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All Your Favorite Island Vacation Spots Have Been Overrun by Feral Chickens

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One day in early 2004, Armando Parra Sr. unlocked his Key West barbershop and found something menacing waiting for him: There, in the middle of the floor, was a sprung wire trap with a rotisserie chicken inside. The latest weapon in an ongoing battle to manage the island's feral fowl population, Parra had recently been named the city's official chicken-catcher, charged with capturing as many of the birds as he could and deporting them upstate. But not everyone wanted him to do his job.

Parra had been excited to get the gig, selling branded T-shirts and interviewing happily on CNN. "I didn't realize it was going to be like this," he later told the Miami Herald. He had learned the first lesson of island chicken management: It's almost always too soon to crow about success.

Over the past few decades, island destinations from Bermuda to Hawaii have had to contend with an influx of feral chickens. Like seagulls in cities or rabbits in public parks, these animals thrive in semi-natural environments, making themselves right at home and presenting a multitude of challenges to their human neighbors.

If you’re strutting around Key West, odds are you’re going to run into a feral chicken or three doing the same thing. They’re everywhere, waking honeymooners with their squawking early in the morning, scratching up local gardens in the afternoon, and stealing from snowbirds’ plates at dinnertime. Their ubiquity has led to a certain cultural cachet: “They are an iconic part of Key West,” says Tom Sweets, executive director of the island city's Wildlife Center. "You'll see them on signs, restaurants, businesses … the tourists love them."

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As befits such a totemic animal, the Key West chicken's origin story is a blend of fact and legend. Some people say the birds came over with early settlers, who brought them as a source of eggs and meat. The advent of supermarkets made these birds less necessary, and their former owners set them free. Others maintain that they're descendants of fighting cocks, imported by cigar workers from Cuba starting in the 1860s, and liberated after the sport was outlawed in Florida in 1986. (The truth, Sweets says, is probably a little of both.)

Since throwing off the bonds of domesticity, these chickens have developed new skills, social structures, and lifestyles. Some of these habits are closer to that of the red junglefowl—the wild ancestor of all domestic chickens, which still roams free in the forests of India and southern China—while others are novel adaptations, inspired by their new situation.

Like red junglefowl, Key West's feral chickens will fly into trees to escape danger, and tend to form small rooster-led social groups. "The feral population is pretty disease-resistant, and they're pretty tough and hardy" compared to domestic chickens, says Sweets. "They have the skill to live on the street."

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This skill, combined with the island's lack of large predators and a law against killing chickens on public property, has made for a steady supply of the birds. This can get a bit stressful. Key West's human population is also a mix of seasoned locals and relative newcomersand, excited tourists aside, the average person's level of chicken tolerance tends to match the length of time they've been around. "Half the island loves them and half the island hates them," says Sweets.

There are reasons for either stance. On the one hand, the chickens are colorful, funny, and great at pest control. On the other hand, the chickens poop in convertibles and pools, and ruin landscaping while scratching for worms. Snowbirds who've flown down for a restful winter find themselves woken up at dawn.

Chickens also cause neighborly disputes: If someone starts feeding a flock, they’re perfectly willing to go against their wide-ranging foraging instincts and hang around that person’s house every day, bothering the people next door. (Feeding chickens is technically illegal—but, Sweets says, "half the island does it anyway.")

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Currently, the Key West Code Compliance Department adjudicates individual chicken-centric conflicts between people. But over the years, the city has tried different strategies to manage the population on a wider scale. The government tried rounding them up themselves and shipping them away, but this was resource-intensive and garnered a lot of public backlash. Parra, the chicken-catcher, tried his best to do the same thing, but after chicken rights activists sabotaged his traps and further vandalized his barbershop, he quit.

So in 2011, the city tried something new: They asked the Key West Wildlife Center to help them by taking care of those birds that can't take care of themselves. In a typical year, Sweets says, the Center takes in about 1,400 sick, injured, orphaned, or unwanted chickens, rehabilitates them, and places them somewhere off the island.

"We do it alongside our wildlife rescue operations—I guess you could say it's a chicken rescue," Sweets says. "We find them homes in a better area for them." Sometimes this means a 12,000-acre free-range ranch in Okeechobee County. Other times it means a mom-and-pop egg operation, or a family who wants an unusual pet. In that last case, the chicken comes with a certificate signed by Key West's mayor.

On the spectrum of possible chicken crackdown strategies, Key West falls solidly in the middle—not completely lenient, but not too harsh either. Other islands handle things very differently. In Bermuda, which has been covered in feral fowl since a hurricane knocked down hundreds of coops in 1987, the government hopes to straight-up eradicate the population, which they say destroys about $100,000 worth of crops per year.

Their plan involves a combination of brute force and public whistleblowing. "If you find chicken eggs, destroy them," the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) advises on their website, which also features a giant button that says "Report a Feral Bird Problem." There is a $3,000 penalty for letting a chicken loose in Bermuda, and the DENR uses traps, nets, and poison bait to cull the birds.

Government employees are also allowed to shoot the birds on sight—an unusual provision in a place where guns are largely forbidden, and one that, according to resident Les Center, often backfires. "Most of the employees hired to do this job are really lousy shots," he writes. Last October, DENR took heat after what was essentially a chicken-focused drive-by shooting: Employees in a van opened fire at a small flock that was strutting along a public beach. (DENR did not respond to a request for comment.)

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In Kauai—which legend has it also inherited its chicken problem from a coop-destroying hurricane—the government has taken the opposite tack. "They pretty much just leave them alone," says Eben Gering, a biologist who studies feral chicken genetics on the island. Like in Key West, the island's thousands of chickens enjoy legal protection on public property, but not private.

Kauians generally don't mind them, though—"they're like pigeons here," Gering says—and state-sponsored efforts to manage them, including a free trap rental program, have been discontinued. For the most part, chickens on Kauai just go about their lives, eating bugs and seeds and, according to one local blogger, the occasional slice of Costco pizza.

Despite this blissful life, it's possible that some have further-reaching plans. "Feral chickens are increasing in number on some of the other islands," says Gering, including the Big Island, Maui, and Oahu. While it's unclear where they're coming from—Kauai may or may not be the culprit—the trend doesn't show any sign of stopping.

This last scenario is Key West's nightmare. Sweets refuses to send rehabilitated chickens anywhere that resembles where they came from—no little islands, no predator-free ecosystems. Recently, "there was a guy on an island up in the Carolinas," he says. "He wanted to adopt them, but we refused."

"If you release some feral chickens on an island like that, it's going to end up just like it is in Key West," says Sweets—a situation that, no matter how much you like it, you wouldn't wish on someplace else.

Naturecultures is a weekly column that explores the changing relationships between humanity and wilder things. Have something you want covered (or uncovered)? Send tips to cara@atlasobscura.com.

This story originally ran on April 14, 2017.


From Apartheid-Era Inmate to Tour Guide—at the Same Prison

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When Thulani Mabaso reflects on his six years at Robben Island prison, he thinks about the birds flying above him. During apartheid in South Africa, he along with inmates such as former presidents Nelson Mandela, Kgalema Petrus Motlanthe, and Jacob Zuma served terms ranging from six to 18 years at the notorious prison, which officially closed in 1996.

During his 2,190 days of incarceration, which ended in 1991, Mabaso had watched the Hartlaub gulls glide across the blue sky from his 8 foot by 7 foot jail cell, hoping he’d one day see them without bars in view. Now, he sees those birds every day as he ushers chipper tourists around the former prison turned museum.

On the bus tour, he points out the beautiful white lilies that inhabit this mostly submerged mountain juxtaposed with the limestone quarries where prisoners toiled rain or shine. As the tourists pass through the main gateway with the phrase “We Serve Pride” at the top, Mabaso remarks on how the prisoners built the entrance in the 1960s out of malmesbury slate from the island’s quarry.

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When they reach Mandela’s cell, he stops for a moment, and watches the tourists clamor around the historic site while posing for pictures. Posted in a neighboring cell is the prisoners’ original weekly food menu. Prisoners were given a set amount of food based on their skin color. Asians and prisoners of mixed backgrounds got better gruel than black Africans, but just barely. Everything and everyone was separate and unequal.

When the tour is over, and the tourists have returned to Cape Town, Mabaso sometimes walks around to take in the sights or meets with his former prison warden turned Robben Island Museum employee Christo Brand. “Mabaso was a natural leader, and I came to depend on him to mediate with a troublesome group of the political prisoners,” wrote Brand in his autobiography. Later in the book, he wrote that “between us, Mabaso and I achieved some peace. We became good friends…”

They are still good friends. They often have dinner and conduct prison museum tours together. It’s a cycle he’s grown accustomed to and enjoys, but it’s a far cry from how his life once was on this very island.

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In the 1960s, Mabaso seethed with rage under the oppressive, dehumanizing apartheid rule. When he was eight years old, the government forcibly removed his family from their home in the northeast coastal province now known as KwaZulu-Natal to a crowded township. His family shared the asbestos-filled shanty house with eight other families. He slept on the floor with his grandfather, who later died of a stress-induced heart attack.

At 16 years old, Mabaso saw hope in anti-apartheid leaders like Mandela and Walter Sisulu, and quickly joined the Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation), the armed resistance of the African National Congress (ANC). With this group, he learned how to use AK-47s and explosives. He also learned the art of infiltration.

Mabaso got a job with the government-controlled South African Defence Force, and befriended many of the pro-apartheid co-workers who would soon be his targets. One Wednesday, he set off a mine bomb in the Defence Force building in Johannesburg. They didn’t see the attack coming. Fifty-seven people were wounded. In a 2013 interview, he said “I could have killed people, if I had wanted to. But our goal was to make a statement.”

Mabaso was 19 years old in 1983 when he was arrested on terrorism charges. While detained at John Vorster Square police station, he was waterboarded, given electric shocks while naked, and hung from a window. His interrogators threatened to drop him and claim he committed suicide. For his crimes, he was sentenced to 18 years in prison, three of which he spent at a Johannesburg prison. Then he arrived at Robben Island.

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Wardens on the island were known for beating political prisoners, putting them in solitary confinement, forcing them to eat their own excrement, and other cruel forms of torture. In Robben Island’s brutality, however, Mabaso says he found a proud community and a new way to liberate himself and his country through education. “Robben Island prison was a real university,” says Mabaso. “Our slogan was very clear: ‘Each one for each one.’ We were very keen to help one another. We had our own career counseling.”

The pro-apartheid government sought to quell the anti-apartheid movement by sealing its activists away on a rocky island. But putting them in the same space emboldened their efforts.

With the help of Mandela, who by then had already been free for nearly a year, the ANC negotiated a deal with the then South African president F.W. De Klerk to release political prisoners. In 1991, Mabaso left a free man, and in 2002, five years after Robben Island Museum opened, he came back as a tour guide. He wanted to educate others about Robben Island’s brutal history, and prevent future atrocities.

It wasn’t easy. Everyday, he re-lived his trauma for tourists. The UNESCO heritage site suffered from mismanagement, corruption, and labor strikes. Some former prison guards, like Christo Brand, became tour guides, which added another emotional layer to his experience. “The wardens were so indoctrinated to believe that we were the most dangerous prisoners in the country, and that we wanted to take their country,” Mabaso says of his time in prison. “through the power of education and through our interaction, we were able to win some of them to be on our side, but it was kept secret all the time.” Brand and former captain James Gregory are a few examples.

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According to Wesleyan professor Robyn Autry, the Robben Island tour is spatially designed to recreate the insular prison experience. Tourists come to the island via ferry, and then proceed with the bus and prison tour. From the quarries to Mandela’s cell, every movement is confined until the very end of the tour at an expansive dedication area. Autry says this museum sequence can be transformative for tourists. Tour guides who were formerly incarcerated are allowed to relate stories, but must follow government-approved guidelines on how to portray the prison. Most visitors are there to see Mandela’s cell and hear stories about him.

For Mabaso, spending time in the prison, though it’s now a tourist attraction, takes its toll. “The pain is existing still when I share with people,” he says. “Sometimes, I break out every other two minutes just to cool myself.”

Several psychological studies show revisiting and safeguarding traumatic places for generations can have rehabilitative effect on survivors. In the case of the Greek island of Ai Stratis, many political prisoners were exiled there from the 1920s until the 1960s under General Ioannis Metaxas’s military regime. Like with Robben Island, former exiles felt preserving this place of pain was instrumental for their healing. For Mabaso, however, that healing came gradually.

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His commitment to keeping Robben Island’s memories alive helped him move forward. “We need to rewrite our history so former inmates come and interact with visitors and re-educate our children about the history of the country,” he says.

There’s a somewhat brighter side to seeing the island differently. Mabaso gets to look at the white lilies and Springbok antelopes that he could never see or touch. He used to think of the ocean as a 6-kilometer swim to freedom. Now, it’s just an ocean. While taking visitors on tours of his former daily struggles is painful, he hopes releasing his story out to the world will make people take action against institutionalized racism. “I am very pleased that I am still alive to see these days,” he says. “There are comrades who never see this day. For those who are still alive let us use our days properly.”

The Eccentric Adventures of Captain Davis, Sea-Desert Dweller

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The Salton Sea, southeast California’s vast inland lake with a tumultuous environmental history and a surface nearly 240 feet below the ocean, is a mecca for obsessives. A former tourist destination and resort area, the lake is now beset by the smell of thousands of dead fish and surrounded by a cluster of ghost towns, the kinds of places where you can take up space or disappear. The salty sea, now the object of many attempts at renewal and revitalization, still draws in folks who are looking for something in its bleak vastness (anarchy, artmaking, something like freedom)—and those who are running from something else.

At the end of the 19th century, Captain Charles E. Davis was both. Captain Davis—a moniker he earned at 18 in an Atlantic fishing fleet, and never gave up for the remainder of his life—was no stranger to failures, or to abandoned projects. He tried and failed to pan for gold in Alaska, was an apparently unsuccessful miner in the Klondike, and explored the Caribbean, Siberia, and the Amazon before “retiring” in the Salton Sea.

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Born in Massachusetts to a wealthy family, Davis abandoned them for the sea, then the sea for the desert. He found the best (worst?) of both in 1898 in what would become the Salton Sea seven years later. He lost everything to a harrowing flood in Galveston, Texas, in 1900, only to return to his safe haven in California and witness the unholy birth of his future home when the Colorado River flooded the Salton Sink.

There, Davis developed and inhabited Mullet Island, on top of an inactive volcanic butte and among what Salton Sea historian Pat Laflin calls “an inferno of hissing geysers and boiling mud pots.” It was befitting of Davis’ character to live atop a dormant volcano, and that is said to have been one of the site’s major draws for him. The island was named for the alfalfa-fed mullet that Davis raised, which later became famous throughout California. It also became the site of Davis’ passion project, Hell’s Kitchen, a combination boat landing/restaurant/dancehall where boaters and fishers often stopped for good food and a good time. Davis built it alone, along with his own cabin.

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In the 1920s, Hell’s Kitchen’s heyday, motorcyclists and adventurers frequently wrote about Hell’s Kitchen’s oddball charms. Describing Mullet Island as “the headquarters of the Salton Sea fishing industry,” one 1922 periodical noted that Hell’s Kitchen was so named because it was “on top of a volcano and may blow off into space any minute.” (The same could be said, perhaps, of Davis.)

A 1920 edition of Popular Mechanics added that area fishermen, seeking to catch the lake’s signature mullet to be sold in San Francisco restaurants, had to sludge through the muddy waters of the Salton Sea underneath canopies, as temperatures regularly climbed to over 125 degrees. But Davis seemed at home there in this cursed corner of the world, setting up shop for over 25 years and serving as the unofficial head of the local fishing industry.

Davis brought his signature spunk, strangeness, and aplomb to all his endeavors at Mullet Island. At Hell’s Kitchen, Kim Stringfellow explains in her book and installation project, Greetings from Salton Sea, Davis was performer, cook, and host alike, holding dances, serving up dinners, and singing sea shanties for customers. He was, by all accounts, a rugged sort, aided in his work by predictably named laborers like “Shorty” Bell and “Slim” Clifford, and seemingly not bothered by the uninhabitable heat of his makeshift home. He fought in local political efforts, primarily for environmental conservation and historic preservation.

Most of all, Davis kept on doing what he did best: failing, and failing big (better than most succeed). He tried to convert a fishing boat into a showboat, says Randy Brown, who recently documented his experience as (most likely) the first person to walk around the shoreline of the Salton Sea. “He brought a barge up from San Pedro that sank as soon as he put it in the water,” Brown explains. He also imported six sea lions that promptly died in the Salton Sea’s toxic waters and became a source of local contention among locals who accused the sea lions of pig-stealing.

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Later, the island’s nearby mud pots served as raw materials for another burgeoning compulsion. Davis developed a fascination with the infamous Donner party and their ill-fated venture that reportedly ended in cannibalism—perhaps, as Diane Bush surmises in Thaw: A Memoir, her hybrid memoir about Davis’ eccentric history, inspired by his own many explorations gone awry.

Davis used homemade oil paints—hematite concretions (“Indian paint pots”) dissolved in fish oil—to create hundreds of paintings based on the Donner Party, which he kept at his headquarters on Mullet Island. This “art gallery,” as Bush describes it, “explores the terrain of loss.” Though reporters speculated that he was enamored with the pioneer spirit, it’s likely, too, Bush suggests, that he was exploring the art of where things go wrong—one in which he was well versed.

Still, paintings weren’t enough: As usual, Davis had to see for himself. Armed only with newspaper clippings and a truly absurd amount of research, he is likely the first person to have traced the Donner party’s 1846-1847 travels from Independence, Missouri, to Sacramento, California (over 2,000 miles). He based his destinations on his own investigations and artifacts he’d found, and added 1,027 photographs and a number of relics to the growing Donner party collection.

Local media outlets wrote about Davis with a mixture of awe, bemusement, and perhaps a bit of fear: Breathless descriptions alternately described him as a traveling eccentric, a pioneer, and an amateur historian. In 1927, a reporter at the Oakland Tribune wrote that history buffs in the Sierras had developed “a renewed interest in the Donner party tragedy as a result of Davis’ explorations” and concluded that, after his trek’s end, Davis would “rest awhile and then break into public notice again with some crusade that only a man who ‘sees God in the clouds and hears him in the wind’ would think of undertaking.” Davis donated the photographs he took and the artifacts he found to Harry C. Peterson at Sutter’s Fort, where they are now housed in the Charles E. Davis Overland Trail Project Collection.

Today, Mullet Island is no longer an island, but a peninsula, experts say. The last geysers in Mullett Island’s hot springs disappeared in the mid-20th century. The birds, too, have left, says Brown: “The island was populated by tens of thousands of cormorants,” he explains, “but now that predators can walk up to the island and eat their eggs from the nests, the birds have all left. But you will still find thousands of their nests all over the rocks on the island.” The mud pots are only accessible by boat and by foot, and the foundation of Davis’ hand-built dwelling still stands.

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Davis, like the Salton Sea itself, appears to have been haunted, eerily beset by the ghosts of stories past. His persona is so offbeat that it almost seems to have been constructed, fashioned self-consciously as a figure who would be written about in newspapers and serve as a model for future explorers with passions and obsessions of their own. He officially acquired the deed to the 160 acres that made up Mullet Island in 1926, and in 1928, he essentially disappeared, only returning to Massachusetts shortly before his 1933 death.

Diane Bush notes that in photographs, Davis rarely looked straight at the camera and was always wearing his signature hat, as if he wanted to be anonymous, unseen—strange, given his propensity for larger-than-life undertakings. Perhaps, like many of the current inhabitants in nearby Slab City and Bombay Beach and many of us who’ve found something to obsess over in the Salton Sea, he needed the whole of the wide expanse of the desert and the sea to unfurl himself.

Once a Year, This Island Goes Completely Vegetarian

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In the late 18th century, pillaging marauders and the plague spread through the islands of southern China and overran Hong Kong’s waters. On edge (and understandably so), the local Huizhou people decided to do something about it. On Hong's Kong's Cheung Chau island—a small, dumbbell-shaped isle with a thriving fishing village—residents turned to the Taoist sea god Pak Tai for protection. They marched along the island's narrow streets, carrying a statue of the deity with them in hopes that it would both ward off evil spirits and protect them from further thievery and outbreaks.

The islanders eschewed all meat for several days as a sacrifice, and offered up sweet buns to Pak Tai. When the pirates disappeared a few years later and the plague ended, Chueng Chau made this Taoist ritual of asking the ancestral gods for continued peace, dubbed Da Jiu, into an annual event. Now, it’s known as the Cheung Chau Bun Festival, and it's the island's biggest yearly celebration.

Hong Kong's Cheung Chau Bun Festival has since morphed from its religious ceremonial beginnings into a multi-day celebration that includes costumed kids, one of the most unique climbing competitions on the planet, and banging gongs. It all takes place each year in the fourth month of the lunar calendar, which typically falls in May. And like all good holidays, food comprises an essential part of the festivities.

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Or, in Cheung Chau's case, not eating certain foods. That’s because during Cheung Chau, revelers eat nothing but vegetarian foods such as put chai ko, a steamed pudding cake, for three full days. It's an increasingly tough practice to implement, especially with the festival's growing number of visitors (organizers estimate the island’s headcount swells up to 60,000 people for the event, which is almost three times its population). As mainlanders and tourists unfamiliar with this tradition began frequenting the festival, the practice fell out of favor for the last couple decades. But starting a couple years ago, the festival's organizers have been working overtime to see it doesn't disappear.

“The three-day vegetarian diet is one of the most important cultural aspects of the festival,” says Eric Ho, Vice Chairman of the Cheung Chau Rural Committee. “And has been a part of it since the beginning.” Despite Cheung Chau's stellar reputation for seafood, Ho says that at least half of the island's food suppliers agreed to substitute vegetarian options for typical meat-filled ones in 2017. Some street vendors replaced fish balls with fried turnip cakes, and local Chinese-run eateries known for their shrimp-filled har gow served vegetarian spring rolls. Western-style restaurants switched out steaks for spaghetti, and even McDonald's got in on the act, swapping its standard meat patties with mushroom-based burgers.

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But sweet buns lie at the heart and soul of the Cheung Chau Festival. During the festivities, tens of thousands of steamed buns are made with three different filling types—lotus seed, red bean paste, and sesame—then stamped with Ping An, a Chinese character meaning “peace.” The island's tiny Kwok Kam Kee Cake Shop churns out upwards of 10,000 buns a day, many of them as edible souvenirs. The others go towards decorating three mighty bamboo towers, erected in front of the island's historic Pak Tai Temple, which both greet festival visitors and act as an homage to Pak Tai. Approximately 20,000 plastic-wrapped sweet buns—all of them blessed by Taoist priests—cover each of the towers, all ready to bring good fortune to whoever eats them after the festival, when organizers distribute them.

For years, these “Bun Mountains” were also the official towers of the “Bun Scramble,” a free-for-all climb. Hundreds of participants grabbed, nabbed, and snatched as many well-placed buns (the higher the buns were on the towers, the more points and good fortune they were worth) as possible using whatever means necessary in the allotted time. Some participants scrambled upward through the towers' interiors before punching their way outside, while others simply used their fellow competitors as climbing tools—trampling loads of sweet buns (not to mention plenty of hands and feet) on the way. The spectacle came to an abrupt end in 1978, when one of the towers collapsed mid-climb with dozens of people still on it. With approximately 100 people injured, organizers cancelled the scramble indefinitely.

More than 25 years later, however, Cheung Chau's organizers decided to revive it (thanks, in part, to the 2001 Chinese animated film, My Life as McDull, in which the movie's main character, a cartoon pig, is training to be an “Olympic-level” bun snatcher). This time, it would be a softer, safer scramble: One with restrictions and geared more toward athletes, such as rock climbers and personal trainers, rather than civilians.

Today there is only one climbing tower—a 60-feet-tall steel A-frame—and just 12 pre-qualified participants, including at least three women, each of them utilizing a harness for added protection. The event begins right before midnight, when participants have three minutes to collect buns worth varying points. Along with bragging rights, the two male and female participants with the highest number of points can earn the title of Bun King or Queen, providing they've won the event three times since 2016. Those who grab the most number of buns aren't forgotten either: they earn the lauded title “Full Pockets of Lucky Buns.”

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Since 2007, plastic buns have replaced the climbing tower's former edible ones, a switch organizers say is more aesthetically pleasing—not to mention less of a health violation. Still, the festival's three bamboo towers remain covered in bakery-made buns, each waiting for its individual moment to shine.

The festival's other activities range from burning papier-mâché deities to a Piu Sik (“Floating Colours”) Parade, in which kids standing on seats atop steel rods—all hidden beneath their elaborate costumes—seemingly float through the air. But it’s the culinary traditions that hold the annual celebration together. After the scramble, festival organizers distribute the towers' edible buns, each of them blessed with luck for the upcoming year.

As for foregoing meat, it's a tradition that organizers believe festival visitors will honor and welcome—as long as word continues to spread. Since UNESCO added Cheung Chau's Bun Festival to its Intangible Cultural Heritage list in 2011, the stakes are even higher. “[Eating vegetarian for three days] is not just a matter of paying respect to the local culture,” says Ho, “but the practice is one of Hong Kong's most distinguishing features, and one that should be recognized.”

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Make no mistake, though: When the bun festival is over, many of Cheung Chau's residents go right back to eating meat, says Ho, who admits that, since the ‘70s, “many restaurants even begin serving meat as early as 3 p.m. on the festival’s last day, right after the parade is finished.” Whatever the case, their two-and-a-half-to-three-day run at vegetarianism seems to be a wonderful palate whetter for the rest of the year.

How a Chicago Dive Bar Exposed Corruption and Changed Journalism

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In late January, a no-frills Irish pub in Chicago, the Brehon, invited a small selection of guests for a night of light appetizers and drinks. The gathering wasn’t a supper club, or a private party. The event commemorated the 40th anniversary of the bar’s previous iteration, the Mirage Tavern, and the paradigm-shifting investigation that took place within it.

While the Mirage had the appearance of (and all the fixings of) a good ’70s dive bar, including dirt-cheap drinks and games, it was actually a front. In 1977, a group of journalists from the Chicago Sun-Times bought the derelict watering hole and operated it in secret for several months. The Mirage turned into one of the most contentious, precedent-setting experiments in investigative journalism to date, which, in turn, revealed an intricate web of corruption, bribery, negligence, and tax evasion.

It’s well-known that Chicago has a long history as a hotbed of organized crime and political corruption. But players and civilians alike aren’t often willing to talk to journalists about the nitty-gritty of how this happens. At least, not on the record. That’s why Upton Sinclair went incognito in order to reveal the horrid conditions of Chicago’s meatpacking plants at the turn of the century. It’s also what led Pam Zekman to convince the Chicago Sun-Times that they should buy a dive bar in the name of investigative journalism.

Before coming on as a reporter for Sun-Times, Zekman had been part of a team at the Chicago Tribune that brought a series of abuses, including medical malpractice, to light by going undercover at hospitals and nursing homes. By the mid-1970s, Zekman had become entrenched in reporting on Chicago’s underground network of corruption and bribery. Frustrated that no one would talk to her for a story, though, she took a cue from her past undercover work and, along with her mentor George Bliss, Zekman proposed that a team of reporters should pose as the owners and operators of a bar in the city’s River North neighborhood.

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The Tribune declined, but the Sun-Times was up for it. So they partnered with the Better Government Association, a watchdog group that looked into local corruption, and bought themselves a watering hole. Why a bar, though? “We started getting phone calls from businesses that were complaining about having to pay a steady stream of inspectors that come into the restaurants and bars looking for payoffs to ignore city violations,” Zekman said in an oral history.

The group settled on a tavern known as the Firehouse, located on the corner of North Wells and Superior, due to how close it was to the paper’s offices. They renamed it the Mirage. There wasn’t anything illustrious about the place. As one of the reporters, Zay N. Smith, remembers: “It was dirty, badly kept, just kind of a hang-out for a few tipplers in the neighborhood.” Zekman and Bill Recktenwald (of the BGA) posed as the married owners of said bar, “Pam and Ray Patterson.” People were more than willing to talk to them nowstarting with the business broker who, upon helping the two buy the the joint, told them right out the gate that he’d lend them a hand paying off building and fire inspectors with cash, and doctoring their tax documents. “When we were a reporter and an investigator, people wouldn’t talk,” Recktenwald remembers. “Now that we were a husband and wife pretending to buy a tavern, people wouldn’t shut up.”

Telling their own newsroom was a different story. Zekman and Recktenwald aside, only a handful of other people were involved. That included Smith (who went by “Norty” for the project) and photographers Jim Frost and Gene Pesek, who posed as repairmen and rigged cameras through the ceiling to capture city officials’ shakedowns when they happened. Few others knew what the team was working on, not even the paper’s publisher.

Keeping the secret close paid off in staggering ways, though. For one thing, the journalists quickly figured out how corruption manifested itself: All they had to do was leave cash in envelopes for the bevy of officials, who then stamped their approval regardless of the place’s condition. And the Mirage was in shoddy shape, to say the very least: The place was structurally unsound, with leaky pipes, bathrooms that weren’t up to code, and a maggot-infested basement. Which meant that it was only a matter of time before the inspectors came around, and they did pretty much immediately, shaking down the crew for about $10 to $100 for each time they looked the other way.

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When the bar opened, people didn’t think too much of it. It was just another place to get a cheap drink (the “Oasis” special during the grand opening featured draft beers for 25 cents, and drinks for 75). As Zekman and Smith would later write of the Mirage in the Sun-Times: “It looked like any neighborhood tavern in Chicago. The beer was cold, the bratwursts hot.” The likes of Peggy Lee’s “Fever” whirred on the jukebox, and the drinks flowed, even though none of the Mirage “staff” knew how to bartend: Zekman once recounted that she’d thought that an order for a beer and a shot meant putting a shot in the beer itself. They aroused little suspicion, even though one day, a regular apparently said out loud: “I’ve figured it out, I’ve finally figured it out, this place is a front! It’s gotta be a front for something.”

The experiment didn’t last very long. After four months, the Mirage shuttered, and the team went to work. Beginning on January 8, 1978, the writers published the first of a 25-part massive exposé series. Right there, on the paper’s A1 page, a Chicago Fire Department lieutenant was photographed foregoing an inspection, and taking money instead. The reports are astonishingly detailed, sparing no one in the discoveries of a “payoff parade” and schemes where contractors acted as go-betweens for inspectors. One story detailed health inspectors awarding passed inspections in spite of a basement“so foul that even the vermin seemed to be dying.” Another health inspector, Robert Hansen, marked the Mirage as a clean premises although the ooze caking the basement floor was later revealed to be coated with rat and human droppings, among other microorganisms.

Chicago waited with bated breath for each of the series installations to drop, and the story quickly went international. The clampdown on corruption was swift and lasting, too. Eighteen city electrical inspectors were convicted of bribery by the following year, the feds investigated City Hall’s inspection system, and a task force known as the “Mirage Unit” was dispatched to investigate tax fraud. But when the series was up for a Pulitzer in 1979, Ben Bradlee, then-executive editor of The Washington Post and board member for the organization, led the charge for it to be stripped of the Local Investigative Reporting award. His fear was that the award would set a precedent and “could send journalism on a wrong course,” though it wasn’t the first time someone had been awarded a Pulitzer for going undercover. Not to mention that the Mirage project exposed, as the Post itself put it, “a systematic pattern of bribery and tax fraud that could cost the city an estimated $16 million in sales-tax revenues a year.”

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While the paper did not win the Pulitzer, it became a textbook example of the ethical quandaries that undercover reporting poses. It also kicked off an ongoing debate, which is still taught in many journalism classes and name-checked in newsrooms today, about whether or not going undercover defies one of journalism’s main no-nos: reporters misrepresenting themselves in order to extract information from their subjects. It’s also telling of the Mirage’s impact that, 40 years later, an event at the former pub, with the journalists-cum-bartenders present, can still pack a room. “I would never claim we stopped corruption in Chicago,” Zekman clarified to the crowd at Brehon’s in January. “But I know that it had a huge effect on the inspectors. It made them think twice.”

Why Michigan's Favorite Hot Dog Has a New York Name

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Detroit is hundreds of miles from the beaches of New York's Coney Island. Yet the "coney dog" name can be seen advertising hot dog stands and restaurants city-wide. Detroit is the coney dog capital of the world, with hundreds of businesses devoted to selling them.

Understanding the makeup of a coney is the first step to figuring out how the name for a New York seaside resort came to describe a Midwestern hot dog. A coney dog is a hot dog in a steamed bun, coated in beanless chili with mustard and chopped onions. Coney fans can be forgiven for thinking that the chili-cheese atop their hot dogs has a Mexican origin. But according to Joe Grimm and Katherine Yung, authors of the 2012 book Coney Detroit, the sauce has its roots in spiced Greek red sauce. Which makes sense, because the first “Coney Islands,” in Detroit and beyond, were founded by Macedonian and Greek families almost a century ago.

In the early 1900s, Greek immigrants came to the United States in droves. A global economic crisis in 1893 and wars in Europe led almost a sixth of the Greek population to emigrate, mainly to Egypt and the United States.

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Coney Island, in comparison, was booming. Americans had an insatiable appetite for fairs’ and exhibitions’ new foods, rides, and innovations such as the electric light. Many permanent pleasure parks put down stakes on Coney Island, and the massive seaside attraction soon ticked off all the boxes. It had the world’s first roller coaster (Switchback Railway, in 1884) and a park filled with more than a million electric lights (Dreamland, in 1904.) Plus, it kicked off the American craving for hot dogs.

Nathan’s Famous was founded in 1916, when Polish immigrant Nathan Handwerker set up shop on the Coney Island corner of Surf and Stillwell streets. Handwerker had worked for another hot dog purveyor down the street and slept on the kitchen floor to save money. When he opened, he sold hot dogs for half as much as his former employer.

At five cents each, the hot dogs quickly became a hit, and they became inextricably associated with Coney Island in popular culture. Yung says she and Grimm heard stories about how early Coney Island proprietors (sellers of hot dogs in Michigan, that is) came through New York’s Ellis Island. Greek immigrants who arrived in New York, before heading out west, likely heard of or tried Coney Island's hot dogs, later hitting on them as a solid business.

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But they probably weren’t picking up the name “hot dogs.” Handwerker himself didn’t like the name, preferring to call his product “frankfurters.” Legend even has it that the Coney Island Chamber of Commerce banned the word “hot dog” in 1913, fearing the “dog” connotation. (However, the Chamber of Commerce was founded in 1924.) Later, during wartime, calling sausages “frankfurters” might have seemed a little disloyal. (Confusingly enough, similar hot dogs in upstate New York are now called "Michigans.")

Regardless, when Greek immigrants arrived in Detroit, opening a Coney Island stand wasn’t just an option. Sometimes, it was the only option. "We know that when Greeks came to Detroit they were looking for work,” Grimm says. They weren’t the only ones. It was the beginning of Detroit’s automotive golden age, and people came from all corners seeking factory jobs. But for many Greek immigrants, there were both prejudices and a language barrier. “Some of them found they had to hire themselves,” Grimm says. Feeding a population of hungry factory workers turned out to be a concept with some legs.

One local family, Grimm and Yung say, made their fortunes off coneys. Two brothers, William and Constantine Keros, gave up sheep farming in Greece to move to Detroit. There, they opened Lafayette Coney Island in 1923. After a decade in business, the brothers quarreled. Constantine left, but he didn’t go far: He opened American Coney Island next door. Both restaurants are still there, selling coneys.

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While the Keros brothers likely didn’t invent the coney (there were earlier restaurants), they were responsible for spreading the knowledge of how to operate a restaurant and cook Coney Island-style. "As Greek people got to Detroit, they had the instructions to go find the Keros family” for a job, says Grimm. It became a tool of economic empowerment for local Greeks, who became so numerous that a section of Detroit picked up the name Greektown. “As the pioneers in the coney culture became successful,” says Yung, “they sent for their relatives in Greece.”

Coney Island restaurants proliferated to the point that the term became a catch-all for “diner.” While many serve coneys, says Grimm, most are typical sit-downs, serving breakfast, sandwiches, and Mediterranean specialties. Once, Grimm says, he asked a restaurateur why he named his diner Coney Island, when he had no coneys on the menu. “So people will know it's a restaurant," the restaurateur replied.

These days, coneys are eaten across the nation. Some states have restaurants with century-long pedigrees, while others were founded by former Detroit residents. There are regional variations, such Flint, Michigan’s drier chili, sometimes made with beef heart. In Rhode Island, hot wieners are sold according to “the New York system,” sometimes also called “the Coney Island system.” Said system consists of the chef lining buns vertically up on his arm to fill them quicker. The spices and size are a little different, but they also have steamed buns, onions, mustard, and a meat sauce. Like the Detroit coney, New York System restaurants were often started by Greeks (and the occasional Macedonian). But in all cases, the combination of German sausage, Greek chili, and a New York name resulted in a hot dog culture that couldn’t be more American.

The Quest for a Universal Translator for Old, Obsolete Computer Files

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Not so very long ago, web designers’ ambitions outstripped the infrastructure of the internet, so they had to resort to physical media to help carry their ideas. Dial-up modems were pokey, and the sluggish speed couldn’t handle large images or streaming video. “People did all sorts of projects that were too heavy for the live web,” says Tim Walsh, a digital archivist at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA).

One workaround to make these projects possible was to separate a website from the web. “A simple solution was to simply burn all the the HTML, JavaScript, and other large files to a CD-ROM,” Walsh says. These sites spent much of their lives offline—viewable only when a user met the hardware requirements listed by the creator and then inserted the CD. Today, with a decent connection, online video and all sorts of other functionality rarely stumbles. In the march to high-speed wi-fi, browser-based applications, cloud computing, and computers that have no need for CD-ROM drives, some older digital artifacts have been left in the dust. In some cases, it's as though they're written in a dead language, so accessing their content can be tricky.

Take the CCA. It has hundreds of thousands of items in its collection, from 16th-century writings on military architecture, to 1,000-plus titles about theater and stage design, to extensive archives of exclusively digital material made between 1980 and 2000. Of the digital assets, roughly 70 or 80 percent are relatively accessible with today’s computers and software, Walsh estimates. They can be obscured in a number of frustrating ways. Some are orphaned because they were made with software that’s now extinct. Others might have been left incompatible by years of updates. Still more may have been created using expensive, specialized, niche software—such as the programs used by special effects studios or video game designers—that's simply not widely available. In these instances, the databases that the Centre consults might not even be able to identify the file format or the software it came from. When a file or digital project is particularly incorrigible, Walsh often finds himself rigging up custom solutions or calling in favors.

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For years, many architects and other designers have used a 3-D modeling software called form·Z. The software, Walsh explains, was especially popular for rendering cutting-edge projects in the 1990s and 2000s. Each new release tends to only support files created within the last two versions, meaning that form·Z 8.5 Pro, the current version installed on CCA’s CAD workstations, can’t wrangle decades worth of files created in older versions. "CCA's archives contain tens of thousands of files created in form·Z versions 1 to 4, which are almost universally inaccessible" with the solutions at hand, Walsh says.

When CCA wanted to display some of these files for an exhibition, Walsh says, “a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend” came to the rescue. An architect who had been working with form·Z for decades happened to have some of the earliest versions still installed on various computers. “He was able to take a handful of files … and piggy-back them from version 4, to version 5, to version 6, and so on until they were in up-to-date file formats that can be opened in form·Z 8.5 Pro, and then even exported into other file formats if necessary,” Walsh says. The solution worked, but it was a clunky chorus: open, save, close, open, save, close, open, save, close.

The digital world continues to expand and mutate in all sorts of ways that will orphan and otherwise impair file formats and programs—from ones long forgotten to ones that work just fine today but carry no guarantees against obsolescence. Instead of a patchwork of one-off solutions, perhaps there’s a better way to keep old software running smoothly—a simpler process for summoning the past on demand. A team at the Yale University Library is trying to build one.


Digital archivists deal with least two broad categories of artifacts. There are analog objects or documents scanned into a second, digital life—digitized maps, for instance, or scanned photos. The other objects are natives of the digital world. These files can include everything from a simple compressed image to a game on a CD-ROM to a CAD design for a skyscraper. The relentless march of new versions and new platforms makes obsolescence a constant presence, from as soon as digital objects are conceived.

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The challenges Walsh has faced are familiar across the field of software preservation, says Jessica Meyerson, who works with the Software Preservation Network (SPN), a consortium that tackles issues surrounding maintaining digital objects. “SPN got together to say, ‘This is absolutely a challenge, and we’re already dealing with proprietary objects that are not as simple as text files,’” Meyerson says.

These problems evolve as the complexity of a digital file increases. If you have a text or word processing document from the early 1990s, for example, you can probably view its contents with little difficulty. The formatting and fonts might be wonky, as Euan Cochrane, then with Archives New Zealand, demonstrated with a project called “Visual Rendering Matters,” side-by-side comparisons of how formatting can go on the fritz. When a Microsoft Works 4.0 document was opened in Word 7.0, for instance, sentence fragments crept in. (Researchers speculated that they may have been deleted from the earlier version, but still stored somewhere in the file.) Hodgepodges of arrows, numbers, and letters with diacritical marks splashed across the bottom, too, but the key material was still more or less intact. “Basically, there’s a way to get you that data because it’s a less-complex format,” Meyerson says.

The more layers or metadata that a file has, the more tangled this process becomes. In a many-layered CAD file, Meyerson says, “we have no idea what this is until we render it in the original software.” Digital architecture, design, and engineering assets present such a challenge that they were the subject of a symposium at the Library of Congress last fall.

To access these complicated files, or to launch some of the sites that lived on CD-ROMs (which may need a certain operating system, browser, or other requirements to open), a user might rig up an emulation environment. An emulator is a proxy: It recreates older hardware and software on a modern-day machine. On occasion, Walsh has made some himself.

When one CCA visitor wanted to take a look at a CD-ROM-based “multimedia website” produced in conjunction with a 1996 exhibition of work by the architect Benjamin Nicholson, Walsh needed to wind back the clock. He tracked down an old license for Windows NT and installed Netscape Navigator and an old version of Adobe Reader. This all enabled decades-old functionality on a two-year-old HP tower.

This strategy works, but it has drawbacks. “These environments are time-intensive to create, will only run on a local computer, and they typically require a lot of technical know-how to set up and use,” Walsh says. Ad hoc emulation is not for the novice or the busy.


Researchers at Yale are working to solve this problem by creating a kind of digital Rosetta Stone, a universal translator, through an emulation infrastructure that will live online. “A few clicks in your web browser will allow users to open files containing data that would otherwise be lost or corrupted,” said Cochrane, who is now the library's digital preservation manager. “You’re removing the physical element of it,” says Seth Anderson, the library’s software preservation manager. “It’s a virtual computer running on a server, so it’s not tethered to a desktop.”

Instead of treating each case as a one-off, like digital triage, this team wants to create a virtual, historical computer lab that’s comprehensive and ready for anything. Do you have a CD-ROM that was once stuffed in a sleeve on the cover of a textbook? A snappy virtual machine running Windows 98 might be able to help you out. “We could create any environment that we needed,” Anderson says. The goal is to build an emulation library big enough that there’s a good fit for any potential case—with definitive, clear results. Cochrane said the integrity should be strong enough that "you can take an old digital file into court as evidence.” Walsh says it should be unassailable; one should be able to stake her dissertation on it.

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But before the project can reach that phase, there’s a lot of work to be done by hand. To recreate environments, the team needs hard copies to work from. It’s a bit like an archaeological expedition, an excavation that produces a specimen collection that can be sorted and stored. Over the last few years, the library has been acquiring a collection of “legacy computers.” Researchers scour eBay for desktop PCs from the 1990s, neon-shelled iMacs, and other machines that have long since vanished from the market. They clean up the hard drives, leaving nothing but the original operating system. The next step is to create a disk image of hard drive, copying everything—its data, its processing systems, its quirks—to a virtual replica. “Once that’s set up, you can launch it in an emulated environment,” Anderson says.

So far, the researchers have copied thousands of CD-ROMs from the library’s collection: some games, diagrams and drawings from a Dutch shipbuilder, and a bunch of scientific reporting. (Scientists could consult old data sets to reproduce and validate or contest research findings, Anderson explains, in a way they’ve rarely been able to before.) Next up is a batch for the Yale Divinity School.

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It’s not all clear sailing. Legal issues manifest, like a bug in a program. "Copyright is where the bulk of the questions are," says Brandon Butler, the director of information policy at the University of Virginia Library. Under the auspices of the Association of Research Libraries, Butler and a handful of collaborators are in the midst of a two-year project to assess and codify best practices for old digital material, especially as they apply to licenses and fair use. The team interviewed 40 people—primarily folks working in archives, libraries, museums, and other cultural heritage institutions—for a preliminary report released last month. In those conversations, licenses emerged as "a big source of heartburn," Butler says.

When you open a piece of software, there's often a long, jargon-packed license full of stipulations. “If you take that at face value, that would be game over, basically,” Walsh says. Butler notes that, while there's "an ambient fear of licenses," these documents can actually be more flexible than people realize. That language about what is and isn't authorized is "kind of squishy," Butler adds. “If they don’t very clearly and explicitly forbid you from making fair uses, then courts are not going to construe them to do that."

These documents don’t show any particular foresight—and why would they—about how much the digital landscape has shifted and how important emulation has become. Plus, "the things that preservation people do are things that no software vendor would do," Butler says. "They're filling a gap, and an important social function." The terrain is still new. Butler and his collaborators plan to release a draft of some guidelines in the fall.


Since this emulation environment the researchers at Yale are creating will just require a (modern) web browser, archivists can tinker with everything on the periphery. They could, for example, tuck the emulator on a new computer tucked inside an old PC case with a traditional CRT monitor, if someone were perhaps studying the aesthetics of the old interface—including the feeling of a rounded, pixelated screen and a whirring beige tower sitting on the floor.

Anderson hopes to launch the first portion of the project in the spring or early summer. (It's slated to be completed by June 2020.) The browser-based emulation won't be available to the general public, but will be accessible in the Yale library and distributed among partners at the SPN.

For certain formats, Walsh says, the idea of on-demand emulation is “a godsend.” Compared to rigging up ad hoc workstations, at least, it can save a lot of time. These portals to the past just may end up preserving the sanity of digital archivists as much as anything else.

The Unique 'Sea Tractor' That Carries Passengers Over the Waves

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England's Burgh Island has always been shrouded in a mystique. After Archibald Nettleford bought the island in 1927 and opened up a hotel, the papers made sure to note that the spot was once a favorite of pirates and smugglers. Nettleford himself was an enigmatic figure, a blind man who owned a movie studio. But the most newsworthy feature of the hotel was the vehicle used to transport visitors to island—the “sea tractor,” a one-of-kind marine vehicle.

This invention, as the Baltimore Sun reported in 1931, was supposed to be “the only conveyance of its kind in the world.” It involved “a street car set upon caterpillar tractors,” which looked like a platform on stilts, half-tank, half-cable car. At low tide, it was possible to walk to the island; at high tide, the tractor would ferry guests across the water “while the waves splash and break around the top deck,” according to the Sun.

The sea tractor did not take the world by storm. Edging on 90 years later, there are still only a few in the world. But at Burgh Island, it’s still a key mode of transportation.

When the tide is in, then we go across with our sea tractor,” says Vladimir Krupa, the hotel’s general manager.

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The first sea tractor had a set of a wheels and a set of tracks; according to Krupa, the designers worried that, with more wheels, the tractor would sink too deeply into the sand. While the platform moves high above the waterline, the wheels and tracks moved across the sea bottom. But over time, the salt water corroded the machine. The second one was built in 1949 and lasted 20 years, until its metal parts rusted out.

At that point, in 1969, the hotel considered other options. They wanted something that would last. Should they have a hovercraft? A simple boat?

In the end, they redesigned the sea tractor. It now only uses wheels to move—there are no treads involved. “It looked similar, but they rebuilt it completely,” says Krupa.

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Since then, the sea tractor has been fine-tuned but the principle has remained the same. Specially trained drivers pilot it across the water. It’s not a long ride—less than 275 yards—and it takes about five minutes.The machine doesn’t have any gears and goes about five miles per hour, max. The hotel will take visitors back and forth more or less on demand but makes sure they initially arrive at low tide. If the weather’s bad, the sea tractor doesn’t run: Watching it trying to make the crossing when the waves are high is harrowing.

There are a handful of other places in the world, including the nearby South Sands Beach, that have sea tractors, as well. But Burgh Island’s is the best known. At this point, the hotel keeps it running in part because it’s been running for so many years. “We pride ourselves on time traveling,” says Krupa. Guests wear black tie to dinner; the sea tractor keeps trundling across the water to Bigbury-on-Sea when the tide is high. Tides are so regular, Krupa says, that they could use tide charts to look a hundred years in advance to know when guests should arrive; if the hotel is still around in another century, perhaps the sea tractor will be, too.

Later this year Atlas Obscura will be leading a trip that includes a stay on Burgh Island. For announcements about new adventures and other exciting updates, sign up for the Atlas Obscura Trips newsletter!


Atlas Obscura Readers Draw Their Personal Fantasy Islands

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On Monday, in honor of Islands Week, we asked Atlas Obscura readers to draw us a picture of their personal fantasy islands, and boy did they deliver! We received submissions from readers young and old, all full of fun and creative details.

Entries included islands full of cats (there were several of those, in fact), political strongholds, simple sandbar paradises, intricate hidden bases, guinea pig sanctuaries, and poetic dreamscapes. Above, reader Lori Wike drew us her vision for what she calls Elsinore Heron Isle: "The Elsinore Heron is a Danish bird, known for indecisiveness. The isle's rocky palindrome shoreline warns of tidal dangers. Plus: a kayak." Pretty cool, Lori.

While we couldn't include all of the fantasy island maps we received, we've compiled our favorites below. Thanks to everyone who participated, and keep those island dreams alive!

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Welcome Island

I thought about islands as a place to escape to and as safe havens in the middle of dangerous seas. That brought me to thinking about migrants and asylum seekers trying to cross the Mediterranean and I ended up drawing this: Isola di Benvenuto, or "Welcome Island."

Situated in the middle of the Med, it's an island where migrants can stop on their way to the European mainland for a while where they are guaranteed safety and comfort. It has facilities for harboring and repairing boats, medical facilities, clean accommodation, educational facilities (I'm an English teacher, so I'm always thinking about that!), offices to help with visas and bureaucracy, and lush gardens that act as peaceful, serene spaces.—James Clayton, Manchester, England


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Cat Island

My girlfriend loves cats and when I saw your article about imagining a fantasy island, the first thing I thought of was an island filled with countless happy, carefree cats. Partly inspired by those strange rocky islands you see covered with sea birds, I thought how strange it would be if they were cats instead!—Evan Clark, Los Angeles, California


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Alan Rogers' Island

The North coast would consist of a tall cliff to act as a wind-break. The home would consist of a Quonset hut with glass ends with doors at each end. There would be solar panels covering the entire Southern walls except for the thin windows. I would also have a fairly large garden for fresh veggies and fruits.—Alan Rogers


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The Pirate Nebula

Welcome to the Pirate Nebula, a communist nation comprised of multiple small states, each with a speciality and industry. I've been working on the Pirate Nebula maps since I was 8 and this specific map is the ninth draft, drawn when I was 13. [...] To me, this map is a memento from my childhood, a reminder of times when Vikings, Bolsheviks, and Olympians shared a nation in the middle of the sea.—Bilal Moin, Mumbai, India


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Kittymandu

It's purrfect.—Maggie Hugie


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Guinea Pigistan

We recommend lunch at Chez Guinea (try the pancakes!). Be warned that smugly blabbering about how people in some countries eat guinea pigs is not only rude, but punishable by death. The local currency is obviously the Guinea. If you plan to visit during mating season, bring earplugs to block the enthusiastic squeaks of the thousands of impassioned guinea pigs.—Robin Hollinger, Florida


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Arcadia

Plenty of room for me and friends and plenty of room for a small eco-friendly resort with solar, wind, and tidal power sources. I created a mountain named after my father and a lake named after my grandmother. I like go-carts, and pirates. I like bamboo and redwoods. By the way, I am 64 years young.—Paul Warshauer, Minnesota


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Yinyang Island

Be sure and take a guided tour of the Game Preserve and check out the many mythical creatures who are protected on this island. If you are accessing the island by boat, please come in from the north so as to avoid contact with the Isle of the Darned, which is infested with crooked lawyers.—Mark Wolfe


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Madi P.'s Island

I read Atlas every day. I am 8. Look at my cool map of my island. I have:

  • a town
  • a forest
  • a castle
  • a dock
  • a pond with a duck in it
  • a pterodactyl

I hope you like it!—Madi P.


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Ben P.'s Island

I am 11 and I made an island map! I really like it and I hope you like it too.

  • there is skull mountain
  • the mystical dancing kitty of wonder is dancing and wondrous
  • a small village with a big castle
  • I have a gold mine and a swamp too
  • there is a mountain range
  • the witch's hut guards the treasure

That is my map. Please put the map on the Atlas. Thanks!—Ben P.


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St. Bean's Island

Wroe Clark


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Fairy Skul Island

It is full of fairies that live in a "skul" rock, which has long teeth and is happy. There are volcanoes next to the rock, and there are many birds flying about.—Sasha Koptev


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Shellbackland

As the name suggests, the two islands are shaped like a turtle. It has a wealth of features to explore: two volcanoes, a hot springs with a geyser, a swamp featuring the elusive Mokele-mbambe, a central river, hills, caves, beaches, and mangroves. All largely unspoiled!—Whit Durham, Washington, D.C.


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Endee Island

Nancy Douglas, Riverside, California


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Ericka Kendall's Island

It is accessible, but I am the only one who can remember that it exists. I can bring people here, but as soon as they leave, they have no memory of being there, unless I want them to. It may not be my full-time home, but I can teleport there any time. Still, there will be a boat for fun. It's big enough that I can explore, but small enough that I can get around without a vehicle. Maybe I can teleport between places on the island, even. Animals of all varieties live together in harmony, and they are all friendly with me and my guests. My husband is also part of this island, but he has his own bathroom, and in the A-frame is a double-king-size bed. Since it was suggested, a few ghosts might be nice. Not pirate ghosts, but a few mischievous ones would be cool.—Ericka Kendall


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Upside Down Island

It is where the world is turned upside down. It is where men are pregnant, the poor are rich, where fish fish and where even the order of day and night is flipped front to back. —Robert Powell

Decoding the Tattoos of Ancient Egyptians

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The average inhabitant of the modern world—frequenting both museums and the cinema—has come to expect a number of things of the preserved bodies of the ancient Egyptians: bandages, amulets, perhaps a funerary mask, dried skin, and sometimes both a malevolent disposition and an uncanny talent for moving slowly yet managing to surprise an often well-armed and presumably fleet-footed human quarry.

Lacking in all realistic Egyptian details, the most recent reboot of The Mummy (2017) inadvertently captured a feature that is indeed present on some (sadly immobile) mummies: tattoos. Tattooed priestesses were a reality in ancient Egyptian temples, and a new study of two ancient Egyptian bodies in the British Museum confirms that this practice (for men as well as women) began over 5,000 years ago. Even more remarkably, these newly discovered oldest figural tattoos reveal that the ancient Egyptians got inked for many of the same reasons as people do today.

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For the past 100 years, a male Egyptian body on display in the British Museum has been an icon of modern perceptions of early society near the banks of the Nile River. This earliest phase of ancient Egypt is called “Predynastic,” because it predates the unification of Egypt in the First Dynasty, which occurred about 3100 B.C. The Predynastic man on display in London arrived (with assistance) at the British Museum at the turn of the last century and was accessioned in 1900 together with five other bodies that likely originated in southern Egypt (probably the site of Gebelein).

Radiocarbon dating—as well as other clues—suggest that the bodies date to the period between 3400 to 3100 B.C. He and his compatriots are not actually mummies, in the sense of an embalmed and wrapped corpse (the kind that get reanimated by the Scroll of Thoth and/or tana leaves in modern cinematic imaginings), but naturally mummified bodies. The sand in which they were buried dried the corpses, preserving them extraordinarily well, so well that their skin and hair are largely intact. What had escaped attention until a recent recording of the “mummies” with infrared photography is that two of the bodies—the famous Predynastic man and a contemporaneous woman—sported tattoos.

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Snarling beasts and noble creatures have been popular motifs in tattoos across wide expanses of time and space, and the Predynastic Egyptian man was no different: he chose a barbary sheep and a bull for his upper right arm. While a sheep might not seem particularly fierce, bagging a barbary sheep (Ammotragus lervia) with just a bow and arrow—or more likely trapping one, considering the speed and precipice climbing abilities of the animals—was the ultimate in ancient Egyptian big game hunting. The bull is a more obvious symbol of power, and one that would later serve as an important icon of royal authority in Egypt. The woman has two tattoos on her upper right arm and shoulder: a vertical line with angled top (possibly a short staff or throwstick) and a series of S-shapes. Taken alone, this new evidence for tattooing arts in early Egypt is interesting, but within the larger context of Egyptian art from between 3500 and 3100 B.C., it is remarkable.

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To discover the meaning of the tattoos, we must seek parallel images in other (non-skin) media, and our first stop are the deserts to the east and west of the Nile River, particularly the area between modern-day Luxor and Abu Simbel. In these deserts, Predynastic travelers left thousands of rock inscriptions, often termed “graffiti,” although in an ancient Egyptian context, the word bears none of the modern connotations of vandalism; the inscriptions cluster along ancient highways (rather than randomly distributed throughout the landscape), precisely so they could be seen by future visitors. The Predynastic “graffiti” artists did not merely illustrate what they saw along the desert roads, but rather focused on animals with symbolic significance. And here we come back to the barbary sheep and the bulls—animals that appear frequently in the rock art, signifying elite hunting and earthly power.

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Much of the imagery in Predynastic Egyptian art focuses on animals that were exotic or uncommonly difficult to hunt: among them, addax, giraffes, elephants, crocodiles, and hippopotamuses. In the rock art, hunters could even wear images of a successful expedition—harpooned hippopotamuses on the chest of one hunter could be part of a decorated garment or even tattoos.

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No group had to hunt a barbary sheep or a hippopotamus to survive—but a successful capture or kill of such an animal revealed exceptional hunting skills. Perhaps it is these skills that the man in the British Museum sought to immortalize through the combination of an animal of power—the bull—and an animal whose capture symbolized hunting prowess—the barbary sheep. The style of the man’s tattoos is very similar to what we see in contemporaneous rock art, and in an Egyptian context, this is not surprising, since hieroglyphic texts can use the same verb to refer both to carving into stone and tattooing a human body.

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Those enigmatic S-shapes and possible staff on the tattooed woman are another key piece in this ancient puzzle. The S-shapes appear on decorated ceramic vessels common in Predynastic burials beginning shortly after 3500 B.C., and—here the parallels get down-right amazing—those shapes frequently appear in the context of imagery depicting a woman presiding over sacrificial animals. The women, most often shown in a dance pose and larger than their male companions, appear to be ritualists whose performances and gestures accompanied the ritual slaughter of desert game, translating the power of the living creatures into the provisions consumed by gods and humans. Predynastic figurines of women, sometimes shown in similar dance poses, can have body art, including in at least two cases, a barbary sheep. The female figurines, the women on the decorated ceramics, and most likely, the tattooed woman in the British Museum embodied the dualities of sacrifice and ritual celebration, death and life.

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Between 3500 and 3100 B.C., as society became more complex in southern Egypt, iconography in these various media—clay, stone, and skin—focused on elite hunting, the capture of big game of both the Nilotic and desert worlds, intended ultimately for sacrifice in a temple complex. In these sacrifices, men and women—both possibly tattooed with images relating to their ritual roles—were not just meat offerings for the gods, but were the way in which the ancient Egyptians maintained cosmic equilibrium. Adorned with these indelible images, the body becomes a reflection of the landscape and canvas for ritual imagery, allowing the bearers of the tattoos to mediate opposing forces of desert and Nile for eternity.

In later Egyptian history, tattoos would continue to function in the same way, with some spectacular examples including amuletic and divine images. As the newly discovered Predynastic tattooed individuals reveal, permanent bodily adornments can express an individual’s role in the larger world, as man or woman, hunter or priestess—tattoos in ancient Egypt, just as today, reveal the skin as a surface that reflects the inner person.

How A Fake Mountain Range Slowed Down Arctic Exploration

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On August 31st, 1818, around 3 p.m., the Arctic explorer John Ross was called away from his dinner and onto the deck of the ship he commanded, the Isabella. Ross and his crew were moored in Baffin Bay, just south of Greenland, seeking a way through to the Arctic sea beyond. All day, they had been waiting for the fog to clear, so they could take a look around and try to find it.

Ross stepped out onto the deck and began scanning the horizon: ice, more ice, and, in between, an imposing set of peaks. "I distinctly saw the land, round the bottom of the bay, forming a connected chain of mountains with those which extended along the north and south sides," he wrote soon after. There was, he concluded, no way through.

Some are born great; some achieve greatness; some have greatness thrust upon them. And some narrowly miss greatness, kept from it by a pesky propensity to imagine land where there is none. Such is the case of Ross, who was just one fake mountain range away from discovering a critical entrance to the Northwest Passage, and more lasting explorational fame. No one is sure why he saw them—but, in the words of one biographer, the false mountains "would haunt Ross for the rest of his life."

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According to a biography by M.J. Ross, John started sailing professionally in 1786, when he was just nine years old, and was on the water "almost continuously" after that. In December of 1817, the British Admiralty decided to send a couple of ships up to the Arctic, "to ascertain the existence or non-existence of a north-west passage," as Ross later put it to a friend. The expedition was in need of a commander—was Ross up to the task? He accepted, and by April of the following year, he had chosen his ships—the formidable Isabella and the smaller Alexander—gathered his crew, loaded up with thousands of pounds of beef, bread, and raisins, and set a course for the North.

The British had been actively looking for the Northwest Passage since the end of the 15th century, when King Henry VII sent the explorer John Cabot to find a more direct route to China. (From 1744 to 1818—the year Ross set out—there was even prize money at stake.) Although certain expeditions had managed to push deeper into the massive archipelago north of the Canadian mainland, no one had yet found a way through.

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For this new expedition, Ross was told to follow a forceful northward current, which had previously been reported by whalers. That current shot through the water south of Greenland and continued up along the coast of Canada. Its strength suggested it came from the open ocean, and that following it would lead there. "Having rounded the northeastern point of the North American continent," wrote M.J. Ross, "he was to steer straight for Bering Strait, enter the Pacific, hand over a copy of his journals to the Russian governor of Kamchatka for dispatch to London, and proceed to Hawaii for replenishment and recreation—an enticing prospect!"

This indeed sounded nice. But once the explorers got to the icier parts of the ocean, the reality was a bit more of a slog. In early June, Ross wrote, the Isabella and the Alexander found themselves trapped in a semi-frozen strait, trapped by "at least seven hundred icebergs" alongside a few dozen whaling ships. (Ross amused himself by pulling up specimens of starfish, mud, and worms from the ocean floor, using a scientific instrument of his own devising, which he called the "Deep Sea Clamm.")

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For much of late July, they couldn't sail at all, and the crew had to drag the Isabella and the Alexander through the slush. At least once, the two ships crashed into each other, though no damage was done. In the middle of August, the ships finally got to Baffin Bay, and began to sail counter-clockwise around its edges, exploring various inlets. After a few days, they had nosed into Lancaster Sound: a channel between two islands that, we now know, provides an Eastern entrance to the Northwest Passage.

It was exactly what they had been looking for—but Ross couldn't see it. Instead, he saw that mountain range, which conveniently blocked their path forward. From his perch on the ship's deck, he began assigning names to the landscape's various capes and bays—and to the fake peaks, which he called Croker's Mountains, after First Secretary of the Admiralty John Wilson Croker. Then, without asking anyone else's opinion, he ordered the crew to head back into the bay.

Some of his shipmates did not agree with this choice. From their vantage point, "it was quite impossible to say what openings there might not be," the ship's purser, W.H. Hooper, wrote at the time. "We could not but feel that, in turning to the Southward, we might be leaving the North West Passage behind us." (Later, Hooper described the shipwide mood as they turned around: "To describe our mortification and disappointment would be impossible at thus having our increasing hopes annihilated in a moment, without the shadow of a reason appearing.")

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But Ross was unswayed: "It appears perfectly certain that the land is here continuous, and that there is no opening at the northernmost part of Baffin's Bay," he wrote. He then doubled down: "Even it be imagined… that some narrow Strait may exist through these mountains, it is evident, that it must be for ever unnavigable."

He was, of course, incorrect on all counts. The very next year, one of Ross's crew members, William Parry, headed back to Baffin Bay and sailed straight on through the supposed mountains and into the beginning of the Northwest Passage, which is now called Parry Channel. ("I know it is in existence, and not very hard to find," a frustrated Parry had written to his family on his way back from Ross's expedition.)

Meanwhile, Ross's career was undergoing a reckoning. In early 1819, a popular magazine featured a scathing review of the travelogue Ross had published after his journey. The review took up 49 pages, and, as M.J. Ross put it, "poured scorn on Ross by contradicting in sarcastic and facetious language almost everything Ross had written," from his descriptions of icebergs to the names he chose to bestow on various landscape pieces to, of course, his decision to turn tail at Lancaster Sound.

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Although published anonymously, the article was almost certainly written by John Barrow, then the Second Secretary of the British Admiralty. It was followed by more published criticism from some of Ross's shipmates. By spring of that year, Ross had been called in front of the Admiralty for questioning, at which point he worked himself into a lather, accusing his former crew of conspiring against him. (He retracted this the next day.) The press had a field day with this spat, and soon, cartoonists and writers were caricaturing Ross, publishing satirical accounts of his journey, and sketching him balancing atop the North Pole and claiming it for England.

This wasn't a good look for a naval officer—and it certainly didn't help that Ross had named those voyage-ruining fake mountains after First Secretary Croker. Indeed, Ross never sailed for the Admiralty again. (He did, however, undertake two more privately funded voyages to the Arctic, and regained the public and the government's respect.)

Why did Ross claim that he saw those mountains? One theory holds that he was fooled by a fata morgana: a trick of the light that causes mirages over large expanses of water, and often convinces sailors that they've spotted a land mass or another boat. But as M.J. Ross pointed out, the conditions in Baffin Bay that day weren't conducive to such apparitions. He speculated instead that John was too hung up on earlier descriptions of the area, and didn't rely enough on his own eyes: "He seems to have formed a preconceived idea of what a Northwest Passage was going to be like," he wrote.

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Another historian, Glyn Williams, agrees, adding that this tendency may have come from Ross's commitment to restoring the credibility of William Baffin, who had originally mapped the Bay and insisted there was no passage. But, Williams adds, "no convincing reason for [Ross's] mistake has ever been produced."

We may never get one, but a later story sheds a bit of light—or at least establishes a pattern. In 1830, John Ross led another voyage to the Arctic, this time with his nephew, James Clark Ross, as second-in-command. During the trip, James Clark discovered three new islands in the Canadian Arctic. He decided to name them the Beaufort Islands, after the Admiralty's official hydrographer, and plotted them in the expedition's chart book.

When the Rosses returned to England three years later, a new king, William IV—formerly the Duke of Clarence—had been crowned. John Ross took the chart book, and, with the enthusiastic consent of the king, erased the "Beaufort" in "Beaufort Islands" and wrote in "Clarence" instead. Then—this time of his own accord—he added six more islands to the map, and named them after the new King's family members: Munster Island, Erskine Island, Cape Sophia, etc. As a slightly miffed Beaufort later told his friend Lady Franklin, "Ross thought it would be as well to make a few more, so that the [royal family] might have one apiece."

The next year, in 1834, Ross was knighted. He had clearly learned a lesson: If you're going to make up land masses, make sure they make someone powerful look good.

Remembering the Coral Route and Its Luxurious Flying Boats

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At their lowest, the Solent flying boats dipped so close to the waters of the Pacific Ocean that passengers could pick out brilliant coral formations, whales, and even the occasional shark from their windows. Starting in 1951, Tasman Empire Airways Limited (TEAL) operated the Coral Route, a monthly island-hopping extravaganza for some of the world’s glitziest people. Within six months, demand was so great that the airline doubled its services. But by the end of 1960, it was all over and the islands, touched for a brief period by seaplane magic, were brought abruptly back to normal.

It started with a mail service. In the wake of the Second World War, New Zealand found itself with an impressive fleet of pilots, who had learned to wrangle tide charts and coral reefs alike as they came in to land in the lagoons of the South Pacific. And so, in the final days of the British Empire, the Royal New Zealand Air Force ferried mail from one island outpost to the next, everywhere from Tahiti to Fiji.

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But, as enthusiast Stewart Haynes writes, “a scheduled air service, flying boats linking islands scattered over thousands of miles on the South Seas; silver craft putting down oh-so-softly in tropical lagoons ... was just too appealing.” The seaplanes continued to take mail, but began bringing passengers with them, on a romantic tourist package that left Auckland for the first time in late December 1951. The name “Coral Route” came from a TEAL staff competition: the head steward, Eric Mullane, was inspired by both the beauty of the coral islands and the “choral” musical welcome that guests received on their arrival in each spot.

For two and a half days, Coral Route passengers would hop from flying boat to island, and from island to flying boat, on a journey nearly 5,000 miles long. The trip began in Auckland, New Zealand, traveling through to Suva in Fiji, the Cook Islands, and Tahiti. Stops to Samoa and then Tonga were introduced in 1952.

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Passengers sat in luxury in TEAL’s Solent flying boats, which were hulled like a boat, but with wings like a plane, allowing them to take off and land on water. First developed in the late 1940s as part of the war effort, the seaplanes seated up to 45 passengers over two decks, and included a five-strong crew, including a chef. Like the zeppelins of just a few decades earlier, passengers enjoyed a full silver service on board, with fresh linen tablecloths and meals cooked to order. The airline’s two Solent boats—named Aparima, after a Tahitian dance, and Aranui, a Māori word meaning “the great path”—cruised at speeds of around 170 miles per hour, in decadent sky-high surroundings. Each guest had paid £30 for their transit, about a third of the annual U.K. salary in the year the service began.

For many passengers, the crowning jewel of the route was the island of Akaiami, an uninhabited islet in the Cook Islands. New Zealand Geographic describes an islet almost parodic in its deserted perfection: shallow, turquoise waters beset with garlands of tropical fish; coconut palms; glittering silver sands. The flying boats landed at dawn, before the sun could climb too high in the sky, and drag the thermostat up with it. TEAL staff on the ground had, the night before, marked out a water landing area with inflatable buoys; the flying boats were then anchored in Akaiami Bay, while crew scrambled to fill the plane with fuel using a refueling barge.

This hectic behind-the-scenes activity was usually kept out of sight of the passengers. Though exhausted—they had taken off from Apia, the capital of Samoa, at 1 a.m.—for a few, brief hours, they enjoyed moments of absolute serenity, hundreds of miles from civilization. After being ferried off the flying boat, guests were welcomed onto the passenger wharf, and decorated with sweet-smelling flower leis by people from nearby Aitutaki, one of the Cook Islands.

For the roughly 2,000 locals of Aitutaki, the arrival of the seaplane to Akaiami was a high point in the week. Aitutaki villagers lived an easy existence in huts with wooden walls and roofs thatched with coconut palms. When the flying boat arrived, children stood agape on the beach, trying to spot someone they might have heard of—although Aitutaki was at that time so isolated from the rest of the world that even the most renowned personality would be likely unrecognizable.

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This uninhabited island paradise was, for a few years, witness to some of the world’s most glamorous people, including Marlon Brando, who liked Akaiami so much he returned a second time while filming Mutiny on the Bounty, and the Crown Prince of Tonga, who reportedly needed a custom-made seat to accommodate his bulk. Passengers recuperated in the thatched TEAL guest house, splashed in the shallow waters, or simply wandered the two miles along the island’s coast.

As a little girl, Queen Manarangi Tutai, now one of Aitutaki’s three high chiefs, remembered often taking a large canoe to Akaiami in the early 1950s with her family, on the night before the plane’s arrival. This was an easy journey of five miles on her father’s sailing canoe, with its mighty cotton sail. When they made it to the islet, they would stay in a local hut, sitting beneath the stars on a coconut log by a hissing billy cooking pot. “We seemed so isolated, so remote, and yet, for a brief instance the next day, Akaiami would be the only place in the whole Cook Islands where we would be so very close to the outside world,” she wrote, on her personal website. “We were, for a very short time, an international airport.”

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At 9 a.m., Tutai recalled, the plane would make radio contact with TEAL staff on the ground. “A shout would go up, and everyone would man their stations,” she wrote. “We all would strain our eyes to see her, vying to be the first. Then, there she was, a speck, gradually becoming larger and larger—then a huge seaplane lining up with the water landing area in the lagoon.” The plane flew lower and lower, until it was just skimming the surf, before settling on the water and taxiing over the buoy. “In the peace of Akaiami, I can still remember the deafening roar of those big engines, and the silence that followed when they were stopped. It just seemed to make the stillness much greater somehow.”

The travelers were an exciting addition to island life, providing a brief glimpse at the outside world, far from the South Pacific, and welcomed accordingly with celebration and singing. In Papeete, in Tahiti, every boatload of disembarking guests was greeted with a dance called “Soirée de TEAL.” The night before, the village’s restaurants and bars displayed blackboards outside, which proclaimed: “L’avion TEAL arrivera demain”—“The TEAL plane is coming tomorrow.” Bars put on special parties to welcome them, and Solent crew and passengers alike treated like stars. Often, they were.

Despite its popularity with both passengers and Pacific Islanders, in September 1960, the service ceased. TEAL had inherited landplanes from a British airline, and the Solents were slowly phased out. First, they vanished from TEAL’s Tasman Strait crossings between New Zealand and Australia. Then, after a new international airport was built at Papeete, landplanes took over the journeys between the Pacific Islands, bringing the Coral Route to an end. By 1965, TEAL was rechristened Air New Zealand, and the service all but forgotten. A glorious chapter in aviation history had come to a close. After a decade of welcoming strangers from far away to their sandy homelands, the islanders, and their islands, went back to the way things had been before.

This Bomb-Covered Island May Soon Host Rare Bunnies

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Every day of Islands Week, we're profiling one uninhabited island. Find more here.

Nomans Land Island, a 600-acre chunk of land off the coast of Massachusetts, is well-named. Sure, people did live there once: Over the years, it's been home to Native Americans, cod fishers, farmers, and bootleggers, all of whom built structures and spun local lore. At one point the island even hosted a family of isolationists, one of whom "had been possessed by the spirit of a Boston milliner and was given to frenzies of hat trimming."

In 1943, though, the U.S. Navy leased the island from its owner, cleared the place out, and started using it as a 600-acre practice target. For the next 53 years, they salted the island liberally with bombs. As so often happens for birds and other animals, the lack of human residents outweighed the regular explosions, and in 1998, the land was declared a National Wildlife Refuge. It remains closed to the public, lest they disturb unhatched eggs or unexploded ordnance. So, save for the occasional visit by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the land is once again no man's.

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Although if a new proposal goes through, it will instead belong to a lot of bunnies. The FWS recently announced a plan to fill Nomans Land with New England cottontails, a native species of rabbit that has been outcompeted by the introduced Eastern variety.

According to the Fish and Wildlife Service, the island could host up to 600 or more bunnies, who would live out their lives unmenaced by mammalian predators, with great access to shrubs and other helpful vegetation. A similar proposal—to fill an uninhabited island in the Quabbin Reservoir with timber rattlesnakes—was nixed last year after pushback from shoreline residents, but this one seems destined to succeed. Bunnies and bombs: What could go wrong?

The Libraries That Preserve the History of Small Islands

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No matter how small a community or how isolated it is, most have an archive of local history. It might be in the form of public records, or a collection of photographs, or shelves of old books. On islands, these archives are particularly important. Islands are surprisingly indefinable, occasionally mobile, and, in some cases, can spontaneously grow in size. Island life is similarly diverse and unusual, and these archives help preserve their unique cultures.

And some of these islands and their cultures are under threat. Natural disasters, such as hurricanes and volcanoes, can make an isolated island uninhabitable. Man-made disasters, like rising sea levels caused by climate change, can make an island disappear. In these situations, the work of librarians and archivists to safeguard and, where possible, digitize materials, is even more important.

Atlas Obscura spoke to island archives and libraries from the Baltic Sea to the Pacific Ocean to learn about their special collections.

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Åland Islands

Finland

Population: 28,500

The Åland Islands, sprinkled in the Baltic Sea between Finland and Sweden, number in the thousands—6,700, roughly, of which just 65 are inhabited. They are an autonomous province of Finland, but demilitarized and neutral, with their own flag and postage stamps. The official language is Swedish. (At various points in history, the islands have been part of both Sweden and the Russian Empire.) Around 90 percent of the population resides on Fasta Åland, which is also where the Provincial Archives of Åland are based.

Established in 1978, the archives are impressively large: They hold nearly 15,500 feet worth of records (3.2 percent of which have been digitized, according to chief archivist Åke Söderlund), along with a library of books on the Ålands, more than 11,000 volumes strong. Their oldest records date to the early 17th century. The booklet above was printed as a supplement to a Swedish newspaper in 1916, a year before the Russian Revolution, and five years before Finland was awarded sovereignty over the islands by the League of Nations.

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Cook Islands

South Pacific

Population: 17, 497

The Cook Islands Library and Museum is located in Rarotonga, the most populous of the 15 Cook Islands. (The least populous is Suwarrow, a designated national park whose two caretakers leave during the cyclone season.) Its closest Pacific neighbors are Tonga, French Polynesia, and New Zealand, the country it is most closely associated with. The Cook Islands are self-governing in "free association" with New Zealand, meaning that the residents are New Zealand citizens.

The Library and Museum holds “couple of diaries written by early European settlers from the early 1900s and the cession document [1891] to Britain,” says Jean Mason, the director and curator of the Library and Museum. It also has a lending library and artifacts that include a Cook Islands stamp collection and some historical photographs. Its goal is to preserve the history, heritage, and culture of the Cook Islands, which sometimes requires specific treatment. Books and artifacts can occasionally become infested with pests, and so a few times a year, the Library and Museum wrap and seal the items, and then freeze them. They’ve used both a household freezer and a larger walk-in freezer, courtesy of the Cook Islands Trading Corporation supermarket.

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Orkney Islands

Scotland

Population: 21,349

The Orkney Islands—an archipelago of around 70 islands, 20 of which are inhabited—are situated off the blustery northeast coast of Scotland, in the North Sea. In the town of Kirkwall, on the main island, called Mainland, is the Orkney Photographic Archive, part of the Orkney Library & Archive. The archive is impressively large: It contains 60,000 photographs, from the 1870s to the present, documenting the history and culture of Orkney.

The collection began in 1976 with around 5,000 glass-plate negatives by Tom Kent, a 19th-century Orcadian photographer. Since then, the archive has increased its holdings thanks to donations, purchases, and a little luck. One collection of photographs was rescued from a dump on Westray Island (population: 600). It’s a collection “of considerable value and historical importance,” says senior archivist David Mackie.

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Anguilla

Caribbean

Population: 14,764

When Hurricane Irma barreled through the Caribbean in September 2017, the northern Leeward Islands—including Anguilla, Antigua and Barbuda, Saint Kitts and Nevis, and the Virgin Islands—saw some of the worst damage. On Anguilla, a three-mile-wide island east of the Virgin islands, the Public Library flooded. This, says librarian Juliane Leverett, “led to mold developing due to the dampness of the building.” Fortunately, the water spared the Heritage Room, where the Special Collections are held. The collection contains valuable historical records, old newspapers, rare books, an archive on the Anguilla revolution of 1967, and its oldest item—archived documents from the 1600s. Around 40 percent of the materials, including newspapers and records, have been digitized.

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Rapa Nui (Easter Island)

Chile

Population: 5,761

Rapa Nui (also known as Easter Island, or Isla de Pasqua in Spanish) is a triangular-shaped volcanic island some 2,300 miles from the Chilean coast. It’s regarded as one of the most remote islands in the world, but it still attracts tourists, particularly to see the moai, the giant stone statues erected across the island by the Rapa Nui people. Created sometime between the 10th and 16th centuries, around 900 of these statues dot the island, each averaging 13 feet tall.

William Mulloy was an American archaeologist who devoted his life to studying Polynesian prehistory and the origins of the moai. Today, the William Mulloy Library holds his entire collection of materials on Rapa Nui and Polynesian culture and history, along with contributions from the Easter Island Foundation, the Andes Foundation, and the Chilean Directorate of Libraries, Archives, and Museums. “It has become the main meeting place for research and discussion on topics related to Rapa Nui, because it houses the largest collection of books, articles, newspapers, maps, photographs, audios, and videos of the island in the world," says head librarian Katherine Atan Retamales.

“In our archive we have 4,000 books, of which 221 are digitized, totally or partially, and we have 3,800 articles or monographs, of which 555 monographs are digitized,” says Atan Retamales. “Plus we have a photographic archive with 23,000 digital images, acquired through donations. All this material is at the service of the community.”

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Sitka, Baranhof Island

Alaska

Population: 8,863

The City and Borough of Sitka sits between mountains and water, on the west side of Baranhof Island, in southeastern Alaska. It's a location of some historical significance: Sitka was where Russia transferred its Alaskan territory to the United States, in a ceremony on Castle Hill, in 1867. The photograph of that site, above, is part of the Romaine Hardcastle Photograph Collection in the Sitka Public Library. "Thanks to a collaborative project between the Sitka Tribe of Alaska and the Kettleson Memorial Library [the former name of the Sitka Public Library], these images were digitized in 2004," says librarian Joanna Perensovich. "They are not online, but are available at the library on a CD."

The library also holds the Clarence L Andrews Collection of approximately 1,900 rare books, documents, and newspapers on Alaskan history. Andrews worked in the U.S. Customs Office in Alaska at the turn of the century, and his collection joins a further 2,640 volumes on Sitka and southeastern Alaska. Perensovich notes that it’s an ever-expanding resource: “This is a dynamic collection to which we still add newly published and historically published materials.”

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Republic of Palau

South Pacific

Population: 21,503

The Republic of Palau consists of more than 300 islands clustered in the Pacific Ocean between Guam, the Philippines, and Papua New Guinea. The nation’s only higher education institute, Palau Community College, holds its largest collection of books at the Tan Sui Lin Library. This is also home to the Micronesia-Pacific Collection, an array of materials about the history, heritage, and culture of Micronesia, including maps, newspapers, government documents, and books. Some of the materials in the collection have been digitized and are available on the Pacific Digital Library website, an online database shared by Pacific island libraries. Items such as maps, however, can only be viewed in person.

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Shetland Islands

Scotland

Population: 23,200

Equidistant between Norway and the Faroe Islands, far north of Scotland, are the Shetland Islands. This archipelago of around 300 islands and skerries, just 15 of which are inhabited, is home to subarctic temperatures, colonies of seabirds, and, thanks to Fair Isle (population: 55), famous knitwear. It's also home to the Shetland Museum Photographic Archive. This collection of around 80,000 images has been mostly donated, and includes everything from glass negatives to postcards. The material covers all aspects of the islands’ heritage: “textiles, fishing, boats, industry, crofting, buildings, landscapes, and people,” says Steven Christie, a photo technician at the Shetland Museum and Archives. The photograph above shows "gutters"—women employed to gut fish—at the docks in Lerwick, the main port.

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Mykonos

Greece

Population: 10,314

In an 18th-century mansion on Mykonos Island, in the Aegean Sea, is the Municipal Library of Mykonos. Here, librarian Vasiliki Nikiforidou oversees a collection of nearly 12,000 books, along with the Mykonos Historical Archive. “It consists of rare manuscripts and public documents of previous centuries concerning the history of the island and the Cyclades in general,” she says. The collection includes rare coins, and its oldest book dates from 1718. The entire collection is catalogued, although not digitized, but this system, says Nikiforidou, “for our little library, is useful and very valuable.”

The Visual Influences Behind Wes Anderson's 'Isle of Dogs'

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How do you make a pile of trash look artful? From New York's Treasures in the Trash Collection to the artists-in-residence at the San Francisco dump, people have found all sorts of ways to find beauty and meaning in garbage. For Wes Anderson's upcoming animated film Isle of Dogs, which takes place largely on an island of trash, the production looked to a diverse array of real-world inspirations to bring a sense of order to its garbage. As it turned out, melding the chaos of detritus with Anderson's famously ordered aesthetic was no simple task. Mild spoilers ahead!

“That was one of the things that intrigued me from the very start. Knowing Wes’s aesthetic, I thought it was an interesting choice to have two-thirds of the film actually take place on a trash heap,” says Paul Harrod, one of the film's production designers. Harrod took over the project from Adam Stockhausen, and led the design and creation of the film’s main location, Trash Island, to its finished look in the film.

Isle of Dogs takes place in a semi-future Japan. “The tone we were always going for was ‘20 years in the future,’" says Harrod. "But it’s not 20 years in our future, it’s more like 20 years from about 1964.” In this future, all of the dogs have been exiled to an offshore landfill—Trash Island. When a young boy escapes to the island to find his pet, a pack of scruffy, celebrity-voiced dogs escort him on his journey across the island's various regions. From color-coded garbage zones to a crumbling animal testing facility, Trash Island has a number of intricately crafted locations.

Much of the overall look of the film was inspired by the films of Japanese masters like Akira Kurosawa, as well as traditional Japanese ukiyo-e art. Produced throughout the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, ukiyo-e art tends to be defined by its framed tableau look, a design trait that has come to define many of Anderson’s films. “[It’s] the idea of taking these very pastoral landscapes from 19th-century Japan, and applying a different surface to them,” says Harrod.

For the look of the trash heaps themselves, the production took cues from photographers such as Edward Burtynsky and Chris Jordan, and their images of staggering collections of trash. “[They] have been documenting the crisis of trash we are facing right now, how there already exists these vast landscapes of trash,” says Harrod. One aspect of such images that heavily influenced the look of Trash Island was that collections of trash often take on a specific color.

“The first scene when we’re introduced to the hero pack, the five main dogs, Chief, Rex, Duke, King, [and Boss], that was going to be a very rust-toned place," says Harrod, "as though this is where all of the ferrous metals had been dumped. We looked at things like strip mines where the ground would be saturated with copper tailings and things like that.”

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According to Harrod, a number of the early Trash Island locations were similarly conceived. “When [the character] Spots is first dropped on Trash Island, he’s in this sort of amphitheater of cubed metal. But it isn’t rusted, so it has this silver-blue hue to it. All of the cubes are going up into the sky, creating a kind of formalist background. Sublime, yet horrifying,” he says. “There’s a scene where they fight the dog catchers and we decided that that would be a totally black landscape, and the best way to create this was to compose it entirely of old car batteries and cathode ray tubes.”

Beyond their unifying colors, each trash zone contains its own hidden details. Internally, many of the unnamed trash zones in the film were given names based on the action that would take place there. There’s “Spots’ Landing,” and the all-black “Drone Beach.” There’s also a setting they called “The Crash Site,” composed of countless pieces of discarded paper. “We wanted it to be covered in newspapers, and it created this sort of beach, because that location is essentially a beach, being a relatively soft surface,” Harrod says. Many of the newspapers seen in the film include real articles that have been translated into Japanese, a detail that's easy to miss.

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The designers looked to specific real-world locations for inspiration as well. For instance, the geography of the island itself was modeled in part on Western Australia’s Horizontal Falls. “It’s this remarkable set of channels where there are hills cutting through the water [placing] the water itself at different levels,” says Harrod. A portion of the film that takes place in a crumbling amusement park was inspired by the old rooftop amusement parks of Japanese department stores. The abandoned animal testing facility from another part of the island was based on locations including the old St Peter's Seminary in Cardross, Scotland, and an abandoned winery in Paris.

Thanks to its myriad real-world influences, Trash Island feels both fantastical and satisfyingly alive. It also manages to fit within Anderson’s ordered, hermetically sealed universe. “Sometimes he would really surprise you and really bring more chaos into the image,” says Harrod. “When you start to see how he’s cutting things together and structuring the narrative, what felt chaotic becomes quite structural.” The Isle of Dogs might be made of garbage, but that doesn’t mean it’s messy.


Most Islands Don't Actually Have Palms Trees on Them

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When someone mentions an island, two images tend to spring to mind: beaches and palm trees. For an example of just how pervasive this trope is, look no further than the Desert Island emoji 🏝️.

Since, even by the loosest definition, an island is surrounded by water, a beach or at least a shoreline is a given. But palm trees only thrive in specific (read: hot) climates. There are obviously plenty of islands located in parts of the world where palm trees can’t grow. So what percentage of our planet's islands actually feature a palm tree-lined beach?

To try and determine at least a rough calculation, we set out to cross-reference the total number of islands in the world with the geographic spread of palm trees. However, as we quickly realized, it’s nearly impossible to arrive at an exact count of either islands or palm trees across the world.

Our next step was to contact Chris Underwood. Underwood is an assistant professor of geography at the University of Wisconsin-Platteville, specializing in biogeography, and he enthusiastically agreed to try to come up with an answer. “I know that many people DO think of only tropical biomes, sandy beaches, and perpetual summer when they hear the word ‘island,’ and I am all about crushing stereotypes,” he told us via email.

To solve the problem of counting the world’s islands (which, as we learned during the course of Islands Week, is actually an incredibly tricky thing to do), Underwood gave himself some very specific constraints to come up with a rough number. “I looked at all islands on Earth greater than 1,000 square kilometers,” he says. “For the sake of your deadline and my sanity, I cut it off there. It'd take me much longer to parse the data if I were to look at every individual island.” He also only included islands that are bordered by an ocean or sea. “These criteria gave me 313 islands globally.”

As for the total number of palm trees in the world, according to ThePlantList.org, a working list of all known plant species, there are over 2,500 different species of tree within the arecaceae family, more commonly known as palm trees. So in order to try and simplify the palm tree problem, we asked Underwood to limit his inquiry to the spread and range of the Cocos nucifera, the traditional, coconut-bearing species that is closest to the platonic palm tree you might see on a cartoon tropical island.

Looking at a distribution map originally published in a 1933 volume of the botanical journal Berichte der Deutschen Botanischen Gesellschaft, Underwood determined that 121 of his previously identified islands fell into the zones where C. nucifera trees were known to grow natively (“I did not attempt to account for islands outside of the range onto which humans have artificially spread C. nucifera,” he notes).

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For those still paying attention, that leaves a clear majority of islands in the world without a traditional palm tree. “In other words, a whopping 61 percent of islands globally (using these criteria) lie outside the native range of C. nucifera,” says Underwood. “Funny how stereotypes are spread, isn't it?”

Even with these rough facts in hand, we’ll no doubt continue to see stereotypical depictions of sandy, sunny islands blooming with palm trees in illustrations, movies, and anywhere else people need a visual shorthand for a remote spit of land. But as Underwood notes, maybe it’s time to rethink that particular trope. “Perhaps our image of islands should instead [include] a sensible windbreaker or scarf.”

The Artist Making Bunches of Banana Art

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Bananas, like many fruits, are a fleeting treat. If you wait too long to eat one, it will brown and turn. But the time limits seem to be freeing for artist Keisuke Yamada, who carves incredible designs—from pop culture figures to grotesque faces—on bananas.

Based in Shiga Prefecture, Japan, Yamada spends his days as an electrician and his spare time as a banana sculptor. (He also occasionally teaches classes on fruit carving.) Over email, Yamada explains that he started sculpting bananas in 2011. Bored, he peeled a banana, and had an idea. What would happen if he carved a face into it?

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From there, Yamada—noting that the Internet loved his creations—began sculpting much more than just faces. "You can carve human beings, animals, whatever," he says, adding that he often finds inspirations in people's movements and favorite movie characters. The texture of the bananas makes some of these creatures, such as snakes, appear even more sinister as they slither out of the peel. Others, such as his elephants and horses, have an astoundingly life-like quality.

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It takes Yamada about an hour to make one banana sculpture, and on a record banana-carving day, he made nine works in 15 hours. His tools are everyday household items: a toothpick and a spoon.

Yamada admits that he's gotten tired of the taste of bananas over the years, and that he "ate too much and gained weight." Nevertheless, he still loves bananas and the unlikely faces and places he can carve out of them.

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The Poo-Poo Project Is Saving Birds From a Dirty Demise

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Joe Foust, district wildlife biologist for Boise National Forest’s Cascade Ranger District, was at work in 2009 when he received a memorable call. A forest visitor had reported an owl stuck in a campground vault toilet—could he take a look?

When he arrived at the campground, he found a note on the toilet imploring those who had to “go” to find a different place to do their business because there was an owl trapped inside. Foust peered down into the hole. “Sure enough, there was a little owl looking up at us out of this vault toilet,” he says.

Vault toilets are common in campgrounds, and these waterless, no-flush toilets simply drop the waste below into an underground tank, which is periodically pumped out by a septic truck. Going around to the side of the vault, Foust opened the trap door to the waste tank. “It was just sitting there on the pile in the vault,” he says. “It wasn’t wet or dirty at all.”

But the bird’s cleanliness didn’t last for long. “I had taken a long fishing net just in case,” Foust says. “I got the net right up to its feet. It started to go crazy, fly, and bounce around. It got itself soaking wet and nasty.”

Once he was able to net the bird and pull it out, a colleague helped him clean it. Donning a garbage bag (“something to reduce the splatter a little bit,” according to Foust) and gloves, he held the owl as a colleague dumped all the water they had, about three gallons or so, over the frightened, excrement-covered bird.

After it was relatively clean, Foust took the bird into the woods to let it go. “I imagine he wasn’t popular at any parties for a long time,” he says. “He still stunk pretty bad.”

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How does an owl get trapped in a vault toilet? A surprising number of birds find themselves entrapped in various pipes, including the vent pipes on vault toilets, when they are looking for a quiet, dark space to nest or roost for the night or to get out from the elements. Birds that seek out these spaces are often called “cavity-nesting birds.”

“They see that inviting pipe, and if the walls are slick and they can’t get back out, it funnels them right down to the vault,” Foust says.

Foust’s owl rescue inspired a group of bird lovers at the Teton Raptor Center in Wilson, Wyoming, to come up with a solution to prevent future entrapments. Teton Raptor Center executive director Amy Brennan McCarthy and board chair Roger Smith saw photos of the owl trapped in the toilet and started looking into ways to keep birds out of the vent pipes.

The “Poo-Poo Project” was soon born. It stands for the “Port-o-Potty Owl Project” and the moniker definitely gets people’s attention. “It’s a catchy name,” says Teton Raptor Center Poo-Poo Project coordinator David Watson. “It makes people laugh and catches them off guard a little bit. It’s a very simple solution to an entrapment issue.”

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Teton Raptor Center worked with a company based in Rexburg, Idaho, to produce powder-coated steel screens to cap vault toilet vents, allowing for air circulation while also keeping wildlife out. The screens have a very simple, four-screw installation process. The price was also right: just $29.95 a piece.

The organization started selling the screens to land management agencies in 2013, and have now sold over 11,000. They are working with more than 395 partners, and currently have screens in all 50 states, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Canada. Screens can be found everywhere from Alaska’s Denali National Park to Minnesota’s Superior National Forest, and from Florida’s Everglades National Park to the Cape Cod National Seashore in Massachusetts.

Dave Trevino, wildlife biologist for the National Park Service’s Biological Resources Division, is the driving force behind the park service’s screen installation at partner sites. “The park service has an obligation to protect and preserve species within parks… If we are having animals that are having preventable fatalities in our park then it’s our obligation to prevent them, especially if it’s as simple a mitigation as a $30 screen and four screws,” Trevino says.

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While the exact number of bird fatalities in vault toilets is unknown, it’s likely that many of the animals who perish in the pits are simply pumped out with the muck by septic trucks.

“There’s no real scientific study about vault toilets and what goes in and what comes out,” Watson says. “That’s not a sexy project. No one wants to sift through that stuff. It’s not a thing grad students are clamoring to do, and there’s not a lot of research.”

However, Watson says he’s familiar with a number of different species becoming trapped in the toilets, including many cavity-nesting birds, such as owls and kestrels, and very rarely, other critters, such as foxes. The latter can become trapped in high snow years when the snow is tall enough to allow them to access the pipe. The owl Foust found in the Boise National Forest vault toilet wasn’t the only bird he’s personally found in such straits either—on another occasion, he found a small crow or blackbird (he wasn’t sure which) that did not survive.

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Bird lovers from around the country and around the world are doing their part to save cavity-nesting birds from a stinky fate. A Boy Scout and avian aficionado in Utah worked with Antelope Island State Park to install 21 screens in the park as his Eagle Scout project.

Up in Montana, Lou Ann Harris, board vice president and co-conservation chair of Bozeman’s Sacajawea Audubon Society Chapter, has actively supported the Poo-Poo Project ever since she learned about it around two years ago. Each year, her chapter budgets for a number of screens and works with local agencies to install them. The chapter initially bought 20 screens and continues to budget for more. “In our region, there are over 1,300 vault toilets,” Harris says. “We’ll start small and just keep working at it.”

Teton Raptor Center also hosts a “sponsor a screen” program which allows people to purchase a screen to be installed on a participating land agency’s vault toilet. Donors receive an email letting them know just where the screen they sponsored was installed. Since June 2016, sponsors have purchased nearly 900 of the screens to donate.

“It’s been a fun project to work on, and we still have a lot of work to do,” Watson says.

Tell Us About Your Most Unusual Cookbook

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Humans have been cooking by the book—or clay tablet—since about 1700 B.C. Modern cookbooks, meanwhile, come in endless varieties and serve a number of purposes. They can be gateways to new cuisines. They can be comforting collections of reference material. (Just look at The Joy of Cooking, which has eight editions and has been in print for 87 years.) Or they can be downright bizarre.

There’s no shortage of unusual cookbooks. Nostradamus, famous for his prophecies, published a cookbook of love potions and jam recipes. Hundreds of years later, Salvador Dali wrote a cookbook filled with vibrant illustrations and Surrealist musings. He also included recipes for tequila artichokes and crawfish with “Viking” herbs (that is, dill). What’s on your bookshelf?

Perhaps you own a slightly-menacing promotional cookbook for bananas from the 1970s. Or the Boy George cookbook, filled with macrobiotic recipes. Some wildly popular books and TV shows have tie-in cookbooks: Game of Scones, anyone? Or maybe you own a cookbook filled with recipes passed on by ghost cooks.

If you have an unusual cookbook, Gastro Obscura wants to see it! Send a picture, description, and the story of how you received your unusual cookbook to anne.ewbank@atlasobscura.com, with the subject line “Unusual Cookbook,” by Friday March 16 at 5 p.m. If you’ve made something from your cookbook, we’d love to hear about that too. We’ll publish our favorite reader stories in an upcoming article, so please include your full name and where you live in the email.

Book Towns Are Made for Book Lovers

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What makes a book town?

It can’t be too big—not a city, but a genuine town, usually in a rural setting. It has to have bookshops—not one or two, but a real concentration, where a bibliophile might spend hours, even days, browsing. Usually a book town begins with a couple of secondhand bookstores and later grows to offer new books, too.

But mostly, they have a lot of books for sale.

Hobart, New York, is a perfect example of how having one bookstore in a small town is nice, but having many bookstores together makes a place special—a destination. Since the 1970s, book towns like it have been springing up all over the world. There are now dozens of them, from Australia and Finland to India and South Korea.

In the forthcoming Book Towns, journalist Alex Johnson catalogues these most charming of tourist destinations. He spoke to Atlas Obscura about the pleasures of out-of-the-way places defined by their books.

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What makes a good book town?

Well, they’re all very picturesque. That’s one of the reasons they generally get picked. They’re away from cities, so rents are low. I think the main thing that makes a book town, what you need, is somebody really keen or a few people who are really keen to push it forward. Often, they’ve been in places where economically things have been a bit slim, or the population’s been decreasing as the younger people move away into the cities.

Hay-on-Wye, in Wales, was the first one, and it started in 1977. How have book towns changed over the past few decades?

I think they’re actually quite similar to when [bookseller] Richard Booth came up with the idea. He started Hay as a book town very much to regenerate it—to provide employment, keep people in Hay, and provide an actual tourist destination. Today it’s the same idea. Book towns are tiny little places, and people wouldn’t come to them otherwise, and everyone would disappear.

After we’ve gone through everyone getting excited about e-books and online reading, having something practical and in your hand is something that people are happy to travel for. They’re starting to come back to this idea of things that are homemade, things that are made, things you can hold and smell and touch. I think in locations that are particularly picturesque, those things come together, and people feel they are getting a proper physical experience.

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It seems like there’s tension there between the picturesque nature of a charming book town and this almost mercenary economic logic.

Absolutely. They’ve got to be quite business-minded and hardheaded about it, otherwise it won’t work. But I don’t think anybody’s going to make billions out of selling secondhand books, so it’s got to be people who are doing it for the love of it.

What does it take to set up a book town that will survive?

They’ve got to be sensible about providing a large amount of bookshops. You can’t do it with one or two. You need plenty. You need to cover a range of things. Some of the most successful ones have been where it’s not just bookselling. There are publishers or printers or artists or designers. It becomes a creative hub, where the books might be the jumping off point but there’s plenty around it. Even the most hardened bookworm is going to want to do something else—that’s where the picturesque element comes in.

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When you have a town like this with so many bookstores in one place, how do the businesses distinguish themselves from one another?

I think nearly all bookstore owners, especially secondhand ones, have their own interests. So they tend to specialize in things anyway. It’s very organic in the sense that people grow in the way that they want to, they want to specialize in things, or sell something else as well as books, or do printing as well as books.

There are a few places that have quite a strong central group, but most of them are quite loose. They nearly all have booksellers associations, but it’s quite like a friendly cooperative—helping each other while still looking out for their own businesses. They’re not trying to do each other down. They are genuinely trying to raise each others' profiles.

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If someone wanted to understand the range of book towns, what four or five would you send them to?

I would definitely go to Hay, because that’s the first one. They’ve got a good wide range of bookshops, and there’s a new book museum opening later this year there.

I would say … Paju Book City in South Korea. There’s a huge number of publishers and printers there, as well as books. Everywhere else, people are living there—in Paju, people don’t live there. They come in to work there. Everything is book-related.

Clunes, in Australia, has done a very good job of building themselves up. Originally it was a gold rush town, and they quite often shoot films there. They shot Mad Max there. They’re really pushing forward what can be done.

I think Wigtown, in Scotland, is a good example of a place that’s really regenerated. Twenty years ago, it was having a really tough time—shops and industries closing, people moving out. And they’ve absolutely turned it around. The guy who runs the biggest secondhand bookshop there, he’s just written a book called The Diary of a Bookseller. They’ve gone from nothing to doing a big literary festival and spin-offs, as well. And it’s a beautiful setting.

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What surprises people about book towns?

I think people are surprised that there are so many around the world. When I tell people here that there are 30 or 40 around the world, they’re taken aback. It’s one of those slightly hidden things. When people pick up [my] book, they’ll be amazed at how widespread it is.

So many of your books have to do with books. It seems like you love them! Why do you keep coming back to writing books about books?

I think there’s so much to do with books, apart from reading them and enjoying them. Book lore and book history and everything around them, to do with libraries or culture, I think it centers so much of civilization. It’s the physical nature of them. It’s the smell of them. That feeling of ownership, once you’ve read it and you own it. I think books are very comforting.

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