Île Saint-Paul
   HOME

TheInfoList



OR:

is an
island An island or isle is a piece of land, distinct from a continent, completely surrounded by water. There are continental islands, which were formed by being split from a continent by plate tectonics, and oceanic islands, which have never been ...
forming part of the
French Southern and Antarctic Lands The French Southern and Antarctic Lands (, TAAF) is an overseas territory ( or ) of France. It consists of: * Adélie Land (), the French claim on the continent of Antarctica. * Crozet Islands (), a group in the southern Indian Ocean, south ...
(, TAAF) in the
Indian Ocean The Indian Ocean is the third-largest of the world's five oceanic divisions, covering or approximately 20% of the water area of Earth#Surface, Earth's surface. It is bounded by Asia to the north, Africa to the west and Australia (continent), ...
, with an area of . The island is located about south of the larger
Île Amsterdam (), also known as Amsterdam Island or New Amsterdam (), is an island of the French Southern and Antarctic Lands in the southern Indian Ocean that together with neighbouring Île Saint-Paul to the south forms one of the five districts of the t ...
, northeast of the
Kerguelen Islands The Kerguelen Islands ( or ; in French commonly ' but officially ', ), also known as the Desolation Islands (' in French), are a group of islands in the subantarctic, sub-Antarctic region. They are among the Extremes on Earth#Remoteness, most i ...
, and southeast of
Réunion Réunion (; ; ; known as before 1848) is an island in the Indian Ocean that is an overseas departments and regions of France, overseas department and region of France. Part of the Mascarene Islands, it is located approximately east of the isl ...
. It is an important breeding site for
seabird Seabirds (also known as marine birds) are birds that are adaptation, adapted to life within the marine ecosystem, marine environment. While seabirds vary greatly in lifestyle, behaviour and physiology, they often exhibit striking convergent ...
s. A scientific research cabin on the island is used for scientific or ecological short campaigns, but there is no permanent population. It is under the authority of a senior administrator on Réunion.


Geography

Île Saint-Paul is a
volcanic island Geologically, a volcanic island is an island of volcanic origin. The term high island can be used to distinguish such islands from low islands, which are formed from sedimentation or the uplifting of coral reefs (which have often formed ...
with a triangular shape that measures no more than at its widest point. It is the top of an active volcano; the volcano last erupted in 1793 (from its SW flank), and is rocky with steep cliffs on the east side. The thin stretch of rock that used to close off the crater collapsed in 1780, admitting the sea through a channel; the entrance is only a few meters deep, thus allowing only very small ships or boats to enter the crater. The interior basin, wide and deep, is surrounded by steep walls up to high. There are active thermal springs. The island is antipodal of Cheyenne County,
Colorado Colorado is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States. It is one of the Mountain states, sharing the Four Corners region with Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah. It is also bordered by Wyoming to the north, Nebraska to the northeast, Kansas ...
, one of the few places in the
continental United States The contiguous United States, also known as the U.S. mainland, officially referred to as the conterminous United States, consists of the 48 adjoining U.S. states and the District of Columbia of the United States in central North America. The te ...
with a non-oceanic antipode.


Geology

The island is located on the mainly under sea Amsterdam-Saint Paul Plateau which is of volcanic hotspot origin, with the currently active Amsterdam-Saint Paul hotspot believed to be located close to the island. The aphyric (no
phenocryst image:montblanc granite phenocrysts.JPG, 300px, Granites often have large feldspar, feldspathic phenocrysts. This granite, from the Switzerland, Swiss side of the Mont Blanc massif, has large white phenocrysts of plagioclase (that have trapezoid sh ...
s) basalts found on Saint Paul are distinct from other basalts found to date on the Amsterdam-Saint Paul Plateau, being mildly alkalic,
incompatible element In petrology and geochemistry, an incompatible element is one that is unsuitable in size and/or charge to the cation sites of the minerals in which it is included. It is defined by a partition coefficient between rock-forming minerals and melt ...
-enriched and highly fractionated. The island is no more than 400,000 years old and was formed by magma that was a simple binary mixture between upper mantle and the Amsterdam-Saint Paul hotspot plume.


History


Early sightings

Île Saint-Paul was first discovered in 1559 by the Portuguese. The island was mapped, described in detail and recorded in paintings by members of the crew of the '' nau'' ''São Paulo'', among them Father Manuel Álvares and the chemist Henrique Dias. Álvares and Dias correctly calculated the latitude as 38° South. The ship was commanded by Rui Melo da Câmara and was part of the Portuguese India Armada commanded by Jorge de Sousa. The ''São Paulo'', which also carried women and had sailed from Europe and stopped in
Brazil Brazil, officially the Federative Republic of Brazil, is the largest country in South America. It is the world's List of countries and dependencies by area, fifth-largest country by area and the List of countries and dependencies by population ...
, would be the subject of a dramatic and moving story of survival after it sank south of Sumatra. The next confirmed sighting was made by Dutchman Harwick Claesz de Hillegom on 19 April 1618. There were further sightings of the island through the 17th century. One of the first detailed descriptions of it, and possibly the first landing, was made in December 1696 by Willem de Vlamingh.


19th century

In sailing-ship days captains would occasionally use the island as a check on their navigation before heading north. Saint-Paul was occasionally visited by explorers, fishermen, and sealers in the 18th and 19th centuries, among which was the American sealer ''General Gates'', which called at the island in April 1819. George William Robinson, an American sealer, was left on the island to hunt seals, and stayed there for 23 months until the ''General Gates'' returned for him in March 1821. Robinson subsequently returned to Saint-Paul in 1826 to gather sealskin, sailing from
Hobart Hobart ( ) is the capital and most populous city of the island state of Tasmania, Australia. Located in Tasmania's south-east on the estuary of the River Derwent, it is the southernmost capital city in Australia. Despite containing nearly hal ...
aboard his own vessel, the schooner ''Hunter''. The sealing period lasted from 1789 to 1876. Sealing visits are recorded by 60 vessels, four of which ended in shipwreck. Sealing era relics include the ruins of huts and inscriptions. France's claim to the island dates from 1843, when a Capitain Mieroslawski re-discovered the island with a group of fishermen from
Réunion Réunion (; ; ; known as before 1848) is an island in the Indian Ocean that is an overseas departments and regions of France, overseas department and region of France. Part of the Mascarene Islands, it is located approximately east of the isl ...
; interested in setting up a fishery on Saint-Paul, Mieroslawski pressed the Governor of Réunion to take possession of both Saint-Paul and Amsterdam Island. This was performed by means of an official decree dated 8 June 1843, and on 1 July, Martin Dupeyrat, commanding the ship ''L'Olympe'', landed on Amsterdam Island and then on Saint-Paul on 3 July, and hoisted the tricolor. Surviving evidence of this claim is an inscribed rock situated on the edge of Saint-Paul's crater lake, inscribed "Pellefournier Emile Mazarin de Noyarez, Grenoble, Canton de Sassenage, Département de l'Isère, 1844". The decree giving the islands St Paul and Amsterdam in possession of Mieroslawski is located in Archives Maritimes in Paris. All fishery operations were, however, abandoned in 1853, when the French government renounced its possession of the two islands. The first good map of the island was not drawn up until 1857, when the Austrian frigate ''
Novara Novara (; Novarese Lombard, Novarese: ) is the capital city of the province of Novara in the Piedmont (Italy), Piedmont region in northwest Italy, to the west of Milan. With 101,916 inhabitants (on 1 January 2021), it is the second most populous ...
'' landed a team which studied the flora, fauna, and geology from November to December. On the 2nd of January 1865, the Confederate warship, the CSS Shenandoah, stopped briefly at Saint-Paul on its way to Australia. The ship had difficulty passing through the thick kelp field growing in the island's sheltered interior harbor. Several sailors explored the island and returned with a penguin, some eggs, and a chicken. They also surprised two French fishermen who informed the Confederates that they were used to seeing no one for six to eight months of the year. In 1871, a British troop transport, HMS ''Megaera'', was wrecked on the island. Most of the 400 persons on board had to remain upwards of three months before being rescued. A short, impressionistic account of the two French residents encountered by the shipwrecked crew appears in Judith Schalansky's '' Atlas of Remote Islands'' (2010). In September 1874, a French astronomical mission conveyed by the sailing ship ''La Dive'' spent just over three months on Saint-Paul to observe the
transit of Venus A transit of Venus takes place when Venus passes directly between the Sun and the Earth (or any other superior planet), becoming visible against (and hence obscuring a small portion of) the solar disk. During a transit, Venus is visible as ...
; geologist Charles Vélain took the opportunity to make a significant geological survey of the island. In 1889, Charles Lightoller, who was later to become famous as the Second Officer of the RMS ''Titanic'', whose sinking he survived, was shipwrecked here for eighty eight days when the sailing
barque A barque, barc, or bark is a type of sailing ship, sailing vessel with three or more mast (sailing), masts of which the fore mast, mainmast, and any additional masts are Square rig, rigged square, and only the aftmost mast (mizzen in three-maste ...
''Holt Hill'' ran aground. He describes the shipwreck and the island in his autobiography, ''Titanic and Other Ships''. Lightoller speculated that pirates used the island and their treasure could be buried in its caves. In 1892, the crew of the French sloop ''Bourdonnais'', followed by the ship ''L'Eure'' in 1893, again took possession of Saint-Paul and Amsterdam Island in the name of the French government.


20th century

In 1928, the ''Compagnie Générale des Îles Kerguelen'' recruited René Bossière and several Bretons and Madagascans to establish a spiny lobster cannery on Saint-Paul, "La Langouste Française". In March 1930, at the end of the second season, most of the employees left, but seven of them stayed on the island to guard the installations, supposedly for just a few months. The promised relief arrived much too late. When the ship finally came, in December 1930, five people had died, mostly from lack of food and scurvy: Paule Brunou (a child born on the island who died two months after her birth), Emmanuel Puloc'h, François Ramamonzi, Victor Brunou, and Pierre Quillivic. Only three survivors were rescued. This event has since come to be known as ''Les Oubliés de Saint-Paul'' ("the forgotten ones of Saint Paul"). A few years later in 1938, the crew of a French fishing boat was stranded on the island. Distress calls sent by the crew over short-wave radio were fortuitously received 11,000 miles away in the United States. The message was relayed to the Navy and the French consul in San Francisco, while 12-year-old Neil Taylor, an amateur radio operator in California, made contact with the stranded crew and assured them that help was on the way.


Environment

The island has a cool
oceanic climate An oceanic climate, also known as a marine climate or maritime climate, is the temperate climate sub-type in Köppen climate classification, Köppen classification represented as ''Cfb'', typical of west coasts in higher middle latitudes of co ...
and the slopes of the volcano are covered in grass. It is a breeding site for subantarctic fur seals,
southern elephant seal The southern elephant seal (''Mirounga leonina'') is one of two species of elephant seals. It is the largest member of the clade Pinnipedia and the order Carnivora, as well as the largest extant marine mammal that is not a cetacean. It gets its ...
s and rockhopper penguins. It was also the breeding site for an endemic flightless duck and several kinds of
petrel Petrels are tube-nosed seabirds in the phylogenetic order Procellariiformes. Description Petrels are a monophyletic group of marine seabirds, sharing a characteristic of a nostril arrangement that results in the name "tubenoses". Petrels enco ...
before the introduction of exotic predators and herbivores, including
black rat The black rat (''Rattus rattus''), also known as the roof rat, ship rat, or house rat, is a common long-tailed rodent of the stereotypical rat genus ''Rattus'', in the subfamily Murinae. It likely originated in the Indian subcontinent, but is n ...
s, house mice,
European rabbit The European rabbit (''Oryctolagus cuniculus'') or coney is a species of rabbit native to the Iberian Peninsula (Spain, Portugal and Andorra) and southwestern France. It is the only extant species in the genus ''Oryctolagus''. The European rab ...
s, pigs and goats during the 19th century or earlier. The pigs and goats have since disappeared or been eradicated. Black rats were eradicated in January 1997 following an aerial drop of 13.5 tonnes of brodifacoum anticoagulant poison baits over the island.Micol & Jouventin (2002).


Important Bird Area

The island, with the adjacent islet of Quille Rock, has been identified as an
Important Bird Area An Important Bird and Biodiversity Area (IBA) is an area identified using an internationally agreed set of criteria as being globally important for the conservation of bird populations. IBA was developed and sites are identified by BirdLife Int ...
(IBA) by
BirdLife International BirdLife International is a global partnership of non-governmental organizations that strives to conserve birds and their habitats. BirdLife International's priorities include preventing extinction of bird species, identifying and safeguarding i ...
because it supports several breeding
seabird Seabirds (also known as marine birds) are birds that are adaptation, adapted to life within the marine ecosystem, marine environment. While seabirds vary greatly in lifestyle, behaviour and physiology, they often exhibit striking convergent ...
s. The island's subtropical location gives it an avifauna distinct from that of
subantarctic The sub-Antarctic zone is a physiographic region in the Southern Hemisphere, located immediately north of the Antarctic region. This translates roughly to a latitude of between 46th parallel south, 46° and 60th parallel south, 60° south of t ...
islands and contains several breeding species which are rare in the region. Saint Paul's seabirds nested mainly on Quille Rock until rat eradication allowed some species, notably MacGillivray's prions and great-winged petrels, to recolonise the main island. Other species include a colony of some 9000 pairs of
northern rockhopper penguin The northern rockhopper penguin, Moseley's rockhopper penguin, or Moseley's penguin (''Eudyptes moseleyi'') is a penguin species native to the southern Indian Ocean, Indian and Atlantic Oceans. It is described as distinct from the southern rockho ...
s, about 20 pairs of sooty albatrosses, a few pairs of Indian yellow-nosed albatrosses, and small numbers of Australasian gannets, fairy prions, little and flesh-footed shearwaters,
Wilson's storm petrel Wilson's storm petrel (''Oceanites oceanicus''), also known as Wilson's petrel, is a small seabird of the austral storm petrel family Oceanitidae. It is one of the most abundant bird species in the world and has a circumpolar distribution mainly ...
s and sooty terns. The island might once have had a species of duck as a painting from 1793 shows one. However, it is not clear if this is conspecific with the Amsterdam wigeon (''Mareca marecula'') or a separate
taxon In biology, a taxon (back-formation from ''taxonomy''; : taxa) is a group of one or more populations of an organism or organisms seen by taxonomists to form a unit. Although neither is required, a taxon is usually known by a particular name and ...
. No specimens have been found though, so the existence of this cannot be proven.BirdLife International. (2012). Important Bird Areas factsheet: Île Saint Paul. Downloaded from http://www.birdlife.org on 2012-01-08.


See also

* List of volcanoes in French Southern and Antarctic Lands *
Administrative divisions of France The administrative divisions of France are concerned with the institutional and territorial organization of French territory. These territories are located in many parts of the world. There are many administrative divisions, which may have ...
*
French overseas departments and territories Overseas France (, also ) consists of 13 French territories outside Europe, mostly the remnants of the French colonial empire that remained a part of the French state under various statuses after decolonisation. Most are part of the Europea ...
*
Islands controlled by France in the Indian and Pacific oceans This is a list of islands of France, including both metropolitan France and French overseas islands. Ranking of French islands By area All French islands over , ranked by decreasing area. By population List of the most populated French i ...
*
List of Antarctic and subantarctic islands This is a list of Antarctic and sub-Antarctic islands. * Antarctic islands are, in the strict sense, the islands around mainland Antarctica, situated on the Antarctic Plate, and south of the Antarctic Convergence. According to the terms of the A ...
*
Temperate grasslands, savannas, and shrublands Temperate grasslands, savannas, and shrublands are terrestrial biomes defined by the World Wide Fund for Nature. The predominant vegetation in these biomes consists of grass and/or shrubs. The climate is temperate and ranges from Semi-arid clima ...


References


Notes


Sources

* *


External links

* *
Pictures of Île Saint-Paul

Antipodes of the USA

Isla de Saint Paul
(Spanish) {{DEFAULTSORT:Saint-Paul, Ile
Saint Paul Paul, also named Saul of Tarsus, commonly known as Paul the Apostle and Saint Paul, was a Christian apostle ( AD) who spread the teachings of Jesus in the first-century world. For his contributions towards the New Testament, he is generally ...
Uninhabited islands of France Former populated places in the Indian Ocean Île Amsterdam Island restoration Stratovolcanoes of France Important Bird Areas of Île Amsterdam Islands of the Indian Ocean Volcanoes of the French Southern and Antarctic Lands Seal hunting Submarine calderas
Île Saint-Paul is an island forming part of the French Southern and Antarctic Lands (, TAAF) in the Indian Ocean, with an area of . The island is located about south of the larger Île Amsterdam , northeast of the Kerguelen Islands, and southeast of Réuni ...