IT HAS taken its exotic name from an ill-fated sailor who never reached its shores.
But the origins of the world’s most remote inhabited island can be traced back to a Scots soldier who was keeping an eye on Napoleon.
Residents of the tiny island of Tristan Da Cunha, the largest of an archipelago in the south Pacific, have survived by trading in rock lobsters, crayfish and producing highly valued colourful postage stamps for collectors.
Affectionately known as Tristan, the volcanic haven - whose capital is Edinburgh of the Seven Seas - lies six days sail from Cape Town in South Africa.
It is believed its 270 inhabitants can claim lineage from Corporal William Glass, from Kelso in the Scottish Borders, who was positioned there in 1817 as part of British efforts to prevent the French from freeing Napoleon from exile on St. Helena, 1,500 miles to the north.
When that threat passed, Glass, with his South African wife and two children, asked to stay. So did a handful of others, who were soon joined by shipwrecked sailors who married wives recruited from St. Helena.
The island’s boasts a community of 270 residents and while its unique social and economic organisation has evolved over the years, it is based on the principles set out by Corporal Glass in 1817, when he established a settlement based on equality.
All Tristan families are farmers, owning their own stock and fishing. All land is communally owned.
Now, in a bid tor preserve the island’s rich wildlife, a Scots marine biologist has capture photographs that will feature on bespoke stamps to highlight the diversity of the ecosystem.
They are the work of Sue Scott, from Lochcarron in Wester Ross, who is also a qualified diver. She has worked with the government of Tristan Da Cunha on and off for the last 12 years. Mrs Scott said “It is incredibly remote. To get there you have to travel a week across an ocean and hardly ever see another ship. “There are no flights because there is no place to put a runway. There is a tiny little harbour, and if it is too rough you have to stay onboard and hide behind an island.”
She first visited as part of a Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) project, to do underwater surveys to see what was there.
Seven landbirds are endemic to Tristan, including the world’s smallest flightless bird, the Inaccessible Rail.
Seabirds dominate. About eight million pairs, mostly burrow-nesting petrels, breed on the islands.
“Then an oil rig that was being towed from Brazil to Singapore broke loose in a storm and eventually ended on Tristan’s south side,” she said.
“I dived on it and found the legs were covered with alien marine life like mussels and barnacles, which posed a threat to the ecosystem.”
She advised the government to tow it off and sink it because a few miles off there was water 3,000 ft deep. “That’s what they did.
“Then a few years later in 2011, a bulk carrier with 65,000 tonnes of Soya beans smacked into Nightingale Island, one of the smaller islands in the Tristan archipelago.
“At the moment it is mice and rat free. So were very worried about the wrecking of this bulk carrier.”
She said that on Gough island 200 miles to the south, there was a real problem with mice that are thought to have come ashore from boats hunting seals in the later 19th century. “They are half as big again as normal mice. They actually gang up on albatross chicks which are the size of a chicken. They just eat their way through the chicks’ body wall. The chicks don’t have the instinct to move. “
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