Selkirk's Island, Diana Souhami [the best books to read TXT] 📗

where fur seals bask and bottle in the sea’s spray. There is transit in a decrepit jeep to the airstrip, then a three-hour flight across the ocean.

The islanders live from the sea. Lobsters are their trade. The same endemic creatures (Jasus frontalis) Selkirk saw, but then they swarmed the shore and were three feet long. Now they are a dying breed, an endangered species. Year on year the size of the catch and of the lobsters, gets smaller. There is a rule that those caught must measure eleven and a half centimetres, tail to thorax. Smaller creatures must be returned to the sea. But trade in undersize lobsters remains.* They find their way into empanadas and on to the islanders’ tables.**

Once a month a supply ship, the Navarino, comes from ‘the continent’ with drums of petrol for the fishing boats, cylinders of gas, fresh vegetables, provisions, building materials and children’s toys. In summer it sails on to the other island where, for eight months of the year thirty lobster fishers live. They look as wild as Selkirk. They come out by boat to meet the ship. It is their lifeline. It takes them letters, cigarettes and pisco – a brandy made from grapes. They send gifts home to Isla Robinson Crusoe: a box of fish, a blackcurrant bush, a terrified goat.

The lobster factory is in Valparaiso. The Navarino returns with its cargo of lobsters. They scrabble and claw in seawater containers nailed with net. A factory official counts them in. Fishermen receive a few hundred pesos for each creature. Smaller lobsters, flung back to the sea, lurch, gulp and head for the life they need. The others, within a day, are taken live by plane to Europe or to the smart restaurants of Santiago.

To save the remaining fur seals, in 1978 they were declared a protected species. Man forbade himself to kill more of them. Some thousands survive around the archipelago. Their voices echo in the bays. Marine biologists observe their feeding patterns, rookeries and hauling grounds and how they treat their young.

Away from protecting eyes there is the same indifference to animal suffering as in Selkirk’s day. For meat, a bull is lassoed then dragged down from the hills. It bellows and is beaten with sticks on its long reluctant journey. The men’s hands bleed as they pull it by a rope from its horns. Dogs yelp and snap at its legs. It arrives defeated at the crude abattoir. It is tethered to the gnarled root of a tree for its last night. In its eyes are depression, or perhaps rage.

Next morning the smell of rendered fat comes from the abattoir. Lumps of hacked meat are pushed from it in a barrow. Notices are soon scrawled on cardboard in windows: Hoy. Empanadas con carne.*

Away from such activity are the still mountains and fissured cliffs, the deep forests, dense luma and chonta, the tree ferns and grasses. The Island has its unobserved life, its own laws. The fire that formed it four million years past still burns. The wind curls through the valleys. Seisms and tsunamis warn. Waves hurl high from a calm sea catching rainbows of sunlight in their spray.

2000 A Worldwide Reserve of the Biosphere

THE ISLAND’S mountains, valleys and gulches are now measured and mapped. With the same passion for inventory shown by the privateers, its birds, snails, lichens, algae, psocoptera, palms and peperomias, bryophytes and gymnospheres, are counted, classified, named and sorted. Sixty per cent of its plants are unique to it. There are 131 kinds of moss and 20 sorts of fern.

In 1935 it was declared a national park. This was in large part a response to the work of a Swedish botanist, Carl Skottsberg.† It intrigued him that life forms that would die at the touch of seawater, that preceded man by a million years, had their home on it, that their ancestors passed uninjured over vast stretches of ocean, or survived on this leftover fragment of unsubmerged land. He saw The Island as a unique ecosystem, a world in microcosm, to be protected and preserved.

But the islanders, like Crusoe, saw it as their estate. For decades they lived without rules or prohibitions. They felled the endemic palms to build their boats and houses, planted blackberry which spread like fire and choked the native plants, and they imported sheep, cattle and goats, which grazed the vegetation and eroded the soil.

In 1969 Carlos Munoz Pizzaro gave a paper to the Academy of Science in Chile. He advocated that boundaries for the park be set, that no building or motor vehicles be allowed in it, that cattle, rats, rabbits, coati (Nasua nasua – brought from Uraguay) and blackberry be eradicated and the primary forest restored.

Four years later CONAF, the Chilean Forestry Commission, took on responsibility for The Island.* Their aim was to preserve it and to restore its endangered species. An administrator and park wardens arrived. Islanders were forbidden to fell trees or take plants. They resented the intrusion. They viewed the wardens as interlopers, were abusive to them and even violent.

To conservationists The Island’s significance went beyond national territory or local need. In microcosm they saw the world’s problems of land erosion, overfishing, the destruction of species that cannot be reborn, the breakdown of the interdependence of living things.

In 1977 UNESCO declared The Island a Worldwide Reserve of the Biosphere. The intention was to preserve its generic species and conserve its ecosystem. Holland gave a grant of two and a half million dollars, Czechoslovakia sent germinating chambers, greenhouses and chemicals to kill the blackberry. Chile paid the salaries of CONAF employees. The Island’s boundaries were set: 164 yards up from the village the Worldwide Reserve began. The islanders were allotted 1000 acres of land around San Juan Bautista and the airstrip. The Reserve claimed the rest of the archipelago: 24,000 acres on the two islands and the islet of Santa Clara.

Year on year the primary forest is extended from high to low altitude. Erosion of the