Gavin Francis - Island Dreams

ISLAND DREAMS

ALSO BY GAVIN FRANCIS

True North: Travels in Arctic Europe
Empire Antarctica: Ice, Silence & Emperor Penguins
Adventures in Human Being
Shapeshifters: On Medicine & Human Change

ISLAND DREAMS

Mapping an Obsession

GAVIN FRANCIS

First published in Great Britain in 2020
by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE

canongate.co.uk

This digital edition first published in 2020 by Canongate Books

Copyright Gavin Francis, 2020

The right of Gavin Francis to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologises for any errors or omissions and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 78689 818 0
eISBN 978 1 78689 819 7

Typeset in Baskerville by Biblichor Ltd, Edinburgh

CONTENTS

For my children.
I couldnt have hoped for finer
anchors, sails, ballast.

ORIGINS of an OBSESSION

Unst

HITCH-HIKING NORTH THROUGH the islands of Shetland a Land Rover stopped for me. The driver was a man of about forty; he wore a gas-blue boiler suit and his beard was flecked with white. Where are you bound? he asked, with a voice like rust and sea-spray, an accent more Norse than Scots.

Unst, I said.

He told me that off the island of Unst, the northernmost of the Shetland Islands, a black-browed albatross had been seen a species accustomed to the skerries of the sub-Antarctic. It must have crossed the equator in a storm, he said, and got disorientated. Took one look at Unst and thought, That looks like home.

I was in search of distant islands, in love with the idea that, on a patch of land, protected by a circumference of sea, the obligations and irritations of life would dissolve and a singular clarity of mind would descend. It proved more complicated than that.

Thinking of islands often returns me in memory to the municipal library I visited as a child. The library was one of the grandest buildings in town entered directly from the street through heavy brass doors, each one tessellated in panes of glass thick as lenses. By age eight or nine Id exhausted the childrens library and been given an adult borrowers ticket. But as my mother browsed the shelves, often as not Id sit down on the scratchy carpet tiles and open an immense atlas, running my fingers over distant and unreachable archipelagos as if reading Braille. I hardly dared hope Id reach any of them; that I have reached a few is something of a relief. And so the love of islands has always, for me, been inextricable from the love of maps.

Cartographers know that to isolate and distil the features of a portion of the earths surface, in all its inexpressible complexity, is to exert power over it. To transfer that distillation onto paper is in some way to encompass it. But it could be said that maps offer only the illusion of understanding a landscape.

Encompass, from Latin en, meaning to make or put in, and compass, to surround, contain, envelop, enclose with steps (com-passare). Perhaps island maps, reined in by their coasts, offer a special case. They invite the viewer to indulge the imagination, pace a dreamed perimeter.

Ive always found old maps intoxicating. In their wavering outlines, archaic scripts and obsolete navigational marks, they are palimpsests of the ways islands have been imagined over the centuries. In the famous world map in his atlas of 1570 Ortelius injected vast tracts of pure imagination, including a river of islands draining a mysterious southern continent.

By their omissions, all maps leave room for the imagination, and for dreams.

However beautiful, with their ships and dragons, those old maps were tools of empire and capital. Science is how capitalism knows the world, a friend remarks to me, and the distinctions and details these maps marked out were first of all for merchants and military expeditions. What was marked Terra Incognita was also what remained unvanquished.

REBECCA SOLNIT

The twelfth-century Chinese scholar Zheng Qiao wrote of the benefits of mingling textual and pictorial descriptions of landscape: Images (tu) are the warp threads and the written words (shu) are the weft... To see the writing without the image is like hearing the voice without seeing the form; to see the image without the writing is like seeing a person but not hearing his words.

Lewis

A few months after my voyage to Shetland, while hitchhiking across the Hebridean island of Lewis, I met a French woman, nineteen years old, whod received a government grant to travel around Scotland looking for fairies. She had pale blond hair like wisps of cirrostratus; archipelagos of freckles were dotted across her cheeks and nose. She told me she had little money left and often slept rough, painting pictures in exchange for meals for paint she snapped open biro pens and mingled their contents with coffee.

The same day I met a buzz-cut banker from New York who had quit his job to spend three months cycling around the Hebrides, hauling his surfboard behind him on a trailer. He had already cancelled his flight back. Id begun to doubt it was possible to feel this free, he said.

Encounters in Unst and in Lewis reinforced to me that my fascination with islands my isle-o-philia was far from unique. There seemed to be a connection between a certain kind of sparsely populated island, remote from urban centres, and dreams. Or perhaps it is that such islands have the power of concentrating dreamers.

The word isolate comes from the adoption into English of the Italian isolare: to make into an island. About two centuries ago a critic wrote disparagingly of this new tendency to coin words from mainland Europe rather than stick with English Latinate equivalents, such as insulate. We have here evasion for escape, one wrote, we have the unnecessary and foolish word isolate.

I read Judith Schalanskys description of circling a man-high globe in Berlin, reading the names of every tiny piece of land marooned in the breadth of the oceans... as full of promise as those white patches beyond the lines indicating the horizon of the known world drawn on old maps