Seven-Tenths Read online

  The precipitous footpath is gone. To replace it a steeply curving road has been bulldozed across the face of the cliff. As we walk up we are passed by a roaring truck full of cement and trailing sooty fumes. At that moment the last vestiges of ‘Tiwarik’ vanish in clouds of carbon. We stop on a curve where labourers are digging a trench for a power cable. They are from ‘Sabay’ and I fished with one of them four years before. He tells me this is the site of the accident a month or so back, just before Christmas. Some boulders fell out of the freshly cut embankment and crushed three workers from up the coast. Two died on the spot, a third is in hospital in Manila and likely to die. I hope their families have been compensated. Oh yes, says my informant’s workmate, they were each given 30,000 pesos (almost £600).

  Once at the top I am unable to recognise nearly all the familiar landmarks. I cannot even be certain where I saw the pegs and surveyor’s ranging rod on my last visit. Much of the Field of Crabs is now landscaped and has been disguised as a miniature golf course. A tennis court is even now being surfaced and a small swimming pool receiving a first coat of obligatory blue. Individual bungalows – double glazed, air conditioned, self-contained – are disposed among tasteful arrangements of rocks already planted with flowering shrubs. The centrepiece of the development (‘the masterpiece’, as the assistant to the architect told me down below in the beach pavilion within the latter’s earshot) is the clubhouse itself, a long, low, white palace whose foyer is painstakingly decorated with appliqué designs of shells set in cement. This is apparently to contain all manner of restaurants, sushi bars, guestrooms and steam baths. At the moment it holds a good few Filipino labourers wearing the snipped-off corners of plaster bags on their heads as sunhats. A siren sounds from up in the forest, a strident wail which sends an instant image of escaped prisoners fleeing through the mind, but it is only to mark the beginning of the labourers’ mid-morning break. Most unwrap their merienda from scraps of newspaper where they stand. A few head up towards a straggle of huts pitched against the steep, rocky slope in the tattered scrub which the lower reaches of the forest have now become. Even within the forest itself there are signs that trails have been hacked to the top. I can see no pagoda but my companions tell me that a chalet is planned for ‘those who want to be alone’. What, then, of the pair of eagles, my familiars? I had tried not very hard to identify them, flicking through bird books for South-East Asia, but each time I visualised them the print slipped from their wings as they soared away, unnamed. Assuredly they were gone. In one corner of their former home a level patch has been gouged and on this now stand three immense concrete legs.

  ‘Those are for the electricity,’ my companion explains. ‘The cables will come across from the mainland.’

  And so, without need for bridges and causeways (‘the whole point is that it is an island,’ a Japanese will tell me stiffly some hours later), the Fantasy Elephant Club is to be firmly tethered to the mainland by umbilical cords. The great weight of unsupported lengths of high-tension lines explains the size of the pylons, which will have to withstand the stress of typhoon winds. It is possible to make out three similar pylons tucked away among the shrubs on the distant promontory. Until the project was hatched, this particular corner of the province must have been well down on all priority lists for a surfaced road and electrification. Now, thanks to foreign developers, new poles have sprouted along the dirt track on the mainland and ‘Betamax’ film shows are daily and nightly entertainment where before the villagers played cards and gossiped cruelly by candlelight. ‘Progress,’ as the mayoress of the municipality is fond of saying. Yet there is little risk that someone who knows the area will melt unresistingly into admiration for the foreigners’ altruism. It is the province’s impoverished power company which is meeting the bills for bringing electricity to the island. And over in ‘Sabay’, where it is reasonable to suppose the developers might in self-interest have improved the villagers’ inadequate water supply, I noticed the new handpump had been installed by local Rotarians, just as the recent hard surfacing of the sandy lot used for basketball had been paid for by the Lions Club.

  Something had gone sour at ‘Sabay’, I discovered, though I never found out precisely what. The villagers disdainfully said the Japanese were arrogant and too mean to work for at 40 pesos a day (66 pence). They claimed they could earn far more from their usual fishing activities. It was only the other villagers up the coast who were too lazy and ignorant to fish who would consider 40 pesos a possible wage. … There had been friction right from the early stages of construction, I gathered. At any rate, the relations of ‘Sabay’ to this new world on its doorstep were decidedly malabo: cloudy, murky, ill-visaged. It seemed the neighbouring village was to do better in terms of the newcomers’ patronage since the developers were indeed sinking a borehole there for the island’s drinking water. Later, I found out something else which might explain this state of affairs, since I never seriously believed my friends’ protestations (no doubt cued to my own responses and facial expressions) that the island had been despoiled, their traditional lives of picturesque poverty ruined for ever by video recorders and concrete pylons.

  It turned out that what was taking shape on the island was only ‘Phase One’ of a far larger project. ‘Phase Two’ was destined for the mainland: 252 hectares which, if all the requisite planning permissions were hustled through, would comprise an eighteen-hole golf course, a clubhouse, cottages for guests, a two-storeyed home for the (Japanese) aged, a private airstrip/helipad, a skating rink (presumably roller rather than ice), a shooting range and a coffee shop. There was also talk of a casino, said the mayoress, although that might eventually more prudently be sited on the island. Further facilities to be offered would include windsurfing, sky diving, water skiing, scuba diving and riding. This ‘Phase Two’ was intended to be open to non-Japanese visitors.

  Since under Philippine law no land can be owned outright by a foreigner, the developers had to have a majority Filipino stakeholding. This was no problem for the corporation’s president since he was married to a Filipina. Most of the land he needed to acquire for ‘Phase Two’ belonged to the village next to ‘Sabay”. In ‘Sabay’ itself the wife was on the point of acquiring – or had already acquired – 33 hectares of land for ‘family use’. The ‘Sabayans” sense of grievance might therefore be partly explained by straightforward annoyance that they were not as well placed as their neighbours to cash in on this land bonanza. They clearly did prefer development to raw nature, but in order to be fully reconciled would have liked a bigger slice. The fact that all the land was at present classified as ‘agricultural’, and that to change this classification required a local referendum as well as action at provincial government level, was a minor technicality. So was President Cory Aquino’s foot-dragging land-reform policy under whose measures several landless tenant farmers in ‘Sabay’ would have stood to gain a little agricultural land of their own. The whole development project was so grand and so powerfully backed that no landless ‘Sabayan’ was likely to risk his neck by making a serious protest, still less bring any sort of legal action.

  So that day in ‘Sabay’ I take ‘Phase Two’ to be pretty much a foregone conclusion. I also assume the villagers’ fears about organised crime in the shape of the Yakuza and insidious disease in the shape of AIDS are not necessarily going to be allayed by the development corporation’s president promising ‘to screen all his visitors most carefully for undersirable connections’ (the reference was apparently to the Yakuza), nor by their lady mayor’s assurance that she would ‘eradicate illegal activities such as prostitution’ if they occurred. Several of the more travelled ‘Sabay’ fishermen had seen at first hand the results of the turning of Puerto Galera in Mindoro into an international resort and had witnessed once-lovely Boracay Island in Panay ‘go to the devil’ and require thirteen full-time tourist security police. ‘There is a price for everything,’ a local official wearing a huge fraternity ring announced sagely. ‘Fighting, prost
itution, AIDS, Yakuza. … They’re a regrettable but inevitable part of the development of our country.’

  I soon lose heart on ‘Tiwarik’ and cut short my unofficial visit. The last thing I notice is that the tree on top of the cliff from which Intoy and I had hung the highest, most dangerous and most beautiful swing in the world had been cut down and replaced with a concrete bench moulded to resemble half a rough-hewn trunk. As we start back down the new road I discover the price of the island was 200,000 pesos. ‘Tiwarik’ was knocked down for £3,500. I also hear its Japanese visitors would be paying £170 a day for their accommodation, not including food and the use of facilities. At the scene of the recent fatal landslip I catch myself doing the sort of pointless sums which nevertheless insist on being done: three days’ lodging equals one life.

  All these details about ‘Phase Two’ and the land on which it is to take shape are not by the way. They are central to the manner of ‘Tiwarik”s demise and how it has lost its existence as an island. Even as, 1,000 miles away, Japanese technology struggles to preserve the single eroding islet of Okinotorishima so it may qualify for its own EEZ, the same technology has here de-created an island and is building in its place an exclusive peninsula. What with private helicopters and hydrofoils and high-tension cables, the narrow strait will have even less of an isolating effect than a six-lane highway has on an urban community. The island and the mainland together form one single project. Splitting it into two phases is merely an engineering and procedural convenience and has to do with two timescales, not two separate places. By annexing – perfectly legally – a piece of territory in another country and turning it into pseudo-Japan, Japan is in effect exporting its boundary. It is mere chance that the project, and the money, happen this time not to be Swiss or American or Chinese or German. The end result is the unislanding of ‘Tiwarik’.

  *

  ‘Tiwarik’ is a good example of an island which has been lost to a kind of gerrymandering, to a redrawing of its cultural boundaries. Its mistake was to have been too amorphous, too anonymous and unclaimed except by a nomadic European who briefly thrust his own identifications on to it and wanted nothing but silence in return. That was selfish, no doubt. Also harmless. It would be a historical solecism to look back a century or two and think yearningly of the unpopulated, unneeded islands then littering the world’s seas. Two centuries ago one’s mind would have been quite different, with different wants and expectations in a completely dissimilar world. So, at least, we suppose. Yet islands have always exercised a fascination and – unlike deserts, for instance – are enough repositories of fantasy to be slightly chimerical. One seldom looks at an island without also imagining it disappearing behind a bank of fog or storm clouds which at length clear to reveal an empty ocean. It would not be a surprise and, like a dream, one might not even miss it. Until remarkably recently the North Atlantic was full of islands which have now disappeared. They constituted another type of vanishing island, one whose loss is due to the redrawing of maps, to improved cartography and navigation, but also to changed expectations.

  These places hovered on the boundaries of the actual and the credible for hundreds of years. They cannot have emerged from nothing and neither have they entirely vanished yet in all their mysterious aspects. The most famous of them were Antillia (or Seven Cities), Brasil, St Brandan, Buss and Mayda. Seven Cities Island had grown out of a legend of Christian refugees, among them several bishops, fleeing the Iberian peninsula before the Moorish invasion in 711 and fetching up in a safe land somewhere well away in the far Atlantic. Travellers who claimed to have visited it had found plentiful church services and brought back sand which was one-third pure gold dust. Not surprisingly it remained a place of considerable interest to navigators. So did Brasil Island, which had appeared on Dallorto’s famous map of 1325 as a large, circular island some way off Munster in Ireland. In 1498 the Spanish ambassador in London reported home that ‘The people of Bristol have, for the last seven years, sent out every year two, three and four caravels [light ships] in search of the islands of Brasil and the Seven Cities.’

  Seven Cities was on Desceliers’s map of 1546 at a position which today would be between 500 and 600 miles off New York. Since Columbus’s day, though, mariners had been sailing the western Atlantic with increasing frequency and by the late sixteenth century the island had begun to shrink, moving southwards and out into the mid-Atlantic wastes. A century later it vanished entirely. Brasil Island lasted much longer – embarrassingly so, since according to one source it ‘persisted in the mind of the British Admiralty until the second half of the Nineteenth century’.*

  The Isle of St Brandan was even more illustrious since it could trace its origins back to ancient Greece and Celtic mythology, both of which had stories about an Island of the Blessed. Pagan myth was converted into Christian parable by putting the sixth-century Abbot of Clonfert into the role of a lone seafarer who, committing his body to a leaky coracle and his soul to God, overcomes all manner of dangers and hardship to arrive at last in a land of paradise. It was this island which Charles Kingsley chose to be the home of the water babies, using it in a curious way. He preserved the fairy-tale aspects. ‘On still clear summer evenings, when the sun sinks down into the sea, among golden cloud-capes and cloud-islands, and locks and friths of azure sky, the sailors fancy that they see, away to westward, St Brandan’s fairy isle.’† The religious connotations were still there, too, for ‘when Tom got there, he found that the Isle stood all on pillars, and that its roots were full of caves’, which implied a place modelled securely on Gothic church architecture. Yet Kingsley then invoked paganism by identifying St Brandan’s with Atlantis, the lost land of higher knowledge which to this day is still assiduously mapped by its faithful.

  ‘The Sunken Island of Buss’ was different in that its discovery was definitely recorded. It was found in 1578 during Martin Frobisher’s third and last attempt to find a north-west passage. One of the smallest of his ships, the Emmanuel, was a buss (a herring smack of about 60 tons) out of Bridgwater in Somerset. During a severe storm off Greenland it became separated from the rest of the expedition. Completely lost somewhere in the region of Bear Sound, it began sailing south-eastward in a vaguely homeward direction whereupon, in the words of a contemporary but second-hand account, ‘they discovered a great island in the latitude of 57 degrees and a half, which was never yet found before, and sailed three days along the coast, the land seeming to be fruiteful, full of woods, and a champaign country.’* Almost at once the Island of Buss began appearing on charts. In the seventeenth century it was large and usually about 570 miles due west of Rockall. By the eighteenth century it had begun to shrink, improved navigation having failed to find it. Owing to its definitive position as well as to the documented date and circumstances of its discovery, Buss was never free to adopt the other islands’ strategy of scooting elusively about the ocean. Instead it shrank by sinking, for van Keulen’s 1745 chart observes, ‘The submerged land of Buss is nowadays nothing but surf a quarter of a mile long with rough sea.’ Later that century and into the beginning of the nineteenth several ships searched for Buss by taking soundings but the results were inconclusive. Probably its last appearance on a map was in the 1858 edition of Keith Johnston’s Physical Atlas, where it is a speck in the North Atlantic.

  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 s
outhwest 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?