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Chapter One

First Islanders

SETTLERS AND STORYTELLERS

“JAMAICA, THE MOST considerable as well as by far the most valuable of the British West India islands, is situated in the Atlantic Ocean, among what are called by geographers the Greater Antilles [. . .] Jamaica is nearly of an oval form; 140 English miles in length, and in its broadest part about 50. It is the third in size of the islands of the Archipelago. It is bounded on the east by the island of St. Domingo [Hispaniola], from which it is separated by the channel called by English seamen the Windward passage; by Cuba on the north; by the Bay of Honduras on the west; and by Cartagena in New Spain [now Colombia] on the south [. . .] The island is crossed longitudinally by an elevated ridge, called the Blue Mountains. What is called the Blue Mountain Peak rises 7,431 feet above the level of the sea. The precipices are interspersed with beautiful savannahs, and are clothed with vast forests of mahogany, lignum vitae, iron wood, logwood, braziletto, etc. On the north of the island, at a small distance from the sea, the land rises in small round topped hills, which are covered with spontaneous groves of pimento. Under the shade of these is a beautiful rich turf. This side of the island is also well watered, every valley having its rivulet, many of which tumble from overhanging cliffs into the sea. The background in this prospect, consisting of a vast amphitheatre of forests, melting gradually into the distant Blue Mountains, is very striking. On the south coast the face of the country is different; it is more sublime, but not so pleasing. The mountains here approach the sea in immense ridges; but there are even here cultivated spots on the sides of the hills, and in many parts vast savannahs—covered with sugar canes, stretching from the sea to the foot of the mountain—relieve and soften the savage grandeur of the prospect.”

—Edinburgh Encyclopaedia (1830)

“[DECEMBER 4, 1844] My first sight of Jamaica was one that I never can forget. There was a conical mass, darkly blue, above the dense bed of clouds that hung around its sides, and enveloped all beneath [the] towering elevation [of Blue Mountain Peak] [. . .] Night soon fell. Many lights were seen in the scattered cottages, and here and there a fire blazed up from the beach, or a torch in the hand of some fisherman was carried from place to place. My mind was full of Columbus, and of his feelings on that eventful night, when the coast of Guanahani [San Salvador, also known as Watlings Island, in the Bahamas] lay spread out before him with its moving lights, and proud anticipations. So did I contemplate the tropical island before me, its romance heightened by the indefiniteness and obscurity in which it lay [. . .] The well-known comparison by which Columbus is said to have given Queen Isabella an idea of Jamaica—a sheet of paper crumpled up tightly in the hand, and then partially stretched out—occurred to me, and I could not but admire its striking appropriateness.”

—Philip Henry Gosse, A Naturalist’s Sojourn in Jamaica (1851)

Like many islanders the world over, Jamaicans often refer to their island as the Rock; and in the beginning Jamaica was just that, a rock rising above the surface of the sea. Long after its geological history had begun, its natural history followed, with biological life forming in the soupy sea around while on the land plants developed over millions of years until eventually the first tree rose up into the air.

Jamaica would one day be covered by trees; but before that it was shaped by volcanic rocks, which were eroded by wind and water and by limestone produced with the slow disintegration of the shells of marine life, including coral. This limestone then dissolved into pockets and purses called karst formations, the sinkholes and springs and caves and underground reservoirs and cone-shaped hills and honeycomb sides of Jamaica’s Cockpit Country, one of the most remarkable examples of such a limestone landscape in the world.

Then, in a familiar island compact, Jamaica’s geography conspired with its geology to give the island a rich diversity of flora and fauna, fascinating travelers and residents alike from ancient times. Such variety remains one of the most reliable markers of island identity. Temperate or tropical, on almost every ocean island around the world there are thousands of plant and animal species, some tiny and hidden away and others portly and prominent, some resident and others just passing through; and over time they create their own island conditions, building a world in which they uniquely belong and bringing nurture and nature together in what Jamaicans might call a rocksteady rhythm. Typical of mountainous islands with windward and leeward shores, Jamaica has two climates; in the northeast, exposed to the wind, it is wet and warm, while in the lee of the mountains to the southwest the weather is drier and cooler. This makes for an even more remarkable range of species, including an exceptional variety of ferns and fruits and berries—and of birds to feed on them.

Birds and islands have a long association, for until very, very recently in the history of the world, birds were the only creatures (other than insects and bats) that could fly over the water to reach islands. The Chinese word for an island combines the ancient ideogram of a bird with that of a mountain—and measured from the seabed, every ocean island is a mountain. In this imagining, an island is a place for a bird to land; and birds hide out or hover about all over Jamaica—it has the highest number of native avian species anywhere in the Caribbean. There are finches and flycatchers, herons and egrets, black-billed and yellow-billed parrots, mockingbirds and kingbirds and the magnificent frigate bird, with its scarlet throat that balloons in breeding season. There are whistling ducks and blue and yellow and black and white warblers, elaenias (called Sarah Birds) and euphonias (called Cho-Cho Quits), an owl called Patoo and an oriole called Banana Katie. The island is also home to a little green and red tody called Rasta Bird, a cuckoo called Old Woman Bird and another called Old Man Bird, and to doves and lots of crows, including the rightly named jabbering crow. And the John Crow, which isn’t really a crow at all but a turkey vulture (graceful or disgraceful, depending on one’s point of view) that has found a place in Jamaican folklore. There are hummingbirds, especially the so-called Doctor Bird, found only on the island and celebrated in Ian Fleming’s James Bond story For Your Eyes Only (1960), where the opening words speak of “the most beautiful bird in Jamaica, and some say the most beautiful bird in the world, the streamer-tail or ‘doctor’ hummingbird.” It is now the national bird of Jamaica. And there are over a hundred species of butterflies, each of exquisite color and design, including the giant swallowtail—largest in the Americas and native to the island.

Green and brown and croaking lizards live in Jamaica, along with a few snakes and one species of crocodile (which appears on the national coat of arms). Turtles have lived on and around Jamaica for millions of years, from the time when the sea was relatively shallow; and now there are green turtles and hawksbills and loggerheads and leatherbacks, bringing the sea and the land together in their amphibious lives. In fact, certain reptiles that can manage significant water crossings are usually among the first animals on any “new” island. Perhaps as importantly, reptiles can go for long periods without eating anything at all, absorbing heat passively from the sun and the ambient air rather than having to generate body heat internally like mammals and birds—which requires a lot of food.

Among the marine mammals, the manatees, or “sea cows,” are relatively scarce around Jamaica these days; but they have made their home close to shore forever, and would have been easy pickings for the earliest human settlers. There are still plenty of dolphins and some whales, including sperm whales and humpbacks, sharing the waters with stingrays and sharks, barracudas and eels, marlin and tuna. Around the reefs there are fish with intriguing names—grunts and groupers, snappers and doctorfish, squirrelfish and goatfish and triggerfish and angelfish—and in some parts of the Caribbean Sea the unusual flying fish, breaking the surface at speeds up to forty miles per hour and gliding on pectoral and pelvic fins for distances from a hundred feet to a quarter mile. Some say it flies over the waves to escape predators; others believe it does it just for fun.

The trees that originally grew on Jamaica, from the dry lowlands to the rainy valleys and up onto the steep hillsides, were drastically reduced—in both number and variety—with the arrival of humans, who cut timber for building and cleared land for agriculture. But this opened up spaces for new plant varieties, some introduced by travelers and some brought there by chance, on the winds and waves or by bird or boat. There are tamarinds whose seeds traveled from Asia, breadfruits brought from Tahiti by William Bligh (the notorious commander of the Bounty), and sapodilla (better known in Jamaica as naseberry) with its delicious fruit and sap called chicle, tapped every six years to make chewing gum. Jamaica has flowering trees such as the native poui, which has a spectacular yellow-gold blossom that lasts only a short while, falling in an apron around the base of the tree; and the blue mahoe, which displays trumpet-shaped, hibiscus-like flowers at different times of the year, its wood prized for cabinet-making and the crafting of musical instruments, and its bark used in Cuba to wrap cigars.

Other trees have various uses. The lignum vitae’s sapwood was once a remedy for syphilis, and its gum is still used in the treatment of arthritis. There is a tree called Duppy Machete, with floral petals deemed suitable for dealing with duppies, West Indian spirits of the dead. The beautiful frangipani has a sweet scent but a poisonous sap, while the fruit of the ackee is poisonous at the wrong time of harvesting but delicious at the right stage. It is now the foundation of Jamaica’s national dish, ackee and salt (cod) fish. There are cashew trees, with a pear-shaped fruit that ends in a kernel that is the nut, and soursop and coconut and pawpaw and mango trees, along with avocado and banana and cocoa and nutmeg, none of them native but all now widely dispersed on the islands of the Caribbean. Nutmeg was an icon of the spice trade, which once centered around a group of islands in Indonesia but was eventually transplanted to Grenada and other West Indian islands. The berries of the indigenous pimenta tree seemed to early European travelers to combine the taste of nutmeg, cinnamon, and clove, and for a long time Jamaica supplied most of the world with allspice, as it was called.

Mangroves grow on many of the Caribbean island shores, as they do in many parts of the world, extending the reach of islands by walking out to sea with their prop roots and capturing sediment and plants that will eventually shape the swamp into an expanded shoreline. There are casuarinas, which have come from afar but made the Caribbean their home, and sea grapes, with their leathery leaves and sour-grape fruit. They may have been the first plant seen by Columbus when he reached what he thought were the Spice Islands of Indonesia—and the smell of these trees, along with the sight of their leaves blown from the shore and carried by the sea, would have been noticed by sailors long before any island came into view.

Anthurium, bougainvillea, Easter lily, wild scallion, and heliconia—called wild banana—are among the flowering plants native to Jamaica, along with a mimosa called Shame-Me-Lady, so sensitive that a light touch or a slight breeze cause the leaf stalks to collapse and the leaflets to close. One indigenous plant called Ram Goat Dash Along makes a healing bush tea, while cerasee makes a bitter tea that is also used as a body wash. Pomegranate and frangipani shrubs are common, along with Duppy Cho-Cho, which may harbor bad spirits. Marigolds and fuchsia grow in the mountains. Jamaica is also home to the greatest variety of orchid species in the Caribbean. They originated in Africa, like the enslaved men, women, and children who were later transported to the island, but many of the orchids were brought to the Americas as seed dust on the Sahara winds.

All humans on the islands of the world are settlers, though when they first traveled there, and why and how and from where, is often uncertain, or else explained in the myths that make up the history of first islanders (and which usually include stories about the first plants and animals as well). We can be sure that some humans came by choice, some reached by chance, and coercion played a part for others. Often islands provided sanctuary for those fleeing hunger or war, or seeking solitude—saintly or otherwise. Islands saw the arrival both of seasonal workers and of enslaved laborers, and of settlers looking for a different life, establishing new societies, and exploiting natural resources that they did not have back home. And some of them will have had a dream.

People seem to have first settled the islands of the Caribbean around six thousand years ago. All of them came by boat—some paddling, some perhaps sailing, others just drifting from the mainland—though over time a myth was told about flying to the islands, transported by birds or spirits. Once there, they gathered wild plants and ocean kelp and hunted food from the seashell-crunchy, seaweed-squishy shore; and according to their stories they were only the latest in a series of travelers in the Caribbean Sea stretching back into the mists of time. Alternating periods of wandering and settling down had defined the lives of these Amerindian people—indeed of all people—since the beginning, with each coming and going being different and yet the same, signaling both a passage and a pattern. Some set out from the mouth of the Orinoco River in Venezuela, and their first islands were Trinidad and Tobago. Others came from Central America along the Yucatán Peninsula and from Florida, and they settled on Puerto Rico, Hispaniola, Cuba, and Jamaica (often referred to as the Greater Antilles). Archaeologists have divided them into different indigenous groups, but such labels are misleading, for they all thought of themselves simply as The People. “We the people” is the quintessential island affirmation, for an island is not a metaphor for home. Home is a metaphor for an island.

We can only guess whether it was because of a crisis or out of curiosity that these ancient peoples began to set out to sea from the American mainland. They may have had dreams of a place where they would find material and spiritual well-being; or maybe they had actually heard about such a place from their singers and storytellers. Some of them may have been looking for a new start; others might have just gone for a boat ride and lost their way. Perhaps they were on their way to meet their ancestors. Whatever their motivation, they did set out.

When these first Amerindians arrived on Trinidad and Tobago, they couldn’t see anywhere else to go and so they stayed, imagining these isles for awhile as the new center of their world. Then they heard from their dreamers and derring-doers about other islands, far beyond the horizon—about one hundred miles across the sea, as it happened. So when they had had enough of life on those first islands, or enough of their fellow islanders, or were restless for adventure, they set off again, paddling and drifting until they reached the island of Grenada. From there they could see another island, and another, and another, part of an arc stretching some five hundred miles—the eastern Caribbean (also called the Lesser Antilles). Were these the blessed isles their shamans had spoken about, over the horizon, at the end of the rainbow? Were they the home of spirits of malice and mischief or of gods of grace and goodness? Nobody knew. And everybody wondered.

These ancient Amerindian peoples were used to the ways in which rivers and mountains offered plants and animals to them, and as they traveled north along the arc of islands, they continued to harvest some of the shore food they were already familiar with. But fishing in the open sea offered another livelihood, where hunting and gathering required new knowledge and skills and a surrender to different natural and supernatural forces; and these soon became part of their consciousness and their culture. Over time, they made these islands of the archipelago their new home. They found oysters, mussels, conch, and crab along the shoreline and in the mangrove swamps, and larger species—including lobsters two feet long and weighing over thirty pounds—on the sand, among the sea grass, and on the rocky beaches. They took to the sea for fish, and they ventured inland, finding some animals and plants they knew about and others they had never seen before. They harvested birds and reptiles and the small mammals that had swum to the islands or stolen a ride on driftwood. Slowly they brought their hunting and harvesting heritages into harmony, with island birds and sea turtles now animating their myths, and island storylines telling about their new relationship with the land and the sea around it.

Still, the history of settlement in the Caribbean was far from over. It seldom is with islands, where comings and goings are facts of life. From the South American mainland, new settlers with new ways of living began arriving in the Caribbean around 500 BCE, moving throughout the islands. They cultivated crops and resided in communal dwellings and village centers rather than seasonal hunting and fishing camps. They built houses to last for generations, farmed the land, harvested the sea, and created sophisticated ceremonies. Because many of the islands are mountainous, some of these new Amerindian settlers established political strongholds in the highland interiors where the resources were plentiful and the competition scarce. They expanded the existing traditions of weaving and basket-making and ceramics and developed forms of dance and music and cooking that caught the attention of the Europeans and Africans who came much later; and they became known as the Arawak—from aru, their word for cassava.

Over time, the culture of the Arawak developed in distinctive ways on different islands of the Caribbean. This, too, is the story of life on islands all over the world. (When Charles Darwin visited the Galápagos archipelago, he was intrigued by the differences in flora and fauna on islands only a few miles apart.) And so on the island of Jamaica unique human cultures and languages emerged, with arts and crafts and games that surprised other islanders, even those relatively close by. A system of chiefdoms provided political stability, inheriting power along the matriarchal line (which seemed unnatural to the European seafarers and nostalgic to the Africans when they came as enslaved laborers), and a class system that allocated responsibilities and obligations according to rank. Shamans brought supernatural resources to everyday life, including the medical and the military, inhaling an hallucinogenic powder for healing and holy enterprise called cohoba, ground from the seeds of a local tree. Perhaps their most intriguing artifacts were ceremonial seats (called duhos) and triangular carved stones—a sculptural expression of their spiritual concept of zemis, which were symbolic of ancestral and cosmic power.

The people throughout the Greater Antilles eventually became known as Taino, and their stories provided new island cosmologies and new understandings, both scientific and religious, of natural forces like the hurricane, a Taino word. They refined technologies such as the canoe and the barbecue and smoking tobacco, words that also come from the Taino language. They called themselves lukku cairi, which means island people. By the time the Spanish arrived in the late fifteenth century, several thousand Taino lived on the island of Jamaica, its harbors home to seafarers, its valleys busy with agricultural and ceremonial activities, and its mountains providing hiding places and safe havens. The distinctive character of their culture was immediately obvious to the Spaniards and persuaded the perceptive among them that this was a complex and sophisticated civilization.

Taino culture continued to inform life after the arrival of the Spanish and other European settlers and then of the enslaved Africans, though as a separate people the Taino lasted only about a century before succumbing to disease, the social and economic depredations of the sugar cane agribusiness, and both friendly and unfriendly intercourse with the Europeans (with whom they shared a fondness for accumulating material as well as spiritual resources, and a facility for separating labor and capital). The arrival of enslaved Africans created island societies different not only from the African homelands which they had been forced to leave but also from the societies that were developing on the mainlands of North and South America; and these differences, though often masked by the shared experience of slavery, are still apparent, signaling something important about the way island life distinguishes itself from its continental counterpart.

The story of European and then African settlement in the Caribbean is in most ways a grim one, and has been often told. It is the story of people in a hurry to make money—which is another typical island story, it turns out, with versions around the world that chronicle the human lust for power and privilege and for products as varied as sealskins and spices and sex. In the case of the Caribbean, it was sugar; and the slavery that made sugar production possible, and for a while highly profitable, deeply warped its island life.

Christopher Columbus did not have all this in mind when he first landed on the islands of the Caribbean. He was completely exhausted, probably a bit scared, and more than a little surprised. First visiting Jamaica on his second voyage in 1494, and still convinced that he had found the Spice Islands of the East, Columbus described the island as “the fairest that eyes had beheld.” It was also “mountainous and heavily populated,” he noted, rather nervously, since he wanted to deal with the indigenous people, whom he had described in his earlier “letter announcing the discovery of the new world” as “of a very astute intelligence, and they are men who navigate all these seas.” The Taino of Jamaica were gentle and generous in their own territory, but jealous of islanders elsewhere. They disliked and distrusted the Amerindian Caribs in the Lesser Antilles and persuaded Columbus that the Caribs were cannibals. They weren’t, at least not in the way the Taino suggested; but that hardly mattered in the jostle of island jealousies. Just so, contemporary Jamaicans hold a special disregard for the “small islanders” of the eastern Caribbean, describing them in all sorts of ways that are, let us say, unflattering. And of course those islanders return the favor.

This is an island habit, it seems; or maybe it is a human one, though perhaps only mountain societies, bound by dialect and cultural differences, display the same capacity as islanders for prejudice against communities only a short distance away but separated by seemingly impassable barriers. Such insularity shows itself in particular ways on certain islands, reinforced by a defensively conservative attachment to traditional practices and ceremonies as well as by ingenious social and economic arrangements, which may explain why the English word “insular” took on negative connotations over time.

But also on islands, something positive is often involved. The Amerindian peoples, arriving separately but finding themselves sharing islands in the Caribbean, had to find new ways of interacting—and new social, economic, political, and cultural dynamics that combined elements of both their hunter-gatherer and their agricultural communities. What emerged after centuries were unique multicultural and multilingual societies, rare at any time and exceptional in the long history of human interaction. On the mainland, the story of agricultural societies impatiently destroying hunter-gatherer communities is the norm; but on some of these islands, despite—or maybe because of—the relatively close quarters they were confined to, the various settlers reconciled these livelihoods, drawing on spiritual as well as material technologies from each and combining hunting with harvesting on land and sea and shore.

For other than setting back out to sea, or flying away on the wings of a dove, there was nowhere else for these people to go. So they could either destroy each other, or find ways of getting along. Anything is possible given time, and on islands time moves at whatever pace people want. Which means that when people are in a hurry, terrible things tend to happen. When they are not, islands can be places of peace and tranquility, or at least of reconciliation; for like everywhere on Earth, in geology no less than in the natural world, island life is a work in progress, and from time to time islanders have nourished remarkable ways of settling their differences. It may have had something to do with the water all around, for as the pioneer ecologist Rachel Carson said in her book The Sea Around Us (1951), there is no “more delicately balanced relationship than that of island life to its environment.” Which includes other human beings. Iceland and the Isle of Man are home to the world’s oldest parliaments, after all, and the parliament in England also has a good long history, while the story of ancient Polynesian political culture is, mostly, one of remarkable checks and balances. (“A difference of opinion surrounded by water” is how one islander describes where he lives on Salt Spring Island on the west coast of Canada.) It doesn’t always work out, of course; but willy-nilly, the sea concentrates an islander’s mind.

The “i” in the English word “island” comes from the Anglo-Saxon eig and the Old Norse ey, which mean water. And water, which covers nearly three quarters of our planet’s surface and surrounds all the continents, is a place where we don’t belong. The various myths about floods, common to peoples all over the world, are a reminder not only of the occasionally catastrophic consequences of climate change (or, in some accounts, the grumpiness of the gods), but of the perpetual condition of humans in relation to water.

Water is a paradox. It is a source of both life and death for us; and for some ocean islanders, especially, water is something that unites rather than separates, its bountiful blessings more important than its occasional brutality, a place of peace that passeth understanding. On the island of Tikopia in the Solomon Islands, death at sea is referred to as a “sweet burial.” When the islander William Wordsworth, in a time of trouble at the beginning of the 1800s, called on John Milton for comfort, he said the great seventeenth-century poet “had a voice whose sound was like the sea.” Life began in the sea, as far as we know; and when we seek evidence of life on other planets we look for water. But no matter how friendly our feelings toward it, we are not at home in the water. We don’t swim very well, or for very long, certainly not compared to our cousins the marine mammals, much less the fish and reptiles that live there. And while small amounts of salt water are cleansing, seawater makes us sick. “You can’t drink the sea,” sings the Newfoundlander Ron Hynes, echoing Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ancient Mariner who cried “water, water, everywhere, nor any drop to drink” shortly after he shot an albatross, perhaps not even knowing that albatrosses drink seawater quite happily.

The sea is undomestic, wild. “No man can ever in truth declare that he saw the sea look young, as the earth looks young in spring” observed Joseph Conrad, and the Newfoundland poet E. J. Pratt wrote: “There is no silence upon the earth or under the earth like the silence under the sea; / No cries announcing birth, / No sounds declaring death.” “Nothing can be put down in the sea. You can’t plant on it, you can’t live on it, you can’t walk on it,” reflects the Nobel laureate Derek Walcott from his island of St. Lucia. The sea “does not have anything on it that is a memento of man,” he adds; and memory is the mark of humankind.

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.

It is sometimes said that language is what defines us as humans. But it is really belief, and ceremonies of belief, of which language may be the most remarkable. It is not the only such ceremony, however. Just as language—its words and images—requires us to believe in its artifice, its man-made (or divinely inspired) ability to take us across the gulf that separates us as individuals, so leaving the shore and sailing to an island involves an act of faith in the technologies of craft and navigation.

“The water is wide, I cannot cross over, neither have I wings to fly. Give me a boat,” begins a famous lament from the British isles. Separateness is a condition that fills humans with both dread and delight. Much ancient and modern philosophy, politics, and now economics are about the insularity of our individual consciousness and the ingenious ways we have developed of making connections, forming relationships, and establishing commerce between you and me or them and us, while also maintaining distance and difference. “Thank God we’re surrounded by water” is the chorus line of a song by Dominic Behan (Ireland) and Tom Cahill (Newfoundland), celebrating the advantages of being separated from others by the sea. “Thank God we speak Irish” (which is to say, Gaelic rather than English) is its cultural counterpart, for we are all islanded by our individual languages. “Shades of the prison house begin to close upon the growing boy,” said Wordsworth about first learning a language. Walter Pater, writing in his book on the Renaissance (1873) about the inner and outer worlds of consciousness that words and images bring together, described how we can be bound by the very intelligence and imagination that give us freedom, with “each mind keeping as a solitary prisoner its own dream of a world.”

The contradiction is always there. Both islands and languages lay claim to their inhabitants, limiting as well as liberating them, holding them hostage even as they set them free—though from what, people don’t always agree. Indeed, it may be a consciousness of our “islanded” existence—and our capacity (and, more often than not, desire) for crossing the wide water between—that makes us truly human, a consciousness and a capacity that incorporates our uniquely human understanding of life and death, the ultimate separation. Crossing the water is an ancient image for the passing over that is death, as Donne knew well, and it is an image shared among many religious traditions. The Christian community, for its part, is often likened to a ship, its church nave and other architectural elements modeled after the ark that saved Noah’s family, with the priest as navigator and the cross conflating mast and anchor. “No man is an island” is a prayer as well as a proposition.

In the British Museum is an ancient Taino sculpture from Jamaica that portrays a bird on the back of a turtle. It represents a creation story that has wide currency among indigenous peoples in the Americas, telling of a special tree that grew on an island high above the world, and an ancient chief who lived there with a woman who was his beloved. She had a dream that the tree had been uprooted, and when she awoke she told her man about it. They went to look, and there it was still standing where it had always been. Just a dream. But dreams must be taken seriously, and the chief decided he’d better do something to make it come true. So he pulled the tree out of the ground.

In art as well as life, an action like this is usually followed by a reaction. Something is given, something must be taken away. Something is lifted up, something must fall down. And sure enough, the tree that the old man had uprooted left a great big hole; and when the woman came to look at it, she fell through.

Down below, water covered everything. The only living things were the fish and the seafaring animals and the birds. They all looked up, and saw a woman falling from the sky—like a meteor, which she eventually became in the stories of science. To save her, two seabirds—swans, some say, or maybe cormorants—caught and balanced her on their wings. They flew about for a long time, but eventually they needed somewhere to rest. Except there wasn’t anywhere. Just the sea below and the sky above.

Another of the waterbirds said she had heard that there was earth far below the surface of the sea. That would be ideal, they all agreed; but how to get it, if indeed there was earth down there. Everyone offered to help. First a beaver went down, but he didn’t find any. Then a loon tried, going down and down, but he, too, came up empty. Finally, a muskrat gave it a go, diving deeper and deeper until, just when she could go no further, she reached bottom, grabbed a pawful of earth, and swam back to the surface, gasping for air.

But where to put the earth? A turtle, swimming by at that very moment, said, “put it on my back.” Which the muskrat did. And birds had a place to land. Trees had a place to grow. Humans had a home called Turtle Island. And the whole world as we know it came into being.

In other accounts of the origin of the earth, a bird drops dirt onto the back of a whale, or onto a mythical water creature. There is a Taino legend about a sacred calabash that contained all the fruits of the sea. It was stolen and then dropped, the water in the calabash flooding the earth, the only parts spared being the mountains that form the islands of the Caribbean Sea. A story from the Pacific islands explains how a boat carrying people—an ark, of sorts—is turned into an island, and then the people call on Katinanik, the mangrove, to protect it from the waves, and on Katenenior, the barrier reef, to surround it. The Maori of New Zealand tell of a bird lifting the land out of the water. In a story from Hawaii, a bird lays an egg that is fertilized by the sun. Still other stories describe how a bird makes a place to land out of twigs and branches, building up an island the way science describes it happening with volcanic ash and the accumulation of sediment, and the way humans have been making artificial islands in rivers and lakes for millennia. Many Polynesian legends include islands being brought to the surface on a fishhook.

On one island archipelago in the North Pacific, people tell of the time when a loon swam about for days and days, looking for land. He’d seen a cloud in the sky, so he flew up and there he found a dwelling in which an old man was lying beside two quartz stones, burning bright. The old man didn’t move, and so the loon went outside and cried, making the call he still makes today. He cried all afternoon and all night and all the next day—until on the third day the old man woke up and complained that he couldn’t sleep with all that noise. The loon explained that he was crying because there was no place down below for the people to live. So the old man gave the loon a small black stone that he took from a box within a box within a box, and he told him to go down and place it in the water and breathe on it for a short while. And then he gave him a large stone with shiny things running through it and told him to do the same, but to breathe on it for as long as he could; and the small stone became Haida Gwaii—the archipelago once known as the Queen Charlotte Islands—and the large stone the continent of the Americas. The old man then created a raven to fly down and land on the islands; and later the real people came out of the sea.

That islands should be part of so many creation stories is hardly surprising, for they provide an image of that first moment when the land was separated from the waters and human life was made possible. In stories of the end of the world, too, islands are usually the last place left. Like floods, earthquakes, and volcanoes, islands are often associated with powers or forces beyond our comprehension but fundamental to our understanding of the world. Some of these forces are imaginary (or personified in the gods who are believed to inhabit the world), but they can seem very real. Myths are often misunderstood as distancing us from such forces. In fact, they make them more real, not less. And the power of such myths comes not from the fact that fires and floods, for instance, are common across cultures, but from the way the stories about them bring together scientific and religious accounts, allowing each its own authority without discrediting the other. We believe such stories not only to make sense of the world, or to take control of it, but also to remind ourselves that some things don’t make sense, and some things we can’t control. The stories of religion show us how to accept these forces. The stories of science show us that we don’t always have to. Creation stories that begin with birds and turtles and firestones and fishhooks are not mistaken explanations of historical incidents but true explanations of the human condition and of our very human wonder about the mystery of creation and destruction. Which is the mystery of islands.

The first bird mentioned in the Bible is a raven, related by more than ornithology to the one in the Haida Gwaii story. Noah, adrift on the waters, sent the bird out and it never came back. Seemingly no comfort there. Except that there was, for Noah knew something about ravens from stories that were told back then, stories in which ravens look after themselves; and he realized that this raven must have found a place to rest. An island, of course, since there was nothing else. No sign of the raven was, for Noah, a hopeful sign. But like a good scientist, he needed some evidence. So he sent out a dove, a homing pigeon. They always come back, he’d been told; and sure enough it did, carrying a leaf. That was enough. An island with a tree on it. A place for a bird to land. Noah had proof that the floodwaters were receding and islands appearing once again; and one of them, which much later became known to us as Mount Ararat, provided a resting place for the ark.

In some stories of the beginning of the world, nothing came first, nothing at all—which is why the opening of John’s Gospel, in its early Greek version, has no definite article. “In beginning,” it begins. But all the stories agree that sooner or later something happened—a word perhaps, or a deed. Many storytellers hedge their bets and hold out for both. Whatever the case, beginning is marked by a difference: a new note in the scale, a new star in the sky, a new color on the canvas. A bang or a whimper. A line separating above from below, light from darkness. A spot of space or time. And, more often than not, an island.

Most of them offer an image to remember that moment—fire or flood, bird droppings or egg hatchings, island craftings or ocean crossings, fallings or risings. Science and religion collaborate on this more than we realize, weaving together stories that have been told around the world forever. Sometimes they describe events that happened in historical time, sometimes in the mythical past, and often it’s impossible to tell the difference. And the question we love to ask—whether it all began with land or water, island or ocean—is like asking which came first, the chicken or the egg. A chicken may simply be an egg’s way of producing another egg. Science and religion dance around this like revelers around a beach fire—and whether about rocks or ravens, tectonic plates or turtles, that’s where creation stories come into their own.

Philosophers were the popularizers of science in ancient times, and their speculations had the same authority we now accord scientific accounts. In fact, “philosopher” as the name for a scientist had currency up until late in the nineteenth century, preferred by naturalists as notable as Charles Darwin and Thomas Huxley. The ancient philosopher-scientists proposed a variety of early representations of the world, and again and again they envisioned land encircled by water. In the sixth century BCE, the Greek philosopher Anaximander, perhaps influenced by images from the Middle East, described the earth as a disc floating in water; and images of the earth as a circle, a square, or a disc, often with some sort of roof or umbrella overhead and sometimes surrounded both above and below by water, were widely circulated in Europe and Asia and North Africa. Around the same time, Pythagoras argued the case for a round planet on philosophic grounds, because a sphere was the most perfect shape and motionless (movement could be undignified). He was a mathematician, after all, and mathematicians like elegant explanations. In the fourth century BCE, Pythagoras’s ideas were picked up by Plato and written into scientific scripture by Aristotle. The Roman Macrobius, writing around 400 CE, suggested a geocentric model of the cosmos, with the earth in the middle surrounded by water and air and fire as well as a set of four planetary islands figured as a quadrille. The earth as a sphere was routinely represented in popular globes that were made and marketed in Europe as early as the thirteenth century. And an Islamic map titled “The Wonders of Creation” from the sixteenth century CE showed the earth surrounded by the sea, which was in turn surrounded by a mountain, all nested in a bowl of water.

Plato also described an island continent he called Atlantis, which lay beyond the Pillars of Hercules (the entrance to the Strait of Gibraltar). It was a philosophical gambit as much as a geological or geographical proposition (science and philosophy really were fellow travelers), an imagining of a place way out there where power and pride and ambition held sway, a place eventually destroyed, as all such places must be when we waken from the dream. Or maybe it was a real place, destroyed by an earthquake or a volcano. He may have been inspired by accounts of Santorini, the Mediterranean island north of Crete that was devastated in about the seventeenth century BCE by one of the most powerful volcanic explosions we know of, darkening the sky, causing crop failure and famine throughout the Middle East and Egypt, and effectively changing the course of Mediterranean history. Or maybe it was a flood, for Plato said that Atlantis sank beneath the waves some twelve thousand years ago (when the last ice age was retreating and reshaping much of the world’s water and land). Stories of the weird and wonderful transformations that took place during that period of climate change might have come down to him in story and song, and both the idea and the reality of Atlantis may have been Plato’s image of a time when the waters rose and the land went under. Whatever the case, Atlantis has held people’s imagination for nearly twenty-five hundred years, and roughly the same number of books have been written about it, establishing its location variously in the Mediterranean, off the west coast of Africa, in the Caribbean, and in the middle of the Pacific. Plato had certainly never seen Atlantis, and indeed the story he told was inside another story which was in turn inside another, like those boxes in the Haida Gwaii creation story. But neither have today’s scientists ever seen the atoms they describe with such detail and delight, recounting stories that their instruments have given them, like the Egyptian priests whom Plato credited with the story of Atlantis. We should be careful not to dismiss the scientific imaginings of classical philosophers, for their storytelling styles are with us still.

So almost all early European and Islamic mappings of the world included images and icons of land surrounded by water. To the Romans, the surrounding or encircling sea was the River Oceanus. The Norse called it Uthal, or the Great Sea. To many sailors of ancient and medieval times it was the Green Sea of Gloom, with boiling waters and frozen wastes, monsters that defied description, and mysterious forces that didn’t have a name. Sometimes there was a realm—an island—above and sometimes one below as well, often on an apparently flat earth; or, especially after the idea of a round earth took hold, the world was pictured as two hemispheres of land, one the mirror of the other where everything was backwards, including people’s feet—which is why that place was called the antipodes. Some dismissed such a place as a philosophical joke or as a lie to mislead them from the truth, since they could not get their heads around the idea that folks on the other side of a round earth were upside down, with plants growing downwards and rain falling upwards. But Pliny the Elder in the first century CE had an answer, suggesting that “in regard to the problem of why those on the opposite side to us do not fall, we must ask in return whether those on the opposite side do not wonder that we do not fall.”

It was also common for cartographers to place their particular home—Alexandria or Athens, Jerusalem or Mecca—right in the middle (just as mapmakers do today with their home turf). Thus centered, the place down under was referred to as the “austral” (from the Latin for south) or southern land. No one was sure whether it was a continent or an island; and indeed no one was sure of it at all. But its existence was presumed in geographical and philosophical traditions, and embraced by scholars who sought symmetry in a world with counterbalancing landmasses surrounded by ocean. Some Christian thinkers, intrigued by cataclysmic accounts, favored islands with strange or grotesque features instead of symmetrical landmasses, representing such singular islands as fragments of a whole, symbolic of a fallen and fractured world. But the idea, and slowly the reality, of the southern shores was hardwired into seafaring by the time of the European Renaissance and its expansion of trade and exploration on the high seas. One part of this great southern (is)land had an especially engaging name for awhile, a name that brings together ancient traditions of island travel with modern tourism. After Marco Polo had mentioned a kingdom he called Lucach, a printer’s error resulted in it being identified on a map published in 1532 as Beach. Francis Drake, being a cavalier spirit, set out to find this exotic “Beach,” apparently full of gold and elephants; but his cautious fellow captains persuaded him not to sail into what they thought was a gulf of one-way winds and currents.

In a world where about 70 percent of the surface is covered by water, beaches and shores are everywhere, forming borderlines between land and water. Botticelli’s painting The Birth of Venus (ca. 1485) and Matthew Arnold’s poem “Dover Beach” (1867) are only two of the thousands of representations of this kind of borderland, many of them conjuring up fear as well as fascination. In many places, waterfront real estate has become especially prized; shores of lakes and oceans have fetched prices far beyond reason. For ecologists, the edge or border is a place of peril as well as possibility; and since islands, in a very real sense, are all border, they become thresholds to a world of wonders in the stories and songs they sponsor.

Since ancient times, shores have also been the meeting point of different worlds and different peoples, sponsoring conflict as well as communion. Throughout history the sea has ensured that powers beyond human control hold sway on its shores; and even with all the hazards of the sea, the shore retains its own menacing authority. The most dangerous moments in an open boat—the kind that carried seafarers for thousands of years—were always launching from and returning to the shore, just as takeoff and landing still are for an airplane or a space shuttle.

There are two fundamental truths about humans and islands. The first is that until very recently, going to an island always meant journeying across a body of water, leaving behind the usual markers of meaning and value. The second truth is that we don’t really understand what motivated people to do this, even though the history of island settlement has been a defining part of the human story from the day the first person left the land and ventured onto a river or lake or the sea on a quest for goodness or godliness or grub or gold. And islanders are not unanimous in their attitude toward the water that surrounds them, with tropical Pacific islanders viewing the sea around them as much friendlier than islanders in, say, the North Atlantic do—because their part of the ocean is in some ways indeed more “pacific” than the iceberg-clogged, storm-tossed far northern and southern seas, and because the great distances between islands in parts of the Pacific paradoxically seem to have created a sense not of island isolation but of ocean companionship, the water providing the currency of communication with other people.

Should islanders be considered colonists or castaways? The story of island habitation—how and when and why—is still controversial. The ability to fashion technologies for travel must figure in any answer, as perhaps does our instinct to cross boundaries, to make connections, to travel in between. Why we go, and why we stay, are among the most basic questions about our human occupation of this earth; which is why islands may be even more central to the human condition than language is, and why the history of island travel may define our deepest wants and needs (and not all of them admirable).

Islands clearly incorporate something fundamental about the human spirit. The stories and songs through which we make sense of the world represent both life as it is (or appears to be) and life as we wish it were or wonder whether it could be, both the so-called real world—its reality conditioned by our habits of thought and feeling—and the world of our imagination, shaped by our anxieties and desires. We try to keep these two worlds in balance, and to maintain some equilibrium between turning inward to ourselves and outward to the world. An island both illustrates and invites this kind of dual consciousness, which may be why some of our most enduring stories and myths have to do with islands. Faced with the difficulty of defining an island, perhaps we should take the advice of one of the wisest of ocean island scientists, Patrick Nunn, who proposes that islands are so completely built into our consciousness that we don’t need a definition.

For a long time, many people have argued that we are most civilized, indeed most human, when we stop traveling and settle down. Others have seen something quintessentially human in our ability to dream about other places, design technologies to go there, and wander off. Islands are at the center of this human conundrum. To get to any island, you have to leave where you currently are and travel. On the other hand, islands are the perfect place to settle; once there, you cannot so easily go anywhere else. And there is something more, something that has to do with the human embrace of moments of wonder, of amazement, of awe. “I wish I were landing on her for the first time,” said a seasoned Newfoundland fisherman as he approached a tiny island in the North Atlantic for the hundredth time, expressing a mixture of dread (for the landing was very dangerous) and delight (because thousands of birds were waiting to welcome him with a deafening chorus). Wonder is inevitably involved in island travel, no matter how routine. This wonder is circumscribed by wondering, as belief is surrounded by doubt, and islands by water.

Just as they were fundamental to ancient science and philosophy, islands have become central images in the modern social sciences, with concepts of the individual and society taking their cue from the psychology of islanded human beings and the sociology of communities as islands where interaction is unavoidable. Psychology and sociology have been joined by anthropology, economics, political science, and history in asking why humans travel to islands, why they stay there, and why some of them leave.

Eventually, such discussions return to a key set of questions. Is island living natural, something that happens in the normal course of human development? Or is it un-natural, prompted by particular circumstances? Are we island travelers by nature or by nurture? Are we pushed there by a crowded or cantankerous community—or are we pulled there by a desire for something different? Do independent people go to islands—or do people become independent once there? The questions go deep into our philosophical as well as historical consciousness, and echo ancient arguments about freedom and fate. And about foolishness. From early days, landlubbers have felt that anyone who gets in a boat and goes to sea for anything other than fish is either mad or bad or a bit of both. In medieval times in certain European, North African, and Middle Eastern communities, if you ventured far out to sea and managed to return, you would not be celebrated. You would lose your civil rights.

This suggests something unusual about those who find their way to islands, and make their home there. Maybe they are at the cutting edge of human evolution—or maybe they are cutting themselves off from the competitive challenges of progressive mainland life. Generations of anthropologists have had a fixation with this, scouring the islands of the world for evidence of either unique or universal human characteristics. One nineteenth-century anthropologist described the islands of the Pacific as museums or “cages in which their insulated occupants were shut in from external influence.” “The sea selects and then protects her island folk,” wrote the American geographer Ellen Churchill Semple early in the twentieth century, with a more positive spin. Of all geographical boundaries, she said, the most important is that between sea and land, and since most of the world is covered by water, “the human species bears a deeply ingrained insular character.”

It seems we often need—or we want—to set out for lands across the water. “And then went down to the sea” is how Ezra Pound began his praise song to world literature, the Cantos. Similar lines can be found across much of the earth. The stories that Homer told opened that way, telling of “a wave-washed island rising at the center of the seas.” “The first god was a gommier [gum tree],” writes Derek Walcott in his poem Omeros (the Greek word for Homer), referring to the tree used by islanders to make canoes for travel in the Caribbean. In the South Pacific during ancient times, ceremonies calling on the gods were performed on the completion of a canoe; in more recent times, the invocations are to Jesus and his fishermen friends.

The circumstances have varied, but the song itself has been much the same across the millennia. It was recited by Andrew Marvell in the 1600s, imagining a group of Puritans rowing to a fortunate isle they had heard about, the island of Bermuda—which had undergone a sea change in the century since it had first been named the Isle of Devils by the Spanish—and singing an elegant sea chanty to thank the God who “gave us this eternal spring / Which here enamels every thing, / And sends the fowls to us in care, / On daily visits through the air. / He hangs in shades the orange bright, / Like golden lamps in a green night; / And does in the pomegranates close / Jewels more rich than Ormus shows. / He makes the figs our mouths to meet / And throws the melons at our feet.” And to remind us that they went by boat, Marvell added: “And all the way, to guide their chime, / With falling oars they kept the time.” Three centuries later another English islander, John Masefield, dreaming of “the gull’s way and the whale’s way,” wrote the famous poem “Sea Fever” (1902): “I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky, / And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by.”

Some seafarers have ventured over stormy seas and some through sheltered passages, but all of them have experienced the strangeness of sea voyages and, often enough, the sudden rightness of islands. The greatest migration in human history, when our early ancestors moved from Africa north and east through Asia, involved a major island expedition: as habitat and hunting capacities and climates changed and the exponential effects of population increase became overwhelming, some of them left the Asian mainland and traveled across the sea on rafts and dugouts to what is now New Guinea (the world’s second largest island, after Greenland), which at that time—fifty or sixty thousand years ago—was part of the Australian landmass. Although we now call Australia a continent, it must have seemed like an island to the Aboriginal travelers who established one of humanity’s earliest civilizations there.

Vagabondage—feeling “bound to go,” in that wonderfully contradictory phrase—has probably been a part of life for people in all times and places. Ancient peoples would have heard stories about islands “out there,” with a storyteller’s assurance that if you traveled in a good way—whatever that might mean—you would sooner or later come across one of them; and setting out for one of the many islands on Earth would have been, in some circumstances, like going down the road in modern life. Rogue storms and outlaw escapades will have always played a role in fostering island travel, along with conflict at home and tales about life abroad. Extraordinary circumstances account for people taking astonishing risks, and we have lots of contemporary evidence for this, often with tragic results: people getting into rickety boats to seek refuge and a better life across the sea—from Cuba and Haiti to Florida; from northern Africa to southern Europe; and from Southeast Asia to Australia and North America.

At certain times, there may even have been a cultural bias toward going to sea, which over time would have become more like riding a horse or (in our day) driving a car or flying in an airplane. That may have been the case for the Arawak and Taino and Carib voyagers, and it was almost certainly so for the peoples who lived around the islands of Indonesia—there are seventeen thousand of these islands, with six thousand of them named and nearly a thousand now inhabited—where island hopping must have been bound into the human psyche, just as it was for peoples in the eastern Mediterranean where so much of Western literature had its beginnings. In East Africa, the name Swahili means “shore people”; and the various island chains in that part of the Indian Ocean framed by Africa and South Asia would have encouraged people to use the sea as a network of roads. “Whale roads” was the familiar phrase among ancient Scandinavians, who also traveled along archipelagoes, the sea connecting rather than dividing. People of the Atlantic, north and south, thought of themselves as shore people for millennia; and for Inuit (Eskimo) peoples, the ice islands of the Arctic continue to be as much a part of their world as the sun and the moon and the stars. Even the Pacific Ocean, greater in size than all the land on Earth, was understood by its Polynesian peoples as a “sea of islands.”

It is one thing to dream or talk about traveling to islands across the sea. Actually doing so is something else, no matter what the circumstances, and it represents one of humanity’s most remarkable accomplishments and most extraordinary acts of faith. A covenant in wonder with the world. And a triumph of craft.