"Us Gets Tired of Us"

It was as if half a dozen Robinson Crusoes had been popped suddenly into Times Square. Six leathery, middle-aged men from the gale-swept, potato-patch little island of Tristan da Cunha (pop. 231) walked off a South African gunboat at Cape Town and into a fairyland of beauties and wonders never imagined. They were the first Tristanites to leave home in 15 years.

Cape Town's summer profusion took their breath away, for Tristan, 1,700 miles over their shoulders in the lonely South Atlantic, is scrubby volcanic crust. In the slow, burred speech of his seafaring west-of-England ancestors, one dazzled visitor exclaimed: "We want time foor arl thus luvverly flowery growth to be thought upon."

"What Sort Big Dornkey?" The sights and sounds of civilization brought murmurs of comparison. On Tristan, fish oil lights the lamps. The diet is fish and potatoes, augmented sometimes by albatross and penguin eggs. Now the six men looked into the kaleidoscope of a lighted city. They ate ice cream doused with brandy. They gazed at autos. Murmured balding, long-nosed Gordon Glass* at his first glimpse of one: "A most wunnerful movement." At his first sight of a horse: "What sort big dornkey is that?"

To questions about themselves and their islands, the Tristanites were shyly candid. "We'm poor but werry 'appy," said Glass. But, he admitted, "Us gets tired of us."

A Job for Specialists. The six were off, a fortnight ago, to a new life in a land even more forbidding than their own. They were to help South Africa set up permanent weather observation stations on Prince Edward and Marion Islands, volcanic juts on the Antarctic fringe of the Indian Ocean, 1,200 miles southeast of the Cape of Good Hope and even more desolate than Tristan. Civilization had found a job for which Tristanites were peculiarly fitted; they would show South African Navymen how to stay alive on barren land in the long, bone-chilling, mid-ocean winter.

The Tristanites were content to leave Cape Town, but one thought disturbed them. The folks on Tristan would never believe their stories. They struggled for words as they transcribed messages to be sent to their families, wept as the record was played back to them. Tall, dark-haired Arthur Reppeto had best told the thoughts of all six: "I never think things in Cape Town is as they is.... The streets, there's cement in 'em. Place is luvverly. And now closing with luv to arl on the Hisland."

* Descendant of a William Glass whose family stayed behind on Tristan in 1817, when Britain, convinced that Bonapartists could not use the island as a base for rescuing Napoleon from St. Helena, withdrew the small wartime garrison. Later, three sailors who had served with Nelson joined the Glasses. To Tristan, too, came a few dark-skinned women from St. Helena. Today, the much intermarried but sturdy Tristanites have only seven surnames among them: Glass, Swain, Green, Reppeto, Lavarello, Rogers and Hagan.

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