First Sight of Tenerife

I have just flown to The Fortunate Isles. As the plane flew down alongside the coast, I found a new pleasure in being able to identify and name the places we passed: Corona Forestal, Punta de Teno, Los Gigantes, Montaña Amarilla, Montaña Roja. Their names are way-markers, directions: Forest Crown, The Giants, Yellow Mountain, Red Mountain. I’d felt a similar pleasure when, as an adult, I’d found a hand-drawn map and discovered the names of the fields and woods surrounding the house I’d grown up in.
 
Descending through white to the blue-blues and brickish reds, I admired the patterns and tracks we humans make on the earth, and how, from the sky, the volcano, El Teide, looks like the lips of a mythic fish puckering at the surface. The corona forests surrounding it, are the foothills that Alexander von Humboldt trekked through to climb Mount Teide, and this is the island that Charles Darwin dreamed of coming to.
 
An astonishing book was published three years ago: Andrea Wulf’s biography of Humboldt, The Invention of Nature. In it, she captures this place, what it meant and means to naturalists, geologists and scientists, as well as the circle of thinkers, artists and polymaths that were fusing ideas through meeting, or reading each others work: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Muir. Humboldt spent six days here collecting samples. A young, seasick Darwin travelled here on the Beagle, but an outbreak of cholera in England meant they weren’t permitted to go ashore. Captain Fitzroy wrote of that day: “This was a great disappointment to Mr Darwin, who had cherished a hope of visiting the peak. To see it -- to anchor and be on the point of landing, yet be obliged to turn away without the slightest prospect of beholding Teneriffe again -- was indeed to him a calamity.”

In his journal, on January 6th 1832 whilst sailing into Santa Cruz, Darwin wrote:

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We came in sight of Teneriffe at day break…Point Naga, which we are doubling, is a rugged uninhabited mass of lofty rock with a most remarkable bold and varied outline. In drawing it you could not make a line straight. Everything has a beautiful appearance: the colours are so rich and soft, the peak has just shown itself above the clouds. It towers in the sky, twice as high as I should have dreamed of looking for it. A dense bank of clouds entirely seperates the snowy top from its rugged base. It is now about 11 oclock, and I must have another gaze at this long wished for object of my ambition.”
 
Later that day, he added another entry: “Oh misery, misery…We have left perhaps one of the most interesting places in the world, just at the moment when we were near enough for every object to create, without satisfying, our utmost curiosity. The abrupt valleys which divided in parallel rows of brown & desolate hills were spotted with patches of light green vegetation & gave the scenery to me a novel appearance… Already can I understand Humboldts enthusiasm about tropical nights, the sky is so clear & lofty, & stars innumerable shine so bright, that like little moons they cast their glitter on the waves.”

I think if he had been able to dock, this island would have another chapter to its history, a key part in his theory of evolution and book On the Origin of Species.
 
I have never experienced nature as it is here: heather the size of trees, waka-waka birds that glide above you in the dark and sound more like practical jokes, fire-resident pines, blue chaffinches, plants that I’m used to seeing in pots, are forests with eagles roosting in them, and other plants seem so unreal, you’d think you were hallucinating them. All my life, I was so used to seeing wild animals in single figures, so when I swam for the first time in a volcanic reef, with a vast herd of fish, I forgot I couldn’t swear underwater and flooded my mouth with sea. There are many species where the only place they exist on earth, is here, on this or adjacent islands, in the snowy bowl of the volcano, in sub-tropical cloud, or laurel forests. They carry their place names: Teide Violet, Canary Island Pines, Tenerife Blue Chaffinch.
 
After leaving the airport, the first thing I did was go to a local harbour and leap into the water. As I was getting changed I saw two children snorkeling. One lifted her head and said something to the other. Manta was the word the air caught - Spanish for blanket. They were following a stingray. When I was over in the spring, on my last day, I finally got to swim with one: an Eagle Ray, with its dolphin-shaped head. I had almost given up on finding them, but two rowdy men were getting in at the harbour steps, so I thought I’d wait a little longer. I turned and put my head back down and there it was, with me in its wake for the next hour. They move in the water as if blown, and seem to fly more than swim.
 
The modern name for these seven islands is Las Islas Canarias, but I prefer the romance and abundance of the ancient name for this archipelago. It’s how I feel when here.