No Island Too Far

Searching for Seabirds on

Remote Specks of Land

Michael Brooke

PELAGIC PUBLISHING
 Contents

Acknowledgements xi
Maps xii

Introduction: A Royal Connection 1

FIRST ISLANDS 3
1. Fair Isle 5
Starting as a wide-eyed teenager
2. Akerøya, Oslo Fjord, Norway 10
Islands are not safe
3. Bear Island 12
Brushing Miseryfjellet (Misery Mountain)
4. Spitsbergen 14
Tundra, saxifrages and Arctic foxes

OUTER HEBRIDES AND BEYOND: A HALF-CENTURY

OF PUFFINS 19
5. Shiants, Minch, Outer Hebrides 21
Counting puffin burrows again, and again, and…
6. St Kilda 27
Life in the near-vertical
7. Faeroes 33
Knocked about by shingles and responsibility

FIRST ISLAND POSTINGS 37

8. Skokholm, Pembrokeshire, Wales 39
Life as the warden tending shearwaters
9. Cousin Island, Seychelles 53
Tropical bliss: life as the warden tending turtles, crabs, tourists and more
10. Skomer, Pembrokeshire, Wales 60
More shearwaters
11. Iceland 66
A bike ride over the central mountains through the snow
iv  Contents

FAR SOUTH 71
12. Marion Island, Southern Ocean 73
Albatrosses and penguins in the Southern Ocean while my distant father
nears death
13. Juan Fernández archipelago(Islas Robinson Crusoe and
Alejandro Selkirk) 84
In the footsteps of Alexander Selkirk, the real Robinson Crusoe
14. Gough Island, Southern Ocean 91
Seabird blizzards
15. Nightingale and Tristan da Cunha 97
The best chips ever and genteel conversation
16. Bouvet Island, Furious Fifties, Southern Ocean 103
The world’s most isolated island? And the bleakest?
17. South Sandwich Islands, Furious Fifties, Southern Ocean 106
Fifty-foot waves and making a mess in the ship’s mess

PITCAIRN ISLANDS, SOUTH PACIFIC 109

18. Pitcairn 111
Two centuries since the arrival of the Bounty mutineers
19. Oeno 120
The holiday island
20. Ducie 123
An awful sea journey and a load of rubbish strewn on a remote atoll
21. Henderson 132
Six weeks, two men and the trials of the nearest neighbours on Pitcairn
100 miles away
22. Tahiti 141
Pop-up quayside restaurants, Roquefort dressing and mountain treks
23. The Marquesas and Tuamotus 144
Luxury! Cocktails in the lagoon in the footsteps of Gaugin

IN PURSUIT OF PETRELS 147

24. Réunion, Indian Ocean 149
Magical encounters near the Piton des Neiges
25. Round Island, Mauritius, Indian Ocean 153
Welcome to the lush tropics
26. Hawaii 157
Breaching whales and suburban albatrosses
27. Falklands, South Atlantic 161
A cradle of life in the aftermath of war
28. Madeira 168
In the footsteps of Winston Churchill and Cristiano Ronaldo
 Contents  v

CAPE VERDES, TROPICAL ATLANTIC, OVER TWENTY YEARS 173

29. São Nicolau 175
Happy transits en route to Raso
30. Raso 179
Lark project amid so many shades of brown
31. Fogo 186
Volcanic fire and delicious wine

SINGING FOR MY SUPPER 189

32. Cocos Island, Eastern Pacific 191
Solving the problem of Sunshine
33. Galápagos, Eastern Pacific 193
Boobies, finches and dancing diplomats
34. Ascension, Tropical Atlantic 199
Experiments with landcrabs amid desert scenery
35. Sri Lanka 205
Leech-ridden rainforest: a plan to welcome the new millennium from
Sigiriya rock fortress
36. Madagascar 213
The conservation conundrum: poor people and poor lemurs
37. Vancouver Island 221
Grizzlies on the shoreline, a cornucopia of life
38. Borneo 225
The Brooke legacy including the Rajah’s birdwing on the flanks of Mt Kinabalu
39. Isla Natividad, Baja California 231
Whale sharks, more shearwaters and masked soldiers

BECAUSE THEY ARE THERE 235

40. Easter Island, South Pacific 237
Stupendous statues, a puzzling paradox
41. Lord Howe Island, Tasman Sea 242
The world’s most beautiful island?
42. Stewart Island, South of New Zealand 245
Kiwis on the beach
43. Sicily 248
Bikini girls depicted in Roman mosaics plus mating snakes

SCOTLAND IN MAY 253

44. North Rona to Jura 255
St Ronan’s cell to fell-racing via a midnight shipwreck
45. Orkney 261
A cross-roads of northern Britain
vi  Contents

RETURN TO JUAN FERNÁNDEZ: THE COVID YEARS 265

46. Isla Alejandro Selkirk, Juan Fernández Islands 267
Extraordinary seabird journeys revealed at a cost: more seasickness

Afterword 273

List of species mentioned in the text 275

 INTRODUCTION

A Royal Connection
I blame the late Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh.
In 1962 one Christmas present that I received was a small red 1963 diary. It
offered such tiny pages that the one-quarter page available each day was literally
the size of an oblong postage stamp. Since the year started in the midst of the
exceptional cold of the 1962/3 winter, when I was living in the Peak District, the
entry for 1 January reports ‘Go skiing twice’, and little more. The following day,
for variety, the entry is merely ‘Go skiing’. Reflections on skiing or anything else
are absent. Skiing morphs into rugby after the March thaw, and entries finally
lapse in August.
It was Prince Philip who put more steel into my diary writing. As a teenage
schoolboy undertaking the Duke of Edinburgh’s Silver Award, I elected to keep
a natural history diary. This commenced around three years after the lapse of
the miniscule 1963 diary. Initially it did not show signs of literary improvement.
There is a thin sketch of the day’s weather and basic meteorological readings from
my school’s weather station.
Come year’s end and there are signs of marginal improvement. Realising
I needed to make the narrative more interesting for His Royal Highness, extra
observations began to be inserted, along with clippings from newspapers. The
inclusion of bird observations was an easy means of expanding the daily account.
As actual interest burgeoned, this triggered a switch at school from physics to
biology. Of course, at the time I had no inkling that life’s path was being charted.
With a serious enthusiasm for birds developing, I visited Britain’s premier bird
observatory, Fair Isle, a speck between Orkney and Shetland. It was a dream des-
tination for a teenage birdwatcher. More importantly, it inserted the island bug:
the realization that, on an island, wondrous animals are literally on the doorstep,
a doorstep that looks out on overwhelming scenery and that can often be reached
only by an adventurous journey to the uttermost mapped dots of the world.
Inadvertently I found myself on track to becoming a professional ornithologist
with a special interest in seabirds. It was these creatures that served to draw me
to so many islands for conservation-inspired population surveys, for studies of
onshore behaviour, and for at-sea tracking using twenty-first-century electronics.
2  NO ISLAND TOO FAR

This book is about the islands that I have been lucky enough to visit, very often
but not always in the cause of bird research. Altogether I have spent around ten
years of my adult life on small, virtually uninhabited islands. The pages that
follow focus on the islands of my life. The continental starting points for these
peregrinations in general receive scant attention, being mentioned only where
needed to explain particular journeys. This means I must exclude (or not in this
case!) such mainland incidents as the occasion when an unholy expletive almost
emerged when my toes were literally trodden on by Bishop Desmond Tutu. In
Cape Town’s Baxter Theatre, the great man was shuffling towards his seat past
members of the audience, including myself, already seated in the same row.
The batch of islands on which I have notched up the greatest number of days
and nights are Skomer and Skokholm, off the UK’s Pembrokeshire coast, Cousin
Island in the Seychelles, Marion Island in the Southern Ocean, Henderson Island
in the South Pacific’s Pitcairn Group and Isla Alejandro Selkirk in the Juan
Fernández archipelago, some 700 kilometres west of Chile. All lack permanent
human inhabitants. Many more islands, visited for shorter periods or even just
brushed past, also crop up in the pages to come. Some are the world’s most iso-
lated; others will be more familiar, and I have not felt any need to restrict the
narrative to the smallest and remotest islands. The ‘carpe diem’ approach that has
helped me cherish each day and suck rich experiences from smaller islands has
also worked well on larger islands. Included are some of these, such as Madagascar
and Vancouver Island. Nevertheless, I have felt no obligation to include every
island I have visited. Some are not included because I was ill for much of the visit
(Cyprus), or because my experience almost certainly matched that of numerous
other visitors (Fuerteventura, Canaries), or because the trip was akin to a honey-
moon and the bedroom door remains closed (Majorca).
Writing this book has hinged on – indeed, been made possible by – the diary
habit, thoroughly maintained for the shorter visits but, alas, neglected in the case
of Skokholm, Skomer and Cousin. For those islands, where a year or more of life is
compressed into a few thousand words, I have relied on my own memory of certain
major incidents, on reports and on magazine articles that I wrote at the time. The
internet has allowed facts to be checked.
In retrospect, I realize that the opportunity to visit such a wealth of islands has
been hugely helped by living the greater part of my life in the second half of the
twentieth century and the early part of the twenty-first, a period that may prove to
be the heyday of international travel. Any earlier, and opportunities for travelling
to distant airstrips and anchorages would have been more limited. Any later, and
opportunities may become constrained by restraints on the use of fossil fuel, not
to mention the fact that that the ecological scars on remote islands are likely to
become even more visible.
Which leads to a final thought. It is common for folk who have spent a chunk
of their lives on an island to write a book about the experience. This is surely no
accident. They are aware that they have been lucky enough to savour, to endure, to
be grateful for a special experience, and wish to share it. I follow in the tradition,
but with the excuse that my list of islands visited is longer than average. Let the
voyaging begin.
FIRST ISLANDS
 CHAPTER 1

Fair Isle
Four visits, 1967–2013

If any single island can claim credit for dispatching me down an island-going
path, it might well be Fair Isle. As an enthusiastic but unskilled young birdwatcher
in the last summer of my schooldays, I knew that Fair Isle was special in its abil-
ity to attract rare birds, especially in autumn. Many were from eastern Europe
and even Siberia. Presumably wandering westward, they found themselves, more
or less by accident, over the North Sea. If, adrift in the skies and roughly in the
middle of the fifty-mile gap between the Orkney and Shetland Isles, these strays
spotted land – Fair Isle – it would be no surprise if they touched down to draw
breath and thrill birders.
Fair Isle’s position not only attracts birds but has also contributed to its fatal
impact on ships using the Orkney–Shetland channel when in transit between the
North Sea and North Atlantic. The list of shipwrecks is long, from the El Gran
Griffon, the flagship of the Spanish Armada, to The Planet in 1955. When the holed
Planet was run ashore in Fair Isle’s North Haven, her hold was full of fresh her-
ring. Even resourceful islanders could not make use of twenty tonnes of fish.
Lucky gulls!
Travelling aboard the overnight ferry from Aberdeen to Shetland for the first
time, I unrolled my sleeping bag on the steel deck; a lifetime’s pattern was set.
The deck was followed by a quick overland bus journey across mainland Shetland
to embark the Fair Isle supply boat, the notoriously uncomfortable Good Shepherd,
crewed by several members of the Stout family –each one Stout of name and stout
of frame. On an unexpectedly calm crossing, the Good Shepherd’s reputation as
a generator of seasickness took a temporary hit. During the three hours aboard
I could admire the island expanding to occupy more and more of the horizon.
Roughly speaking, the island was lower in the east and higher in the west, before
the western cliffs dropped precipitously into the sea.
I made my first landfall on Fair Isle on 18 August 1967 and then stayed for
eleven days at the famous Bird Observatory, based in a cluster of Nissen huts beside
North Haven. In my ornithological innocence and ignorance, I did not realize that
6  NO ISLAND TOO FAR

this was too early in the autumn for serious rarities to be anticipated. Yes, there
were species new to me, such as barred and icterine warblers, but these are very
small beer to serious twitchers. As a wide-eyed schoolboy, I nonetheless grasped
at the new knowledge available when warden Roy Dennis called the daily log of an
evening and the other guests reported what they had seen that day – reports that
far exceeded my sparse contributions.
For much of the stay mist hung over the island. This did not deter the athletic
Arctic skuas from swooping to attack my head. Just as the fatal bullet is suppos-
edly never heard, so the skua blow, delivered by lowered feet, often arrives from
behind without warning. Obstreperous birds and pervading damp, however, did
not stop me tasting and treasuring the local place-names: Golden Water, just
south of the North Light which dominated Da Nizz, the isle’s northernmost prom-
ontory; the dark dank clefts in the western cliffs, such as Hjukni Geo and Hesto
Geo; the big hill in the south-west, Malcolm’s Head, which served to buttress the
island against the prevailing south-westerlies; the simple croft names, such as
Taft, Houll and Busta. The fact that the mist made it difficult to learn how those
places fitted together in the landscape only fostered my urge to return, an urge
emphasized by the tears that welled up as the Good Shepherd left North Haven on
29 August, my seventeenth birthday.
A return was possible in June the following year, when Roy generously prior-
itized enthusiasm over competence and offered me a three-week slot in late June
and early July as seabird assistant. That said, my incompetence was to the fore in
the matter of boiler maintenance. One of the assistant’s tasks was to stoke the boil-
ers that provided hot water to the sleeping huts. The plumbing was always noisy,
but when the hot water in the pipes started to boil the noise increased dramati-
cally and provided a rumbling indication that I had stoked the system above and
beyond any safe limit.
After the first seabird ringing excursion, to a cave where guillemots nested in
clamorous mayhem, I wrote that it was ‘highly putrid and unhygienic’. That is
doubtless true – the stench of slimy guano is powerful – but it completely fails to
highlight that the smell, the hubbub of life, the chance to handle wild creatures
are together addictive. They have continued to draw me to seabird colonies over a
life and a career.
A few days later, when we visited a shag colony at Gunnawark, I was start-
ing to recognize the attraction more explicitly. The visit was ‘very mucky and
enjoyable’. The sea nearby was remarkable; areas of dark, almost navy blue were
sharply demarcated from regions of greenish turquoise, where the water was in
effect stained by an abundance of near-translucent sea gooseberries. But that
Gunnawark visit was eclipsed in my memory when we entered another shag-filled
cave at Lericum. A startled bird quit its nest in the inner darkness and flew towards
the daylight. When it passed my companion, Charlie, he extended a strong arm
and caught the shag by its long outstretched neck. Captor and captive were equally
surprised, but the bird was none the worse for its irregular interception. I was
increasingly hooked by the thrill of the chase.
If ever there is a sight to set the hunting juices of a young aspiring bird-ringer
flowing, it is that of a fulmar hovering on the wind. The bird is a mere three
metres way, its wings spread and occasionally twitching as it holds position on the
 Fair Isle  7

cliff-edge updraft. The feet are dangling down. The tail rolls from side to side to
help the bird maintain position as its dark eye surveys its human admirer sitting
on the clifftop. Surely, but surely, I can catch that bird, not for the pot but to add
a ring to its leg? So it was on Fair Isle that I developed a zest for fleyging: catching
fulmars with a long-handled net, or fleyg, as used in the Faeroes and Iceland for
catching puffins.
Not surprisingly, the road from gleam in eye to actual capture was bumpy.
The catching spot on the cliff edge had to be safe. Not long after my stay another
person swung his fleyg with such vigour that he toppled to his death. Then the
fleyg must rest on the ground as far out of sight as possible, for fulmars seemed
remarkably able to estimate that they should bypass a three-metre net with four
metres of clearance. But, preparations made, I waited and swept and, with luck,
caught a bird. It was primaeval and satisfying, a quenching of some atavistic urge.
One day in late June, seabirds became a sideshow when three white-tailed eagle
chicks arrived on the back seat of an Islander aircraft. They were promptly taken to
keeping cages built in readiness. In captivity, the young eagles could look forward
to fishy meals with an occasional side order of disoriented racing pigeon. This
project was the brainchild of George Waterston, whose vision had established the
Bird Observatory in 1948. He was now present to watch the arrival of the birds
that would, all being well, establish a breeding wild population, and so restore the
species as a Scottish resident after an absence of over half a century. The chicks,
two females and a male, had been brought from Norwegian nests by Dr Johan
Willgohs, who had shepherded his charges all the way across the North Sea. In
the event, the eagles once released into the wild did not survive beyond 1969. But
the knowhow gathered on Fair Isle certainly contributed to the eventual success
of the Scottish eagle reintroduction project that resumed on the Hebridean island
of Rum in 1975.
As I left the Isle aboard the Good Shepherd on 9 July, we passed a guillemot chick
and its father also swimming away from the island. They would stay together for
several weeks while the youngster reached full size and developed fishing skills.
To this day, I remain amazed that contact between Dad and his teenager is main-
tained through the days and nights of late summer when gales howl and waves
create splashing mayhem.
As is true for so many people, I was struggling to find an employment niche in
the autumn following university graduation. The upside was ten spare days for my
next visit to Fair Isle in mid-October 1971. The vagaries of scheduling imposed a
spare day near Sumburgh, on Shetland, while the wind blew. The clifftop ravens
stretched their wings and remained aloft as if reclining into a comfy armchair.
When the wind brought rain, I retreated to my tent and was asleep by early evening.
Next morning, I flew from Sumburgh to Fair Isle to find the island had lost
the friendly green of summer, to be replaced by the gentle brown of a fading year.
Not only had the landscape changed, but the Nissen huts of yesteryear had been
replaced by the spanking new Observatory. Unlike more fortunate observers,
I failed to see a serious rarity from the east, a citrine wagtail. A week later the poor
wagtail was found dead at the South Light, and I did get to see it after all!
It was the season when skeins of geese, fleeing the far north, passed through.
Some flocks maintained a perfect V-formation as they flew overhead and set a
8  NO ISLAND TOO FAR

southwards course for Orkney. Others circled, broke formation and, in a flurry
of hectically beating wings and lowered feet, touched down for rest. Perhaps they
were pinkfeet from Iceland or barnacle geese from further north. Still others
were shot by the Islanders and, mortally wounded, tumbled spectacularly from
the frosty sky.
Geese that had touched down risked being caught when warden Roger and
I ventured forth one night on a dazzling expedition. The birds, hoping for an
uneventful if wind-blasted night on the pond of Easter Lother, were confused by
our bright light. They could be approached, but were too large to be caught in a
small handnet. A rugby tackle was needed.
Over the following days the island was variously bright in sunshine and drab in
rain squalls. When snow showers temporarily turned the island white, the island
donned yet another costume. The fluctuating vistas delighted, except when rain
slashed inside my jacket. But it was clearly weather announcing that winter was
approaching. No wonder thrushes were fleeing Scandinavia. When their numbers
peaked, there was much argument about the redwing total that should be entered
in the daily log. Roger’s was the casting vote, and he decreed 1,000. I would happily
have entered 2,000.
As the weather continued unsettled or worse, the Good Shepherd sailing was
delayed for two days. The crossing was miserable and I needed to warm up in the
lounge of Sumburgh airport. After catching a bus to Lerwick, there were two days
to kill before the ferry departed for Aberdeen. It was an opportunity to ascend
Ronas Hill, Shetland’s highest point. When I asked the bus driver to drop me at
the base of the hill in the dark he was incredulous – with every justification, since
the weather was wild. The tent went up in record time and remained standing
through that night and the next. I duly sailed to Aberdeen before catching an
ambling train to Perth and then hitch-hiking to a friend’s home on the shores of
Loch Rannoch.
Forty-two years passed. The Fair Isle flight no longer departed from Sumburgh
but from Tingwall, closer to Lerwick. However, on the May morning of departure,
a thick mist guaranteed no take-offs. When news arrived that the Good Shepherd –
same name, newer boat – had left the island and was Shetland-bound, it was an
easy decision to grab a taxi to Grutness and, in due course, step aboard the vessel.
My companions were six Japanese ladies, each wearing a Fair Isle sweater. Over
the ensuing days they frequently changed sweaters, but I never managed to deter-
mine how many sweaters each lady had brought from Japan to Shetland. And,
while most guests spent the days scouring the island for birds, the Japanese team
mostly remained in the Observatory common room, clicking their needles and
creating more exquisite Fair Isle sweaters.
Particularly in the island’s south, in the vicinity of the crofts, the land had
changed over the decades from a mosaic of crops, such as oats and potatoes, to
sheep pasture. But, to attract migrants, small thickets had been planted alongside
the houses. In one such thicket a long-eared owl stood erect and motionless in a
rose bush. As far as I could discern, it did not move for two days, but there was a
consensus that it remained alive.
Alas, not all birds remained alive. In late May there was a goodly passage of
shrikes, also known as butcherbirds because of their habit of killing small birds
 Fair Isle  9

and mammals and impaling them on thorns or barbed wire. Evidence of this
behaviour came in the form of six headless swallows on the beach at South
Harbour.
One day I tramped over the springy sheep-grazed turf to Lerness. Gannets
croaked unmelodiously on their nesting slabs to the north. Deep chasms split the
cliffs, the vertiginous walls speckled with grey dots: nesting fulmars. Returning
via Ward Hill, the island’s highest point, I saw fresh-cut neatly stacked peat bricks,
Guinness-brown in colour. Nearby was a peat-cutting blade, fixed at right angles
to the handle. Even if wind power is now crucial to Fair Isle, the old ways have not
completely vanished. I celebrated with a downhill run back to the Observatory.
After five days of heavy-duty fry-ups at breakfast, and certainly insufficient
running to burn off those greasy calories, I took a flight back to Shetland. That
evening’s ship-borne departure from Lerwick, unusually, skirted north of Bressay
before swinging south under the shadowy cliffs of Noss. It was a perfect northern
evening of warm sun, low islands and a surfacing minke whale. Next morning
I enjoyed breakfast croissants with a friend in Aberdeen, drove to Schiehallion to
bag the Munro and supped with another friend in Edinburgh. It felt very differ-
ent from the more haphazard travel of the 1960s and 1970s, which was slower and
so often depended on the kindness of strangers who were ready to help a young
hitch-hiker. Meanwhile, my personal viewpoint had clearly shifted. The early dia-
ries listed birds as if one barred warbler more or less actually mattered. The later
diaries were more adept at celebrating the quirkiness of life. What could be more
quirky than Japanese ladies travelling thousands of miles to knit one purl one?
 CHAPTER 2

Akerøya, Oslo
Fjord, Norway
Two short visits, spring 1968

Quite early in my island-hopping trajectory, in that gap between school and uni-
versity, I spent several months in Norway and visited Akerøya, situated in the
eastern approaches to Oslo Fjord. It is a small (1.6 square kilometres), rocky and
unremarkable island that might not have demanded mention on these pages but
for its connection to an ornithologist named Gunnar Lid, whose ill-fated end
prompted thoughts about links between risk and lives well lived. These thoughts
became more prominent during the Covid era, when much of this book was
drafted.
I visited Akerøya twice, for about ten days in mid-April and a further ten days
in late May. The purpose was to catch and ring migrant birds arriving as winter
eased its grip. During the April visit, goldcrests were arriving in the early morn-
ing: it seemed barely credible that five grams of feathery fluff could make its way
across the North Sea. By May, the focus had shifted to migrants arriving from
Africa, especially willow warblers. My diary from those visits emphatically does
not bear reproduction. With all the literary panache of a telephone directory, it
provides lists of birds ringed on a particular day, and even their ring numbers.
Adrian Mole it is not.
The organizing force behind the visits was Gunnar Lid, a charismatic and
handsome man a dozen years my senior. In the years that followed we did not
keep in personal touch but I remained aware of his research publicising the abject
breeding success achieved by the puffin populations of the Lofoten Islands in
northern Norway. It was around midnight on 1 August 1983 that disaster struck.
Lid’s boat hit a rock off Røst, one of the Lofotens, and he plunged into the cold sea
and drowned at a meagre forty-five years old. Whatever his last thoughts might
have been in that moment when the certainty of death arrived, I am sure they were
not regrets about studying puffins and island-going.
 Akerøya, Oslo Fjord, Norway   11

This tragedy occurred about a year after three young British Antarctic Survey
scientists, based near the Antarctic Peninsula, died after falling through sea ice
while on a midwinter sledging trip that was essentially recreational. I remember
the Survey’s then Director, Dick Laws, speaking on national radio. He was not
in the least heartless but, in a nutshell, said ‘They were doing what they wanted
to do, they were not foolhardy, but they knew full well there was a risk attached,
and shit happened.’ How different to the need felt by every organization in the
twenty-first century to announce to customers that ‘Your safety is our highest
priority’. Is that really true? Is life’s wonderful richness really enhanced by forever
staying safe?
While Gunnar Lid is the only person I have known who has died in the course
of island-going, friends and colleagues have been nearby when others have died
from drowning and cliff falls, the obvious prime hazards. On each occasion when
I heard the fatal news, I murmured internally ‘There but for the grace of God…’.
Indeed, it was exactly those hazards that have delivered my own most frightening
moments; as I tumbled out of the pirogue and was grasped by a non-swimmer on
Cousin, flipped onto the reef while striving to steer an inflatable onto Henderson’s
beach, and watched a rucksack, parked on a slope on Alejandro Selkirk, teeter,
topple, gather pace and then somersault all the way to the bottom of a vertiginous
slope, with results fatal to a camera lens. Had I been attached to the rucksack the
results would probably have been fatal to me.
My years on marvellous distant islands have provided emotional peaks and
troughs transcended only by love affairs and parental deaths. Many of those peaks
would have been out of reach had I not been comfortable in solitary isolation.
Just as I have been confident in my own hillcraft when alone overnight in the
Scottish hills, so I have been confident in my mental fortitude when alone on
an island. Perhaps the peaks would have been higher still if shared more. I shall
never know – but at least these pages offer the chance of some retrospective, vicari-
ous sharing.
Of one thing I am certain. Staying safe was never a primary aim. Accidents are
most likely when one’s guard is down. That might be when descending rather than
ascending Mount Everest. In my more down-to-earth trajectory I have roamed the
Scottish hills for years. Excluding reversing my car into a ditch, the accidents –
a gashed hand needing five stitches and, separately, a dislocated finger – both
occurred when not concentrating because I was close to a road and safety. By the
same token, the risks of island isolation can be much reduced but never elimi-
nated by the prosaic expedient of being careful. What is unquestionable is that sci-
entific curiosity and encounters with magnificent scenery and entrancing wildlife
comfortably win out over any attendant risks.
 CHAPTER 3

Bear Island
Passed offshore July 1968

It was early in my island-hopping days that I went furthest north and notched
up life’s greatest latitude. The Hurtigruten ship embarked in Bergen provided
a comfortable start to the Spitsbergen adventure for the nine leaders and thirty-
four pupils of the 1968 British Schools Exploring Society Expedition. Norwegian
coastal towns were ticked off one by one. North of the Arctic Circle, Tromsø, tightly
linked to the romantic heroics of Nansen and Amundsen, was slightly shabby. The
onward scenery was dominated by bleak grey slopes exuding power and mystery.
The mystery might have diminished had the mist dissipated. It might even have
been possible to see the mountain allegedly towering above Hammerfest.
Honningsvåg, the northernmost town of mainland Norway, seemed devoted
to fish. Local passengers used the two hours at the quayside to lob a fishing line
overboard to catch cod, flounder and coalfish. I wandered onshore, fought off the
all-pervading odour of fishmeal and spotted the wooden racks over which cod,
tied in pairs tail to tail, were draped to dry. Despite their devotion to northern
fish, younger people wore the clothes of the south and the Sixties, US Army jackets
and kaftans.
Shortly after midnight, the ship passed Norway’s North Cape (Nordkapp). The
late July timing precluded any prospect of spotting the Northern Lights, nor was
there any sign of midnight sun. There was just continuous murky daylight. The
Cape, clinging onto the northern fringe of Europe, had an overwhelming wild-
ness, its bulky, misty prow pointing north towards Bear Island.
Next day, the ship churned dull waters while advancing towards Bear Island.
For many an hour there was no glimpse of land through the pervading drab mist-
iness, yet the numbers of birds hinted at increasing proximity to land. First a
couple of birds beating their short wings and heading in the same direction as
ourselves, then a cluster, then a continuous stream, a ribbon of vitality that clearly
had some invisible destination in mind. They were guillemots and their high-
Arctic cousins, Brunnich’s guillemots, in roughly equal numbers. I was amazed
that such abundance could flourish in conditions that any sensible creature would
 Bear Island  13

strive to flee. When the island finally became visible in mid-afternoon, its tree-
less profile matched the bleakness of the surrounding sea. No wonder the highest
point was named Miseryfjellet.
A small boat appeared from below the weather station that crowned the north-
ern cliffs. It was pulling a raft on which three bear men stood. They clambered
aboard in good spirits, relishing the forthcoming restocking of the larder. That
said, the raft bounced like a March hare as the replenishing stores were swung
overboard. There were no mishaps. Onward towards Spitsbergen we steamed,
leaving the men to enjoy their treats. In years to come I was to appreciate how the
arrival of ‘Christmas’ treats in July – or any other month – invariably boosted team
morale: a dollop of joy spread onto the tranquil daily routine of island life.