I THINK OF that journey to the Lofoten Islands now, from a distance of more than twenty years, with a tender gratitude – that I should have been so fortunate as to have made their acquaintance at that time when I needed rest, silence and isolation. I wander about the island as usual, thinking of this and that, wrote the Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun. Peace, peace, a heavenly peace speaks to me in muted tones from every tree in the forest.
When Napoleon and Tsar Alexander wanted to make peace, on the banks of the River Nemen, no island was available. It was resolved that one should be constructed. A barge was moored at the midpoint of the river and towering white tents were erected, embroidered respectively ‘N’ and ‘A’.
Sire, I hate the English no less than you do and I am ready to assist you in any enterprise against them, Alexander is supposed to have said as the two men met on the barge.
In that case everything can be speedily settled between us and peace made, replied Napoleon.
Of course Napoleon came to know islands less for their ability to promote peace, than to imprison – as he was imprisoned on Elba and on St Helena.
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.
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.
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.
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.
