Island Dreams, page 6
Uros Islands
The floating islands of the Uros are built of reeds moored close to the marshland where the distinction between earth and water is blurred. They were constructed, like Venice, as a refuge from violence on the mainland. Several small reed-islands had been set adrift on Titicaca for the benefit of tourists like me. Cruise boats passed ceaselessly, announced by megaphone-toting guides, their engines a buzzing in the brain.
From the Uros it was another two-and-a-half-hour voyage to the island of Taquile: again the slow, hypnotic whisper of the waves, stacks of cumulus tumbling towards the margins of the lake, and between those clouds, diapasons of light.
Calaminæ
Two thousand years ago Pliny wrote in his monumental Natural History that In Lydia, the islands named Calaminæ are not only driven about by the wind, but may be even pushed at pleasure from place to place, by poles. Some of these floating islands could move in time to music, said Pliny, while others arranged themselves into geometrical shapes so as at one time to exhibit the figure of a triangle and at another of a circle; but they never form a square.
For this Annie Dillard called him credulous Pliny.
Taquile Island
Taquile Island: a world separated by water, language, culture and disposition. Steep-sided as a fortress, terraces like contour lines, each thick with carefully tended maize, beans and potatoes.
From the ferry landing five hundred steps climbed to the top of the island, at an altitude of nearly 14,000 feet. I panted up them, struggling in the thin air, to be met by a grave trio – the head man atop a pedestal to make him higher than the other two. I paid him ten soles (about three US dollars), and was led by a boy through the maze of terraces to my allocated family. Tourists, as a valuable resource, were shared out equally between members of the community.
Thin tracks worn into trenches were woven like textiles into the island’s earth; there were no roads, cars, dogs or electricity. ‘My’ house was built of mud bricks, but the bed and sheets were clean and the mattress covered with polythene against infestations. I ate by candlelight, and when I went to pay for the meal, saw that the family’s wealth was held in an unlocked drawer beneath my place at the table.
GULL ISLAND
THE BBC RADIO show Desert Island Discs, in which public figures are asked to nominate eight pieces of music they’d take to a desert island, has been running since January 1942. Its theme tune, accompanied by the sound of gulls calling, hasn’t changed since its inception, and its popularity shows no sign of waning. The introduction to a book celebrating seventy years of the show observed there was nothing new in asking people to nominate their favourite records: what really made the programme unique was the desert island . . . This was it: there was no going back to the record shop. Your choices defined you.
Is that the perennial appeal of Crusoe? That we all have a thirst to define ourselves in solitude? That we dream of being castaways at last?
Isle of May
In my late twenties, training as a junior neurosurgeon in a particularly onerous hospital job in which I rarely saw natural light and struggled to meet the needs of the broken people admitted under my care, I began to think again about the Isle of May – the island I’d watched blinking in the night as a child through the window of a caravan awning. I learned that it was still a national nature reserve for nesting seabirds. In the Old Norse of the Vikings, who subdued and then settled this coast over a thousand years earlier, May means Gull Island: Maa-Øya.
I made some phone calls, wrote an application letter, and a couple of months later found myself living in the island’s terrace of lighthouse-keepers’ cottages. My neighbours were a handful of ornithologists working for the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, two Scottish Natural Heritage wardens, and several hundred thousand puffins, guillemots, razorbills, kittiwakes, herring gulls, great and lesser black-backed gulls, eiders, wagtails, chiffchaffs, warblers and wheatears. A great skua made predatorial, gangster-like circuits of the island. Gannets on stately fly-bys passed to and from the Bass Rock.
I stayed just a month as a warden – a month of sunsets and sunrises, of painting walkways, clearing beaches, digging out wells, clearing turf from paths, scrubbing steps and algae-ridden landings, building bird hides. The keepers’ cottages overlooked some medieval ruins, and I pored over archaeological reports and paced out the distances to pre-Christian burial grounds. In a 900-year-old chapterhouse I hunkered down next to eider ducks on their nests.
At the north and south ends of the island there were abandoned foghorn towers, whitewashed and three storeys high. At the top of one of these towers of silence I found the corpse of an Arctic tern. There was a ring around one of its legs; with the help of one of the ornithologists we looked up its code. The ring testified that the tern had travelled the length of the Atlantic, Arctic to Antarctic, as often as I.
There were three lighthouses on the island. The oldest was the beacon Alexander Selkirk would have known, truncated and ruined at the suggestion of Sir Walter Scott, then crenellated by the Victorians. The ‘Low Light’ on the east shore had long been disused, and was given over to visiting ornithologists – this was the lighthouse where Keith Brockie had stayed for the year of painting and sketching that became One Man’s Island. The largest lighthouse, crowning the island’s summit, was separate from the lighthouse keepers’ cottages, and was built, like so many around Scotland’s coasts, by the Stevenson family. It was automated when I visited, but the principal warden held a key: she and I picked our way through its Victorian rooms. Their marble fireplaces were dusty and cold, their floorboards cracked and rotten.
On the rocks of the southeastern beaches of the May it was possible to explore the twisted iron remains of a ship wrecked in 1937, the Island, a Danish vessel that had made almost three hundred runs between Denmark, Iceland and Leith before losing its way in fog. Sixty-six were on board and all survived, the ship being beached high up on the strand line. Five days after the wrecking, the inhabitants of the newly established bird observatory boarded the vessel and took off any food, crockery and bedding they could carry. The daily log entries from that year describe these events vividly, wrote Brockie, and crockery with the Danish Seaways imprint is still in use in the Low Light.
The island has claimed the Island; its twisted plates of steel have been pushed higher up the beach by decades of successive storms, a memento mori for mariners, and a cautionary reminder of the power of the sea.
In a book about the Isle of May by W.J. Eggeling I read that Sir Walter Scott, on visiting the island, declared that it would make a delightful residence for sea bathers. But the appropriately named ornithologist W. Eagle Clarke lobbied for it to become a bird reserve instead. The log of the bird observatory suggests both of them had their way:
September 1st, 1947. A white form was seen on the rocks which on closer examination proved to be a naked woman. We thought it advisable to move on.
The party is agreed that should any more naked ladies be observed . . . they should be ringed to discover if the same individuals visit the island year after year.
More than a decade after my spell as a warden, by then a father and an ostensibly settled professional, I revisited the Isle of May. It was early summer, and I sailed on the tourist boat from Fife. No albatross trailed the ship, but a pod of dolphins like steel blades sliced straight for the hull and then veered away; puffins paddled out of our way. Ashore, nesting terns rose in a cloud from the ruined chapel, cormorants squared up to the waves like prizefighters entering the ring. My children ran off from the jetty to play, their faces flushed with the thrill of summer’s growth and change. And sunlight glittered over the ocean, diamonds on blue silk, sky and sea embracing along every horizon. A distant music sang through my mind, a dreamlike poem of Auden who knew the gifts of connection and of isolation. The poem, ‘Seascape’, speaks of delight in leaping island light, of shingle scrambling along whispering lines of surf, and compares the way clouds glide over the mirror of the sea to the movement of images through memory. It begins hypnotically: Look, stranger, on this island now . . .
I walked up to the main lighthouse, now open to the public and all cleaned up. The dusty rooms I’d once picked my way through were scrubbed and newly painted, and an exhibition of island artwork hung on the walls. The lantern of the light itself had been converted to solar power; instead of burning fossil fuels, sunlight was now caught by an array of solar panels, cradled in battery packs, then flashed out overnight In Salutem Omnium.
Islands and seabirds, seabirds and islands – the sound of gulls a shorthand for home.
TREASURE ISLANDS
Halley Research Station
THE DECISION TO live and work at Halley Research Station in Antarctica was perhaps the most extreme manifestation of my isle-o-philia. The obsession that pulled me to Iona, to the Andamans, to Tierra del Fuego as well as to the Isle of May, drew me to the most remote research station operated by the British government, isolated for ten months of the year, and about a thousand kilometres from its nearest neighbour. During my year there I read up on the scientific literature of what are known to aerospace psychologists as ‘isolated and confined environments’ – a category usually taken to mean oil rigs and polar bases, and which once included lighthouse keepers and deep-sea sailors. These environments are studied for the analogies they offer with deployment to space stations, and to prepare for an eventual mission to Mars.
One paper, in the International Review of Applied Psychology, found that Antarctic overwinterers became easier to hypnotise after a year of isolation, and their brainwaves changed shape. They also concluded that polar isolation induced already self-sufficient, controlled, calm men to become even more so.
This paper was published in the 1970s. It was thirty years before the body of research on isolated and confined environments began to show that women cope better than men with the pressures of Antarctic living, but were less likely to be selected at interview.
A journalist who met Alexander Selkirk in London after his long isolation commented: He had a strong but chearful Seriousness in his Look, and a certain Disregard to the ordinary things about him, as if he had been sunk in Thought.
I am uncertain if I became easier to hypnotise after my fourteen-month stay in Antarctica, but don’t doubt my brainwaves altered. Another gift of the place was a recurring dream that began there, but continued for many months after my return. I’d be out skiing, far from base, a tiny figure moving between a vast plain of ice and a still vaster sky, when a crack began to open in the ice ahead of me. The base was constructed on a shelf of floating continental ice, easing itself out over the Weddell Sea, and so beneath my feet I knew there were hundreds of metres of polar seawater close to the point of freezing.
As the chasm in the ice advanced I’d race towards the base, straining every muscle to leap the crack before becoming marooned. I’d always wake at the same moment, airborne over the widening gulf, not knowing if I’d reconnect with the ice.
Of his journey to Iceland, William Morris wrote:
sometimes I like the idea of it, and sometimes it fills me with dismay.
Crusoe’s terror on becoming separated from his island prison:
And now I began to give myself over for lost; for as the current was on both sides of the island, I knew in a few leagues’ distance they must join again, and then I was irrecoverably gone . . .
And now I saw how easy it was for the Providence of God to make the most miserable condition mankind could be in, worse. Now I looked back upon my desolate solitary island as the most pleasant place in the world.
DANIEL DEFOE
Not long after my departure from Halley it became connected by satellite to the internet. But my dream has, in a sense, come true: an evolving crack in the ice shelf, accelerated by climate change, now risks calving the whole base adrift into the ocean. As a consequence, the research station has been abandoned for winter use.
From his shipwreck, Crusoe recovered a pile of gold and silver coins, and Defoe recounts his internal monologue: What art thou good for? . . . I have no manner of use for thee. But then, upon second thoughts, I took it away, and wrapping all this in a piece of canvas, I began to think of making another raft.
Perhaps all islands offer the promise of treasure, of one kind or another. I now see that the book I wrote about Halley, Empire Antarctica, was a series of soundings for treasure, made into landscape composed solely of ice and of light.
Treasure Island
After three years on Treasure Island Ben Gunn degenerates, beast-like, something that also happened to the real-life sixteenth-century Spaniard Pedro Serrano who, marooned for seven years on an island in the Pacific, was eventually rescued but whose saviours found him irretrievably mad.
For Jim Hawkins the gold lies thick as autumn leaves but as long as he stays on the island its riches are worthless to him. Question: do the riches of island-living only make themselves manifest once you’re back on the mainland?
Daniel Defoe didn’t expect Robinson Crusoe to be such a success on publication: in that year alone, 1719, he published sixteen other pieces of writing. His sequels never found the same readership – it turned out readers were less interested in Crusoe’s further adventures at sea, or in the Far East, than they were in the singular fact of his being marooned.
Elephant Island
In 1914 the polar explorer Ernest Shackleton set out to traverse Antarctica, but before reaching it his ship, the Endurance, was crushed by the vice-like winter ice of the Weddell Sea. Shackleton resolved with his crew to drag lifeboats hundreds of miles across jagged ice fields towards open water. After great privation they reached Elephant Island, off the Antarctic Peninsula.
At the outset of this journey Shackleton is said to have stood in view of his men and carefully turned out his pockets of money, letting it fall to the ice. On the journey they were about to take, he said, they didn’t need such trash weighing them down. Also in his pocket was a volume of the poems of Robert Browning, but he baulked at throwing it away.
Haply some philanthropic god steers bark,
Gift-laden, to the lonely ignorance
Islanded, say, where mist and snow mass hard
ROBERT BROWNING
Juan Fernandez
Alexander Selkirk was eager to make his fortune early – records from his village in Fife report that in 1693, at the age of seventeen, he was called to the Kirk Session to answer charges of indecent conduct, but did not appear being gone to sea. He became a privateer with the notorious William Dampier, as navigator on a second ship skippered by one Captain Stradling. By September 1704 he was insisting to Stradling and the rest of the crew that the ship was unseaworthy. He had been hoping to start a mutiny and force a refit of the ship, but instead Stradling marooned him with clothes and bedding, a pistol, gunpowder, bullets, a hatchet, a knife, a pot in which to boil food, a bible, a book of prayers, his navigation instruments, and charts on how to read the imprisoning sea.
This turned out to be all he needed. And he was right: Stradling’s ship went on to founder, and those of his former crewmates who survived were enslaved by the Spanish.
Robben Island
Selkirk’s isolation lasted just four years and four months, not the twenty-eight years, two months and nineteen days of Crusoe’s fictional confinement – comparable rather to Nelson Mandela’s incarceration, the majority of which was on Robben Island.
Juan Fernandez
In May 1720, a few years after Selkirk’s rescue and a year after the publication of Robinson Crusoe, another British pirate, George Shelvocke, was shipwrecked on Juan Fernandez with some of his crew. Over the following five months Shelvocke built an escape vessel from the wreckage. Again, several of the crew were convinced the escape vessel was unseaworthy, and there seems to have been a mutiny: Eleven or twelve renegades, with a similar number of Blacks and Indians, had deserted the main party while on the island, and refused to leave with the rest.
These ‘renegades’ were picked up two years later by the Spanish, and enslaved.
Shelvocke’s book – A Voyage Round the World by Way of the Great South Sea – like Defoe’s, was widely read. William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge treasured it, and parts of Shelvocke’s story were transferred wholesale into Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
We had not had the sight of one fish of any kind since we were come to the Southward of the Straits of Le Maire; nor one sea-bird excepting a disconsolate black albatross, who accompanied us for several days, hovering about us as if he had lost himself.
GEORGE SHELVOCKE
Shelvocke’s mate Hatley decided that the bird was an ill omen and, in a melancholy fit, shot it – an act Shelvocke deplored.
I never saw the albatross in Unst – by the time of my visit it had moved on to another rocky outcrop closer to the Hebrides, called Sula Sgeir.
For an albatross, this was like moving just a few doors down the same street.
TOWARDS RESOLUTION
THERE ARE TIMES in the city when I have to remind myself that connectedness too has its appeal: urban living offers limitless opportunities for engagement, as does travel, with what Montaigne called its capacity to rub and polish our brain with the ideas of others.
Andaman Islands
In the Andaman Islands, resting each day in the shade of palm trees in the company of the remorseful, war-traumatised Israeli couple, it became apparent to me that isolation and connection were the two energising poles of my life. First, immersion in medical practice for its intensity, its social engagement, its ringside seat to all the bustle and brilliance of humanity. And then island postings and polar travel – for the distance and perspective they grant, for the chance to feel part of a world somewhat emptied of the human, for their silence and space for contemplation.
