I

Tiwarik lies little more than half a mile off the coast, immediately opposite the fishing village of Sabay which from the seaward side appears as a straggle of huts on stilts half lost among the coconut groves. In front of them on the stony beach boats are drawn up, each of which in time becomes identifiable so it is possible on any particular day to read the beach and know who is doing what. The island is uninhabited (uninhabitable, practically, since there is no water) and tiny, being about a quarter of a mile across. But its size on a map – and I have never seen a map large-scale enough to mark it – would be deceptive, for it rises to a peak off in one corner which cannot be less than 400 feet above the sea. There are no beaches, merely that one shifting coral strand maybe a hundred yards long and facing the mainland. The rest of Tiwarik rises from gurgling boulders more or less vertically up volcanic cliffs of black rock. From one quarter there is a steep sweep of coarse tall cogon grass up to the forest which caps the peak. Seen from the strait on a breezy day the sunlight goes running up and up through this wild grassfield. It is the same effect as with young hair and similarly afflicts me with deepest melancholy, affection and pleasure.*

This was how I depicted an uninhabited island where I lived for a while. I wanted to account for its centrality to my life, while describing the lives of the villagers on the other side of the narrow strait, their habits of dynamite fishing and our nocturnal spear-gunning forays among the reefs and boulders. I noted some of the salient features of tropical offshore islets in South-East Asia: their considerable discomforts, their frequent lack of drinking water, their distance from supplies of nearly everything other than brine, rocks, harsh coral sand, thorns and greenery.

Perhaps I wrote too much about beauty – at least, about the unidyllic way the island struck me as beautiful – since really I wanted to make the point that in the terms of holiday brochures it was nothing out of the ordinary and near to nowhere very special. I observed that it was in no sense a ‘paradise isle’ as the tourist industry understands it, advancing its complete lack of fresh water and, more especially, its lack of a permanent beach of soft white sand as reasons for asserting that at least ‘Tiwarik’ would never suffer the indignity of being turned into a resort. Its unyielding, basaltic indifference to any melting aspect, to the dreamy topos (not a coco palm anywhere) would guarantee its own rugged persistence. Finally, to protect myself as much as the island, I gave it a fictitious name and was carefully vague about the Philippine province off which it lay.

Many months after I had finished writing the book wisps of rumour reached me way up the coast. Rumours in those parts being what cocaine is to Hollywood, I attached no importance to them. Then in due time I went back to the little fishing hamlet of ‘Sabay’ from whose shore one can see the island a mile or so away on the other side of a strait of tearing currents.

To be the biographer of a place or person can insert a murky distance between them and oneself, especially after publication. What has been a private, even obsessive, project turns overnight into an implied claim to special knowledge or scholarship when really all one had on one’s mind was love and curiosity. It becomes easy to retreat into snappish inward pronouncement that while anybody may be a greater expert on the subject, nobody else has quite the same affectionate eye … and up drifts the murk. But on this occasion I sat on an empty oxygen cylinder on ‘Sabay’ beach and gazed through a clear lens of air at ‘Tiwarik’, picking out the details which I still felt had written me as much as I them. On that very outcropping I had lived, had fought a grass fire, dried my catches, had worms, been bitten by centipedes, had watched a pair of sea eagles come and go to their nest in the cap of jungle with fish in their claws. I had glimpsed much else besides, and often felt I had voyaged on it further than the island’s small boundaries.

‘No more,’ said a friend. ‘It’s been sold.’

A knifelike stroke. Studiedly offhand, though: ‘Oh? To whom?’

‘Japanese. Very rich. Ayy … very big project, James. Very big plans.’

‘For that? Oh, nonsense, Baka tsismis lang.’ Just another of those rumours (narcotic, stimulant, currency). Just the favourite Filipino pastime of telling tales of projects which are going to transform the hardscrabble of living, tales which occupy a psychic territory as much as a local site. Sunken galleons … Japanese war chests … Chinese pirate hoards … wood-burning power stations. … The tales fade, re-emerge, fade again. The captains and the scuba divers depart; the phrase ‘feasibility study’ drops from conversations. Things go on being the same.

Not this time, apparently. This time they really were to change. I paddled across to ‘Tiwarik’, half despondent and half thinking there was probably nothing to worry about. The familiar difficult strand, the familiar steep climb up the cliff path were the same. But up on what I knew privately as the Field of Crabs were signs that people other than local farmers and fishermen had been there. Ominous pegs had been hammered into the baked soil. A shallow pit had been dug and a red-and-white surveyor’s ranging rod stuck up out of it like a thermometer in the mouth of a sick man. Only in the most oblique and imaginative sense had I ever thought of ‘Tiwarik’ as my island. Now it wore the anonymous, severed look of real estate.

For an hour or two I wandered about without being able to reclaim it. I stood in favourite places and looked down at the suck and surge of water, down through water to the island’s roots. Those boulders, ledges, shelves, coral palaces; those blue thoroughfares and weedy balconies: I knew them, had examined and hunted every inch of them by day and by torchlight. While their aerial map was still familiar they themselves had withdrawn, taking with them whatever it is that makes places vibrate when looked at with a certain eye. Over the horizon comes the world; the eye in distraction flickers and clouds and at once even the rocks shrink in upon themselves like touched anemones. The land reverts to a blob.

So I left. Over the next year or so stories reached me out of which I built my own fretful picture of the vanishing of ‘Tiwarik’ and the creation of the ‘Fantasy Elephant Club’, as the new resort was apparently to be known. The lack of beach would be no hindrance to the wealthy Japanese visitors who would be flown there direct from Manila by seaplane and helicopter. The last thing they would want to do was swim. There in the chalets where the Field of Crabs had once been they would live in the pallor of circular neon lights and beneath these coldly fizzing haloes be massaged by geishas, recline on vinyl couches to watch porno videos, gamble and sip Chivas Regal and other drinks peculiar to duty-free life. … I hoped the fish eagles had lifted off disdainfully at the first roar of the chainsaws. Where they had nested a cement tower was apparently now going up. I envisaged an oriental folly, a stylised ninja pagoda symbolising the martial art of Third World property development. I kept hoping that some of ‘Tiwarik”s old, implacable quality would assert itself: plagues of centipedes, perhaps; the belated discovery that the Japanese military had tested anthrax bombs there in 1944 and that all the soil more than a metre deep was virulent; even a Krakatoalike eruption of the volcano opposite which had not let out so much as a squeak of steam in the past 50,000 years. … Then I heard that three people had been killed – labourers, possibly, but not from ‘Sabay’. I packed my bag and went back to the village to see old friends and separate news from rumour.

This time there was a choice of two oxygen cylinders on the beach on which to sit. Several families depended for their income on catching small, brightly coloured species of coral fish, bagging them in plastic with a litre or two of seawater and a squirt of oxygen and shipping them off to Manila for export to the pet shops of Japan and the West. (The mortality rate was probably 80–5 per cent, but as long as they left ‘Sabay’ alive it was not the fishermen’s problem.) Now from these empty cylinders the view across the strait was novel indeed: of an unfamiliarly shaped island girt with rows of what seemed to be white cement bungalows with red roofs. What had once been an empty stretch of water was full of small craft ferrying groups of labourers and materials. Even as I sat, a bangka carrying a large cylindrical water tank crawled heavily out of the difficult shallow channel off ‘Sabay’ beach, its outriggers ploughing the water instead of skimming its surface. Elsewhere along the beach were long heaps of sandbags. Clearly, two of the disadvantages I had wishfully imagined would guarantee the island’s immunity to change were being remedied almost with disdain. No drinking water? Fetch it over in huge tankfuls. No beach? Take ‘Sabay”s across in sacks. What, then, is an island? The author of The Island Within surveys his kneecaps sticking up out of the water in his bathtub and considers them very much part of his personal mainland.* The image has a geological aptness. ‘Tiwarik’ is as much a part of the mainland as ‘Sabay’ is. It just happens to look like an island because the land between was low-lying enough to have been invaded by the sea. Its flora and fauna are scarcely affected by the intervening strait. The weather is that of the mainland, birds and seeds fly to and fro. From time to time people had made efforts to cultivate small patches of its total 13 hectares, though lately this amounted to little more than occasionally cutting the cogon for thatch. The island’s crown of virgin jungle is a miniature version of those vestiges still surviving in gullies and ravines high up Mount Malindig opposite.

‘Tiwarik’, then, is a crumb fallen from the mainland, made of the same dough and nourishing the same plants and animals. At the time I built my first hut on it the island had no economic function of its own. Yet it did form a casual part of several economies. Locals fished there and, especially when caught by sudden squalls or currents, would hole up on it until conditions improved. On ordinary days they might land and build a driftwood fire on the coral strand, toasting a fish for lunch. It was also used by travellers. The archipelago is full of migrants undertaking long and dangerous journeys in frail craft with ropy engines. Some of these travellers are landlubbers apprehensively trying as cheaply as possible to reach a city like Cavite or Batangas or Manila where they have heard jobs are to be had. But most are born boat people who give the impression of being refugees from dry land. Visayan fishermen spend weeks away from home, drifting from province to province, from one favourite fishing ground to another, catching and selling. Some of them claim to have no particular home but, gypsy-like, roam these central seas often with only a language, a dialect and a place of birth to give them geographical identity. Any of them at any time may haul their boats on to ‘Tiwarik”s little shore for a few hours to mend nets, cook a meal, calculate how much rice and fuel they will need to buy across the strait before pressing on again. Still other maritime vagrants are smugglers and pirates. Why else would a big, 30-foot bangka from Romblon be carrying at least six boxes of grenades and a .50 calibre machine-gun hidden beneath a nylon sail? They were the most affable of all, catching me mending a plywood flipper. I gave them cooking oil and a disposable butane lighter and in return they offered me a grenade for fishing. When I declined, saying I would rely on my speargun, they said ‘For self-defence, then. There are a lot of bad characters around these parts. Us, for example.’ We all laughed, I a little uneasily; after an hour or two they left, waving.

Since ‘Tiwarik’ had no population and nothing to offer except a bit of dry land in the middle of a lot of water it was on nobody’s itinerary and was no one’s port of call. It lay at the crossroads of no particular routes, it formed no conceivable milestone in anyone’s journey. Yet it was there to be used, to provide refuge or shelter, sticks for fires, corals and boulders for fishing. Or, for the reflective, it offered a place where one could hear only the sea’s rinsing murmur, the cries of birds and, at night, the tiny hollow sigh of a lamp wick in its glass chimney.

Now this place no longer exists, and I need no reminding as our bangka noses on to the Fantasy Elephant Club’s new beach. The tangle of boulders and thorns which had always hidden the foot of the cliff is gone. In its place is a concrete sea wall which at one end abuts the foundations for a small pier. Grey cement teeth stick up out of the blue water sprouting tufts of rusty reinforcing rods. On the spot where I had pitched a flapping shelter during a storm on my first visit to ‘Tiwarik’ many years before stands an octagonal, open-sided beach house with at its centre the beginnings of a circular bar surrounded by polished marble stools. At empty stone tables sit a variety of site officials – architects and engineers – waiting for a boat, as well as a blue-uniformed guard with a pistol and a walkie-talkie. No, he says, it isn’t possible for me just to stroll on up and look around. This is a Japanese operation and things are run in an efficient and security-conscious manner. Why do I want to visit the island, anyway? I explain that I had once spent time here, had lived here alone, am curious to revisit it. The guard calls up, is told to wait. I sit down on a marble stool and watch relays of sweating boys stagger beneath the sacks of sand they are unloading from a bangka. Time passes; the guard speaks, his radio crackles back; more time passes. Finally, I and my two friends from ‘Sabay’ are allowed to walk up to the site but are reminded that when it is finished the Fantasy Elephant Club will be exclusively for Japanese members.

The precipitous footpath is gone. To replace it a steeply curving road has been bulldozed across the face of the cliff. As we walk up we are passed by a roaring truck full of cement and trailing sooty fumes. At that moment the last vestiges of ‘Tiwarik’ vanish in clouds of carbon. We stop on a curve where labourers are digging a trench for a power cable. They are from ‘Sabay’ and I fished with one of them four years before. He tells me this is the site of the accident a month or so back, just before Christmas. Some boulders fell out of the freshly cut embankment and crushed three workers from up the coast. Two died on the spot, a third is in hospital in Manila and likely to die. I hope their families have been compensated. Oh yes, says my informant’s workmate, they were each given 30,000 pesos (almost £600).

Once at the top I am unable to recognise nearly all the familiar landmarks. I cannot even be certain where I saw the pegs and surveyor’s ranging rod on my last visit. Much of the Field of Crabs is now landscaped and has been disguised as a miniature golf course. A tennis court is even now being surfaced and a small swimming pool receiving a first coat of obligatory blue. Individual bungalows – double glazed, air conditioned, self-contained – are disposed among tasteful arrangements of rocks already planted with flowering shrubs. The centrepiece of the development (‘the masterpiece’, as the assistant to the architect told me down below in the beach pavilion within the latter’s earshot) is the clubhouse itself, a long, low, white palace whose foyer is painstakingly decorated with appliqué designs of shells set in cement. This is apparently to contain all manner of restaurants, sushi bars, guestrooms and steam baths. At the moment it holds a good few Filipino labourers wearing the snipped-off corners of plaster bags on their heads as sunhats. A siren sounds from up in the forest, a strident wail which sends an instant image of escaped prisoners fleeing through the mind, but it is only to mark the beginning of the labourers’ mid-morning break. Most unwrap their merienda from scraps of newspaper where they stand. A few head up towards a straggle of huts pitched against the steep, rocky slope in the tattered scrub which the lower reaches of the forest have now become. Even within the forest itself there are signs that trails have been hacked to the top. I can see no pagoda but my companions tell me that a chalet is planned for ‘those who want to be alone’. What, then, of the pair of eagles, my familiars? I had tried not very hard to identify them, flicking through bird books for South-East Asia, but each time I visualised them the print slipped from their wings as they soared away, unnamed. Assuredly they were gone. In one corner of their former home a level patch has been gouged and on this now stand three immense concrete legs.

‘Those are for the electricity,’ my companion explains. ‘The cables will come across from the mainland.’

And so, without need for bridges and causeways (‘the whole point is that it is an island,’ a Japanese will tell me stiffly some hours later), the Fantasy Elephant Club is to be firmly tethered to the mainland by umbilical cords. The great weight of unsupported lengths of high-tension lines explains the size of the pylons, which will have to withstand the stress of typhoon winds. It is possible to make out three similar pylons tucked away among the shrubs on the distant promontory. Until the project was hatched, this particular corner of the province must have been well down on all priority lists for a surfaced road and electrification. Now, thanks to foreign developers, new poles have sprouted along the dirt track on the mainland and ‘Betamax’ film shows are daily and nightly entertainment where before the villagers played cards and gossiped cruelly by candlelight. ‘Progress,’ as the mayoress of the municipality is fond of saying. Yet there is little risk that someone who knows the area will melt unresistingly into admiration for the foreigners’ altruism. It is the province’s impoverished power company which is meeting the bills for bringing electricity to the island. And over in ‘Sabay’, where it is reasonable to suppose the developers might in self-interest have improved the villagers’ inadequate water supply, I noticed the new handpump had been installed by local Rotarians, just as the recent hard surfacing of the sandy lot used for basketball had been paid for by the Lions Club.

Something had gone sour at ‘Sabay’, I discovered, though I never found out precisely what. The villagers disdainfully said the Japanese were arrogant and too mean to work for at 40 pesos a day (66 pence). They claimed they could earn far more from their usual fishing activities. It was only the other villagers up the coast who were too lazy and ignorant to fish who would consider 40 pesos a possible wage. … There had been friction right from the early stages of construction, I gathered. At any rate, the relations of ‘Sabay’ to this new world on its doorstep were decidedly malabo: cloudy, murky, ill-visaged. It seemed the neighbouring village was to do better in terms of the newcomers’ patronage since the developers were indeed sinking a borehole there for the island’s drinking water. Later, I found out something else which might explain this state of affairs, since I never seriously believed my friends’ protestations (no doubt cued to my own responses and facial expressions) that the island had been despoiled, their traditional lives of picturesque poverty ruined for ever by video recorders and concrete pylons.

It turned out that what was taking shape on the island was only ‘Phase One’ of a far larger project. ‘Phase Two’ was destined for the mainland: 252 hectares which, if all the requisite planning permissions were hustled through, would comprise an eighteen-hole golf course, a clubhouse, cottages for guests, a two-storeyed home for the (Japanese) aged, a private airstrip/helipad, a skating rink (presumably roller rather than ice), a shooting range and a coffee shop. There was also talk of a casino, said the mayoress, although that might eventually more prudently be sited on the island. Further facilities to be offered would include windsurfing, sky diving, water skiing, scuba diving and riding. This ‘Phase Two’ was intended to be open to non-Japanese visitors.

Since under Philippine law no land can be owned outright by a foreigner, the developers had to have a majority Filipino stakeholding. This was no problem for the corporation’s president since he was married to a Filipina. Most of the land he needed to acquire for ‘Phase Two’ belonged to the village next to ‘Sabay”. In ‘Sabay’ itself the wife was on the point of acquiring – or had already acquired – 33 hectares of land for ‘family use’. The ‘Sabayans” sense of grievance might therefore be partly explained by straightforward annoyance that they were not as well placed as their neighbours to cash in on this land bonanza. They clearly did prefer development to raw nature, but in order to be fully reconciled would have liked a bigger slice. The fact that all the land was at present classified as ‘agricultural’, and that to change this classification required a local referendum as well as action at provincial government level, was a minor technicality. So was President Cory Aquino’s foot-dragging land-reform policy under whose measures several landless tenant farmers in ‘Sabay’ would have stood to gain a little agricultural land of their own. The whole development project was so grand and so powerfully backed that no landless ‘Sabayan’ was likely to risk his neck by making a serious protest, still less bring any sort of legal action.

So that day in ‘Sabay’ I take ‘Phase Two’ to be pretty much a foregone conclusion. I also assume the villagers’ fears about organised crime in the shape of the Yakuza and insidious disease in the shape of AIDS are not necessarily going to be allayed by the development corporation’s president promising ‘to screen all his visitors most carefully for undersirable connections’ (the reference was apparently to the Yakuza), nor by their lady mayor’s assurance that she would ‘eradicate illegal activities such as prostitution’ if they occurred. Several of the more travelled ‘Sabay’ fishermen had seen at first hand the results of the turning of Puerto Galera in Mindoro into an international resort and had witnessed once-lovely Boracay Island in Panay ‘go to the devil’ and require thirteen full-time tourist security police. ‘There is a price for everything,’ a local official wearing a huge fraternity ring announced sagely. ‘Fighting, prostitution, AIDS, Yakuza. … They’re a regrettable but inevitable part of the development of our country.’

I soon lose heart on ‘Tiwarik’ and cut short my unofficial visit. The last thing I notice is that the tree on top of the cliff from which Intoy and I had hung the highest, most dangerous and most beautiful swing in the world had been cut down and replaced with a concrete bench moulded to resemble half a rough-hewn trunk. As we start back down the new road I discover the price of the island was 200,000 pesos. ‘Tiwarik’ was knocked down for £3,500. I also hear its Japanese visitors would be paying £170 a day for their accommodation, not including food and the use of facilities. At the scene of the recent fatal landslip I catch myself doing the sort of pointless sums which nevertheless insist on being done: three days’ lodging equals one life.

All these details about ‘Phase Two’ and the land on which it is to take shape are not by the way. They are central to the manner of ‘Tiwarik”s demise and how it has lost its existence as an island. Even as, 1,000 miles away, Japanese technology struggles to preserve the single eroding islet of Okinotorishima so it may qualify for its own EEZ, the same technology has here de-created an island and is building in its place an exclusive peninsula. What with private helicopters and hydrofoils and high-tension cables, the narrow strait will have even less of an isolating effect than a six-lane highway has on an urban community. The island and the mainland together form one single project. Splitting it into two phases is merely an engineering and procedural convenience and has to do with two timescales, not two separate places. By annexing – perfectly legally – a piece of territory in another country and turning it into pseudo-Japan, Japan is in effect exporting its boundary. It is mere chance that the project, and the money, happen this time not to be Swiss or American or Chinese or German. The end result is the unislanding of ‘Tiwarik’.

*

‘Tiwarik’ is a good example of an island which has been lost to a kind of gerrymandering, to a redrawing of its cultural boundaries. Its mistake was to have been too amorphous, too anonymous and unclaimed except by a nomadic European who briefly thrust his own identifications on to it and wanted nothing but silence in return. That was selfish, no doubt. Also harmless. It would be a historical solecism to look back a century or two and think yearningly of the unpopulated, unneeded islands then littering the world’s seas. Two centuries ago one’s mind would have been quite different, with different wants and expectations in a completely dissimilar world. So, at least, we suppose. Yet islands have always exercised a fascination and – unlike deserts, for instance – are enough repositories of fantasy to be slightly chimerical. One seldom looks at an island without also imagining it disappearing behind a bank of fog or storm clouds which at length clear to reveal an empty ocean. It would not be a surprise and, like a dream, one might not even miss it. Until remarkably recently the North Atlantic was full of islands which have now disappeared. They constituted another type of vanishing island, one whose loss is due to the redrawing of maps, to improved cartography and navigation, but also to changed expectations.

These places hovered on the boundaries of the actual and the credible for hundreds of years. They cannot have emerged from nothing and neither have they entirely vanished yet in all their mysterious aspects. The most famous of them were Antillia (or Seven Cities), Brasil, St Brandan, Buss and Mayda. Seven Cities Island had grown out of a legend of Christian refugees, among them several bishops, fleeing the Iberian peninsula before the Moorish invasion in 711 and fetching up in a safe land somewhere well away in the far Atlantic. Travellers who claimed to have visited it had found plentiful church services and brought back sand which was one-third pure gold dust. Not surprisingly it remained a place of considerable interest to navigators. So did Brasil Island, which had appeared on Dallorto’s famous map of 1325 as a large, circular island some way off Munster in Ireland. In 1498 the Spanish ambassador in London reported home that ‘The people of Bristol have, for the last seven years, sent out every year two, three and four caravels [light ships] in search of the islands of Brasil and the Seven Cities.’

Seven Cities was on Desceliers’s map of 1546 at a position which today would be between 500 and 600 miles off New York. Since Columbus’s day, though, mariners had been sailing the western Atlantic with increasing frequency and by the late sixteenth century the island had begun to shrink, moving southwards and out into the mid-Atlantic wastes. A century later it vanished entirely. Brasil Island lasted much longer – embarrassingly so, since according to one source it ‘persisted in the mind of the British Admiralty until the second half of the Nineteenth century’.*

The Isle of St Brandan was even more illustrious since it could trace its origins back to ancient Greece and Celtic mythology, both of which had stories about an Island of the Blessed. Pagan myth was converted into Christian parable by putting the sixth-century Abbot of Clonfert into the role of a lone seafarer who, committing his body to a leaky coracle and his soul to God, overcomes all manner of dangers and hardship to arrive at last in a land of paradise. It was this island which Charles Kingsley chose to be the home of the water babies, using it in a curious way. He preserved the fairy-tale aspects. ‘On still clear summer evenings, when the sun sinks down into the sea, among golden cloud-capes and cloud-islands, and locks and friths of azure sky, the sailors fancy that they see, away to westward, St Brandan’s fairy isle.’† The religious connotations were still there, too, for ‘when Tom got there, he found that the Isle stood all on pillars, and that its roots were full of caves’, which implied a place modelled securely on Gothic church architecture. Yet Kingsley then invoked paganism by identifying St Brandan’s with Atlantis, the lost land of higher knowledge which to this day is still assiduously mapped by its faithful.

‘The Sunken Island of Buss’ was different in that its discovery was definitely recorded. It was found in 1578 during Martin Frobisher’s third and last attempt to find a north-west passage. One of the smallest of his ships, the Emmanuel, was a buss (a herring smack of about 60 tons) out of Bridgwater in Somerset. During a severe storm off Greenland it became separated from the rest of the expedition. Completely lost somewhere in the region of Bear Sound, it began sailing south-eastward in a vaguely homeward direction whereupon, in the words of a contemporary but second-hand account, ‘they discovered a great island in the latitude of 57 degrees and a half, which was never yet found before, and sailed three days along the coast, the land seeming to be fruiteful, full of woods, and a champaign country.’* Almost at once the Island of Buss began appearing on charts. In the seventeenth century it was large and usually about 570 miles due west of Rockall. By the eighteenth century it had begun to shrink, improved navigation having failed to find it. Owing to its definitive position as well as to the documented date and circumstances of its discovery, Buss was never free to adopt the other islands’ strategy of scooting elusively about the ocean. Instead it shrank by sinking, for van Keulen’s 1745 chart observes, ‘The submerged land of Buss is nowadays nothing but surf a quarter of a mile long with rough sea.’ Later that century and into the beginning of the nineteenth several ships searched for Buss by taking soundings but the results were inconclusive. Probably its last appearance on a map was in the 1858 edition of Keith Johnston’s Physical Atlas, where it is a speck in the North Atlantic.

What did the Emmanuel find in 1578? After Buss had finally gone cartographers were left with four possibilities. Either it was a fraud from the start or else the disoriented sailors had mistaken a fog bank or ice field for land. Or was it a genuine island which had soon submerged? The fourth and most likely explanation is that the little buss from Bridgwater had glimpsed a stretch of the Greenland coast, probably in the region of Cape Farewell. A certain amount of imagination and a vivid non-eyewitness account (Greenland is not an obviously ‘fruiteful’ and well-wooded country) did the rest.

Lastly, the Island of Mayda survived on maps longest of all. It was usually crescent in shape and placed out in the Atlantic to the southwest of Ireland, more or less where the Porcupine Seabight is on modern charts. One of the variants of its name, Asmaida, probably points to its having originated with mediaeval Arab navigators. Like Brasil Island it began moving steadily westward across the Atlantic, in 1566 fetching up in Newfoundland waters. By 1814 Mayda had drifted much further south, on a level with the West Indies. According to one source,* its final appearance was on a Rand McNally map of 1906. It is anyone’s guess as to what Mayda’s objective correlative was: possibly Bermuda or Cape Cod or Cape Breton. It was most likely to have been dimly perceived America.

The modern world with GPS at its disposal, to say nothing of satellite pictures, may view these elusive islands of the North Atlantic with a degree of indulgent patronage. Yet for Mayda to have existed on maps from 1400 to 1906 – albeit in a variety of locations – is a feat which testifies to something other than mere navigational error. It clearly served a real function. In its slow and stately disappearance over some 500 years the Island of Mayda – which no one had ever seen twice, still less landed on – in effect demonstrated that something cannot come into being without displacing something else. Mayda had to be pushed gradually aside in order to allow the eastern seaboard of America to come into cartographical existence.

We who carry in our heads an image of the Earth seen from space and have noticed on the surface of its blue ball continents and land masses looking identical to the ones in atlases cannot picture the world as it was to someone half a millennium ago. At that time the prevailing image was entirely influenced by Ptolemy’s great Geographia (AD 90–168 c.). Ptolemy conceived the Earth as spherical; the problem he bequeathed was a lack of enough known world to cover the sphere. The whole of the globe was centred, as the name implied, on the Mediterranean. Every Greek sailor knew that once one had sailed beyond the last points of land the sea just went on and on. What particularly frightened the Greeks, and therefore the European mind which inherited their philosophical tradition, was the idea of void. The sea’s void, that infinitely dangerous blank beyond known land, was as worrying metaphysically as it was physically. The Greeks’ idealisation of a static universe full of fixed entities, faithfully reflected in their mathematics, underpinned all that could be thought. The sea was a positive insult to this metaphysics, a naked opposition to it. Not only was the ocean of unknown dimensions but it was moving, unstable, in certain circumstances even breaking out of its natural confines. How then could this fluid void be mapped? How did one map an ocean when it was featureless? How did one represent an absence of topography?

To appease this Aristotelian horror vacui mapmakers before 1500 resorted to a variety of devices, including that of coralling the ocean safely within a complete ring of imaginary continents like the zetetics’ ice barrier. Until roughly that date maps of the world were entirely notional. Ptolemy had been rediscovered in about 1200, but Geographia was only a text. The features of the globe were extrapolated from it entirely according to the cartographer’s fancy. Religious imagery was prominent, some maps depicting three continents which corresponded to the three sons of Noah. (The insistence that the globe assume a doctrinal shape lasted at least into the Age of Enlightenment. The French cartographer Robert de Vangoudy published a map of America in 1769 showing the land as divided by Poseidon among his ten sons, much to the amusement of Voltaire.) Other shapes assumed by the world’s land masses at mapmakers’ whim were neat crosses, caskets, and the tabernacle. Until a certain date the function of land on mappemonds is to express the wish that the physical world should conform to theological or aesthetic categories. Underlying this, though, runs an anxious desire to frame a linked and anarchic series of voids into distinguishable oceans. When this is done the picture reverses out and instead becomes a map of land with bits of sea in between. It is a profound relief.

Mayda and all the dozens of other islands in the North Atlantic were the surviving, mobile fragments of conceptually necessary but imaginary land. This is precisely Claude Lévi-Strauss’s idea of the ‘floating signifier’. He argues that in culture there is always a need for certain concepts and expressions in order to soak up any excess of existence which has not yet been turned into words. It is the analogue of the algebraic concept of nought, which it is necessary to have before other things can be deployed.* The Island of Mayda’s function was to be non-existent, to blot up an excess of vacancy, until something more solid turned up. Its poignancy is that even when it had been rendered redundant cartographers were loath to part with it. This was no doubt a matter of pride as much as sentimentality. Mayda was doomed to wander in an oceanic oubliette like a melting ice floe until being covered with the map’s legend. When in some future edition the legend was moved, Mayda was found to have vanished.

Mythical or badly misplaced islands were not, of course, confined to the North Atlantic. The parts of the world remoter from Europe which were explored, mapped and named later had their own share which lingered correspondingly longer, even though by the mid-nineteenth century navigational methods were very reliable. Dougherty Island was believed for over a century to lie to the south of Australia. It was frequently reported at its given coordinates and in 1893 a New Zealander, Captain White, claimed to have sailed entirely around it, saying there was no other land for 1,100 miles. After that it vanished, but its image endured on US charts until 1932. The same went for Podestà Island, named for the Italian ship which discovered it, the Barone Podestà. It was sighted in the South Pacific, some 900 miles off the Chilean coast and the ship’s master wrote down its position. However, since his name was given as Captain Pinocchio it is perhaps not surprising it was never seen again, though it survived on some charts until 1936.

More inconvenient was the case of Sarah Ann Island, which ought to have formed part of the Gilbert Island group in today’s Kiribati. In 1932 some American astronomers decided it would be the ideal spot from which to view a long-awaited total eclipse of the sun. The US Navy went off to have a look at the island and report back regarding the difficulties of accommodating scientists and their equipment on it. Despite searching, however, they failed to find Sarah Ann and the observations had instead to be made from Canton and Enderby Islands, 500 miles to the east.

Of all such islands maybe the longest lived were – or are – a couple far down in the Pacific, south-west of Tierra del Fuego, Macy’s Island and Swain’s Island. These had vanished from practically every known chart by 1939, but they are still there in the 1974 edition of the Soviet Atlas of the Pacific Ocean. It is not clear which country they belong to; nor, indeed, to which era. One of them even persists on a John Bartholomew map in The Times Atlas of the World (the 1986 reprint of the seventh edition of 1985).

If this seems like a catalogue of earnest errors, the case of Hunter Island is one which from the start ought to have aroused suspicion but which was long treated very seriously in some quarters. In 1823 Captain Hunter of the brig Donna Carmelita claimed to have found an island some 300 miles north-west of Fiji. Not only did he establish its exact position, he landed and found an island which was intensively cultivated and lived on by a tribe of ‘highly developed’ Polynesians. These natives had certain peculiarities. They all had their cheeks perforated in weird patterns and the little fingers of their left hands amputated at the second joint. For many years passing skippers kept their eyes skinned for Hunter Island, since apart from anything else the captain’s account had intrigued a good few anthropologists who had never before heard of a Polynesian tribe with these curious characteristics. Alas, the island was never seen again. The idea that the entire thing might have been invented as a joke by a bored captain with a gift for subversive fantasy might have crossed somebody’s mind on learning that his original – and private – name for the island was Onaneuse.*

 

*

‘Tiwarik’ and Onaneuse and, for that matter, all the world’s chimerical islands have things in common which do not depend in the slightest on notions of ‘objective reality’. To the gaze beneath which they once fell they had an absolute existence. St Brandan’s exercised its significance on the religious imagination of the time, while Seven Cities with its gold sand and Buss with its ‘champaign country’ stood as lands of promise whose only fault was to slip further out of reach as the centuries passed. Onaneuse, since all jokes are serious until their inventors begin to laugh, maybe stood for something which had been at the back of Captain Hunter’s mind long before he ever went to sea. It might be oddly reassuring to invent a private erotic idyll, give it precise bearings and then watch other people search for it in vain. While the Captain laughed the scholars accorded it a status he would never have dared allow himself to claim. They did his work for him even as they failed to find it, and since he had known all along it wasn’t there he had the last laugh as well.

No doubt islands draw some of their peculiar significance from the dozens of cosmogonies which begin with a watery chaos out of which land emerges. Any emergent land must initially take the form of an island, so the island stands as the archetype of land. As to what this proto-land might contain would depend on when it was first spied, and by whom. Paradise, treasure and naturalists’ nightmares were variously seen as appropriate, but the nearer our own century was approached the more an explorer, an adventurer or a philosopher might expect the proto-land (glimpsed tantalisingly in the parting of a fog bank or glittering in the objective of his telescope) to contain a domestic order reassuringly old-fashioned as well as exotically unlike any known society. Things are different nowadays. Nobody any longer expects to find a place where the people are nobler, sexier or just better behaved. Wistfulness has been replaced by a certain hard-nosed quality. If you can’t find them, you found them. Were there such a thing as an endangered species of land, the island would be it. Far from being proto-land it is coming to feel like a last land. The whole concept of the island, which until recently was implicit with all manner of promise, is now redolent of loss.

‘Tiwarik’ will go on existing only as long as its author. Unlike the island to which I attached the name, it is not contingent on Japanese developers. Somewhere its grasses still blow in the wind. Six or so years ago, when it was its old self, I ended my description by calling it an act of the imagination. This will always be true of places which at last become properly real to us.

It is not its grasses my feet have trodden nor its little coastline I have so lovingly followed, and neither does it retain any trace of me. There is another island locally known as ‘Tiwarik’ but it is only an exact facsimile, a fly-spit on the map of the objective planet which we agree to inhabit.*

* James Hamilton-Paterson, Playing with Water (1987).

* Richard K. Nelson, The Island Within (1990).

* Yi-fu Tuan, Topophilia (1974).

† Charles Kingsley, The Water Babies (1863).

* E. J. Payne, ed., Voyages of the Elizabethan Seamen to America (Oxford, 1893) p. 183.

* W. H. Babcock, Legendary Islands of the Atlantic (New York, 1922).

* See Brian Rothman, Signifying Nothing: The Semiotics of Zero (1987).

* See Karl Baarslag, Islands of Adventure (London, 1941) and Henry Stommel, Lost Islands (1984).

* Hamilton-Paterson, Playing with Water (1987).