The Islanders

Introductory by Chaster Kammeston

I find it ironic that I should be invited to write a few introductory words to this book, as I know as little about the subject as it is possible to know. However, having always maintained that what one feels is more important than what one knows, let me begin.

Here is a book about islands and islanders, full of information and facts, a great deal I knew nothing about, and even more on which I had opinions without substance. People too: some of them I knew personally, or had heard about, and now rather late in the day have learned something about them. There is so much out there, so many islands to discover, while I am familiar with but one of them. I was born on the island where I live now and where I am writing these words, I have never stepped off the island, and I expect never to do so before I die. If this were a book only about my home island I should be uniquely equipped to introduce it, but for quite other reasons I would then not agree to do so.

For me the visual aspect of this Archipelago in which I contentedly live is confined to the handful of adjacent islands I can see in the offing as I walk or travel about close to my house. I know the names of most of them — there are three or four that are too small or unimportant to be named — and I carry a vivid mental picture of them as they appear to me. In rain, sunshine or wind, these neighbouring islands are constant companions, the background scenery to my life. They are lovely and intriguing to behold, they induce moods in me that are always varied and unpredictable, and I never tire of staring at them. They infuse me with the spirit of island life, and thus infuse every word I have ever written.

I am however incurious about them. I assume that many of the people who visit my own island must come from some of them, and, no doubt, return to them afterwards. By reading the advance proofs of this book I have accidentally discovered a few unsuspected facts about one of these adjacent places, but on the whole I remain as ignorant about my part of the Dream Archipelago as always. That is how it is, and how it will remain.

Although I can describe nothing of what I myself know about the islands, I none the less have a commission to write about them here. Let me sum up what is more generally accepted and known. I have culled most of it from reference books.

The Dream Archipelago is the largest geographical feature on our world. The islands are found around the whole girth of the planet, spreading across tropical, subtropical and temperate latitudes, both north and south of the equator. They are placed in the only ocean we have: this is known as the Midway Sea and it too is circumambient of the world. The sea with its islands occupies more than seventy per cent of the total surface area, and contains more than eighty per cent of all the world’s water.

The Midway Sea is mostly wide, but there are two comparatively narrow stretches which create troublesome local currents and disturbances as the tides rise and fall. The Sea is bounded and bordered to north and south by two continental masses.

Of these continents the larger, to the north, is unnamed. This is because it is the location of approximately sixty different states and nations, many of them landbound. Each of these nations has its own language and customs and lays fierce and argumentative claim to pre-eminence on the vast continent. The countries all have names by which they know the continent, but as these names are in a variety of languages, and emerge from many cultural, historical and folkloric roots, no one can agree on what they should all call it.

Some maps call this continent ‘Nordmaieure’, but this is more to do with the fact that cartographers do not like unnamed spaces on their maps. ‘Nordmaieure’ has no political or cultural meaning. Most of these quarrelsome nation states are found in the mid-regions, or along the southern plains, because north of the seventieth parallel all is permanently frozen and therefore more or less uninhabitable.

The smaller southern continent does have a name: it is called Sudmaieure (explaining the cartographical fiction of the north) and it too is as yet mostly unpopulated, and for the same general reasons of intense cold. Sudmaieure is a chill polar wasteland, lacking temperate or tropical latitudes. Much of it is under permafrost or deep icefields. The outer fringe, where the land meets the southern littoral of the Midway Sea, experiences some seasonal thawing, and here there are a few small settlements. Some of these are temporary camps set up by the various military factions who have an interest in Sudmaieure, others are related to scientific projects, or fishing or mining.

The political concerns of this world of ours are worrying. Many of the countries in the north are at war with each other — they have been at it for as long as I have been alive, they were at it for at least three centuries before I was born, and they show every eager sign of being at it for centuries more to come. The issues over which they violently disagree, and the alliances they have formed in an attempt to prevail, are often reported in our newspapers and on television, but few islanders seem to take much notice.

This is largely because in an act of unusual, not to say unique, far-sightedness, the elders of the Dream Archipelago long ago drew up and agreed a document called the Covenant of Neutrality. The Covenant is just about the only matter on which the various peoples of the islands have ever agreed. It extends to every island, small or large, populated or unpopulated, and it was intended to guarantee that the belligerent concerns of the north should not affect the people of the Archipelago.

Although there have been many attempts in the past to breach the Covenant, and it is by no means an untroubled document, it has by some miracle held firm. The neutrality established long ago still manages to hold today. Nor is it just a matter of treaties and conventions: neutrality is a way of life in the islands, a constant preference, an attitude, a habit.

Our neutrality is tested every day, because for perhaps understandable reasons the warring nations have drawn up their own agreement of sorts. It reflects their particular and vested interests, not those of the islanders. This makes the islanders’ Covenant continue to be necessary.

By their agreement, these northern countries draw back from invading each other, or from bombing each other’s cities, or damaging their industries and valuable reserves of minerals and fuels, and instead confine their war-making to the battlefields of Sudmaieure. They send their armies down to the stony wastes and the terrible icefields, and there they kill and wound each other’s young soldiery, they fire bullets and missiles and shells at each other, they bash and batter and shout a lot, wave their colours and blow their cornets, march around making a lot of noise and no doubt leaving a mess behind them. All this activity is more or less without harm to anyone else, and appears to satisfy those who take part.

To reach Sudmaieure, though, the armies and everything connected with them must pass through the Archipelago, so we are constantly traversed by troopships and naval vessels and auxiliaries. Our islands are over-flown by military aircraft. It happens that my house overlooks one of the channels regularly used by troopships, and from my study window I can see the grey ships cruising slowly by. I try not to imagine the conditions aboard. The sight of these ships, with their cargo of young lives heading to war, has haunted me all my life and indirectly has helped give the essence to every book I have written.

I have also been asked to say something about the physical facts of the Archipelago.

For the purposes of this Introductory I have been trying to discover how many islands there are in all, since a statistic of that sort seems to be what matters to the kind of people who compile books like this one. They refer to it from time to time by the technically accurate description of gazetteer, because what we have here is a long list of names of islands.

It is however an incomplete island gazetteer, something which the compilers would be the first to admit. Logically, one can easily understand that if every island in the Dream Archipelago were to be listed by name in a book, the result would be of such immense size, and so full of trivial information, that it would have little practical use.

The same argument against usefulness may be made for an incomplete list, of course, compounded by the unarguable fact that an incomplete listing of anything reveals that a selection has been made, and any act of selection is of course political. So here we have partiality added to triviality, and they have made a book of it all while maintaining the conceit that a gazetteer is apolitical.

This is a conundrum I do not propose to solve for the no doubt industrious gazetteers who have produced this book, but it did lead me to try to find out, if only for my own amusement, what is the total number of islands in this world of ours.

There are many different reference books about the Dream Archipelago and I have several of them on my shelf. All the books make guesses about numbers, and all of those guesses differ from each other. Some authorities say there are hundreds of islands, but they count only the large or important ones. Others say there are thousands, but they are vague about how they define an island, and confuse island groups with individual islands. A few of these experts, by including half-submerged rocks and parts of reefs, say there are hundreds of thousands, and hint at even more.

After much browsing I reached the conclusion that the only thing the experts do agree on is that there are a great many islands.

Approximately twenty thousand of the islands appear to have names, but even this is uncertain. Some islands are organized in large administrative groups and known by collective names, or they are distinguished only by ordinal numbers. Others are in groups which are not named, while the islands in those unnamed groups, or some of them, are individually named. Other islands stand alone, and of these many are named but many more appear not to be.

Then there is the problem of the profusion of island patois.

Nearly all the islands have local names as well as the ‘official’ names that appear on the map. (Or they would do, if there were any maps. I shall return to this shortly.) Sometimes, there are two or more alternative patois names, some of which are based on physical features of the island, but most of which are not. Where attempts have been made to standardize the nomenclature, further confusion has been created. Confusion is standard and normal, I’m afraid.

For instance, there is a group of islands called the Torquils, or the Torquil Group, or (occasionally) the Torquil Islands. They are situated at approximately 45°E, in the broad subtropical zone south of the Equator. The Torquils are apparently well known, much visited, famous for their beaches and lagoons. All the main Torquil islands have ferry ports, and the largest has a civil airport. The overall population at the most recent census was in excess of half a million people. There is no doubt that these islands exist and are well known by many people, other than the residents. The main text of this book, with its concern to provide as much information and detail as possible, makes several references to them. The Torquils therefore appear to be real, or at least really there.

However, it seems possible that there is another name for this group of islands, which is the Torquis, or the Torqui Group. As I’m accustomed to dealing with clumsy editorial work, I assumed at first that one name might be a mis-spelling of the other. However, the Torquils are said to have the patois name which means EVENING WIND, while the Torquis are said to have a patois meaning of SERENE DEPTHS. So many variables occur! How much is lost in translation from one patois to another, or in the oral traditions on which so much island lore is based?

To someone like me, who has not visited the Torquils or the Torquis and never will, there does not seem to be much that distinguishes one group from the other. They even appear to be in the same general area, or at least have similar coordinates. I suppose many people will assume they are one and the same.

I was willing to make a similar assumption until to my astonishment I discovered there was yet another group of islands, these called the Torquins, which might of course be a further mis-spelling.

My reference books are more or less in agreement that there are one hundred and fifteen named islands in the Torquins, seventy-two named and twenty-three unnamed islands in the Torquils, and fifty-eight identified islands in the Torquis. However, in those allegedly separate island groups there are at least five islands in each with the same name, some of those have minor variations in spelling and a few appear to have been recently renamed in an attempt to capitalize on the presumed fortunes of somewhere else.

Some of the ones with the same or similar names have longitude and latitude references which are identical, or almost so, which would appear to be objective evidence that they are one and the same, until we discover that the Torquins and the Torquis, at least, are on opposite sides of the world, and that the Torquis and the Torquins are emphatically located in the northern hemisphere while the Torquils are just as firmly positioned in the south.

If the reader is at this point feeling muddled or mystified, let me reassure him or her that I am in the same state. I also suspect that many of these so-called experts who have written reference books have been just as bewildered by it all, and over the years have passed down their imbroglio for someone else to sort out.

The gazetteer does make an honourable effort to clarify this sort of problem, although as far as I am concerned it is a mystery on which I wish to spend no more time.

So I gladly join the general consensus of scholars and admit or declare that the Dream Archipelago contains a great many islands, and leave it at that.

But where exactly are they and how do they lie in relation to each other?

There are no maps or charts of the Dream Archipelago. At least there are no reliable ones, or comprehensive ones, or even whole ones.

There are thousands of charts which have been drawn up locally, mainly to enable navigation for fishing vessels and the inter-island ferries, but most of these are crudely drawn and graphically incomplete. They concentrate on depths of channels, hidden rocks and guyots, tidal passages, reefs, safe havens, coves, lighthouses, sandbanks, and so on. They show locally known prevailing winds. All this is plainly vernacular in origin, based on the seagoing experiences of local men and women, which is as it should be but is of absolutely no use to a global consideration of the whole Archipelago.

The problems of mapping the Dream Archipelago are well understood. High-altitude aerial cartography is more or less impossible because of the distortion caused by the temporal gradients. These gradients, impossible for me to explain here (there is an attempt later in the book), exist in every part of the world except at the magnetic poles. Even within a few degrees of those poles, which of course are in frozen land areas, the variations in what can be observed or photographed make reliable charting inconsistent and therefore unfeasible.

The only solution would be for mapping to be conducted on a scientific or consistent basis, concentrating on small or local areas, drawn at ground level or from an extremely low altitude, then combined by some central authority so as to produce a comprehensive worldwide map. Until comparatively recently no attempt on this mammoth task has been made. You will read about the modern efforts in this gazetteer. Maybe they will enlighten you, as they have enlightened me, although not by much.

The present-day cartographers use low-level aerial photography of the highest visual quality, but again because of the gravitational anomalies it has proved impossible to send out these pilotless aeroplanes in any planned or consistent way. The results are haphazard and random and it will be many years before anything approaching a definitive atlas of our world is produced. Until then the picture remains unclear and everyone continues to meander around in a way that is typical of islanders.

The dream-state of the Archipelago, which is what we islanders most respond to, and least wish to see changed, seems likely to continue without interference for a long time to come.

We are not at war because we have no disputes. We do not spy on each other because we are trusting and incurious. We travel short distances because we can see other islands around where we live and our ambitions are satisfied by going there. We rarely travel long distances for the same general reason. We invent gadgets and leisure activities and pastimes without purpose, because that is what we like to do. We paint and draw and sculpt, we write adventurous and fantastic literature, we speak in metaphors and we designate symbols, we act out the plays of our forefathers. We brag about our past glories and we hope for a better life ahead. We love conversation and sitting around, good food and passionate affairs, standing on beaches, swimming in the warm seas, drinking ourselves into contentment, sitting under the stars. We start making things then forget to finish them. We are articulate and talkative, but we only quarrel for the excitement of it. We are guilty of self-indulgence, irrational behaviour, illogical arguments, sometimes indolence, a musing state of mind.

Our palette of emotional colours is the islands themselves and the mysterious sea channels that churn between them. We relish our sea breezes, our regular monsoons, the banks of piling clouds that dramatize the seascapes, the sudden squalls, the colour of the light reflecting from the dazzling sea, the lazy heat, the currents and the tides and the unexplained gales, and on the whole prefer not to know whence they have come, nor whither they are destined.

As for this book, I declare that it will do no harm.

It is in fact to be commended. It is a typical island enterprise: it is incomplete, a bit muddled and it wants to be liked. The unidentified writer or writers of these brief sketches have an agenda which is not mine, but I do not object to it.

I did not write this book, although there have already been rumours that I did. This is the moment to aver that there is no truth in the rumours. I am in fact sceptical of the whole enterprise while liking it a great deal.

The book is arranged in alphabetical order and it is intended that it should be read in that order. However, as most people are supposedly expected to use it as a work of reference, or as a travel guide, then the order in which the articles have been placed is completely irrelevant. I do maintain, though, that few will be able to ‘use’ this book in the way it is presumably intended, so the alphabet is as good a basis as any from which to start.

One of the reasons for its lack of usefulness is something the reader should be warned about. Not every entry here is strictly factual. I found it surprising that in some cases the islands are described not by their physical characteristics, but by narratives concerning events that took place on them or people who did something while there. There is always a lot to be said for indirect truth, for metaphors, but if you are looking up a hotel in which you might wish to reserve a room, you probably do not want to read instead a biography of the proprietor. There is altogether too much of this kind of thing, but it is for some reason the chosen method of these gazetteers. I find it rather charming, but as a non-traveller I am always much more interested in the lives of hotel proprietors than I am in the rooms they have for rent.

Finally, it seems to me innocuous and even attractive to be urging travel to so many places at once, but it is in fact pointless when so few readers will act on the recommendation.

Any direction or travel plan within the Dream Archipelago more ambitious than being ferried across to the next island is usually a matter of guesswork or hazard. Because of the mapping problem, if you seek to land on any of the islands recommended by this gazetteer you will almost invariably turn up somewhere else. Furthermore, should you attempt to return whence you came, your difficulties will multiply.

Our history has largely been created by adventurers and entrepreneurs who arrived somewhere other than on the island they sought. The ones who landed where they intended frequently found that matters were not as they expected. Our history is full of people going, becoming confused, and then coming back or wandering off somewhere else.

Even so, finding any of these attractive places by chance, as that is the only way to appreciate them fully, will be a reward in itself, so it is my view that the foreknowledge these gazetteers are so keen to impart will always be irrelevant.

Prepare yourself by all means for the no doubt maddening and illogical local currency, be warned of the sometimes inexplicable local laws, know in advance the best spot from which to observe a cathedral, a mountain, or a group of mendicant artists, discover the patois name for the forest through which you plan to dawdle, brush up your knowledge of ancient arguments and abandoned diggings and installations of art, because you must be ready for anything that might occur.

None of it is real, though, because reality lies in a different, more evanescent realm. These are only the names of some of the places in the archipelago of dreams. The true reality is the one you perceive around you, or that which you are fortunate enough to imagine for yourself.

Chaster Kammeston