Critical Tract on the Depiction of
Exploration, Adventure, and Islands

Islands – strange and magical, far away in dangerous waters – have for centuries driven Europeans to explore and to discover. Though by definition only “a piece of land surrounded by water” (Oxford Dictionary), the word describes more than just a landmass; the phrase island is inextricably linked with notions of how these places look, feel, and the myth tied around them: “They emphasize sensuality, escape, solitude, seduction, and self-sufficiency. [...] Islands also can be lonely, inhospitable, forbidden, or mysterious.” (Resh & Resh 2009)

Our understanding of islands is implicitly linked to, and cannot be separated from, the way we have been invited to experience islands by those who first reported on them. We have come to see islands through the prism offered by the accounts, genuine or fictionalized, of Westerners who went out to search, conquer and colonize them. The islands these adventurers and colonists describe are luscious or murderous, inhabited by wild animals or savages, ruled by sultans or sheikhs. Islands have come to be associated with notions “of bounty, of primitivism and paradisalism” (Zurick 1995) in Western eyes. While this contural construct may seem primeval to us who inhabit a modern and increasingly multipolar world, it continues to be affirmed, in one way or another, by contemporary works of fiction. Even today, cast-away sagas and sailor’s yarns, exploration and adventure reports, tales of mystery and paradise islands abound as we can see in movies like The Beach (2000), books like David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004) or the commercially successful and critically acclaimed television series Lost (2004-2010). In a contemporary world of everyday boredom and habitual stress, the island’s “allure of (seemingly) complete worlds, introspective ecosystems, secured by natural borders” (Cohen 1988) has as much appeal as it did in colonial times.

Yet the cultural history of islands is old. In the Age of Exploration and Discovery – roughly from the 15th to the 17th century – European ships started to sail the world in search of adventures and treasures such as gold, silver, and spices. In the process, Europeans encountered peoples and mapped lands previously unknown to them. They ‘discovered’ new territories and islands and conquered and ruled over them. As their ships wrecked in heavy seas or hazardous waters, sailors were cast away and mutineers marooned on remote islands.

Islands were not only conquered in the harsh reality of foreign seas but also  in the warm drawing rooms of the general public at home, where they were accompanied by fictitious tracts. Already the very first reports offered by returning sailors on the faraway places they had visited encouraged a very distinct notion of islands. The early days of European maritime travel saw “the emergence of the tropical and oceanic island as an important new social metaphor and image of nature in its own account.” (Grove 1995) Island became a synonym for adventure, rooted in the experiences of seafaring men.

In 1516, the English statesman and philosopher Sir Thomas More published the book Utopia in which he describes a fictional island society and its religious, social and political customs. His writing surpasses other accounts on islands in as much as Sir Thomas drafts a new – and in his opinion perfect – form of society. In order to develop his model, he uses the potential of islands as secluded entities. A few years prior to this, in 1512, Gerardus Mercator was born in the Flamish town of Rupelmonde. Mercator is famous for devising a cylindrical map projection that became the standard for nautical maps – the Mercator projection. Even though this invention would prove most useful for future seafarers and explorers, at his time he became famous for something else: Mercator was an early advocate of a large format bound compilation of maps which he called Atlas – playing with the image of holding the world in your hands as Atlas is the name of the poor fellow in ancient mythology who has to carry the weight of the world on his shoulders. It soon became a fashion amongst wealthy noble men to show-off their education and their savoir vivre with expensive atlantes. In fact, they became the word’s first true coffee table books. A main characteristic of coffee table books is that their alleged functionality must not lessen their true purpose as a status symbol. The atlases printed by the famous Antwerp presses Gillis and Plantijn were splendid and beautiful – they were, however, of no use to sailors for navigation purposes. Exorbitantly expensive, they were symbols for the education and knowledge of their owners. They were about fantasizing more than they were about navigating, just like More’s Utopia was not so much about island as geographical entities but about spaces of wonder and possibility.

The Age of Discovery was followed by the Age of Colonization and the European Empires were formed. In this era, novels like Gulliver’s Travels (1726), The Mysterious Island (1874), and Treasure Island (1883) were written. Yet, none of these books was more famous than Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, published in 1719. Considered to be the first novel, it is a purely fictitious tract by a man who never set foot on a ship himself. Instead, Defoe is said to have met Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish sailor who was castaway for four years on a deserted island, and the real world model for Robinson Crusoe. Defoe’s story hit a nerve – in the first year alone, the book ran through four editions. Within a few years, the volume reached an audience as wide as any book ever written in English. By the end of the 19th century, no book in the history of Western literature had more editions, spin-offs and translations (Watt 1951). A work of pure imagination surpassed the real-life accounts of sailors. The island was no longer framed by explorers who, at times aided by vivid imaginations, wrote down their experiences, but shifted completely into the realm of the fictitious. The success of Robinson Crusoe spawned enough imitations for its name to become the title of a new genre, the desert island story or Robinsonade.

The Industrial Revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries further advanced the popularity of imagined islands: “in cold lands under grey skies a harsh repressive urban and industrial landscape was being created, whilst on hot islands in warm blue seas, nature appeared bounteous.” (Conell 2003) In that period, steamboats made travelling easier, the existence of European Empires made vast world regions accessible, and the upcoming capitalism created a leisure class that was able to travel. In 1827, Karl Baedeker founded a publishing house that would later pioneer the publication of travel guides. In 1883, the Express d’Orient started operating, connecting Paris and Istanbul (then called Constantinople). Parallel to the continuing popularity of the genre of Robinsonades, a second genre of travel books became popular: armchair travel books. Writers such as the German Karl May, the Frenchman Jules Verne, or the British Robert Louis Stevenson brought the exciting world of countries faraway to the cosy reading rooms of the Western European middle classes. Their novels offered an escape into a foreign world “at a time when modern state began to exert its administrative and political presence” (Anderson 1983). Armchair travel books enabled those unable or unwilling to travel to explore exotic places nonetheless; while at the same time they provided white male travellers with a stage so as to tell a wide audience about their hazardous and heroic ventures.

The native inhabitants of islands the arm chair traveller encountered were allotted certain roles: namely either that of a barbaric member of a lower race or that of the noble savage. While the barbaric savage gave Europeans an excuse to subdue and exploit foreign cultures, the noble savage served as the image of a primeval man untouched by the course of history, ignorant of the blessings and curses of what was then (always in the singular) called civilization. Romanticists promoted the notion that in a state of nature humans are essentially good: “Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things [God]; everything degenerates in the hands of man,” is the opening sentence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s novel Emile: or, On Education (1762). The noble savage became a literary stock character. The educated idealized the alleged innocence of savages as escapism from the atrocities at home. Noble savages and their “islands clearly constituted a mental refuge from political turmoil.” (Grove 1995) Thus, fantasising about the qualities of le bon sauvage always also was a criticism of (Western) civilization – as was the mental flight to a faraway, harmonious island paradise. Not surprisingly, the concept had a renaissance after the First World War when “a submerged unrelenting critique of Western civilization” and the idea that “we in the West have lost what they – the cultural other – still have” (Marcus & Fischer 1986) became the dominating notions of ethnography. Whilst initially a glorification of savages the scheme allows Europeans “as modern, civilized human beings, […to] assert authority over the savage” (Spurr 1999). This duality of perceiving foreign islanders as either barbaric or noble savages teaches us that mechanisms of exoticizing and othering indigenous populations of the non-European world were not a sport of right-wingers alone but also the practice of liberals, progressives, even of critics of colonialism and imperial exploitation. Imagining foreign islanders as uncivilized and inferior as well as accepting simplified clichés to label members of very distinct and different cultures had, by the 19th century, been firmly established as pan-European bias.

This bias still influences how we see the world today: “ideas about primitive societies and, very important, their persistent Western tendency to process the third world as ‘primitive’ have made things happen in the political world. Many events in this [the 20th] century would have been less possible without operative notions of how groups or societies deemed primitive become available to ‘higher’ cultures for conquest, exploitation, or extermination.” (Torgovnick 1991)

Today, most TV-series, movies, books, and magazines choose to depict islands as secluded paradises rather than focusing on the barbaric or noble savages inhabiting it. The stereotypical representation of islands evokes a sense of mystery, of escape, solitude and self-sufficiency (Baum 1997). That, too, has an impact on Western behaviour. Post-War prosperity in the United States and much of Western Europe bolstered mass tourism. While the first generation vacationed close to home, their children zigzagged across the world in search of their tropical paradise. Some of them went on the hippy trek to India, advancing slowly and not unlike earlier generations of adventurers – but most chose airplanes, speed boats and cruise ships to travel around the world. “Islomania – an obsessive and irrational attraction to islands” (Birkett 2000) has us in the grip. Contemporary cultural depiction in TV-Series, movies, books and magazines provide us with (imaginary) depictions of the remoteness and virginity of islands. Turquoise waters and pristine beaches are the stimulants of the “island paradise effect” (van Damme & Banfield 2011) which promises eternal spring. As said before, a big part of the attraction of islands lies in their isolation. Accordingly, “the effort visitors must make to reach their destination” (ibid) determines the value of an island. While first generation of islomaniacs still found tranquillity on Mallorca and Ibiza, following generations had to journey all the way to Bali and The Seychelles to discover their unforgettable island. As those islands became touristically exploited, tourists had to set out to Galapagos or Fiji for perfect seclusion and thrilling vacations. It is a paradox of tourism that travellers want to experiences their destination as authentic while tourism “also works counterproductively by affecting the authenticity of the local culture and environment (…) and making it actually less attractive for future visitors.” (ibid) After all, most tourists expect a certain level of touristic infra-structure. “The tourist wants to discover Nature untouched by man; and yet, when he finds it, he cannot resist the impulse, if only in the imagination, to ‘improve’ it” (Andrews 1989). And so the travel industry has a certain habit of improving tourist destinations until they lose what initially made them attractive.

However, who am I to judge? I myself got enchanted by the seclusion and otherness of mystical islands and went for exploration of my island Socotra. I set out for adventure in a faraway place and – with this volume – added my account to the long list of reports on such places by Western voyagers. I followed in the footsteps of an old tradition that perceives the whole world as being available for adventure tourism. Yet, I did not merely see the cave dwellings other explorers reported on, but I slept in them with the natives. Along the way, I discovered and explored not only the isle Socotra but also the very practice of this type of voyage, the practice of travel writing and reporting on foreign places. I realized that there is a disjunction between what I expected my island to be and what I experienced on Socotra. I understood that there are at least two kinds of islands – the ones in our heads and those out there in the world. “What has been the alluring ‘otherworld’ for so long becomes real, and the ‘real world’, back on the mainland, now becomes the allusive ‘other’, which we may or may not get back to – depending on the whims of the weather and ferryman” (Manwaring 2008). I learned first-hand that more than anything else Socotra’s insularity means paucity and surrender to the forces of nature. As the mystique isle cast its spell on me, I discovered that only strangers can get enchanted.