Utopias, retreats and islands of death – 65 fascinating stories by Adwin de Kluyver

You don’t just go to a Wadden Island for your holiday for the beaches and dunes, because beaches and dunes can be found along the entire Dutch west coast. You also go to an island to experience the island feeling.

The island feeling is the feeling that you have distanced yourself from the big world. You have exchanged the big world and everything in it for a well-organized small world in which the influence of the big one is only felt indirectly. And the demands that an island places on your existence seem to be so much simpler than those of the big world.

Adwin de Kluyver (Etten-Leur, 1968), author of two well-received books about the polar regions, has now written a fascinating book about islands, The islands of good and evil . This consists of travel stories, history and presentation of many remarkable facts and facts about 65 special islands. The writer and historian lives and works alternately on Vlieland, Terschelling and in Leeuwarden.

Floreana

Islands in themselves are of course neither good nor evil. What people do, or do with it, or undergo there, manifests itself as good or evil and often both at the same time.

The first of the twelve narrative chapters is about the Galapagos island of Floreana, in the Pacific Ocean, about 500 kilometers west of Ecuador. It is beautiful, there is a spring with clear fresh water and you can grow crops there. Floreana became uninhabited in 1927 after the evacuation of a whaling station.

In 1929 a German doctor, Dr. Ritter, and his former patient Dore Strauch, to live ‘a natural way of life’ on Floreana. Letters – a mail boat regularly visited the island – show that Ritter seriously neglected Dore mentally after his arrival. In 1932 another German couple came to Floreana, the Wittmers, with their blind son. There would be no cordiality between the two couples.

Meat poisoning

Not much later, a Baroness calling herself Mrs. Von Wagner turned up, accompanied by, according to Dore, two lovers. Von Wagner behaved in an extremely authoritarian manner and relations quickly deteriorated. In 1934, deaths occurred under obscure circumstances: the bodies of von Wagner and one of her lovers washed up on the shore of another Galapagos island and Dr. Ritter (vegetarian!) died of a mysterious meat poisoning. In short, what should have been an idyll became a nightmare and Floreana became an island of evil.

Unwritten rules

Did Utopia Exist? In 1861, the Katwijk sailor Pieter Groen was shipwrecked near Tristan da Cunha, a lonely volcanic island in the South Atlantic Ocean. Together with a certain Glass and his family, he became the founder of a close-knit, self-sufficient island community. Both their descendants are still part of the nearly three hundred current residents. The small community governed itself for more than a century according to the principles of equality and anarchy and according to unwritten rules of sharing everything, only bartering with passing ships and not allowing money. In 1963, a small fish cannery with wage labor spoiled this little Utopia.

Perfect retreat

Usedom, the Baltic Sea island where the Nazis developed the V2, Bikini, an atoll where several atomic bombs were detonated, prison islands, the Scottish Gruinard, where the British tested biological anthrax weapons: all islands of evil? Are there actually islands of good? It has been: off the west coast of Ireland there are – now uninhabited – rock islands that have been inhabited for centuries by monks, who recognized them as a perfect retreat to get closer to God.

Until recently, it was possible for the newly super-rich to buy an island, preferably an uninhabited island. For retreat and contemplation? That is doubtful. Probably to have a place free from prying eyes, so as not to lag behind other super-rich people and perhaps also to experience the romantic Robinson feeling.

Bomans and Wolkers

Robinson Crusoe , the book by Daniël Defoe, was published in 1719. Learning to survive on a paradisiacal, uninhabited Caribbean or South Sea island with coconut palms and white beaches, but without the aids of civilization and technology, has since been part of the Western world as a romantic idea. collective consciousness. The TV reality show Expedition Robinson refers to that. De Kluyver also carries the Dutch radio robinsonade on: Godfried Bomans and Jan Wolkers who spent a week in solitude on Rottumerplaat, interviewed daily by novice radio presenter Willem Ruis. His questions are included in an appendix.

‘Isolarios’ are included among the narrative chapters written in a compelling style, in which De Kluyver briefly describes a handful of islands. Together they form the ‘island compendium’ of The islands of good and evil. The book is richly illustrated with photographs and pictures .