“No matter which direction I walked I would arrive at the border of another wilderness, the savage sea,” recalls the writer Thurston Clarke of his visit to Más a Tierra, one of the three Juan Fernández Islands off the coast of Chile. Más a Tierra, which means “close to the mainland” (four hundred miles away!), is the island where Alexander Selkirk was marooned in 1704; and Selkirk’s four-year sojourn there was the inspiration for Daniel Defoe’s classic island novel, Robinson Crusoe (1719). “An island wilderness is different and more perfect than a continental one,” Clarke continues. And indeed there is something different—no, something indifferent, inhuman—about the sea. Only death is as indifferent, which is the sentiment behind the poet John Donne’s famous line: “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.” He wrote this in a prose meditation on death in 1624, and its truth also lies in the contradiction that the separateness of islands as well as of humans is underwritten by their respective connectedness. Not unlike the ocean floor, which is shared by sea islands and connects them underwater, our human connection is language, language that reminds us of both how united and how divided we are. In the end, the connection lies in death, which is to say in our shared human mortality, just as all islands will disappear eventually.
It is sometimes said that language is what defines us as humans. But it is really belief, and ceremonies of belief, of which language may be the most remarkable. It is not the only such ceremony, however. Just as language—its words and images—requires us to believe in its artifice, its man-made (or divinely inspired) ability to take us across the gulf that separates us as individuals, so leaving the shore and sailing to an island involves an act of faith in the technologies of craft and navigation.
“The water is wide, I cannot cross over, neither have I wings to fly. Give me a boat,” begins a famous lament from the British isles. Separateness is a condition that fills humans with both dread and delight. Much ancient and modern philosophy, politics, and now economics are about the insularity of our individual consciousness and the ingenious ways we have developed of making connections, forming relationships, and establishing commerce between you and me or them and us, while also maintaining distance and difference. “Thank God we’re surrounded by water” is the chorus line of a song by Dominic Behan (Ireland) and Tom Cahill (Newfoundland), celebrating the advantages of being separated from others by the sea. “Thank God we speak Irish” (which is to say, Gaelic rather than English) is its cultural counterpart, for we are all islanded by our individual languages. “Shades of the prison house begin to close upon the growing boy,” said Wordsworth about first learning a language. Walter Pater, writing in his book on the Renaissance (1873) about the inner and outer worlds of consciousness that words and images bring together, described how we can be bound by the very intelligence and imagination that give us freedom, with “each mind keeping as a solitary prisoner its own dream of a world.”
The contradiction is always there. Both islands and languages lay claim to their inhabitants, limiting as well as liberating them, holding them hostage even as they set them free—though from what, people don’t always agree. Indeed, it may be a consciousness of our “islanded” existence—and our capacity (and, more often than not, desire) for crossing the wide water between—that makes us truly human, a consciousness and a capacity that incorporates our uniquely human understanding of life and death, the ultimate separation. Crossing the water is an ancient image for the passing over that is death, as Donne knew well, and it is an image shared among many religious traditions. The Christian community, for its part, is often likened to a ship, its church nave and other architectural elements modeled after the ark that saved Noah’s family, with the priest as navigator and the cross conflating mast and anchor. “No man is an island” is a prayer as well as a proposition.
In the British Museum is an ancient Taino sculpture from Jamaica that portrays a bird on the back of a turtle. It represents a creation story that has wide currency among indigenous peoples in the Americas, telling of a special tree that grew on an island high above the world, and an ancient chief who lived there with a woman who was his beloved. She had a dream that the tree had been uprooted, and when she awoke she told her man about it. They went to look, and there it was still standing where it had always been. Just a dream. But dreams must be taken seriously, and the chief decided he’d better do something to make it come true. So he pulled the tree out of the ground.
In art as well as life, an action like this is usually followed by a reaction. Something is given, something must be taken away. Something is lifted up, something must fall down. And sure enough, the tree that the old man had uprooted left a great big hole; and when the woman came to look at it, she fell through.
Down below, water covered everything. The only living things were the fish and the seafaring animals and the birds. They all looked up, and saw a woman falling from the sky—like a meteor, which she eventually became in the stories of science. To save her, two seabirds—swans, some say, or maybe cormorants—caught and balanced her on their wings. They flew about for a long time, but eventually they needed somewhere to rest. Except there wasn’t anywhere. Just the sea below and the sky above.
Another of the waterbirds said she had heard that there was earth far below the surface of the sea. That would be ideal, they all agreed; but how to get it, if indeed there was earth down there. Everyone offered to help. First a beaver went down, but he didn’t find any. Then a loon tried, going down and down, but he, too, came up empty. Finally, a muskrat gave it a go, diving deeper and deeper until, just when she could go no further, she reached bottom, grabbed a pawful of earth, and swam back to the surface, gasping for air.
But where to put the earth? A turtle, swimming by at that very moment, said, “put it on my back.” Which the muskrat did. And birds had a place to land. Trees had a place to grow. Humans had a home called Turtle Island. And the whole world as we know it came into being.
In other accounts of the origin of the earth, a bird drops dirt onto the back of a whale, or onto a mythical water creature. There is a Taino legend about a sacred calabash that contained all the fruits of the sea. It was stolen and then dropped, the water in the calabash flooding the earth, the only parts spared being the mountains that form the islands of the Caribbean Sea. A story from the Pacific islands explains how a boat carrying people—an ark, of sorts—is turned into an island, and then the people call on Katinanik, the mangrove, to protect it from the waves, and on Katenenior, the barrier reef, to surround it. The Maori of New Zealand tell of a bird lifting the land out of the water. In a story from Hawaii, a bird lays an egg that is fertilized by the sun. Still other stories describe how a bird makes a place to land out of twigs and branches, building up an island the way science describes it happening with volcanic ash and the accumulation of sediment, and the way humans have been making artificial islands in rivers and lakes for millennia. Many Polynesian legends include islands being brought to the surface on a fishhook.
On one island archipelago in the North Pacific, people tell of the time when a loon swam about for days and days, looking for land. He’d seen a cloud in the sky, so he flew up and there he found a dwelling in which an old man was lying beside two quartz stones, burning bright. The old man didn’t move, and so the loon went outside and cried, making the call he still makes today. He cried all afternoon and all night and all the next day—until on the third day the old man woke up and complained that he couldn’t sleep with all that noise. The loon explained that he was crying because there was no place down below for the people to live. So the old man gave the loon a small black stone that he took from a box within a box within a box, and he told him to go down and place it in the water and breathe on it for a short while. And then he gave him a large stone with shiny things running through it and told him to do the same, but to breathe on it for as long as he could; and the small stone became Haida Gwaii—the archipelago once known as the Queen Charlotte Islands—and the large stone the continent of the Americas. The old man then created a raven to fly down and land on the islands; and later the real people came out of the sea.
That islands should be part of so many creation stories is hardly surprising, for they provide an image of that first moment when the land was separated from the waters