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
