Island Dreams, page 3
Prison Islands
There are many other prison islands: Andaman, Alcatraz, Robben, Île Sainte-Marguerite, Rikers, Château d’If, the Bass Rock, Hashima. Even Ellis Island was chosen for its holding properties, its containment.
Andaman Islands
From Chennai in India I once took a plane to the Andaman Islands, midway across the Bay of Bengal. Under British rule the archipelago had been a penal colony, but from the air they looked more like paradise than penitentiary: islets of palm trees haloed by crayon-yellow sand, scattered across a sea as blue and translucent as Murano glass.
On the ground the heat was like a migraine, pounding and shimmering, fracturing the light. I queued for a landing permit behind an extended matriarchal family of Tamils, the long plaits of the women braided with jasmine blossom. Behind me there were ten or fifteen Israelis recently demobbed from war in South Lebanon. The fort was sun-bleached; we were invited to walk among the cells where up to 12,000 Indian political dissidents who had fought against British rule had been chained, whipped, forced to grind nuts for oil and pound coconuts for coir fibres. Prisoners were often summarily executed. The suicide rate was high. On a visit in 1872 the British viceroy, Lord Mayo, was stabbed to death by an inmate.
They used to hang people three at a time on the prison gallows. On the day I visited, they were sticky with fresh paint.
There are tribes living on some of the remoter islands of the archipelago who remain entirely without any contact with the modern, connected world. It’s forbidden to put ashore on these islands. Recently an American missionary who tried to land on North Sentinel Island was killed by its islanders.
Neill Island
On the ferry to Neill Island, one of the islets of the Andamans, I noticed how different the air had felt sailing earlier that year on a Scottish ferry, but how startlingly familiar the ferry itself was – a great steel vessel of rust caked in layers of white gloss, garlanded with lifeboats, its flip-up seats stuffed with orange safety vests. The sea was a shade of iridescent turquoise – a thin pale bar of coastal sand plummeted to a deep, almost phosphorescent blue. Small salvos of flying fish whirred from the water like clockwork toys. Dolphins bounced ahead of the prow.
On the island a track led down to a beach where four huts were arranged in a horseshoe. The only other residents were an Israeli couple who’d been there a week. He was from a small kibbutz in the Negev, she from the Sea of Galilee. They spoke of their reluctance to fight, the abomination of war, of the erosion of their loyalty towards the commanders who gave the orders. The man told me that he’d never experienced freedom until now, on this tropical beach.
We lit a fire. They passed a home-made narghile pipe between themselves. The sand was very fine, studded with tiny cowries and pieces of broken coral. I wish I didn’t have to go back, the woman said.
Well, don’t, I said. Though I knew that I too would soon be obliged to return.
‘We’re the last ones here. I’ve no idea when we’ll go, but my brother and sister are in Hebron.’ She did not know that this was a Jewish island in an Arab sea.
COLIN THUBRON
Despite their proximity to Myanmar, the Andaman Islands run on Indian time. At 4.30 a.m. I stood waist-deep in the sea, watching the sunrise with two Brahmins from Delhi, thinking of a monk I met once who imagined he felt divine love waxing and waning on his skin. The sun rose quickly over a scarlet bank of cloud, a liniment over the wound of the horizon.
By 6 a.m. dawn was a beach in the sky, yellow and endless. I pedalled back to my hut and ate thali for breakfast, regretting the necessity of my departure.
Inch Garvie
In Scotland I sleep a hundred yards from a firth dividing two lands that, many centuries ago, were considered different countries: Fife and Lothian. In 832 an island at its midpoint, an island I see every morning as I open my curtains, saw the forging of an uneasy peace. A defeated king of Lothian and Northumberland, King Athelstane, was decapitated by Angus, the Pictish king of the lands to the north. Athelstane’s head was displayed on the island as a warning to any who would try to cross to Fife.
A bridge stanchion rests on it now, a friendlier emblem of reconciliation.
Inchcolm
Further downstream is the holy island of Inchcolm, also known as the Iona of the East.
Bass Rock
Further yet is the prison island of the Bass Rock, a volcanic plug rising sheer from the sea.
Gannets thrive on it, so many that the Linnaean identifier of the species is bassanus – ‘of the Bass’. To the Spanish the gannet is known as alcatraz, an Arabic word meaning ‘the diver’.
Inchkeith
And in the same estuary is the island of Inchkeith, once Edinburgh’s leprosarium, now the possession of an absentee landlord who made millions fitting car tyres.
A year after Columbus breached the microbial isolation of the Americas with the smallpox virus, a king in Edinburgh, James IV, conceived an experiment on Inchkeith to reveal the language of angels. A near contemporary, the historian Robert Lyndsay, wrote of the experiment (the following translated into modern English):
He ordered them to take a mute woman and to put her in Inchkeith, to give her two children, and to provide her with everything she would need for their nourishment. His goal was to discover what language the children would speak when they were old enough to have ‘perfect’ speech. Some say they spoke good Hebrew, but I do not know of any reliable sources for these claims.
Beyond this, the historical record is silent. When I imagine the infant speech of those children, it’s not the speech of angels that I imagine, but the cries of gulls, the spray of waves, the susurration of wind over rough stone.
A pitiless place: four years later the record suggests that the nurse and the two children were removed. In 1497 it was decided that Edinburgh sufferers of syphilis, plague and leprosy would be transported by ship to die on Inchkeith. For three hundred years it remained a place of pestilence and quarantine.
Barra
One November at the close of the millennium, when I was starting out as a junior surgical trainee, I left the hospital wards behind for a week’s camping in the Hebridean island of Barra. The forecast was for storms: after a couple of nights in a shaking tent I swapped canvas for a hotel room, and set up my camp stove in the en-suite bath. Each day I walked: over the high blustery freedom of Ben Scurrival, around the western reaches of the island, down to Vatersay Sound, across beaches raked by waves. There were families of otters, endless horizons, abandoned homesteads, inquisitive seals. There was a beach that doubled as an airport runway, its landing timetable rotating with the tide.
The open bays were chopped into textual, symmetrical lines of waves. The agitation kindled by my hospital work was gradually extinguished. As the days passed I began muttering as I walked, random subconscious connections, snatches of songs, memories. Their content didn’t seem to matter, my voice being lost in the sound of the wind and waves.
BOOKS of DISTANT ISLANDS
LOUIS MACNEICE FLED to the islands in part to escape an excess of books. Perhaps he needed isolation from language in order to clear his mind. But that has never been true for me – of the islands I’ve cherished most, I met many first in print.
Chiloé
I first encountered the Pacific island of Chiloé, and its poverty, through the books of two English travellers, Charles Darwin and Bruce Chatwin: The Voyage of the Beagle and In Patagonia. Of the main town in Chiloé – Castro – Darwin wrote: The poverty of the place may be conceived from the fact, that although containing some hundreds of inhabitants, one of our party was unable anywhere to purchase either a pound of sugar or an ordinary knife.
In the same town, more than a century and a half later, I was unable to purchase so much as a cheap watch. Darwin: No individual possessed either a watch or a clock: and an old man, who was supposed to have a good idea of the time, was employed to strike the church bell by guess. Perhaps the passing of time has less traction on the minds of Chiloé’s inhabitants than it does on the mainland.
The island of Chiloé is notorious for a dank and macabre mythology in which much of the population is said to still believe: goblins, warlocks and all manner of creatures are thought to populate the caves in the forest along the eastern shore. When Darwin visited in the 1830s there were tales of people accused of devil worship being sent to the Inquisition in Lima. More than a century later Chatwin wrote of a brujeria, or witchcraft, sect rumoured to be flourishing in Chiloé, with the sole purpose of spreading evil and causing pain and misery to humankind. According to Chatwin they kept their headquarters in a cave near Quicavi, where the Invunche, or Guardian of the Cave, lives on human flesh and keeps the secrets of the Brotherhood safe.
Chiloé
Of the church in Castro, Darwin wrote that it stands in the middle, is entirely built in plank, and has a picturesque and venerable appearance. I wanted to see it for myself. From the town of Puerto Montt, in Chile’s Los Lagos region, I hired a car and took a ferry to the island. The church had not long been declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Soaring beams of dark wood were joined in an aerial reflection of the loamy earth of the island. Figures of the Passion of Christ were suspended on its walls, each sheened with chipped lacquer. The Madonna showed her patriotism with two Chilean flags. The bleeding Jesus on Calvary was a wax anatomical model. In the playpark opposite the church I saw pigs rooting through broken bottles.
I camped on the beach between Quicavi and Tenaún, and lit a fire. Out of the darkness came the sound of galloping hooves; twinned pinpoints of red light danced around those sounds, speeding towards me. I switched on my torch, called out in a shaky voice, Buenas tardes! A Chilote on horseback appeared in the pallid beam; the two glowing eyes I’d seen were his concurrently smoked cigarettes. He didn’t reply and, after glancing down at me with disdain, cantered on.
On the western coast of Chiloé I watched the Pacific.
The roar of it, the mother of all oceans, deadened all other sound. Wind whipped out of the fog, blowing the sand into a delicately dancing mist.
My mind couldn’t begin to grasp the immensity of water: the same ocean lapping the Antarctic, California, the Aleutians, Kamchatka, Japan, Sumatra, New Zealand and countless thousands of atolls and islands sprinkled across the globe’s half-span. From it, tropical sunshine raises clouds which pour rains over the whole of the earth. The numbers of dialects and languages spoken along these shores was inconceivable, as were the diversity and abundance of the species and habitats dipped in the water that slapped the soles of my feet. In my mind’s eye I was returned to the childhood atlas, and its own map of the Pacific.
The road lay along a very broad beach, on which even after so many fine days, a terrible surf was breaking. I was assured that after a heavy gale, the roar can be heard even at Castro, a distance of no less than twenty-one sea miles across a hilly and wooded country . . .
Don Pedro asked the commandant to give us a guide to Cucao. The old gentleman offered to come himself; but for a long time, nothing would persuade him, that two Englishmen really insisted to go to such an out of the way place as Cucao.
CHARLES DARWIN
I realise that often in adult life I’ve considered books as portable islands, in the way they grant isolation from one’s surroundings, offering relief from immediate demands and space for contemplation. More and more, as we grow older . . . great novels declare their authority, wrote Helen Dunmore. They will certainly outlive us, like sea or rock or sand. We can inhabit their world for a while, and be changed by it, but they are forever moving beyond us to the next generation.
I take refuge in prose as one might in a boat . . . I cross over to an island, and every time, the moment I read the first sentences, it is as if I were rowing far out on the water.
W.G. SEBALD
Tierra del Fuego
There was a time in my youth when, like Bruce Chatwin, I was captivated by E. Lucas Bridges’ The Uttermost Part of the Earth – a book about growing up on the island of Tierra del Fuego, at the tip of Patagonia. At twenty-six years old I went there, between a spell training in emergency medicine and taking up a job as a doctor with the British Antarctic Survey.
The town of Ushuaia was lined with backpackers’ hostels where restless travellers idled, and asked one another for leads on finding a cheap passage to Antarctica. On the other side of the Beagle strait, named for Darwin’s ship, Navarino and Hoste Islands came and went through the mist. Beyond them, I knew, stood Cape Horn, the full stop at the end of the Americas.
After a day or two I went north to the Valle Carbajal. Eagles watched warily from the low-hanging branches I passed along the trails, a Fuegian fox ran off with my bread rolls, but at the summit I swung my legs over glaciers the colour of petrified sky. In four days along the trails there were no other walkers.
You will find nothing there. There is nothing in Patagonia.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
In Patagonia the monotony of the plains, or expanse of low hills, the universal unrelieved greyness of everything, and the absence of animal forms and objects new to the eye, leave the mind open and free to receive an impression of nature as a whole.
W.H. HUDSON
For Borges, Patagonia was an absence. But even emptiness has its compensations: when Brian Keenan and John McCarthy were held hostage in Lebanon, chained together in a series of dungeons for five years, they fantasised about it and, later, when freed, they went there. In Between Extremes: A Journey Beyond Imagination Keenan wrote: The experience of Patagonia is a journey to a higher plane of existence, a kind of harmony with nature which precludes thought. But for McCarthy it proved too much: I have had enough of the world’s grand scale. The landscapes of Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego have disturbed me. It is like meeting some glamorous and beautiful character whom you wish to befriend but you cannot think how to open a conversation.
As ship’s doctor on the Royal Research Ship Ernest Shackleton I sailed from England late one October for the Antarctic. In the two weeks it took to reach the equator we skirted the Isle of Wight, Madeira, the Canary Islands and the Cape Verde Islands. A further week’s sailing took us past the archipelago of Fernando de Noronha and down the coast of Brazil to the Uruguayan capital of Montevideo.
A couple of days after leaving Montevideo the ship picked up some camp followers: nimble, black-browed albatrosses, perhaps relatives of that exile that turned up in Unst. We hadn’t yet reached as far south as the latitudes of the wandering albatross, known to taxonomists as Diomedea exulans.
Falkland Islands
Off the Patagonian coast I rushed from below decks to my first view of the Falkland Islands, thirty days after leaving England. Low, defiant swells of land, fringed with beaches of gold, and behind them all a dark mountain the colour of military camouflage.
Linnaeus named the wandering albatross for the Greek warrior Diomedes who, in Dante’s Inferno, compares the busy city of Florence to a vast bird whose wing-beats darken the earth, and whose name spreads over hell. The canto goes on to describe Ulysses’s voyage south beyond the Pillars of Hercules, his ship’s oars beating as wings, until a remote island rises before them beneath unfamiliar southern stars. The island is crowned with the dim mountain of Purgatory. Just before reaching it, Ulysses’s ship is caught in a whirlpool, a maelstrom; over us the booming billow clos’d.
Falkland Islands
The Falkland Islands are purgatorial for some – military staff consider it a misfortune to be posted there. But to me the grandeur of ocean and sky there, the squall of the natural world, the wind whipping up from Antarctica, all granted the islands a sense of timelessness. I hiked out to one of the beaches, mercifully cleared of the mines laid by retreating Argentinian soldiers more than twenty years before. Settling into a hollow, inches from gentoo penguins on their nests, I coughed back the stench of guano, familiar from Shetland, and fended off dive-bombing skuas. Piebald Commerson’s dolphins played in the shallows. Europe felt distant, its history as thick as dust in a forsaken library. I visited penguin rookeries, thriving with new life, their layers of guano suggesting they’d been continuously occupied for over two million years.
South Georgia
On our approach to South Georgia, the ship pushed through bands of fog and sunshine, the seas around the ship’s hull teeming with life. Fur seals somersaulted through the water; sooty, wandering and black-browed albatrosses swooped in the ship’s wake. The waves frothed with giant petrels, cape petrels and penguins.
From the ship I took a small boat, a ‘tender’, to be met on a jetty by scientists who lived year-round on Bird Island – a splinter of rock off South Georgia’s western cape. They handed me a broom handle ‘seal-bodger’, with which I was to beat off any fur seals that approached with fangs bared.
Black-browed albatrosses nested along the slopes among the tussock grass. Up on the plateau I tiptoed, awe-struck, between the nests of wandering albatrosses. These immense birds, larger than swans and with a twelve-foot wingspan, were untroubled by my presence, marvellous in their serenity.
At intervals it arched forth its vast archangel wings, as if to embrace some holy ark. Wondrous flutterings and throbbings shook it . . . Through its inexpressible, strange eyes, methought I peeped to secrets which took hold of God. As Abraham before the angels, I bowed myself.
HERMAN MELVILLE
In South Georgia the longing was strong to lose oneself in the mountains, to walk for days high in the ice, in timelessness, and see only rock faces, delicate shades of lilac and crimson, the only focus point for the eye that of infinity.
