Island
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Islands have been at the heart of our desires, and our fears, forever. *Island* tells the groundbreaking story of humans and islands, and islands and nature, from the beginning of time to the present. Drawing on history, literature, art, anthropology, biology, and earth science, *Island* explores the human settlement of islands—including the seafaring skills required to cross the seas—and describes in vivid detail the spectacular flora and fauna of islands as well as their earth-shattering geology. It shows that ever since humans have been traveling and telling tales, they have been fascinated by islands. Creation stories around the world speak of land rising out of the water, and there are many literary island encounters—from Noah to Prospero and Gulliver, and from Ulysses to Robinson Crusoe and the Count of Monte Cristo. In real life, too, sailors and settlers, explorers and scientists, pirates and artists, have all been drawn to islands. The story of islands is also the story of our planet, from its beginning as an island in space to the contemporary appearance and disappearance of islands in the cycles of climate change and seismic upheavals.
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Island
The Harrowing of Eden: White Attitudes Toward Native Americans
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The ocean is the only domain, other than outer space, where humans are so completely alien and where wonder holds us so close. This is the heart of the matter, for it is this wonder that has inspired voyagers for millennia to row and sail the seas in search of an island, sometimes any island; and it is this wonder that still inspires us to look for a planetary island like ours in the furthest reaches of space. Ultimately, we are all islanders on planet Earth, surrounded by the air and the water which we need in order to survive but which by themselves will not sustain us.
“No matter which direction I walked I would arrive at the border of another wilderness, the savage sea,” recalls the writer Thurston Clarke of his visit to Más a Tierra, one of the three Juan Fernández Islands off the coast of Chile. Más a Tierra, which means “close to the mainland” (four hundred miles away!), is the island where Alexander Selkirk was marooned in 1704; and Selkirk’s four-year sojourn there was the inspiration for Daniel Defoe’s classic island novel, Robinson Crusoe (1719). “An island wilderness is different and more perfect than a continental one,” Clarke continues. And indeed there is something different—no, something indifferent, inhuman—about the sea. Only death is as indifferent, which is the sentiment behind the poet John Donne’s famous line: “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.” He wrote this in a prose meditation on death in 1624, and its truth also lies in the contradiction that the separateness of islands as well as of humans is underwritten by their respective connectedness. Not unlike the ocean floor, which is shared by sea islands and connects them underwater, our human connection is language, language that reminds us of both how united and how divided we are. In the end, the connection lies in death, which is to say in our shared human mortality, just as all islands will disappear eventually.
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