Among the Islands: Adventures in the Pacific - Hardcover

Flannery, Tim

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0802120407 ISBN 13: 9780802120403

Verlag: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2012

Inhaltsangabe

Tim Flannery is one of the world’s most influential scientists, credited with discovering more species than Darwin. In Among the Islands Flannery recounts a series of expeditions he made at the dawn of his career to the strange tropical islands of the South Pacific, a great arc stretching nearly 4,000 miles from the postcard perfection of Polynesia to some of the largest, highest, ancient, and most rugged islands on earth.

Flannery was traveling in search of rare and undiscovered mammal species, but he found much more: wild, weird places where local taboos, foul weather, dense jungle, and sheer remoteness made for difficult and dramatic exploration. Among the Islands is full of fascinating creatures—monkey faced bats, giant rats, gazelle-faced black wallabies, and more—and the adventure of discovery. This is an idea read for anyone who has ever imagined voyaging to the ends of the earth to uncover and study the rare and the wonderful.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Tim Flannery is a scientist, explorer and conservationist. He has published more than 130 peer-reviewed scientific papers and many books including The Future Eaters and the international bestseller The Weather Makers, which has been translated into more than 20 languages. He was named Australian of the Year in 2007.

http://www.timflannery.com.au

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Among the Islands

By Tim Flannery

Grove Atlantic, Inc.

Copyright © 2011 Tim Flannery
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8021-2040-3

Contents

Introduction, 
PART 1 In the Realm of the Sunbird, 
1 Woodlark, the Wandering Isle, 
2 Arrival of the Snake Man, 
3 Alcester, the Lonely Isle, 
4 Goodenough Not Near Enough, 
5 Island of Lepers, 
PART 2 Bismarck's Isles, 
6 Manus, 
7 New Ireland, and Travelling in Time, 
PART 3 The Solomon Islands, 
8 Guadalcanal: Emperor, King and Little Pig, 
9 Probing towards the Summit, 
10 Makira's Mysterious Rat, 
11 Malaita, 
12 The Face Never Seen, 
13 Poncelet's Giant and the Last Great Forest, 
PART 4 Fiji and New Caledonia, 
14 Bats at the Limit, 
15 Fiji's Garden Isle, 
16 Nouvelle Calédonie, 
17 The Mystery of Mont Panié, 
Afterword, 
References, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Woodlark, the Wandering Isle

It was the lure of being able to travel in time as well as across the seas that first carried me to the islands. It was 1987 and I was in my early thirties, and I must admit that daydreams of Polish anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski's fabled Islands of Love were part of the attraction. Malinowski had lived on Kiriwina Island in the Trobriands Group during the 1920s, and in The Sexual Life of Savages he'd reported in lively terms on the seemingly promiscuous young people he'd found there. At the time I was in charge of the mammal department at the Australian Museum in Sydney, and while girls in grass skirts are, technically speaking, mammals, they most emphatically did not fall within my research remit. Instead it was the distributions of possums, bats and rats that would need to set the agenda.

I'd been employed as a research officer. In pay and status it was the bottom of the scientific totem pole, but I couldn't have cared less. What mattered was that I was expected to carry onthe great tradition of the curators who'd preceded me and conduct research on the mammals of New Guinea and the southwest Pacific Islands. The museum had a proud history in the Pacific, and I soon learned that its collections held many important specimens, some acquired during the age of sail. As I pored over the mammal collections, the rudiments of a geography of the distribution of Pacific Island mammals began to take shape in my mind. But even when combined with what I learned from published sources, the picture was woefully incomplete — like a jigsaw with nine out of every ten pieces missing. A new book on the mammals of Australia had just been published, and it occurred to me that there should be a similar book for the southwest Pacific. But with so many ghastly blanks in our knowledge, an immense amount of fieldwork would be required before I could put pen to paper.

While full of goodwill for my aspirations, the museum could provide no financial support for my plans beyond my modest wage. So it was clear that I'd need to find a source of funding. And this, in the case of the Islands of Love, as they became known, was provided by TAMS — the Australian Museum Society. Headed by the wonderful and ever-gracious Susan Bridie, the society consisted of several hundred mostly well-heeled supporters of the museum, some of whom who were keen to participate in scientific research.

And so it was that on a bright, breezy August day in 1987 I found myself standing on a wharf in far north Queensland alongside a group of people I hardly knew. It was the season of the southeast trade winds, the sea was covered in whitecaps and the wind was relentless and salty. A mountainous pile of scientific equipment — from traps and nets to supplies, along with great silver vacuum flasks of liquid nitrogen (so that we could store samples of DNA that might reveal how the creatures we hoped to encounter had reached their island homes) — lay on the dock beside an aluminium catamaran with the name Sunbird on her bows. She'd been purchased for the Australian Museum by Suntory, the Japanese whisky producer, though just why alcoholic beneficence had smiled upon the museum in this particular guise I never discovered. Perhaps some past director was a great supporter of their product, I mused as we heaved the gear aboard.

The whole business of the expedition seems ridiculously romantic from this distance in time. TAMS had seen fit to organise and fund the work, the quid pro quo being that five of its members would participate in this voyage of biological discovery. Our objective was to survey one of the most inaccessible large islands in Melanesia — Woodlark in the Trobriands Group. Woodlark attracted me because of its size, its small human population and the abundance of undisturbed habitats. Furthermore, it was home to an unusual cuscus (a cat-sized marsupial), and I felt that other biological novelties might lie hidden there. But it lacked an air service — hence the need for the Sunbird.

Woodlark had been visited by scientists interested in mammals only twice prior to our expedition. In 1894 Albert Meek, one of Lord Walter Rothschild's most adventurous biological collectors, had tried to reach the island on a seven-metre whaleboat. He wrote later of his foolhardy attempt that, 'I had no knowledge at all of navigation and had not even a compass aboard …I was to learn in the school of experience that navigation was not a matter that could be taken in the casual way.' Day after day the understating Meek found himself driven back by the same trade winds that we experienced on the dock in Cairns, until he was finally blown far out to sea where he had to proceed by the light of the moon towards an unknown shore. Without matches, food or shelter, Meek was forced to abandon his first attempt to reach the island.

Months later he tried again, but a great wave washed him and his crew clean out of their vessel. He said it was only the pain of being severely cut about the legs by coral that gave him the impetus to save himself from being battered to death. But an Aboriginal boy who was travelling with him perished on that jagged shore. Clearly, a more substantial vessel was required, and so Meek purchased a nine-tonne cutter. Upon finally reaching Woodlark in 1895 he found what was, from a zoological point of view, a virgin island: nobody had previously collected there. When I first read Meek's classic account of his experiences, A Naturalist in Cannibal Land, I was hoping for a rich word-trove of experiences and observations, and was appalled to discover that he dealt with the island in just four lines. Perhaps he was too exhausted or ill to write more, or perhaps he found the place dull. Whatever the case, among the discoveries he made on this most inaccessible isle (which he fails to mention in his book) was a peculiar kind of possum whose coat was spotted in black, brown, yellow and white like a crazy patchwork quilt. Remarkably, every individual had a unique pattern — a characteristic seen more often in domesticated rather than wild animals.

Nearly sixty years were to pass before another biologist followed in Meek's footsteps. This time the researchers came from the American Museum of Natural History and were part of a well-organised and well-funded expedition. In 1956 it spent three weeks exploring the south and west of Woodlark Island and reported that the island's lush forests were deficient in mammal species. The researchers thought that the unusual cuscus was very rare. Although they added some bat and rat species to the limited list of...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Atlantic Monthly Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2012
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0802120407
• ISBN 13: 9780802120403
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 288
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar