Crusoe's Island

by Andrew Lambert

  The way to the island had changed in the 1970s, when an airstrip was laid out at El Puente at the far end of the island, linked to Bahía del Padre (Horseshoe Bay) by dirt road. The bay has a fine jetty, and massive herds of seals and sea lions that have lost their fear of humans since they acquired protected status in 1978. They bask, play and feed, filling the air with the same snorts, shouts and cries, night and day, that once startled Selkirk and Shelvocke. Then visitors make the ninety-minute trip to San Juan Bautista in a local fishing boat, running along the coast, much as Dampier, Selkirk, Shelvocke and Anson had, bewitched by the sudden strangeness of waterfalls cascading into the ocean, verdant valleys and scorched uplands, weird rock formations and rough beaches. For those able to take their eyes off the scenery a rich parade of marine life offers an alternative spectacle, dolphins and whales supported by flocks of seabirds, quick to exploit the fishy panic caused by hunting cetaceans. These are rich waters, where the Humboldt Current flowing up from the Antarctic meets warmer air.

  Down on the beach at San Juan Bautista, Souhami found an assorted aggregation of shacks, together with the odd new guest house, providing all the accommodation, entertainment and souvenirs required at the end of the world. Alongside the local community, travellers, eccentrics and dreamers could experience the island life, indulge curiously ahistorical visions of hybrid Selkirk/Crusoe figures living on an island that had changed a great deal since 1704, listen to improbably tall tales, enjoy stiff climbs and boats trips laced with sea spray and startling sights. The airstrip may have eased access, but it did nothing to reduce the cost. Tourism remained exotic, and no one comes to Juan Fernández without some thought and a good deal of cash.

  One of the more promising lines of business was ecological, visitors coming to sample the unique and strange flora and fauna. Early visitors only bothered to identify strange plants and creatures if they could eat them, or harvest them for profit. Most of the native sandalwood ended up in China, along with the pelts of the fur seals; the crayfish still travel to their doom in the best Santiago restaurants. Pioneering naturalists and botanists quickly identified many species as unique, and more recently the entire ecosystem has been understood, the remnants of a totally unique pre-human island. Carl Skottsberg’s great book put the island ecosystem on the map. Unique and irreplaceable it may be, but the island is also home to around 500 people, who use it in much the same way that people around the world use their land. They cut down trees for timber and fuel, introduce nonnative plants and graze their livestock. The results have been predictable. Without vegetation the soil erodes, blackberry bushes choke the native species, and cattle compound the ecological problems by exposing the soil and damaging natural drainage. The introduction of rabbits and Uruguayan coati deepened the devastation.

  A belated counter-attack was launched in 1969 when a Chilean biologist with the suitably resolute name of Pizzaro demanded boundaries on the National Park, banning any construction or motor vehicles, exterminating the cattle, rabbits, coati, rats and even cats, along with the invasive blackberry. Four years later the Chilean forestry commission, CONAF (Corporación Nacional Forestal), acquired responsibility for the island, with a mandate to preserve and restore indigenous species. The park boundaries were marked, the exploitation of resources inside the park banned. After decades of living without rule or restraint local people found themselves restricted by a nature reserve, without any say in the way it was run. Predictably they ignored the rules. This led to confrontation, abuse and even violence. While the global attempt to end ecological degradation has many supporters it would appear remarkably few of them live on Juan Fernández. Local opposition did not stop UNESCO declaring the island a Worldwide Reserve of the Biosphere in 1977, a suitably grand title that meant little to people banned from cutting trees and grazing cattle on their own small speck of land.

  Instead the project attracted foreign support. Dutch descendants of Schouten and Roggeveen provided $2.5 million, while Communist Czechoslovakia offered equipment to begin the revival of indigenous species, and chemicals to clear the invasive maquis. Chile would pay the CONAF staff. Boundaries were set: the villagers had 1,000 acres to call their own, along with a section around the airstrip. The state claimed the remaining 24,000 acres and the outlying island of Santa Clara as a reserve. Work on the restoration was always going to be slow; it began with the high forest on the slopes of El Yunque, where some indigenous plants survived. Working slowly downhill the invasive species have been eradicated, replaced with newly germinated indigenes. To reduce losses among new plants the rabbits had a price put on their tails, encouraging the locals to shoot them. Planting fast-growing eucalyptus and cypress trees on the lower slopes helped to stabilise the soil, while providing timber and firewood, reducing the temptation to cut rare species.

  CONAF’s garden and research centre in San Juan provides work for locals and education for visitors, with regular crops of cabbage palms, flowering shrubs, chonta pine, myrtle, orchids, campanula and even sandalwood. The nursery also attracts the indigenous hummingbirds. Reviving the island’s native species holds out the prospect of ecotourism, but the economics of travel suggest that progress on this front will be limited. Things become more complicated when it is understood that some invasive species have become staples of the ecosystem, buzzards feed on rabbits, blackberry is a major source of fruit and the roots helped bind the soil. Other invasive species, right down to the amaryllis, poppies and nasturtiums that bloom brightly along the shores of Cumberland Bay, will be hard to remove. While CONAF wants to decide how the island will be, taking life and death decisions, species by species, ‘like Crusoe’s God’, the pursuit of a perfect restored island has run head first into a simple fact. The presence of people on the island, and the frequent arrival of visitors is the main barrier to ecological reconstruction.8

  Yet there are positive signs. The restoration of adjacent Santa Clara was completed in 2010. Once known as Goat Island, it is now free of goats, blackberries and rabbits, while native species are growing with great success (both CONAF’s seedlings and naturally regenerated plants). On Alejandro Selkirk Island a Dutch-funded goat-clearing programme had to be restrained when the lack of goats allowed the maquis to explode; the task here is on a far grander scale, and will tax the ingenuity of all concerned, unless some way can be found to make the island into a tourist destination. That might require a little imagination.

  NOTES

  1 Skottsberg, The Natural History of Juan Fernández and Easter Island, vol. I, pp. 180–90.

  2 K. Rushby, Paradise: A History of the Idea that Rules the World, Basic Books, New York, 2007, pp. 32, 111–14, 146.

  3 Grove, Green Imperialism, p. 54, citing Marshall & Williams, The Great Map of Mankind, pp. 8, 54–9.

  4 Grove, Green Imperialism, pp. 63, 222–37, 325–6, 454.

  5 Grove, Green Imperialism, pp. 222–5.

  6 Woodward, Robinson Crusoe’s Island, pp. xiii–xxiv.

  7 T. Clarke, Islomania: A Journey among the Last Real Islands, Abacus, New York, 2002, pp. 28–39.

  8 Souhami, Selkirk’s Island, pp. 220–2.

  29

  Islands, Nations and Continents

  With luck, Robinson Crusoe’s island will survive, but what of the English world view that created it? What of Defoe’s half-German, upwardly mobile, middle-class hero, and the vast blue ocean he wanted to rule? Will oceanic Englishness endure amid the stultifying mendacity of the new order, where Europe is the present and the future, a world where curiosity is compressed, and everything can be measured and judged in tabular form? Defoe did not advise his countrymen to follow a core curriculum; his island, real or imagined, emerged from free play of the intellect, opportunity and the human ability to be different. In our conformist culture there are no marginal spaces for the wilder flights of fancy. As we read Defoe’s book we are losing touch with the essentials of his world, a world that consciously turned away from the Universal Monarchies of Europe, secular and religious, an
d the static societies they sustained. Crusoe was tolerant, progressive and enlightened, he saved Catholic castaways, converted heathens and defeated cannibals; he made the land fruitful, and did so without setting foot on the continent. He exemplified the ‘British’ identity of a newly united kingdom, and the dynamic culture that transformed German George I into ‘Farmer’ George III, the royal agriculturalist improver who helped his island bloom. George III followed Crusoe; he never visited Europe.

  The high days of Crusoe’s Empire, the seapower empire conceived by More, Raleigh, Bacon and Defoe, lasted two centuries. It was brought to ruin by the ignorance and folly that stumbled into a massive European war in 1914, and waged it in with such continental intensity that it bled the country dry, emptied the exchequer and pulled the empire asunder. Ironically Britain had won the First World War by December 1914: the remaining years were spent fighting to get the German Army out of France, a task beyond Britain’s means, and eccentric to its interests.

  The rot set in half a century before, when British statesmen compared their empire with that of Imperial Rome, bragging about its size and ubiquity. This Victorian boast should not detain us long. It was at once a delusion and snare. Not all empires are the same, and Britain’s followed the seapower model of Athens, Carthage and Venice, not the militarised continental dominion of Rome. The great swathes of red empire that decorated the British world map of 1900 were mostly empty, uneconomic or assumed. Neither central Australia, nor the frozen North of Canada added as much to Britain’s imperial power as Hong Kong, Gibraltar, Malta or Bermuda, fragmentary insular outcrops that, even taken together did not register as territorial assets. Instead they contained the dry docks, communication hubs, coal supplies and machine shops that enabled the Royal Navy to control the world ocean, and the trade that flowed over it. These tiny islands were the key to British imperium, microscopic dots linked by sea routes and submarine telegraph cables that enabled Britain to exert control without a major land footprint.

  This approach was essential because Britain never had the manpower to rule a continent by force, as the crushing defeat suffered in 1782 demonstrated. The loss of America had more to do with the limited supply of sailors than soldiers; Britain simply could not keep the supply lines open. Having learned a painful lesson in the realities of global power the British rebuilt their empire on the original maritime lines. ‘The sea, the one commodity apart from coal and sheep they had around them in abundance, allowed the British to compensate for sparsity of numbers by mobility and ubiquity.’1 Critically, Britain prospered because none of its rivals had the luxury of such strategic single-mindedness.

  The British experience of Empire was dominated by salt water. After 1782 Britain recognised that colonies of settlement would quickly develop into rooted communities with distinct, local views. Australia, New Zealand, Canada and South Africa were always going to spin off, while colonised peoples only became British by moving to Britain. Only small uninhabited islands like Juan Fernández or the Falklands could become truly British. By forming a link in the imperial chain, they escaped their own limits, much as the British Isles had escaped the limits of Europe, within a larger collective consciousness that tied the state to the sea. And so it is that in the twenty-first century we find the deepest lines of British imperial ambition remain indelibly scored onto the Falklands, tiny windswept outcrops at the end of the earth. The brief conflict of 1982 and the simmering stand-off of the 2010s were, at heart, a question of Britishness. That Britain was prepared to recapture and then defend the Falklands suggests the insular oceanic identity that began with the Tudors has not been entirely overwhelmed by European agendas.

  The obverse of that image proved equally potent. Tiny, remote islands came to occupy a remarkably prominent place in the national consciousness, and they still do. They acquired British histories, British maps, British scientific studies and British economic significance. The island mattered because in the vast web of British power, trade and influence they were so few in number, and the individual threads by which they were connected were so terribly slight. Despite its significance, Juan Fernández remained a dream because it was not necessary. Ultimately the British Empire was different:

  It was Britain’s very smallness that helped to drive – as well as constrain, – its overseas enterprises, for without other peoples’ land and resources it could not be powerful. Small can be aggressive, large can be confident and inward looking. However, there is another side. Because its core was so constrained, and because it depended on maritime power, Britain’s empire was always overstretched, often superficial, and likely to be limited in duration.2

  Tracing the origin of such thoughts is easy. Every commentator on English/British power since the fifteenth century to the Edwardian age recognised the vital choice between land and sea, and understood that if the British lost sight of seapower, as they did when they built a sub-continental Raj and took a major share in the land combat of the First World War, they would be reduced to tourist attractions by the Continental superpowers.3

  The British Empire may be largely a thing of the past; more often the occasion for fatuous apologies that reflect twenty-first century values than coherent reassessment, but is has suffered another, more insidious fate. Modern Britons are profoundly ignorant of their imperial past, having been systematically fed a very different identity, one of Continental origin. The search for a European future has distorted the past. Whether this is conscious, and thereby mendacious, or unconscious, and thereby careless, is of less moment than the impact such a profound shift in national intellectual engagement with the origins of identity will have on future generations. It is hardly surprising that people whose ancestors arrived in Britain as a legacy of Empire, from places as disparate as Hong Kong and Jamaica, India and Africa, are at a loss to comprehend their place in an artificial ‘Britishness’ that is entirely European in construction and regulation. Nor are they alone in this. My Australian relatives face significant barriers to entry into the United Kingdom, while vast populations with whom I share nothing in blood, language, history or culture are free to enter at will. As John Pocock has observed:

  A point has unhappily been reached, however, at which the ideology of European union demands, or commands, that this kingdom’s involvement in France be recognised as more important, because more truly European, than its involvement in the maritime frontier of the Atlantic archipelago.4

  While this is patently absurd it is not a singular example. The British understanding of the First World War is dominated by the appalling tragedy of the Western Front, when this truly global war could only be won with the support of the entire British Empire, formal and informal, made possible by control of the world ocean. Today the British are being force-fed a Eurocentric past, one that denies the centrality of the sea and empire in the construction of all post-medieval English/British identities, reversing centuries of sustained intellectual effort that shifted the focus away from Europe after 1421. Little wonder some in Scotland consider their relationship with Europe more important than their membership of the United Kingdom.

  This ‘European’ past has replaced the ‘imperial’ version because it serves present political needs. The maritime course set after the death of Henry V has been reversed in exactly the same way that it was created. A new past invented to support current agendas is repeated ad nauseam until all connection with other pasts has been lost, at which point it becomes the new orthodoxy. The process will be complete when Trafalgar Square is bulldozed, the Victory recycled, and the mortal remains of Lord Nelson cast out of St Paul’s. This may seem far-fetched, but anyone familiar with the systematic, widespread and deliberate destruction of rejected pasts that followed the French Revolution or Irish Independence, to name but two cases, will recognise that contemporary change requires radical historical recreation on a grand scale. Ultimately, as Friedrich Nietzsche declared in 1873, ‘You can explain the past only by what is most powerful in the present.’5

  A
century ago the oceanic, imperial vision of British history was dominant; historians described the Tudors as aspirational Victorians, turning Raleigh from a gold-crazed nationalist zealot into the architect of their world empire. This version worked because the imperial project had been a success story. In 1913 the Empire was strikingly successful. Insular, isolated Britain had become a world empire without Europe. It could never be a Continental Roman empire; instead it evolved, like all seapower empires, into a looser political model, better suited to the maritime imperium of islands linked by oceans and controlled by fleets rather than armies. This was a conscious choice. Between 1688 and 1914 British statesmen consistently avoided the continental delusion, turning back to the oceans and economic expansion as soon as possible. They recognised that European engagement led to spiralling national debt and standing armies, giving overbearing influence to the political leadership. Naval power, colonies and commerce enabled Britain to influence Europe without being drawn into binding alliances, or military commitments. It was in this context that Juan Fernández became ‘British’. Naval power, economy and the absence of standing armies were rightly popular in a democratic nation.6 This approach enabled Britain to survive and prosper in the total wars of the French Revolution and Empire, and shape the peace that followed.