that Atlantis sank beneath the waves some twelve thousand years ago (when the last ice age was retreating and reshaping much of the world’s water and land). Stories of the weird and wonderful transformations that took place during that period of climate change might have come down to him in story and song, and both the idea and the reality of Atlantis may have been Plato’s image of a time when the waters rose and the land went under. Whatever the case, Atlantis has held people’s imagination for nearly twenty-five hundred years, and roughly the same number of books have been written about it, establishing its location variously in the Mediterranean, off the west coast of Africa, in the Caribbean, and in the middle of the Pacific. Plato had certainly never seen Atlantis, and indeed the story he told was inside another story which was in turn inside another, like those boxes in the Haida Gwaii creation story. But neither have today’s scientists ever seen the atoms they describe with such detail and delight, recounting stories that their instruments have given them, like the Egyptian priests whom Plato credited with the story of Atlantis. We should be careful not to dismiss the scientific imaginings of classical philosophers, for their storytelling styles are with us still.
So almost all early European and Islamic mappings of the world included images and icons of land surrounded by water. To the Romans, the surrounding or encircling sea was the River Oceanus. The Norse called it Uthal, or the Great Sea. To many sailors of ancient and medieval times it was the Green Sea of Gloom, with boiling waters and frozen wastes, monsters that defied description, and mysterious forces that didn’t have a name. Sometimes there was a realm—an island—above and sometimes one below as well, often on an apparently flat earth; or, especially after the idea of a round earth took hold, the world was pictured as two hemispheres of land, one the mirror of the other where everything was backwards, including people’s feet—which is why that place was called the antipodes. Some dismissed such a place as a philosophical joke or as a lie to mislead them from the truth, since they could not get their heads around the idea that folks on the other side of a round earth were upside down, with plants growing downwards and rain falling upwards. But Pliny the Elder in the first century CE had an answer, suggesting that “in regard to the problem of why those on the opposite side to us do not fall, we must ask in return whether those on the opposite side do not wonder that we do not fall.”
It was also common for cartographers to place their particular home—Alexandria or Athens, Jerusalem or Mecca—right in the middle (just as mapmakers do today with their home turf). Thus centered, the place down under was referred to as the “austral” (from the Latin for south) or southern land. No one was sure whether it was a continent or an island; and indeed no one was sure of it at all. But its existence was presumed in geographical and philosophical traditions, and embraced by scholars who sought symmetry in a world with counterbalancing landmasses surrounded by ocean. Some Christian thinkers, intrigued by cataclysmic accounts, favored islands with strange or grotesque features instead of symmetrical landmasses, representing such singular islands as fragments of a whole, symbolic of a fallen and fractured world. But the idea, and slowly the reality, of the southern shores was hardwired into seafaring by the time of the European Renaissance and its expansion of trade and exploration on the high seas. One part of this great southern (is)land had an especially engaging name for awhile, a name that brings together ancient traditions of island travel with modern tourism. After Marco Polo had mentioned a kingdom he called Lucach, a printer’s error resulted in it being identified on a map published in 1532 as Beach. Francis Drake, being a cavalier spirit, set out to find this exotic “Beach,” apparently full of gold and elephants; but his cautious fellow captains persuaded him not to sail into what they thought was a gulf of one-way winds and currents.
In a world where about 70 percent of the surface is covered by water, beaches and shores are everywhere, forming borderlines between land and water. Botticelli’s painting The Birth of Venus (ca. 1485) and Matthew Arnold’s poem “Dover Beach” (1867) are only two of the thousands of representations of this kind of borderland, many of them conjuring up fear as well as fascination. In many places, waterfront real estate has become especially prized; shores of lakes and oceans have fetched prices far beyond reason. For ecologists, the edge or border is a place of peril as well as possibility; and since islands, in a very real sense, are all border, they become thresholds to a world of wonders in the stories and songs they sponsor.
Since ancient times, shores have also been the meeting point of different worlds and different peoples, sponsoring conflict as well as communion. Throughout history the sea has ensured that powers beyond human control hold sway on its shores; and even with all the hazards of the sea, the shore retains its own menacing authority. The most dangerous moments in an open boat—the kind that carried seafarers for thousands of years—were always launching from and returning to the shore, just as takeoff and landing still are for an airplane or a space shuttle.
There are two fundamental truths about humans and islands. The first is that until very recently, going to an island always meant journeying across a body of water, leaving behind the usual markers of meaning and value. The second truth is that we don’t really understand what motivated people to do this, even though the history of island settlement has been a defining part of the human story from the day the first person left the land and ventured onto a river or lake or the sea on a quest for goodness or godliness or grub or gold. And islanders are not unanimous in their attitude toward the water that surrounds them, with tropical Pacific islanders viewing the sea around them as much friendlier than islanders in, say, the North Atlantic do—because their part of the ocean is in some ways indeed more “pacific” than the iceberg-clogged, storm-tossed far northern and southern seas, and because the great distances between islands in parts of the Pacific paradoxically seem to have created a sense not of island isolation but of ocean companionship, the water providing the currency of communication with other people.
Should islanders be considered colonists or castaways? The story of island habitation—how and when and why—is still controversial. The ability to fashion technologies for travel must figure in any answer, as perhaps does our instinct to cross boundaries, to make connections, to travel in between. Why we go, and why we stay, are among the most basic questions about our human occupation of this earth; which is why islands may be even more central to the human condition than language is, and why the history of island travel may define our deepest wants and needs (and not all of them admirable).
Islands clearly incorporate something fundamental about the human spirit. The stories and songs through which we make sense of the world represent both life as it is (or appears to be) and life as we wish it were or wonder whether it could be, both the so-called real world—its reality conditioned by our habits of thought and feeling—and the world of our imagination, shaped by our anxieties and desires. We try to keep these two worlds in balance, and to maintain some equilibrium between turning inward to ourselves and outward to the world. An island both illustrates and invites this kind of dual consciousness, which may be why some of our most enduring stories and myths have to do with islands. Faced with the difficulty of defining an island, perhaps we should take the advice of one of the wisest of ocean island scientists, Patrick Nunn, who proposes that islands are so completely built into our consciousness that we don’t need a definition.
For a long time, many people have argued that we are most civilized, indeed most human, when we stop traveling and settle down. Others have seen something quintessentially human in our ability to dream about other places, design technologies to go there, and wander off. Islands are at the center of this human conundrum. To get to any island, you have to leave where you currently are and travel. On the other hand, islands are the perfect place to settle; once there, you cannot so easily go anywhere else. And there is something more, something that has to do with the human embrace of moments of wonder, of amazement, of awe. “I wish I were landing on her for the first time,” said a seasoned Newfoundland fisherman as he approached a tiny island in the North Atlantic for the hundredth time, expressing a mixture of dread (for the landing was very dangerous)
