Ascension E-Book

Duff Hart-Davis

• Herausgeber: Merlin Unwin Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

The bleak, volcanic island of Ascension, 800 miles from its nearest neighbour St Helena, was described by a Victorian naval officer as 'one of the strangest places on the face of the earth'. It is still exceedingly odd. Uninhabited when it was taken over by the British in 1815, it was an almost perfect natural vacuum – a triangular heap of lava and ash. When the Royal Marines brought in plants and animals, some flourished, others died. Tropical forest now clothes the peak of Green Mountain, and feral donkeys haunt the plains. As sea birds swarm around the coast, radar stations monitor space from the tops of rust-red cinder cones, and primeval, giant green turtles lumber up the beaches to nest. The island's history is short but extraordinary.

Leseprobe

ASCENSION

the Story of a South Atlantic Island

DUFF HART-DAVIS

CONTENTS

Title PageMap of Ascension Island Author’s Note Introduction 1.The Useless Island2.HMS Ascension3.The Marines Take Over4.William Bate5.Garrison Life6.The Captain’s View7.Flora and Fauna8.Rooks for Ascension9.White Elephant?10.Communications Centre11.The Cable Men’s Heyday12.American Invasion13.Space Age14.Forward Base15.Moving On16.In the Sky17.Sea Creatures18.The PresentCommanding OfficersAcknowledgementsSourcesIndexPlatesAlso by Merlin Unwin BooksCopyright

Map of Ascension Island

AUTHOR’S NOTE

I first went to Ascension in 1967 as a journalist reporting on the island’s role in the early stages of the Space Age. I was so entranced by the place that I became determined to write its history, and I returned for a month in 1969 to explore its surface and study local records. After a year of intermittent research in the Public Record Office, my book Ascension – the Story of a South Atlantic Island came out in 1972, but it has long been out of print.

For this second edition I am much indebted to the generosity and imagination of the present Administrator, Marc Holland, and his wife Rachel, who invited me to return to the island on the bicentenary of its occupation, in October 2015. I am glad to say that, although many things had changed, I found the place no less fascinating, and the inhabitants no less friendly, than when I first went there almost fifty years earlier.

Duff Hart-Davis

Uley, Gloucestershire

August 2016

INTRODUCTION

Ascension is the top of an extinct volcano that pokes up out of the South Atlantic almost exactly half-way between Africa and the bulge of South America. The island lies just below the Equator – eight degrees south and longitude fourteen degrees west – and it would be intolerably hot were it not constantly swept by the trade winds that bluster across it from the south-east. For me its appeal lies not so much in any great events that have taken place there – rather in its physical strangeness. The story of how the British struggled to make habitable what one writer called ‘the abomination of desolation’ is in many ways extraordinary.

Some people find Ascension hideous, and describe it accurately enough as a heap of clinker, slag and cinders on which the rakings from some gigantic boiler have recently been dumped. But for me, and for many of the people who have lived there, the island has a wonderful, harsh beauty. Its landscape is fierce and exciting, almost surrealist in its starkness; and wherever you look you are instantly reminded that the place was created by fire.

The island is forty miles west of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, a major rift valley and chain of submarine mountains curving for 10,000 miles north-and-south down the middle of the ocean. The ridge was created by the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates drifting apart. At various points in the rift, lava erupted from the ocean bed about 10,000 feet below sea level, and ranges of peaks are set on either side of the valley. One of them is Ascension, which rises steeply from the surrounding ocean floor and has a highest point 2817 feet above sea level. The part of the volcano above water is roughly the shape of an equilateral triangle, with sides seven miles long, and the land area is only thirty-five square miles. For geologists it is a minor paradise, since to the eyes of an expert the violence of the past is laid out with exceptional clarity.

The final effect of successive eruptions was to leave two quite different types of terrain. In the eastern half of the island the land rises vertiginously to the massif which early sailors called Green Mountain because, as they looked from the sea, they could see that the summit and the slopes round it were the only area that supported vegetation. The rock forming the mountain is mainly white trachyte, and over thousands of years some of it had broken down to form rich soil in which plants could grow.

But the western half of Ascension, which new arrivals usually saw first, was entirely different – a blackened, fire-blasted plain almost lunar in its desolation. From a wilderness of clinker, ash and tumbled lava rose nearly forty dead volcanic cones, grey, brown or bright rust-red. Their lee slopes were thickly coated with gritty black ash, and from their feet a wild jumble of rock stretched away to the sea.

Even today, at close quarters, the desolation of the low-ground is still breathtaking, particularly in the north-west corner of the island. There the lava is piled high into petrified jungles, with black, basaltic rocks dumped in total confusion. Many are loose and tip when stood upon; many have razor edges that rip boots and shoes to shreds and lay your skin open if you stumble. No wheeled vehicle can move a yard through this chaos. Slow, careful scrambling – locally known as ‘clinker-crawling’ – is the only means of crossing it. There is no earth, no shade, no plant, no water. The sun blazes vertically down, and all that the rock gives back is a suffocating heat-haze. The different colours give clear indications of successive eruptions: the older rocks have weathered and oxidised to shades of ochre and rust, but the latest lava-flows snake blackly round the flanks of the cinder hills looking as though they had only just solidified.

Scattered about is an extraordinary variety of debris. Volcanic bombs lie everywhere, some weighing several hundredweight, some the size of peas, but all bearing in their shape and texture the marks of their violent passage through the air after they had been hurled from the throat of the mountain. Sticks of lava, curled like the handles of enormous teapots or twisted like the branches of trees, ring with the hollow chime of porcelain when struck against other rock.

Much of the island is thus still a lava desert, dusty, sterile, and baked by the equatorial sun; and it can scarcely have changed since the first settlers arrived in 1815. Yet on higher ground, and on the Mountain, the story is entirely different.

So remote is Ascension – 800 miles from its nearest neighbour St Helena, 1,000 from the closest point of Africa, and 1,400 from Brazil – that hardly any seeds reached it before men first settled there. James Cunninghame, who carried out the first botanical survey in the 1690s, found only four kinds of plant. The original fauna were equally scarce. Before the early sailors brought goats (and, inadvertently, rats), there were no animals except the green turtles which came ashore to nest on the beaches, and the land crabs which at some stage in the distant past had evolved from their sea-going relatives. Nor, with the possible exception of a flightless rail, were there any land birds. The only other inhabitants were the sea birds, which nested in immense colonies among the rocks.

Into this natural vacuum the British Navy – principally the Royal Marines – brought a number of birds and animals and a huge variety of plants, as they wrestled from 1815 onwards to establish a farm round the upper slopes of Green Mountain. Most of the birds died, and so did many of the animals; but, in the absence of natural controls, those that did survive ran amok. Goats, rats, pigs, oxen and donkeys all got out of control and became a menace to agriculture.

The introduction of plants and trees was more successful, and the result today is astonishing. At levels below 1,000 feet, much of Ascension is still forbiddingly barren; throughout the year the temperature is in the high seventies or lower eighties, and the annual rainfall of only five inches either evaporates instantly or disappears into the thirsty clinker and ash. But climb 2,000 feet from sea level, up the western shoulder of the Mountain, and you enter another world. The air is ten degrees cooler. Norfolk Island pines, eucalyptus, Cape yews, casuarina, palms and evergreen oaks cast welcome shade; huge flat fronds of banana trees sprout from the ravines; blackberries and wild raspberries ripen among thickets of ginger; and a dense green mantle cloaks the precipitous sides of the mountain. The lower slopes have also changed. In the past few years invasive Mexican thorn (mesquite) has spread a brilliant green cloak over much of the lava.

All this is the legacy of the Marines. The creation of a farm, and the construction and maintenance of a reliable water-supply, absorbed an absurdly high proportion of the garrison’s energies. The place was ostensibly an ordinary naval station, run like a ship under rigid discipline. Yet the official archives make it clear that the Royal Marines gave far more of their time to building and agriculture than to defence, and when one finds records of admirals sending home urgent requests for rooks, barn-owls and hedgehogs, one cannot help suspecting that some senior officers were seriously under-employed.

This is the real story of Ascension – how the Marines battled against a hostile environment and won a limited victory. ‘Only the British would have bothered with such a place,’ wrote the French naturalist Réné Lesson, who sailed round the world between 1822 and 1825; and now, looking back with the hindsight of 200 years, one can hardly doubt that he was right.

Ascension is still extraordinary. Linked though it is with a global system of communications, it has no harbour, no public transport, no taxis. Nobody may land without permission or own a house. ‘This is one of the strangest places on the face of the earth,’ wrote a newly-arrived commandant in 1858, and he would say the same if he could go back and see the island today.

Duff Hart-Davis

THE USELESS ISLAND

1501-1801

In the year 1501 King Manuel, wishing to send a fleet of four ships to India, entrusted the command of it to John da Nova, a noble from Galicia and a special magistrate of Lisbon, whose long experience of naval matters and honourable record with the ocean-going fleets had made him one of the most important men in the city.

As soon as the expedition was assembled, they sailed from the port of Belem on 5 March 1501. And on this voyage, as they passed eight degrees beyond the equator, towards the south, they found an island to which they gave the name Conception.

Thus, with tantalising brevity, the 16th-century Portuguese historian João de Barros describes the discovery of the island now known as Ascension. Like other early authors who wrote about the period, his eyes were firmly focused on the distant lands in the East towards which the mariners were heading, and incidental discoveries made en route were evidently of little interest to him.

Nor, apparently, was the new-found island of much interest to Nova, for he sailed on and rounded the Cape of Good Hope early in July. A year later, as he returned towards home, he found another island which he named St Helena, and since this offered better prospects for colonisation, he did not return to Ascension, which remained deserted.

It was not long, however, before another little armada found it. Having recently opened up the route to the East and established their empire in India, the Portuguese were mounting expeditions with astonishing energy: in the decade 1500-1509 no fewer than 138 ships set out to search for spices, gold and precious stones, and to do battle with the native rulers who were harassing the empire-builders.

Of these Indian princes, none was more perfidious than the Zamorin of Calicut. Nova was warned to look out for him in 1501, and by 1503 he had become so troublesome that King Manuel dispatched a special fleet to put him in his place. The commander of this punitive force was Alfonso d’Albuquerque, the great admiral who became Viceroy of India.

His fleet of four ships sailed from Lisbon in April 1503, and among the company was one Giovanni da Empoli, who went as agent for the Marchionni of Lisbon, and later described his voyage in some detail. His account gives a good idea of how uncertain an art navigation still was. Albuquerque evidently decided not to hug the coast of Africa all the way down, but to take the deep-sea route pioneered by Vasco da Gama in 1497; even so, he had only a vague idea of how to go about it:

We left Lisbon on 6 April 1503, in the fleet of our commander-in-chief St James of 600 tons, the Holy Spirit of 700 tons, the St Christopher of 300 tons and the Catarina of 200 tons.

Having formed ourselves into a convoy, we began to navigate straight for Cape Verde. When we sighted the said Cape, the commander-in-chief consulted his pilots as to which course we should take to give ourselves the best run to the Cape of Good Hope. Normally, the direct route skirted the coast of Guinea, in Ethiopia, but since that land and coast were much affected by currents, reefs and shallows, as well as coinciding with the Equator, through the influence of which the wind cannot blow with any strength, we decided to avoid the coast and sail out into the open sea to a distance of 750 or 800 leagues.

And so it was that, as we sailed in that direction, at the end of 28 days we sighted land – land which had already been discovered by others (according to unconfirmed claims) and called Ascension Island. We spent the whole night off shore in very stormy weather, and came near to sinking because the wind was blowing across the island. The place was of no use as far as we could tell, and we left it behind us.