I spent nearly four years in the Falkland Islands. The seasons and storms were matched in their ferocity by the incredible wonder of the wildlife. On Saunders Island I woke up when an albatross landed on my leg. On North Island I accidently surprised a Southern Sea Lion while carrying out peat surveys. It took a nip as it made its escape from my incursion. The bruise lasted two weeks, a fading reminder that behind every pedestal there may be teeth.

At the base of Settlement Rookery, on New Island, a rogue wave nearly took me to sea to join the penguins. On the beaches of Sea Lion Island, I stood close to beachmaster Southern Elephant Seals knocking ten bells of blubber from each other, waves of fat cascading down their bodies like earthquakes. Brown Skua and Johnny Rooks have swooped at me. I’ve been stopped in my tracks by gusts of wind, sand blasted on Yorke Bay, watched the Milky Way in minus fifteen degrees when the air turns clear as the thinnest ice.

The islands are surrounded by cold seas, currents drawn straight from the Antarctic, creating a miracle ecosystem rich with squid and fish. With near pristine seas come the seabirds and marine mammals. Commerson’s Dolphins, Peale’s Dolphins, Southern Elephant Seals, sea lions, fur seals, Sei Whales, Southern Right Whales, Humpback Whales, albatross, penguins, cormorants, sheathbills, Sooty Shearwater, prions in their millions and millions. Just like the Milky Way the sheer wealth and vast biomass of wildlife dwarves you. The Falklands I love are rich, an ecological haven in a messy world.

The people are some of the most capable I know. Practical, intelligent, good company, passionate. Over sixty nationalities inhabit the islands. In a population of less than four thousand that astounded me. The people, like the wildlife, are rich in diversity. But there are always threats to beauty and the hazards always come from the small group of ‘too much and never enough’ that see money in landscapes and don’t care what they destroy to get it.

Cue the open-pen salmon farming champions that have sized up the waters of the Falklands and digested the vast amount of money they can cheat from these pristine seas. These marine nets hold in thousands of salmon, in strings of welfare-diminished cages, but let the excrement and chemicals out into the marine environment. Given that the industry has smothered most available sites and are facing significant opposition to continued salmon farming or expansion, the Falkland Islands are one of the few remaining places they can locate. The majority of the islanders find this an abomination. They have made their feelings clear. The free press highlighted the issues. Before the election the prospective Members of the Legislative Assembly said no. Then the government said no. There was no ambivalence but Unity Marine, the salmon farming champions, still ‘see a powerful opportunity to shape a world-leading aquaculture industry…in the Falkland Islands, one that sets new global benchmarks for quality, sustainability, and innovation.’ Of course that’s nonsense as has been seen around the world.

The salmon farming industry has sucked money from every country they could get a hold in and left behind a disaster of pollution. They sink to as low a place as they can get away with. The cheapest possible place. They tell you what they want you to hear and hide the reality behind a cloak of industry secrets and commercial sensitivity. All the while the seabed is smothered in dirt, creating vast dead zones. Chemicals and antibiotics are dumped into the aquatic environment. Dissolved wastes follow the currents sending plumes of pollution into the sea.

Then there’s disease and parasites, and to stretch this to an analogy, the business sucks all the profits out of the local and national economy back to faceless multi-national shareholders. There is no altruism. They degrade the sea and take the money. It’s a modern Tragedy of The Commons pursued by greed and a wanton disregard for opposition or wildlife.

Louise Cherrie, a consultant and former member of the Tasmanian Environmental Protection Authority and Marine Farming Review Panel, recently visited the Falklands. She gave an overview of the experience in Tasmania. She highlighted that those in opposition to the industry will be labelled activists, eco-nuts and cranks. That the industry has a well-planned attack filled with misinformation and lies along with legal threats and employing the ‘right’ local people. This has already begun in the Falkland Islands. Unity Marine is part owned by a Falkland Islands company which has busied itself hiring ex-government staff including the ex-Chief Executive and the ex-Director of Fisheries. People that know and understand how the government works and have taken the dirty shilling.

It’s impossible to know if they’re smitten with the idea of salmon farming, want to diversify a limited economy or are just enjoying a good pay day. Not that any of those are mutually exclusive. But what they clearly don’t care about is the wider community who are against open-pen salmon farming. They also can’t care about the waters surrounding the islands, one of the few near-pristine ecosystems left in the world and among the very best of the UK and the UK Overseas Territories. They can’t have accounted for the potential knock-on impacts to wildlife, tourism or the fishing industry. Of course, there’s a chance they’ve been employed for their skills in other areas.

Louise Cherrie highlighted the mess and pollution that will occur if this industry is allowed to commence. The nutrient discharges from the proposed 50,000 tonne salmon industry would be the same as the nitrogen discharge from over 2,000,000 people. And this figure is the first proposal, once the door is ajar the industry will inevitably push for more. Up to 85% of the salmon waste would be dissolved and couldn’t be captured. The solid 15% will smother the seabed. Drifts of pollution will cloak coastlines, killing kelp stands and jeopardising the survival of fish and squid and their eggs and larvae. This would impact the Falkland Islands fisheries, and the ecosystem of seabirds and marine mammals that rely on these species for food.

Further south in Antarctic waters the pressure on krill fisheries would be increased as masses of them are stripped to be added to the salmon food stock. Then there are the high chemical and antibiotic use, risks to biosecurity, the disease, mass mortalities, escaped salmon feeding on native species, sea lion deaths, constant light pollution impacting seabirds, particularly those at the critical stages of fledging and migration. It doesn’t matter what the industry tells local communities; the reality is always a disaster.

And the play book continues. The Falkland Islands Government were taken to Judicial Review by the salmon lobby for saying ‘no’ in the wrong way. Given better legal representation the Government may have won but as it turned out they lost. The free press had its freedom taken away with the threat of legal action for making supposed allegations of bribery, insider dealing and secret agreements between Fortuna, the Falkland Islands partner to the overseas company, and officers working for the Falkland Islands Government. These allegations were never made, but a small press cannot afford legal action and so that avenue of free speech was silenced. Soon the most vocal people in opposition will be labelled and dismissed by the industry. The salmon farming lobby will push and push and divide and use all the weapons available to them; lies, abuse, threats, co-opting, bribery. The recent all paid for ‘fact-finding’ trip for the Chamber of Commerce, and other invitees, is an example. The idea that the people invited on the trip would have seen anything other than a stage-managed deceit is laughable and of course the subsequent trip report was positive about salmon farming. But it was always going to be.

A recent post on the ‘Salmon Free Falklands’ Facebook page titled, ‘They Never Stop Taking You to Court’ highlights salmon farming companies taking the Canadian Government to court for not renewing licences for fifteen salmon farms in British Columbia. They take you to court at the start and at the end and everything in-between and all the while they pollute your environment. But the threats aren’t all external. The present Falkland Islands Chief Executive has argued the Islands can legislate themselves out of a problem. That they can accept salmon farming and apply the oversight that will ensure it’s clean and safe. Despite that other, larger and better resourced, countries have been unable to do this, she is adamant that the challenge can be met. How do you debate or reason with that level of hubris?

Once it’s there it won’t leave easily. The industry will continue to grow till all available sites are utilised and the ecological debt will grow and grow and grow. The clarity of the seas that allow you to peer into the underworld of sea lions and dolphins will turn as opaque as the industry. The haven of prions, pinnipeds, penguins, cetaceans and albatross will become impoverished.

This is the ecocide far sighted governments are looking to make a criminal act, Scotland ahead of the crowd on this. And it’s all for the greed of a dirty industry and the people that fuel it. If this happens the Falkland Islands community will look back and wonder what they could have done to prevent this from happening. But what more could they do? They’re running a local scale campaign against a filthy and rich multinational industry that steamrollers opposition. Louise Cherrie suggests they’ll offer a small-scale trial next knowing that such a trial could never reveal the true horror of large-scale open-pen salmon farming and so would offer further ammunition to their lies.

Open-pen salmon farming would be an unwelcome venture in pollution that would trap the Falklands into a decades long con and a failing marine environment. I can see a future where they look back to the days the sea was clear and pristine with anger-tinged nostalgia. The same nostalgia I feel for the reed buntings and skylarks that used to exist in the fields behind my childhood estate and the astonishing urban commons that became a housing estate. But it’s worse in the Falklands, those fields near me were never even close to pristine.

Tropic birds screeched and flailing feathers strained

the thousand-mile Atlantic wind. We walked to Mundens,

where gun batteries wasted back to rock, and bulbous canons,

dusk-orange with deep red graffiti, rested. Ann-Marie and I

*

sat down and looked over Jamestown and its bay. White terns

with crushed-coal eyes floated away. Zig-zagged

down the deep valley towards a heart-shaped waterfall.

In their bills, each carrying two small fish for their chicks.

*

Ann-Marie lay her back against the old-faced concrete.

I sat, legs resting against the crevice of mesh

that kept the rocks from tumbling down to the wharf.

She began to tell me how she came to be here.

*

The paper-clips she once shuffled giving way

to days out on the ledges of Blue Point and Ladder Hill.

Ann-Marie’s voice was hushed from the yawning torment

of childhood; I held my breath to hear.

I came home yesterday

I fell upon it when I looked

across Nidderdale and

found a 1000 fields looking back

*

and I went to those fields

to see the late greening

of the summer grass

nourishing the cattle and sheep

*

just a little beyond those meadows

I sat among the heather

and found curlew chicks

and lapwings to welcome me home

*

and the fields and the birds

and the stock and the moor

they all asked asked me

where have you been all these years

*

and I couldn’t find an adequate reply

I hadn’t seen him for twenty-four years. We met at Umhlanga Rocks. He taught me to dive at Sodwana Bay. On my first attempt I shot from the sea like a Trident missile. Target unknown, (my last, twenty-three years later, I ran out of air). He was a good memory, looked after us on our first long trip. Durban, just as apartheid was ending. The year Mandela was released. Those days of hope, of possibility, standing at the fore of a new era. We were watching beautiful waves break against the turn of history.

In our smaller world we’d swap stories. He told us about his unbearable stutter. How his older brothers would smack him, snapping him out of the impediment. He was one of those people that make living worthwhile. A social glue. Not arrogant, not self-centred. Just warm. Giving. Kind. Welcoming. Funny. The worst part of travel is saying goodbye. Not getting that chance is just as bad. I was heading to South Africa again, so I googled him. Roux le Noury, Durban.

Roux died in a helicopter crash three years earlier. Forty-two. His life, just short brackets in an infinity of time. I was a passer through. A small blip in his line but his generosity made the trip. We’d sit in his flat and talk. He introduced us to a fresh network of people in a fresh country. When I saw the newspaper article I was overwhelmed. Twenty-four years on, three years after his death, still an unbearable loss.

There were others on the trip. We volunteered at a Leonard Cheshire Home, Sparks Estate. Amelia was the manager, an ex-missionary. She didn’t know I was an atheist and asked me to say grace at our first dinner. I fumbled through, awkward, embarrassed. I drew on juvenile memories from infant school, ‘for what we are about to receive…’ Her kindness too remains with me.

Carlos was a young resident at the home, not yet double figures. He had the worse scars I’ve ever seen. Skin frothed, melted and reformed in a fire after he knocked a paraffin lamp on to himself. He was eighteen months old when it happened. From that young moment his life changed to one of pain and surgery. The sinuses in his forehead bulging with every breath. We took him to the beach, as far as we knew it was the first time he’d seen the sea while we noticed how people saw him.

It wasn’t the only burn we witnessed. Amelia asked us to join her at the hospital where a young man was being treated for severe scalds to his legs. Toe to thigh. One night he ran his own bath but had no concept of hot and cold. He screamed till someone ran in to take him from the steaming water.

At the hospital we had a choice. We waited for one of the wheelchairs that were in short supply, or I carried him to the elevator and then the car. I carried him. He wailed and wailed from the discomfort. We couldn’t sooth him, till a preacher put a hand on his forehead and said a prayer. Then he calmed down. My atheism challenged, for a short while.

We travelled to the Drakensburg Mountains and Kruger National Park. I saw wildlife I thought would forever be beyond my limited horizons. We watched lions and hippos and wildebeest and zebra. I was amazed that the grace of running giraffes in The Colour Purple was an accurate depiction. At Sodwana Bay I swam with turtles and white tipped reef sharks and octopus, those kaleidoscope aliens of the sea. I slept on the beach. Had my shoes taken from outside the bivi. Laughed at vervet monkeys sneaking into apartments to steal food. We met many people that remain in my thoughts. But it was Roux and Amelia and Carlos that changed me.

Roux arrived at his final destination far too soon. The fire of his life burned out long before it should. The newspaper article quoted his wife, colleagues and friends. They all confirmed what we’d recognised. It was clear his generous kindness would live long beyond him. I don’t know about Amelia. If she’s still alive she’ll be very old, but it wouldn’t surprise me. Her will alone could repel death. I hope Carlos is with us and his life has moved beyond the endless surgery to one of happiness and success. Though I worry that the odds will always be against him. In the end, it is all of their humanity and company that will remain with me till the day my own brackets close.

At the edge of Race Point I sing to seals. It began by mimicking their desolate calls. They called back and swam to me. At their closest they were within two arm lengths, hovering in watery embraces. Heads above, bodies below.

Over the last month I’ve learned the songs they like; ‘Hello’ by Neil Diamond is a favourite. I haven’t found any that like ‘Pervy in the Park’ by Demented Are Go. These seals are discerning. With my feet submerged, arse indented and splayed on sharp rocks, I watch them as they watch me. We’re divided by species, united by Neil Diamond.

The sea here drains away to leave a rising bar at low tide. At high tide Ynys Berchen is isolated. It’s now the seals pass through the connection. Dumpy bodies all grace and smooth as they push across, projected by elegant back flippers that mesmerise me.

Here it’s less than a metre deep and clear as a coral sea. The current washes through strands of kelp, creating serpents of hair. A grey seal swims against the tide, I’m deferential to its exquisite poise.

I have found my place. You get up, do what needs doing. When you want to stop you stop. If something good happens you watch it. There are no cars, trains, buses, planes. There are no crowds, no meetings, no steering groups, no statistics, no trips to sort. I don’t have to manage people, organise kit or boats. Deadlines don’t hang over me. Conflict is over there, far away on the mainland. Here it’s birds, seals and the sea.

The sound of the tide stops as if the ocean has been switched off. It’s the first time I’ve witnessed the moment the tide turns slack. The sun is concealed by clouds, eventually swallowed by the horizon. Kittiwakes call. Seals keep watching, intrigued by my dusk-diminished incursion.

One rises fifteen metres from me. It moves closer and closer till it’s within two metres. Its puppy eyes dark and attentive, staring me down. I sing ‘Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye,’ one the best Laughing Lenny songs, ‘you know, my love goes with you as your love stays with me. It’s just the way it changes, like the shoreline and the sea.’ I think it appreciates the sentiment.

After the ferocity the loser just wants to rest and heal but on these beaches there are species with other ideas. Small tussock birds pick at wounds and angelic appearing snowy sheathbills pace through the colony looking for wounds and torn proboscis. They wait with intent till the bulls fall asleep or relax then rush into steal their ounce of flesh.

From the top of Egg Island we hear the sea. The twilight’s deepening but the ocean positions us. We’re set up just beyond the shot furnace, the sea equidistant east, west and north. St Helena Island directly behind. While the Atlantic positions us it’s also a danger. Johnny radios Annalea, ‘you need to pack and head to the ledge.’ His voice urgent. We hear it too; the swell is intensifying. The forecast didn’t foresee this, but that’s not unusual. We’re a tiny dot off the coast of a small wart of land in the middle of the Atlantic ocean. Weather forecasts at this scale are rarely reliable.

*

It takes thirty minutes to dismantle the kit. The process is disturbingly slow but essential. Leaving mist nets up and unattended could kills dozens, even hundreds, of seabirds. Madeiran Storm Petrels, Black and Brown Noddies, Fairy Terns, Red Billed Tropic Birds and Sooty Terns all breed here. They could quickly become wrapped in the fine mesh to slowly die hanging through the heat of the day.

*

Egg Island is a Dulux faecal-grey because of the birds. Half-melted candles latched to edges are Black Noddy nests. A flawless moon shimmers across sheets of guano. The smell is seabird sharp too. Nutrients of fish and squid filtered through bird intestines, before being deposited, cling to the islands surface. It can make your eyes water.

*

With all the kit stashed safely beneath a ledge we descend past Cockburn’s Battery, a remnant of St Helena’s fortification. The earthworks here are relicts from Napolean’s imprisonment on St Helena from 1815 to his death in 1821. Now Brown Noddies stand on top of oranged canons that rust flakes of oxidised iron. Madeiran Storm Petrels nest inside the barrels and the shot furnace is filled with a Red-Billed Tropic Bird. It spends the evenings watching us as we catch other seabirds and process them. Not tonight. Tonight, we exit in haste, down crumbling rock as quick as we dare.

*

Long needles of torchlight pierce the deepening dusk. The moon is above Old Woman’s Valley. The first stars dot the sky. The route is steep, sharp ridges of volcanic stone snap underfoot. We’re careful to avoid brown noddy eggs that litter the path and are tucked in to recesses along the step-downs.

*

By the time we arrive at the final ledge the sea is startling. It pulses and swells over the ledge we need to reach, up to two metres of water pushes up and back down. The sea is breathing its watery breath on the island. In and out, in and out. All the while taunting us with the danger of it. The Gannet II, that brought us from Jamestown, is constantly pitched towards jagged rocks. Johnny works hard to keep it steady, he’s skilled but tonight the Atlantic is testing. We trust hm, we just don’t trust the sea. A whale shark drifts by, sparking phosphorescence, unaware of our drama.

*

On the island Chris, Lourens and Phil take charge. We gather above the ledge and wait in turn. Phil, a man who can simultaneously extract regurgitate and faeces from a Brown Noddy, is in his element now. Together they help us reach the step. The sea washing up over us as we steady for the jump across. We listen, taking the lead from Robert who’s stood on the boats deck.

*

When he shouts ‘go’ we jump. All the while the boat shifts position, rising and dropping with the swell. We aim to meet the rise of the deck while making sure the swell doesn’t take us. One after the other we wait our turn, landing in thuds of relief. One by one by one we make it back to the safety the boat offers. Only Julie mis-times the leap. As she reaches the deck her balance is skewed. She starts falling backwards but Robert grabs her dragging her aboard. She joins the rest of us next to the cabin.

*

Once the main group are safe our bags are rugby-balled across. It takes forty minutes for our nine strong party to get aboard; all the while the sea swirls and rises. The last three to make the jump are Chris and Phil before Lourens takes the final leap over and Johnny can take the boat to open water away from the hull-shredding jags of rock.

*

In the diminishing light we watch Brown Noddies acrobatically fly past as we move east to James Bay. Pure white Fairy Terns drop from the rock shelves to check us out. Their quick sharp movements and rapid-wing hovers mesmerise us while the bird’s liquorice eyes seem to study us. Higher up Madeiran Storm Petrels jink the air, turning figure eights, twisting and turning with exceptional finesse and ease. Red-Billed Tropic Birds screech, wings set in V shapes as they kamikaze seawards. The days final formations of Masked Booby head south-west to Lot’s Wife and the high stack of Speery Island.

*

Away from Egg Island the sea is less dangerous. The boat chugs diesel fumes into the air while the night turns to a pincushion of stars. I sit on the bow with Liz, Annalea and LeeAnne. We watch phosphorescence spark and fade. Comb jellies flashing into view before drifting away into watery darkness. Behind us Storm Petrels continue to flutter like sea bats. We’re intoxicated by the wildness; the thick exhaust and low groan of the engines can’t drown the moment. Its dark now but a lightness surrounds us.

*

A ‘phheew’ of exhalation and a pod of Pan-tropical Spotted Dolphins find the bow. They surf the sea beneath us, pushed along by the bow wave. Star-sparks of phosphorescence streak out, creating glittering cetaceans. Without the sparks the night would swallow them but the phosphorescence streaks dolphin-shaped light. Occasionally they leap clear of the water, and the sparks of shooting light switch off to re-ignite as they splash back down. Dolphins, long flashes and sparks of torpedo-shaped blue light, have turned the dark into a living animation. It feels as though we’ve fallen into Walt Disney’s imagination. We cartoon across the water to home. Above us a thin strip of stars sparkle, creating an echo of the sea.

*

The dolphins keep with us as we pass Lemon Valley and below the cliffs of Breakneck Valley with its vertical slither of green Brazilian formed by a nutrient rich sewage outfall. They stay with us all the way to James Bay where we turn to the wharf. As they leave fantasy blends back to reality.

*

We’re further brought back to life on the wharf steps when the Marine Team brandish serrated knives, and saw into the heads of fish to retrieve the otoliths. The living cartoon and poetry of life starkly returned to their compartments.

*

Later, I’m sat in Veronica’s flat along with Pam, Aine and John eating pizza from Get Carter’s, a cold beer at my side. We talk about the day and the things we’ve done. Pam has judged the St Helena photography competition along with Andy and Jill. She tells us they had some ‘very good entries,’ but as she’s sworn to confidence, she says nothing else. I tell them about the dolphins but don’t dwell on it. Instead, we spend time talking about our friends that have come and gone; Linda and Martin who are in California now, Ian and Gaynor who are back in Wales and Victoria who has a two-year contract in Kuala Lumper. That’s the hazard of travelling, the good times are intertwined with far too many goodbyes.

*

At eleven o’clock I say my own goodbye and walk to the wharf through poor-lit streets. Over-blinged cars drive by. People, heavy with drink, laugh and talk. At the Wharf four Saints, the name for the people of St Helena Island, stand looking out to sea. They’re here for the dolphins too.

*

We spend ten minutes struggling with each other’s accents till two flying fish whip into the air. Caudal fins thrashing against the sea. They take sharp turns before dropping into the water by the concrete wall. Our accents fail to miscommunicate the excitement.

*

Another flying fish heads towards me. It’s at least thirty-five centimetres long and travelling at speed. The fish dips and thrashes against the surface, desperate to keep above the water. It arcs towards me. I’m too slow. It whacks both thighs, leaving two trails of scales, as it passes between my legs.

*

I move up the steps knowing I’m fortunate to remain intact. From higher ground I see four Bottlenose Dolphins racing between the boats, quick-turning as they select flying fish from the background noise of Butterfly-Fish, Needle-Fish, squid and sea cucumber. Click-sonar distinguishing shape and size, forming images that see through skin.

*

Another dolphin forces a fish to panic into the concrete. With no discernible effort the dolphin turns one-eighty and grabs it. It navigates the prey in its fixed-smile mouth to swallow it head-first. We watch for forty minutes before the dolphins leave.

*

I’m alone now beneath a vast glisten of stars, enjoying the solitude. It’s not quiet solitude, the distant thump-music at Donny’s steals that from the night but it doesn’t matter. The boy racers screeching, braking and carrying out drunken wheel-spins can’t take this away. Not even the evening’s empty beer cans bobbing haplessly on the surface of the sea break through the moment. The Atlantic is the dominant feature, and I’m tuned to the clinking of fishing boats that dance on the great oceans diminishing swell.

*

It’s hard to know how many days I’ll get like this, sublime moments ticking away minute into minute into hour. But when they arrive they transcend the otherness of things and slip neatly into the grey folds to become a long-remembered ache of something wonderful.

‘It’s an emerald set in turquoise,’ they said. It wasn’t, not now. Now it was an emerald set in bronze. The coast grazed to dust that blew away in blistering winds, ravines scraped clean of soil. As the RMS St Helena approached the island red-billed tropic birds, v-winged and screeching, arrowed towards the sea, fairy terns hovered in front of us. At Breakneck Valley the sewage outfall fed vegetation into a cliff-high strip of greenery, a natural Brazilian. The smell of the sea, the look of a new home as I approached by the old way, at the time the only way, increased my heart rate. Jamestown, squashed into a long narrow valley. To the west Half Tree Hollow sprawled across the hint of a plateau. The 699 steps of Jacob’s Ladder connecting the two. On deck we stood together, Saints, tourists, itinerant workers. Nobody mentioned the slaves.

*

Anchored in James Bay waiting for customs to arrive I scanned the island. East was Rupert’s Valley with over 8000 graves of Liberated Africans, westwards to Lemon Valley – fewer graves but hundreds still to be discovered. Half Tree Hollow a few hundred more. A playground covers that one. Later Helena Bennett, the director of the St Helena National Trust, told me St Helena has a history of building playgrounds on graveyards. On a forty-seven square mile island space is used again and again.

*

My role was with the St Helena Government’s Conservation Team. An advisor on the Department for International Development (DfID) Technical Cooperation programme. The wildlife fascinated me, seabirds and invertebrates, whale sharks and whales. The invertebrate specialist told me mile for mile the island holds more endemic species than The Galapagos. The history captivated me too.

*

The year 1840 was momentous, described as a season of excitement – Napolean was moving, and it happened to be the year the first Liberated Africans arrived on worse ships than the one I travelled on. Britain abolished the Transatlantic Slave Trade in 1807, and the West African Squadron was tasked with liberating the kidnapped, the enslaved. The questionable term ‘Liberated Africans’ was created by the British authorities. From 1840 onwards 25,000 were processed, first in Lemon Valley and then in Rupert’s Valley.

*

With every new ship of Liberated Africans there came an influx of mortality. Newly liberated, newly dead. Some graves held seven people. Not side by side but vertically stacked. Dumped one on the other in shallow graves of volcanic rock. The grave diggers held no emotional connection. That, along with smallpox, dysentery and the filth of a slave ship, gave haste to the procedure. With time the death rate fell meaning fewer burials, less densely packed graves. That was the pattern, new arrivals, influx of death, tailing off as they began to recover. The modal age of those buried was twelve, not even teenagers. Buried in a lonely valley on an isolated island thousands of miles from everything they knew. Some didn’t even know they were on an island, or didn’t understand a place could be surrounded by a vast ocean. They set off to find home and arrived at the far cliffs. Each turn brought them to the sea till, in desperation, they threw themselves in. Suicide their only way out.

*

The day I arrived I moved to Barren Ground in the district of Blue Hill. Perched over Old Woman’s and Thompson’s Valleys. It was a thirty-minute drive to my office at Essex House, passing High Hill and High Peak. On clear days, along the ridge, I could see the volcanic intrusions of Lot and Lot’s Wife to the south, ravine after ravine to the north. I’d drive by verges greened with endemic ferns, dotted white with Peace Lilies. I learned that Saints know how to make you welcome. I took to my new colleagues as they showed me round and told me about the wildlife and history.

*

After wildlife it was Napoleon that was the focus. His second exile was here, transported to the island in 1815 after the battle of Waterloo. First, he resided at The Briars and then moved inland to higher altitudes at Longwood House. After his death in 1821 he was buried in a tomb at the Valley of the Willows, near Hutts Gate. In 1840 when the first Liberated Africans were being buried his body was exhumed and returned to France in a fever of excitement. His remains were re-interred in a monument erected at Les Invalides in Paris.

*

Napoleon’s vacated tomb became the property of France. Today it’s tended by Michel Dancoisne-Martineau, the French Consul. At the tomb I watched two ship compliments of French military hold a sombre service. It felt as hollow as the grave. Less than three miles away lay history’s victims buried in their thousands, nothing to mark them apart from lines on the old Mellis Map of 1860. While the Africans were dying of their own fevers, and their graves hastily filled, Napolean’s was emptied and revered.

*

A mile and a half from Longwood House, and two miles from the tomb, I worked with Shayla Ellick at Millennium Forest digging holes. We sieved soil isolating the roots of common gumwood trees. It was Shayla’s project. She was trying to establish the potential for carbon capture in the endemic plantation, created on denuded wind-blown soils. The overheated wind blast-furnaced our faces. We spent as much time removing dust from our eyes as weighing roots. Looking to the airport development, surrounded by cragged cliffs where blustering squalls cascaded over King and Queens’s Rocks, we agreed we wouldn’t want to be on the first plane. But it was this development that brought Rupert’s Valley back into focus.

*

Rupert’s was forgotten for decades, a place where ugliness developed. Fishing depots. Power stations. Storage units. An incinerator. The island’s industrial estate. I often walked through the valley on the way from Jamestown to Bank’s Battery, passing the redundant desalination plant built by Boer prisoners of war. Occasionally I sloped up Sugar Loaf Hill. By chance my route avoided the graves, I was relieved to discover I hadn’t walked over murdered children. Those liberated dead. But I may have stepped on unknown graves.

*

With the airport and the Haul Road, leading from Rupert’s to the airport on Prosperous Plain, the graves returned to the collective psyche. They were just bones now but in life they felt pain and fear, wept, understood terror. Could smell the dysentery, feel their bodies engulfed by disease. Understand being left to die. Some dumped at sea, and in the days of slavery many disposed that way would have been alive. For a short while. The cruelty of men as vast as the imagination.

*

In Rupert’s there are thousands of buried children, youth stolen from their own futures. Taken from the people that made them safe. Removed from everything they’d ever known. The slavers were the bogeymen of Africa, the snatchers that brutalised them. Chained and walked, chained into the holds of ships. So cramped you wouldn’t do it to livestock. Laying in faeces and vomit. Broken, abused. Contemporary reports about them suggest limbs were as thin as walking sticks. Many died as they were moved from the ships to smaller boats that were meant to bring them to safety.

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And what do we know of them? The complexities of their lives, their loves, parents, siblings, the world they inhabited, what made them laugh. They entered history as victims. Nameless unknowns. Sold, chained, marched, whipped, beaten, raped, transported, sold again, raped again. Murdered. There’s nothing else. Victims in life and victims of a history where individuals were lumped into the holds of shit-ridden disease ships, lumped together as enforced labour. Finally lumped together below the ground. Rupert’s holds their remains, lifeless souls dumped beneath crumbling volcanic rock. No origin, no future. They lay there unknown. Not even their ghosts were heard. It felt like these people were hardly individuals.

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On the arrival of one ship, when Bishop Gray of Cape Town was visiting, he decided he would offer them water from his cupped hands. He sent a message saying the Liberated Africans were not to be moved till he arrived. They waited two hours. Those on the cusp couldn’t hold on for a saviour with refreshing handfuls of water. Even if they had he hadn’t the stomach. When he finally boarded the ship the sight and stench forced him to faint.

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Away from Rupert’s the walk to the top of Diana’s Peak sits in the heart of the cloud forest, home for endemic trees and invertebrates. Golden sail spiders and spikey yellow woodlouse exist on she-cabbage trees, tree ferns and gumwoods. The vegetation harvests water from low cloud. Organic peat soils are the island’s aquifer. Stepped wooden boardwalks take you to the highest point, at 818 metres. On clear days the whole island is revealed, coast to coast to coast. At this elevation there’s over 12000 square miles of ocean stretching away. With good eyesight, or with binoculars, you would see a ship sixty miles away. In the days of sail that could be thirteen hours. I wonder how many Liberated died in those hours with land in sight, just there on the horizon. Thankfully, Bishop Gray was a temporary visitor, and most journeys ended on arrival, at least temporarily.

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It was a change of transport that brought the forgotten valley back into the equation. Since St Helena’s discovery you could only arrive by sea but now an airport was on the cards, Ruperts was needed. DfID put the money up. They carried out Risk Assessments, Environmental Impact Assessments (EIA), checked historical records but local knowledge didn’t translate to international knowledge. Previous developments in the valley, houses and power stations, had turned over remains but the siting of the Haul Road wasn’t expected to be an issue. The assumption was the route circumvented them. Still, in 2008, having scoped the issue as part of the EIA, the lead archaeologist Andy Pearson returned with two colleagues ready to excavate a small area where graves and road may intersect.

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Andy told me the extent of the known grave site avoided the Haul Road, but no-one knew if there were unmapped graves. There were, several hundred bodies lay within the footprint. Had he known what would transpire, he told me, he may not have taken the contract – it was a big step-up in scale. Soon, three archaeologists swelled to fifteen. Along with local volunteers, including three sixth form students that worked every day of the dig, they exhumed 325 bodies. A fraction of the buried but these people lay beneath the route of the road. Local geology and geography meant the road couldn’t be moved so they had to be. Andy and his team were meticulous. Everything was documented and cross-referenced. They brought in extra supplies. Each body was put in storage at the Pipe Store. The artefacts clearly marked, linked to the remains and placed in a different store. The bodies remained there for fourteen years.

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It took so long as everyone had different ideas on what to do with them. An ossuary, reburial, some other form of memorial? Committees formed and folded, new ones formed and folded. Each committee grappling with the same conundrum; how to show respect while looking to the future. And the airport stalled, halted and resumed adding further delay and confusion. In the meantime, there were things to learn.

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Andy, and subsequent researchers including Dr. Andreana Cunningham, carried out incredible research. Broken bones highlighted the barbarity the Liberated were subject to. A few, less than ten percent, had artefacts some of which could be traced back to Africa. Only five where in coffins, four of those were babies. Andreana tells me those burials were more careful than the others. The barely formed skeletons resting on pillows of material or wrapped in cloth. The presumption being these burials were carried out by the Liberated, and the bereaved mothers, not by those that buried with haste.

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I asked Andy and Andreana how it felt to work with the bodies of children, especially those bearing marks of barbarous abuse. They told me you keep a professional distance, but afterwards the emotions hit. Andy has children of his own now. He says the impact would be far greater if he was exhuming bodies of children and babies today.

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But they didn’t all die. The grave sites were up and away from the valley floor which became a tented community where the arrivals were supposed to recover. Over the years more than twenty-one thousand people camped there. Of those we know that 543 remained on St Helena, 2775 were shipped to Jamaica, 3028 to British Guyana, 2466 to Trinidad, 91 to Grenada and 1404 to South Africa. At those destinations, and on St Helena, they were forced into apprenticeships, became indentured labour or worked in domestic servitude. As far as we know none found their way home. Their treatment was better than slavery but for many it doesn’t reach the standard of liberation. A contemporary legal term was Recaptive Africans coming from the Royal Navy prize law. Rather than being ‘liberated’, they became the property of the Crown, and their liberators were paid ‘head money’.

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On arrival they were numbered and tagged. George McHenry, the surgeon working at Lemon Valley, complained that the staff helping him, and the resources they had to give care, were inadequate to the task. It wasn’t the squalor of a slave ship, but it wasn’t a place to heal. In Rupert’s, only one building survives from the time. In typical unimaginative bureaucracy it was called Number 1 Building, a hospital block built in 1861. While we can’t learn much from the survivors who were moved on, the dead and their relicts offer clues.

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The research of the artefacts, the bones, teeth and craniums gave ages and genders and inferred what culture they may be from. Isotopes extracted from the teeth added knowledge, offered rough origins within Africa. From the work done researchers believe they came from the west and east coasts. From Nigeria to Angola, some inland along the Congo River, and Mozambique. Many were from Bantu populations displaying typical filed down teeth.

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Years ago, I visited slave forts in Ghana and Mozambique. I walked into the dark prisons where people could be held for months at a time. In chains and squalor. It didn’t give the sense of terror, the stench, the pitiful sorrow, the hurt or anguish. It was dark, disorientating, authentic but not overpowering, not like Auschwitz. But each of these slave sites, including Lemon Valley and Rupert’s Valley, are the relicts of an equally disturbing crime against humanity. A transatlantic trade that lasted for centuries.

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John Hawkins was the founder of the English slave trade. It began in 1561 with a three-ship voyage to West Africa. He attacked and captured a Portuguese slave ship. Not to liberate. He sold the 301 slaves in Santa Domingo in the Domique Republic. The Jesus of Lubek was his next ship, along with three smaller ships, he captured a further 400 slaves and sold them in Venezuela. Hawkins became known as Queen Elizabeth’s Slave Trader.

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European involvement in slavery is older. St Helena was discovered by the Portuguese in 1502. The first resident was a mutilated Portuguese nobleman, Fernandez Lopez. Fernandez was punished for desertion, and for taking sides against his own country. When his compatriots captured him, they cut off his nose, his ears, his right hand but only the little finger of his left hand. Perhaps they were bored of the cruelty by then. He was deposited on St Helena in 1511 along with a few slaves. Their names are unknown. He revisited Portugal for a short time but returned to St Helena, dying there in 1545.

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So, on St Helena slavery existed from the beginning of settled history and at its peak over 50% of the population were enslaved. For those people there are no known burial sites. The assumption is they’re in unmarked graves at disparate locations around the island. Everywhere you walk on St Helena you could be stepping on the bones of abuse. I imagine it was less severe than in the Caribbean or the Americas. Eight years was the average time it took to work a slave to death on the sugar plantations. Some were whipped out of life. It could be such a tiring task that the abusers had to take turns cracking the whip. And slave owners had too much leisure to think up horrific tortures. One was to pack gunpowder into a slave’s behind, light the fuse and revel in their agonies.

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But it wasn’t easy on St Helena. In the extensive archives there are records telling of one slave who attacked his master and was subsequently sentenced to death. His master spoke up. Not for clemency, he just didn’t want to lose a worker. They reduced the sentence, only amputating his arm. The aggrieved owner asked for compensation, after all how could a one-armed slave work as hard as he did before? There are worse stories from the slave trade. Some too difficult to put into words.

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Walking the short distance down Jamestown’s High Street to the coffee shop there are many conversations. A five-minute walk can turn into a forty-minute chat. It’s hard to imagine the old St Helena. How could such a welcoming island evolve from that history? But it’s the same all over the world. All societies have evolved from past horrors, some are still trapped in barbarity, others are sinking backwards. Slavery wasn’t a historical anomaly. It lasted thousands of years and estimates suggest forty-nine million people are trapped in modern slavery today.

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I’m from Hull. At the far end of Queens Gardens, in the city centre, stands a statue to William Wilberforce. A man at the front of the anti-slavery campaign. A campaign that led to its abolishment. Hull is proud that one of us fronted the movement. He couldn’t have been a west coast man. The slave trade in Bristol, Liverpool and Glasgow was far too entrenched. We’re often encouraged to feel pride at a drop of historical humanity but not shame for an ocean of abuse. Slavery and colonialism have held back generations of people of African descent. We can’t feel contrition, we’re told, because it’s history. Yet if we feel pride for the good, we should be prepared to feel shame for the bad. Andreanna tells me this isn’t the way to look at it. History was not perpetrated by anyone alive today but, she says, we need to look at it objectively and not wrap it in sugar coated cliches.

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At the end of slavery, the equivalent of one billion pounds compensation was provided by the British government. It was given to the abusers. Could you imagine a world where we compensated the Nazis after liberating the concentration camps? And the newly freed slaves were then charged rent and other costs which they didn’t have the means to meet. It pushed them into a different form of poverty and abuse. The economic disparities still exist today.

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The past travels to the present and slips into the future. What of the remains in Rupert’s Valley, what future can be forecast for St Helena? The airport development has saved lives. When I was there a medivac would take five days on the ship to Cape Town, or two days to Ascension Island and a military flight to the UK. But patients had to wait for the ship to arrive before they could get away. People died of remoteness. A medivac now takes hours, for many that justifies disturbing the graves.

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That wasn’t the purpose of the airport. St Helena was prosperous once. The East India Company owned it for many years before the British Government took over. It was thriving. A thousand ships a year could anchor in James Bay. After that there was the flax industry. The material was processed on island and used to create sacks for The Royal Mail, but when flax became obsolete the wealth faded. Now the slopes are smothered in New Zealand flax. It’s a conservation nightmare. It clings to slopes you can’t walk on. On shallower angles it’s cut back and replaced with native and endemic species to restore the cloud forest and repair the islands water supply. St Helena has few resources today and receives millions from the UK Government every year.

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So, the airport was built to increase revenue from tourism. It was incredible engineering. They scraped a mountain down to a flat surface for the runway and filled a huge ravine with the spoil. The long-term projection was for 30000 tourists every year. By the time the first plane came in I was back in the UK, but I followed the moment. I could picture the crowds of Saints, most of the 4200 population will have been watching. The plane swept round, just above cliff height. Angled straight and came in between The Barn and King and Queen’s Rocks. Its wings see-sawed as it descended. Then it powered up and took to the air before a wheel had touched the ground. It had a second go eventually landing on the third attempt. The wind shear was intractable, quickly the airport hit the international press described as the world’s most expensive waste of time. But they revised the plans, overcame the difficulties. Smaller planes were used, and tourists arrived. Not 30000, not yet. Many remain sceptical over whether that number can ever be achieved.

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The infrastructure for tourism requires work. The plan is to develop the buildings along The Wharf and move cargo storage to Rupert’s. There the new breakwater allows ships to come alongside rather than anchor at sea where they double moved cargo via flat-bed boats.

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Now Rupert’s has competing demands; a church, port, power station and incinerator sit in the valley. And then there’s the Liberated African graves, the only large grave site of first-generation enslaved Africans, weeks from their previous lives. A site of tortuous reality. What does St Helena do? Rupert’s Valley is one of the world’s largest relicts of a barbarous trade, a holocaust memorial of the Middle Passage of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. For a long time it was ignored but the airport changed that. There were other things that changed it too.

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For a short while, when I lived at Barren Ground, Ian and Elsie Hughes were my neighbours. Ian is English and Elsie’s a Saint. They moved to St Helena from Dubai ready for retirement. Elsie, like many Saints, became interested in her heritage. It’s an inevitable direction of thought on an island where people from three continents mixed for centuries. She traced her heritage back to Liberated Africans arriving in 1840 after HMS Waterwitch captured a slave ship off the Angolan coast. Others have taken DNA tests. Some have African heritage as high as 33%.

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The echoes of those Liberated Africans reverberate through time. They live on in the DNA of St Helena. A decision was finally made and in 2022 a multi-faith ceremony took place on gifted land behind the small church in Rupert’s Valley. The 325 were re-buried with greater dignity, greater connection. School students made the caskets. The artefacts were carefully returned to the bodies they were found with. Too many decades after their final sickening days they were given respect.

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Adam Sizeland is the Director of the St Helena Museum, I asked him what happens next. Rupert’s will be a multi-purpose valley. The island has no choice, but the dark history and the dead will be commemorated. Number 1 Building has been offered as a place to design a museum to remember the slave holocaust and the Liberated Africans. A memorial will be erected. We will never piece together their stories, who they were, who they loved, how they were torn from their families. There is no mechanism for understanding the terror, the pain, the anguish. Nothing could tune our smell to the stench of a slave ship. It’s all fleshless bones now. But we can go some way towards remembrance, towards reparation and conciliation. Rupert’s Valley offers the world the memory of a crime only the Nazis matched in geographic reach. It will never be an Auschwitz but then Auschwitz is never going to be a Rupert’s Valley, they’re different, but both remain monuments to barbarity.

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The St Helena National Trust is working with the International National Trust Organisation as part of the Re-Imagining Sites of Enslavement. There is work to become part of UNESCO’s Places of Memory. The Commonwealth Heritage Forum are helping to develop the plans. Both Helena and Adam have made it their professional and personal goals to have this period of the island’s history recognised. On an island of limited resources I wonder who will fund the development.

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No-one alive today is responsible for the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, but the legacies remain. Wealth has been enshrined in private hands, international business and whole economies as a direct cascade from slavery. Reparations aren’t just about handing money from the descendants of slavers to the descendants of the enslaved. It’s also about recognising a crime against humanity and how its tentacles pervade into the modern age. Monuments and museums are part of reparation and conciliation. The UK should be enabling this, but slavery wasn’t just a national crime, the violence was also a private enterprise. Families and businesses created on the bones of Africans remain wealthy today. They too should be adding to the funds required to commemorate the dead and to hold a light to the centuries long Slave Trade. While the descendants are not to blame it would be a fitting recognition that their wealth and success was whipped out of Africa all those years ago.

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One day I hope to return to St Helena. When I do, I’ll go to Diana’s Peak and search for the spikey yellow woodlouse and the golden sail spider. I’ll swim with whale sharks again. I’ll photograph screeching tropic birds from Ladder Hill Fort. Over a coffee at the sea front I’ll catch up with old friends. But the first thing I’ll do is walk from Jamestown over Munden’s to Rupert’s, with far greater care then I did before, and there I’ll offer my own respect to the victims of those dark days.

Morrisey once sang, ‘you have never been in love until you’ve seen the stars reflect in the reservoirs.’ Here in Africa I can tell you that you’ve never heard your heartbeat till four hyaena are cackling round your tent. The Serengeti has no fences. Camping ten metres outside may as well be ten kilometres inside.

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I’ve been chased by hippos, elephants and a West Highland terrier. I’ve had malaria. Twice. Nearly drowned a dozen times. Saw-scaled vipers came close to ending me on three occasions. I’m the consummate travel hazard, but none of that stuff scared me. When you’re in the moment the moment takes over. This is different. I’m planked like a splodged-out dinner platter with only a thin stretch of canvas protecting their meal.

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If there’s evil in the world it laughs like a hyaena. They know what they’re doing, meat must taste better washed in terror. Theres two either side of my head now. Cackle, cackle, cackle in stereo. Dolby NR to off. I know they’ve taken people from tents before. It’s my only thought; the dread of it swirls through my head like their aperitif. I’m trying to shake it, but my supper companions keep on laughing about it.

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They go quiet for a while but only to allow a lion time to walk through. It leaps onto the cab of the truck to monitor the scene. If there’s food going, he wants a share. Eventually he bores of it all, moves on and the cackling resumes, inches from the fragility of my cranium. These bone-crunching jaws seem set on me. If I can hear my heartbeat then it’s drum and bass to them.

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I’m not alone here, there are eight tents worth of us. Two in most of the others. Bigger meals over there I’m thinking. But how to let them know without getting out and leading the way? I remember Chris only pitched a mosquito net from his fly sheet. He’s a much, much easier option. Like a bastard I will them to go and check.

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I know I’m crossing the line but I’d much rather they ate someone else.

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Sometime in the night calm resumes and come the morning everyone is on a go slow. They prepare a lazy breakfast acting like there’s all the time in the world. They’re right of course but I want to be on, so I walk ahead knowing they’ll catch up when they eventually get moving.

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Two hundred metres from the truck I stop. Take stock. The track is three metres wide. Either side waist high grassland stretches away. There are lion pug marks in the dust all around me. There could be any number of predators watching. I know hyaena and lion are nearby.

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If I turn back I look like a coward. If I carry on I’m as stupid as the day is long. In the end it’s the fear of cowardice that spurs me on. I begin to wonder why no-one tried to stop me, am I that unpopular?

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I pick up stones, fill my pockets. Keep one in each hand and continue forward wondering when the attack will come. Pebbles to stop lions and hyaena. I don’t fancy my chances.

At the edge of Race Point I sing to seals. It began by mimicking their desolate calls. They called back and swam to me. At their closest they were within two arm lengths, hovering in watery embraces. Heads above, bodies below.

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Over the last month I’ve learned the songs they like; ‘Hello’ by Neil Diamond is a favorite. I haven’t found any that like ‘Pervy in the Park’ by Demented Are Go. These seals are discerning. With my feet submerged, arse indented and splayed on sharp rocks, I watch them as they watch me. We’re divided by species, united by Neil Diamond.

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The sea here drains away to leave a rising bar at low tide. At high tide Ynys Berchen is isolated. It’s now the seals pass through the connection. Dumpy bodies all grace and smooth as they push across, projected by elegant back flippers that mesmerise me.

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Here it’s less than a metre deep and clear as a coral sea. The current washes through strands of kelp, creating serpents of hair. A grey seal swims against the tide, I’m deferential to its exquisite poise.

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I have found my place. You get up, do what needs doing. When you want to stop you stop. If something good happens you watch it. There are no cars, trains, buses, planes. There are no crowds, no meetings, no steering groups, no statistics, no trips to sort. I don’t have to manage people, organise kit or boats. Deadlines don’t hang over me. Conflict is over there, far away on the mainland. Here it’s birds, seals and the sea.

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The sound of the tide stops as if the ocean has been switched off. It’s the first time I’ve witnessed the exact moment the tide turns slack. The sun is concealed by clouds, eventually swallowed by the horizon. Kittiwakes call. Seals keep watching, intrigued by my dusk-diminished incursion.

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One rises fifteen metres from me. It moves closer and closer till it’s within two metres. Its puppy eyes are

dark and attentive, staring me down. I sing ‘Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye,’ one of my favourite Laughing Lenny songs, ‘you know, my love goes with you as your love stays with me. It’s just the way it changes, like the shoreline and the sea.’

Our accommodation while working on The Skerries

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And you think for a moment that somewhere down

there are your minuscule ancestors trapped in the

viscosity of the sea, but as the sun rises east of Sandy Bay

you see them as they are; evolutionary siblings sharing

some distant parenthood aeons before all these cliffs

spewed from Atlantic lacerations, somewhere below the

swells that roll in and out trapped by their own momentum.

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Last night as the Gannet II carried you all from Egg Island

to Jamestown the sparks of phosphorescence glistened

little comb jellies into view before drifting back into the

wake of things. And the pan tropical spotted dolphins

rode along the night bow while stars echoed the shimmer

of the sea. From behind you storm petrels still fluttered

like sea bats. Those long old sighs you took, inebriated

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in the wildness of it all, ignoring the heavy exhaust and

the low moan of the engines. Your friends were wrapped

in dungarees or wet from the sea, neoprene hugging them.

As you came to the wharf foot long flying fish fled from

the bay, gliding long flights from bottlenose dolphins that

seemed to ripple in the hunt. The lights from the wharf

distorting their outline: those ghosts of the sea. While the

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Marine Team cut slices through the brains of fish you stood

and watched dark dolphins skim round the boats, startling the

gliders to fly free. But in their haste for life, they overshot the

Wharf and lay on the steps, blood dripping from glassy eyes.

Existence silenced beyond that moment. And the watchman

stood with you till midnight. There, amidst all those wonders

of life, you talked about the small things that quickly pass by.

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I’m laid on my back as waves wash over me. I try to remove the bag, but it won’t budge. The next thing Katy’s next to me, one boot on, one off. She didn’t even finish changing before leaping down the narrow rock cleft onto steep algae-slipping rock. Katy takes the rucksack giving me a chance to stand. She maintains she was there to help me, everyone else suggests she was rescuing the cores. As I climb out, I kneel in sea lion shit. It’s a marine smell that loves to linger. I introduce insult to injury, and salt to wound.

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North Island is a place I yearned to visit since arriving in the Falkland Islands. A distant rock island, steep sides with a plateau fringe of Tussac Grass concealing a Bluegrass centre. It sits north of New Island in the far south-west of the Falklands, Saddle Island positioned between the two.

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The Falkland Islands are situated in the South Atlantic about three hundred miles from South America. North Island sits north of New Island in the south-west of the Falklands.

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My project is managed by Falklands Conservation and funded by Defra’s Darwin Plus programme which enhances UK Overseas Territories understanding and management of biodiversity and climate change. The target habitats on North Island are Tussac and Bluegrass. Both are exceptional peatlands, but Tussac is the one that fascinates me.

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Extensive wind-rustled stands of Tussac Grass can cover whole islands. The peat is carbon dense and up to thirteen metres deep. Above ground, living plant matter sits on packed pedestals of dead leaves. In combination, the plinths can be three metres high. The densest Tussac, that most like pristine habitat, grass blades become fixed by friction which makes walking arduous.

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Tussac Grass is a habitat for Sea Lions, Prions, Petrels, Penguins, Shearwater, Albatross, Tussac Birds (Blackish Cinclodes) and endemic species like Cobb’s Wren. The soil properties give a structure burrowing birds love. Their tunnels are supported by a stable soil, layered like cakes and bound together by a string of old roots. The high pedestals create a sheltering micro-climate that dampens constant South Atlantic winds.

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Species that use Tussac Grass include (clockwise from top left): Sooty Shearwater, Southern Rockhopper Penguins, Imperial Shag, the endemic Cobb’s Wren, Southern Sea Lion and Black-Browed Albatross Photos: David Higgins.

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The grass relies on the annual influx of marine nutrients and the birds rely on it for protection and a place to nest. It’s a habitat-scale symbiosis of incredible proportions. The worlds densest carbon peatlands are Tussac habitats in the Falkland Islands. The peat can hold over 90% water meaning dead matter accumulates at several millimetres a year.

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Tussac Grass is a dense vegetation with tall pedestals of dead and living matter. Images clockwise from top left: Carrying out soil surveys in Tussac Grass (image Ollie Lawson), Tussac peat holds high water levels (image Grant Munro), the soil can be up to 13 metres deep with exceptionally high carbon content (image David Higgins), vegetation surveys in Tussac (image Ollie Lawson) Tussac Grass is extensive and difficult to walk through. Photo: David Higgins.

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Tussac Grass is a pig to push through. The best method is to jump from pedestal to pedestal. Never let your feet touch the ground. But I’m waiting for a hip replacement and my method is to jump, fall and roll into the tight spaces between pedestals. Then regain composure, push through friction locked blades, falling as I go. Sometimes I remove the heavy rucksack, drop it on the other side and try to join it. When I was younger, I walked 45 miles in a day and could cycle over 100 miles with laden paniers. Pushing through 300m of Tussac with a gammy leg is far more exhausting.

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To access North Island we travel by yacht with Hugue and Marie-Paul. Then Marilou or Theo takes our six strong team in two runs on a small tender to the base of the cliff. Once on land we take a moment to plan the route. The added hazard; it’s the same route the Southern Sea Lions take. The step-cliff is slippery from Sea Lion smoothed rocks, from soil leached water and Sea Lion muck.

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When we start clambering we look out for these marine mammals that could panic right over us if disturbed. It takes fifteen minutes to reach the top, the Tussac becoming denser and denser as we go. In full Tussac we can’t see beyond a few pedestals meaning we rely on the GPS. If lost here, a short distance can quadruple as you walk in circles with no landmarks to aid the way. Quickly the group are ahead of me. I don’t like it, this is my project but I’m always behind. Thankfully, the team make allowances.

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We push on towards the rookery. The group go right around a large pedestal, but it looks easier to the left, so I take that path. I’m hit by something that bites into my stomach. I only see the Sea Lion as it flubbers away at top speed. Not much blood but a large spreading bruise. I learn my lesson, never stray from the crowd.

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I clean the wound but refuse to dwell, we have four large 200m² X-plot surveys to conduct in both habitats. We need to identify plants, measure sward height, take soil depths and soil samples for bulk density, moisture, pH and carbon analysis. There are invertebrate and bird surveys to complete with the added hazard of the wildly changeable Falklands weather. Then we have to land on Saddle Island and do it all again while pushing through old-growth grass that only the maddest tackle. Each pedestal can be two hundred years old set in a habitat that’s been accumulating carbon for thousands of years.

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After we survey the Tussac we move to Bluegrass. This was once the most abundant grass in the Falklands, but it’s been grazed down to severely restricted. We have to travel to high hills or offshore islands to find a mirror of the past. On islands like Motley, Flat Jason, Split and North Bluegrass still thrives forming stumbling tussocky hollows rich in ferns and flowers. The sward height can be a metre high, much less biomass than Tussac, but there are more associated species. Woolly and Smooth Ragwort, Small Fern, Tall Fern, Scurvy Grass, Orchids, Mountainberry, Teaberry, Pale Maiden, Vanilla Daisy and Falkland Rock-Cress can all thrive with Bluegrass. Then there are Black-Chinned Siskins and White-Bridled Finch, Johnny Rooks (Striated Caracara) and Magellanic Snipe. Large stands of Bluegrass give a pink hue to the landscape. It’s as stunning as it is remote.

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Bluegrass habitat and associated species. Images (clockwise from top left); surveying Bluegrass habitat (image Ollie Lawson, remaining images David Higgins), Falklands Smooth Ragwort, Pale Maiden, Scurvy Grass, Magellanic Snipe.

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We take soil and vegetation measurements, identify plants, suck up invertebrates with the vac sampler. While I do the bird surveys the others go to the rookery of Black-Browed Albatross, Southern Rockhopper Penguins and Imperial Shags. Being the lead has its downside.

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It takes four hours to complete the surveys from landing to leaving. At the last moment my fingers give way as I scramble along a narrow shelf. It’s an uncontrolled two metre drop to where Katy leaps to my rescue. I’m soaked, clothes dripping, boots full of cold sea. I stink of Sea Lion muck. No injuries other than a diminished self-respect.

*

As the island reduces with distance, I smile knowing I’ll never visit again. I can forget the constant discomfort from a half-working leg, the Sea Lion hazard, the falls, the gymnast standard plummet, the knee coated in shit. But I realise how fortunate I’ve been. More people will have been to space then have landed on North Island. It’s a place rich in biomass, deep carbon-rich soil coupled with species I never thought I’d see. North Island may be my nemesis, the place where my dignity died, but it’s still an incredible natural wonder.

*

A short video of a dynamic team at work:

* One of the final outputs from the DPLUS110 Peat-Wetlands Project was to develop a Habitat ‘scoring’ Key which can be downloaded from:

https://falklandsconservation.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Field-Key-V3-Compressed.pdf

*

I’ve just moved from the Falkland Islands. I loved my three and half years there and owe the islands, and people, a huge debt of gratitude. If my contract had been more certain I wouldn’t have looked for another job, but The Skerries aren’t a bad second choice. These tiny islands and islets are a seabird haven of Terns, Puffins, Gulls, Shags and Razorbills and to make my transition less traumatic I watched the Northern Lights for the first time as they coloured the night sky over The Irish Sea, but I’m paid to look after the birds not look at nocturnal phenomena. These islands are important as they hold an incredible Arctic Tern colony sitting at the southern fringe of their breeding territory. Usually they prefer higher latitudes; in the Arctic for breeding then leaving northern winters behind to ‘overwinter’ in the Antarctic. The last time I saw one was at Yorke Bay in the Falklands plumaged in winter feathers and feeding among a mass of summer plumaged South American Terns.

*

Arctic Terns are stunning examples of evolution. A delicate fork tailed, slender and graceful with a long-distance athlete’s physique. Their scientific name, Sterna paradisaea, means paradise tern. In Wales they’re called Sea Swallows, in Scotland they’re Tarrock – in deference to their call. It’s easy to be fooled by appearance but these subtle looking birds are the hardiest characters of the oceans. They have the longest migration of any animal and see more daylight than any other species as they aim to exist in an endless summer. It isn’t plain flying; they take huge hundred-mile meandering sweeps over the ocean to avoid storms and catch the winds.

*

When focused on migration they can fly at thirty miles an hour at over three kilometres altitude for sustained periods. Other times they’ll stop for weeks to tank up on food as they try to harvest the thirty thousand kilojoules they need for this multi thousand-mile journey. For a bird that weighs ounces the amount of energy they expend is astounding. Each two-way migration can be as much as sixty thousand miles. Over an average thirteen-year lifespan that can be as much as three round trips to the moon. The oldest known Arctic Tern lived thirty-four years of endless travel punctuated by an annual breeding season when they navigate to the same spot in an isolated colony like ours on The Skerries. No GPS or satnav, they do it by processing geography, the sun, moon and stars, and the earth’s magnetic fields; all number-crunched in a tiny pea sized super-computer brain.

*

The pure psychotic aggression they display towards any threat entering the colony is beyond what an animal their size should possess. I can testify to it, but I’m really no challenge. In the Arctic they fend off Polar Bears by targeting their black noses and eyes with sharp bill jabs and crap bombs. Fending off predators and chasing the sun isn’t an easy life and still we do our best to make it more difficult. Habitat loss, diseases such as bird flu, non-native species like rats and cats, and fish stock crashes all stack the deck against them but still they prevail, often through sheer stubbornness and fortitude.

*

The Skerries remind me of the Falkland Islands every day; whenever I glimpse a Great Black Backed Gull I automatically think it’s an albatross. When I see the shadow of a bird cast in front of me I think there’s a Johnny Rook about. Health and safety rules are different here though. I’m not allowed to stand on the roof even if there’s a safety barrier, but I can clamber over wet rocks and up cliff faces, making the rules inconsistent. My time in the Falklands got me too used to wildlife encounters that you struggle to find in the UK. Magellanic and Blackish Oystercatchers feel semi-tame but here I’m lucky to get within twenty metres of their European cousins.

*

This is a sad day. Two Falklands friends, Marilou and Katy, were due to visit on the ten-day resupply cycle, but the weather made it impossible. On my personalised Beaufort Scale it’s blowing a proper Falklands. Gusty and aggressive winds drive the sea into a frenzy. Waves crash over rocks and islets; sea foam fills the gulches. Birds are flying backwards till they struggle to correct the natural order of things. At the back of the lighthouse an Arctic Tern stands on the wall chattering its pre-attack chant. A gust of wind whips round the curve of the lighthouse and unsteadies the bird making it fall backwards. In a few unnatural twists and wing beats it rights itself and heads for my face. ‘It wasn’t me,’ I tell it. My indignant reasoning makes no difference, so I run away. In the face of a tern attack cowardice is the correct response. Down the next path I suffer sortie after sortie of angry birds. Slowing down for the steps that lead over the wall where two more birds wallop me. On the other side the courtyard birds rise and drop several dump bombs. It doesn’t rain here it pours and on The Skerries it pours copious amounts of faeces.

I hadn’t seen him for twenty-four years. We met at Umhlanga Rocks. He taught me to dive at Sodwana Bay. On my first attempt I shot from the sea like a Trident missile. Target unknown. My last, twenty-three years later, I ran out of air. He was a good memory, looked after us on our first long trip. Durban, just as apartheid was ending. The year Mandela was released. Those days of hope, of possibility, standing at the fore of a new era. Watching beautiful waves sloshing against the turn of history.

*

In our smaller world we would swap stories. He told us about his unbearable stutter. How his older brothers would smack him, snapping him out of the impediment. He was one of those people that make living worthwhile. A social glue. Not arrogant, not self-centred. Just warm. Giving. Kind. Welcoming. Funny. The worst part of travel is saying goodbye. Not getting that chance is just as bad. I was heading to South Africa again, so I googled him. Roux le Noury, Durban.

*

Roux died in a helicopter crash three years earlier. Forty-two. His life, just short brackets in an infinity of time. I was a passer through. A small blip in his line but his generosity made the trip. We’d sit in his flat and talk. He introduced us to a fresh network of people in a fresh country. When I saw the newspaper article I was overwhelmed. Twenty-four years on, three years after his death, still an unbearable loss.

*

There were others on the trip. We volunteered at a Leonard Cheshire Home, Sparks Estate. Amelia was the manager, an ex-missionary. She didn’t know I was an atheist and asked me to say grace at our first dinner. I fumbled through, awkward, embarrassed. I drew on juvenile memories from infant school, ‘for what we are about to receive…’ Her kindness too remains with me.

*

Carlos was a young resident at the home, not yet double figures. He had the worse scars I’ve ever seen. Skin frothed, melted and reformed in a fire after he knocked a paraffin lamp on to himself. He was eighteen months old when it happened. From that young moment his life changed to one of pain and surgery. The sinuses in his forehead bulging with every breath. We took him to the beach, as far as we knew it was the first time he’d seen the sea while we noticed how people saw him.

*

It wasn’t the only burn we witnessed. Amelia asked us to join her at the hospital where a young man was being treated for severe scalds to his legs. Toe to thigh. One night he ran his own bath but had no concept of hot and cold. He screamed till someone ran in to take him from the steaming water.

*

At the hospital we had a choice. We waited for one of the wheelchairs that were in short supply, or I carried him to the elevator and then the car. So, I carried him. He wailed and wailed from the discomfort. We couldn’t sooth him, till a preacher put a hand on his forehead and said a prayer. Then he calmed down. My atheism challenged, for a short while.

*

We travelled to the Drakensburg Mountains and Kruger National Park. I saw wildlife I thought would forever be beyond my limited horizons. We watched lions and hippos and wildebeest and zebra. I was amazed that the grace of running giraffes in The Colour Purple was an accurate depiction. At Sodwana Bay I swam with turtles and white tipped reef sharks and octopus, those kaleidoscope aliens of the sea. I slept on the beach. Had my shoes taken from outside the bivi. Laughed at vervet monkeys sneaking into apartments to steal food. We met many people that remain in my thoughts. But it was Roux and Amelia and Carlos that changed me.

*

Roux arrived at his final destination far too soon. The newspaper article quoted his wife, colleagues and friends. They all confirmed what we’d recognised. It was clear his generous kindness would live long beyond him. I don’t know about Amelia. If she’s still alive she’ll be very old, but it wouldn’t surprise me. Her will alone could repel death. I hope Carlos is with us and his life has moved beyond the endless surgery to one of happiness and success. Though I worry that the odds will always be against him. In the end, it is all of their humanity and company that will remain with me till the day my own brackets close.

We stood far back

watching the distortion

as the fog of them

stormed the reeds

and flowed into the land.

*

You removed your coat

as though unclothing

would raise them again.

But even you couldn’t bring back

what the night had swallowed.

*

More and more came.

Cloud after cloud.

Blurring the transitions

between the ground and the sky.

And your eyes glistened

*

at the relentless wonder

of molecules swarming

the air, turning reality

to abstract dreams

where superorganisms

*

rose from out of the mass.

It was there I found myself

caught between

the miracle of you

and the murmuration.