It had been a harsh summer on the island. Jenny drove me northwards, past a withering vegetable garden built over a pit once used by early settlers to render penguins. “It was seven rockhoppers to a gallon of oil,” she said. Near a memorial to HMS Sheffield, sunk 40 miles offshore in 1982, we stopped by a rockhopper colony. These 50cm-high penguins have punk Mohawks, yellow eyebrows and the countenance of mad professors. They didn’t seem too bright though: their cliff-top roost was over 20m high and, rather than choosing a nice smooth beach from which to bellyflop into the sea, they bounded hazardously down between ledges, waiting to be swept up by the ocean’s ferocious swell. They’d had a bad breeding season. “Almost no chicks have been raised,” said Jenny. “Unseasonal storms soaked and chilled the chicks, then skuas moved in to annihilate the survivors.” Damn those skuas.
But today sunshine bathed Sea Lion Island. I walked for six hours without seeing anybody, adrift of the modern world. I visited sea lions and looked wave-wards for killer whales amid the russet-brown kelp. I also learned that it’s imperative not to sit on anything resembling a boulder amid the tussock glasses because it may have big eyes and folds of blubber. Preposterously inelegant tubs of lard, the elephant seal bulls had beached themselves to moult: a process that involves lazing around for a few months rasping, belching and groaning. I paced out one large bull: he was 3.5m long. “It’s nothing,” Italian researcher Filippo Galimberto later told me. “A young bull, six years old, not so big. They can weigh 3.5 tonnes.” Living in a small hut with his wife, small baby and limited funding, Filippo has been researching elephant seals for 19 seasons. His love of the islands and his passion for these fatty blobs imbues him with the fierce determination needed to prevail in the Falklands.
“Post-moulting, elephant seals hunt over hundreds of kilometers of ocean to depths of 1,500m,” Filippo continued. Those lie’s studied in Mexico have a more chaotic social structure with harems easily splintered and pups neglected. “Not here,” he explained. “The bulls have control of the harems (some 130 females strong) and the pups are fully weaned. They’re typically British,” he laughed, “so very organised”. Yet there’s a subversive irony about them: Filippo suspects many have migrated here from Argentina. Perhaps I should’ve alerted naval patrol?
Born survivors – The following morning I crossed the archipelago to the largely uninhabited West Falklands. I buzzed over scattered farmsteads and swathes of bleak moorland punctuated by black tarns and white-sand coves before bulbous grey massifs rose on the western isles. With a humour as arid as Carcass Island’s three-year drought, farmer Rob McGill is perhaps the hardiest septuagenarian I’ve ever encountered. Owner of this 17 sq km island for 40 years with wife Lorraine, their remote fiefdom is named after the 19th-century HMS Carcass – arguably the most unromantically named vessel in naval history. At the base of a rounded 200m outcrop, their two-storey weatherboard-clad farmstead snuggles within a wind-contorted shelterbelt – the first trees I’d seen in days.
The tireless McGill is either milking his dairy cows at dawn to put fresh milk on the breakfast table, driving visitors to penguin colonies or moving his beef cattle around – inevitably with his sheepdog, Sidney, chasing behind. “I’m an outdoors person,” he said. “Whenever I go to Stanley I want to get out. We have Skype here so I can keep in contact.” He left Stanley on the morning of the 1982 invasion to return to Carcass. “The governor said we weren’t going to be invaded so should go about our business.
So I did, and my wife and children were left trapped in Stanley. Not his best piece of advice,” he remarked drily. Lorraine could look after herself though. She was part of a mercy convoy of vehicles evacuating schoolchildren back to their families in ‘Camp’ (the countryside outside Stanley). “It was surreal,” she recalled. “We had to siphon petrol and use local boats to deliver the children. But islanders are resilient. You improvise here and get on with life.”
