“Of the islands I’ve cherished most, I met many first in print”. In Island Dreams, Gavin Francis examines our collective fascination with islands. In this short extract, he follows the literature of Charles Darwin, Bruce Chatwin and Herman Melville to remote islands in the Pacific and Southern Atlantic Ocean.
South Georgia and Bird Island, G.W. Colton, Colton’s Atlas of the World Illustrating Physical and Political Geography, Vol. 1 (New York, 1855)
Chiloé
The island of Chiloé is notorious for a dank and macabre mythology in which much of the population is said to still believe: goblins, warlocks and all manner of creatures are thought to populate the caves in the forest along the eastern shore. When Darwin visited in the 1830s there were tales of people accused of devil worship being sent to the Inquisition in Lima. On the island’s western coast, I watched the Pacific. The roar of it, the mother of all oceans, deadened all other sounds. My mind couldn’t begin to grasp the immensity of water: the same ocean lapping the Antarctic, California, New Zealand and countless thousands of atolls and islands sprinkling across the globe’s half-span. From it, tropical sunshine raises clouds which pour rain over the whole of the earth. The number of dialects and languages spoken along these shores was inconceivable, as were the diversity and abundance of the species and habitats dipped in the water that slapped the soles of my feet.
Tierra del Fuego
There was a time in my youth when, like Bruce Chatwin, I was captivated by E. Lucas Bridges’ The Uttermost Part of the Earth – a book about growing up on the island of Tierra del Fuego, at the tip of Patagonia. I went there aged 26, between a spell training in emergency medicine and taking a job as a doctor with the British Antarctic Survey. I travelled north to the Valle Carbajal. Eagles watched warily from low-hanging branches, a Fuegian fox ran off with my bread rolls, at the summit I swung by legs over glaciers the colour of petrified sky. In four days along the trails there were no other walkers.
Bird Island, South Georgia
On our approach to South Georgia, the ship pushed through bands of fog and sunshine, the seas around the ship’s hill teeming with life. Fur seals somersaulted through the water; sooty, wandering and black-browed albatrosses swooped in the ship’s wake. The waves frothed with giant petrels, cape petrels and penguins. I took a ‘tender’ to meet scientists who live year-round on Bird Island – a splinter of rock off South Georgia’s western cape. They handed me a broom handle ‘seal-bodger’ with which I was to beat off any fur seals that approached with fangs bared. Black-browed albatrosses nested along the slopes among the tussock grass. Up on the plateau I tiptoed, awe-struck, between the nests of wandering albatrosses. The immense birds, larger than swans and with a 12ft wingspan, were untroubled by my presence, marvellous in their serenity.