the Abrolhos group off Western Australia. Its discovery set the seal on a terrible tale of shipwreck, followed by the callous murder of 125 castaway passengers by the deadly crew. Skulls were found with bullets wedged in them.

  The survivors of another Dutchman, the Zeewyde, were luckier. They spent a year marooned on the Western Australian islands, living on seabirds, fish and seals and sitting on the treasure chests they had salved from the ship. From the wreck they resourcefully constructed a small vessel (the first built by white men in Australia) and sailed to the Dutch East Indies – taking the treasure chests with them.

  It is now fourteen years since I set out on the singular travels recounted in the first edition of this book. I believed then that my journey and the book were unique, that no one had set out to visit such a wide range of islands in every part of the world and had set down their experiences in this way. I still believe that this is the case. In the ensuing time I have visited many other islands around the coasts of Britain and in other parts of the world. Accounts of three of them, Lord Howe, lying so beautifully, peacefully and spectacularly, far out in the Tasman Sea between Australia and New Zealand, Saint-Pierre et Miquelon off Newfoundland, the only remaining French possession in North America, and Sanibel and Captiva Islands, on the Gulf of Mexico, have been added to this new edition.

  During the filming of the television series Great British Isles for Channel Four in 1988, I revisited some of the islands around Britain, which for me are as familiar as old friends. I also went to Barra, in the Hebrides, where I had never before landed. Barra is a great, spectacular island, the foreheads of its hills overlooking the flat of the coast. It was here, in the cossetted anchorage at Castlebay, that the MacNeil clan lived in their fortress, Kiessimul Castle, an island within an island, where the present chief of the clan, an American, now comes to spend vacations in a comfortable apartment within the old stone walls.

  In former times, the chiefs lived more grandly; after supper each evening a herald was sent to the battlements to cry, ‘The MacNeil of MacNeils has dined! The rest of the world may now eat!’

  Here I followed in the footsteps of a great island man, Sir Compton Mackenzie (he also lived on Herm and Jethou in the Channel Islands) who had a house there, still to be seen. You can go in and have tea.

  My abiding memory of Barra is of an old lady called Morag who lived in a cottage by the sea and still sang the old songs of the island, one of them called ‘The Fair Maid of Barra’ which was written for her. She knitted me a big pair of socks and sent them to me by post. The landing on the island itself was part of the adventure, as it so often is – this time by plane on the beach. It was an experience on a par with the journey I made years ago with the men of the Great Blasket, off the west coast of Ireland, who took me to their island in a curragh, the slimmest, flimsiest boat ever to cross a tortuous channel.

  I also travelled to Bimini in the Bahamas by flying boat from Miami. It was there that Ernest Hemingway caught his first shark – by shooting it with a rifle (the next bullet went through his foot).

  I sailed with an estate agent who was attempting to sell the pile of Drake’s Island in Plymouth Sound; I returned to Guernsey to peer from the window from which Victor Hugo, exiled from France, looked out to the pencilled coast of his beloved country; and voyaged to Herm, my favourite of the English Channel Islands where Jenny Wood, who loved the island completely and had written about it in an evocative book, Herm, Our Island Home, had lived since the war with her husband Peter. Very sadly, she died just after my visit.

  For me, one of the endearing things about islands is their names – the Desertas; Silhouette; Anonyme; Desolation; the Isle of the Bingo Sea; Nantucket; Anacapa; Murderer’s Island; the Great Blasket; Turtle Key, Cat Cay and Dry Tortugas; the Hawaiian island of Kauai, which is anything but dry; the Grenadines and Ōshima. Sounds that made me want to set sail at once. Sometimes, now, in my house in inland England, especially in winter, I pause and wonder what people are doing at that moment in the Sulu Archipelago or the Lesser Antilles.

  My choice of islands was eclectic. It was impractical to visit even all the most famous islands, including some of those which enticed me by their names. Easter Island and the Galapagos I did not attempt to visit because, although they are among the most isolated places on earth, they are also among the best known. Books, films and television have made them familiar, almost commonplace. I regretted being unable to visit the Diomedes in Bering Strait, one islet belonging to the United States and the other, only a channel away, part of Russia.

  St Helena, Tristan da Cunha, the Maldives, the Gilbert and Ellice group, Yap, the Faroes, Ascension, Pitcairn . . . will all have to wait another time, as will the Falklands, my first magnet. I was all set to go when the Argentines got there ahead of me.

  There have always been people like me, island-haunted. Joe Frahm, whom I met in New Zealand and who has lived on Great Barrier Island, coined the word insulatilia for the condition. Napoleon, the Corsican, exiled to Elba and buried on St Helena, was touched by islands; Mark Twain visited many and recorded the same comment about most of them – that when he died he would rather be transported there than go to Heaven.

  Islandmen have constantly sought other islands. Joseph Banks, explorer of Tahiti and the islands of the Australian Barrier Reef, also explored Fingal’s Cave in the Hebrides. A Nantucket whaler gave his name to Starbuck Island in the Pacific; and another Nantucket man, Foulger, found remnants of the Bounty mutineers on Pitcairn. It was men from the Shetlands, north of Scotland, who were the first real settlers on the tiny West Indian island of Saba. Among the Californian Channel Islands is remembered one William Henry Davies, a smuggler, who was the stepson of John Coffin Jones of Hawaii; and Coffin is also a Cape Cod island name. On Great Barrier I met a man from Lord Howe; in Mauritius one from the Whitsunday Islands. On Santa Catalina was a couple who loved Guernsey in the English Channel Islands and in Guernesy I was given names of people I would meet in Corfu.

  I would like to think of myself as one of the company of islanders. I began the long journey in front of my own fireside, of a winter, reaching for every book I could find that had been written about islands. Then followed the joyful exploration of maps, discovering capes and coves, and learning the names of small places across the earth.

  Then came the going – travelling (light with a single bag) from one island to another, those contours on the maps becoming real rocks and beaches, and those names transformed into towns and settlements, houses and people, who became my friends and whose lives and adventures I have recounted in this book. Every sort
and facet of human life came my way on those islands. Show me an island and I will show you a world.

  Given my fascination for islands, I have often reasonably been asked if I would ever live on one. I have to answer honestly that I do not believe I could. There are some, like the Isles of Scilly, or Lord Howe, where I could happily stay for an extended time. But in the end I know I would have to leave and return to my home in the middle of Southern England. Since writing the original chapters of this book I have moved house from rural Somerset to the cathedral city of Salisbury, a similar twenty miles or so from the sea.

  But I continue to enjoy islands. The adventure of them, the maps, the approach, whether by boat or plane, the shape and size, the weather, the people, and above all, the stories. I always promise my hosts and myself that I will return. Sometimes I have. But there is always another island, a new place, beckoning somewhere.

  I suppose I am one of those people who can be described as anecdote-prone and there were few places where some oddity did not occur. In addition I made it an object to reach as great a variety of islands as possible. Those I have written about in this book are in many different climes; some have an ancient civilization; some are still wild; some have the traditional beachcomber’s palms waving about a lagoon; some are assaulted by regular storms; some creak with winter ice.

  Men have seen islands in different ways – as a prison, as a paradise, as a penance. Islands have been sought as a refuge, although this motive can go awry as it did, so the story goes, for a wealthy American in 1939. He tried to find an island sanctuary for himself and his family – somewhere to hide throughout the oncoming war. He chose a spot far away in the wide Pacific ocean. It was called Guadalcanal, in the Solomon Islands, and it became one of the bloodiest battlegrounds of World War II.

  For me the travelling to these small places of the world was both an adventure and a pleasure. I hope that you find you can share in the voyages and the feelings.