Seven-Tenths (9 page)

What did the
Emmanuel
find in 1578? After Buss had finally gone cartographers were left with four possibilities. Either it was a fraud from the start or else the disoriented sailors had mistaken a fog bank or ice field for land. Or was it a genuine island which had soon submerged? The fourth and most likely explanation is that the little buss from Bridgwater had glimpsed a stretch of the Greenland coast, probably in the region of Cape Farewell. A certain amount of imagination and a vivid non-eyewitness account (Greenland is not an obviously ‘fruiteful’ and well-wooded country) did the rest.

Lastly, the Island of Mayda survived on maps longest of all. It was usually crescent in shape and placed out in the Atlantic to the southwest of Ireland, more or less where the Porcupine Seabight is on modern charts. One of the variants of its name, Asmaida, probably points to its having originated with mediaeval Arab navigators. Like Brasil Island it began moving steadily westward across the Atlantic, in 1566 fetching up in Newfoundland waters. By 1814 Mayda had drifted much further south, on a level with the West Indies.
According to one source,
*
its final appearance was on a Rand McNally map of 1906. It is anyone’s guess as to what Mayda’s objective correlative was: possibly Bermuda or Cape Cod or Cape Breton. It was most likely to have been dimly perceived America.

The modern world with GPS at its disposal, to say nothing of satellite pictures, may view these elusive islands of the North Atlantic with a degree of indulgent patronage. Yet for Mayda to have existed on maps from 1400 to 1906 – albeit in a variety of locations – is a feat which testifies to something other than mere navigational error. It clearly served a real function. In its slow and stately disappearance over some 500 years the Island of Mayda – which no one had ever seen twice, still less landed on – in effect demonstrated that something cannot come into being without displacing something else. Mayda had to be pushed gradually aside in order to allow the eastern seaboard of America to come into cartographical existence.

We who carry in our heads an image of the Earth seen from space and have noticed on the surface of its blue ball continents and land masses looking identical to the ones in atlases cannot picture the world as it was to someone half a millennium ago. At that time the prevailing image was entirely influenced by Ptolemy’s great
Geographia
(
AD
90–168
c
.). Ptolemy conceived the Earth as spherical; the problem he bequeathed was a lack of enough known world to cover the sphere. The whole of the globe was centred, as the name implied, on the Mediterranean. Every Greek sailor knew that once one had sailed beyond the last points of land the sea just went on and on. What particularly frightened the Greeks, and therefore the European mind which inherited their philosophical tradition, was the idea of
void
. The sea’s void, that infinitely dangerous blank beyond known land, was as worrying metaphysically as it was physically. The Greeks’ idealisation of a static universe full of fixed entities, faithfully reflected in their mathematics, underpinned all that could be thought. The sea was a positive insult to this metaphysics, a naked opposition to it. Not only was the ocean of unknown
dimensions but it was moving, unstable, in certain circumstances even breaking out of its natural confines. How then could this fluid void be mapped? How did one map an ocean when it was featureless? How did one represent an
absence
of topography?

To appease this Aristotelian
horror vacui
mapmakers before 1500 resorted to a variety of devices, including that of coralling the ocean safely within a complete ring of imaginary continents like the zetetics’ ice barrier. Until roughly that date maps of the world were entirely notional. Ptolemy had been rediscovered in about 1200, but
Geographia
was only a text. The features of the globe were extrapolated from it entirely according to the cartographer’s fancy. Religious imagery was prominent, some maps depicting three continents which corresponded to the three sons of Noah. (The insistence that the globe assume a doctrinal shape lasted at least into the Age of Enlightenment. The French cartographer Robert de Vangoudy published a map of America in 1769 showing the land as divided by Poseidon among his ten sons, much to the amusement of Voltaire.) Other shapes assumed by the world’s land masses at mapmakers’ whim were neat crosses, caskets, and the tabernacle. Until a certain date the function of land on mappemonds is to express the wish that the physical world should conform to theological or aesthetic categories. Underlying this, though, runs an anxious desire to frame a linked and anarchic series of voids into distinguishable oceans. When this is done the picture reverses out and instead becomes a map of land with bits of sea in between. It is a profound relief.

Mayda and all the dozens of other islands in the North Atlantic were the surviving, mobile fragments of conceptually necessary but imaginary land. This is precisely Claude Lévi-Strauss’s idea of the ‘floating signifier’. He argues that in culture there is always a need for certain concepts and expressions in order to soak up any excess of existence which has not yet been turned into words. It is the analogue of the algebraic concept of
nought
, which it is necessary to have before other things can be deployed.
*
The Island of Mayda’s function was to be non-existent, to blot up an excess of vacancy, until something more
solid turned up. Its poignancy is that even when it had been rendered redundant cartographers were loath to part with it. This was no doubt a matter of pride as much as sentimentality. Mayda was doomed to wander in an oceanic oubliette like a melting ice floe until being covered with the map’s legend. When in some future edition the legend was moved, Mayda was found to have vanished.

Mythical or badly misplaced islands were not, of course, confined to the North Atlantic. The parts of the world remoter from Europe which were explored, mapped and named later had their own share which lingered correspondingly longer, even though by the mid-nineteenth century navigational methods were very reliable. Dougherty Island was believed for over a century to lie to the south of Australia. It was frequently reported at its given coordinates and in 1893 a New Zealander, Captain White, claimed to have sailed entirely around it, saying there was no other land for 1,100 miles. After that it vanished, but its image endured on US charts until 1932. The same went for Podestà Island, named for the Italian ship which discovered it, the
Barone Podestà
. It was sighted in the South Pacific, some 900 miles off the Chilean coast and the ship’s master wrote down its position. However, since his name was given as Captain Pinocchio it is perhaps not surprising it was never seen again, though it survived on some charts until 1936.

More inconvenient was the case of Sarah Ann Island, which ought to have formed part of the Gilbert Island group in today’s Kiribati. In 1932 some American astronomers decided it would be the ideal spot from which to view a long-awaited total eclipse of the sun. The US Navy went off to have a look at the island and report back regarding the difficulties of accommodating scientists and their equipment on it. Despite searching, however, they failed to find Sarah Ann and the observations had instead to be made from Canton and Enderby Islands, 500 miles to the east.

Of all such islands maybe the longest lived were – or are – a couple far down in the Pacific, south-west of Tierra del Fuego, Macy’s Island and Swain’s Island. These had vanished from practically every known chart by 1939, but they are still there in the 1974 edition of the
Soviet Atlas of the Pacific Ocean
. It is not clear which country they belong to; nor, indeed, to which era. One of them even
persists on a John Bartholomew map in
The Times Atlas of the World
(the 1986 reprint of the seventh edition of 1985).

If this seems like a catalogue of earnest errors, the case of Hunter Island is one which from the start ought to have aroused suspicion but which was long treated very seriously in some quarters. In 1823 Captain Hunter of the brig
Donna Carmelita
claimed to have found an island some 300 miles north-west of Fiji. Not only did he establish its exact position, he landed and found an island which was intensively cultivated and lived on by a tribe of ‘highly developed’ Polynesians. These natives had certain peculiarities. They all had their cheeks perforated in weird patterns and the little fingers of their left hands amputated at the second joint. For many years passing skippers kept their eyes skinned for Hunter Island, since apart from anything else the captain’s account had intrigued a good few anthropologists who had never before heard of a Polynesian tribe with these curious characteristics. Alas, the island was never seen again. The idea that the entire thing might have been invented as a joke by a bored captain with a gift for subversive fantasy might have crossed somebody’s mind on learning that his original – and private – name for the island was Onaneuse.
*

‘Tiwarik’ and Onaneuse and, for that matter, all the world’s chimerical islands have things in common which do not depend in the slightest on notions of ‘objective reality’. To the gaze beneath which they once fell they had an absolute existence. St Brandan’s exercised its significance on the religious imagination of the time, while Seven Cities with its gold sand and Buss with its ‘champaign country’ stood as lands of promise whose only fault was to slip further out of reach as the centuries passed. Onaneuse, since all jokes are serious until their inventors begin to laugh, maybe stood for something which had been at the back of Captain Hunter’s mind long before he ever went to sea. It might be oddly reassuring to invent a private erotic idyll, give it precise bearings and then watch other people search for
it in vain. While the Captain laughed the scholars accorded it a status he would never have dared allow himself to claim. They did his work for him even as they failed to find it, and since he had known all along it wasn’t there he had the last laugh as well.

No doubt islands draw some of their peculiar significance from the dozens of cosmogonies which begin with a watery chaos out of which land emerges. Any emergent land must initially take the form of an island, so the island stands as the archetype of land. As to what this proto-land might contain would depend on when it was first spied, and by whom. Paradise, treasure and naturalists’ nightmares were variously seen as appropriate, but the nearer our own century was approached the more an explorer, an adventurer or a philosopher might expect the proto-land (glimpsed tantalisingly in the parting of a fog bank or glittering in the objective of his telescope) to contain a domestic order reassuringly old-fashioned as well as exotically unlike any known society. Things are different nowadays. Nobody any longer expects to find a place where the people are nobler, sexier or just better behaved. Wistfulness has been replaced by a certain hard-nosed quality. If you can’t find them, you found them. Were there such a thing as an endangered species of land, the island would be it. Far from being proto-land it is coming to feel like a last land. The whole concept of the island, which until recently was implicit with all manner of promise, is now redolent of loss.

‘Tiwarik’ will go on existing only as long as its author. Unlike the island to which I attached the name, it is not contingent on Japanese developers. Somewhere its grasses still blow in the wind. Six or so years ago, when it was its old self, I ended my description by calling it an act of the imagination. This will always be true of places which at last become properly real to us.

Four things about small islands:

1. The concept of the ‘private island’ satisfies most people’s major fantasies.
   
2. They look like objects and, hence, like property.
   
3. The effect of islands is almost wholly regressive.
   
4. An island’s boundaries can never be fixed.
   

Everyone looks at an island, whether consciously or not, much as a tyrant eyes a territory. It takes a long time to have any relationship with a land or a country, but the mere sight of an island from an aircraft’s window or a ferry’s deck mobilises the beginnings of possessiveness. The place is small enough to treat with, to become familiar, to exhale an air of exclusivity, even if it is quite nondescript. A slight grammatical shift can mark either social desirability or small size – usually going together. Thus, one has a house
in
Malta, but a bungalow
on
Gozo. He lives in Jersey, she on Sark. (But they have a house on Long Island as well as one in Jamaica.)

This unit of land which fits within the retina of the approaching eye is a token of desire. The history of the Isle of Buss shows this desire working so strongly that successive mariners appropriated a portion of a long coastline and changed it into the island they would have preferred to discover. To have happened upon an unclaimed continent while lost in a small fishing smack would have been inconvenient, but to have found an unknown island was both manageable and enviable. How, then, could its discoverers have extrapolated a self-contained shape from a length of coastline? How were they able to draw the fictitious ‘back’ of this ‘island’ which remained forever as hidden and theoretical as the dark side of the Moon? Mediaeval
cartographers often solved this problem by giving the Atlantic islands stylised shapes: circles, clover leaves, rectangles and crescents. The Isle of Mayda retained its crescent or indented circle shape on map after map, and eyewitness accounts of it seemed to conform to this outline with remarkable faithfulness. Quite possibly this reflected its rumoured Islamic origin.

There for the taking
… Ever mobile, for several hundred years the lost islands of the Atlantic might bob up anywhere from behind freezing mist, in a hurricane, or during a search for somewhere else entirely. The point was they could be possessed at the drop of an anchor, named for a vessel, claimed for a monarch. Even today, visitors and holidaymakers may ‘discover’ an island which becomes ‘theirs’ in respect to their friends, envious neighbours, peers.

Icebergs, floes and ice islands also form a particular class of islands in that they are both mobile and temporary. They look like and are objects, and are sometimes colonised by Eskimo hunters and teams of scientists for varying lengths of time. Several islands made of shelf ice and far larger than the Isles of Wight or Man have provided stable bases for research stations for ten or more years at a stretch. The question of possession is another matter, though. If they are inside territorial waters there is no problem; but many icebergs carry with them a vast tonnage of boulders and other morainal material and one might wonder to what extent they go on being part of the nation in whose territory they were calved. Canadian soil and Canadian water presumably made up the iceberg which sank the
Titanic
; but while the Canadians would have retained full rights over it while it was in their waters, would they automatically have ceded all responsibility once it had left? Presumably so, otherwise the White Star line could possibly have brought an action against the dominion for negligence in allowing pieces of its sovereign territory to go drifting away out of its control.

The boulders carried by such icebergs and released as they melt often end up thousands of miles away from their place of origin and in the early deep-dredging oceanographic expeditions of the mid-nineteenth century caused geological confusion. Were such boulders now discovered to contain valuable rare minerals in exploitable
quantities, perhaps Canada and Denmark might pursue a legal claim granting them exclusive mining rights over their pieces of rogue territory shed from Newfoundland and Greenland, a claim which would also exonerate them from blame when anyone accidentally rammed one of their melting assets.

This assertion may be true only for our culture; but as Western culture in general seems regrettably set eventually to subsume most others it is probably at worst a truism. The ‘private island’ fantasy is simply one expression of the urge to define, annex and defend territory. It is clear that in this context ‘island’ can as easily mean any patch of land anywhere, even a mere house. This is especially noticeable in England, where his home is only half-jokingly referred to as ‘the Englishman’s castle’. The apotheosis of this is a place like Loch Leven Castle in Kinross, where Mary Queen of Scots was imprisoned and from which she escaped in a rowing boat. This consists of a castle on an island in the middle of a lake which is itself on an island in the north-east Atlantic. The idea embodied in this arrangement can be expressed graphically by a series of concentric rings: circular boundaries nesting within one another, lines of exclusivity and defence which intensify in power the more they approach the centre. The average mediaeval castle, in default of a handy lake with an island, had to make do with a moat, thereby becoming an artificial island.

There is certainly a tendency, perhaps more pronounced in some cultures than in others, to make ‘islands’ on dry land. In Tuscany, for example, the natives increasingly resent the habit of foreigners (meaning both non-Italians and non-Tuscans) of buying up pieces of their countryside, fencing them off and forbidding all access to them by locals. As with the villagers of ‘Sabay’, the resentment is mainly twofold. The Tuscans do not like their immemorial rights to hunt, gather, stroll or otherwise come and go suddenly abrogated, nor what they have always considered part of their horizon to be out
of bounds to them. At the same time, they are put out that it is not they themselves who had the financial liquidity to take advantage of the boom in local land values. Had they done so it is open to anyone to wonder whether they might not with alacrity have assumed the grandiose mantle of landowner and as swiftly put up fences and given large, mean dogs the run of their property.

The ‘private island’ remains the correlative of a particular dream. Islands are at once objects of desire and a locus for desires. The dream embodies fantasies of autonomy, independence, security, sex, grandeur, individuality and survival, in recognition that modern metropolitan and suburban life connotes powerlessness, dependence, defencelessness, frustration, lack of status, anonymity and a general feeling of expendability. In waiting rooms, people eye colour advertisements in
Country Life
, aerial views of yet another Scottish island about to come under the auctioneer’s hammer, while an easily decoded dream crosses their mental retinas and glazes their eyes.
‘Estimated price: £750,000
.’ The same dream leaks into all sorts of stories and films set on private islands where the unities of time and place can be rigidly controlled. These may be tales of manhunts with the narrator-guest as the next quarry; reigns of terror; ghoulish experiments; masterminds plotting the world’s overthrow from their flamboyant yet top-secret lairs; elaborate erotic baroqueries. Science fiction carries the dream on, being full of expansive futures in which the rich and powerful own private planets, while even the moderately wealthy may aspire to a humble asteroid as the site of a kingdom, retreat, hideout or love nest.

Nor is the dream confined to adults. In their coastlines, as in their potentiality, all lost islands go on reappearing in the maps which every powerless schoolchild draws.

Islands infantilise people even as people idealise islands. Those with appetites and no souls think they would be safe from the eyes of the world. Those with soul and little appetite believe they can fall under an island’s benign and teaching gaze.

The island repeats a fantasy of human beginnings. The foetus – castle of the ego and keep of the soul – is effectively an island for the first nine months of life, entirely surrounded by an amniotic moat and connected to the mainland only by an umbilicus. Soon afterwards the playpen becomes an island, probably the most fabulous of all. Not only does the infant command its every square foot, he commands the world which his own supreme frontiers deign into being by marking off. His shores, his limen; and so by extension his ocean, his continents, his world.
*
Moreover, the fantasy of a private island always takes on that infantile characteristic of absolute flexibility in being able simultaneously to stand for almost any desire and to serve as the ideal locus for practically any fantasy. For islands are also sexual places because they have the air of being extra-legal, extra-territorial, out of sight and censure. Every so often a film appears depicting torrid intimacies among the conveniently marooned. For this cinematic purpose the island must be tropical and the state of undress constant. It would not be at all the same for two nubile castaways to find themselves stranded in the Bering Sea.

The island is thus the perfect territorial expression of the ego. As such, it is all too easily a metaphor for the individual. Sometimes the metaphor is used at one remove, so the island takes the place of a wise alter ego. The message here is that man learns by true experience of himself. The lessons may be practical and moral (as in
The
Swiss Family Robinson
or the story of Alexander Selkirk) or spiritual (as in Richard Nelson’s
The Island Within
).

The infinitely flexible nature of islands, of their being at once safe and adventurous, constraining and boundless, erotic and polemical, has made them ideal destinations in a long literary tradition of imaginary voyages. More than 1,000 years before Homer there was a twelfth-dynasty Egyptian story about a castaway on a marvellous
island, and Plato’s account of Atlantis functions as a kind of blueprint on which he might later have constructed a more complete utopia. When Sir Thomas More produced his own original
Utopia
in 1516 he put fresh life into an ancient genre. The dignity of his Latin must have induced many a lesser writer to indulge his own intellectual fantasies under the disguise of gravity, for the literature of the next three centuries abounds with all kinds of utopias and ideal commonwealths, most of them sited on imaginary islands. (At this point, and quite gratuitously, I wish to note an allegation that Sir Thomas More ‘used to thrash his grown-up daughters with a rod made from
peacock-
feathers
’.
*
Without bothering to try and put a finger on it more precisely, one feels this sort of behaviour is not inconsistent with thought about islands and ideal societies.)

It is curious there was no discussion in English of the imaginary voyage as a genre before the nineteenth century. Indeed, there was not even any recognition that it was a literary type worth discussing. In France, on the other hand, there were all sorts of studies and by 1787, when Garnier’s remarkable
Voyages imaginaires, songes, visions
… was published, he was able to subdivide his classification of Allegory into a whole variety of islands, among them an
île d’amour
, an
île de la félicité
, an
île taciturne,
an
île enjouée,
an
île imaginaire
and an
île de portraiture
. After Crusoe’s great success in France, several imitative
Robinsonades
showed what man might be capable of when thrown entirely on to his own resources, whereas adventures on an
île inconnue
tended to depict what happened to a domestic society cut off from the rest of the world. In this respect they constituted something of a counterpart interest to that in feral children (such as Victor, the wild boy of Aveyron), around which at that time all sorts of arguments revolved concerning what exactly constituted ‘the natural’ and ‘the civilised’.

The genre still exists. The French writer Georges Perec in a novel published in 1975
†
uses an imaginary island off Cape Horn as the
setting for a fascistic society obsessed with sports. And what else is one kind of science fiction but a convenient locating of utopias and dystopias off-Earth on imaginary planets which are, from our perspective and by any other name, islands in space?

The effect of islands is almost wholly regressive
… This is most true of prison islands since there is nowhere more regressive than a prison. ‘Regressive’ should not, of course, be read as a synonym for ‘comforting’, although many brutalised and institutionalised people find incarceration reassuring. The objections are obvious. Did Napoleon ‘regress’ on St Helena? What was so comforting about
le
bagne
which induced ‘Papillon’ to escape Devil’s Island? Was the camp on Blood Island in some way deeply cheering? But ‘regressive’ applies as much to the behaviour of a prison’s governor and guards as to that of its inmates. It refers to the effect on everybody concerned which all institutions exercise and penal institutions in particular. Punishment is by its nature regressive, and prisons usually involve extremes of pettiness, brutality and sexual licence: the normal ingredients of infantile behaviour. Seen in this light, Devil’s Island was something like a nineteenth-century English public school with mosquitoes and a guillotine. A succession of the prison’s governors encouraged their charges to settle into some variety of homosexual marriage, jointly tilling a small garden and sharing its produce. This was considered an effective antidote to the yearning for escape, a progressive piece of penology known locally as ‘the cucumber solution’ (
la résolution du concombre
).
*

At the very centre of imprisonment’s concentric rings is solitary confinement: isolation (from
insula
), which if inflicted for long enough on the wrong individual may cause a regression from which it can be hard to emerge. It all depends on one’s position. From the authorities’ point of view isolation is the place where the community expels the individual. From certain individuals’ points of view, solitude is what they long for to escape the community. Their yearning may even be for the numinous, invisible spot in the centre, identity’s apotheosis and vanishing point.