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
