This excerpt is truly one of the best things I've read recently:
> It stems from a somewhat bizarre British government decision, taken during World War II, to reclassify some of its more remote island possessions as ships. Tristan was transmuted into HMS Atlantic Isle, and its role was to patrol (from its rock-hewn state of immobility) for any German U-boats that might be lurking in the southern Atlantic. To compound the fantasy a small party of sailors was posted there to man the ship
"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...."
A practical application of duck typing. Both are a bunch of dry people surrounded by water. @anchor is a constant for one and a variable for the other.
My grandfather once told me the story of a Nazi propaganda broadcast which attempted to damage British morale by (falsely) announcing the sinking of a "ship", only to backfire when they used the name of a stone frigate.
Unfortunately I can't find any reference online, so the story may be apocryphal; has anyone else heard this?
I recall that during the first Gulf War, Iraqi propaganda broadcasts were telling American servicemen that their wives and girlfriends back home were carrying on with Bart Simpson.
Either it's apocryphal or the kriegsmarine had a knack for making silly announcements. I'm inclined to think the former, and that it was more likely black propaganda to make the enemy appear stupid.
How would this backfire?
-by revealing the truth to soldiers in propaganda controlled media?
-by not allowing for fake news to enter news circulation in Britain?
-or maybe to try to uncover the truth in state owned German newspapers?
I wonder if it has something to do with the career advancement of the service members who are stationed there, i.e., if there is some sort of higher prestige (or pay) for people who have served on a ship.
Yes. Officers above a certain rank have to be on a "rated" ship, and IIRC the stone frigates were all 4th-rates, which meant a senior Post Captain (later just a captain) could be in command there and not lose his seniority. And in fact, the first stone frigate command (of a rock in the Atlantic) was given to the lieutenant who had led the assault that took the island. Since the act gave him promotion to Captain, he couldn't command his old cutter anymore, so they came up with the stone frigate idea. Later on it became more of an unofficial punishment; a way to take a commander who was too senior to just keep on the beach and put him somewhere that he wouldn't do too much harm.
For any "Master and Commander" book series fans, Jack was threatened with being sent off to a stone frigate in I think "The Yellow Admiral".
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.
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.
The British Empire also holds a similar tiny island in the Pacific: Pitcairn, population 67, inhabited by the descendants of the Mutiny on the Bounty: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutiny_on_the_Bounty
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.
It's a similar isolating feeling on Pitcairn. There's no air access so I arrived via a two day boat trip from Mangareva. Once there my boat left leaving me with no way off for the time I was there until another arrived to pick me up. You become very aware of how problematic a medical emergency would be.
In the Netherlands we had a Dutch writer, Boudewijn Büch[0], who was obsessed with remote islands and as such visited many. He wrote his experiences in several books, which might be of interest to to some people.
I'm not sure if any of his books were translated to English though.
He also made a few documentaries for television, for example a visit to Tahiti[1] (again, in Dutch).
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.
When the outside world came into contact with the Pitcairn settlement there was one mutineer left, John Adams. There were Tahitian women alive as well who were part of the Bounty story, having been retrieved from Tahiti after the mutiny.
The island did suffer from lack of resources as the population grew. This lead to two migrations. One to Tahiti in 1831 and another to Norfolk Island in 1856. The latter is where many Norfolk Islanders can claim their ancestry from. Some islanders returned from Norfolk and re-settled Pitcairn soon after that migration.
With regards to genetic diversity, there have been many 'outsiders' that have settled and married with islanders. These were often the result of visiting whalers and shipwrecked sailors. You'll find most of the ancestral lines on Pitcairn have a mix of the initial mutineers, their Tahitian wives and outsiders giving genetic diversity.
I can only think in all this remote islanders and how their way of living will be equivalent of the space settlers of the future. Tiny communities almost completely isolated from the rest of human kind, but yet at the same time, having to deal with the rest of the universe.
I looked into the quote from Pascal. It turns out to be from his "Pensées" (Thoughts). In the original French, the passage in question reads:
> Quand je m'y suis mis quelquefois à considérer les diverses agitations des hommes, et les périls, et les peines où ils s'exposent dans la Cour, dans la guerre d'où naissent tant de querelles, de passions, d'entreprises hardies et souvent mauvaises, etc., j'ai dit souvent que tout le malheur des hommes vient d'une seule chose, qui est de ne savoir pas demeurer en repos dans une chambre.
> When I have occasionally set myself to consider the different distractions of men, the pains and perils to which they expose themselves at court or in war, whence arise so many quarrels, passions, bold and often bad ventures, etc., I have discovered that all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber.
I think I would translate that last bit as "... I have often said that all the unhappiness of men derives from just one thing: not knowing how to sit still in a room."
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.
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.
Related - an article I wrote about the settlement of Tristan da Cunha and the history of micronations last year. [1] There are also some fascinating clips of the island on Youtube (including the odd, 19th century sounding variant of British English spoken there) if anyone is looking for interesting procrastination material. [2]
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.
Why do you think you have such certain knowledge of these things? It seems like knowledge of human genetics and diseases is in a very early stage. As far as I can tell the idea that inbreeding is bad is primarily political.
The action of recessive genes is well understood, as are various diseases caused by them.
Don't forget that European royalty conducted a long-running experiment on the effects of inbreeding, and the result was a great deal of deformities and disabilities. A whole genetic disorder is named this way: just look up "Habsburg jaw." Lots of other experiments on human inbreeding have been run on islands like the one in the story.
Your post sounds an awful lot like, "I don't understand, therefore it is not understood."
More like no one would ever write about the need for Jews to outbreed, and if they did they would be rebuffed with a bazillion qualifications about the science being uncertain. You only get to make sweeping statements when politics are on your side.
The Jews are several orders of magnitude more numerous than these small island populations, and even then there are genetic diseases that are far more common among them.
So since the science of recessive genes is so well understood, how big does the population need to be before scientists instruct the group to start outbreeding?
Scientists typically don't outright instruct, but merely describe the consequences of various options. Sometimes (e.g. with global warming and the "keep dumping massive amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere" option) the consequences are "lots of people die horribly." But outright instructions are typically left up to the nice men with large guns.
My point was that the quantity of the effect matters. If the science can't quantify how bad having a population of 150 is, then we can't say we understand things well enough to recommend "outbreeding", as the original post did.
Let me put it another way: Can you or anyone else provide scientific studies that would directly back the claim
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.
And not the general statements that have been made in this thread, but something that would pin down a specific numeric relationship between population size in humans, and health.
EDIT: and for reference, the prevalence of Asthma may be purely due to the founder effect, not an effect of inbreeding per se. Two or three of the original settlers suffered from asthma[0].
Rougly 1.5 new deleterious mutations per diploid genome per generation. If you have closely related individuals having children, there is a greater chance that the deleterious mutations will overlap.
But the question is how the population size relates to health, which you haven't answered here. You have numbers for the number of deleterious mutations, but that doesn't directly give a quantitative relationship between population size and health.
It's because your question isn't really properly formed. What do you mean by "health"? The chance of a person having a really shitty genetic disorder? The fitness cost of inbreeding as a function of coefficient of relationship? The probability that a bottlenecked population will go to zero due to harmful mutations, as a function of the bottleneck size?
I would be interested in seeing any of these quantified. And I'm not asking for people to educate me, but rather for people to take a more careful look at which claims can be directly justified by the science, vs which claims are assertions made based on extrapolating from very different data.
The claim was that the population size of Tristan da Cunha is problematic. I still haven't seen any direct evidence presented of this fact.
> The claim was that the population size of Tristan da Cunha is problematic. I still haven't seen any direct evidence presented of this fact.
You linked to an article about the higher incidence of asthma on that island yourself (above), and the reason why the number of individuals is so high directly traces to the islanders' gene pool.
However, I wouldn't say the population size is unsustainable. They are more likely to be decimated by a random disease or, over generations, by a shared mutation. But the population is not nonviable. The issue is more that, to the modern humanitarian mind, they will have to deal with more ill effects due to the genetic monoculture.
I'm having trouble understanding this line of reasoning:
> purely due to the founder effect, not an effect of inbreeding per se
Genetic bottlenecks greatly amplify the effects of any genetic abnormalities for obvious reasons. It sounds like you assume inbreeding and genetic scarcity are two different things when they're not.
Yes, the founders brought these genes into the population. That is the whole point when we're making observations based on the inbreeding which caused a higher incidence of symptoms as compared to the mainland human population - exactly because there is a high chance for recessive traits to be expressed.
If you mean inbreeding does not necessarily lead to a higher mutation rate, you are correct. But that was not implied by the comment you're quoting.
Not surprising. People interested in such things say that the southern U.S. accent is closer to 18th century British English than current British English is.
The Microsoft billionaire who arrived on Namibia’s Skeleton Coast with five helicopters full of bodyguards, and demanded that all available local lions be collected in one oasis so that he could see and picture them.
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.
Googling for 'microsoft billionaire namibia lions' and various similar things, I haven't managed to find any other sources for this, or anything like it.
I would guess Paul Allen, who has done work in Namibia. But take his anecdote with a grain of salt - plenty of journalists have misrepresented stories.
Tourism is a double edged sword. Large chunks of the world with very fragile eco-systems, sometimes the last few of a species depend on the tourists for their income. But tourists don't have quotas and too many of them destroy the thing they seek to find. It's a delicate balance. Kudos to mr. Winchester for realizing that all by himself on that boat, it's a hard realization that the best tourists are the ones that you can't see.
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.
I had a hard time getting the point of this article at the end about why he shouldn't have written the original story. Anyone have an insight or some other way to get that point across?
All I can imagine is the guy who didn't want the story told was upset because it reminded him his wife was longing for that other guy but otherwise it's really hard (as a dumb american) for me to understand why that story would bug anyone. 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.
I loved the article. Well written and certainly compelling to read and fascinating all the way through. I'm just wondering what I missed or some other way to see it and truly grok it.
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.
Free speech means you are free to say what you want, but you may be violating a law, and that may have consequences. It's "freedom of speech" to systematically call the mayor of your town gay, do it enough and you might be charged with defamation. In other words, "free speech" does not protect you against breaking the law.
In any case, my point simply is that whatever you say, there will be consequences, however backwards they may be. I used "free speech" as an example here, because he was entirely within his right to write it - it just had a consequence (that may or may not be illegal in it self, but that is unknown).
It doesn't, or at least it shouldn't. It doesn't make any difference whether it's a government, a corporation, or an individual who's stopping you speaking. The first amendment only applies to the government, but the first amendment is only one part of free speech.
I disagree. It makes big difference weather its government or somebody else.
Government has too much power(guns) so it must be checked, and strict rules on what they can and can't do established.
On the other hand private entities, should be allowed to say for them self what you can or can't do with their equipment (work PC's, phones) and on their premises (digital and physical: homes, offices, blogs, forums, ... ). This is fundamental for private ownership to have any meaning.
And if you don't like rules that this private entity has established you can go elsewhere. (anti monopoly law's should ensure you have that option ; but they are not always perfect or applied)
So freedom of speech should only apply to governments.
In practice these days we have a lot more choice of government (there are dozens of reasonable countries you can move to without changing your lifestyle too much) than of particular corporations (avoiding apple, google and microsoft would involve substantial changes to most people's lifes).
Ownership doesn't have to be absolute to have meaning. You've always been forbidden from using your property in illegal ways (e.g. just because you own a knife doesn't mean you have the right to stab someone with it; just because you own a field doesn't mean you're allowed to bury toxic waste there).
You've got it entirely backwards here - the entire article was about an island in which freedom of speech does not exist. If he'd been free to say what he wanted (and he did very, very little of that), then he wouldn't have been banned from the island.
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.
- 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.
> 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.
I've been fascinated by this island for the past 10 years now. It was an isolated community where you could study its composition in an entirety of its isolation. The island has charming place-names such as "Ridge where the Goat jump off" and "Down where the Minister land his things." The island's official website, tristandc, is put together by the villagers themselves. Thus I wondered, where do they get their electricity from?
So, I corresponded with the island's administrator (who, along with the village's doctor, is from England - only 'foreigners' or outlanders allowed on the island.) The only outlanders who are permanently allowed on the island are anyone who's been shipwrecked, which is how there are two Italian families there now (or is it one?) He explained that there's a crayfish factory owned by a South African company on the island that employs roughly half of the villagers. The factory is powered by diesel generators and for their exclusive deal with the islanders, the generators power the village.
The other half of the employed villagers work "for the government." He didn't really expand on that point, but I took that to mean that part of the jobs are the make-work kind. Because of the harsh climate, the dominant food is the potato and the administrator, Mike Hadley, told me many of the dishes are potato based. The villagers drink an ungodly amount of alcohol per capita, and every year they crew boats to the nearby Gough island where they collect bird eggs for eating. Rest of their supplies are shipped once or twice per year, so saying that they buy in bulk is an understatement.
The islanders are very shy and self-aware of what's perceived as their backwardness. But they appear to be rather charming, in their own way. Whale oil trade made the remote island attractive for resupplying whaling ships, but after the industry's collapse the islanders got cut off. Their genetic pool got cut in half after a single boat capsized and men were lost in a storm. Their speech patterns, fashion and culture lagged behind the times- almost literally by centuries. Their reconnection to modernity happened after the volcano erupted post WWII, and the islanders were evacuated to London for a couple of years. And now, they let tourists on for a few hours and charge a steep fee for a visa stamp.
The island is in middle of nowhere. You really have to pull up a map and slowly zoom out until it sinks in that they're basically living on a desolate volcano: https://goo.gl/maps/CTLn9
But for all its remoteness, the island "caught" a floating oil platform back in the mid-2000s with all its serial numbers filed off, and claimed salvage rights. And of course, at the time I wanted to move to the island and bring them wind turbines.
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).
I finished this article thinking it must be fiction. I had heard of an island in the Atlantic called Tristan da Cunha, and I figured the general outline was similar to what the article says, but the way the more and more unusual details of the story accumulate makes it read beautifully like someone trying to pull your leg. Amazing that it seems to be true.
Personally I think the first half of the article was fantastic, then it tapered off toward the end. But ultimately, my takeaway is that we should be more considerate in all aspects of our lives about how our actions affect others, which is a good resolution, even if the moral of the article was a bit muddled by the end.
I recently wrote a highly upvoted comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9444578) on another thread whose parent article discussed why people rarely read much any more. I railed against authors who overly enjoy the sound of their own words.
As a follow-up I'd like to point out that this article kept me riveted right through. It was interesting, intriguing, and written without the multitude of irrelevant tone-setting sentences that plague so many so-called "long-form" articles today.
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.
[After talking on the books with good story but not good writing, and the ones with good writing but not good story] "Read sometimes for the story, Bobby. Don't be like the book-snobs who won't do that. Read sometimes for the words---the language. Don't be like the play-it-safers that won't do that. But when you find a book that has both a good story and good words, treasure that book."
The Crying of Lot 49 is one of my favorite examples of a book that tells a story about basically nothing, yet happens to be an absolute marvel to absorb.
It has nothing to do with feeling superior and simply reveling in masterful use of language. Does it make one feel superior to watch a world class athlete perform? Reading Pynchon or DFWallace is a pretty similar emotional experience, in my book. 😎
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.
> It stems from a somewhat bizarre British government decision, taken during World War II, to reclassify some of its more remote island possessions as ships. Tristan was transmuted into HMS Atlantic Isle, and its role was to patrol (from its rock-hewn state of immobility) for any German U-boats that might be lurking in the southern Atlantic. To compound the fantasy a small party of sailors was posted there to man the ship