Angry Island: The Story of Tristan da Cunha (1506-1963)

By Margaret Mackay

Tristan da Cunha is both a remote group of volcanic islands in the south Atlantic Ocean and the main island of that group. It is the most remote inhabited archipelago in the world, lying approximately 1,511 miles (2,432 km) off the coast of Cape Town in South Africa, 1,343 miles (2,161 km) from Saint Helena and 2,166 miles (3,486 km) off the coast from the Falkland Islands. The territory consists of the main island, Tristan da Cunha, which has a diameter of roughly 11 km (6.8 mi) and an area of 98 sq km (38 sq mi), the smaller, uninhabited Nightingale Islands, and the wildlife reserves of Inaccessible Island and Gough Island. As of October 2018, the main island has 250 permanent inhabitants who all carry British Overseas Territories citizenship. The other islands are uninhabited, except for the personnel of a weather station on Gough Island.

Tristan da Cunha is part of the British Overseas Territory of Saint Helena, Ascension, and Tristan da Cunha. This includes Saint Helena and also near-equatorial Ascension Island, which lies some 1,741 miles (2,802 km) to the north of Tristan. There is no airstrip of any kind on the main island, meaning that the only way of travelling in and out of Tristan is by boat, a six-day trip from South Africa.

Angry Island: The Story of Tristan da Cunha (1506-1963) by Margaret Mackay was first published in 1963, the year the Tristanians returned to their island after its volcano erupted in 1961 and forced the evacuation of the entire population to England. As the most isolated inhabited island on Earth, the Tristanians have had to adapt and develop innovative ways in order to survive, and in this book, Mrs. Mackay tells a very detailed history of Tristan da Cunha since its discovery over five hundred years ago, sharing many shipwreck tales and early yet failed attempts to settle the island.

A gripping read!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Muriwai Books
• Release date: Dec 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9781789125160

Margaret Mackay

Margaret Mackay (1907-1968) was an American author who lived and travelled in many parts of the world and began writing at the age of six. Born on November 19, 1907 in Oxford, Nebraska, she was brought up and educated in America and obtained dual British/American citizenship when she moved to London. She married a Scotsman in Peking, China, whose family had lived for three generations in Tientsin and Peking. Her early married life was spent amid the war lords’ campaigns, guerillas, bandit scares and the long Japanese invasion of China. Her husband was killed in action during the fall of Burma in 1942. Mrs. Mackay was the author of several novels, including the semi-autobiographical Valiant Dust (1941). She also wrote children’s stories and features which have appeared in such magazines and newspapers as Vogue, The Queen, The New Yorker, Punch, The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, Saturday Evening Post, The Times, The Toronto Star and The Sydney Herald. She died on October 14, 1968, aged 60.

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Text originally published in 1963 under the same title.

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Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

ANGRY ISLAND

THE STORY OF TRISTAN DA CUNHA (1506-1963)

BY

MARGARET MACKAY

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 3

DEDICATION 6

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 7

PROLOGUE — THE LONELIEST ISLAND IN THE WORLD 8

PART ONE—EARLY ADVENTURES 11

1. Discoverers of a Desert Isle 11

2. The Dogged Dutch and a Marooned Skipper 14

3. Swindlers, Sealers and Smugglers 18

4. A Lost Naturalist 20

5. The Pirate King of a Treasure Island 22

6. A Robinson Crusoe—and Perhaps a Murderer 25

7. ‘Tristan Luck’ and a Modest Hero 27

8. A Romance at the Cape and an Exile on Tristan 30

9. Yo, Ho, Ho, and a Pirate’s Last Words 36

10. The Loss of H.M.S. Julia 38

PART TWO—SAIL AND WHALE 42

1. Betrayals and Disappointments 42

2. The Castaways of the Blenden Hall 45

3. Adventures and Misadventures 52

4. A Marooned Artist 54

5. A Cargo of Wives 58

6. The Heyday of the Yankee Whalers 61

7. Refugees and Runaways 64

8. The First Missionary 67

9. The Great Exodus 70

10. The American Civil War in the South Atlantic 79

11. The First Royal Visit 81

PART THREE—SHIPWRECKS AND FLOTSAM 84

1. Five Shipwrecks 84

2. Two Hermits on Inaccessible Island 86

3. Family Rule 89

4. The Cowardly Captain, his Wife and Daughter 93

5. Cats, Donkeys and Alice in Wonderland’s Uncle 96

6. The Fateful Arrival of the Rats 100

7. An Island of Widows 102

8. Clinging to the Rock 109

9. The Grand-Opera Shipwreck and the Two Italian Castaways 113

10. A Queen’s Portrait and a Cargo of Whisky 118

11. An Accident and the Boer War 121

PART FOUR—MISSIONARIES AND BARTER 126

1. An English Housewife on Tristan 126

2. ‘Hanimals’ and ‘Wisitors’ 134

3. Feasting, Mumming and ‘Dawncing’ 138

4. A Businessman and the Prodigal Sons 146

5. Sail Ho! 152

6. The First World War and a Parson’s Bride 156

7. The Critical Explorers from the Quest 164

8. Courtships, Weddings and Birthdays 167

9. Appling Days and Ratting Days 170

10. Luxury Liners and a Psychic Priest 174

11. Pioneers and Pilgrims 181

12. A Sociologist Sums Up the Settlers 187

13. A Sensitive Sailor in World War II 195

PART FIVE—CHANGE AND ERUPTION 202

1. The Post-war Boom and Another Prince 202

2. Earthquakes 207

3. Eruption 209

4. Evacuation 214

5. England 218

6. A New Life 221

7. To Stay or to Go 224

EPILOGUE—‘NO PLACE LIKE HOME’ 229

BIBLIOGRAPHY 235

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 237

DEDICATION

To

Sir George Thomson, F.R.S.

with warm thanks

for his kind help and advice

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Opening parcels after the arrival of a long-awaited ship from the ‘Outside World’

(Photo: S.P.G.)

Boats on Little Beach

(Photo: E. O. Hoppe, courtesy of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel)

Thatching a roof with tussock grass

(Photo: S.P.G.)

Oxcarts bringing stores up from Big Beach

(Photo: Camera Press)

Village elders at their open-air council meeting

(Photo: Camera Press)

St. Mary’s Church, 33rd Dedication Festival. The Procession after evensong

(Photo: The Rev. Philip Bell, courtesy S.P.G.)

Some of the stone cottages in their tussock gardens

(Photo: C.O.I.)

The Potato Patches, with ancient extinct craters in right foreground

(Photo: Camera Press)

Two little girls in the traditional white knitted stockings and oxhide moccasins. The one on the left is wearing a Cape ‘kappie’ in the style brought to the island in 1816

(Photo: E. O. Hoppe, courtesy S.P.G.)

Spinning the local wool, which has just been carded with the implement on the bench

(Photo: Camera Press)

Frank Glass making oxhide moccasins

(Photo: Camera Press)

Map of Tristan da Cunha

From the survey by Allan Crawford 1937–38

(Photo: Courtesy of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts)

Panorama of the island with its continual cloud-belt

(Photo: C.O.I.)

The fresh eruption above one of the deserted cottages

(Photo: C.O.I.)

PROLOGUE — THE LONELIEST ISLAND IN THE WORLD

When I met the Tristan da Cunha refugees at their camp in the Surrey hills, after the island volcano had erupted late in 1961, I was shown a pile of the school children’s essays. The themes were their new life in England and their day’s trip to London to be taught traffic safety-for at home they had never seen a car, train, horse, or even a real tree.

I wondered what had most impressed them. The glittering shops? Buckingham Palace? The strutting red-coated guardsmen?

Again and again appeared the words, ‘The river Thames.’

‘Why?’ I asked, puzzled.

‘Because it was water, and there were boats,’ they told me.

And their teacher added, ‘They miss the sea.’

No wonder. For the sea was their home. The high, stormy island of Tristan da Cunha had been for more than a century and a half the most remote inhabited land on earth—until for a year it became a desert isle again.

The captain of one of the big liners in the South Atlantic, who had seen the distant cone many times, told me that he understood. The isolated rock was like the deck of a ship under their feet. So they have clung to it almost fanatically for generations, and were determined to go back.

There are other strong reasons. And it has been fascinating to find that the patterns of the past have built up, like Tristan itself, a mountain of incidents to show why it is natural and inevitable that most of the islanders should have felt impelled to face any risks, any hardships, to go home.

‘They are the most marvellous boatmen,’ said the South Atlantic captain.

They have had to be, to survive in those fierce and frantic seas, in their small home-made boats of canvas and driftwood. Every Tristan boy has learned to handle a dinghy and to fish as soon as he was big enough. The pride of his adolescence has been a place in a longboat, each built and owned by several men. And while he learned to row, he learned to swim-to save his life. But there is little swimming for pleasure at Tristan, since sharks hover near that small treacherous coast with its ghosts of floundering castaways.

The ocean around the island is more than 1,000 fathoms (6,000 feet) deep: a graveyard for the many vessels wrecked over the centuries—some described, others unseen and unknown. An explosion in the Tertiary era blew the great symmetrical cone up to its height of 18,000 feet from the bed of the South Atlantic—6,760 feet above sea level.

The round island comprises some thirty square miles, is seven and a half miles in diameter, and has a coastline of about twenty-one miles. It is wheel-shaped, spoked with giant precipitous gulches of eroded lava. The slope rises steeply, with only a bare toehold on the north-west corner for a settlement. The ascent is so abrupt that the old crater at the summit, with its mile-round lake of icy water, is only four miles from the sea in any direction.

Down by the shore there are dark basalt rocks and black lava sand. Midway up the mountain, around the so-called ‘Base’, it is moist and lush with tree-ferns, waist-high or more, and an almost constant belt of cloud. Then from the ‘Second Base’, above the timber line of 5,000 feet, the rise is so steep and cindery that even the sure-footed islanders rarely make the climb, except as guides to exploring foreigners.

The Tristan archipelago contains two much smaller islands, Inaccessible and Nightingale, each less than twenty miles south-west and south-south-west of the main island, and about nine miles apart; and two islets, Middle and Stoltenhoff, but all are uninhabited. Gough Island, 250 miles distant, is also desert.

Other lonely islands of adventure—such as Pitcairn, Easter, Midway, Christmas, or Juan Fernandez—Robinson Crusoe’s isle—are much nearer other populated archipelagos or a mainland.

But Tristan da Cunha squats almost in the middle of the South Atlantic, roughly half-way between South Africa and South America. It lies at approximately 370 South latitude—near the ‘Roaring Forties’. Its nearest inhabited neighbour is the island of St. Helena, 1,200 miles north.

No wonder it has been known as ‘the loneliest isle on earth’.

Ships have been rare, especially since the end of the days of sail. Until recently their visits were often many months and sometimes years apart. Ever since the founding of the colony in 1816-17, settlers have longingly scanned the horizon.

Never for a moment in their lives, before their evacuation in 1961, had most of the 264 islanders been out of earshot of the huge waves crashing against the hundred-foot cliff above the beach. Never had they been far from the salt sting of spray and the reek of kelp. Their sixty-odd stone cottages cling like seabirds’ nests to the windy lava shelf at the foot of the volcano: a rolling plateau about five miles long and two miles wide, squeezed between the mountain and the ocean. Sometimes the winter gales last a fortnight. Even some of the thick low cabins have been blown down from around the great fireplaces where the families keep warm, cooking their fish and potatoes, knitting the white wool stockings and shaping the oxhide moccasins, telling gossipy stories and singing the old songs of the sea.

There have been explorers, sealers, whalers, pirates, adventurers, deserters, traders, sailors from men-o’-war and privateers, marooned men, perhaps a murderer whose buried treasure may now lie for ever under the new lava. But most of the islanders are descended from castaways, who in turn have cared for the later castaways buffeted ashore after them.

It was fated that their descendants were to become castaways from the land rather than the sea.

Not even the foreign geologists had supposed that the Tristan volcano would ever come to life. The archipelago lies on a submarine ridge which divides the Atlantic longitudinally with many volcanoes. Some are active as in Iceland; some dormant as in the Azores; others extinct, like Ascension and St. Helena, and—it was assumed for centuries—Tristan da Cunha. Scientists estimated that the last eruption took place some 2,500 years ago. Then the Royal Society’s geological expedition ventured on to Tristan in 1962 to investigate the fresh activity, and determined that the last flow must have occurred only between two hundred and three hundred years before.

A number of old minor craters pit the landscape here and there—some, like the Ponds, blue-eyed with water. The island children and donkeys have long made a playground of a cluster of grass-grown cinder cones on the Settlement plain near the Potato Patches.

‘These illustrate the fact,’ wrote a missionary’s wife in the 1920’s, ‘that at one time Tristan must have been a centre of immense volcanic activity, and one of the hottest spots on earth. We were thankful that this was so only in prehistoric times.’

It seems characteristic that after hundreds of dormant years a new crater should have ‘chosen’ to erupt directly above the one tiny stretch where human beings could live and scratch a subsistence.

There were no aborigines on Tristan, and even the first few squatters did not appear until after 1800. Had there been any early tribes, they would doubtless have had a frightening mythology of the island gods.

The Christian colonists developed a stoic acceptance of merciless nature around them—not without minor superstitions of their own; many of the men were even afraid of going out in the dark. Tracing its history, it has seemed as if, from first to last, some malevolent force was trying to impede man’s puny claims to plant a foot on the shore. Events have appeared to pile on the agonies like cheap fiction or the exaggerated plot of an opera. Through the centuries nearly every human challenge to share the unfriendly rock went wrong; until at last, the giant woke and tossed off the persistent little creatures.

For a year Tristan da Cunha was alone once more.

And yet—

‘We will go back,’ said the people, even in the hour of rescue, and over and over again, until it came true.

PART ONE—EARLY ADVENTURES

1. Discoverers of a Desert Isle

The first recorded mariners to see the beautiful and sinister peak rising from the clouds of the South Atlantic were Portuguese sailors in 1506.

Throughout the previous century the painted caravels from Lisbon had been exploring the west coast of Africa. They had ventured farther and farther into the mysterious south, fearing to fall over the edge of the world, but hoping to find a sea route to India.

Eighteen years before the discovery of Tristan da Cunha, the vessels of Bartolomeu Dias had been blown around the legendary Cape of Good Hope—which he first named the Cape of Storms.

Fourteen years before Tristan was sighted, the Genoese captain Cristoforo Colombo, sailing under the Spanish flag, had discovered America.

Eight years before, another Portuguese, Vasco da Gama, had found the long-sought ‘passage to India’—the sea route to rich Calicut, or Calcutta.

Six years before—in 1500—his compatriot, Pedro Alvares Cabral, had discovered Brazil.

Thereafter the early European navigators found it expedient to sail south to touch the bulge of Brazil, which is roughly opposite the bulge of Africa; then eastward across the South Atlantic to the Gulf of Guinea, and then again southward around the Cape of Good Hope to the Indian Ocean.

In the hilly harbour of Lisbon two cousins, who started as friends but later were to quarrel, took part in a plan to send an expeditionary fleet to India in 1506, to prevent the Arabs from again controlling the valuable pepper trade of Malabar. One cousin was the voyager and diplomat, Afonso d’Albuquerque, who was destined to become the second governor of India and a great national hero. The other was Admiral Tristão da Cunha. (The surnames are often spelled ‘Dalboquerque’ and ‘d’Acunha’ and in other early forms.)

According to The Commentaries of the Great Afonso Dalboquerque, King Manoel I meant to send Tristão da Cunha as governor. But when the fleet was ready to sail, he ‘fell ill with giddiness in the head, whereby he finally became blind’.

Fortunately, the next year da Cunha had recovered his sight. And the king sent him off again, as admiral in charge of six ships and four hundred men, to bring back the precious Indian peppercorns. After the frustration of his temporary blindness, King Manoel consoled him with a mercenary boon: he was allowed to travel in a vessel of his own, the Capitão Mor, to do some private trading.

It was a grim time to try to man an expedition. Plague was killing thousands of people in Lisbon. The fleet was being fitted out at Belem, the ancient port of the capital on the river Tagus, but no one wanted to risk sailing with seamen from infected Lisbon. Admiral da Cunha finally started across the bar on the morning of April 5, 1506, with his vessels gravely undermanned.

Captain d’Albuquerque, meanwhile, was delayed by losing his pilot, who had fled into Castile two days earlier after murdering his wife. Portuguese captains were aristocrats—hidalgos—and the piloting of ships was supposed to be left to professional sailors. But he quickly tired of cooling his heels ashore, and since he was obviously a brilliant seaman, he set sail with his caravel himself. Further, he brought along some replacements of crew to fill up the Admiral’s half-empty ships.

Admiral da Cunha—a stubborn, stocky man—refused to have them for fear of plague, and ordered them put ashore when they reached Biziguiche in Brazil. However, while the fleet ‘stayed refreshing’ in port, not one man died or became sick. So the commander relented. He ordered that the healthy men replace his own who had died or fallen ill. The sick men were to be returned to Portugal in a caravel which King Manoel had anxiously sent along for the purpose.

Now the fleet moved out to double the Cape of Augustine, but it was late in the season and the winds were contrary. The caravels were unable to round the cape because of Admiral da Cunha’s private trading vessel, which was a bad sailer. So they tacked again towards Guinea, the others continually keeping back to wait for the Capitão Mor. The urgent weeks dawdled on, with the approach of winter across the Equator, and the other captains growled.

The only one who dared to protest was gaunt Afonso d’Albuquerque. He ordered his men to lower a boat and row him over to the flagship for an audience with his cousin in the high cabin in the poop. He suggested that, since the private trading vessel could not keep up with the fleet, they might leave it behind with another ship, whichever his cousin might choose.

The Admiral declined huffily, ‘which produced angry words between them, and for good reason’.

Later da Cunha grudgingly realized that he was losing more by not reaching India the same year than he gained by making the fleet wait for his ship.

When they were near Ascension Island, he hung out the square flag for a conference. Swallowing his pride, the Admiral told them that they ‘should each make way with what speed he could, and wait for him at Mozambique’.

It was too late to regain the time they had lost. They had to sail south of the usual course to get the wind. They wandered far into wintry southern waters. Expecting hot Africa and India, the crews lacked warm clothing. Some died of cold. Others were too weak to man the sails.

And when they were all in their course for doubling the Cape of Good Hope, as the morning broke they came in sight of land very extensive and very beautiful.

When Afonso Dalboquerque saw it, he went and spoke with the Admiral, and told him that since it had not yet been discovered, they ought to make for it and know what land it was.

As this advice seemed good to the Admiral, he gave orders to work his ship to windward, so as to come up with it; and all the others did the same, and when the evening was come he shaped his course again as at first.

This land proved to be some islands, to which they gave the name of ‘Tristão da Cunha,’ as he was the first who discovered them.

And sailing along past them just as the sun was on the point of setting, the wind began to blow so hard, and with so many showers, that the ships were unable to keep with the Admiral, and all separated from him, except Afonso Dalboquerque, who followed him, and they kept on their way together for some days with a favourable wind.

One might imagine Admiral da Cunha landing in a small boat, excited and picturesque, but there is no record that he ventured to set foot on the forbidding coast.

He may have sent a boat ashore before the squall, for long afterwards, other visitors found goats on Tristan, which had no indigenous land mammals. It was the custom of the Portuguese explorers to release a pair of goats on desert islands, so that later, when they or their countrymen returned, they would find meat.

Subsequent Portuguese voyagers apparently did not make use of their goats—and very little of the tiny archipelago. It was too remote. Nevertheless they showed it for the first time on a map in about 1509: ‘Islands which were discovered by Tristão de Cunha.’

2. The Dogged Dutch and a Marooned Skipper

For a century mariners seem to have ignored the unpropitious isle of Tristan. Then the Dutch began to reconnoitre it.

Its next record appears in the log-book of the captain of the ship Bruinvis, outward bound from Amsterdam to the East Indies in September, 1601. At night the officers sighted the looming silhouette of an island they had not seen in the daytime. They cautiously stood off until dawn, and then approached the coast. It was a high island and round, covered on top with snow. They searched for a landing-place, but could find none because of the steep cliffs on all sides, so they moved away again.

‘Then,’ says the log-book, ‘they felt a great whirlwind rapidly coming down from the heights of the land.’

The first British sight of the island was reported nine years later, in May, 1610, by the East Indiaman Globe outbound from London. The ship’s log states that the captain had hulled, fearing to come near the shore in the ‘strong wynde’. The crew saw ‘dyvers foules’ which followed them from Tristan to the Cape of Good Hope.

Many other vessels of the British East India Company must have glimpsed the aloof peak throughout the rest of the seventeenth century as they carried their cargoes of spices, silks and porcelain.

In 1617 the Dutch United East India Company captains followed a new westerly and southerly course for both the South Atlantic and the Indian Oceans. Thereafter Tristan is often mentioned in the Dutch log-books as a landmark by which the skippers could check their situation and course.

The first verified attempt to go ashore was made on a winter day in June, 1628, by a Dutch fleet en route to the Indies. A ship’s mate wrote that they lowered a boat to try to find an anchorage near the shore, but again the men found nothing but a high, snow-capped mountain with barren cliffs.

Summer weather brought better luck in mid-February, 1643, when the Dutch captain of the Heemstede stayed for eight days. They ‘took in very good fresh water, while the crew was refreshed with vegetables, sea-mews, penguins, seals, and very good fish, in surprising abundance’.

This report encouraged the directors of the Dutch East India Company. They were founding the colony of the Cape of Good Hope in 1652, and they thought an outlying naval base might be useful. In 1654 they wrote to Jan van Riebeeck, the famous first Governor of the Cape Colony, to send a ‘convenient vessel to examine the islands of Tristan d’Acunha to find out what means they possess for being made a revictualling station’.

The next April, Governor van Riebeeck replied, ‘...they lie right in the course of the ships, and coming in December, January and February, do not require the circuit of a mile to get there. These ships, however, which arrive later would find it impossible to call in consequence of fogs and storms.’

When the southern summer came, he reported the exploratory voyage of the galliot ’t Nachtglas. Her officers were instructed to observe the winds and currents, harbours and bays, anchorages and shelters, fresh water, soil, vegetables (edible plants), trees, fishes, animals, etc. They were to bring back samples and specimens, ‘in order that we may ascertain whether some profit for the Honourable Company may be won’.

Ironically, the Governor was especially anxious for wood and timber and for ‘sandalwood, other odorous or finely coloured woods...and in case nothing better is to be obtained, the galliot must be loaded with firewood and timber’.{1}

The zealous Dutch officers, in their Rembrandt-period dress, arrived on January 5, 1656, near the small island now called Inaccessible, which they named after their carved vessel, ’t Nachtglas. They found boulders, reeds and sea-lions; no ‘vegetables’, and scanty drinking water. The mate, Jacob Gommersbach, must have been something of a poet, for he wrote:

This island is so full of sea-mews that when the evening sets in and they come up from the sea they are like the snowflakes which in winter float in the skies of Holland....

The colour of the water is that of Spanish wine and just as red. When we reached the shore with the boat we could hardly land because of the sea-lions. We had first to beat a number to death with handspikes.

The water is still wine-red, because of the seaweed. As for the sea-mews’, gulls were by no means the only birds which the good mate meant. They would also have included the fulmar, the mollymauk and other petrels, the tern, the great shearwater, the sooty albatross and even the great albatross—which traditionally harbours the soul of a dead seaman.

Four days later they set the course ENE for Tristan. Now at last they saw the ‘flat point of land’ which had eluded their predecessors. But they could find ‘no anchorage at the distance of a gunshot from the shore, nor any bottom, but seeing a stream falling into the sea, and finding that we were on a lee shore, we resolved to stand off once more owing to the great danger’.

Nevertheless, to satisfy their chiefs, they lowered a boat and approached gingerly. They found that the craft could pass between two small reefs on which the surf was very heavy; but between the two, and near the shore, the water was slack. (This has been, until the eruption in 1961, the one precariously suitable approach to the habitable plateau.)

They found only clumps of tall tussock reeds under which thousands of penguins made their nests. Again there were no trees; merely high and naked rocks, sea-lions and seals. However, good water tumbled over the cliffs from the waterfall, and was not hard to load into casks.

At the watering-place they discovered a small board nailed to the rocks. On it was inscribed the year 1643, and underneath, ‘de fluit Heemstede, 17 Februari’. They in turn attached another board, on which was cut, ‘de galjoot ‘t Nachtglas, Jan Jacobszoon, skipper, 10 Januari, 1656’.

The next morning they made similar investigations on what they named Gebroocken Island—Broken Island, now called Nightingale, formed by one large and two smaller rocks. ‘With its peaks more like the ruins of a castle than an island,’ wrote the literary mate. There too they found no useful anchorage—only harsh rocks and heavy surf. They decided to return to the Cape, as there is nothing profitable for the Company on these islands’.

The officers had obeyed the order to make workable charts of the group. But later Governor van Riebeeck reported to the directors of the Dutch East India Company:

The skipper and mates of the aforesaid galliot are of the opinion that out of ten voyages perhaps only one will be successful in enabling the seamen to touch there, in consequence of the stormy and variable winds and cloudy sky.

Meanwhile the island of St. Helena—1,200 miles north—had been found so pleasant that its first colonizers kept it a secret.

It was discovered in 1502, four years before Tristan, by one João de Novo Castelo, returning to Portugal from India. He named it St. Helena. It was only 10¹/2 X 6¹/2 miles in size, and uninhabited. But it was well wooded, with a ridge of mountains, and fertile green valleys rising as a refreshing surprise from a steep coastline rust-brown and arid with prickly pear. ‘An emerald in a ring of bronze,’ it has often been described. The climate was delightful. The Portuguese imported livestock and planted fruit trees and vegetables. They built a chapel and a few houses, and left their sick seamen there to convalesce until the next ship called.

The Dutch annexed St. Helena in 1613, and made a weak gesture towards occupying it, planting vineyards. However, they gave it up in 1651, the year before the founding of Cape Town, which provided them with a better alternative.

Seeing the island unclaimed, the British East India Company annexed it in 1659. The Dutch recaptured it briefly in 1673, but were driven out a few months later. By this time it had a thousand inhabitants, half of them Negro slaves.

The British, in the flush of Restoration enterprise under Charles II, thought it would be convenient to turn gaunt Tristan da Cunha into an imitation of pretty St. Helena. In 1684 the directors of the British East India Company gave orders similar to those issued by their Dutch counterparts thirty years earlier, to three of their captains. They were to reconnoitre the winds and waters, flora and fauna, and ‘make any settlement which would save the lives of many men in any of our ships bound for the South Seas...or Madagascar...or any part of India....’ If they liked the islands, they were to leave two sows and one boar pig, and a letter in a glass bottle fixed upon a stanchion on the shore, ‘that any of our commanders touching there may know your opinion’.

They were then to put on board Captain Robert Knox’s ship ‘some intelligent person to be Governor at the salary of thirty pounds per annum, five soldiers at the salary of fourteen shillings per month, besides their diet at the Company’s charge, and three or four of the Company’s old Negroes that speak English with their wives’. Provisions, utensils, animals, plants and seeds