Smack dab in the middle of the ocean, thousands of miles from land, there are islands you’ve probably never heard of. These islands don’t show up on a globe, and if you zoom out on google maps enough to see the entire ocean they’ll disappear into the ether. Some are just uninhabitable rocks jutting up out of nowhere. Others are big rocks with just enough of a shore to build a wharf on and just enough of a valley or a plateau to build a settlement in.
Once upon a time, in the days before GPS and chart plotters, sailors literally happened upon these islands, and left some people and some provisions behind, and those intrepid immigrants persevered and prospered and populated these far flung rocks. Without them, it would just be an annoying obstruction to avoid mid-ocean rather than a blessed place to refuel, reprovision and rest. Nations have fought for sovereignty over these rocks almost as arduously as they have protected their land borders, because to have a safe harbor in the middle of the ocean is invaluable for seafarers.
Can you imagine, several weeks into your voyage across an ocean, to just happen upon an island? If I train my eye away from the chart plotter and let my imagination run wild, I can almost “discover” the island again. I’m on watch on a square rigger, up in the crow’s nest, seeing nothing but whales and dolphins and birds and flying fish for days on end, and then I see a strange cloud formation, low lying dense clouds in an otherwise blue sky. As we get closer, I see a dark outline about halfway up the clouds. And closer still, it is discernibly the outline of a jagged volcanic formation jutting up from the sea. A few hours later, the grooves and valleys and peaks are visible. And just as we are near enough to douse sails and throw an anchor, I make out trees and plants – signs of life. I just may stake a “Life is Water” flag and call it home.
And then I glance back at the chart plotter and remember we’ve been sailing a rhum line headed directly to this well charted island for days, and it was long claimed by some colonial power that will accept my payment for an entry visa but deny me any discovery rights. If I am considered one of the undesirables, I might even get detained in one of these paradises and allowed to stay forever.
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St Helena, Atlantic Ocean, 15°55’S, 005°49’W |
My most recent “discovery” was St Helena, a British Overseas Territory smack dab in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, 3500km from South America (Brasil), 2000km from Africa (Angola) and 1300km from the nearest land (Ascension Island). It is 15km long, 122sqkm area, 820m at its highest peak and supports a population of 4500 people. It was discovered by the Portuguese in the early 1500s, was briefly claimed by the Dutch in the mid 1600s, and has been English territory ever since.
Volcanic rock cliffs tumble into the ocean around the entire island, and you wonder what kind of settlement could ever survive here. But Jamestown is the quaintest little British town, with colonial clapboard homes, winding tree-lined streets and church steeples and clock towers gracing it all. The people on the streets all say hello and the service providers all greet you by name. The yacht club is a volunteer organization that can source just about anything on island you need and provides a convenient place to get a cheap beer and a WiFi connection. If you’re bold enough to cross the Atlantic Ocean by sea, a water taxi picks you up at your boat and deposits you on the wharf; otherwise a much more civilized plane flies from Johannesburg twice weekly.
I loved St Helena more for its underwater inhabitants than its land variety. Several endemic fish school around the shore (St Helena Butterflyfish, St Helena Flounder, Strigate Parrotfish, St Helena Sharpnose Pufferfish) and whale sharks frequent its shoals for food (curious, massive, graceful creatures vying to be my favorite new fish). It was hard to sail away from those beautiful waters. Really, Napoleon (1815-1821) and the Boers (1900-1902) couldn’t have chosen a better place to be exiled and imprisoned.
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Niue, Pacific Ocean, 19°03’S, 169°55’W |
Half way across the Pacific I “discovered” Niue, a self-governing state freely associated with New Zealand in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, 9800km from Ecuador, 3900km from Australia and 400km from the nearest land (Tonga). Polynesians from Samoa settled this rock in the middle of nowhere around 900 AD, and protected it from foreign invasion for nearly 1000 years. The English navigator James Cook sighted Niue in 1774, and named it “Savage Island” after he was refused landing three times by Niue warriors that he believed were painted in blood. Not until a Niuean trained as a missionary in Samoa and returned in the mid 1800s did a foreigner make landfall almost a century later; Captain John Erskine visited the island on HMS Havannah in 1849. Shortly thereafter, in 1901, Niue briefly became an English possession before England gave it to New Zealand for as a reward for New Zealand’s contribution to the Anglo-Boer War.
Commonly referred to as “The Rock of Polynesia”, Niue is one of the world’s largest raised coral atolls, surrounded by a coral reef, with steep limestone cliffs along the shore pocketed with caves and chasms, and a high limestone plateau in the center. It is 40km long, 260 sq km area, 68m at its highest peak, and now supports a population of 1500 people, down from 5000. The water is crystal clear, due to the lack of vegetation on island, making snorkeling and scuba diving big attractions, and humpback whales frequent the shores in July-November. For those Pacific Ocean goers, a crane hoists dinghies up onto the concrete pier away from the crashing waves. On “plane day”, when a flight arrives from Auckland once or twice a week, all the rental cars are snatched up.
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Christmas Island, Indian Ocean, 10°29’s, 105°37’E |
I “discovered” Christmas Island about a quarter of the way into the Indian Ocean. An Australian external territory in the middle of the Indian Ocean, 350km from Indonesia and 1500km from Australia. It was discovered by Richard Rowe of Thomas in 1615, named by Captain William Mynors on Christmas 1643, and landed on by William Dapier in 1688, but was not annexed by Britain until the late 1800s when phosphate mining took off. It remained a British territory until it was invaded and occupied by the Japanese during World War II, and the population either escaped to Australia or was imprisoned in Indonesia. After the war, sovereignty and control of the phosphate mining was taken over by Australia.
Christmas Island is the shape of a terrier dog – 19km long, 135 sq km area, 361m at its highest peak – and supports a population of nearly 2000 people and 50 million red crabs. Every rainy season, all 50 million red crabs migrate down from the high rainforests to the shore in order to spawn in the early hours of the first quarter moon (when the tide is lowest) after the first big rain (when food on the migration is most plentiful). The female crabs incubate the eggs for two weeks on the shore, and then release them into the water at max ebb of the high tide, where millions of the larvae are eaten by whale sharks. The 2000 islanders and interested tourists divert traffic to ensure safe passage of the crabs in their annual migration.
It’s the kind of place where everyone knows and trusts everyone else, and cars are freely lent to tourists to run errands. Twice weekly flights from Perth and weekly charter flights from Jakarta deposit a few tourists and a lot of groceries, while boats bring the rest. The weekly news is chalked up on a board in the main roundabout, which consisted only of the weekly Hash House Harriers run while I was there in September.
The real news on the island revolves around the detention facility up the hill (picture courtesy Wikipedia), which for the last decade and a half has held asylum seekers, mostly departing from Indonesia. Prior to construction of the facility, Australia had been first rejecting their disembarkation on Christmas Island and later relocating them to other islands. By 2013, the detained population was nearly triple the facility’s operating capacity, and pressures forced its closure in late 2018. In early 2019, it was reopened after Australia’s parliament passed legislation giving asylum seekers easier access to mainland hospitals. The facility, when open, provides a much-needed source of employment and resources to Christmas islanders.
A Rock, An Island, A Kingdom
Habitability is the line differentiating a rock and an island; the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea’s rules apply to habitable islands, not uninhabitable rocks. But some of the more well-known mid-ocean rock outcroppings are not suitable for human habitation. St. Peter and St Paul Rocks, South Atlantic Ocean (00°56’N, 029°21’W), are one of the few places on Earth where an underwater oceanic ridge breaks through the surface of the sea. These mylonitic peridotite rocks, rising 4000m off the Atlantic floor and just 20m over sea level, were visited by Charles Darwin, but otherwise attract more marine and avian attention than human visitors. Similarly, Rockall, North Atlantic Ocean (57°35′N, 13°41′W), is a granite islet whose sovereignty is disputed among the UK, Ireland, Denmark and Iceland. The rock is receiving renewed attention after 40-day habitations in an attempt to classify it as an island and as territorial splits heat up with Brexit.
In the Caribbean, no one seems too worried about technicalities in staking claims on one uninhabitable rock. Redonda, Caribbean Sea, 16°56′N, 62°21′W, is just a rock. It’s not a very big rock; it measures 1.6km long and 300m tall. It’s not even a pretty rock (and usually nothing gets my heart beating quite like volcanic rock I can climb); shear brown cliffs rise up to a small greenish plateau of cactuses and other scrub. It was never inhabited and rarely traversed. Phosphate mining ruins from the early 1900s scatter the plateau and the southwestern shore, and remains of a post office constructed by Antigua in the 1970s may have survived the several hurricanes that have passed through. It doesn’t have a dock to tie to or a sandy bottom to anchor on; there’s no stairs up the cliff or airport on the plateau. But the little ugly uninhabited rock of Redonda is a Kingdom, storied with tales of royalty and pirates, mining and colonization.
Redonda is one of the “Islands that Brush the Sky”. Like its neighbors Antigua, Nevis and Montserrat, it probably changed hands several times among the colonial powers, before Britain laid final claim in the late 1800s. Redonda had a booming phosphate mining operation at the time, and was ripe to become a kingdom. Legend has it that Matthew Dowdy Shiell, an Irish merchant living in neighboring Montserrat, claimed Redonda for his son, M.P., who was crowned King Felipe I of Redonda by the Bishop of Antigua. The crown lost all worth when mining shut down in the early 1900s, and has been abdicated and transferred more times in the last one hundred years than all the other crowns in the world put together. Many of the crown transfer tales involve writers down on their luck looking to cash in on their title, one includes claims of ESP and reincarnation, none are legitimate, and all provide for a good fodder at the bars on neighboring islands.
Nearly finished with my circumnavigation, I’m still searching for the right rock, island or kingdom to plant my Life is Water flag. My priorities are clear water and rich marine life, maybe even a good shipwreck or two to dive, but realistically it also needs fertile soil for a vegetable garden, enough shore for a wharf, and enough of a valley or plateau for a settlement and airport.
