Isle of the Forbidden, With a Tinge of Fantasy Island

A dinghy drifts outside the Bay of Dolphins in the cool mauve of dawn. Three tourists sit on the bow, waiting for the spectacle to begin.

Before the sun rises to sear the sky, 700 spinner dolphins will return to this protected cove to socialize, to nurse their young, and to have plenty of sex after 14 hours of hunting in the deep Atlantic south of this archipelago.

Carlos, a fisherman, has brought the tourists to this place touched by the whispering trades, the dancing rain and little else.

As the Earth’s virgin places disappear one by one, there is almost nowhere left outside of the subzero Antarctica where nature is truly as it always was. Jumbo jets whisk us to islands once considered remote. Developers spread asphalt over swamps. Hotels sprout like asparagus on beaches once ruled by crabs.

But there is Fernando de Noronha, a watchband of islands in the middle of the Atlantic, where fate, luck and politics have come together to preserve a timeless jewel.

This is why they have come, these three who bob in a paint-peeled boat. Leeward, several hundred yards away, foam is blowing off the tops of a line of waves. No, wait. Those aren’t waves. They’re dorsal fins.

The tourists tumble into the gin-clear water. Seventy feet below them, the bottom pulses, a living quilt of neon yellow, orange, red and purple sponges and coral.

First come the high-pitched squeals and clicks of dolphin sonar. The dolphins are closing fast as sailplanes. Dozens, no, hundreds, sweep by in unison.

A few shift into neutral to inspect the interlopers, these humans who look so clumsy in the water, so absurd in phosphorescent-yellow flippers and goggles.

A baby female with a white horizontal stripe peers quizzically into the goggles. Then she’s off like a torpedo.

*

Each morning, the leaping, spinning dolphins return as surely as the tide, oblivious to the knots of tourists who oooh and aaah from scattered boats and cathedral-like cliffs.

The spinners are no circus act. They are the last pint of nature’s blood, still beating wild in its heart.

This is the National Marine Park of Fernando de Noronha (Fair-NAN-doo jee No-RONE-ya), a 70-square-mile area encompassing 20 islands and islets 340 miles off Brazil’s northeastern nose.

The waters around Noronha are so rich that biologists can’t yet name all of the varieties of sea life they hold. There are endangered sea turtles, octopuses, 200-pound grandfather jewfish, roughneck grunts, crevalle jacks and at least 14 different species of shark.

The sanctuary survives because of its remote, open-ocean location and because of an environmental program with some of the strictest controls over humans anywhere in the world.

“Ours is the Island of the Forbidden,” says Rosemary da Silva Arrida, 21. one of the archipelago’s 2,000 residents. And then she giggles. “But that’s all right. It’s a beautiful thing we are doing.”

The guardian of these islands in the rough is IBAMA, the Brazilian environmental protection agency that administers its national parks.

IBAMA allows no more than 420 tourists on the archipelago at a time, and outsiders are not allowed to work here. Only two twin-engine planes arrive each day from the mainland, bringing no more than 25 passengers.

To discourage long stays, IBAMA charges an “ecological tax” that rises exponentially by the day. For three nights, the tax is $18 a person; for six nights, $50; for a month, $1,800.

For Noronha’s residents, environmental approval is needed for almost everything. All property on the island belongs to the federal government, and new construction--even adding a porch or an outhouse--is forbidden.

So are hunting, logging, littering, campfires and remaining on any of the island’s 16 beaches after 6 p.m. Fishing is permitted only outside the marine park, where Atlantic waters are deeper than 150 feet.

Violators lose their boats and equipment and face thousands of dollars in fines. Seized equipment is put on public display as a warning.

Is all this enough to keep Noronha from becoming another Club Med? Will the success of this environmental program be its worst enemy and attract too many tourists?

Ze Gaudencio, IBAMA’s director on the archipelago, ponders the question while watching night fall on Sancho Beach.

“This cannot die.” he says. “If the wildness of Noronha dies, something pure and wild inside of us will die along with it.”

*

This archipelago may be a paradise, but not for comfort creatures.

There are practically no restaurants, pubs, theaters or boutiques. There is no shopping mall, and there is only one hotel--a converted World War II Quonset hut that swelters on a good day.

Forget the golf clubs, water skis and tennis rackets. And don’t plan on finding any games of chance.

There are two public telephones and only six lines to the outside world. Mail can take weeks. Freight makes all “imports” expensive, from a $2 can of Coke to a $12 roll of film.

There are no cars, and no one misses them. Where would one go?

There is no autobahn to Lion Beach, where waves of white gold burst into clouds of mist on the reefs. There is no expressway to Caracas Point, where frigate birds dive into the waves and then rise into the wind with sardines twitching in their beaks. There is no road to Ponta da Sapata, where granite spires are chiseled by the wind.

“On the mainland, you are what you have,” says Edilene Francisco da Silva, 20. “Here, on Noronha, you don’t need things to be someone. You are what is inside of you. When you learn this, you find peace.”

*

Noronha isn’t just a utopia. It is the utopia.

The islands were discovered in 1503 by Amerigo Vespucci, the Genovese sailor and map maker who gave the New World his name. It was Vespucci’s account of Noronha that inspired Thomas More to write his book “Utopia,” a plan for a perfect socialist state set on a remote island.

The Portuguese colonials had something else in mind for Noronha. For more than 200 years, it was the site of Forte de Remedios prison, where dark, brick cells were so small and narrow that they had to be entered backward and where, at times, punishments included 100 lashes, or death at the bottom of a pit of hungry sharks. The prison didn’t close until World War II, when Noronha became an air base for American warplanes en route to Africa.

Brazil’s armed forces maintained a base there until 1987, finally pulling out and leaving behind one potholed road, 150 dilapidated barracks and a paradise of silvery waterfalls, crescent bays and sand as white as flour.

“It was sort of like waking up in Eden,” says Fabio Souza Carnacao, 24, a scuba-diving instructor. “The question was, what were we supposed to do with paradise?”

The Odebrecht construction company and Brazil’s biggest banks had an idea: Turn Noronha into a resort, complete with posh hotels, sushi restaurants, yacht club and golf course.

Environmentalists and scientists in Brazil, Canada, the United States and Great Britain had another idea.

Brazilians Russell Coffin and Jose Truda Palazzo led a movement at home to petition the government, while Canadian photographer Guy Pelland and Jack McKenney drew worldwide attention to the archipelago’s uniqueness with the film “Bay of Dolphins.”

On Sept. 14, 1988, then-President Jose Sarney ended the tug-of-war with the stroke of a pen, signing a decree that transformed Noronha into a national park.

“Noronha has been in a 500-year time warp,” Palazzo says. “To turn it now into one more playground for the rich, now that would be cause for 100 lashes.”

*

The tourists peer through their masks as Fabio, the dive master, leads them into a weightless world. Wrapped in blue light, swept by a sense of vertigo, they fall without end, displaced in time. Shafts of sun come over their shoulders and spear the depths.

Above, French angelfish chase the intruders’ air bubbles to the surface. Below, the current pushes a broth of microscopic life over hills of sugary sand, over hydroids white as bone, over the blinking eyes of octopuses.

The tourists hover, watching schools of surgeonfish gather, dissolve and regather into a formation that looks like one big fish--a ploy to confuse predators.

Suddenly, the bottom falls 30 feet. Thrilled, terrified, the divers soar over the abyss. This must be what it means to fly.

Scarlet tube sponges wave, hairlets of coral quiver, tiny wrasses peer from holes like residents of a high-rise. A silvery swarm of roughneck grunts converges on the tourists as if they are lumps of rock. A wall of mutton snappers, sky blue with yellow stripes, glides among them.

A 10-foot nurse shark snoozes; a sharp-tail eel hunts for sleeping fish; a starry moray and her children ripple their slick, freckled bodies as they cruise in unison. A wrasse delicately picks parasites from a barracuda with its jagged, white teeth.

A green turtle, big as a Buick, sneaks up from behind to watch the tourists watch the fish.

*

Earlier, before the dive, Fabio’s boat swayed easily in the lee of Rat Island. The plan was to go down 112 feet on the archipelago’s open-ocean side. It was a risky dive for these beginners.

Fabio stepped off the boat and splashed into the turquoise water.

“Ready?” he asked the others. “Then let’s go say hello to God.”