| .....My
haunting passion was the island. I ransacked libraries for the literature
of Islands, the more desolate they were the better I was pleased. I pored
over great maps till Polynesia and Melanesia were more familiar than the
geography of the county in which I lived. I found that men who had written
of Utopia and other impossible things were as mad as I was about Islands,
and I loved them all and read their books over and over again. I knew the
Hebrides by heart, I was at home in the archipelagoes of the Pacific, I
could thread my way through among the smallest groups of the Indies, East
and West, and a navigator of the Cyclades might almost have used me for
a pilot. Columbus, Magellan, Drake, Dampier, Anson, Cook - these were the
names of my familiar spirits; and had I not sailed with Odysseus of many
devices over leagues and leagues of the the unharvested seas? It was always
the little islands I loved the best, and if they were not only small but
remote, like St.KIlda, Kerguelen, or Juan
Fernandez, so that the mariner shipwrecked on their shores might have
reasonable chance of being unrescued for years, I rejoiced like the man
who discovered a treasure hid in a field........ |