At that moment, wondrous gusts of cool wind began sweeping across the deck, brushing against the faces of the bedraggled passengers. That clean air renewed the condition of their lungs and sedated their digestive systems, soothing their death wishes. A seagull flew leisurely over the ship, announcing the proximity of land. As if by magic, the waters became calm, and the ocean, recovering its liquid state, became golden and smooth. The collective intestinal nightmare abated, and the child who sang like a bird became silent.
Men and women lifted their heads and saw it in the distance: before their eyes, white and radiantly barren, was the silhouette of Clipperton Island. It was August 30, 1908.
Clipperton, 1917
ON THE MORNING OF JULY 18, 1917, U.S. Navy captain H.P. Perril saw Clipperton Island for the first and last times. He never came ashore, but he took a very careful look at it from his ship, the Yorktown, through his spyglass. He circumnavigated the isle — outside the barrier reef, and at a safe distance from it — exactly in an hour, and confirmed that it was about five miles around. “Clipperton Island,” he wrote, “is a dangerous low atoll, approximately 2 miles in diameter.”
An atoll is an astonishing formation in the shape of a doughnut, with water in its center and around its perimeter. A ring of land with a lagoon in the center, floating in the middle of the ocean. At some moment in its prehistoric past, Clipperton had been a volcanic mountain surrounded by a powerful crown of coral reefs. The mountain in time sank slowly, and disappeared under the water, and the reef wall was the only thing left above sea level. What had been the crater of a volcano was now a lagoon of brackish waters, effervescent with sulfur coming from the belly of the earth.
The captain goes on: “[The isle] has a promontory 62 feet high on its southwest coast, which at first sight looks like a ship’s sail, and on approaching it, like a gigantic castle. This promontory can be seen from a distance of 12 to 15 miles provided there is no fog: then, the promontory and the isle itself can only be seen when it is already at very close range.
“The breakers on its eastern shore do not provide early enough warning for a ship to change course in order to avoid running aground. The isle is surrounded by an uninterrupted coral reef on which the ocean pounds heavily and ceaselessly, sometimes covering the isle. There are sharks swimming around. During the rainy season, waterfalls cascade on its southwestern coast.
“While we were circumnavigating the isle, I saw more seagulls, flying fish, and butterflies than I had ever seen on a similar stretch of coastline,” Perril comments, amazed at this place which, lacking any vegetation, no blade of grass to soften the hostility of those rocks, nonetheless abounds in an unusual and alarming proliferation of animal life. “Thousands of birds fly around the island, and the guano deposits are being exploited commercially. A colony was established to operate a phosphate plant some years ago. […] A layer of guano several feet deep covers the isle. There is no doubt that birds have inhabited it for years.”
Nine years earlier, and from the deck of another ship, the Corrigan II, the Arnauds had viewed, full of expectation, what for them was a promised land. Though that happened long before and they were seeing the isle through glasses of a different color, what they saw could not have been much dissimilar to what the American captain, H. P. Perril, saw when he accidentally approached its shores.
Clipperton, 1908
THERE WAS A BUNCH OF CHILDREN and women watching them from shore. Alicia looked at them from the barge, and they seemed dejected and lonesome in that hot weather. Their tanned skin, dark and dry, withstood the rigors of the sun while the white sun glare bleached out all the colors, already faded, of the scant garments they wore. Boobies, the shore birds, fluttered around them and walked over their feet, and people shooed them away with either strong arm gestures or lazy kicks.
The small, faded universe in front of her eyes reverberated and consumed itself in a slow combustion. Alicia saw how the ocean seemed to explode over the reefs, pounding the rocks, the few sickly coconut palms, and the human beings, then coming to rest on every crevice, hollow, and cranny. The sun lost no time in evaporating the water, and everything was soon covered with a mirrorlike layer of salt, refulgent, blinding. The ocean spray would fall slowly on the people, transforming them into salt statues. It was only in their eyes, in the feverish eagerness in their gaze, that Alicia discovered the great expectations, repressed but fierce, for the boat’s arrival.
A few yards ahead of the women, a half-dozen soldiers stood firmly, their heads covered with big straw hats, their drill uniforms battered, their feet in huarache sandals. They also appeared sleepy and blurred, like tin soldiers melting in the sun. They all look like castaways, Alicia thought uneasily. Someday I myself will be watching for the arrival of a boat and will also have an expression on my face like Juan Diego’s when the Virgin of Guadalupe appeared to him.
Two masculine figures stood out in the group. One was a youthful man of medium height in uniform and the only one who seemed vital, miraculously fresh in his clean shirt, and the other was a big strong man, radically blond, with a single thick eyebrow extending from one temple to the other without a break in the middle. On a big pole set in a cement base in the midst of everything, a very faded national flag was waving rather reluctantly, as if it were laundry hung out to dry in the wind.
The Corrigan II was anchored at a prudent distance from the dangerous reefs surrounding the isle, and passengers and crew were disembarking from flat-bottomed barges. Alicia’s first sensation on setting foot on Clipperton was one of annoyance: the land was not firm enough, and her shoes sank into the black-green, sticky guano.
More conscious now of the nauseating vapors coming from the lagoon than of the prophetic vibrations that had jolted her a few moments before, she wrinkled her fine little nose and observed, “The whole thing smells like rotten cabbages.”
Suddenly Ramón came out of his mesmerizing seasickness, as if the penetrating smell of cabbages had the same effect on him as did the smelling salts on those who had fainted. Keeping in mind the role he had to play, he regained his natural color, composure, and energy and, with a commanding air, greeted one by one all the members of the reception committee, including the children, with an accompanying firm hand-shake. He immediately called his men and ordered an improvised ceremony for saluting the flag. His first act as governor would be to replace the existing flag with the brand-new one embroidered by nuns.
While the soldiers were delayed searching for it among the dozens of wooden crates they had brought ashore, the Arnauds pulled aside the young-looking officer and the strong blond man. The first was Lieutenant Secundino Angel Cardona, stationed in Clipperton for over six months and assigned as Ramón’s assistant. With six men under his command, he had come to the island before his superior in order to ready the necessary installations for the arrival of Alicia and the incoming troops.
Cardona was a good-looking guy, his hair arranged in the fashion of a neighborhood bully. His impeccable white teeth produced an open, frank smile, and not even his slightly prominent ears nor a few pockmarks managed to detract from his handsome presence.
The blond one was a twenty-eight-year-old German fellow, Gustav Schultz, who represented the English company exploiting the guano, the Pacific Phosphate Company Ltd. He had been established in Clipperton for four years, in charge of processing and exporting the product, and of a number of workers that fluctuated from fifteen, at best, to only two or three when business was not so good. Beneath his bushy, gruff eyebrows, his eyes looked gentle. He smiled softly, balancing on his enormous feet like on a platform, and seemed to expect the newcomer to make a speech.