Taino culture continued to inform life after the arrival of the Spanish and other European settlers and then of the enslaved Africans, though as a separate people the Taino lasted only about a century before succumbing to disease, the social and economic depredations of the sugar cane agribusiness, and both friendly and unfriendly intercourse with the Europeans (with whom they shared a fondness for accumulating material as well as spiritual resources, and a facility for separating labor and capital). The arrival of enslaved Africans created island societies different not only from the African homelands which they had been forced to leave but also from the societies that were developing on the mainlands of North and South America; and these differences, though often masked by the shared experience of slavery, are still apparent, signaling something important about the way island life distinguishes itself from its continental counterpart.
The story of European and then African settlement in the Caribbean is in most ways a grim one, and has been often told. It is the story of people in a hurry to make money—which is another typical island story, it turns out, with versions around the world that chronicle the human lust for power and privilege and for products as varied as sealskins and spices and sex. In the case of the Caribbean, it was sugar; and the slavery that made sugar production possible, and for a while highly profitable, deeply warped its island life.
Christopher Columbus did not have all this in mind when he first landed on the islands of the Caribbean. He was completely exhausted, probably a bit scared, and more than a little surprised. First visiting Jamaica on his second voyage in 1494, and still convinced that he had found the Spice Islands of the East, Columbus described the island as “the fairest that eyes had beheld.” It was also “mountainous and heavily populated,” he noted, rather nervously, since he wanted to deal with the indigenous people, whom he had described in his earlier “letter announcing the discovery of the new world” as “of a very astute intelligence, and they are men who navigate all these seas.” The Taino of Jamaica were gentle and generous in their own territory, but jealous of islanders elsewhere. They disliked and distrusted the Amerindian Caribs in the Lesser Antilles and persuaded Columbus that the Caribs were cannibals. They weren’t, at least not in the way the Taino suggested; but that hardly mattered in the jostle of island jealousies. Just so, contemporary Jamaicans hold a special disregard for the “small islanders” of the eastern Caribbean, describing them in all sorts of ways that are, let us say, unflattering. And of course those islanders return the favor.
This is an island habit, it seems; or maybe it is a human one, though perhaps only mountain societies, bound by dialect and cultural differences, display the same capacity as islanders for prejudice against communities only a short distance away but separated by seemingly impassable barriers. Such insularity shows itself in particular ways on certain islands, reinforced by a defensively conservative attachment to traditional practices and ceremonies as well as by ingenious social and economic arrangements, which may explain why the English word “insular” took on negative connotations over time.
But also on islands, something positive is often involved. The Amerindian peoples, arriving separately but finding themselves sharing islands in the Caribbean, had to find new ways of interacting—and new social, economic, political, and cultural dynamics that combined elements of both their hunter-gatherer and their agricultural communities. What emerged after centuries were unique multicultural and multilingual societies, rare at any time and exceptional in the long history of human interaction. On the mainland, the story of agricultural societies impatiently destroying hunter-gatherer communities is the norm; but on some of these islands, despite—or maybe because of—the relatively close quarters they were confined to, the various settlers reconciled these livelihoods, drawing on spiritual as well as material technologies from each and combining hunting with harvesting on land and sea and shore.
For other than setting back out to sea, or flying away on the wings of a dove, there was nowhere else for these people to go. So they could either destroy each other, or find ways of getting along. Anything is possible given time, and on islands time moves at whatever pace people want. Which means that when people are in a hurry, terrible things tend to happen. When they are not, islands can be places of peace and tranquility, or at least of reconciliation; for like everywhere on Earth, in geology no less than in the natural world, island life is a work in progress, and from time to time islanders have nourished remarkable ways of settling their differences. It may have had something to do with the water all around, for as the pioneer ecologist Rachel Carson said in her book The Sea Around Us (1951), there is no “more delicately balanced relationship than that of island life to its environment.” Which includes other human beings. Iceland and the Isle of Man are home to the world’s oldest parliaments, after all, and the parliament in England also has a good long history, while the story of ancient Polynesian political culture is, mostly, one of remarkable checks and balances. (“A difference of opinion surrounded by water” is how one islander describes where he lives on Salt Spring Island on the west coast of Canada.) It doesn’t always work out, of course; but willy-nilly, the sea concentrates an islander’s mind.
The “i” in the English word “island” comes from the Anglo-Saxon eig and the Old Norse ey, which mean water. And water, which covers nearly three quarters of our planet’s surface and surrounds all the continents, is a place where we don’t belong. The various myths about floods, common to peoples all over the world, are a reminder not only of the occasionally catastrophic consequences of climate change (or, in some accounts, the grumpiness of the gods), but of the perpetual condition of humans in relation to water.
Water is a paradox. It is a source of both life and death for us; and for some ocean islanders, especially, water is something that unites rather than separates, its bountiful blessings more important than its occasional brutality, a place of peace that passeth understanding. On the island of Tikopia in the Solomon Islands, death at sea is referred to as a “sweet burial.” When the islander William Wordsworth, in a time of trouble at the beginning of the 1800s, called on John Milton for comfort, he said the great seventeenth-century poet “had a voice whose sound was like the sea.” Life began in the sea, as far as we know; and when we seek evidence of life on other planets we look for water. But no matter how friendly our feelings toward it, we are not at home in the water. We don’t swim very well, or for very long, certainly not compared to our cousins the marine mammals, much less the fish and reptiles that live there. And while small amounts of salt water are cleansing, seawater makes us sick. “You can’t drink the sea,” sings the Newfoundlander Ron Hynes, echoing Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ancient Mariner who cried “water, water, everywhere, nor any drop to drink” shortly after he shot an albatross, perhaps not even knowing that albatrosses drink seawater quite happily.
The sea is undomestic, wild. “No man can ever in truth declare that he saw the sea look young, as the earth looks young in spring” observed Joseph Conrad, and the Newfoundland poet E. J. Pratt wrote: “There is no silence upon the earth or under the earth like the silence under the sea; / No cries announcing birth, / No sounds declaring death.” “Nothing can be put down in the sea. You can’t plant on it, you can’t live on it, you can’t walk on it,” reflects the Nobel laureate Derek Walcott from his island of St. Lucia. The sea “does not have anything on it that is a memento of man,” he adds; and memory is the mark of humankind.
The ocean is the only domain, other than outer space, where humans are so completely alien and where wonder holds us so close. This is the heart of the matter, for it is this wonder that has inspired voyagers for millennia to row and sail the seas in search of an island, sometimes any island; and it is this wonder that still inspires us to look for a planetary island like ours in the furthest reaches of space. Ultimately, we are all islanders