Sift through what those who have despaired have left behind, and nothing so sharpens the poignancy of failure as the little jeux d'esprit with which they once meant to ornament their lives.
You could be forgiven for calling it a shed, but push your way in over the rotting planks and fallen corrugated iron and you will find yourself in what was plainly once the parlour. Rain running down one inside wall has stained the careful paintwork, but you can see the pains taken to achieve a clean line at the running edge along the top. There are display corner-cupboards, quite fancy, even a cornice, and a small fireplace with a brave attempt at a proper mantelpiece. Poor settlers -
what did they think they were going to burn? Did somebody tell them there were trees?
Outside, where the window-panes lie smashed on the ground, the wind hisses in the grass. The sea in the sheltered little cove below is golden in the late afternoon light, but here within are shadows. This is Port Couvreux.
And what is that, lying on the floor? A slab of white - is it stone? Cement? - into which something is chiselled. With difficulty we can discern it in the gloom: "1927 - Pierre Petite - Colon."
Port Couvreux was a settlement and meant to be the first, a bridgehead into a new world. France had claimed this territory in the Indian Ocean for 150 years without doing more than visit. Nobody had tried to settle or colonise. Now the owners of the island of Kerguelen were to take possession in the proper manner.
This was never a port, despite its name, but a place where big ships could anchor in deep water not far offshore, protected from the wind. Down by the shore rowing boats could beach in all weathers. A short path over firm dry ground would lead up to the site where the settlement could nestle beside a waterfall, beneath a sheltering flank of hillside. To the seafarer's eye the site was perfect.
To the seafarer's eye. The seafarer's eye has been responsible for much of Kerguelen's melancholy history of false starts and fatal errors. Most of those who have fallen under the islands' spell have been seafarers, for who else would come? Even today nobody unwilling to spend the better part of a month in the arms of a cruel sea has ever visited Kerguelen. No French minister - let alone President or Prime Minister - has ever visited this,
one of France's largest overseas possessions.
Even today, few who are anything in the world have come. A Thatcher can be in Port Stanley within 15 hours; an Attenborough can be in Antarctica within days. But to come here? A day by air to the island of La Réunion, then a week and a half at sea - and then no more than days on Kerguelen before your ship departs. Or stay for months until the next ship. A century ago a visit meant a year away from France. Nobody came but explorers, chancers, professional sailors and idiots.
Pierre Petit, his wife, and the two families with them, were simple people, not chancers; but those who talked them into coming were. The Bossière brothers - Henri and René - were dreamers and fantasists. Fresh in popular imagination at the time were the achievements of Cecil Rhodes in southern Africa, and this British way of combining commerce with adventure and wreathing the endeavour in patriotic laurels, interested the French too.
In particular the example of the Falklands appealed. René went there not just to buy hardy sheep, but to see for himself how an isolated sub-Antarctic colony could be made not only viable but profitable - without investment from the colonial power. The Falkland Islands Company had seen to that. Sheep were the answer: sheep and, of course, settlers. Kerguelen seemed to offer so many parallels: of distance, of climate and of latitude.
First sighted in 1772 by the unreliable Captain Yves de Kerguelen (who took it to be a bountiful new continent) the archipelago had been relocated and properly described four years later by James Cook, but he never contested the implicit French claim. It took France a century to stake possession formally, by which time American and British sealers and whalers were already calling and hunting here a great deal; so as the 19th century closed, the French were anxious to substantiate ownership by
activity.
The Bossière brothers, shipowners, had offered this. They had badgered colonial ministers into granting them an exclusive lease for the exploitation of the whole Kerguelen archipelago and its surrounding waters, in return for securing what politicians had embarrassingly failed to achieve: palpable consolidation of French ownership. Paris was grudgingly persuaded of the brothers' two-point plan: a big, shore-based whale-oil and seal-oil operation; and a start with the sheep
stations which had been so successful in the Falklands and New Zealand.
For France the whaling and sealing part of the concession was to prove a disaster. The Bossières never summoned the resources or organisation to make it pay, and finally sub-leased their concession to an Anglo-Norwegian company in return for 5 per cent of takings.
The company plundered the whale and seal population, wrecking the marine ecology in a way which even in those days caused dismay. Port Couvreux was to be the second arm of the Bossières' concession. French families were recruited from Le Havre for their knowledge of sheep farming.
M and Mme Georges Le Galloudec and their nine-year-old daughter Georgette; M and Mme Léon Ménager and their 12-year-old daughter Léone; and M and Mme Petit, are unlikely to have been rich or educated people and can hardly have known what to expect: no such venture had been tried before.
Pierre Petit was to be part of history. These happy few were to be the lucky ones, the founding fathers. This territory was to become a brave and successful part of Europe-beyond-the-seas - like New Zealand perhaps. One day, sheep stations would extend right across the gentler parts of this great island, and from harbours yet unmade a trade in wool, lamb and mutton would be plied across the oceans.
They stopped at Durban, South Africa, on the way, to buy sheet tin, pigs, cows and some angora goats. By the end of their first year, Georges Le Galloudec had died. His wife and child were repatriated. Pierre Petit and the others carried on. The sheep kept dying: rolling, rain-sodden, on to their sides, floundering in mires, freezing and starving. The financial figures and the logistics had never made sense anyway. The two families were lonelier than they had imagined possible. Hardly anything
would grow and the settlers' health was nagged by vitamin deficiencies. There were no roads or paths. Facing the sea, with only an inhospitable void behind them, they were left to wonder when the next ship would come.
Back in France, people had lost interest. Two more settlers, Joseph Lemartret and Ambroise Clauzier died in the winter of 1930. In 1931 the venture was abandoned and everyone left alive hauled on to the first whaling vessel to call, to face a two-month journey home to Le Havre. The dream had ended in ruin. And the funny thing is, I could have told them this before they started. Sheep do thrive here in Kerguelen, but only in the right place. One gentle and sheltered island, Ile Longue, is given
over to sheep now; they thrive, and Ile Longue looks like the Peak District. But Port Couvreux was doomed.
Only a small basin behind the cove of Port Couvreux itself invites grazing. From the ocean this was all you could see. Climb the hills behind and you are in another, crueller world. The remains of the straggling fences the shepherds built are touching in their futility. The little cemetery - just five drunken wooden crosses by a beautiful, lonely beach - is heart-rending. There are no names on the crosses but from what is recounted above we can probably account for three. I wonder
if their descendants know?
The Bossière brothers' venture was finally bankrupted. No sustained attempt to settle or exploit Kerguelen was ever made again. There is an old photograph of Pierre and his wife with the Ménagers, at their gate. They had even built a swing for Léone. Pierre is about 35, with a shock of curly hair. He looks stocky and obstinate. Perhaps too obstinate.
We are sleeping in what was once his settlement: just wooden cabins and some sheds. Parts are derelict but a kitchen and bedroom have been kept weatherproof. At night the wind howls and the candles flicker and I think of poor Pierre and Mme Petit and the other families and the child's questions and the slow way in which it comes to a person, not as a clear certainty at dawn but as a creeping suspicion in the dead of night, that your project is failing and you have made a terrible, life-wrecking
mistake.
Perhaps the words were never even spoken. It took Pierre four years to know fully what his wife may have guessed as they stepped out of a little rowing boat on to the rocky shore where tomorrow I shall await an inflatable dinghy: that if she and her family were the first colonists, they were also to be the last.
