Waylaid by Islands
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The colonial aspect of the westward impulse is unavoidable. My Hy Brasil was originally colonised by the Portuguese, at almost the same time as they arrived in the Azores. Henry the Navigator mentions the possibilities for economic exploitation. A slave ship was wrecked there in the eighteenth century, and some of the Africans aboard escaped and settled there. In 1812 it became a British colony, after being the site of a skirmish between the British and American Navies. Twentieth century Hy Brasil was strategically crucial in the Cold War. Economic prosperity in the 1950s and 1960s was dependent upon the large NATO base located at St Brandons. However, a revolution in 1958 gave it equivocal independent status. The President, James Hook, combines attributes of his eponymous literary ancestor with aspects of Castro’s early career. The novel plot, set in 1997, is a thriller based around drug smuggling, dubious electioneering and one of the volcanic eruptions so prevalent along the Atlantic ridge.
My idea was to create a history that could have happened if the islands had happened to be real. At the same time I acknowledge — or steal — the textual grounds for the colonial history of Hy Brasil. The first café Sidony stops at is Caliban's Fast Food Diner, the highest mountain is Mount Prosper, and Ferdy's Landing lies on the other side of the island. Whether the place names were given by literary islanders with a taste for irony, or whether this is in fact Prospero's (or Caliban's) island, is left open, but there are many other resonances with The Tempest, and other island texts, which, if the islands are geographically real, can only be defined as uncanny.
The first arrival on Hy Brasil was not driven there by any commercial impulse. The Navigatio of St Brendan is central to my interrogation of imagined island spaces. Real voyages have been made to establish the geographical accuracy of Brendan’s travels. Tim Severin undertook a replica voyage in a skin boat from St Brendon's point of departure in Ireland to his landing place in Newfoundland. I have visited the points of departure and arrival and can vouch for both being solid ground. That may look like proof: Severin finds rational explanations for all the supernatural phenomena encountered on Brendan's voyage between these two fixed points. I prefer (one keeps dryer) to take St Brendan more literarily than littorally; St Brendan's voyage is a pilgrimage, after the manner of the white martyrdom of the Celtic church, in which the distant island represents spiritual fulfilment. Brendan
| urgently besought the Lord to give him a land secret, hidden, secure, delightful, separated from men… and he saw the mighty intolerable ocean on every side, and then he beheld the beautiful noble island…" (Lives of the Saints p 252) |
For the Celtic monks who chose the white martyrdom the sea voyage and the spiritual journey were the same thing,
and to ask how one related to the other was presumably a non-question. In the modern world the relationship
between physical and psychological reality is the question: the ironic gap between the two becomes the space in
which textual islands can be constructed, revised and reconstructed. Another Irish text, whose author specifically
acknowledges his debt to Severin's travel book
The Brendan Voyage, is Shaun Davey's Suite for Orchestra and
Uillean pipes, also named The Brendan Voyage. Many of my own journeys have been accompanied, and transfigured,
by Davey's version of the voyage to Brendan's islands. Music takes the Navigatio into a farther space that neither
ships nor words can quite reach: perhaps this is the medium where the modern reader/listener can temporarily
close the gap between real and imaginary crossings, so that, in spite of all that we know to the contrary,
the boundless possibilities of the western horizon can always remain open.
Margaret Elphinstone University of Strathclyde www.margaretelphinstone.co.uk