Yves Chesselet was in his 20s when he found his calling as a hermit protecting seabirds on tiny, remote islands — which led to a life of confrontation with seals.
He spent a total of 17 years living on three such islands off the coast of Namibia, saving the breeding colonies of penguins, gannets and bank cormorants from the depredations of these predators.
In the process he became famous among leading conservationists and ornithologists as the go-to guy for this task, a niche career if ever there was one. Now he’s about to earn wider recognition with the local release of My Mercury, a documentary written and directed by his elder sister, Joelle Chesselet.
Premiering in South Africa this month as part of the Encounters documentary film festival, the film focuses on the eight years Yves spent on Mercury Island, 3ha of barren rock 800m off the coast 100km north of Luderitz, in the 1990s.
It uses extensive footage that Yves shot himself on the island with a Hi8 camcorder – a gripping video diary in which he lays himself bare, figuratively and literally, documenting his passion for the island, his war against the seals and his own plunge into despair.
He comes across as a figure in the mould of Eugene Marais, a naturalist whose meticulous observations have enriched science, and a man struggling with addiction. While Yves may not be a literary figure of Marais’s stature, his filmmaker sister has turned his videos — and his written diaries that fill eight A4 books — into a priceless record.
“It’s such a unique access to a character, it’s not invented, there’s no lies. It’s a story from the inside out,” Joelle tells the FM from her home in Kommetjie.
So intensely personal are the videos and diaries, Yves, 63, agreed to the documentary only because of the tight sibling bond he forged with Joelle during a fraught childhood.
“There’s a lot of love in that film. From me, to him,” says Joelle. “And admiration.”
She first filmed Yves in the late 1980s after he started his seabird protection career on another island off Namibia, Ichaboe, and started keeping a diary.
“He showed me his diaries … I just thought, this is a compelling story. I was obsessed with the idea of an island, the idea of projection from an inner landscape, solitude and what comes up in solitude, how various tropes of the human psyche are acted out on an island,” Joelle says.
“Yves being such an impenetrable human … He’s so kind of held inside himself but so expansive in his imagination. So his diaries were incredibly inspiring, because I didn’t know this person.”
A Sisyphean task
Mercury Island was named by early sailors for the way it shudders like quicksilver when the Atlantic waves crash into a huge cavern at its core. The film introduces the island with a line from Lawrence Green: “This is the place where one man after another has gone mad.”
And Yves was one of them. After two or three years on Mercury, the trauma of his war against the seals caused a nervous breakdown, and he had to be airlifted off by helicopter.
“[Dealing with the seals] is what made me sick for the next four, five years,” Yves tells the FM. “That kind of shit builds up in your system. It’s all to do with the seals. People are going to have an opinion, about, you know, how cute they are, how amazing they are, but there’s the other side of the coin; because that amazingness is what makes them a problem, because they’re too good at what they do.”
And what they do is catch and eat penguins, gannets and other seabirds.
“When you wake up, the first thing you do is chase 20,000 seals into the water before breakfast. You’ve got to chase them again. You’ve got to chase them four, five, six times a day.”
Yves spent six months recovering in Walvis Bay, then returned to Mercury — despite his inner turmoil, it was the only life he wanted.
Solitude didn’t bother him. “Especially when I was there on Mercury Island. Wow! Sealing, research, maintenance to the buildings, expeditions into the desert, crayfishing … I could do what I wanted and nobody was my boss.”
Yves now works for Cape Nature at Lamberts Bay — shepherding seals away from the gannet colony on Bird Island.
In making My Mercury Joelle collaborated, among others, with Pippa Ehrlich of My Octopus Teacher fame and London-based editor Jinx Godfrey, whose credits include Man on Wire, Chernobyl and Black Mirror.
“It’s rare to encounter a rich and layered story such as that of Yves,” Godfrey says. “The wealth of archival footage he shot allowed me to immerse the audience in his unique world, seeing through his eyes, feeling how he felt and ride with him on his rollercoaster journey on an inhospitable island. He was Robinson Crusoe, Grizzly Man and beyond; riveting and unforgettable.”
* My Mercury is showing at The Bioscope in Joburg on June 22 and the Labia in Cape Town on June 25 as part of the Encounters Film Festival
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