Over the past three months I’ve been lucky enough to sail and film the final leg of the tall ship Oosterschelde’s two year global voyage retracing the famous five year expedition of Charles Darwin and Captain Robert Fitzroy aboard the HMS Beagle. When he set off, Darwin was 22, the same age I am now. He was certainly no sailor, growing ever-more seasick and homesick with each passing day. His ship was almost half the size of the 107-year-old Oosterschelde that I sailed on, with triple as many people crammed into its decks and none of the modern wonders of satellite positioning or even accurate maps to work from. After all, that’s why the Beagle sailed—to make the maps of the South American continent.
But my expedition had an altogether different purpose—in each port we berthed at between Cape Town and London we joined forces with a young conservationist and a local environmental charity to create powerful documentary series about the changes our planet has seen in the nigh 200 years since the Beagle’s passage and the work being done to save some very special species. Curious? Here are the projects I was blessed to film:
Cape Town
Joining the ship at the Southernmost tip of the African continent, my first stop was De Hoop Reserve where Cape Nature are writing one of the most incredible conservation success stories I’ve ever witnessed for an animal almost no-one has heard of: the bontebok. This gangly purple and white antelope was once hunted by farmers to a point where perhaps as few as 20 remained. Now, however, the farmers are leading their conservation, and over 3000 bontebok can be found roaming and grazing South Africa’s renosterveldt plains. We joined population counts and surveys of the species to check how they were doing and collected fresh scat to scan for deadly parasites that could undo much of this good work.
Then heading on to Simon’s Town, I linked up with iCWILD to study and document human-wildlife conflict with the waterfall troop of baboons that patrol the streets. Historically, breakaway male baboons coming down from the mountains into town were captured and euthanised here before others including females and young could catch on and follow—research proved this method effective, and the loss of these few baboons’ lives was considered a fair price to prevent the loss of dozens more at the hands of guns and cars in the city. But now a new strategy is being put forward in the form of electric fencing that could prevent this conflict with zero loss of life for the troop; we spoke with the community to raise awareness about this more hopeful future solution.
Ascension
Sailing North, passing through St Helena we paused briefly for a rapid five-day project encompassing the entire range of conservation on the small island. My highlights: sleeping out on a scree slope beside the island’s masked booby colony, snorkelling beside a curious devil ray that chose to investigate our ship, and meeting Jonathan, a Seychelles giant tortoise and the oldest land animal on Earth at 193 years young. Jonathan, I was interested to learn, is gay and certainly took a liking to me.
But we had to press on, and next in our sights was Ascension. One of the most remote inhabited islands on Earth, Ascension is exactly between Congo-Brazzaville and Brazil in the midst of thousands of miles of oceany nothingness. Used by both the US and UK as a military base, visits there are strictly regulated, but joining forces with their conservation team, I had the privilege of three weeks to tackle a trio of projects in this bizarre, beautiful martian landscape described by Darwin as a ‘cinder.’
The first explored the history of turtle hunting on the appropriately-named ‘long beach.’ For centuries, sailors and later the military garrison posted here to prevent rescue of Napoleon would flip nesting turtle mothers onto their backs as they pulled themselves up the beach at night to lay their eggs, then float them down to walled sea cages and stack them alive ready to eat and sell. The practice only stopped because there were too few turtles left to bother harvesting. But thanks to over fifty years of conservation and monitoring, thousands of turtles now nest on the island annually; we counted their tracks, excavated successful nests to check on hatching rates and helped remove invasive plants from their all-important nesting dunes.
Project number two saw us microchipping and surveying frigatebirds at Letterbox Reserve, a peninsula on the island’s remote far tip. They too face an invasive plant threat—mexican thorn—which we battled to remove, and they too were almost driven extinct by sailors, not only hunting and eating the birds but introducing rats and cats that decimated their populations, indeed wiped them out on the mainland. Thankfully, since feral cats were eradicated from Ascension in 2004, thousands of masked boobies and frigatebirds have returned to nest—a strong message of the resilience of nature and the difference we can make.
The final project then took me to the island’s highest point: green mountain. Once barren rock, Darwin and his good friend Joseph Hooker transformed this peak into a cloud forest to bring a steady source of fresh water to the island and stepping foot there today, you can’t help but feel you’ve been transported to the heart of some vast Asian jungle. It’s quite marvelous. And it’s home to perhaps the rarest plant on Earth: Ascension’s parsley fern. Only one remains in the wild, on a sheer cliff face we hiked and scrambled our way up to. It’s smaller than my hand and ever so fragile. But the conservation team here have been breeding up dozens more of these ferns over months and years and soon they’ll be ready to transplant back into the wild, pushing this plant back from the precipice of extinction. Filming the fern and assisting their reforestation work was an experience I’ll never forget.
Azores
Still buzzing from Ascension, my final port of the Atlantic crossing was Horta on the island of Faial. Here, on the mid-Atlantic ridge with inky depths of one thousand plus metres accessible five minutes from the harbour and a cornucopia of hundreds of seamounts to explore, the Azores Deep Sea Research group have developed an incredible camera capable of filming the strange, hardy species that lie on and float above these unfathomably deep sea floors from sixgill sharks to 3000-year-old black corals, sponge gardens and octopuses. The ‘drift cam,’ as they call it, is made from parts anyone could find locally or order online and for less than ten grand (compared to the millions it costs to build and deploy a deep sea ROV).
We got to send it down to a series of half a dozen target seamounts between Terceira and Faial and watch the images come back in real time. But more importantly, as with every project, every port, we made three fantastic, emotional, inspiring documentaries and screened them to the local community, showing them the wonders of the ocean they live by and fish in every day and maybe even helping them to love some of these deep sea oddities. They’ve got a local word—‘fafafauna,’ for the cute, charismatic fauna that we all know and love: dolphins, whales etc. But if I’ve learnt anything these past three months, it’s that we can learn to love any animal, and protect it, no matter how small, how desperately threatened, how remote. Thanks YET for your support in making this happen. Here’s to more adventures to come!
