Tristan da Cunha VICISSITUDES OF A LONELY PEOPLE

Press, Volume C, Issue 29643, 13 October 1961, Page 12

Tristan da Cunha VICISSITUDES OF A LONELY PEOPLE

(Specially written for “The Press” by JOHN ATHELSTONEI

On a map of the world, Tristan da Cunha is no bigger than a pin’s head, and little more important in the minds of those who vaguely remember stories of shipwrecked sailors being landed on its lonely shore. Though it has only 12 square miles of habitable area, it is the principal island in a group of islands in the vicinity of St. Helena, where Napoleon lived in exile. It lies in the southern Atlantic between South America and South Africa and is visited annually by a ship carrying stores, mostly flour and sugar. Small herds of cattle and flocks of sheep, together with potatoes and poultry and fine-quality fish, supplied all the islanders’ other needs. Free from taxation and from the dictates of fashion they could dream their lives away, “the world forgetting, by the world forgot.” A wireless and meteorological station was set up there during World War II by the Royal Navy and the South African Air Force. Through the wireless they may have discovered what a good place the world is to be out of. Eleven Families The earliest inhabitants of this lonely island were William Glass, an artillery corporal, and his wife, who elected to remain on the island when . the garrison withdrew in 1817. Together with some shipwrecked sailors who have since been cast on its shores, they comprise the ancestry of the very few families (probably about 11) that have remained there until this week. When H.M.S. Odin visited the island in 1904 and offered to take the inhabitants to the Cape Colony, only three of the II families accepted the offer. About 20 years before this, nearly all the ablebodied men had been drowned while trying to board a ship in a heavy sea. In spite of such vicissitudes, however, the Tristan da Cunhans have clung to their lonely isle. At one time five unmarried 1 settlers there asked a sea captain to bring them wives

from St, Helena, which he did. One imagines that it was in such a place as this that Ulysses found a people who fed on the fruit of the lotus plant, and in doing so lost all desire to journey abroad or revisit their native countries. Tennyson’s lines eould have been written about these people: There is sweet music here that softer falls Than petals from blown roses on the grass. Music that gentlier on the spirit lies Than tired eyelids upon tired eyes. But now, alas, with the violent eruption of the volcano that comprises the greater part of their island, they have been compelled to abandon their ancient homes. Some may go to other islands nearby, the Inaccessible or the Nightingale, or the Gough, or perhaps to St Helena itself. It is dtfficult to believe they will not yearn for the lonely isle where their flocks and herds have for so many years grazed peacefully on the small grassy plain at the foot of the 7640Tt volcano that everyone has called, until this tragic week, “extinct”