Last Chance to See

directly above me and kept bashing me against the rock face whenever I tried to make for the surface.
    Okay, I thought, I’ve got the point. This is why the island is relatively unspoilt. I made one more lunge upward, just as those onshore succeeded at last in pushing the boat away from me. This allowed me to get my head up above water and cling on to a crack in the rock. With a lot more slipping and sliding and thrashing in the heavy swell, I managed finally to maneuver myself up to within arm’s reach of Mark and the others, who yanked me urgently up and onto the rock. I sat in a spluttering, bleeding heap protesting that I was fine and all I needed was a quiet corner to go and die in and everything would be all right.
    The sea had been swelling heavily for the two or three hours it had taken us to reach the island and it seemed as if my stomach had heaved something approaching my entire body weight into the sea, so by this time I was feeling pretty wobbly and strung out, and my day on Round Island passed in rather a blur. While Mark went with Wendy Strahm, the botanist, to try and find some of the species of plants and animals that exist only here on this single island, I went and sat in the sun near a palm tree called Beverly and felt dazed and sorry for myself.
    I knew that the palm tree was called Beverly because Wendy told me that was what she had christened it. It was a bottle palm, so called because it is shaped like a Chianti bottle, and it was one of the eight that remain on Round Island, the only eight wild ones in the world.
    Who on earth, I wondered as I sat next to Beverly in a sort of companionable gloom, gets to name the actual islands?
    I mean, here was one of the most amazing islands in theworld. It looked utterly extraordinary, as if the moon itself was rising from the sea—except that where the moon would be cold and still, this was hot and darting with life. Though it appeared to be dusty and barren at first sight, the craters with which the surface was pocked were full of dazzling white-tailed tropic birds, brilliant Telfair’s skinks, and Guenther’s geckos.
    You would think that if you had to come up with a name for an island like this, you’d invite a couple of friends over, get some wine, and make an evening of it. Not just say, “Oh, it’s a little bit round, let’s call it ‘Round Island.’ ” Apart from anything else, it isn’t even particularly round. There was another island just visible on the horizon, which was much more nearly round, but that is called Serpent Island, presumably to honour the fact that, unlike Round Island, it hasn’t got any snakes on it. And there was yet another island I could see which sloped steadily from a peak at one end down to the sea at the other, and that, unaccountably, was called Flat Island. I began to see that whoever had named the islands probably had made a bit of an evening of it after all.
    The reason that Round Island has remained a refuge for unique species of skinks, geckos, boas, palm trees, and even grasses that died out long ago on Mauritius is not simply that it is hard for man to get onto the island, but that it has proved completely impossible for rats to get ashore. Round Island is one of the largest tropical islands in the world (at a bit over three hundred acres) on which rats do not occur.
    Not that Round Island is undamaged—far from it. A hundred and fifty years ago, before sailors introduced goats and rabbits onto the island, it was covered in hardwood forest, which the foreign animals destroyed. That is why from a distance and to the untutored eye, such as mine, the island appeared to be more or less barren at first sight. Only a naturalist would be able to tell you that the few odd-shaped palms and clumps of grass dotted about the place on the hot, dry, dusty land were unique and unspeakably precious.

    Precious to whom? And why?
    Does it actually matter very much to anyone other than a bunch of obsessed naturalists that the eight bottle palm trees on Round Island are the only ones to be found in the wild anywhere in the world? Or that the
Hyophorbe amaricaulis
(a palm tree so rare that it doesn’t have any name other than its scientific one) standing in the Curepipe Botanic Gardens in Mauritius is the only one of its kind in existence? (The tree was only discovered by chance while the ground on which it stands was being cleared in order to construct the Botanic Gardens. It was about to be cut down.)
    There is no