Crusoe's Island

by Andrew Lambert

  Policy-makers, statesmen and opinion-formers must recognise that the English/British world view, dating back to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and hastily dismantled in the last four decades of the twentieth, remains potent. Any culture that sees itself in tiny islands on the other side of the world is not ready to join the continental project. Much of this can be read in British responses to the Argentine grandstanding over the Falkland Islands. The curiously old-fashioned combination of economic opportunity, honour and common heritage provide visceral evidence of an enduring global vision, built on common values. The British are not going to abandon these islands. What is more, they retain close ties with other islands that were once part of the Empire. It seems the British are not ready to give up on the ocean, or the tiny specks of land that punctuate it. This sensibility may be the product of large scale global activity over many centuries, but it is best understood by taking a very specific focus, using a single exemplary island to follow the evolution of a unique global vision. That the island in question was neither British nor economically attractive sharpens the focus. Juan Fernández, a tiny, volcanic outcrop in the South Pacific, became British in the imaginations of sickly men and visionary writers because it added something vital to the structure of Englishness – something that was never real, but astonishingly powerful for all that.

  NOTES

  1 Colley, Captives, p. 11.

  2 Colley, Captives, p. 378.

  3 J. Ruskin, The Stones of Venice: The Foundations, London, 1851, p. 1; D. Wormell, Sir John Seeley and the Uses of History, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1980, p. 41–2; J.R. Seeley, The Expansion of England, London, 1883, p. 1.

  4 J.G.A. Pocock, The Discovery of Islands: Essays in British History, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2005, p. 49. New Zealander Pocock takes a radically different view of British history to the current ‘European’ phase of historiography. The founding father of British naval history made the same argument a century ago; see A.D. Lambert (ed.), Letters and Papers of Sir John Knox Laughton, Navy Records Society, London, 2002, pp. 263–97.

  5 F. Nietzsche, The Use and Abuse of History, 1873, tr. A. Collins, Bobbs-Merrill, Indianapolis, IN, 1949, p. 40.

  6 Pocock, The Discovery of Islands, pp. 109–10, 146–8.

  30

  Another Tragedy

  Juan Fernández entered the twenty-first century in flux. A mix of fishing and visitors provided an income of sorts, while the contentious issue of land use was never far from the surface. Yet behind the slow rhythms of island life there were deeper concerns. The other island history – of mutiny and disorder, of British sailors running to the hills, of Spaniards and Chileans desperate to get to the mainland – evolved into darker forms of small island life. At the same time the islands are threatened by another, more all-embracing danger. They have a dynamic history of seismological activity, including three major tsunami events in the past 250 years. Such tourism as there was led the bars and hostels of San Juan to creep down onto the beach, right alongside the jetty, the very area devastated by Sutcliffe’s tidal wave. Fortunately there was an international warning system in place for earthquakes and other tectonic activity. But the warning never came.

  On 27 February 2010 a 15-foot-high tsunami hit Cumberland Bay. It struck before the village received any warning, killing 16 people and destroying the waterfront area of San Juan Bautista. The vital lobster fishery in the bay was left cluttered with wreckage from shattered buildings, fishing boats and even an old Land Rover; this wreckage will take years to remove. The graveyard at the point has a new set of markers, memorials for young and old alike, close by the wrecked commemoration of the Dresden dead. The victims were familiar to all on an island which gets by with so few surnames: they join a select group of buccaneers, naval ratings, convicts and settlers who will call this place home for all eternity. They rest in peace with British, Spanish and Chilean histories.

  The island has slowly recovered, supported by the Chilean Navy, which brings out building materials and takes away the wreckage. The village has been rebuilt higher up the slopes of the mountain. The loss of almost all the hotels, the museum and reliable telecommunications has been a handicap to recovery, while the latest tragedy – the loss of a Chilean Air Force transport plane which crashed into the sea while attempting to land, killing all 21 people on board in September 2011 – only increased the sense of isolation and danger. The weather deteriorated while the plane was en route, and it did not have the range to return to the mainland. After two or three failed attempts, the last proved fatal. On the mainland the political ramifications of the disaster rumble on, while the island slowly returns to the nearest equivalent to normality that can be found at the end of the world.

  This tiny island on the opposite side of the earth will always be Robinson Crusoe’s abode, a magical mixing of Selkirk’s very real residence, Defoe’s imaginary evocation, and persistent patterns of English/British visits from 1680 to the 1930s, as buccaneers, privateers, warriors, ocean harvesters and scientists sought a chance to refit, recover and reprovision on an island that promised to cure scurvy, healing the damaged minds of sickly mariners, while generations of hydrographers sounded and recorded the realities of finding and using tiny specks of land in the Great South Sea.

  The British made other people’s islands their own, burying their dead and naming the key features, and they kept coming back. That Juan Fernández was never taken under formal British rule is less important than the many layers of ownership that built up over time, layers that left the precise, legalistic Foreign Office in no doubt that a good title could be created. The British maritime perspective made the world into a series of islands and sea passages; they avoided the continental land masses favoured by other great powers, to build an oceanic identity, an identity crowned with tiny specks of pure strategic gold, inhabitable islands with good anchorages that commanded key trade routes. Juan Fernández is not so much an island as an opportunity. For three centuries it was the key to the South Pacific; now it is home to modern hopes and dreams inspired by ancient mariners, and Robinson Kreutzenaer, that quintessential English hero.

  Although every island story has been retold and reworked, in a seemingly endless cycle, the scurvied madness of the seafarer, dreaming of the mines of Peru and the fresh green fields of home, retain their power. Immersion in the life of the island enabled me to see English identity from a very different perspective. Crusoe’s island may be a very small mirror, but it can show us who we are. Today there are great holes in the ground at Puerto Inglese, where a lot of money has been spent looking for a treasure that never existed. Sometimes the truth is inconvenient.

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