Travels in a Thin Country

by Sara Wheeler

  In the brilliant indigo bay Juan Fernández fur seals were swimming around a rotting jetty.

  ‘Your countrymen,’ said Figueroa, ‘hunted them almost to extinction.’

  I was quite used to being held responsible for the actions of the entire British nation. It was part of the job description. He was referring to the sailors who skulked in and out of the Pacific in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and killed the double-coated Juan Fernández seals for their thick underfur and their blubber. The pelts were dispatched to China to be turned into felt, and the blubber was boiled down for oil. Entrepreneurs from North America couldn’t resist it, either, and within a five-year period at the turn of those two centuries three million fur seals were killed off Juan Fernández.

  The boatman, waiting next to his small blue boat, lifted the lid of a box Figueroa had unloaded from the plane.

  ‘Tomatoes!’

  It was a highly dependent community: almost everything had to be flown in or sent on an infrequent sea cargo service. We even had a gross of eggs with us.

  It rained. Wind and rain are as much a feature of life in the archipelago as they are in the Shetlands. As we pulled round the bay and out into the ocean the cliffs and rocks, spotted with seals and striped ochre, veiled themselves in a fine mist. It was a cold, wet ninety-minute trip. About half way, the first wooden boats appeared, fishing for langostas Juan Fernández, large red crustaceans like pincerless lobsters which dominate the island economy and fetch a hefty price in the wealthy districts of Santiago.

  Cumberland Bay and the wooden buildings of the settlement were circumscribed by forest. It was not an inhospitable sight, and it presumably gave Selkirk some measure of courage when he was rowed ashore in 1704. He was the sailing master (like a first mate) of the Cinque Ports, a British privateering vessel circumnavigating the globe. It had not been a happy journey, and at Juan Fernández Selkirk had a row with the unpopular captain over the ship’s seaworthiness. When the captain insisted on continuing, leaks or no leaks, Selkirk demanded to be set ashore. (Defoe decided that a shipwrecked but innocent Crusoe was a better idea.) The story goes that Selkirk’s courage failed him as his colleagues rowed back to the Cinque Ports, and he shouted that he had changed his mind. The captain had not. Selkirk was not a man of phlegmatic disposition, and when he realized what he had done it nearly killed his spirit.

  Later, the island was named Más a Tierra (Nearer Land), and the second island over a hundred miles away became – obviously – Más Afuera (Further Out). It was Crusoe, not Selkirk, who became an international star, and Más a Tierra was renamed after him in the 1970s. Further Out was simultaneously transformed into Alejandro Selkirk.

  The first person I met on the island was an old salt called Robinson Green. For no reason except to welcome me as I stepped ashore he shook my hand enthusiastically, so I took the opportunity of asking his advice on where to stay; I wanted to rent a room in a cottage. Robinson thought for a few moments, then spoke to Manolo the boatman, who, it turned out, had built a cabin in his garden. A workman from the electricity board was staying in this cabin until the next day.

  ‘But you can rent it after that,’ said Manolo, wiping grease onto his trousers. ‘Come and stay at our house tonight.’

  Robinson was delighted, which I later found out was particularly generous-spirited of him as his family owned a ‘hotel’ on the island. After Manolo had dealt with the boat we walked along a wide mud street which turned into a coastal path, and at a small house next to an even smaller pine cabin Manolo said, ‘Welcome’.

  Inside we sat on chairs covered with penguin pelts and drank pisco while Mrs Manolo made six loaves of bread. I learnt that I was to share a bed with a twenty-two-year-old daughter. Manolo told island stories. Even isolation wasn’t what it once was.

  ‘Now the government pays for schooling on the mainland for all children over eight – didn’t when I was young. They’re brought back by the navy in December, and leave again in March. Mind you, we still don’t have a doctor.’

  They did have a nurse, and she was one of the most important people on the island as it was she who decided who was sick enough to require a free flight to the continent.

  ‘We still don’t have telephones, but we have access to a radio phone sometimes. There’s no crime here, you know – none at all. We can leave our doors open.’

  In the evening I went to a café on the waterfront and ate a fried fish under a naked bulb, rain and wind pounding on the cracked windowpanes. People came in and out, and chatted over congealed sauce bottles. When I got back, Manolo and his wife were studying their accounts on the kitchen table, the Sony system between them pumping out the music of the Smurfs.

  The next morning was bright and clear, and after moving the carpetbag into the vacated cabin I set off for Selkirk’s lookout, in a saddle in the mountains where he climbed each day to search the horizon for rescue vessels. The vegetation translated itself from eucalyptus groves to rare indigenous ferns and creepers, and then to pungent rainforest, and the smell of the rainforest hit the back of my throat like nitroglycerine. At the top I stood among red hummingbirds looking out at tiny langosta boats crawling around the rich sapphire of the bay.

  I had long cherished the idea of visiting that spot, as it was what William Cowper had in mind when he wrote ‘The Solitude of Alexander Selkirk’, which begins famously, ‘I am monarch of all I survey’. Cowper knew a good deal about isolation and incapacity, though he had learnt it while surrounded by people. Selkirk and the island were Cowper’s perfect symbols of the terrifying solitude of mental anguish. The poem goes on,

  O Solitude! where are the charms

  That sages have seen in thy face?…

  How fleet is a glance of the mind!

  Compared with the speed of its flight,

  The tempest itself lags behind,

  And the swift-winged arrows of light.

  When I think of my own native land

  In a moment I seem to be there;

  But alas! recollection at hand

  Soon hurries me back to despair!

  The cabin was sandwiched between the mountain, which always wore a turban of cloud, and the bay, and it had its own balcony, with a treetrunk table. It even had a tiny kitchen, though buying anything to cook in it was barely possible. There were half-a-dozen shops on the island, all with five shelves lined with widely spaced tins of spam and tinned peas and numerous packets of a product called fairy whip which I supposed to be a food substance rather than a sex aid. There were no fresh goods. I enquired if anyone made their own goat’s cheese which I might buy. They did not. Was there no fruit in season? There was not. On my third day, with a small flush of triumph, I located a tin of olives.

  One night I ate at the Daniel Defoe Hotel with two Danish chemical scientists on an adventure holiday. They were the only guests there. The salt and pepper on the table were kept in old Jean Patou perfume bottles, which didn’t go down very well with the Danes. We were served mussel soup and langosta cooked in wine and cream, and it was very good. I guessed what the dessert would be before it arrived and, yes, it was fairy whip, as pink as nail varnish and I imagine fairly similar in flavour. After dinner I looked through the visitors’ book. In 1989 HMS Newcastle had docked. A marine signing himself Phil ‘I can’t whistle’ Renton had written, ‘This place very similar to Berwick-on-Tweed,’ and his colleague below him, ‘Had a few, got pissed, then did duty watch.’ I had to explain this to the Danes, and they spent the next hour suggesting Danish equivalents to Berwick-on-Tweed to each other. Exactly ten years before my visit (a decade only took about twenty pages of the book) I found Gavin Young’s entry. He had described himself as ‘another Robinson Crusoe and a dipsomaniac to boot’. Pinochet, on his page, had been less self-deprecatory.

  The days went by, and I followed paths that tipped over mountains and rubbed themselves out or sat on walls talking aimlessly with anyone who stopped (it was starting again they had trouble with, not stopping)
. I made friends with one of the three policemen. How the island justified three, I couldn’t imagine. I watched people making jewellery out of black coral wood. They carried branches of it from their boats, and the wood looked as if it came from a regular tree, but inside the flaky bark it was black and nacreous and had to be cut with a hacksaw. I was initiated into island lore. One of the more recent additions to its tomes concerned a collision between the only two vehicles on the island. It was hard to believe that this impressive victory over the laws of probability had actually occurred; but they all swore it had.

  Another popular story involved a plane that crash-landed in the bay on its way back to the mainland, and it illustrated the importance of langostas in their lives. This tale was recounted to me half a dozen times, always embroidered with the same details about how it was the pilot’s birthday, how he radioed a distress signal to the village and they all came out of their houses to look for the plane, and what a great crack it made when it hit the water (they all remembered that). The story always ended with the same dramatic climax. ‘And do you know what? There were three hundred langostas on board.’

  At the back of a cemetery on the western edge of the village someone had put up a monument with an inscription in German. It was in memory of the dead of the cruiser Dresden, which sank in Cumberland Bay on 14 March 1914 when the captain blew up the magazine. It had been cornered by the British warships Kent and Glasgow while it was trying to get repaired, and shells from the battle were still embedded in the cliffs past the lighthouse. This was my first encounter with the Dresden. In southern Chile I was often to hear stories of its almost miraculous passage up the coast.

  I went to mass. The thirty islanders in the diminutive church shouted choruses in a very un-Catholic fashion. When I spoke with the Argentinian priest afterwards he was rather apologetic about the size of the congregation, as if it were his fault; perhaps it was. Four hundred miles of Pacific and a meagre five hundred and fifty potential converts hadn’t deterred the Pentecostals, or the Mormons, or the Jehovah’s Witnesses, all of whom had established a base in the village. The growth of other Churches and sects is a Latin American phenomenon, not a Chilean one; in many countries – Guatemala, for example – the influx of ‘new’ denominations is even more visible. It has been likened to a new Reformation.

  The Pentecostal movement, which claims most Chilean Protestants, rooted itself in the continent in about 1910 and grew swiftly in the 1930s and 1940s in the expanding urban centres. As traditional social structures collapsed, notably the feudal haciendas, Pentecostalism offered an alternative to a Church which the migrant poor identified with the Establishment. Everyone participates in a Pentecostal service; it doesn’t replicate the rigid, hierarchical nature of society like traditional Catholicism. It’s no wonder that they went for it, or that they still do go for it.

  Protestantism has come a long way in Chile. An Englishman travelling through in the 1790s found that everyone was convinced Protestants had a reptilian, Satanic tail. One old woman lifted up his coat tails to find it – or that was her story.

  The Mormons sustained an impressive growth-rate in Chile throughout the 1980s, and in 1992 they were claiming over 314,000 Chilean members. According to Mormon teachings, two prophetic utterances have conferred special status upon the country. The nice man I met at the vast and gleaming headquarters of the Church of the Latterday Saints in Santiago a couple of months later told me that more than half their missionaries were still North American. The close identification between the Mormons and the United States, and specifically US money and foreign policy, was presumably one reason why their chapels were subject to terrorist bomb attacks whenever a US politician visited the country.

  Two Frenchmen in their fifties came to the cabin. They were on holiday on the island for six weeks, and didn’t like it much.

  ‘We heard you were here. Come and have dinner with us.’

  They had read an article in a French magazine describing Juan Fernández as paradise on earth, like a Bounty ad. It had led them to expect sun all the time, warm seas, delectable food, comfortable accommodation for several francs a day and lots of people who spoke French. It wasn’t like that, and the pair of them spent a good deal of time plotting revenge on the journalist who had so cruelly deceived them.

  One was a Vietnam veteran. He had fought in the Algerian War in the late 1950s, too, and later it came out that he had been a mercenary in Africa for fifteen years. His card was embossed with the words ‘Légion d’honneur’ in a heavy Gothic script. He was entirely bald, and had halitosis and the most extraordinary piercing pale blue eyes. His companion, also a retired military man, was much quieter. His wife had died of cancer a year before, and he seemed to be only half present. The bald man insisted on two large rounds of sweet martini, and found a bottle of champagne to go with the rabbit, the only dish on offer at the restaurant. It wasn’t champagne actually, it was sweet foamy liquid, like Asti Spumante. In his cups the bald man began to rave.

  ‘I never sleep, you know. Hardly at all. Can’t be bothered with tablets. I go over things in my mind, you can’t imagine. If I could draw, I could draw my memories for you in the finest detail, though most of the people in them have been dead for years. You don’t forget, you know. Africa, Indochina, Algeria … I always see one face, Bernard Groutier, he was twentytwo, and he was going to marry my sister. He was one of the best – we were never apart. He would have been my brother-in-law. Smashed in the forehead at point-blank range.’

  The pale blue eyes had filled with tears.

  I had asked if it would be possible to go out with a langosta fisherman.

  ‘Of course,’ said a boy who often stopped on the wall. ‘You can go out with my dad. You don’t get seasick, do you?’

  ‘No,’ I laughed.

  He came back later and told me to meet his father, who was called Alejandro, at seven-thirty the next morning, by the jetty.

  There would only be one thing more difficult than finding the right Alejandro in Juan Fernández, and that would be picking out the Robinson you wanted. The entire male population of the archipelago were eddying around the little harbour in their woolly hats, preparing their boats, filling water containers and pulling on yellow oilskins.

  When I found him, he was a wiry little man with a deeply creased face, like a tortoise.

  He said, ‘You don’t get seasick, do you?’

  ‘No,’ I said confidently.

  ‘Are you sure?’, he said doubtfully.

  ‘Yes,’ I said loudly.

  Alejandro shouted across to another fisherman that he’d be back around seven. This meant that we’d be out for almost twelve hours. The other man replied that he was going to Santa Clara island for three days, and I thought, You’ve got off lightly.

  Alejandro’s first mate rowed the twenty-five-foot Norma Hortensia to the jetty. The mate was in his early twenties and had a startling exuberance of hair and a sour expression which turned sourer as he watched me climb in. He muttered to Alejandro, ‘I bet she gets seasick.’

  We rowed out, switched on the motor and puttered to the edge of the bay, where I was handed a spool of line and told to catch small fish (as if I had any say over what size of fish might bite). I did catch some fish, and they were small, fortunately. Most of them were used to bait large ones, which in turn were going to attract the langostas, and Alejandro fried the last six over a fire he made in a tin drum. They were sweet and delicious, but I only ate one, as my stomach was on my mind.

  Langostas are caught cooperatively. Wooden cages are suspended from floats and drift permanently about a hundred and twenty feet under, whereupon hungry crustaceans crawl through the large-holed rope netting on one side to take a bite out of the juicy fish in the cage. The fishermen simply take it in turns to service the cages, and they pull them up by hand. Some of ours contained as many as thirty langostas. The first mate measured the body of each scrabbling red creature with an object resembling a bristle-less metal scrubbing brush
, and if it didn’t meet the standard requirement (about nine inches body length) it was tossed back. The others were stored in a wooden compartment; on shore they are kept alive in seawater until they leave for the plane. They must arrive in Santiago live, for if they are cooked dead they lose their flavour.

  I believe the scientific name for the langosta Juan Fernández is Palinurus Frontalis, a species which has no common name in English but which is referred to, along with several other species within its group, as the spiny lobster, rock lobster or marine crayfish. Why the genus was named after Aeneas’ helmsman I do not know – except perhaps because Palinurus fell into the sea when he dozed off on the job.

  The pair mainly worked in silence. They regularly spent several days alone together, and seemed not to feel the need for verbal communication. They were either concentrating on catching things or far away on their own private oceans; the first mate didn’t address a single word to me during the long day we spent in the small boat.

  When we moved out into the ocean a violent swell tossed the Norma Hortensia into the air. I clamped my jaws together. Several waves broke over us. I turned my head away from Alejandro and swallowed hard. We were trying to spot the floats of a missing cage, and twisted around fruitlessly. My stomach contracted urgently.

  When we headed back to calmer water, Alejandro started talking about lunch. Even the word made my throat go into spasm. I lay down in a snug hole under the prow and watched two rosy langostas vibrating in the pot. Twenty minutes later Alejandro split one in half with a chopper which looked like a murder weapon and placed it in front of me, bright white flesh and gooey brown entrails gleaming in the pink case. The men licked out their shells and set about a flat black fish they had fried on a griddle. I lay back on my bed, where I remained for the next few hours, snoozing (this was not respite, as I suffered two-second dreams in which I was suspended by my feet from the top of a tall building) and occasionally calling out questions in an attempt to allay suspicion. I was not sick.