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This excerpt is truly one of the best things I've read recently:
> It stems from a somewhat bizarre British government decision, taken during World War II, to reclassify some of its more remote island possessions as ships. Tristan was transmuted into HMS Atlantic Isle, and its role was to patrol (from its rock-hewn state of immobility) for any German U-boats that might be lurking in the southern Atlantic. To compound the fantasy a small party of sailors was posted there to man the ship
A better one:
"For though I sedulously followed the rule of taking nothing and leaving nothing, it suddenly seemed to me that my very being on the island, and my later decision to record my impressions of that visit and the impressions of earlier visitors, had resulted in a series of entirely unintended and unanticipated consequences—consequences that were as inimical to the islanders’ contentment as if I had plundered or polluted there.
"I had no understanding whatsoever that by repeating that naval officer’s memoir, I could hurt the feelings of anyone. To my clumsy, unthinking, touristic mind, the notion seemed quite absurd. To be sure, old Kenneth Rogers had explained it to me kindly—but I had chosen to ignore his warning, to dismiss his assertion of feeling. I had failed, even for one second, to consider what he and his fellow islanders might think—because I held to an unspoken assumption that as a visitor from the sophisticated outside, I knew better, and that I had something of a prescriptive right to do with him and his like, more or less as I pleased...."
Referring to land bases as HMS dates from 1805.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_frigate
The British MOD's Vulcan Naval Reactor Test Establishment at Dounreay in Caithness in the north of Scotland used to be known as HMS Vulcan [0].
No effing way. I'm sorry, no way. This is like the Simpsons with:
Homer, I'm in a rhubarb of a pickle of a jam here.
I was all set to go off on vacation when I get called up for jury duty.
Oh, it's a corker of a case.
Seems a man drove up onto a traffic island and hit a decorative rowboat full of geraniums.
Now they're trying it as a maritime offense.The Royal Australian Navy does this too
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMAS_Stirling
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMAS_Albatross_%28air_station%2...
Appears to be a legal oddity. Renaming the islands to boats must have seemed an easy solution at the time.
>Under section 67 of the Naval Discipline Act 1866, the provisions of the act only applied to officers and men of the Royal Navy borne on the books of a warship.
Hasn't the US done this too, even if not recently then at least historically?
The Royal Navy still does this today though.
The British Empire also holds a similar tiny island in the Pacific: Pitcairn, population 67, inhabited by the descendants of the Mutiny on the Bounty: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutiny_on_the_Bounty
It is mainly notable for a contentious rape trial in 2004: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitcairn_sexual_assault_trial_o...
Long form Vanity Fair article, which is sufficiently similar to the OP that at first I thought I was rereading the same essay: http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2008/01/pitcairn200801
On the slightly larger side, I was able to visit Easter Island at one point. Depletion of natural resources led to an all out class war that nearly wiped everyone out (see: the popular 'Collapse' (2005)). It is a very eerie place to visit because there is not much vegetation across large parts of the island and you can see the the extent of the island in all directions standing on one of the peaks. I couldn't really put my finger on it at the time but I definitely had an uneasy feeling being in such a remote location in the middle of the vast ocean. It hits you in the gut that you would be trapped on this tiny speck of land if it were not for the occasional airplane or cargo ship. I can only imagine what crew of the Bounty (or any other shipwreck) felt.
I visited Pitcairn Island a few years ago, staying with an island couple. It's a great place to explore and I found the islanders friendly and welcoming.
There is an aspect of wariness I think with outsiders amongst them - especially those who are journalists or involved in media in some aspect. They've been bitten before and had their lives written about (Dea Birkett's book Serpent in Paradise comes to mind).
Interesting, I had thought that the Bounty mutineers had died out because of lack of genetic diversity/lack of resources already.
Not quite the same, but there are islands in the St. Lawrence in Quebec that are similar backwaters. My father has been hunting snow geese on Ile-aux-Grues, just across from Montmane, Quebec. At this point, there are only about a dozen families on the island that stay there and continue doing the guiding/dairying lifestyle that is traditional year-round.
I wish someone translated http://www.kulturalna.warszawa.pl/kapuscinski,6,4351.html?lo... into English - it was one of the most mindtwisting books I've read for a long time.
I had the same reaction, though I'll note that it rapidly becomes obvious it's a different story.
I looked into the quote from Pascal. It turns out to be from his "Pensées" (Thoughts). In the original French, the passage in question reads:
> Quand je m'y suis mis quelquefois à considérer les diverses agitations des hommes, et les périls, et les peines où ils s'exposent dans la Cour, dans la guerre d'où naissent tant de querelles, de passions, d'entreprises hardies et souvent mauvaises, etc., j'ai dit souvent que tout le malheur des hommes vient d'une seule chose, qui est de ne savoir pas demeurer en repos dans une chambre.
One English translation (http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl302/texts/pascal/pensees-...) renders this as follows:
> When I have occasionally set myself to consider the different distractions of men, the pains and perils to which they expose themselves at court or in war, whence arise so many quarrels, passions, bold and often bad ventures, etc., I have discovered that all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber.
I think I would translate that last bit as "... I have often said that all the unhappiness of men derives from just one thing: not knowing how to sit still in a room."
It's a lot more subtle than that.
| "de ne savoir pas demeurer en repos dans une chambre."
Is literally: "To not know how to remain at rest in a room"
There is certainly no mention of one's own room, but it is a conclusion one could draw from the previous paragraph: these issues would certainly be avoided if one did not leave their house, but without additional context, it's not the only conclusion.
From the given context, my interpretation is closer to its literal core: people cannot content themselves to be still, in a state of calm.
People routinely and actively flee moments of calm, moments of idle. Glance around public transport, and you'll see people cramming every second with something - the ageless inability to remain calm in a room.
If you don't feel like reading the article, he was banned because he wrote a book exposing some private details of the lives of two residents.
He was OK with it because the details were publicly available, but not easy to access. The residents were not happy about it.
He feels bad about it, and won't fight it even though he would win.
He concludes by asking tourists to try to have a greater feeling for the people you visit.
I wouldn't use the word exposing for something that was already in a book and known by enough people to be an annoyance.
I also wouldn't use the phrase private details for "she talked with some guy one night, nothing ever came of it".
Alternative version:
Writer was banned from remote British island with 275 inhabitants and a gene pool restricted to 7 families. Apparently he wrote about a lieutenant's memoir in which he mentions being interested in a local girl during WW2. The woman is still alive and her husband did not like the story being written about.
The writer is not satisfied with this rather simplistic ending to his article, so he creates a narrative of insensitive tourists that make natives sad. The final message is that tourism is a plague on society and we should all just stay at home.
The author seems to come to grips with the islanders' scorn, and apparently agrees that it was improper of him to retell this story.
...which he is retelling again in this article.
I'm a little confused about the true depths of his contrition.
The purpose of telling the story the first time was for selfish reasons. The purpose of retelling the story now is for selfless reasons.
I'm betting he thinks the islanders can tell the difference.
He addresses that near the end.
Related - an article I wrote about the settlement of Tristan da Cunha and the history of micronations last year. [1] There are also some fascinating clips of the island on Youtube (including the odd, 19th century sounding variant of British English spoken there) if anyone is looking for interesting procrastination material. [2]
[1] http://theappendix.net/issues/2014/7/the-king-of-the-islands...
The level of inbreeding on that island is quite scary. Although if they purged a lot of the deleterious alleles from the population, if they outbred with others, they could produce much healthier offspring and a lower likelihood of various genetic ailments.
They sound pretty American. More than British people, for example.
The Microsoft billionaire who arrived on Namibia’s Skeleton Coast with five helicopters full of bodyguards, and demanded that all available local lions be collected in one oasis so that he could see and picture them.
Obnoxious and disgusting.
Don't get worked up by one highly stylized sentence from someone trying to make a literary point. There isn't nearly enough information here to pass that kind of judgement.
Who would that be? Not Gates surely.
Tourism is a double edged sword. Large chunks of the world with very fragile eco-systems, sometimes the last few of a species depend on the tourists for their income. But tourists don't have quotas and too many of them destroy the thing they seek to find. It's a delicate balance. Kudos to mr. Winchester for realizing that all by himself on that boat, it's a hard realization that the best tourists are the ones that you can't see.
Case in point, Maldives:
"Maldives island swamped by rising tide of waste"
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/29399966-e80b-11e4-9960-00144feab7...
It's one of the most beautiful places on earth that you must visit to truly appreciate. But each extra person generates a load on that fragile ecosystem that diminishes that beauty by a little bit.
I had a hard time getting the point of this article at the end about why he shouldn't have written the original story. Anyone have an insight or some other way to get that point across?
All I can imagine is the guy who didn't want the story told was upset because it reminded him his wife was longing for that other guy but otherwise it's really hard (as a dumb american) for me to understand why that story would bug anyone. And it's certainly hard for me to understand why the author would get banned by the island rather than just hated by the guy who brought up his wife's innocent history.
I loved the article. Well written and certainly compelling to read and fascinating all the way through. I'm just wondering what I missed or some other way to see it and truly grok it.
It was the revalation that what he, and evidently you, think is innocent, is not de facto true. It was not innocent to them, and he realized that he was warned of this but didn't respect it.
It illustrates a great point about freedom of speech: You are free to say what you want, but that does not mean it's without consequences.
He was asked kindly by a man on the island not to publish anything embarasing about his wife. The writer thought the story would entertain others and improve his book so he disregarded that request. The islanders decided that someone who wasn't open to reasonable requests from them wasn't welcome on their island.
> I had a hard time getting the point of this article at the end about why he shouldn't have written the original story.
You really do sound like the lawyers in the story suggesting he sue to get readmitted. I'm sure it's not just Americans, but Americans in particular really do often look completely oblivious to the opinions, usages, general culture and way of life of the other, non-American people they encounter abroad. Edit: just look at the other posts in this discussion, talking about "the first amendment" when the whole story had nothing to do with the US at all (the UK, and presumably Tristan as well, don't have anything close to a law safeguarding free speech).
Maybe just because they make up a large amount of the tourists in the world, and therefore also a large part of the oblivious tourists as well.
When tourists showed up on Kerguelen island (which isn't comparable to Tristan as the population isn't permanent, but those who stay there for a full year are indeed the ephemeral natives of the place) it was always the Americans that were full of themselves, had their weird expectations and got angry when we couldn't get them fizzy water, or anything fizzy but not Orangina, or "ok just get me a beer right... wait, no not this shitty French beer". Or who wanted to touch the albatross chicks. Or bring home a gentoo egg. Or... "who are you to tell me not to do that? Call your manager right now."
Somehow even French government officials, for all their disconnectedness and abuse of the limited resources not intended for them, or most other foreign tourists, could at least get a sense of the place, and understanding of the people, at the very worst they were aware that they did not understand everything.
Wow, this is sounding very anti-American now that I'm reading this again. But my experience of tourists on a few remote islands really taught me that Americans often seem completely unprepared to meet places and people that aren't either America and American, or completely devoted to catering to their every wish and expectation.
You don't have to understand why people think differently than you do. But when they do and you are their guest, just listen to them and accept that they are different people in a different place, with different rules and different means. It's easy for me to understand how one guy could turn the few hundred inhabitants of his island against one foreigner.
I had a few hypotheses on this:
- There is more to the story, and the public part was enough for islanders to deduce the full story given what they knew. E.g. she had a child to the sailor who was raised by someone else, or she had an abortion.
- Extra marital sex was so taboo in their culture than a story that even implied it might have happened would be a scandal.
- The husband simply found the story offensive, and had enough influence in the community to get the journalist banned.
> And it's certainly hard for me to understand why the author would get banned by the island rather than just hated by the guy who brought up his wife's innocent history.
They're all one big family.
I've been fascinated by this island for the past 10 years now. It was an isolated community where you could study its composition in an entirety of its isolation. The island has charming place-names such as "Ridge where the Goat jump off" and "Down where the Minister land his things." The island's official website, tristandc, is put together by the villagers themselves. Thus I wondered, where do they get their electricity from?
So, I corresponded with the island's administrator (who, along with the village's doctor, is from England - only 'foreigners' or outlanders allowed on the island.) The only outlanders who are permanently allowed on the island are anyone who's been shipwrecked, which is how there are two Italian families there now (or is it one?) He explained that there's a crayfish factory owned by a South African company on the island that employs roughly half of the villagers. The factory is powered by diesel generators and for their exclusive deal with the islanders, the generators power the village.
The other half of the employed villagers work "for the government." He didn't really expand on that point, but I took that to mean that part of the jobs are the make-work kind. Because of the harsh climate, the dominant food is the potato and the administrator, Mike Hadley, told me many of the dishes are potato based. The villagers drink an ungodly amount of alcohol per capita, and every year they crew boats to the nearby Gough island where they collect bird eggs for eating. Rest of their supplies are shipped once or twice per year, so saying that they buy in bulk is an understatement.
The islanders are very shy and self-aware of what's perceived as their backwardness. But they appear to be rather charming, in their own way. Whale oil trade made the remote island attractive for resupplying whaling ships, but after the industry's collapse the islanders got cut off. Their genetic pool got cut in half after a single boat capsized and men were lost in a storm. Their speech patterns, fashion and culture lagged behind the times- almost literally by centuries. Their reconnection to modernity happened after the volcano erupted post WWII, and the islanders were evacuated to London for a couple of years. And now, they let tourists on for a few hours and charge a steep fee for a visa stamp.
The island is in middle of nowhere. You really have to pull up a map and slowly zoom out until it sinks in that they're basically living on a desolate volcano: https://goo.gl/maps/CTLn9
But for all its remoteness, the island "caught" a floating oil platform back in the mid-2000s with all its serial numbers filed off, and claimed salvage rights. And of course, at the time I wanted to move to the island and bring them wind turbines.
>the women knit large woolen sweaters called “ganzeys,”
Now that's fascinating. 'Ganzey' is a perfect phonetic pronunciation of the Irish word for sweater which is 'geansaí'.
That's just a an evolution of the pronunciation of "Guernsey"[0]. I'm not sure how they say it but it doesn't sound very far from the original to me (and the Irish doesn't seem very different either).
As an aside, Winchester's books on the development of the Oxford English Dictionary are wonderful, especially "The Surgeon of Crowthorne".
I highly recommend "Krakatoa."
I finished this article thinking it must be fiction. I had heard of an island in the Atlantic called Tristan da Cunha, and I figured the general outline was similar to what the article says, but the way the more and more unusual details of the story accumulate makes it read beautifully like someone trying to pull your leg. Amazing that it seems to be true.
His book, Outposts, is a really decent read. Not as good as his original bestseller, The Surgeon of Crowthorne though.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outposts:_Journeys_to_the_Survi...
Personally I think the first half of the article was fantastic, then it tapered off toward the end. But ultimately, my takeaway is that we should be more considerate in all aspects of our lives about how our actions affect others, which is a good resolution, even if the moral of the article was a bit muddled by the end.
I recently wrote a highly upvoted comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9444578) on another thread whose parent article discussed why people rarely read much any more. I railed against authors who overly enjoy the sound of their own words.
As a follow-up I'd like to point out that this article kept me riveted right through. It was interesting, intriguing, and written without the multitude of irrelevant tone-setting sentences that plague so many so-called "long-form" articles today.
In my humble opinion, well worth a read!
I'm sure your reasons are just as valid as my own for forming an opinion, but I've always wondered if the people who enjoy reading because of the linguistic qualities, rather than the content, are really just spending too much time looking for ways to feel superior. Then again, maybe I'm being critical in an attempt to feel superior. Who knows and/or who cares I guess.
heh this island reminds me of Odd John's island before they supposedly self-destruct