| St. Paul Island
Île Saint-Paul
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| Motto: Liberté, égalité, fraternité | ||||
| Anthem: La Marseillaise |
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Map of St. Paul Island
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| Geography | |
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| Area | 6 km2 (2.3 sq mi) |
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France
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| Demographics | |
| Population | Uninhabited |
Île Saint-Paul (St. Paul Island) is an island forming part of the French Southern and Antarctic Lands (Terres australes et antarctiques françaises--TAAF) in the Indian Ocean, with an area of 6 square kilometres (2.3 sq mi). The island is located about 85 km (53 mi) southwest of the larger Île Amsterdam, and 3,000 km (1,900 mi) south of Réunion. During sailing ship days captains would occasionally use the island as a check on their navigation before heading north. A scientific research cabin on the island is used for scientific or ecological short campaigns, but there is no permanent population. It is under the authority of a senior administrator on Réunion. However, in 2007 Mauritian authorities indicated that they are exploring a potential claim on both Île Saint-Paul and Île Amsterdam.[1]
Île Saint-Paul is one of three land antipodes of the continental United States, corresponding to an area about 10 miles (16 km) southwest of Cheyenne Wells, Colorado. (The other two land antipodes are Île Amsterdam and Kerguelen Island.)
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Île Saint-Paul is triangular in shape, and measures no more than 3 mi (4.8 km) at its widest. It is the top of an inactive volcano, and is rocky with steep cliffs on the east side. The thin stretch of rock that used to close off the crater collapsed in 1780, admitting the sea through a 100 m (330 ft) channel; the entrance is only a few meters deep, thus allowing only very small ships or boats to enter the crater. The interior basin, 1 km (0.62 mi) wide and 50 m (160 ft) deep, is surrounded by steep walls up to 270 m (890 ft) high. There are active thermal springs.
There is a cool ocean climate and the slopes of the volcano are covered in grass. The island is an important breeding ground for a number of seabirds including an endemic subspecies of Salvin's Prion (Pachyptila salvini macgillivrayi).
(See Amsterdam and Saint-Paul Islands temperate grasslands for more detail of the flora and fauna)
Île Saint-Paul was first discovered in 1559 by the Portuguese. The island was mapped, described in detail and painted by members of the crew of the Nau São Paulo, among them the Father Manuel Alvares and the chemist Henrique Dias (Alvares and Dias calculated the correct latitude 38° South in the same moment of discovery). The ship was commanded by Rui Melo da Câmara and was part of the Portuguese India Armada commanded by Jorge de Sousa. The Nau São Paulo, who also carried women and had sailed from Europe and had scale in Brazil, would be the protagonist of a dramatic and moving story of survival after sinking south of Sumatra.
The next confirmed sighting was made by Dutchman Harwick Claesz de Hillegom on 19 April 1618.[2] There were further sightings of the island through the 17th century. One of the first detailed descriptions of it, and possibly the first landing, was made in December 1696 by Willem de Vlamingh.[3][4]
Saint-Paul was occasionally visited by explorers, fishermen, and seal hunters in the 18th and 19th centuries, among which was the American sealer General Gates, which called at the island in April 1819. George William Robinson, an American sealer, was left on the island to hunt seals, and stayed there for 23 months until the General Gates returned for him in March 1821. Robinson subsequently returned to Saint-Paul in 1826 to gather sealskin, sailing from Hobart aboard his own vessel, the schooner Hunter.
France's claim to the island dates from 1843, when a group of fishermen from Réunion, interested in setting up a fishery on Saint-Paul, pushed the Governor of Réunion to take possession of both Saint-Paul and Amsterdam Island. This was performed by means of an official decree dated 8 June 1843, and on 1 July, Martin Dupeyrat, commanding the ship L'Olympe, landed on Amsterdam Island and then on Saint-Paul on 3 July, and hoisted the tricolor. The only surviving evidence of this claim is an inscribed rock situated on the edge of Saint-Paul's crater lake, inscribed "Pellefournier Emile Mazarin de Noyarez, Grenoble, Canton de Sassenage, Département de l'Isère, 1844". All fishery operations were, however, abandoned in 1853, when the French government renounced its possession of the two islands.[5]
The first good map of the island was not drawn up until 1857, when the Austrian frigate Novara landed a team which studied the flora, fauna, and geology from November to December.[6]
In 1871 a British troop transport, HMS Megaera, was wrecked on the island. Most of the 400 persons on board had to remain upwards of three months before being taken off. A short, impressionistic account of the two French residents encountered by the shipwrecked crew appears in Judith Schalansky's Atlas of Remote Islands (2009).[7]
In September 1874 a French astronomical mission conveyed by the sailing ship La Dive spent just over three months on Saint-Paul to observe the transit of Venus; geologist Charles Vélain took the opportunity to make a significant geological survey of the island.
In 1889 Charles Lightoller, who was later to become famous as the Second Officer of the RMS Titanic, was shipwrecked here for eight days when the sailing barque Holt Hill ran aground. He describes the shipwreck and the island in his autobiography, Titanic and Other Ships. Lightoller speculated that pirates may have used the island and their treasure could be buried in its caves.[8]
In 1892 the crew of the French sloop Bourdonnais, followed by the ship L'Eure in 1893, took possession of Saint-Paul and Amsterdam Island in the name of the French government.
In 1928, the Compagnie Générale des Íles Kerguelen recruited René Bossière and several Bretons and Madagascans to establish a spiny lobster cannery on Saint-Paul, "La Langouste Française". When the company went bankrupt in 1931, seven of its employees were stranded on the island. Five died, the two survivors were finally rescued in 1934. This event has since come to be known as Les Oubliés de Saint-Paul ("the forgotten ones of St. Paul").[9][10]
A few years later in 1938, the crew of a French fishing boat were stranded on the island. Distress calls sent by the crew over short-wave radio were barely but fortuitously received 11,000 miles away in the United States. The message was relayed to the Navy and the French consul in San Francisco, while an amateur radio operator in California made contact with the stranded crew and assured them that help was on the way.[11]
There is a fictionalized description of the island in Robert Stone's novel Outerbridge Reach (1998).
The island is a breeding site for Subantarctic Fur Seals, Southern Elephant Seals and Rockhopper Penguins. It was also the breeding site for an endemic flightless duck & several kinds of petrel before the introduction of exotic predators and herbivores, including Black Rats, House Mice, European Rabbits, pigs and goats during the 19th century or earlier. The pigs and goats have since disappeared or been eradicated. Black Rats were eradicated in January 1997 following an aerial drop of 13.5 tonnes of brodifacoum anticoagulant poison baits over the island. Subsequently two species of seabirds, Macgillivray's Prion and Great-winged Petrel, were found to be recolonising the island as breeding birds.[12]
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