In a world where about 70 percent of the surface is covered by water, beaches and shores are everywhere, forming borderlines between land and water. Botticelli’s painting The Birth of Venus (ca. 1485) and Matthew Arnold’s poem “Dover Beach” (1867) are only two of the thousands of representations of this kind of borderland, many of them conjuring up fear as well as fascination. In many places, waterfront real estate has become especially prized; shores of lakes and oceans have fetched prices far beyond reason. For ecologists, the edge or border is a place of peril as well as possibility; and since islands, in a very real sense, are all border, they become thresholds to a world of wonders in the stories and songs they sponsor.
Since ancient times, shores have also been the meeting point of different worlds and different peoples, sponsoring conflict as well as communion. Throughout history the sea has ensured that powers beyond human control hold sway on its shores; and even with all the hazards of the sea, the shore retains its own menacing authority. The most dangerous moments in an open boat—the kind that carried seafarers for thousands of years—were always launching from and returning to the shore, just as takeoff and landing still are for an airplane or a space shuttle.
There are two fundamental truths about humans and islands. The first is that until very recently, going to an island always meant journeying across a body of water, leaving behind the usual markers of meaning and value. The second truth is that we don’t really understand what motivated people to do this, even though the history of island settlement has been a defining part of the human story from the day the first person left the land and ventured onto a river or lake or the sea on a quest for goodness or godliness or grub or gold. And islanders are not unanimous in their attitude toward the water that surrounds them, with tropical Pacific islanders viewing the sea around them as much friendlier than islanders in, say, the North Atlantic do—because their part of the ocean is in some ways indeed more “pacific” than the iceberg-clogged, storm-tossed far northern and southern seas, and because the great distances between islands in parts of the Pacific paradoxically seem to have created a sense not of island isolation but of ocean companionship, the water providing the currency of communication with other people.
Should islanders be considered colonists or castaways? The story of island habitation—how and when and why—is still controversial. The ability to fashion technologies for travel must figure in any answer, as perhaps does our instinct to cross boundaries, to make connections, to travel in between. Why we go, and why we stay, are among the most basic questions about our human occupation of this earth; which is why islands may be even more central to the human condition than language is, and why the history of island travel may define our deepest wants and needs (and not all of them admirable).
Islands clearly incorporate something fundamental about the human spirit. The stories and songs through which we make sense of the world represent both life as it is (or appears to be) and life as we wish it were or wonder whether it could be, both the so-called real world—its reality conditioned by our habits of thought and feeling—and the world of our imagination, shaped by our anxieties and desires. We try to keep these two worlds in balance, and to maintain some equilibrium between turning inward to ourselves and outward to the world. An island both illustrates and invites this kind of dual consciousness, which may be why some of our most enduring stories and myths have to do with islands. Faced with the difficulty of defining an island, perhaps we should take the advice of one of the wisest of ocean island scientists, Patrick Nunn, who proposes that islands are so completely built into our consciousness that we don’t need a definition.
For a long time, many people have argued that we are most civilized, indeed most human, when we stop traveling and settle down. Others have seen something quintessentially human in our ability to dream about other places, design technologies to go there, and wander off. Islands are at the center of this human conundrum. To get to any island, you have to leave where you currently are and travel. On the other hand, islands are the perfect place to settle; once there, you cannot so easily go anywhere else. And there is something more, something that has to do with the human embrace of moments of wonder, of amazement, of awe. “I wish I were landing on her for the first time,” said a seasoned Newfoundland fisherman as he approached a tiny island in the North Atlantic for the hundredth time, expressing a mixture of dread (for the landing was very dangerous) and delight (because thousands of birds were waiting to welcome him with a deafening chorus). Wonder is inevitably involved in island travel, no matter how routine. This wonder is circumscribed by wondering, as belief is surrounded by doubt, and islands by water.
Just as they were fundamental to ancient science and philosophy, islands have become central images in the modern social sciences, with concepts of the individual and society taking their cue from the psychology of islanded human beings and the sociology of communities as islands where interaction is unavoidable. Psychology and sociology have been joined by anthropology, economics, political science, and history in asking why humans travel to islands, why they stay there, and why some of them leave.
Eventually, such discussions return to a key set of questions. Is island living natural, something that happens in the normal course of human development? Or is it un-natural, prompted by particular circumstances? Are we island travelers by nature or by nurture? Are we pushed there by a crowded or cantankerous community—or are we pulled there by a desire for something different? Do independent people go to islands—or do people become independent once there? The questions go deep into our philosophical as well as historical consciousness, and echo ancient arguments about freedom and fate. And about foolishness. From early days, landlubbers have felt that anyone who gets in a boat and goes to sea for anything other than fish is either mad or bad or a bit of both. In medieval times in certain European, North African, and Middle Eastern communities, if you ventured far out to sea and managed to return, you would not be celebrated. You would lose your civil rights.
This suggests something unusual about those who find their way to islands, and make their home there. Maybe they are at the cutting edge of human evolution—or maybe they are cutting themselves off from the competitive challenges of progressive mainland life. Generations of anthropologists have had a fixation with this, scouring the islands of the world for evidence of either unique or universal human characteristics. One nineteenth-century anthropologist described the islands of the Pacific as museums or “cages in which their insulated occupants were shut in from external influence.” “The sea selects and then protects her island folk,” wrote the American geographer Ellen Churchill Semple early in the twentieth century, with a more positive spin. Of all geographical boundaries, she said, the most important is that between sea and land, and since most of the world is covered by water, “the human species bears a deeply ingrained insular character.”
It seems we often need—or we want—to set out for lands across the water. “And then went down to the sea” is how Ezra Pound began his praise song to world literature, the Cantos. Similar lines can be found across much of the earth. The stories that Homer told opened that way, telling of “a wave-washed island rising at the center of