Islands in History and Representation

Rod Edmond, Vanessa Smith, Rod Edmond, Vanessa Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000143119
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early American History
• Index: History

This innovative collection of essays explores the ways in which islands have been used, imagined and theorised, both by island dwellers and continentals. This study considers how island dwellers conceived of themselves and their relation to proximate mainlands, and examines the fascination that islands have long held in the European imagination.
The collection addresses the significance of islands in the Atlantic economy of the eighteenth century, the exploration of the Pacific, the important role played by islands in the process of decolonisation, and island-oriented developments in postcolonial writing.
Islands were often seen as natural colonies or settings for ideal communities but they were also used as dumping grounds for the unwanted, a practice which has continued into the twentieth century. The collection argues the need for an island-based theory within postcolonial studies and suggests how this might be constructed. Covering a historical span from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, the contributors include literary and postcolonial critics, historians and geographers.

1 Taking history offshore

Atlantic islands in European minds, 1400-1800

John R. Gillis

The island seems to have a tenacious hold on the human....But it is in the imagination of the Western world that the island has taken strongest hold.

(Tuan 1998: 118)

Continental Europeans had been thinking archipelagically long before they ventured offshore into the Atlantic. Prior to the Age of Discovery, Europe imagined itself to be an island, or rather a part of an earth island called Orbis Terrarum. bounded by an encircling river named Oceanus. in the Middle Ages places referred to as islands were as likely to be landlocked as sea-girt. Following classical tradition, dwellings and neighborhoods were often called insula. The exclusive association of islands with water came later, coincidental with the first tentative movements of Europeans offshore in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It was then that Oceanus ceased to be imagined as an impassable barrier and became the all-connecting sea. The same period gave us the modern distinction between continents and islands, the former defined by territorial contiguity, the latter by a land's relationship to water.

Today, in a second great era of global expansion, what once seemed such firm geographical distinctions are dissolving. The notion of the continent has recently been challenged, and it is possible to see that the idea of the island is also a construction, variable by time as well as by culture. What I like to call the islands of the mind have had histories and geographies distinct from but never altogether separate from those of physical islands. They figured prominently in ancient mythical geography, and the legendary isles of late medieval "insular romanticism" inspired a surge of island finding that led to the openihg-up of the Atlantic in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (Olschki 1937).

But it was in the period roughly 1400-1800 that islands of the mind played the most prominent role. So powerful was European islomania at this time that even lands that were later to be recognized as continents, the Americas and Australia, were conceived of in insular terms. In the course of the sixteenth century, islands became the favored places for locating paradise and Utopia. It was on an island that the fiction of the modern individual was first represented. In time, however, these imagined islands were gradually displaced from the charts by those whose value was more economic than speculative. In the seventeenth century, mainland colonies of plunder and extraction were overshadowed by sea-borne empires in which islands played a central role economically and strategically. By the end of the eighteenth century virtually every Atlantic island had been found, explored, and exploited to the fullest extent possible. At this point, the insular imagination moved on to the Pacific, where a whole new mythical geography was in the process of formation.

Historians have only just begun to take history offshore to ask questions about oceans and islands. "Although history is ostensibly about people, it has tended to become overwhelmingly about 'lands,'" writes Ian Steele. "Countries are given histories that can portray areas of soil as living social, economic, and political beings, whereas oceans are viewed primarily as vast and empty moats between those histories" (Steele 1986: vi). The reasons for this are not hard to fathom. The rise of the professional practice of history in the nineteenth century coincided with the age of the nation-state, when power became firmly rooted in clearly bounded contiguous territories. The first phases of the industrial revolution concentrated capital investment on terra firma, obscuring the degree to which the oceans and islands had been the source of that wealth in earlier centuries. As a result, maritime history has remained until recently a marginal area. As for islands, they became the province of anthropology, a field which became increasingly ahistorical, reinforcing the notion that islands are timeless places where nothing important ever happened.

It is only lately, coinciding with the awareness of globalization, that oceans and islands have attracted renewed interest. The movement of capital and people offshore, the success of insular cities like Hong Kong and Singapore in dominating global networks, and the enormous acceleration of international trade, much of it carried by ship, has turned attention away from the continents and the nation-state itself. This deterritorialization has stranded conventional history and has led to calls for new perspectives that would allow us to capture the fullness of historical experience. Historians of the Early Modern period have been in the vanguard of this change, partly in response to John Pocock's invitation "to let our mental vision travel out into a diffusion of pelagic cultures lying beyond 'Europe' and 'civilization' as conventionally imagined" (Pocock 1996: 174). Suddenly maritime history has become fashionable, and social historians have gone offshore to explore maritime proletarians who belong as much to islands as they do to continents.

Islands in ancient and medieval minds

Yet western geographical as well as historical imaginations remain deeply landlocked, a consequence of a culture that has made a particularly sharp distinction between land and water, treating all those lands defined by water as marginal or peripheral. This is partly rooted in Judeo-Christian tradition, in which water represents chaos and islands were seen as fragments of an earth, once whole, which would remain in a fallen condition until redeemed at the end of time. The geographical understanding of the pagan ancients was equally landlocked. The Greeks and Romans ultimately mastered the Mediterranean, domesticating its islands in the process, but their voyages offshore were invariably heroic journeys, the ultimate purpose being a glorious return home to the safety of that bounded place, the polis, which Plato liked to think of as an island. Oceanus remained for them, as it did for the Celts, a mysterious place, the location of legendary isles and the resting place of deceased heroes, but off limits to ordinary men.

Even in the late Middle Ages, when fearsome Oceanus became the somewhat less daunting Western Sea, it remained the edge of the known world, inaccessible, and, by definition, mysterious, imagined as an otherworldly world. The Middle Ages conceived of the world as a closed, temporally and spatially finite, hierarchically organized cosmos endowed with significant vertical gradients circles of Hell and the spheres of Heaven — but without horizontal extension. In this view the far horizon was connected to the heavens, creating a closed geocentric, anthropocentric cosmos. This was a centripetal universe, in which each part was similar to every other, where all times and spaces were synchronous and analogous. Time did not run deep or space wide. To medieval minds, everything was essentially contemporaneous. Biblical events and places were represented on medieval mappaemundi as if they were still present. The Garden of Eden was distant but present, usually pictured as landlocked in the inaccessible terrain far to the East, sometimes as a remote isle in the Indian Ocean.

Because curiosity was still a sin, discovery held no attraction. History was a matter of confirming old truths rather than producing new knowledge, and travel was undertaken in the interest of recovery of old worlds rather than finding new ones. As Wilcomb Washburn points out, medieval thinkers were "blessedly free" of geographical categories, tending "merely to contrast land with sea, zone with zone, part with part, West with East, the known world with the unknown" (Washburn 1962: 3). Distances and directions mattered little; and even words for different kinds of lands were used ver)' loosely and interchangeably. Africa, Europe, and Asia were simply "parts" of Orbis Terrarum, not bounded continents in their own right. Nor was the definition of islands any clearer. The term "isle" meant any isolated or remote territory, whether landlocked or sea-girt. Sir John Mandeville referred to Tibet as an "isle" in his fictional account of his world travels. Place names like the Isle of Avalon, which today designates a feature of the English countryside, were commonplace. To medieval minds islands were not, as they are for us, a distinctive category.

The vagueness of medieval geography was an understandable product of a lack of travel experience, but it is attributable less to ignorance than to the prevailing epistemology, which John Kirtland Wright has called "geosophy" to distinguish it from the physical geography of later times (Wright 1966: 68—88). Geosophy conceived of all land forms as equally subject to divine will. "God made the Earth quite round, in the middle of the firmament," wrote Mandeville. But, in contrast to the heavens, earth was far from perfect, having been cursed, like mankind itself, first by the Fall and then by the Flood. "The hills and valleys that are now on earth are the result only of Noah's flood, by which soft earth moved from its place leaving a valley, and the hard ground stayed still and become a hill" (Mandeville 1983: 183-4). In Biblically informed metageography islands were seen as fragments, as ruins of a once smooth and whole earth where everything was once plentiful and easily accessible. Islands were therefore parts of a larger whole, not worlds of their own. Only at the end of time would the shattered earth, together with scattered humanity, be reunited. This millennial moment was some way off, however, dependent in part on the ability of Christians to convert the whole of mankind, but also on the will of God, who was seen as the arbiter of geography as well as history.

Islands figured prominently in the Christian understanding of the history of the earth, especially at the beginning and ending of the story. The shattering of the perfection and wholeness of Eden triggered by the sins of Adam and Eve anticipated the devastating results of the Flood, which had riven the earth and scattered God's people. Islands were thus the emblem of God's wrath, constant reminders of man's sinfulness. But they were also symbols of the hope for redemption and destined to disappear at the end of time, when God's grace would make the world whole again. As it was predicted in Revelations, at the end of time all the lost parts of the world, conceived of as both landlocked and sea-moated islands, would be recovered and the earth would again be restored to good order. In the process, islands would disappear for "there was no more sea" (Revelations 27: 1),

In the geosophy of the Middle Ages, islands were the "favorite places for the most astounding and divine adventures" (Claude Kappler; quoted in Delumeau 1995: 98). Irish monks ventured into what they regarded as the "desert of the sea" to find barren isles where they could practice kinosis, the emptying out of the self, the opening-up to the divine, that constituted the core of their ascetic practices. By the sixth century, islands off the Scottish and Irish coasts were peopled by holy hermits, becoming ultimately monastic and pilgrimage sites. In time this "desert of the sea" would extend to the Shetlands, Faroes, and Iceland before succumbing to Viking intrusions of the eighth century.

One account of these holy travels, known as the Voyage of Saint Brendan, ultimately became one of the Middle Ages' most popular fictions. The equally legendary Brendan's Isle found its way onto medieval mappaemundi, where it was eventually joined by a host of other fictional isles - Am ilia. Hy-Brazile, the Fortunate Isles - being only the most famous. In the later Middle Ages the legendary isles of East Asia, as reported by Polo and Mandeville, were added to this stock, filling what had become known as the Western Sea with a vast imagined archipelago that beckoned Europeans offshore, not just in religious quest, but in search of fame and fortune.

But the sea itself remained alien, and islands peripheral, until the fifteenth century. Europeans conceived of them as places in a far sea, an understanding that contrasts sharply with the notion, indigenous to the Pacific, of a sea of islands where water connects rather than disassociates. There islands were seen, not as fragments of a world that was once whole, not as reminders of remote pasts and equally remote futures, but a whole world of its own with its own unique history. It would be a long time before anything like an Atlantic sea of islands would develop.

Islands in the Age of Discovery

As European culture took a more worldly turn in the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance, legends of the Fortunate Isles revived, luring European explorers first to the Canaries, then to the Madeiras, Azores, Sao Tome, and the Cape Verdes. By the late fifteenth century, settlers on the Portuguese Atlantic isles were launching their own forays even further west, gambling their own resources on finding the Hy-Brazile, the Isle of St. Brendan, Antilia, all believed to lie just beyond the western horizon. Columbus voyaged from these same archipelagos, inspired by many of the same legends. It was islands, not continents, that first lured Europeans offshore in the fifteenth century. And the voyages that were ultimately to transform the world were initiated not in the name of discovery, but of recovery. It was not new worlds, but old worlds that were the ultimate destination.

Throughout the Middle Ages the European geographical imagination had been oriented almost exclusively to the east, the site of Christianity's holiest places, Eden as well as Jerusalem. Both trade and pilgrimage routes pointed eastward, but, with the closure of the eastern Mediterranean by the Turks in 1453, the idea that the East might be reached by going west became thinkable. "The roundness of the earth was the knowledge by which Christendom began to revive the pagan idea of the west," writes Loren Baritz, "though the east lingered as a place while the west, for the Catholic nations, became mere direction" (Baritz 1961: 625). A desire to recapture Jerusalem and thus to bring on the Second Coming had been the goal of late medieval and Renaissance millennialists like Joachim of Fiore. But now the millennialist vision was directed increasingly westward; and, together with the desire to reopen trade with Asia, it impelled Columbus on his voyages, a project that began with the intention, not of discovering a new world, but, rather, of reconnecting with the old world, the eastern parts of Orbis Terrarum.

In the fifteenth century the prospects of a westward passage were enhanced both by the legendary islands that were thought to exist off the coasts of Europe and by Mandeville's and Marco Polo's accounts of the Far East, describing a huge Asian archipelago stretching eastward toward Europe. Polo guessed that there were 12,700 isles in the Indian seas alone. Because the distance between Europe and Asia was often vastly underestimated, those who ventured westward believed that they might easily island-hop to the riches of Asia. In some reckonings the island called Chipango (Japan) was located in what today would be the mid-Atlantic. True to this mythical geography, Columbus's first landfall was an island. Everything he encountered was interpreted analogically in terms of the legendary isles that filled his mental maps. Arriving at the shores of Hispaniola, he proclaimed: "This island is Tarsis, is Cynthia, is Ophir and Ophas and Chipango, and we named it Española" (Campbell 1998: 178). Even when the mainland was finally reached and colonized, the Americas continued to be thought of as large islands in a vast archipelago, through which would ultimately be found the prized westward passage. As long as the idea of earth island persisted, the new world was more easily assimilated to the notion of islands in the seas surrounding Orbis Terrarum than to the idea of a new continent. Thus, as the exploration of the Americas continued there was a tendency even as late as the eighteenth century to see everything archipelagic ally.

Some of the mythic islands seeded in medieval maps were to be purged in the course of the Age of Discovery, but many, like St. Brendan's, Brazilé, Antilia, and California, all found new locations in yet unsurveyed places. Others, like the Canaries, ceased to be identified as the Fortunate Isles, to become sites of exploitation and slavery. But even as the islands of the Atlantic were demythologized and colonized, the search for isles of fabulous wealth and eternal happiness moved westward. Explorers chased the legendary Island of California for three centuries, from the Atlantic to the Caribbean and finally to the Pacific, before finally accepting the fact that it was a part of the North American continent.

"In the history of consciousness, fictions are the bridges for discovering facts. Myth and science go hand in hand," writes the historian of the California quest Dora Beale Polk (Polk 1991: 20—1). Because European voyagers had set out to recover an old world it took a long time before the notion of a New World sank in and the idea of recovery was replaced by the modern notion of discovery. For the first two centuries of contact, Europeans refused to acknowledge the newness of the New World, insisting on assimilating it to familiar categories, including the Biblical narratives which had been the voyagers' inspiration. The newfound lands and peoples were thought of as places lost in time, their inhabitants more ancient than the Europeans themselves. From the start, Europeans held highly ambivalent, unstable views of the peoples they encountered in the Caribbean and the mainlands of the Americas. Sometimes they were treated as nonhuman cannibals and monsters, but just as often they were assimilated to the image of simple nobility that Europeans attributed to their own pagan past. Whatever their views, Europeans had great difficulty in understanding the geography or the anthropology of the Americas on their own terms.

Yet the Age of Discovery ultimately expanded the boundaries of the known world, disrupting the medieval and Renaissance geocentric, anthropocentric geosophy by both extending the horizon and disconnecting it from the heavens. With the discoveries of Copernicus and Kepler indicating that plane...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Editors' introduction
• 1 Taking history offshore: Atlantic islands in European minds, 1400-1800
• 2 Island bounds
• 3 'The cane-land isles': commerce and empire in late eighteenth-century georgic and pastoral poetry
• 4 Bulama and Sierra Leone: Utopian islands and visionary interiors
• 5 Pacific island encounters and the German invention of race
• 6 Cook in Tonga: terms of trade
• 7 Pitcairn's 'guilty stock': the island as breeding ground
• 8 Abject bodies/abject sites: leper islands in the high imperial era
• 9 Derek Walcott's Omeros: representing St Lucia, re-presenting Homer
• 10 The island of wandering souls: processes of creolisation, politics of emancipation and the problematic of absence on Reunion Island
• 11 God save the Falklands: postcolonial geographies of the Falklands/Malvinas
• 12 The gilded cage: from utopia to monad in Australia's island imaginary
• 13 Afterword
• Bibliography
• Index