Where Is the Simple Life?

The hardy people of Tristan da Cunha discovered last week that there is a force more powerful than Atlantic gales and flaming volcanoes--bureaucracy.

All 260 Tristan islanders were hustled off their tiny island in the South Atlantic last October when a long-dormant volcano poured a river of molten rock toward their thatch-roofed houses. In traveling 6,500 miles to safety in England, they moved nearly a hundred years forward in time. At home, they had lived on a fish-and-potato diet, carded and spun wool by the light of oil lamps, ridden in bullock carts. In their new cottages near the British port of Southampton, they encountered for the first time the 20th century wonders of electric light, store clothes, supermarkets, frozen foods and traffic jams.

For most Tristan islanders, it seems a bad exchange.*Looking at his first TV show, an old man said, "I don't think much of it; the people are too small." After making a down payment on a transistor radio, another Tristan islander was baffled by the bill for the next installment, asked, "How often does a man have to pay for the same thing in h'England?" On Tristan da Cunha, the only wage-earning job was in the local crayfish cannery, where everyone got the same pay. In England, the visitors could not comprehend the idea of different pay rates for different jobs. Argued one: "H'it h'ain't fair. They's not payin' me for no job. They's payin' me for one man's time. My time's wuth as much to me as h'anybody h'else's!"

Mostly, they were homesick for their windswept island and wanted again to feel pride in eating what they grew, wearing what they made, and living out a life that was hard but simple and eminently suited to their spare tastes. Willie Repetto, the 60-year-old leader of the islanders, claims, on the basis of a Royal Society expedition, that the lava flow has actually improved the island by creating a breakwater, and last week he appealed to the British Colonial Office, asking for help in returning to Tristan da Cunha.

Impossible, replied the Colonial Office, at least for the time being. Said Repetto: "If the island is left uninhabited too long, it will be overrun by rats, and the calves we left behind will turn into wild beasts."

*All Tristan islanders, who have only seven family names, are descended from a handful of British, U.S., Dutch and Italian adventurers, mostly shipwrecked sailors. In 1827, wives were found for the island's bachelors by importing five colored women from equally tiny St. Helena, 1,600 miles away.

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