Inagua: Which Is the Name of a Very Lonely and Nearly Forgotten Island

by Gilbert C. Klingel

Book by Klingel, Gilbert

416 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1997

About the author

Gilbert Klingel (1908–1983) was a naturalist, boat-builder, adventurer, author, and contributor to the Baltimore Sun. For a time he was affiliated with the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and was a long time member of the Maryland Natural History Society.

He is best known for his book about the Chesapeake Bay, The Bay, winner of the John Burroughs Medal.

Reviews

[Ruth · Rating 4 out of 5]

So this guy tries to go to this one island one a boat, and he's got all these crazy books and equipment, but then he ends up getting shipwrecked on a different island and just stays there for a while and watches the birds and the crabs and whatever else there is. And then he comes back to the island at a later date and does a bunch of diving at a coral reef off of the island with a big clunky old helmet and a human being pumping his air from above. I found it so interesting and I really felt like I was there with him feeling and thinking and wondering all the things. The way he writes about the people, though, is a little bit uncomfortable. I often have problems with the ways naturalists write about people. I mean, to be fair, there are lots of problems, not exclusive to naturalists, about how people write about each other, and this book has got some of them. Another thing that's a bit disconcerting is how he stops to take specimens every once in a while- that takes me out of the moment a little bit. But as a whole, yeah, I'm into it.

[Eldon]

Well, I happened across this book by accident: while searching the American Museum Novitates for the classic Frost / Etheridge work on the Iguana (Total evidence, sequence alignment, evolution of Polychrotid lizards, and a reclassification of the Iguania (Squamata: Iguania), for those of you who care), I typed Inagua by accident and came across this memoir by Gilbert Klingel, an amateur naturalist and adventurer, better known for The Bay, his influential book about the Chesapeake.

Inspired by Joshua Slocum and his trip around the world in the 1890s in the ship Slocum named The Spray, Klingel outfits a boat of nearly identical design. Through a series of mishaps primarily of his own making, Klingel and his close companion Wally Coleman (characterized as tall, blond, and Nordic) are shipwrecked in the late 1930s on the island of Inagua, southernmost and third largest island in the Bahamas.

Although most of his instruments are lost, Klingel decides nonetheless to stay, take pictures with his salvaged camera, and explore the island. Wally, despite his close relationship with Gilbert, decamps back to Greenwich Village, leaving Gilbert to have adventures on his own.

The book has a number of nice photographs of flora and fauna, and has a sense of adventure and language clearly influenced by Robinson Crusoe. This at times jars the modern reader, who can only wince at Klingel's depiction of the people living there as barely enlightened savages. It is hard to tell if Klingel is having fun emulating Crusoe, or is simply emulating Crusoe for lack of any better ideas -- this is his first book, and one can see the growth in his writing ability in reading The Bay.

Even so, there are some nice depictions of a very sleepy island in a very remote corner of what remains (for a few years longer) that beast we deplore as The British Empire.

[Katharina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful tale of adventure, scientific investigations of the Natural World on a Bahamian Island.