The Teatime Islands

Ben Fogle took part in the BBC’s hit series Castaway 2000. He now presents BBC1’s Countryfile, and his writing has appeared in numerous newspapers and magazines, including the Sunday Times, the Daily Telegraph and the Guardian. The Teatime Islands is his first book – and the fulfilment of a lifetime’s ambition. He lives in London.

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Thanks to Sukey Cameron and everyone at FIGO for all their hard work planning, organizing and hosting me twice, Becky Ingham, Debbie Summers, Councillor Richard Cockwell, Hattie Lee for her hospitality, Karen Taylor, Rob McGill, Neil Watson, Ken Greenland, Tex and Mandy at Port Edgar for their time, HM Governor Donald Lamont and Lynda Lamont, HMS Endurance, HH Administrator Geoffrey Fairhurst and Wendy Fairhurst, Chief Islander James ‘Jimmy’ Glass, Constable Conrad Glass, Yvonne and Lewis Glass for their hospitality, HH Administrator Bill Dickson and Trisha Daniels, HM Governor David Hollamby and Mrs Hollamby, Captain Roberts and the crew of the RMS St Helena with particular thanks to Purser Geoff for his humour during the long passages, Linda Butler at Andrew Weir Shipping for coping with my disorganization, Didier Wattrelot and the Sauvage for getting me to Pitcairn against the elements, Johnny Hobson for all his kind help both on and off Ascension, Adam Hensham and Buffalo, the crew of the Dream Voyager, Jeff Shea, Ted Cookson, Brian Appleby, Dick Benson, Bill Woodward, Doug Patterson and family, Dulcie and Bobby Robertson, Shelco and Bryan Jones, Basil George, Michael Swales for his indispensable knowledge, Anne and Frank Dakin for their wonderful story, Air New Zealand for the comfy seats, Ken Lennox for his photographs and all those trips, Lucy Irvine for the inspiration, the Taransay castaways, Colin Cameron, Chris Kelly, Jeremy Mills and everyone at Lion Television for the opportunity, Sheila Jowers for her artwork and Roger Stephenson for all his helpful advice. A hearty thanks to Charles Veley; good luck to you, sir – you have made the world a very small place. And finally, to everyone who helped me along the way, thank you.

Julian Alexander and all at LAW, Ginette Chalmers and Kathryn Fleming at PFD for the transition, to Ed Bettison, Clare Pollock, Georgina Atsiaris and all at Michael Joseph and Penguin for helping me steer a course through the publishing ocean, and for allowing me to fulfil my dream, and thanks to Peter McClure for the maps. Special thanks to my editor Rowland White for his enthusiasm and zeal throughout.

To Mum and Dad for their unfailing support and encouragement throughout the years, and to friends and work colleagues who have put up with incessant ‘book talk’ for so long. Thank you all for putting up with me, and sticking around.

To my darling Kinvara: thank you for an understanding and patience way beyond the call of duty and for always being there for me. You will always be special to me, x.

Toby Grimwood and Linford Casenove, two friends and fellow dreamers, their lives cut tragically short, you are not forgotten.

To the people of Tristan da Cunha, Pitcairn, Ascension, St Helena, the Falklands and the British Indian Ocean Territories: this book is about you and for you. Thanks, guys.

A milky Corn Flake fell on to the kitchen table as I spluttered over my bowl of breakfast cereal. ‘NAVAL OFFICER FINDS ISLAND’, read the small article in the Daily Telegraph. My eyes strained as I read the news story hidden in the depths of the broadsheet: ‘A Royal Navy petty officer who discovered an island in the South Atlantic which did not appear on any charts may have the rocky outcrop named after him.’ The article went on to explain that ‘Mark Robinson, 28, a medical assistant, was serving on HMS Endurance when he saw the island, which is a quarter of a square mile in size with a peak of 18 feet.’

I was flabbergasted, mesmerized and, quite frankly, very, very envious. What was an island doing hanging about undiscovered – this was 2002 not 1702 – and, more to the point, where were all the other officers looking? It certainly didn’t inspire my confidence in the Royal Navy, although the visual acuity of their medical assistants was reassuring.

That an island could remain undiscovered in the twenty-first century seemed inconceivable. I dusted off my world map and scanned the South Atlantic. I had forgotten how vast that great South Atlantic ocean is, and as I searched across it I reacquainted myself with some old friends, the Teatime Islands.

I have been fascinated by islands and travel since I was a young boy. I went on my first expedition when I was just six. It was teatime and I had just finished a milk chocolate digestive. I decided to visit Ostrov Kotel’Nyj in the Arctic Ocean above the former Soviet Union. A bitterly cold island chain highlighted by an assortment of fallen biscuit crumbs and inhabited, I imagined, by a lost tribe of brown-jumper-wearing Latin teachers, it seemed a suitably remote place to begin my ‘daydream’ travels.

The trip had been a success, and over the next few years these teatime expeditions took me to some of the most remote corners of the earth: from the South Sandwich Islands (if I told you they were giant floating ham and cheese sandwiches you wouldn’t believe me) to Christmas Island (inhabited by a whole tribe of Father Christmases). I was the ‘Teatime Traveller’. The world was at my knees (my mother actually made me some special cushioned kneepads for comfort, and because I wore through so many trousers) and I embarked on some serious finger-walking.

The school became so concerned about my lack of attention that I was eventually sent to a number of specialist doctors who examined everything from my hearing to my sight, and all because I was busy daydreaming down the Amazon. I can still remember thinking how useful the ear doctor’s little torch would be for night-time trips.

I found a map of Britain’s former empire in an old National Geographic. I was dazzled by the vast tracts of colour that streaked the globe pink. It seemed incredible that this small rainy island in Western Europe once governed nearly a quarter of the world’s population and about the same proportion of the earth’s land. The British Empire was the biggest empire ever, encompassing 1,000 territories, but how had we done it?

Rapid decolonization after the Second World War left only a handful of dependent territories – now politically classified more correctly as overseas territories – including Hong Kong and Gibraltar, but it was a series of tiny islands that captured my imagination more than anywhere else: St Helena, Tristan da Cunha, Gough, Ascension, the Falkland Islands, the Pitcairn islands and the Chagos Archipelago. It wasn’t just the remoteness of these tiny places that lay predominantly in the South Atlantic, nor was it their exotic names – what intrigued me most was the tiny ‘(UK)’ that appeared next to each name. These few places were all that remained of that great empire. Why did Britain insist on retaining this flotsam and jetsam?

There were other islands of course with equally evocative names, such as Anguilla, Grand Cayman and Turks and Caicos, but they were all in the Caribbean, a tamed playground for the rich and famous and a well-documented hotchpotch of cultures and races. I was more intrigued by the remoteness and anonymity of these other strange places. Apart from the fact that they seemed barely large enough to appear on most maps, they were thousands of miles from the nearest land, and many more from the UK.

I became infatuated by these islands, and the people that lived there. What did they look like? Did they look like me? Or were they more like my friend William? I would spend hours staring at my map hoping somehow to learn more about these remote places.

I had friends who had lived in Bermuda and even Gibraltar, but I had certainly never met anyone from Tristan da Cunha. I had a friend called Tristan so I asked him, but he was unsure. I asked my geography teacher (daydream co-ordinator), who was also uncertain.

On close inspection of a larger-scale map I noticed that Tristan da Cunha’s main settlement (I wasn’t even sure if it was a capital) was called Edinburgh. This was certainly a new lead, but now I wondered: was it anything like Scotland? Did they wear kilts and eat haggis? If they were British did they drink tea? Did they have a branch of Boots? And, most important of all, where was their local Marks & Spencer’s? The more I discovered, the more questions there were.

Within a few months of leaving school, my teatime expeditions left the realms of fantasy and became reality as I found myself on a cargo boat of biscuits sailing 3,000 miles up the Amazon from Belém to Iquitos in Peru. I couldn’t help but wonder whether my being aboard with this biscuity cargo was somehow the effect of one of those early childhood crumbs.

I spent the rest of the year living in Quito, Ecuador, where I taught English in a primary school and helped out in an orphanage. The year had a profound effect on me. I relished the freedom afforded me, and the rich sights that flooded my mind. I decided to spend a second year in Central America, where I sought the location of one of my literary heroes, Paul Theroux, and travelled to the Mosquito Coast of Honduras, where I worked on a turtle conservation project before moving on to Nicaragua. I then went on to pursue Latin American Studies, which included a particularly memorable year at the University of Costa Rica.

My life would change for ever in March 1999, when I noticed an advert in the Guardian newspaper. The BBC was looking for thirty volunteers to create a new society on a remote uninhabited island, for a television series to be called Castaway. The volunteers were expected to be entirely self-sufficient and cut off from the rest of the world except for the half-dozen video cameras that would record our lives for, a year. (Little did I realize that those images would be beamed to the farthest corners of the globe, even flickering on to the screens of those mysterious Teatime Islanders.)

While those islands remained as elusive and seductive as ever, Taransay, our island home, served as a catalyst, introducing me to the benefits of communal living, fuelling my wanderlust and reigniting my fascination with islands.

A fascination with islands was part of my childhood duty – along with dragons, castles and mountains, islands represent all that is exciting for a child: escapism, freedom, safety and adventure. My early reading consisted of Robinson Crusoe, Swallows and Amazons, the Famous Five books and Treasure Island, so it seemed only natural that when I was twenty-six I should follow my literary heroes and go to live on an island for a year.

Robinson Crusoe of course was the fictional character created by Daniel Defoe, but he was based on Alexander Selkirk, a mariner who spent over four years marooned on the uninhabited island of Juan Fernández. Selkirk, however, was not the first sailor to be castaway on a tropical island. The 1700s were an age of great maritime exploration, and the seas were dotted with ocean-going traffic, so it is not surprising that many sailors ended up shipwrecked on the reefs of uncharted islands, often for years at a time. The populations of many islands today are the descendants of shipwrecked sailors.

Not all castaways are involuntary. I had read of one who made the headlines in 1957. A passenger on a passing ship thought they had seen someone on the beach of the uninhabited Henderson Island, part of the Pitcairn archipelago. The Pitcairn islanders confirmed that it wasn’t one of their people and sent a search party to investigate. They found Robert Tomarchin – an American – and his chimpanzee Moko. At first Tomarchin claimed he had been accidentally stranded on the island but it later turned out that he had asked to be dropped off there. He stayed on the island for six weeks before spending a short period on Pitcairn and then returning to the USA.

Tomarchin, like me, had chosen his island. Shipwrecked castaways in modern times are extremely rare. Maritime sophistication and technology have reduced the risks in going to sea, and society has evolved to find a new way of becoming marooned – by answering an advert. I had done just that. I am often asked what inspired me to answer such an ambitious call, but I was not the first. One of the world’s most famous castaways, Lucy Irvine, answered an advert in Time Out magazine: ‘Writer seeks “wife” for a year on a tropical island.’ Lucy went on to spend a year living with a strange man on Tuin Island in the Arafura Sea.

There’s something about the castaway lifestyle that appeals to people. I was intrigued by the public’s fascination and decided to conduct my own experiment. Short of a travelling partner for some of the more remote islands I hoped to visit, I placed a small advert in Time Out: ‘CASTAWAY WANTED for remote tropical island adventure’. I had anticipated a flood of replies from aspiring castaways and adventurers, but was staggered not to receive a single one.

Where were all of these romanticists that had deluged the BBC with tens of thousands of applications for Castaway, or the thousands that had applied for Shipwrecked and Survivor? It made no difference; for me, discovering new islands had become a necessity.

I had found it difficult to integrate back into the ‘real’ world after my year on Taransay. I had been bewitched by the island. It seemed to have an invisible hold on me, and I struggled with daily life back in London. I found fumes too intoxicating, noises too loud, artificial lighting too bright, food too rich; but above all, without the omnipresent island wind I felt like I was suffocating in the stale, still London air. I used to hide in my room dreaming and wishing I was back on that island, and reverted to my childhood passion of poring over maps.

Alain de Botton once wrote that the best part of travel is anticipation and memory, and maybe that is why maps are so perfect: none of the reality of travel, just the mental pleasure. I spent hours staring at maps, wondering what all those little places look like, and who lives there. They offer a one-way ticket away from the real world. Even on Taransay, on cold, wet days I would sit by the driftwood fire in the schoolhouse and disappear into the children’s atlas for hours at a time, sailing across the oceans and visiting the islands of my dreams.

I’ve always been envious of the early explorers, able to sail the oceans in search of new lands and islands – then name them after themselves. Some early explorers and cartographers went so far as to make up entirely fictitious islands complete with first-hand accounts and lavish illustrations. Today these islands are more commonly known as phantom islands.

Among these phantom islands, the Isle of Demons was reported to be inhabited by monsters and demons whose sole purpose was to torment and attack passing ships and anyone foolish enough to stray ashore. The tale of Frisland was even immortalized in print and is the story of a nobleman who travelled to the island to help its king defeat neighbouring islands. Buss Island was one of the most persistent in mariners’ minds and wasn’t taken off some maps until the twentieth century. Some clever sailors even managed to sell it to the Hudson Navigation Company. To this day some believe that the island really does exist. Antilla Island was reported to be two thirds the size of Portugal and inhabited by seven Spanish bishops fleeing the mainland. Hy-Brazil comes from Irish folklore and is the mythical land of gods which was sometimes seen off the Irish Coast. It appeared on maps for many centuries but no one could ever find it. The legend of Ursula and her eleven thousand virgin companions has her visiting islands in the far reaches of the Atlantic before her untimely martyrdom back in Europe.

Icebergs, clouds and even mirages have all been misidentified as new islands. As late as the 1920s, Bartholomew’s Great Survey Atlas, the bible of the British cartographer, still showed the Anson archipelago, a non-existent island chain between Hawaii and Japan named after Lord Anson, who had seen it only on charts of a Spanish galleon he had seized off the Philippines in the 1800s. Until the 1980s, the globes (by the historic globe manufacturer, J. R. O. Globus of Munich) that were featured on Lufthansa tickets around the world placed the non-existent Matador islands – inhabited by a colony of shy albino lepers according to their British discoverer – just north of the equator, and even the National Geographic Society’s 1982 world map depicted these imaginary islands as a cluster of unnamed dots.

It was during one of the many rainy days on Taransay that I discovered Dr Roger Stephenson, a fellow castaway, had a secret. He was a closet isleophile. Roger had spent time as a doctor on two of my Teatime Islands, Pitcairn and St Helena.

His experience fuelled my own enthusiasm. I had waited until 1982 to catch a glimpse of a real-life Teatime Island. It was the outbreak of the Falklands War, and I watched with fascination as my first images of these remote UK islands came on to the screen. I was certainly surprised: they looked like Wales with fewer trees and more rain, and the people looked like Dorset farmers. A little disappointing really, although I was still intrigued that these little pockets of England could retain their British culture in such faraway places. And my questions about Pitcairn, St Helena and Tristan da Cunha were still unanswered.

When I first applied for Castaway, my friends all thought I was totally bonkers. Why would anyone volunteer themselves to spend a year on a windy, wet, cold island in the North Atlantic. ‘Are you mad?’ they spluttered into their pints when I first told them about the project. Their fears were confirmed when, after my return to reality, Hello! magazine offered to send me anywhere in the world. It seemed only natural for me to choose another isolated windy island, this time in the South Atlantic: the Falklands.

As a child I had been thrilled to discover a map of the Falkland Islands in one of my old National Geographic magazines. I had been particularly delighted to discover that the archipelago included Bob’s Island and Puzzle Island, not to mention Fanny Island, Knob Island and Shag island. I used to snigger into the map at this dazzlingly smutty array of names.

The Hebrides were my first childhood experience of island life. My Scottish nanny, Katrine, took my sister and me for a holiday on the island of Eigg, in the Inner Hebrides. I had been particularly thrilled to visit one of my daydream expedition favourites, partly because I felt sure it was the home of Cadbury’s Creme Eggs.

We had spent an idyllic week fishing and walking on the beautiful island, where we had been staying with the laird, Keith Schellenberg. As a child I had been totally unaware of and oblivious to the bitter feud between Schellenberg and the islanders, which would finally become unique among island stories of recent years.

The islanders and the laird were locked in dispute over the running of the island. Affairs soon deteriorated and after Schellenberg’s Rolls-Royce mysteriously caught fire the two camps had been reduced to playground tactics. The islanders dismissed Schellenberg as a ‘landlord in the worst tradition of nineteenth-century feudalism’, while Schellenberg retorted by accusing the islanders of being ‘rotten, dangerous and totally barmy revolutionaries’.

Eventually Schellenberg sold the island, and according to records the islanders cheered his final departure. As the boat pulled away from the jetty he shouted at them: ‘You never understood me. I always wanted to be one of you.’

This ‘us’ and ‘them’ mentality spread to us on Taransay, in the form of ‘islandism’. The BBC castaways managed to assimilate to island life because we were creating our own society, rather than integrating into one. We had arrived as mainlanders, but we left as islanders. The transformation was startling and rapid. It took just a few weeks for us to become territorial, possessive, shy, suspicious of outsiders and very snobby about our island. I don’t know how or why it happened, but it affected all of us. By the end of our year we were like fallow deer, dipping behind rocks at the first sign of a stranger on ‘our’ island.

Eigg hit the headlines again in 1997 after the islanders managed to buy the island from the last of its nine lairds. The money raised by the Eigg Trust, a partnership made up of the island’s eighty-six residents, the Highland Council and the Scottish Wildlife Trust, was augmented by donations from island-lovers all over the world. One donor contributed £750,000 towards the buy-out on the understanding that they remain anonymous.

While Eigg had managed to weather the mental storm, another island hadn’t been so lucky. I visited Eigg’s neighbouring island of Rum to write a story for one of the broadsheets. The islanders had been embroiled in a scandal that had headlined the Scottish press for months and they were naturally fed up with the press. I, the paper had decided, would be a perfect envoy.

‘RUMPY PUMPY ISLAND’, screamed the headlines of the Scottish tabloids. The country had been gripped by the real-life castaways, after it emerged that a young mother had run off with her husband’s best friend. Adding insult to injury, the police had been called on to Rum to confiscate the jilted husband’s gun after fears that he was a danger to himself and to the other seventeen inhabitants of the island.

The final indignity came when Scottish National Heritage, who owned the island, informed the deserted husband that he would have to leave his house and the island, as it was his wife that had been the employee and therefore entitled to accommodation. Tensions rose, the Scottish press flooded the island and matters reached such a pitch that nearly 95 per cent of the islanders sought medical treatment for stress.

‘It’s all your fault,’ explained an islander as I sat in silence in the late-summer sunshine. ‘Taransay put the spotlight on remote islands,’ she continued. ‘If it hadn’t been for Castaway, the press wouldn’t have been so interested, and we would have been left to sort out our problems in private, rather than the public airing that made our lives miserable.’ My experience on Rum alarmed me. What would the Teatime Islanders make of me, and more importantly was I an ‘us’ or a ‘them’? On Taransay we had received letters from remote island communities all over the world confiding in us and commending us. I’d felt I was an ‘us’ but now I wasn’t so sure.

The effect of the pen on islands is an interesting one. I wondered how I would be received by the remote island communities that I intended to visit. Certainly on Taransay we had been wary and suspicious of our resident writer, Mark McCrum, whom we nicknamed the ‘detective’. I knew that a string of travel-writers before me had left a trail of destruction in their wake.

The problem with small islands is that everyone is easily identifiable, and a writer or journalist can often open a Pandora’s box of debilitating gossip, which is endemic on small islands. The Castaway book very nearly tore our small island community apart when it was finally published. What I had discovered on Taransay is that islands have extremely fragile equilibriums that can be easily upset by the presence of an outsider.

Mark McCrum, the author of the book about our year on the remote Hebridean island, wrote that he could never have written his book by staying all year on that ‘mad and magical’ island. ‘Even in two days you find yourself getting sucked into the latest drama,’ he wrote, ‘it’s too easy to take sides and get far too involved in the ever lively local politics, which the castaways always tell you they wish would go away, but somehow can’t help feeding.’

At university I joined the university Royal Naval Unit, where I became a midshipman assigned to HMS Blazer, a P2000 Fast Patrol Boat on which I would spend weekends training in the Solent, and holiday time away on deployment as far afield as Norway and Gibraltar.

During a number of these deployments we sailed throughout the Channel Islands. I had been charmed by these Britannic islands with their Gallic twist, but it had been one island in particular that had intrigued me.

Brecqhou Island is a 160-acre, treeless island off Sark. It was bought by the reclusive Barclay twins, David and Frederick, in 1993 for £2.3 million. They had spent more than £25 million building a turreted Gothic castle. The brothers filed for independence from Sark and even designed their own flag, which depicted the two twins in the corner. They had declared the island ‘closed’, guarding it with dogs and security guards and even a patrol vessel to chase away any unwanted visitors.

What intrigued me was the juxtaposition that islands represent, on the one hand offering a safe haven for their residents, while on the other acting as a catalyst for conflict and even war. The very fact that Britain was willing to go to war with Argentina in 1982 for the Falkland Islands illustrates their significance, but on what grounds? They have no obvious assets or resources and yet we continue to send governors and fly the Union Flag. Indeed, the British government has agreed to carry out a study into the feasibility of building airports on St Helena and Pitcairn, a seemingly vast expense for the islands’ tiny populations.

Islands have had a rich recent history of warfare, from the Falklands War to the most recent stand-off between Spain and Morocco over an island no larger than a football pitch. The Spanish-owned Parsley Island, just 200 yards off the coast of the Moroccan mainland, was the scene of a Moroccan occupation in mid-2002 when a dozen troops landed on the uninhabited island and planted their flag.

The incident led to a full-blown diplomatic row in which ambassadors were expelled and warships sent for. Spain reinforced its garrison in Ceuta, a Spanish enclave in northern Morocco. Hadn’t the world learnt from the Falklands? Was a minuscule island called Parsley with nothing more than a few goats really worth fighting for? The confrontation was eventually resolved. The Moroccans vacated the island, and the Spanish replaced the flag and stationed some Spanish soldiers on the small outcrop.

Islands, it seems, no matter what their size, location or strategic value, will always be worth fighting for. And islands are also excellent platforms for fighting from: one of the largest military establishments in the world is hidden away in a remote corner of the Indian Ocean.

While researching the Teatime Islands, I met Alan Huckle, head of the Overseas Territories Department at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. He had been wonderfully helpful and encouraging about plans for my island odyssey, until I mentioned Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. ‘You can’t go there,’ he snapped. ‘Cancel it from your list, Garcia is totally off limits,’ he barked. I noticed his skin had gone a soft shade of rouge. ‘Not even the Prime Minister is allowed to visit,’ he added by way of closure. Cagey Foreign Office ministers and mysterious islands in the Indian Ocean that are out of bounds to all, including heads of government, sounded like a John le Carré novel.

I volunteered to live on Taransay for a number of reasons, but primarily because I wanted to experience island life first hand. I wanted to know what it was like to be self-sufficient and to live independently from the mainland. I wanted to know what it was like to live in isolation. I had visited islands before but always was an outsider looking in, never an insider looking out.

The more I learned about these remote outcrops of the British Empire the more I needed to visit them. I wanted to know how they regarded themselves and their place in the world. While giving an interview on Radio Scotland I was asked whether I now consider myself an islander. ‘No,’ I replied without thinking.

‘But you are,’ said the interviewer rather triumphantly. ‘Great Britain is an island, therefore we are all islanders.’

And so we are, but being an islander is a state of mind. A resident of the Isle of Man, or Jersey, and a Londoner will regard themselves very differently, as will a native of Rathlin Island, or Bardsay, and someone from Jersey.

On Taransay we considered ourselves a unique island with our own self-sufficient community, independent from Harris and Lewis. Harris and Lewis also see themselves as independent from the Scottish mainland. It seems that the smaller and more isolated the island, the more fiercely that sense of independence is felt.

There was little serious concern in Britain about how the construction of the Channel Tunnel might affect our island status. But compare this to the huge vocal outcry on Skye when they built the Skye bridge to replace the old ferry service. Islanders were up in arms at this challenge to their island status.

I spent the year after Castaway visiting a number of small islands off the coast of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. I was mesmerized by the similarities between the communities I met and our temporary community on Taransay. I was startled by the familiarity of their resourcefulness and of their unremitting suspicion of outsiders.

There is a very definite island mentality, and I wanted to compare my own experience of it to some of the most remote island communities in the world, to find out why the Teatime Islanders choose to live in such abject isolation, many miles from the services of a modern society. I wanted to find out whether an islander must always live on an island. And to discover whether or not a Londoner like me could ever consider myself a real islander or whether I’m just a wannabe.

If once you have slept on an island
You’ll never be quite the same;
You may look as you looked the day before
And go by the same old name,

You may bustle about in street and shop
You may sit at home and sew,
But you’ll see blue water and wheeling gulls
Wherever your feet may go.

You may chat with the neighbors of this and that
And close to your fire keep,
But you’ll hear ship whistle and lighthouse bell
And tides beat through your sleep.

Oh! you won’t know why, and you can’t say how
Such a change upon you came,
But once you have slept on an island,
You’ll never be quite the same.

I am often asked how the year on Taransay affected the BBC castaways, and it is perhaps tribute to the power of islands that nearly a third of them have moved permanently to island homes. And as for me, I embarked on my own adventure. An island odyssey in search of the remaining islands of empire. A journey to Tristan da Cunha, Ascension, Pitcairn, the British Indian Ocean Territories, St Helena and the Falkland Islands.

It was a search that would take me to the faraway corners of the earth in search of some of the most extraordinary islands in the world, the Teatime Islands.

‘Goin’ anywhere nice?’ asked the taxi driver, his eyes framed in the rearview mirror.

‘Tristan da Cunha,’ I replied, as we sped through the deserted streets of London on our way to Heathrow on a frosty January morning.

‘Near Magaluf, innit? Fink the missus and me ’ad fish and chips there once.’

‘It’s a little further south actually,’ I ventured warily, conscious of how much black-cab drivers hate being told where a place is.

‘Oh yeah, Portugal innit? Me mate Trev went last year,’ he said triumphantly.

The ‘knowledge’, it was clear, did not extend beyond the boundaries of the M25.

‘Actually, it’s in the middle of the South Atlantic somewhere between South Africa and South America,’ I corrected.

Who indeed? The answer had eluded me since I was a child, and, I had concluded, the only way to find out was to visit.

I still knew very little about this tiny outpost, so little in fact that I had called on the advice of an expert to help me with my packing.

‘Sorry to bother you,’ I had apologized, ‘but is Tristan da Cunha hot or cold?’

I was talking to Michael Swales, whose phone number I’d found in a Falkland Islands newsletter. His details had appeared next to an article about the hurricane that had recently devastated Tristan da Cunha. I had hoped he would be able to help me decide between my Marks & Spencer shorts and my Helly Hansen thermals.

I knew that Tristan da Cunha was around the same latitude as Cape Town, but it was also in the South Atlantic ocean, just two thousand miles from South Georgia, and I was still none the wiser as to whether it was temperate or arctic. That it had penguins and elephant seals was a clue, but I wasn’t sure that was enough to assume it would be chilly.

‘I think you’ll find it a little like a Scottish summer,’ replied Swales with staggering ambiguity. That could mean rain, wind, sun, snow, heat or even hurricane force winds, which, as the article had explained, had devastated the island in May 2001. It was the worst storm to hit the island in over a hundred years, churning the sea into a heavy mass, tearing roofs from buildings, bringing power cables down and killing many cattle and sheep. Communications were severed and the island had been left totally isolated from the rest of the world.

The disaster barely made the news in the UK, with the Sun newspaper confining the report to a paragraph on page 18 which stated little more than the fact that the remote island had lost the roof of its pub to the storm. I had been even more surprised to read in the newsletter that the Falkland Islands government had pledged more money to the island’s disaster appeal than the UK government.

Michael Swales, I soon discovered, was something of a Tristan da Cunha guru, having been involved with the island for nearly fifty years. He had first visited it in 1955, as a Cambridge undergraduate, on an expedition led by Robert Chambers. A biology student, Swales had joined the expedition to visit and chart the hitherto unexplored and uninhabited island of Gough deep in the South Atlantic, 250 nautical miles south of Tristan da Cunha.

The team set off aboard HMS Magpie, bound for Tristan da Cunha, whence they would continue to Gough aboard a local fishing-boat. The team and their ten tons of provisions finally arrived on Gough in November 1955, where they built the first base there. They named it Goncalo Alvarez after the first Portuguese navigator to sight the island.

During this landing, however, the expedition leader, Chambers, slipped and lost the use of the lower part of his body. The weather deteriorated, and without adequate shelter his condition grew worse and he soon developed pneumonia. Fortunately for the expedition, the fishing-vessel was still in the vicinity and he was evacuated back to South Africa.

Despite this early setback, the expedition was a resounding success, and the team of zoologists, meteorologists and botanists spent six months studying and mapping the island. It was during this survey that the young Swales was able to leave his mark on the island in the form of Michael’s Col and Swales Peak.

Getting to the island had been one thing, getting off it would be quite another. The South Atlantic is a watery desert with little to no shipping. The Foreign Office, who had sponsored part of the expedition, struck a deal with the South African government. The team of meteorologists had concluded that the island was vital to South Africa for predicting South Atlantic weather patterns, and an agreement was negotiated between the two governments that in return for a 2.5 acre allotment on Gough on which they could build a weather station, the South Africans would collect the team. The SAS Transvaal arrived in late 1956 to collect Swales and his colleagues.

Gough had been the expeditionary home, but it was the people of Tristan da Cunha who had captured Swales’s imagination. A close relationship had been forged over the ensuing fifty years, during which time Swales had made a number of return visits to the isolated island.

World communications may have improved since then, but Tristan da Cunha remains as remote and inaccessible as it was in 1955. With no airport, the only way of reaching the island is aboard the Royal Mail Ship St Helena, which visits the island just once a year, sailing from Cape Town in South Africa.

I had booked a berth on this annual voyage and had organized to board the ship in Cape Town for the five-day journey to the most remote inhabited island in the world.

‘It’s rather a coincidence that you should call,’ Swales had continued, ‘as I’ll also be on the voyage to Tristan da Cunha.’ I thanked him for his help and we agreed to chat more over a cup of beef tea somewhere in the southern hemisphere.

That wasn’t the last stroke of chance, as the next day a middle-aged couple introduced themselves at the British Airways check-in as Anne and Frank Dakin. They explained that they were the parents of Helen Dakin, a television director I had worked with while filming BBC1’s Animal Park.

We swapped pleasantries and they asked where I was going. I recalled the awkward conversation in the taxi and thought it best to keep my answer simple. ‘Cape Town,’ I replied. ‘And yourselves?’ I reciprocated.

‘Oh we’re going somewhere you probably won’t have heard of. It’s called Tristan da Cunha, an island in the middle of the South Atlantic.’ That will teach you to be so smug, I thought to myself.

Anne and Frank Dakin were farmers from the Midlands who had become involved with Tristan da Cunha through their late son Jo, who in a strange twist of fate had been part of one of Michael Swales’s later expeditions to the island.

In 1982 Swales had organized a return expedition to the island that had so enchanted him as a young student. Swales, by now a teacher, surprised the scientific world by announcing his plans to map nearby Inaccessible Island with a team of sixteen- to eighteen-year-old students from his school, Denstone College.

The science world had frowned on his plans and been critical of his intentions, which it thought foolhardy. But the Royal Geographical Society gave the project its blessing and eventually, with the help of the Foreign Office, Michael Swales and a team of fourteen young men set off from Cape Town laden with twelve tons of stores on an island adventure.

The young team spent eight months mapping and surveying Inaccessible, just as Swales had done on Gough almost thirty years earlier. It was during the expedition, on a rare visit to nearby Tristan, that the group had found themselves stormbound for several months. The Tristanians looked after the young men, who became part of the family.

One of those young men was Jo Dakin. During those months marooned, Jo had been ‘adopted’ by an island mother, Margaret Repetto. Margaret treated him like her own son, feeding him and even dressing him in her own son’s best clothes for the island dances. She knitted him socks and jumpers, and when they finally returned to Inaccessible, she would send over cakes and fresh pastries whenever the islanders went to check up on them.

The expedition had been a triumph and the team had returned to the UK to a tumultuous reception. The Dakins wrote to the Repettos to thank them for being so kind to their son, and a friendship began between the two families separated by five thousand miles of ocean.

Several years later it was the Dakins’ chance to repay the Repettos for their kindness, when Margaret and her husband Lindsey’s daughter, Elaine, came to study in the UK. Just as the Repettos had treated Jo like a son, the Dakins treated Elaine as a daughter.

Tragically, their son Jo died shortly after Elaine arrived in the UK. Somehow the Dakins got through the tragedy and their relationship with Elaine Repetto strengthened as she stayed on in the UK to train as a nurse. She eventually fell in love with a Glaswegian officer on the RMS, and they married and moved to the Mull of Kintyre, where she still lives with her husband and two children.

For the Dakins, this would be the first visit to the island that had become so much a part of their lives.

Tristan da Cunha was first sighted in 1506 by a Portuguese admiral named Tristão da Cunha. Tristan and the nearby islands were then forgotten for around three hundred years, until in 1810 a whaler named Jonathan Lambert from Salem, Massachusetts, landed on the island together with two other sailors, an American named Williams and a half-Italian called Tomaso Curri.

Lambert was responsible for some of the islands’ more colourful history. He declared himself king and renamed the islands the ‘islands of refreshment’. He even made his own flag of blue and red diamonds on a white canvas, which flew proudly from a driftwood mast.

King Lambert’s reign was short as he and one of his subjects, Williams, were both drowned in a boating accident just two years later. According to historians, Lambert accumulated a vast wealth in his short tenure, from the sale of penguin and elephant seal oil. Curri, the remaining castaway, allegedly confided to British soldiers some years later that a treasure of gold sovereigns lay buried on the island. A treasure that has never been found.

Tristan da Cunha is, however, one of the few islands in the world from which treasure-seekers have returned with a profit. In 1864, when the American Civil War was raging, the southern states sent a brig named the Lark, with Howard Summers as its captain, from the east coast of America to buy supplies in South Africa. She had on board a sea chest full of gold bars and over $70,000 in cash. The money had been plundered in the Union, and since the war appeared to be finishing in a victory for the North, the captain decided to run the Lark aground and bury the treasure.

Summers, with the aid of a crew member, Henderson, managed to get the chest from the wreck and they successfully buried their valuable treasure. Unfortunately for them, another ship bound for the United States soon arrived, and to avoid suspicion the two returned to the US. Summers died shortly afterwards, and Henderson was the only one who knew about the buried treasure.

Henderson decided to embark on a recovery mission, but he had no money with which to finance such a journey. For several years he attempted to procure a ship to reunite him with his buried wealth, until eventually he was able to return aboard the Rover. He sailed to the remote island, dug up his booty and returned to the US a wealthy man, but rumour spread and one day Captain Summers’s son appeared and successfully demanded that he receive his father’s share, half the treasure. Henderson, however, had spent so much on the expedition that he ended up without profit.

The flight to Cape Town was relatively uneventful until, half-way across Africa, somewhere above central Zaïre, we hit a storm. Lightning flashes illuminated the thick black clouds that clung over the African savannah far below. I scrunched my eyes tightly closed in the hope that if I ignored the worsening weather, then it would disappear. The plane was buffeted around like an empty tin can. I clenched the arm rest with my thoroughly gnawed finger nails as a bead of sweat made a bid to escape from my forehead.

The plane was jostled and buffeted like a paper aeroplane. I had never heard screaming on a plane. It felt like we were in a giant washing-machine as we tumbled through the air. I scrunched my eyes still tighter, and just when I didn’t think things could get any worse, we dropped like a penny from the sky. We had hit an air pocket. My body strained against the seat belt, my neighbour kissed the ceiling. Like on a horrible roller coaster gone wrong, we stopped tumbling, only to hit another pocket of air a few minutes later. Within five minutes the whole experience was over and we continued to our destination.

I was shocked in the taxi from the airport to pass mile upon mile of slum towns. Huge fences had been erected along their boundaries. Whether this was to keep people in or out, or was simply an attempt to conceal this embarrassment from tourists on their way to the increasingly popular city, I couldn’t be sure.

It was a warm Cape summer’s day by the time I reached Duncan Dock next to Cape Town’s recently restored Victoria and Alfred Dock. The docks were a forbidding place with their towering cranes and humungous ships. Like the slums on the road from the airport, they had been cut off from the city by an enormous perimeter fence.

Table Mountain towered behind. She was shrouded in her regular blanket of cloud. The Cape sky was crystal clear but for the white cloth that clung to her summit as if she were being prepared for some giant’s banquet.

Cape Town is often described as one of the most beautiful cities in the world. I would argue that while the setting is spectacular, the city is actually rather ugly with its high-rise buildings and ever-encroaching slums.

The RMS St Helena was dwarfed between two huge fruit ships when I finally found her. She was much smaller than I had imagined. Her blue hull dipped into the murky waters. Her upper half had been painted a dazzling white, while her single funnel was a sun-bleached yellow, on which was mounted the ship’s crest, a lion with a fish-tail holding a crown.

The present RMS St Helena was built in 1989 to serve the island of St Helena in the South Atlantic, some two thousand miles north of Tristan da Cunha. Until 1977 the Union Castle mail service between Southampton and the Cape had provided the islands of St Helena and Tristan da Cunha with a vital link to the UK. Neither island had nor indeed has an airport, and the ship provided the outposts with important supplies and communications.

The end of the Union Castle service spelled disaster for Tristan and St Helena, and the British government sought to replace the service. The vessel chosen was the Northland Prince, which had been built in Vancouver for the British Columbia–Alaska coastal trade. She was refitted and renamed the RMS St Helena. She served her island namesake for twelve years, providing her transport, cargo and mail requirements. In 1982 she was appropriated to serve as a supply ship in the Falklands War that was raging several thousand miles away.

A new ship was commissioned as part of a British government aid package to the Overseas Territories and the new RMS was launched in 1989. She was twice as big as her predecessor with berths for up to 128 passengers and space for 2,000 tonnes of cargo. ‘Just how must post does Tristan receive?’ I thought as I imagined her hold brimming with thousands of tons of mail.

The front of the 344-foot ship was dominated by a huge white crane that was busy lifting containers into her deep hold. The stern of the ship appeared to be the passengers’ quarters. A huge red ensign on her stern stood to attention in the brisk Cape breeze.

Although principally a cargo ship, the RMS was very much a passenger liner, and every effort had been made to ensure a comfortable journey. The poop deck had been fitted with tables and chairs and even a small seawater swimming-pool, the onboard library provided passengers with an array of literature that seemed to be dominated by Jackie Collins novels, and the sun lounge offered endless cups of tea and coffee. There was even a gym for those looking to shed a few pounds from the punishing amount of eating and drinking that was to follow during our five-day ocean voyage.