Seven-Tenths Read online

  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.

  It is not its grasses my feet have trodden nor its little coastline I have so lovingly followed, and neither does it retain any trace of me. There is another island locally known as ‘Tiwarik’ but it is only an exact facsimile, a fly-spit on the map of the objective planet wh
ich we agree to inhabit.*

  * James Hamilton-Paterson, Playing with Water (1987).

  * Richard K. Nelson, The Island Within (1990).

  * Yi-fu Tuan, Topophilia (1974).

  † Charles Kingsley, The Water Babies (1863).

  * E. J. Payne, ed., Voyages of the Elizabethan Seamen to America (Oxford, 1893) p. 183.

  * W. H. Babcock, Legendary Islands of the Atlantic (New York, 1922).

  * See Brian Rothman, Signifying Nothing: The Semiotics of Zero (1987).

  * See Karl Baarslag, Islands of Adventure (London, 1941) and Henry Stommel, Lost Islands (1984).

  * Hamilton-Paterson, Playing with Water (1987).

  II

  Objects of desire

  Four things about small islands:

  The concept of the ‘private island’ satisfies most people’s major fantasies.

  They look like objects and, hence, like property.

  The effect of islands is almost wholly regressive.

  An island’s boundaries can never be fixed.

  1. They look like objects and, hence, like property

  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.

  2. The concept of the ‘private island’ satisfies most people’s major fantasies

  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 astero
id 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.

  3. The effect of islands is almost wholly regressive

  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.