The Un-Discovered Islands Read online

  Kibu too was replaced, of course, by a heaven that was entirely unlike the islanders’ own world. The afterlife today lies not just over the north-west horizon but skyward, detached entirely from the islands and from the sea. Unlike Kibu, heaven is unimaginable, and the ghosts of the dead are now gone for good.

  Hawaiki

  WHEN MAORI PEOPLE first began to communicate with Europeans in the eighteenth century, they insisted that New Zealand was not their original home. Instead, they explained, their ancestors had come from Hawaiki, an island somewhere over the north-east horizon. What’s more, they had not arrived in the distant past, but only a few hundred years previously.

  The details of this migration were not entirely clear. Different tribal groups, or iwi, told different versions of the story. And though their cultural memory was rich in detail, many Ma_ori were understandably reluctant to share such important knowledge with settlers, especially since those settlers were also demanding to share their land.

  In the best known version of the country’s early history, a fisherman and explorer called Kupe discovered New Zealand more than a thousand years ago. He arrived there by accident, while chasing a giant octopus south across the ocean. Kupe then returned to Hawaiki and told his people about this new land in the south, which he called Aotearoa, the ‘long white cloud’. Around 1350, following the instructions he had given, a ‘great fleet’ of seven large canoes set out to make the crossing back to Aotearoa. The passengers in those canoes were the ancestors of today’s Ma_ori.

  The problem with this story is that it wasn’t reliable. It was a constructed history, an amalgamation of many different tales pieced together by an ethnologist, Stephenson Percy Smith, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Smith was a thorough researcher, but his conclusions were misleading. Rather than accept the inconsistencies and mythical elements that he found within traditional stories, Smith tried instead to iron them out and present the results as fact. In doing so, he built a narrative that was neither historically accurate nor truly representative of what the Ma_ori themselves actually believed.

  As it turns out, the date Smith proposed for the ‘great fleet’ was not that far wrong. According to the most recent evidence, the first people to settle in the country arrived around 1280, though not in a single flotilla but more likely in several groups, perhaps over a period of decades. The Polynesians were highly skilled navigators, and there could have been contact for some time between the new and old home. In total, there may have been as few as 200 people among those first immigrants.

  The Ma_ori’s geographical origin can also now be pinpointed with a fair degree of certainty. They came from eastern Polynesia: specifically, the Cook and Society Islands. Which might provide a simple answer to the question of Hawaiki. Except that it doesn’t. For Hawaiki is not simple at all. In traditional stories it is a multifaceted idea that cannot be pinned down to a single location. This island was not just the migrants’ point of departure, it was part of their luggage – that rich, mythical tradition with which they arrived.

  In 1793, a Ma_ori chief called Tuki Tahua was asked to draw a map of New Zealand for the governor of New South Wales and Norfolk Island. This he did, with an impressive degree of accuracy. But in addition to the physical features of the land, Tuki also included what he called a ‘spirits road’, which traced the line of mountain ranges from the far south right up to the North Cape. This was the path that one would follow after death, he explained, which led ultimately to Te Reinga Wairua, ‘the leaping place of the spirits’. From that final point of land, at the tip of the North Island, each spirit would dive into the ocean then swim towards the underworld, where they would find Hawaiki.

  But this island unfolds still further, for these were the words with which newborn babies were traditionally welcomed into the world:

  E taku pōtiki, kua puta mai rā koe i te toi i Hawaiki.

  My child, you are born from the source, which is at Hawaiki.

  Both afterlife and prelife, Hawaiki surrounds the Ma_ori. It is the the place from which the spirit comes and to which it returns; it is the source and the destination. In some stories, it is also the place in which the very first human was created: a kind of Eden, where gods still dwell. The precise way in which the island is portrayed – the balance between physical homeland, spiritual origin and underworld – varies greatly, depending on the story being told and the local culture of the teller. But Hawaiki is a shared idea; it ties people together. And not just within New Zealand.

  Eastern Polynesia is among the most recently inhabited parts of the world. Many of the islands of that region – which stretches from Hawaii in the north to Easter Island in the east and New Zealand in the south – were populated only within the past fifteen hundred years or so. The traditions of these places are closely related and interlinked, and the notion of an origin elsewhere has remained fresh in the thinking of their people. Where most cultures have myths of creation, the Polynesians have myths of migration.

  For the Ma_ori, Hawaiki is a place of goodness. It is the place from which their people, their traditions and their culture derive. It is both real and imagined, both geographical and mythical. Yet it does not divide them from their current home, for it is within as well as without. It connects, in time and in place.

  Hufaidh

  AT THE CONFLUENCE OF two great rivers, the Tigris and Euphrates, there was once a wetland that covered thousands of square miles, the largest of its kind in all of Western Eurasia. This region – once part of Mesopotamia, now southern Iraq – was the birthplace of modern civilisation, and home to the Ma‘da_n people, known as the Marsh Arabs. The Ma‘da_n are descended from Babylonian, Sumerian and Bedouin cultures, and for five millennia their lifestyles barely changed. The way in which they lived was defined, always, by the place in which they lived.

  That place was one of shallow lagoons, gangling bulrushes and low floodplains. It was a strange world, where buffalo waded among the reeds and pelicans flocked overhead; beneath the waves swam deadly serpents. Few outsiders ever knew this place, and until the mid-twentieth century it was a mysterious, half-mythical location. Gavin Maxwell travelled to the marshes in 1956, from where he brought back Mijbil, the otter that was to be at the centre of his most famous book, Ring of Bright Water. That otter was of a subspecies previously unknown to science, and today it carries his name: Lutrogale perspicillata maxwelli.

  Maxwell wrote of his time in the marshes in A Reed Shaken by the Wind, and in his first encounters with the place he seemed confused about how to respond. It was both repellent and beautiful to him, like nowhere he had ever seen before. ‘It was in some ways a terrible landscape’, he wrote, ‘utterly without human sympathy, more desolate and inimical than the sea itself’. And yet, two days later, that ‘terrible landscape’ had become:

  a wonderland, and the colours had the brilliance and clarity of fine enamel. Here in the shelter of the lagoons the reeds, golden as farmyard straw in the sunshine, towered out of water that was beetle-wing blue in the lee of the islands or ruffled where the wind found passage between them to the full deep green of an uncut emerald.

  The people of this region lived with what their home provided. The water buffalo were not eaten, but their milk was drunk and their dung used as fuel and as cement. The Ma‘da_n fished with spears, kept birds to eat, and in the saturated earth they cultivated rice. The reeds that grew there in abundance were tall and strong enough to be used for making boats and building houses. From inside, the great halls they constructed – mudhifs – looked like the hollowed interior of a whale. Tall, curved ribs of woven reeds supported a thick, thatched skin. Everything that was needed came from the water.

  The Ma‘da_n were Shia Muslims, and some were descendants of the prophet Mohammed himself. They believed in supernatural spirits, or jinn, that could take the form of snakes and other creatures. But they also retained elements of pre-Islamic beliefs, including stories about a magical island somewhere out in the marshes.
The explorer Wilfred Thesiger visited the Ma‘da_n several times in the 1950s, living with them for many months at a time. On one of his stays, Thesiger was asked if he had ever heard of Hufaidh. He had, he said, but he wanted to know more. Waving towards the south-west horizon, his host told him: ‘Hufaidh is an island somewhere over there. On it are palaces, and palm trees and gardens of pomegranates, and the buffaloes are bigger than ours. But no-one knows exactly where it is.’

  ‘Has no-one seen it?’ Thesiger asked. ‘They have, but anyone who sees Hufaidh is bewitched, and afterwards no-one can understand his words. By Abbas, I swear it is true. One of the Fartus saw it, years ago, when I was a child. He was looking for a buffalo and when he came back his speech was all muddled up, and we knew he had seen Hufaidh.’

  The Ma‘da_n explained that anyone searching for the island would fail to find it. The jinn could make it disappear at will. But Hufaidh was real, they said. The sheiks knew of it, the government knew of it; there was no room for doubt. Like many such islands, Hufaidh existed in a region bridged between life and death. It was part paradise and part hell, both of this world and of another.

  But Hufaidh is no longer of this world, for the marshes are a very different place today. The draining of the wetlands began around the time of Thesiger and Maxwell’s visits. Initially it was on a small scale, to increase the availability of agricultural land. But as the decades passed, more irrigation channels diverted water away from the rivers, and the marshes began to shrink. It was not until the 1990s, though, that the damage was truly and deliberately done.

  Saddam Hussein hated the Ma‘da_n. As Shias, they were hostile to the Sunnis who were in power, and had sheltered dissidents and rebels. So when the first Gulf War ended, Saddam took terrible revenge. He diverted the flow of the Tigris and built a new canal to ensure the water would go elsewhere. The plan succeeded. Within two years, two-thirds of the wetlands had dried up, and by the end of the decade ninety per cent of the marshland was gone. It was an act of devastating barbarism, a human and ecological tragedy.

  Thousands of miles of southern Iraq, once home to fish, plants, birds and mammals, turned to desert. A unique ecosystem was lost. And the people who depended on that ecosystem – who were, in fact, part of it – were forced to flee. In the 1950s, there were half a million Ma‘da_n in the region. Today, there may be only ten per cent of that number, and perhaps fewer than 2,000 living as they did for five millennia, in reed huts on the water.

  After the second Gulf War, Saddam’s work was undone. The embankments were destroyed, and water was allowed to flow into the marshes once more. In the years since then they have grown, slowly, and they continue to grow. Some of the species that once inhabited the region have returned, though some are extinct and can never come back. The restoration of such a place is not a simple task, and some damage cannot be undone. The culture of the Ma‘da_n may not be lost forever; those who remained may stay, and some who left may return. But Hufaidh – that island of palm trees and pomegranates – has gone. It has turned to sand, and scattered in the wind.

  Setting Out

  Thule

  Fusang

  St Brendan’s Island

  The Island of Seven Cities

  Setting Out

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  FOR TRAVELLERS IN THE last centuries BC and the first millennium AD, the boundaries of geographical knowledge were narrow. People understood that the world was big and that their part of it was small, but they knew little of what lay beyond. The map was hardly more than a sketch, its edges crowded with speculation. Those who did make journeys towards those edges would encounter things they had never seen or even heard about before. The ocean was a terrifying, wonderful place, where legends and facts would mingle, and where anything imaginable might be possible.

  During these centuries, extraordinary journeys were taking place all over the world. In the Pacific, the Polynesians were navigating across thousands of miles, using skills their descendants still employ today. In the North Atlantic, the Norsemen were island-hopping, from Shetland to Faroe to Iceland to Greenland, and even to North America. They too developed a rare competence at sea, which took them to places no European had ever been before.

  Everywhere, human beings were crossing the oceans in search of new land. Some of these journeys were recorded in writing, some in oral traditions, and others on maps. But myth and geography are difficult to prise apart after so long. Facts are hard to separate from fiction. Legendary islands appeared on charts of the Atlantic as late as the nineteenth century without any proof of their existence, yet stories of Viking expeditions to ‘Vinland’ more than one thousand years ago were widely considered to be false until archaeological evidence of Norse settlement was uncovered in L’Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland, in 1960.

  Some of the islands in this chapter may likewise be real places, but it is impossible now to know. Their stories are so distant, and so infused with the imaginary, that they exist today only in name. With nowhere left to go, they are true ex-isles.

  Thule

  BRITAIN IS A LONG way from the Mediterranean, and for the ancient Greeks it was a dark and potentially dangerous land, at the edge of the human world. But in the fourth century BC, an explorer from the Greek colony of Massalia – today’s Marseille – claimed not just to have reached Britain but to have gone beyond, to the previously unknown island of Thule.

  That explorer was Pytheas, and his book recounting the journey, On the Ocean, though since lost, was widely read and remarked upon by other classical writers. From what has been pieced together, it seems Pytheas set out on his travels around 330BC. He first reached the tin-producing regions of south-west Britain and then went onwards, taking measurements of the sun’s height along the way. When he reached the edge of the mainland he did not turn back. Instead, the Greek claimed to have continued, travelling six days north to the ‘farthest of all lands’, Thule. This was truly an astonishing journey.

  Among early commentators, however, Pytheas’ voyage was not looked upon with unqualified admiration. Some expressed considerable scepticism about the authenticity of his reports, and in particular serious doubts were raised about the existence of Thule. In his Geography of 30AD, Strabo, another Greek historian, was voracious in his attacks. Repeatedly he questioned Pytheas’ claims, and described his fellow Greek as an ‘arch-falsifier’. Earlier still, in the second century BC, Polybius wrote that Pytheas ‘misled many readers’ with his stories, and that ‘Even Erastothenes doubted’ elements of On the Ocean.

  The suspicion that came to surround Thule was understandable, for there was much to raise scholarly eyebrows about in Pytheas’ tale of distant lands. For one thing, he claimed to be travelling in a place that many believed to be too far north for human habitation. According to Strabo, the island of Ireland ‘is such a wretched place to live in on account of the cold that the regions beyond are regarded as uninhabitable’. So Thule, a place six days’ sail north of Britain, was a highly implausible idea.

  But later writers have been less cynical. Pytheas has been given the benefit of the doubt by many, and celebrated as a true northern pioneer. The descriptions that survive of Thule seem just about plausible enough for it to be considered a real place. But where? The evidence is thoroughly ambiguous. A six-day journey from Britain could take you to any number of places, depending on where you left from, the direction you travelled, whether overnight stops were made, the type of craft that was used, the weather, and a multitude of other factors. Shetland, Norway, Faroe, even the Baltic, if your idea of north was somewhat confused: all could be reached within six days.

  Beyond this, though, there are several other elements of the story that have fed speculation. There is, first of all, the rather fantastical description that Polybius gives, seemingly quoting directly from On the Ocean. In the vicinity of Thule, he writes:

  there is neither unmixed land or sea or air, but a kind of compound of all three (like the jelly-
fish or Pulmo Marinus), in which earth and sea and everything else are held in suspense, and which forms a kind of connecting link to the whole, through which one can neither walk nor sail.

  This is a very strange image indeed, but has most often been taken to refer to fog combined with slushy sea ice, rising and falling like the body of a jellyfish.

  Another intriguing part of Pytheas’ tale is the matter of daylight. According to Pliny the Elder, writing in the first century AD, in Thule ‘there is no night at the summer solstice, when the sun is passing through the sign of Cancer, while on the other hand at the winter solstice there is no day. Some writers are of the opinion that this state of things lasts for six whole months together.’ Discounting the latter possibility, since it could be true only at the North Pole, the suggestion here is that Thule lies somewhere in the vicinity of the Arctic Circle, which would certainly shorten the list of possibilities. Unless, of course, the description is not entirely literal. In many parts of the north, including Shetland, the skies remain pale throughout midsummer nights, while in winter the sun seems barely to lift the darkness at all. A southern visitor could quite easily describe these periods in the language used by Pliny.

  Over the centuries, the most popular candidates for the title of Thule have been Shetland, Norway and Iceland, and for a long time it was the last possibility that was favoured. On maps, the two names were for a long time interchangeable. The Venerable Bede, in the early eighth century, was certain of the correlation, as was Christopher Columbus in the fifteenth. Gerardus Mercator, on his world map of 1569, evidently considered Iceland and Thule to be one and the same; and Barry Cunliffe, formerly professor of European archaeology at Oxford, has recently proposed the very same theory.