Thomas - My World of Islands

Leslie Thomass 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 worlds 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, Thomass search for the mystique of these islands gives the reader a unique insight into an extraordinary and beautiful world of islands.

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.

Leslie Thomas

For my son Gareth

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.

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 worlds 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. Its 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 dont 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 Stevensons 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 Shovells 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 (Defoes story is based on Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish sailor marooned on Ms Tierra in the Juan Fernndez 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