"Inagua" by Robert Klingel

There are few really good books written about the Bahamas. “The Out Island Doctor” and “Wind from the Carolinas” about completes the list. So imagine White Pepper's surprise to find a treasure in a gift shop on the Chesapeake--”Inagua” by Robert Klingel. Written in 1940 and largely forgotten, it was reissued by his daughter due to local demand in the Chesapeake where Mr. Klingel was well regarded mostly for his boat work and environmental efforts.

Robert Klingel was a young man and budding naturalist when he set out with his friend Wallie Coleman for the Caribbean to study lizards. They had commissioned a replica of Joshua Slocum’s Spray. Without any real seamanship they survived a horrible storm and were eventually ship wrecked on the island of Inagua. The year was 1930. Inagua is the southern most of the Bahamian archipelago. It was even more forlorn and God-forsaken than is it now which is saying something.

Rather than abandon everything he stayed a year on Inagua doing naturalist studies. Years later he returned with primitive diving apparatus to continue his studies on the reef.

In 1940 he wrote a comprehensive account of his adventures and studies. The result was a wonderfully entertaining book. The first few chapters review his preparations and voyage. Then there is a marvelous section about life on Inagua early in the depression. The bulk of the book is a series of essays about the geography, geology, flora and fauna of the island. There are several chapters about the magnificent flamingos that live and breed in the interior of the island. The last three chapters reprise his pioneering studies of the reef with an air helmet.

It is a beautiful book and available at Amazon. For Jan and I it enlarged our appreciation of the subtle beauty and delicate ecology of these desert island in the southwest Atlantic.

For the reader who has ventured this far let me add that the writing is reflective of biology as it was taught in the 1920's and 30's. Evolution was fang and claw. “A death for every life, ” in Klingel's words. This view of evolution, while strictly true, is no longer taught in school. The gory winner take all view of nature informed Nazi ideology and was using to justify killing Slavs and Jews as “natural.” Now teachers emphasize one set of DNA versus another. Same idea, just gentler consequences.