Sargeant Glass

One of my favourite pass times, which usually gets accomplished at the expense of something I need to get done not getting accomplished, is to browse Google Maps.  I love checking out far-flung places, mysterious little blips of colour splotches dotting the oceans in all corners of the vastness of the Earth.  Some of them I know, or recognize at very least.  Most I just notice while skimming over the map, shifting in and out in scale to locate the really tiny ones—the ones no one ever notices or even cares to discover.  Those are the ones that carry the most appeal.  Anyone can explore Paris or New York or Tokyo.  But have you ever heard of Gough Island?  How about the Orkneys?  Sark, anyone?

One of the best parts of teaching Grade 4, at least for me, is the social studies unit about exploration.  Since we can scarcely afford to explore our own back yards, doing any real traveling is of course out of the question.  However, a few years back, the government saw fit to invest in SmartBoards, which are interactive projection screens you conjure up with your laptop.  They were a great investment, if a little pricey and temperamental if not installed properly.  And lord help you if the bulbs burn out.  But when they work, you can do everything except cook breakfast with them.  Math sure can be a lot of fun when you manipulate virtual shapes and stuff.  Morning messages are chalk-dust free now (except when I use my actual chalk board, which I do almost daily anyway).   Atlases and globes—objects of my fascination when I was a child in Grade 4—are all but obsolete now, but who cares.  These interactive applications are a marvel to see, especially when you get Google Earth up and running.  Locating a place on the world map is like watching a super-fancy weather forecast—the ones where the Earth zooms in from space to the exact location.  Talk about exciting!  If you find this kind of thing boring, I can’t think of any better way to make it less so for you, but I’ll try my best.

I decided that rather than read books and copy notes, that I would take my class on a classroom exploration of some of the farthest-flung places in the world.  What appears to be uninteresting, uninhabited wastelands on the Google Map have turned out to be really neat places after all.  I mentioned the remote places interest me the most, and it turns out they interest my students as well, possibly due to my irrational enthusiasm for the material, but also because I decided to show them something different.  Last year, my group and my Grade 3 teammate explored Sable Island off the coast of Nova Scotia.  Most Maritimers know where Sable is, and its unique geography and history.  In short, it’s a large crescent-shaped sand dune in the Atlantic Ocean, and wild horses live there unhindered by humans.  I even went as far as to explore how much it would cost to go there.  Turns out I don’t have the $6000 you need to visit, but you never know. 

I chose to bring my kids on a trip to one of the harshest settlements on the face of the earth.  Svalbard is an archipelago in the Arctic Ocean, belonging to Norway, and roughly equidistant to the North Pole as the northernmost reaches of Canada’s Ellesmere Island (the one way up there; the little place called Resolute that you see on national weather forecasts is where I’m talking about).  It is semi-famous for having one of the world’s most comprehensive seed vaults.  They store seed samples from all over the world in a climate-controlled bunker below ground in the event of some great catastrophe, so in the future we can re-introduce crops, sort of like Noah’s Ark without the noisy animals and Noah’s fighting in-laws.  The islands of Svalbard are very remote, and are mostly ice-covered, save for the capital of Longyearsbyen and the surrounding countryside, which has some breathtaking landscape and a surprising amount of tourist-friendly destinations.  I found a news clip on YouTube about a Thai family who moved to Longyearsbyen a while back (many long years ago—sorry, couldn’t resist), who loved it so much they stayed.  That would be some kind of culture shock I would think.  I was getting cold just looking at the pictures.  At any rate, Google Maps provided links to dozens of pictures submitted from both the land and sea surrounding it, and the students were thrilled to see sunsets, whales, snowmobiles, and even polar bear warning signs.  I never even got to tell them about the seed vault, which is what brought me there in the first place.  I could have spent hours with them, and they would have been glued to the SmartBoard the whole time, but unfortunately, I have other subject matter to teach.  So over to the virtual shapes we went…

After a few weeks, I decided to introduce them to another far-reaching destination.  This time, I chose a place with which I am somewhat familiar from my early atlas-navigating days.  Tristan da Cunha is a small volcanic island in the South Atlantic.  It is a British dependency, administered from St. Helena, which is some 2000km to the north and famous in its own right as being the detention center for Napoleon for a while.  Tristan is known as being the most remote permanent settlement on earth, which is to say it is further away from its nearest town than anywhere else.  Now that sounds fantastic.  Think of how much writing I could get done there!  With average highs of 22 C and lows around 12, the climate sounds perfect.  And the only way in or out is by boat.  Forget the tropics, this sounds like heaven to me.

Tristan is a remarkable little island.  During the Influenza Pandemic of the 1910s, only Tristan got by with zero reported cases.  It is somewhat famous among stamp collectors for its unique and rare stamps and other sundries, which you can order from their website.  There is exactly one police officer, overseeing a population of under 300.  They use British sterling, and don’t issue their own coinage.  Internet is available, but if you think your Rogers coverage is bad, forget trying to Skype Tristanians anytime soon.  The capital ‘city’ is called Edinburgh of the Seven Seas.  I like that name even more than Longyearsbyen.  In photos, it looks kind of like St. John’s, if St.John’s was made of only cottages.  In the 1960s, the whole island was evacuated because of a volcanic eruption.  The entire population was housed in England for a couple years, but when the ordeal was over, they all elected to return home.  They sound like my kind of people.

Everyone on Tristan has one of only a handful of last names.  The first person to settle it was reportedly a man named William Glass, a Sargeant of the British Royal Marines.  To this day, the surname Glass is prominent on Tristan.  Others include Repetto, Hagan, and Green among others.  When I was researching this quaint little island, I couldn’t help but imagine myself as Sgt. Glass, setting foot on that remarkable island for the very first time ever.  Today, we can thank Neil Armstrong for stepping on the Moon for the first time, imagining who one day might first tread on Mars, or even beyond.  As kids we explore whenever and whatever we can.  Rarely, if ever, can we find something original, but it’s that innate wonder within us that keeps that light of our imaginations bright.  Imagination of course is where all of our innovations are conjured, and to be sure, all the scary ones as well.  But once in a while, one of us stumbles upon something new, something invigorating, something special.  It might me a discovery, a work of art, an idea, or maybe just a clearing in the woods near a small stream.  There aren’t any more Tristans out there, but there is no telling how many Sgt. Glass’ there are.  If you don’t believe me, come visit my students; there were 23 of us in one room the other day.