Seven-Tenths (10 page)

Chapter 1 hints at some of the problems international law has in trying to fix Exclusive Economic Zones. In terms of absolute position, boundaries, like the Earth’s crust itself, can remain fluid. Thus when I hypothesised the case of an island’s EEZ happening to cross the edge of a tectonic plate and therefore either widening or shrinking, the response at IOS was a scathing ‘Good God, they can’t measure to the nearest nautical mile, let alone to the nearest centimetre.’ Over time, though, these centimetres add up. In 1492 when Columbus crossed the Atlantic, America was 20 metres nearer to Europe than it is today.

One may multiply almost indefinitely the special cases of volcanically inconstant islands, islands whose coastlines are hard to define, artificial islands and self-proclaimed independent principalities sited on World War II anti-aircraft towers 6 miles off the Essex coast (a perfect example of an island as egoic headquarters).
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There are islands like Rockall which seem to have no purpose but to act as a focus for legal wranglings, their sole value being as pegs in the ocean around which a lucky winner might draw an EEZ. Japan has recently been driven to considerable feats of technology in order to rescue its own eroding islet of Okinotorishima at the extreme southern tip of the Japanese archipelago. At high tide Okinotorishima consists of two lumps of coral respectively 3 metres and 5 metres wide. Without these little rocks Japan’s territory would end at Iwo Jima and she would lose 154,440 square miles of EEZ and with it all exclusive fishing and mineral rights. With each typhoon the rocks erode a bit more, so the Japanese have spent upwards of $300 million to enclose the island in a concrete and steel protective wall. It is important that no part of the wall should touch the corals because this would turn Okinotorishima into an artificial island and disqualify it from having an EEZ. As a professor of international law, Soji Yamamoto, says: ‘Territory is not
something that exists naturally. It must be obtained by a country’s efforts.’
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Meanwhile, if sea levels rise as predicted over the next half-century, what of island boundaries then? Will the original outlines of a largely submerged Maldives be maintained on maps as much out of respect as for legal or navigational reasons, so sightseers can peer down from the rail of a boat at a lost land as they might today at a sunken battleship?

Other kinds of island boundary are blurred, too, especially when there seems to be no logical or geological reason for assigning a particular nationality. Corsica is historically, linguistically and geographically more Italian than French. The Channel Islands might quite as easily be French as British and, with their degree of autonomy, form part of that odd, anomalous category of offshore tax havens which are neither fully integrated nor fully independent. The Isle of Man also falls into this category. Such islands generally have a certain diehard quality and are as much leftovers of an older social order as they are of a former geological configuration.

It is archipelagos and chains of islands which are so often the geographical versions of displaced persons, holding at best a temporary passport. The Sulu Archipelago is a perfect example. One has only to sit on the wharf in Jolo to be prey to a literary sense of unreality. The waterfront of huts built on stilts over the sea, the lumps of islands at every distance, the decaying ferries and wooden launches full of fish and copra and red logs: allowing for a lack – but not complete absence – of sail, it is Conrad’s horizon still, and filled as ever with the dreamy tropic energy which slops across all boundaries. Politically, Sulu is part of the Philippines right down to Tawitawi, at its closest reaching to within a few miles of Sabah in northern Borneo. However, in 1981 it became part of an autonomous region with special barter trade rights between it and Malaysia. This was in response to the long and bloody war waged by the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) against what they thought of as an attempt by Christian Manila to oust or dilute
Islamic culture and greedily expropriate whatever it is that governments habitually do greedily expropriate.

On Jolo jetty Conrad’s azure map lies ahead, while immediately behind is a troubled, dark green backdrop of conspiracy and heavy weapons. Conrad would have recognised that, too, since men here have always gone over-armed. A drunken fight can lead within minutes to mortar rounds. The Republic of the Philippines, with its implied promise of centralised law and institutionalised order, covers Sulu with a cartographer’s fiction. The islands of the archipelago are defined and individuated by language, usage, tribal politics, gangs, bandits, even pride. They are criss-crossed by the interests of disparate ethnic groups, trading links, smuggling, piracy, local tyrannies, fishing, seditious movements and intersecting anarchies. In such places official boundaries vanish entirely unless drawn fleetingly by the wakes of navy patrol craft or coastguard cutters. I once went on a week’s fishing trip in an open boat from Palawan southwards. We fished for lobster off Bugsuk and Balabac islands, sleeping at irregular intervals wedged into the bows or on occasional dry land. I lost all sense of time and position. On the way back I discovered we must have spent one night on Borneo. The same thorns, mangroves and littoral clutter, it had seemed nowhere different.

The example of ‘Tiwarik’ and its grandiose conversion from nondescript islet into businessman’s fantasy, vaulting a strait to appropriate a chunk of mainland, is a reminder that if physical and legal boundaries can often only be fixed with great difficulty, then areas of wish can never be clearly demarcated. The greed of dreams is to expand into any space denied them. Fantasies, daydreams and dreams flap about as they may, but they all roost in the unconscious and share its logic, which is that there are no contradictions. Just as sexual fantasies can simultaneously involve a single person and many, at once watching and being watched, doing and being done to, so may an island be experienced as both small and infinitely large, part of the land and part of the sea, sheltering and exposing, terra firma and freakishly unstable. As they melt, icebergs may become very unbalanced, often rolling completely over without warning. The private nickname ‘Tiwarik’ was prescient, for the word means
‘upside down’ and something about the place had always suggested rich possibilities of inversion. Never had I thought to see it so thoroughly stood on its head.

All this points to a boundary which as yet appears on no map but which is ever more real and ever more cavalier. If one considers ex-‘Tiwarik’ as a piece of terrain which has recently been annexed for the convenience of a foreign ‘lifestyle’, then probably there can be no such thing as a holiday island. Once an island becomes a resort it ceases in some essential way to be an island and turns into an extension of a mainland, even if that is half the world away. Nor need this mainland even exist as a sovereign country. It is enough to comprise that fictional international place to whose citizenship so many lay claim or aspire: that stateless state of BMWs, Chivas Regal and Dunhill lighters; of treasure and pleasure and leisure, guaranteed moth- and rustproof. Since much of this fabled place lies in chilly latitudes, it needs to push out long, tentacle-like peninsulas into warmer climes: Vacationland, embracing all sorts of otherwise under-used bits of lesser countries in the sun. It simply kits these out with its own standard furniture (scuba gear, water skis, hang gliders, beach barbecues, rock music, drunks, whores). And suddenly there are no more islands, only scattered slabs of a single moneyed empire joined each to the other by something solider than water. Or so it seemed, waiting for ‘clearance’ in the new beach pavilion on what was once ‘Tiwarik’. This building is now a border post. Under Philippine law no private individual may own any part of the foreshore below a point 30 feet above the mean high-tide line. It is national property. Hence anyone may land on the Fantasy Elephant Club’s beach. But where once by civilised common usage they were free to wander the rest of the island, they now have to be vetted by an immigration official in a blue uniform and wearing a gun. The beach has changed from a haven into a frontier.

There is one last kind of island, one whose elusive presence flickers at the edge of vision, quick as fish. This is the imaginary island faithfully mapped in every psyche, mostly unsuspected, infrequently discovered, even more rarely inhabited. An outcropping of
the self, it lies across a treacherous strait which discourages acquisitiveness and, even on clear blue days, may have vanished as if it were roaming the oceans in search of the one worthy inhabitant. Then on a rare day the rare person wakes and it has swum out of the corner of his eye and stands before him. On such a morning it takes no effort to cross over, paddle flashing in the sun, until the skiff’s bows nudge grindingly into the shore.

And then what pleasure to set up a hut, a fish drier; to pare things back to water and light, to knives and spearpoints, to order and silence!
All men have an island
, Donne should have said, for a suspended wheel rim being beaten in a cement block chapel on the distant mainland ought to tell us no more than the fish curling and flapping between our hands, bleeding rusty threads into the sea. That steely tolling from across the water brings no news, nothing we do not already know as later we climb the headland to watch soft dusk well up over the world’s rim and efface the ocean below. It is not interesting to tot up the sunsets seen and perhaps to come. Those deaths, our deaths, are not plangent affairs but matters of geology. We are all at best marginalia in another era’s fossil record. Go down to the hut instead through a drift of fireflies. Light the lamp, cook rice. There is nobody else on this island; there never was and never could be. Outside, the waves wring green flashes from plankton. The great mineral machine turns its fluid gears. The firefly in the thatch tugs us into its gravitational field.

Did Britain cease to be an island at some debatable moment between the end of World War II and the construction of the Channel Tunnel? Until 1939 Britain had lavishly exported its boundaries in terms of Empire, and while much was made of the idea of this ‘tiny island nation’ ruling a good part of the globe, it did still retain certain characteristics of an island. Among these were the world’s largest maritime presence, a thriving fishing industry around its entire coastline and an attitude towards the rest of the world which can only be described as insular. (The putative headline
Thick
Fog – Continent Isolated
puts it quite succinctly.)

The war provoked insular rhetoric, ranging from endless Shakespearean tags about ‘this precious stone set in the silver sea’ to re-emphasising the tininess of ‘this island nation’, although not now in comparison with the world it ruled but with the Hitlerian might threatening to crush it as it ‘stood alone in the dark days’. The white cliffs of Dover stopped being rather striking beds of calcareous plankton and took on the quality of Britain’s boundary, ramparts, bulwark, palisades. A few miles of cliffs came to stand for an entire spiritual seaboard which might not be violated. Had that portion of Britain’s coastline most adjacent to the rest of the world been as low and unremarkable as it is in parts of Essex, Suffolk or Lincolnshire, the rhetoricians and songwriters would have needed to come up with a different trope altogether.

After the war, Britain with its depleted spirit and collapsed economy became vulnerable to the very things which erode islands: links with foreigners and – as the economy improved – increasing travel abroad by the islanders themselves. Somewhere between 1945 and 1990 Britain lost consciousness of itself as an island. The sea which surrounds it (and which only poetic fancy could ever have
described as ‘silver’) now plays virtually no role in its thinking or its economy. Its naval and merchant fleets are shadows; its fishing industry is ravaged; even its own people find the beaches of Spain and the Greek islands more congenial than those at home. So when the two pilot tunnels, one from England and one from France, met beneath the Channel in 1990 and Britain became technically joined to the rest of Europe by dry land, the event seemed to provoke remarkably little upheaval in the nation’s psyche. King Arthur, Drake and Churchill slumbered on, unmoved. The country was already part of the EC, with the free movement of member citizens guaranteed. Insular attitudes still abounded, but something had changed. A generation had grown up which knew and cared nothing of precious stones set in silver seas and would in any case think the description fitted Barbados or Mykonos far better.

It is probable that only a war which threatened Britain directly could ever resurrect the insular rhetoric. In his speech in
Richard II
John of Gaunt did mention infection, however. (‘This fortress built by Nature for herself / Against infection and the hand of war …’). It so happens that Britain does still jealously guard the ghost of its island self by means of a last and potent symbol of foreign contamination: the fear of rabies. Ironically, it is mad dogs which give the Englishman his final solitary status.
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There is about the swimmer a sentimentality, or self-pity, which
disgusts him even as he finds himself thinking that surely he ought to
have earned a reprieve. All that close attentiveness to the sea over the
years, to this ever-yielding, stony-hearted medium which has him in its
embrace – it surely cannot have been wasted. There must be something
he has learned from it, some subliminal message from his ancestral
home, instructions for survival? The idea is fatuous but persistent.

He is beginning to tire. Not of staying afloat, since this is effortless,
but of trudging the water to stand higher, of spinning to keep every
horizon constantly in view. More and more he allows his face to hang in
the water. Through the glass panel of his mask his vision lengthens past
the rope’s end 20
feet below his ankle. He no longer sees the prismatic
chips of phytoplankton, the blazing motes and jellies as they drift past
his face. Now he believes he glimpses shapes far beneath, not predators
but bulks of deeper purple as though. … Why not? This archipelago is
full of hidden reefs, its contorted seabed thrusts up unexpected pinnacles
to within feet of the surface in the middle of nowhere. There could
easily be a coralline peak, a ledge, even a plateau over in that direction
away from the sun where the water does seem to deepen its colour as if
a little further down there lay a solidity. …

Away from the sun? The swimmer jerks his head up, gasping and
squinting painfully at the blazing disc overhead. Is it not past its zenith
now? Has it not begun to sink? May this illusion of a darker bulk
be nothing but his own shadow, cast as he has so often seen it in late
afternoon? No; ridiculous. It is not late afternoon, merely maybe a few
minutes past midday. He looks downwards again and in a while his
eyes adjust from the dazzle and once more he thinks he can pick out an
area of deeper tone. So convinced is he that he begins swimming
towards it, slowly, so as not to give the impression of having finally
picked a direction or of expecting very much. Now and again he glances
around to tell his invisible boat where he is going. It seems to him that
all will be well if it turns out to be a lonely reef he is heading for.
However small, it will convert the ocean at that point into a shallow
sea. He would then, as if by magic, be in his depth in 20
feet of water.
Or at least, hovering as if in air above the unknown but familiar city,
he would be close enough to feel its dwellers might intercede for him,
present his case for survival at some court of marine jurisprudence. …
As an idea it is better than nothing; even a glimpse of a reef would
sustain him. Besides, reefs were mysterious and deceptive places whose
greater being remained hidden. If one kept one’s eyes on a reef under
water and followed its avenues it had a habit of turning into a shore.
The swimmer had experienced it a thousand times. Might not this one,
despite an apparently yawning horizon, somehow work the same
friendly trick?