Losing our Treasures III - Pellew Island

I dreamed all night about the island, the Little Island, we called it when I was a child. It had many names. My parents called it Monkey Island, although there is another Monkey Island in Portland. Its real name is Pellew Island, a corruption of Peleau, named for a shadowy French hermit, who reportedly lived there, on coconuts and seafood, until he was drowned in a storm surge.

Pellew Island was given a title in 1953 – part of the land titling of Goblin Hill and San San Bay. The original plan was that there would be gracious houses on the land, each with a title to a small coastal plot, where the owners could have boathouses or cabanas. Decades of official disregard for the intentions of these titles have allowed cabanas to become mansions more or less sitting in the sea.

The Portland coastline is one of the most gorgeous in Jamaica, edged as it is by the soaring Blue Mountains. And the San San coast is nothing short of stunning, curving from Alligator Head to Whale Head and Blue Lagoon, with the jewel of Pellew Island set just offshore.

The early advocates for tourism saw this beauty and immortalized it in a 1960s Jamaica Tourist Board poster, the caption of which said: “In a world of bad air, poisoned water and litter, there are still a few virginal places. Enjoy. Quickly.” Serious t’ing.

Generations of Jamaicans – not just Portlanders – have stopped at the side of the road and looked out at the island, generations of Jamaicans have swum or rowed or rafted to the island, over the shallow seagrass beds to lie on the tiny beach, or to climb to the top and look over the miracle of the reef, and listen to the surf, rolling over and over and over.

Pellew Island is a jewel, and like a jewel, it has been privately owned - mostly by women - since the 1950s. It was bought by Baron Heinrich Thyssen in 1953 for 60 pounds Sterling, as a valentine’s gift for his fiancée, Nina Dyer of New York. The marriage didn’t last, and they divorced two years later. Nina then married Prince Saddrudin Aga Khan. I remember the island when it was owned by the Princess Aga Khan – Princess Island, was another of its names – she built a bamboo raft to one side of the little beach and scandalized everyone by sunbathing nude there. Even when owned by a Princess, though, the island was undefiled by concrete and there were no gates or security guards to keep people off. The Princess committed suicide in 1965, and in 1983, Betty Estuvez, a close companion of the Princess, bought the island for US$7,000. In 1995, the island was sold again to its current owners.

Now Pellew Island is to be “developed.” The owners seek to construct two villas – one seven bedroom and one four bedroom – on this steep, fissured, forested, fragment of limestone in the Caribbean sea. There will be decks and plunge pools and a bathroom for every bedroom, and electricity and water will have to be taken to the island via underwater conduit, and somehow a barge like boat will take the construction materials across without any damage to seagrass beds or corals, although the draught of the boat exceeds the depth of the water close to the island. The island is said to be “lightly vegetated” and virtually no trees will be touched, no land clearing will be done in the rain, there is little diversity of flora and few birds, although those who are fortunate to gaze out on the island every evening report many flocks of birds. A plateau at the summit of the island will be used – but there is no plateau worthy of the term, just a small, flattish area in a grove of bamboo. Promises, promises, I thought as I sat in the public meeting, hearing all this.

But the island is privately owned, and as we understand it, the private ownership of land conveys the right to do anything at all to that land. The Government of Jamaica could, of course, acquire the island for the public, deem it part of a scenic coastline, and keep it in its natural state for all of us. The GOJ purchases land all the time when what is needed is a road or a bauxite mine. But for a natural asset – I doubt the GOJ has ever done it.

So here’s what I’m thinking. The Tainos "owned" Jamaica until the men in Columbus’s ships took it and killed off the Tainos. And then the British captured Jamaica. There’s been a fair amount of taking and capturing, and I figure I have as much right to do some capturing as anyone. So I’m gonna invade Pellew Island with my flag of Taino symbols and I’m gonna declare it mine – mine; and the world’s. Ours. Ours to see and love and visit and snorkel the waters around and lie on the beach and sit in that grove of bamboo and hear the wind in the trees and the surf on the reef and the solider crabs rustling in the dead leaves. Ours.

I know my invasion will be symbolic rather than real; but it will be my statement that some things belong not to a single person, no matter how monied, but to humankind. Pellew Island is one such thing, and so, while we’re on the subject of Portland, is Blue Lagoon. Anyone who wants to join my invasion can e-mail me at dmccaulay@cwjamaica.com And I will accept all suggestions for other precious places, whether private or public, in dire need of similar invasions.

The PM, the Tainos and the Environmentalists

According to yesterday’s press, Prime Minister, the Hon. Bruce Golding – why are PM’s automatically “the Hon?” Suppose they act in ways that are not Hon? Subject of another blog, I suppose. Anyway, as I was saying, speaking at the opening of two new hotels on Seawind Cay in Montego Bay, the PM apparently said words to the effect that “the environmentalists” wanted to take us back to the time of the Tainos. Now I’m sure Mr. Golding knows the story of the Tainos – Jamaica’s indigenous people murdered by Spanish Conquistadores in the 15th and 16th century. Considering we are now facing a different kind of Spanish invasion via massive and non Jamaican resort development, I would have though the less said about the Tainos, the better.

It’s not the first time I’ve heard the PM say something offensive about “the environmentalists.” The first occasion was at the opening of the office of the Jamaica Institute of Environmental Professionals back in roughly October – this is a blog, I’m not checking dates. He said then that there were folks in Jamaica who regarded “the environmentalists” as akin to terrorists. My husband, sitting beside me, wanted to know sotto voce, where were our bombs, our WMDs, our tanks. (Are you allowed to say ‘bomb’ in a blog these days? Stay tuned…)

So I thought about the weapons we environmentalists had used over the years. Words – oh gazillions of words – words spoken, shouted, argued, pleaded, written, bleated, whispered, yup, we’ll admit to using words. And we’ve attended hundreds of badly organized and hostile public meetings, sat on scores of useless committees, contributed to dozens of policy documents fated to retire to a shelf after the high profile launch, to await the future updating, when the unused policy is inevitably deemed to be obsolete. I’ve even attended a street demonstration or two in my time, where generally the police security detail outnumbered the protesters, and there WAS that heady moment when we blocked a busy new Kingston street by walking in a line across a pedestrian crossing while singing “By the Rivers of Babylon” to protest the shipment of nuclear material through the Caribbean sea. We’ve made films, visual records of gorgeous places being lost to short-sightedness, stupidity and greed and interviews with the Jamaicans who live there, about their lives, their livelihoods, their hopes, their disappointments. Not a single bomb building session comes to mind.

You have to see with the PM, someone said later that night. I was out, dressed in my uniform head-to-toe black to avoid the what-to-wear-dilemma, I was at a bank function, and then a birthday party. The PM had to sing to that audience. No, I said. He didn’t. He could have displayed some leadership. He could have told investors that they were welcome, but the laws of Jamaica would be enforced and they had to respect both the Jamaican people and our landscape. You’re not practical, Diana, the person said, patting me on the shoulder. At least it wasn’t on the head.

How will “the environmentalists” respond? asked a radio talk show host. I conducted the interview while getting dressed for the bank function, passing my cell phone through my sleeves to my amused husband, who thought I was talking to a colleague and not to the radio listening public. How TO respond? How to respond to a PM who apparently thinks requiring coastal development to have a few garbage receptacles on site, to take waste to approved dumpsites (as opposed to dumping it in nearby wetlands, those few that have so far survived the development blitz), to retain one or two big trees, to conserve endemic plants, to keep the dust down, to put screens in the sea to keep silt off the coral reefs - is tantamount to a return to the primitive? For even these few and basic requirements are routinely ignored by our investors…and ignored by our own government. Indeed, in his speech, the PM referred to breaches as “mere misunderstandings…”

When I got to the bank function, I saw myself in the mirror for the first time. My hair was only combed on one side and my shirt was on back to front. Pesky environmentalists. Can’t even dress themselves, much less build a bomb or organize a good back-to-the-cave movement…