This is the story of Yves Chesselet, who as a young conservationist and wild spirit, forsakes the pleasures and comforts of modern life to live on an island with only seabirds and seals for company. Mercury Island, off the coast of Namibia, becomes the centre of Yves’ world when he pledges to wrest 15,000 seals off the island, ‘encouraging’ them to settle a kilometre away along the Skeleton Coast, to reclaim Mercury on behalf of the endangered gannets, cormorants and penguins that once thrived there.