Islands by Jim Keeble
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As the small boat chugs away, we stand on a slender quay with two bags of clothes, a bag of food and seven bottles of wine, watching its wake.
‘A week,’ she says.
‘A week,’ I confirm.
We watch until the boat disappears and the bay is empty once more. Only the water, laughing onto bone-white rocks, and the mocking call of seagulls.
We turn to face our future. A week on a small, barely inhabited Mediterranean island called Zut in the Kornati archipelago off Croatia. There’s no ferry, no airport. No way on or off except the travel company’s delivery boat. Not exactly ship-wrecked. Just ship-left.
I am an islander by birth (my rock is about 90,000 square miles and ends in a place called Cornwall). My companion is also an island child (her rock is green and finishes in Dingle Bay). We thought we’d slip back to our water-bound roots. We thought we could cope.
‘A week.’
I open the first bottle of wine.
‘No man is an island; every man is a piece of the continent,’ wrote John Donne in 1624, but that was before Airtours and Shirley Valentine. Undeniably exotic, islands now account for a large part of the travel bore’s lexicon - Madagascar, Zanzibar, Tristan da Cunha, Mauritius, Easter Island. They are the caviar of the travel trade, the Bollinger of the holiday industry. ‘Private island’ trumpets the brochure, and we lose all reason, along with our wallets.
Castaway books sell in their millions. Billionaires buy islands as the ultimate fashion accessory. Michael Douglas takes Catherine Zeta-Jones to his villa on Majorca, Bill Gates gets married in Hawaii, and rocks-stars trip around the Caribbean like it’s the Circle Line.
Yet, as I am about to discover on our Croatian island, glorious isolation is double-edged. If I say ‘paradise’ you might well picture a palm-fringed atoll surrounded by sea the colour of Windolene. But equally think of the world’s most infamous prisons. Alcatraz? Nelson Mandela’s Robbin Island? Papillon’s Devil’s Isle? As the sun sets and we sip local Babic wine, my Irish friend and I compare notes. She feels ‘at ease’, ‘liberated.’ I feel nervous.
‘What if I break a leg? What if we run out of food? God, what if we run out of wine?’
She doesn’t reply, but simply relieves me of my watch for the next six days. The moon begins to rise, bigger and brighter than ever before. There’s no electrical illumination to be seen. We light candles. Slowly, certainly, the rest of the planet eases away until the dark ridge of the mainland becomes the edge of the world. I begin with Robinson Crusoe. I’ve come prepared to research our continuing literary fascination with water-bound land, extending from ‘Captain Corelli’ and ‘The Beach’, through ‘The Tempest’ back to Homer’s ‘Ilyiad’.
Mr Crusoe doesn’t immediately fill me with hope. I’ve landed on my island almost exactly 340 years after Defoe’s hero tumbled onto his (30th September 1659), and we seem to share the same first impression of ‘a dreadful deliverance ... locked up with the eternal bars and bolts of the ocean, in an uninhabited wilderness, without redemption.’
‘It says here,’ remarks my companion, buried in her travel guide, ‘that God created the Kornati Islands by taking a handful of stones left over from making the world and tossing them over his shoulder. This is God’s last gift to mankind.’
We carry candles to bed, she feeling blessed, me wondering if I’m being punished for something. My last panic of the day comes when I discover that the telephone number we’d need to call in case of emergencies (a house at the other end of the bay has some sort of phone) has become smudged to the point of illegibility.
‘What if you choke on an olive?’ I shout in terror.
‘I’ll die happy’ comes the languid reply.
I picture myself building a fire to attract some passing ship, a fantasy obliterated the next morning by the arrival in our bay of a fat German motor cruiser. I am instantly indignant (having been a citizen of our island now for just under 24 hours).
‘Couldn’t they have found somewhere else?’
‘It’s not your island Jim.’
Yet we have a better chance of solitude here than on most islands. The Kornati archipelago is one of the Mediterranean’s last unswept corners. Proclaimed a national park in 1980, foreign tourism only began in 1994 during the Balkans War when Slovenian tourists arrived by hydrofoil to avoid bombed-out roads. Today many holidaymakers still equate Croatia with Kosovo and the beautiful islands are far from busy.
You stay in renovated fishermen’s cottages - seasonal fishing still goes on, but most of the 180 islands are sparsely, if at all, populated. Amenities are simple - we have one electric light, no hot water. In 6,000 years of habitation, you get the feeling not a whole lot has changed in these parts, except the fishermen’s Reeboks. Such a sense of permanence, of an unbroken link to the past, is one of the lures of islands. Rituals - fishing, fig-picking, sitting around in the sun talking about sardines - set the pace, usually about 67% slower than the mainland (I’ve carried out studies).
I go for a swim shortly after dawn. A small fishing boat putters forth, ‘manned’ by two old women wearing black. Together they’re singing - a lament that idles across the water, a chant of fishermen’s wives reaching across the centuries, like hands to pull their menfolk back from the depths of the sea. I wave, they wave back. I feel a million miles away from my mortgage.
Just as Robinson Crusoe begins to relish the challenges of island life, so I begin to cherish the restrictions Zut Island places on us. With a limited food supply, you tend to appreciate what you have. I never knew tomatoes tasted so good. The one shower a day, created by boiling several pans of water, is a time of ecstasy. As our wine supply diminishes, so each mouthful becomes nectar.
Gradually I’m sensing the exhilaration of being an islander. Of being at the centre of a world I can see the edges of, of appreciating the constraints. I’ve felt this elation before: on the Samoan island of Savaii where they believe that heaven is a line of rocks off-shore (nobody has yet proved them wrong). On Inishman in Ireland where the one donkey (islands always have a donkey) knows everyone by name. On Eagle Island in Rainy Lake Minnesota (twelve steps across, exactly).
After three days, Zut Island is our world. And as such it makes much more sense than anything shown on the nine o’clock news. Mr and Mrs Stojanovic arrive every morning to turn their drying figs. The little boy sets out in the boat every evening to check his lobster pots. There is a balance of weather and activity, of tide and travel. An innocent equilibrium exists between climate, nature and people, that the mainland seems to have long since lost.
We conquer the summit of the island, gazing south to further islands scattered by God’s hand. In the same way Crusoe’s instinctive curiosity led him to map out his domain, so we survey our own little kingdom, mentally marking the four corners of Zut as if we might soon be asked to defend it against invaders. We have become part of the island after all - Mrs Stojanovic gave us a bowl of figs yesterday which we took to mean the bestowal of instant citizenship.
On hotter days we take a small rowing boat to a deserted cove and step from our clothes, casting the last vestiges of western civilisation to lie forgotten under an oar. At night we struggle to moor the skiff so it won’t bang against rocks, and conjur a meal from one tin of tuna, two tomatoes, a pepper, and a piece of vache qui rit.
‘Mmmm. Fish-cheese ratatouille.’
Perhaps it’s this combination of escape and challenge that so endears far-flung, difficult islands to the British. Islands, especially distant, inhospitable ones, can be hard work, but that’s what makes them worthwhile to our pragmatic, dogmatic eyes. I mean, which other nationality would have fought that hard for the Falklands?
Such islands provide a challenge to our adaptability, our ingenuity, our stiff upper soul. Few are the Britishers, I’m prepared to wager, who don’t think they could survive a desert island. We even have a cherished radio programme listing the records we’d select for our captivity - come on, try and tell me you haven’t chosen yours? The Smurfs and Vaughan Williams for me please. And your one luxury? Mine’s a box of cocktail umbrellas.
A week has passed. The last morning dawns pink and warm. The donkey bays, gulls sigh. The island continues. But we have to move on. Atlas, the Croatian travel company who opened up the Kornati Islands to tourism, plans expansion to encompass more cottages, more tourists, a longer season. All around the world islands are becoming less isolated, less detached. Runways are built, tunnels dug, bridges erected. The Internet curbs island eccentricity. Even the King of Tonga has his own web-site.
I recently visited one of the planet’s most far off rocks - the frozen wasteland of Beechey Island in the Canadian Arctic. Here stand the graves of four members of Sir John Franklin’s ill-fated quest to find the North-West Passage, an illustration of the deadly power of isolation in the 19th century. Yet today the simple wooden crosses have been joined by a large jam jar containing business cards left by helicopter tourists. I took one at random:
‘Dakota Fast Track Oil Change Centre - Glen Peterson, Chairman.’
We need to protect our islands. Give grants, pass zoning legislation. A World Council for the Preservation of Islands, or something like that. Because if the runways and bridges and tunnels don’t get them, global warming might well - with sea levels rising, many of our favourite isles risk going the way of Atlantis. In the future perhaps we’ll have to look elsewhere for our holiday getaways: ‘A week On Your Own Private Asteroid!’
At the end of my version of Robinson Crusoe there’s a telling addendum. Defoe based his hero on a real-life castaway - Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish sailor who was abandoned on the Juan Fernandez islands off Chile in 1704 after an argument with his ship’s Captain. He was rescued five years later and returned to England. But the co-founder of The Spectator Magazine, Richard Steele, wrote after interviewing Selkirk in 1713:
‘The Man frequently bewailed his Return to the World, which could not, he said, with all its Enjoyments, restore him to the Tranquility of his Solitude.’
A week, it must be said, was never going to be long enough.