The annals of Tristan da Cunha

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This record of the early history of Tristan da Cunha, an isolated island in the South Atlantic Ocean, is taken from the "Annals of Tristan da Cunha", written by Professor Arnaldo Faustini

The manuscript is the property of Liz Nysven, and this document is the result of co-operation between Liz, Larry Conrad and Paul Carroll.

Preface

"An Attempt of History from the Humble Events of the Loneliest British Colony in the World".

[Professor Faustini collected some thoughts on slips of paper for his preface. I have arranged them in what I hope reflects his intentions, although it will be obvious that he never actually drafted a complete Preface.]

"It is a trite proverb that the nation which has no history is happy,"

says W. Robertson Smith in one of his magnificent lectures, "but no side of national existence is likely to find full development where there is little political activity."

[It is] only in view of the future of a Country or of a Nation - small or large--that their first however vaguely and imperfectly known records must be in some way patiently and carefully collected, not only for the benefit of those who undoubtedly would be in the future interested in the first limelight of history of these Countries or Nations, but also for the citizens if not, too, for sentimental and spiritual expression of love to mankind in general.

This work is one of national rather than public importance. The importance of having the whole record of discovery, settlement, and life of so typical a colony brought together is--I think--so unusual, that it only requires to be printed out to be generally and favorably recognised.

"At Tristan da Cunha even the ordinary happenings of everyday life seem to take on a glow of romance, and commonplace folk come to fill conspicuous places in our interest which in larger settings are denied to them."

This authentic and [often] dramatic record [is full of] fascination and romance and [is] based on years of thorough investigations. This book unquestionably represents only the skeleton of what some say can be considered the history of Tristan da Cunha. Of course I jotted down - or better, I recorded - here only the major events [that] occurred on the Island; disregarding small occurrences, for the sake of clarity and brevity, avoiding in this manner as unnecessary and in some reports useless [information] that [often] overcrowded the work, not giving it much more importance.

Naturally [it] would have been far more interesting if, for each year of the whole period that made up my Annals, I had had a larger number of more or less valuable entries to fill the many resulting gaps (some of which [are] very wide); but having been confronted with so many uncertain and dubious items, I preferred to leave these gaps rather than fill them with dubious matter which, indeed, I could have [done] in abundance. Naturally, [as] we approach modern times, the number of recorded events, year by year, is bigger for many obvious reasons.

Of course [there are] three different periods covered by the presence on the Island [of] the three missionaries who left each other a sort of history in their works:

1885-1889 Reverend Taylor;
1905-1909 Reverend Barrow;
1922-1925:Reverend Rogers.

[These] are the periods in which I was able to collect the larger [amount of] material for my Annals. Unfortunately, for the two periods spent by the Rev. Dodgson (1881-84 and 1886-89) and others - especially from [1910] to [1920], the material, for which however I made painstaking researches, is very [small], if not in quality [then] in quantity.

[It is] difficult [to] ascertain the exactness of some dates because for some of the same events related by different historians or chroniclers, said dates present sometimes a very wide gap. Unfortunately, in many instances, I was unable to give the date of the month or days of the herewith recorded works--because the records omitted it, suffering [it] not to be absolutely necessary or because, considering the cultural standard of them, have utterly failed to record [those dates]. The log-books of vessels are in general incomplete, and the exact dates of departure, of arrival, etc., [can] very rarely can be ascertained.

The information, the accounts, [and] the statistics contained in this book, while not guaranteed, have been obtained from sources - outside of official sources -we believe to be reliable, and are correct to the best of my knowledge and belief. Undoubtedly may I have incurred in mistakes or simply in lesser exactness about the stating of some of the following entries; but I beg--from the Reader--a benevolent pardon if he will only consider for a moment, the somewhat misty, uncertain and ambiguous value of the sources from which descended to us some of these entries, capable--for some--to lead anybody unwittingly to unavoidable errors. I am not so rash as to assert that no mistakes, no omissions have escaped me, but I think that no very or only important fact [will] ever be found omitted.

Lastly, I most sincerely state that this work is the result of many months of almost painful labor because of the involved researches among International Sailing Directions, Pilots Directories, shipwrecks, interminable registers, movements of ships of all nations and over the seven seas. The titles of which, however, I omitted from the bibliography at the end of the present volume, to avoid unnecessary crossing of works, and where are only recorded those that exclusively dealt with the Tristan da Cunha Islands.

[Tristan da Cunha is but a small and lonely outpost of the British Empire and no one can know what the future holds.] This raw [work] I hope will, [however, provide] students [an] estimate of the historical value of Tristan da Cunha.

Contributors to this work

Professor Arnaldo Faustini (Author)

Professor Arnaldo Faustini was born in Rome in 1872. He completed his training at the University of Rome at age 21 when he received his PhD. He was an eminent writer, with a particular interest in polar subjects, employed as a Rome newspaper's scientific editor for many years. He published 19 books on polar subjects in his native Italian as well as numerous articles. He was in addition a cartographer. In the magazine Il Polo, Silvio Savatti, the original director of Instituto Polare Geografica (The Institute of Polar Geography) called Professor Faustini "Il Primo Polarista Italiano", "The First Italian Polar Specialist." He was prominent in Europe and de Gerlache, Amundsen, Shackleton, and Scott all knew him personally. De Gerlache had published his account of Belgica's voyage in French; Professor Faustini translated it to the Italian and drew the definitive map of that area of the Antarctic. And as a result, de Gerlache gave him the flag of the Belgica, which his daughter Liz recently presented to the Frederick Cook Society (Cook, his later notoriety notwithstanding, having been a key member of the expedition.) Major A.W. Greeley, the Arctic explorer, invited Professor Faustini to the United States in 1915 for a lecture tour. He met his future wife when he was lecturing in Colombia University in New York where he stayed and married her. After a period of interpreting, writing and translating foreign correspondence for the Bank of Italy, Professor Faustini worked as an editor in the textbook division of the American Book Company. Professor Faustini had very far flung interests (he was fluent in Italian, French, English, Spanish and Russian and understood Greek) and there's no way of telling how he became interested in Tristan da Cunha. Liz was twenty-something when he died and had no chance to discuss any of this with him. The manuscript surfaced several years after her mother's death in 1990, when Liz began sorting through her father's papers. They were all in trunks, cardboard cartons, and a file cabinet whose drawers were jam-packed with her father's manuscripts and reprints of his articles.

Liz Nysven (Prof. Faustini's Daughter)

In preparing for this, Larry Conrad asked Liz to say a little about herself: "Oh, ahm, well, I was born at an early age. And I studied music, I went to Dominican College in San Rafael, and got through my senior year there by the grace of God because there was a war on. And married and had two daughters and ended up by having to go to work because my first husband and I just agreed to disagree and I needed to support myself and the children. And all I had was a major in English and a minor in music, so I went to the local newspaper there, the San Francisco News, and I started out in the classified department. Then the San Francisco Examiner and the San Francisco Chronicle, and the San Jose Mercury News. And finally in 1966 I had my own ad agency and from there on out I was freelancing on promotion and public relations and advertising."

Larry Conrad (Transcriber)

Larry is a retired Naval Aviator (currently flying for a regional airline) who was stationed at VXE-6, the Antarctic Development Squadron, from March 1982 until March 1985. While there, he developed an interest in Antarctic geography and history. He has a Gazetteer of Antarctica in work that matches the actual verbiage used by individuals naming Antarctic places. In the process of collecting first person accounts, he became familiar with a bibliography of Antarctic fiction, written by a woman from San Francisco, Fauno Cordes. He wrote to Fauno asking for a copy of the bibliography, and she mentioned to him that Liz had a manuscript regarding Tristan da Cunha, and asked if he would be interested interested in something like that, he was, contacted Liz, and began collaboration on this work.

Paul Carroll (Editor)

Paul Carroll is an ex-North Sea Oil Driller, now safely esconsed on land and involved in the development of Railway Control Centre systems. He has had a lifelong interest in the Antarctic and Subantarctic, and this culminated in the development of a World-Wide-Web site "The South Atlantic and Subantarctic Islands"

Larry Conrad visited this site and asked if Paul would be interested in the Professor's document. Naturally, he was, and thus began the painstaking translation of the "Annals of Tristan da Cunha" from a series of text files into first a Microsoft Word Document, and then into an Adobe Acrobat Document, readable on most computer platforms.