When Napoleon Bonaparte exhaled his last breath after ingesting a dose of calomel administered to combat his stomach ulcers in May 1821, it’s safe to assume that one of the least noted immediate consequences of his passing was how it would affect the tiny military garrison posted on the island of Tristan da Cunha.
Le Petit Caporal had been exiled on the remote Atlantic island of Saint Helena since the Battle of Waterloo six years earlier. At pains to ensure that he could never escape, British naval authorities decided to place soldiers on another island situated 1,300 miles to the south. If Napoleon decided to use this volcanic outcrop as a waystation on the way to freedom, then it would only have been of use if he intended his final destination to be the South Pole. Yet this seemingly entirely unnecessary act of recidivist safeguarding was how Tristan da Cunha came to be populated.
“All of the islanders are direct descendants of…William Glass of Kelso, Scotland, a corporal in the Royal Navy,” writes Gregory Rodriguez in a 1999 issue of the journal Transition. “When the troops departed (after Bonaparte’s death), Glass stayed on with his wife, a [mixed-race woman] from the Western Cape named Maria Magdalena. The couple had sixteen children.”
The Glasses set up home on what remains the sole settlement on the island, the evocatively named Edinburgh of the Seven Seas. “Over the next century,” continues Rodriquez,
a handful of men felt compelled to quit the world and repair to Tristan’s tiny village settlement.… Situated in the middle of the West Wind drift—the traffic line for vessels rounding the Cape of Good Hope on their way to India and the Pacific—Tristan became a water and supply station for the many whaling ships that trolled the South Atlantic throughout the nineteenth century.
Life was tough on Tristan. Then, as now, the islanders lived in tiny, croft-style, single-story cottages, similar to those visitors would find in a small Scottish fishing port. As the nascent steam era of shipping rendered way stations such as Tristan unnecessary, the struggling Tristanites needed to find new ways to survive in the twentieth century, as D. F. Roberts explains in a 1978 lecture published in the Journal of Anthropological Research.
“[T]he Tristan da Cunha Development Company was established to fish for crayfish, freeze them in a factory on the island,” he writes,
then market them via Cape Town as “Tristan brand rock lobsters,” thus providing contact with the outside world through the company’s two fishing boats, and a reason for the Colonial Office to maintain skeleton administrative services on the island. Success came to the enterprise, enabling funds to be provided for the installation in 1960 of running water in each house, modern sanitation and the prospect that at last the island could become self-supporting.
Just a year after running water came to the hardy islanders, disaster struck. The volcano that dominates Tristan da Cunha erupted, forcing the islanders to relocate to England.
For the British, the arrival of a couple of hundred islanders from the most remote inhabited place on Earth was akin to seeing time travelers from the nineteenth century appear. The British national press wrote stories of Tristan children, who had never seen television before, attempting to feed chocolate to faces on the screen. The adult islanders were determined that, despite attempts by the British colonial powers to abandon their home island, they would return to Tristan.
More to Explore
The Maldives: Paradise Lost?
G. Gass describes the Royal Society expedition, organized under his leadership, that arrived on Tristan six months after the eruption to report on the devastation. The main body of the expedition, traveling on the South African Navy frigate Transvaal, reached the island on January 22, 1962. Geologists P. G. Harris and R. W. Le Maitre, both aboard the HMS Jaguar, arrived some six weeks before the Transvaal and reported that on December 16, 1961,
the lava extended for 400 yards into the sea along a front some 1000 yards wide and that a peripheral vent behind the main cone was exploding every 10–15 minutes, giving off ash-laden, mushroom shaped clouds. These distinctly audible explosions were accompanied by the emission of red flames or liquid rising 10 feet or more above the summit, and blocks or bombs were thrown 1000 feet in the air.
By the time the main expedition landed, “the intensity of the volcanic activity had greatly diminished,” reports Gass. Even so, the eruption was disastrous for Tristan’s inhabitants.
“Undoubtedly,” Gass concludes, “the most disastrous effect of the volcano on the economy of the island was the engulfing by the lava of the only industry, the Crawfish Canning Company.”
Despite attempts by Great Britain to re-purpose the island as a nuclear testing site, the islanders’ campaign, supported by the British press, meant that, just two years after the volcano erupted, they were able to sail home.
The population has remained steady at around 250 people over the last half century. Too small for there ever to be an airport, this 40-square-mile outcrop of vertiginous cliffs surrounded by churning ocean is only reachable via a berth on one of the South African fishing vessels that come to collect the crayfish. Yet a strong, and entirely distinct, island culture is extant.
Weekly Newsletter
The English spoken by the people of Tristan contains words that are rooted in the early nineteenth century (“musket” is still used instead of “gun,” for example), while the islanders have created, or re-appropriated, many distinct songs, as Peter Millington explores in a 2015 issue of the Folk Music Journal.
“Many of Tristan da Cunha’s songs have a nautical theme,” Millington writes. “Little Powder Monkey Jim” (c. 1770)
tells a poignant tale about a young sailor who sang cheerfully as he carried gunpowder from the magazine to the gun crews on board Nelson’s Victory during the Battle of the Nile but was felled by a bullet at the moment of victory. This was sung [on Tristan] by Fred Swain, who regarded it has his song.
Today, Tristan is an extremely rare example of a colonial era territory where there is no desire by the Indigenous population, or from the colonial powers, to alter Tristan’s status as an overseas territory.
“Tristan da Cunha is too small to be independent,’ writes Stephen A. Royle in The Geographical Journal. “The absolute amount needed to support Tristan is small and the island is not currently a charge upon the UK…. It has achieved economic self-sufficiency; that is all that can be expected. There is no pressure for its status to change.”
In 2008, Ann Day published the results of an oral history project she worked on with locals on Tristan. During the project, her team recorded a Tristan man born in 1982, making him 24 years old at the time of the interview.
“What I remember about my childhood… well, it was definitely the freedom,” he concluded. As he recalled, kids
used to get up to all sorts ‘cos of the amount of freedom. You would always find us around climbing trees, looking for the right shaped piece of wood to make slingshots. We went all over the place on our bicycles, and we also built go-karts, using the biggest wheels we could find.
It may be easy to romanticize Tristan da Cunha, forgetting about the isolation and hardship that the island’s population has historically endured. Yet, if you sit with a crayfish sandwich and a pint of beer outside the island’s solitary pub, The Albatross Inn, it’s hard to imagine that life on the world’s most remote inhabited island is likely to change too much—as long as the volcano keeps its counsel.
Support JSTOR Daily! Join our membership program on Patreon today.
.svg){kind=link}