Take Nothing, Leave Nothing: On being banned from the world’s most remote island

Referring to land bases as HMS dates from 1805.

   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_frigate

Which doesn't negate the reason for this particular decision of course.

A better one:

"For though I sedulously followed the rule of taking nothing and leaving nothing, it suddenly seemed to me that my very being on the island, and my later decision to record my impressions of that visit and the impressions of earlier visitors, had resulted in a series of entirely unintended and unanticipated consequences—consequences that were as inimical to the islanders’ contentment as if I had plundered or polluted there.

"I had no understanding whatsoever that by repeating that naval officer’s memoir, I could hurt the feelings of anyone. To my clumsy, unthinking, touristic mind, the notion seemed quite absurd. To be sure, old Kenneth Rogers had explained it to me kindly—but I had chosen to ignore his warning, to dismiss his assertion of feeling. I had failed, even for one second, to consider what he and his fellow islanders might think—because I held to an unspoken assumption that as a visitor from the sophisticated outside, I knew better, and that I had something of a prescriptive right to do with him and his like, more or less as I pleased...."

Appears to be a legal oddity. Renaming the islands to boats must have seemed an easy solution at the time.

>Under section 67 of the Naval Discipline Act 1866, the provisions of the act only applied to officers and men of the Royal Navy borne on the books of a warship.

No effing way. I'm sorry, no way. This is like the Simpsons with:

  Homer, I'm in a rhubarb of a pickle of a jam here.
  I was all set to go off on vacation when I get called up for jury duty.
  Oh, it's a corker of a case.
  Seems a man drove up onto a traffic island and hit a decorative rowboat full of geraniums.
  Now they're trying it as a maritime offense.

The Royal Australian Navy does this too

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMAS_Stirling

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMAS_Albatross_%28air_station%2...

Hasn't the US done this too, even if not recently then at least historically?

The Royal Navy still does this today though.

The British MOD's Vulcan Naval Reactor Test Establishment at Dounreay in Caithness in the north of Scotland used to be known as HMS Vulcan [0].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dounreay#Vulcan_NRTE

I had the same reaction, though I'll note that it rapidly becomes obvious it's a different story.

I visited Pitcairn Island a few years ago, staying with an island couple. It's a great place to explore and I found the islanders friendly and welcoming.

There is an aspect of wariness I think with outsiders amongst them - especially those who are journalists or involved in media in some aspect. They've been bitten before and had their lives written about (Dea Birkett's book Serpent in Paradise comes to mind).

Interesting, I had thought that the Bounty mutineers had died out because of lack of genetic diversity/lack of resources already.

Not quite the same, but there are islands in the St. Lawrence in Quebec that are similar backwaters. My father has been hunting snow geese on Ile-aux-Grues, just across from Montmane, Quebec. At this point, there are only about a dozen families on the island that stay there and continue doing the guiding/dairying lifestyle that is traditional year-round.

On the slightly larger side, I was able to visit Easter Island at one point. Depletion of natural resources led to an all out class war that nearly wiped everyone out (see: the popular 'Collapse' (2005)). It is a very eerie place to visit because there is not much vegetation across large parts of the island and you can see the the extent of the island in all directions standing on one of the peaks. I couldn't really put my finger on it at the time but I definitely had an uneasy feeling being in such a remote location in the middle of the vast ocean. It hits you in the gut that you would be trapped on this tiny speck of land if it were not for the occasional airplane or cargo ship. I can only imagine what crew of the Bounty (or any other shipwreck) felt.

I wish someone translated http://www.kulturalna.warszawa.pl/kapuscinski,6,4351.html?lo... into English - it was one of the most mindtwisting books I've read for a long time.

It's a lot more subtle than that. | "de ne savoir pas demeurer en repos dans une chambre."

Is literally: "To not know how to remain at rest in a room"

There is certainly no mention of one's own room, but it is a conclusion one could draw from the previous paragraph: these issues would certainly be avoided if one did not leave their house, but without additional context, it's not the only conclusion.

From the given context, my interpretation is closer to its literal core: people cannot content themselves to be still, in a state of calm.

People routinely and actively flee moments of calm, moments of idle. Glance around public transport, and you'll see people cramming every second with something - the ageless inability to remain calm in a room.

Alternative version:

Writer was banned from remote British island with 275 inhabitants and a gene pool restricted to 7 families. Apparently he wrote about a lieutenant's memoir in which he mentions being interested in a local girl during WW2. The woman is still alive and her husband did not like the story being written about.

The writer is not satisfied with this rather simplistic ending to his article, so he creates a narrative of insensitive tourists that make natives sad. The final message is that tourism is a plague on society and we should all just stay at home.

I wouldn't use the word exposing for something that was already in a book and known by enough people to be an annoyance.

I also wouldn't use the phrase private details for "she talked with some guy one night, nothing ever came of it".

He addresses that near the end.

The purpose of telling the story the first time was for selfish reasons. The purpose of retelling the story now is for selfless reasons.

I'm betting he thinks the islanders can tell the difference.

They sound pretty American. More than British people, for example.

The level of inbreeding on that island is quite scary. Although if they purged a lot of the deleterious alleles from the population, if they outbred with others, they could produce much healthier offspring and a lower likelihood of various genetic ailments.

Who would that be? Not Gates surely.

Don't get worked up by one highly stylized sentence from someone trying to make a literary point. There isn't nearly enough information here to pass that kind of judgement.

Case in point, Maldives:

"Maldives island swamped by rising tide of waste"

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/29399966-e80b-11e4-9960-00144feab7...

It's one of the most beautiful places on earth that you must visit to truly appreciate. But each extra person generates a load on that fragile ecosystem that diminishes that beauty by a little bit.

It was the revalation that what he, and evidently you, think is innocent, is not de facto true. It was not innocent to them, and he realized that he was warned of this but didn't respect it.

It illustrates a great point about freedom of speech: You are free to say what you want, but that does not mean it's without consequences.

I had a few hypotheses on this:

- There is more to the story, and the public part was enough for islanders to deduce the full story given what they knew. E.g. she had a child to the sailor who was raised by someone else, or she had an abortion.

- Extra marital sex was so taboo in their culture than a story that even implied it might have happened would be a scandal.

- The husband simply found the story offensive, and had enough influence in the community to get the journalist banned.

He was asked kindly by a man on the island not to publish anything embarasing about his wife. The writer thought the story would entertain others and improve his book so he disregarded that request. The islanders decided that someone who wasn't open to reasonable requests from them wasn't welcome on their island.

> I had a hard time getting the point of this article at the end about why he shouldn't have written the original story.

You really do sound like the lawyers in the story suggesting he sue to get readmitted. I'm sure it's not just Americans, but Americans in particular really do often look completely oblivious to the opinions, usages, general culture and way of life of the other, non-American people they encounter abroad. Edit: just look at the other posts in this discussion, talking about "the first amendment" when the whole story had nothing to do with the US at all (the UK, and presumably Tristan as well, don't have anything close to a law safeguarding free speech).

Maybe just because they make up a large amount of the tourists in the world, and therefore also a large part of the oblivious tourists as well.

When tourists showed up on Kerguelen island (which isn't comparable to Tristan as the population isn't permanent, but those who stay there for a full year are indeed the ephemeral natives of the place) it was always the Americans that were full of themselves, had their weird expectations and got angry when we couldn't get them fizzy water, or anything fizzy but not Orangina, or "ok just get me a beer right... wait, no not this shitty French beer". Or who wanted to touch the albatross chicks. Or bring home a gentoo egg. Or... "who are you to tell me not to do that? Call your manager right now."

Somehow even French government officials, for all their disconnectedness and abuse of the limited resources not intended for them, or most other foreign tourists, could at least get a sense of the place, and understanding of the people, at the very worst they were aware that they did not understand everything.

Wow, this is sounding very anti-American now that I'm reading this again. But my experience of tourists on a few remote islands really taught me that Americans often seem completely unprepared to meet places and people that aren't either America and American, or completely devoted to catering to their every wish and expectation.

You don't have to understand why people think differently than you do. But when they do and you are their guest, just listen to them and accept that they are different people in a different place, with different rules and different means. It's easy for me to understand how one guy could turn the few hundred inhabitants of his island against one foreigner.

> And it's certainly hard for me to understand why the author would get banned by the island rather than just hated by the guy who brought up his wife's innocent history.

They're all one big family.

That's just a an evolution of the pronunciation of "Guernsey"[0]. I'm not sure how they say it but it doesn't sound very far from the original to me (and the Irish doesn't seem very different either).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guernsey_(clothing)

I highly recommend "Krakatoa."

I'm sure your reasons are just as valid as my own for forming an opinion, but I've always wondered if the people who enjoy reading because of the linguistic qualities, rather than the content, are really just spending too much time looking for ways to feel superior. Then again, maybe I'm being critical in an attempt to feel superior. Who knows and/or who cares I guess.

I often stop reading long articles because, as you mention, there is simply too much fluff. I have better things to do than reading 10 pages of what could have been said with 4.

But this, this I read until the very end, and I liked it. I liked how the author reflected upon himself. It was good.