IT started with a headcount gone wrong. When Duke of Gloucester sailed away from the remote island of Tristan da Cunha, to which she had repaired on March 18, 1824, to weather out a storm, Capt Simon Amm accidentally left behind a crew member, Thomas Gooch, a passenger, painter Augustus Earle (1793–1838), and the latter’s dog, Jemmy.
If it wasn’t quite Robinson Crusoe, it was close: the island, ‘a spot hitherto unvisited by any artist’, as Earle wrote in , only had a handful of settlers and half a dozen houses. Despite being stranded with ‘no other preparation’ than his sketchbook, his gun and the clothes on his back, the artist was at first sanguine: ‘We must bear our lot patiently, and endeavour to make the best of it.’ It probably helped that by then he was already a seasoned forgot him on Tristan da Cunha.
