As we start our southward migration without reliable internet, here is a little story I wrote about one of our first sails in Brittany. Y'all can chew on this for a week or so until we can post news from the land cruise.
This story has now been publisehd in
The Island Review Magazine (June 2014).
* * *
“There she is! Mysterious Dumet Island!” Yves, blue
eyes sparkling mischievously, pointed to a rather unimpressive brown slab
appearing on the horizon beyond our bow.
I squinted
at it intently, searching for some physical oddity or telepathic emanations. As we sailed closer, the slab transformed into
a half-moon bay with a bright ribbon of sand and turquoise water protected by
dark, jagged rocks.
Still squinting, I turn to Yves. “Okay, I give up. Why is it mysterious?”
“Oh, there
are so many stories, you know,” he said excitedly. “They say the island was the site of some
ancient druid cult with mystical powers, and during the war, there were secret
military experiments here. It was
forbidden to go anywhere near the island for years.”
This was my
first time sailing with Yves, but I already understood that this spirited
octogenarian loved telling tall tales. I
looked dubiously at Luke, our skipper for this day sail, for some indication of
whether or not I should just politely let this drop and go down below to start
preparing lunch.
“No, it’s
true,” said Luke. “For several decades
after the war, a couple of elderly mystics lived there as caretakers, searching
for some sort of paranormal source of
power on the island.”
With growing
exasperation, I pressed for details, but after several volleys of one-line
teasers, each more bizarre than the last, I realized that I was unlikely to get
anything resembling a coherent account from either of these two.
Although we
had only recently moved to the south coast of my husband’s native Brittany in
France, I was already getting used to the legends and folklore that saturate
every rock, island, or inlet along the coast. The caves and grottoes cut into
Brittany’s rugged coastline are passageways to the land of the Korrigans,
diminutive nocturnal sprites of repugnant physical appearance and unpredictable
character who enjoy frightening humans and occasionally swapping their ugly
babies for more attractive human ones.
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| The coastline of the Korrigans. |
|
 |
| Inside a Korrigan grotto. |
The Bretons also have their own Atlantis myth, a
sunken city called Ys (pronounced eez),
traditionally situated in the Douarnenez Bay to the northwest, but with at
least a dozen other islands and coastal sites contending for the title.
Sometime around 400 B.C.E., Ys was one of the world’s most beautiful and
advanced civilisations, protected from the sea by a large dike and lock
system. The devil, in the form of a
charming knight, seduced the King’s young but sexually-perverse daughter and convinced her to steal the key to the lock system from her father. In short order, the city was sunk and the
King’s daughter transformed into a malevolent mermaid who still unleashes her
wrath on mariners sailing these waters.
As an aside, the legend tells us that the bodies of her lover-victims
are piled up in a ravine in the eerily beautiful river valley of the Huelgoat
forest, having its own share of mysteries.
With one of
the largest concentrations of megaliths in the world and human settlement that
spans the last 7000 years, Brittany has no lack of fodder for fantastic
fables. But unlike the typical Breton tales
involving fairies, druids, sorcerers, and trolls, my crewmates’ stories of
Dumet Island were peppered with more modern and possibly verifiable enigmas.
We furled
the sails and motored slowly up to anchor just off the beach. What was immediately mysterious to me was
that we had such a postcard-perfect beach to ourselves. Yves had mentioned
earlier that this was a forbidden zone during the war, and I began to wonder if
we were even supposed to be here at all, frightfully aware that
breaking-the-rules-when-one-is-almost-certain-not-to-be-caught is a favourite
French pastime. The solitude was,
however, anything but silent, with hundreds of screeching gulls signalling
their collective indignation at our presence until one of them apparently
suggested to the others that we might be sloppy eaters and they rapidly formed
a more congenial greeting committee flotilla at our stern.
Peeking up
over the dune grass and wind-carved hedges were the remains of a small
square fort that from the sea looked like something a child might draw; a
perfectly square block with a square opening in the center and two arched
windows on either side. In response to
my dismissive musings, I was informed that this was, in fact, a fort designed
by Sebastian Le Prestre Vauban, King Louis XIV’s military architect, whose
fortresses around France are widely considered to be some of the finest
examples of military architecture anywhere, many of which are now UNESCO World
Heritage Sites.
 |
| Vauban fort at Dumet. |
 |
| Close-up of Vauban fort at Dumet. |
Sobered, I pointed to
another circular construction sitting out on one of the spits of land
encircling the harbour, which our coastal pilot guidebook identified as the
ruins of the Fort Ré, built in 1756.
 |
| Fort Re |
 |
| Fort Re |
Pleasantly
anesthetized by the sun and the wine, lulled by the gentle rocking of the boat,
I was thoroughly pleased with my discovery of this little jewel of an island, now
protected as a bird sanctuary. I was,
however, wholly unsatisfied with the unresolved mysteries and unfinished
stories surrounding it. As we finished
our long languid lunch in the cockpit and headed home, I set myself the task of
filling in the missing bits of the story so that I could regale my next crew
with a more compelling tale.
 |
| Long languid lunch at Dumet Island. |
* * *
In carrying
out my mission, I fully expected to stumble onto the typical fairy-laden
fantasies to explain the stories that had been passed on to me. Instead, my first finding was that mysterious
little Dumet Island is, in fact, the geodesic pole of the world’s land masses.
In 1912,
French physicist Alphonse Berget addressed the French Academy of Sciences to demonstrate
that if you define a hemisphere on the globe that places the maximum of Earth’s
land masses in one half of the globe (the continental hemisphere) and the
maximum of water mass on the other half (the oceanic hemisphere), the pole of
the continental hemisphere is located at 47° 24’ 42” North, 2° 37’ 13” West, or
bang on top of little Dumet Island, measuring a mere 450 feet wide by 1800 feet
long. This finding came at a pivotal
time in geodesic science as the nations of the world (or at least the French)
were still settling the issue of the Prime Meridian. Following the 1884 International Meridian
Conference where the Prime Meridian was established in Greenwich, England, the
French continued to use their own Paris Meridian for time keeping purposes
until 1911, and didn’t get around to adopting the Greenwich Meridian for
geodesic referencing until 1914. While a world at war provided the winning argument for
adopting a global standard system of geodesy, the 1912 sinking of the Titanic may also have contributed to
convincing the French to accept Greenwich as the universal geodesic reference
point, when it was realized that the telegram sent from the French vessel La Touraine warning the Titanic of icebergs in the area had
issued this warning using Greenwich Mean Time but with locations still
referenced to the Paris Meridian.
The 1912
discovery of Dumet Island as the pole of the continental hemisphere may have
helped soften the blow over the loss of the Prime Meridian. While the French would be losing the honour
of having the 0° meridian running through Paris, they may reasonably have hoped
that Dumet Island, as the most central point to the majority of other inhabited
parts of the globe, would be adopted as a sort of zero point for calibrating a
system of universal time and distances. Several months after Berget’s finding was announced,
France hosted the first International Conference on Time, where they proposed
the Paris Observatory as the global central time office with the Eiffel Tower serving
as the most powerful wireless transmitter in Europe, with the argument that the
installations in Paris were the closest to the continental pole capable of
carrying out such a mission. Sadly, owing to the outbreak of World War I, the
Convention was never ratified, but by general agreement, the Paris Observatory
established the International Time Bureau and began carrying out its mission of
calibrating time and distance.
In the wake
of war, however, the discovery of the continental pole became little more than
a geographic curiosity and quickly faded from memory. In 1945, the work of Berget was further refined by the American geographer Samuel
Boggs, who confirmed Berget’s triangular area estimation for the pole, but
located his pole in the city of Nantes.
In 2000, an undocumented and possibly farcical claim put the location of
the pole at the site of the newly-opened Cyber-Laundromat in the town of
Damgan, about 7 miles north of Dumet Island.
But druids, mystics, and paranormal powers? Where did those stories come from? It is understandable that once the island was
conferred the title of Ombilicus Mundi (the
world’s bellybutton), it was also granted special powers as a center for all
things mystical. To my surprise, however, many of the legends surrounding Dumet
pre-date its discovery as the center of Earth’s landmasses.
Like many
sites along Brittany’s coast, the Dumet area has been inhabited since
the Neolithic period, and over the centuries has been a magnet for both
religious and military invasions. Celts,
Gauls, and Romans slept here, and according to legend, the Druids established
an important religious site on the island.
One Dumet myth speaks of a cult of women priestesses called the Samnites
who lived on the island and who, during one special day of the year, would
destroy and then rebuild the roof of their temple before nightfall. During this frenetic construction, if anyone
dropped her building materials, she was immediately torn apart by her sisters
as a human sacrifice. It has been suggested that this cult was linked to the
ancient Celtic holy festival Samhain, held on the day of the year that marked
the opening of a passageway between the world of the living and the dead. This celebration was held at the end of
autumn, corresponding to the more familiar Christianized version, All Hallows’
Eve and All Saints’ Day.
After
successive invasions by Danes, Saxons, and the Vikings, the Benedictines
managed to establish a foothold on the island that lasted over 700 years,
during which time, various religious miracles were alleged. In 1756, the French military built the circular
fort, which they named, rather inexplicably, after the Egyptian sun god
Ra. After less than 25 years of
occupation, Fort Ra (today Fort Ré) was curiously abandoned. In the early 1800s, the square Vauban fort
was constructed, and in the mid-1800s, renovations to the fort were said to be
carried out in the greatest secrecy, mostly at night. When the Nazis arrived in 1944, they promptly
encircled the island and issued official warnings forbidding any attempt to
approach it.
In 1955, a 30-ton vessel, the Grey Ganet, was found by fishermen at the headwaters of the near-by
Loire river estuary with no sign of her six man crew. Her home port identification had been painted
over and no official papers were ever found.
Strange traces, thought to be made by some sort of machinery, were found
on the deck. These same traces were
later found on Dumet Island.
Explanations put forth included alien abduction and offloading of top
secret cargo from the island. The
investigation at the time classified the affair as a banal case of illegal
trafficking by bandits plagued with transmission problems.
In the early
1950s, a French aristocrat-turned-occult-scientist, Robert de Fleury Valois and
his music-hall star wife moved into the remains of Fort Ré to serve as the
guardians of the island’s new lighthouse. They were also looking for a paranormal
phenomenon they called “the orange ray” (first Ra, then Ré, and now ray?) which
they claimed was a source of energy and longevity important for humanity. After 34 years of searching, aged 93 and 88,
the guardian and his wife left the island.
When asked if he was disappointed about not having found the orange ray,
he said he had come to realize that it was a terrible thing that should not be
found, explaining that every time man has found a natural source of power, such
as the atom, it has been used for evil.
“We’re the devils!” he
exclaimed.
The couple
also said they were happy to leave the island because the noise of the birds
was driving them crazy.
A few months
after my first encounter with Dumet, I was sailing in the area with a new
crew. As Dumet became visible over our
bow, I exclaimed “Ah, mysterious Dumet Island!” in keeping with what I took to
be the customary salute.
Jeanne, our
new crewmember, asked me why it was mysterious.
Poised to describe my recent findings, I stopped, suddenly overwhelmed
by the task. What do I say? Druid cults? Portals between the world of the
living and the dead? Secret military
experiments? Life-prolonging energy rays?
I decided to
take a conservative approach, sticking to the facts, and simply described Dumet
as the pole of the continental hemisphere.
Jeanne’s face lit up.
“I did heard about that a few years ago, but I thought it was a
joke. Something about the grand
opening of that new laundromat in Damgan?”
As we
drifted past the island, I could hear the mocking laughter of the gulls.
