Refuge and hell itself: How two Pacific islands shaped the buccaneer presence from the seventeenth to the eighteenth century
De Winter, W. (2024). Refuge and hell itself: How two Pacific islands shaped the buccaneer presence from the seventeenth to the eighteenth century, in: Prokic, M. et al. Entire of itself? Towards an environmental history of islands. pp. 149-170. https://dx.doi.org/10.3197/63831593227779.ch06
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| Abstract |
A fascination for temporary possibilities of escape brings me to islands. As remote places outside the grasp and haunting demands of economy and society, they can form autonomous zones for intentional being. One's presence in such zones is lived more directly, within a natural environment. For me, such revelations came on a maritime voyage between the Scottish Hebrides, looking out at the ocean from the woods at the end of the world. A sense of something wider engulfing us and our histories. Islands can thus be a vantage point from which to observe the unfolding flow of human interactions on and around them. The element enabling this flow is water, connecting human history in close proximity with the natural world: overwhelming, threatening, yet encompassing us all. Historically, the vast stretch of ocean known as the Pacific exactly allows us to study island groups as spaces which no one could ever truly 'own', where human-environment interaction was always temporary and where nature finally had the upper hand. As for the human agents looking for such islands as places of escape or refuge, who else stimulates our fascination as much as pirates? They inspire an imagination of escape as much as their real-life brutality appals us, rejecting and plundering established societies around them. Comparing the Galapagos and Juan Fernandez island groups reveals how strikingly different an island environment can appear - from hell to verdant green - as a resource, as a place of risk, as a temporary refuge. In this fascinating diversity, island environments present themselves as almost larger than one's own imagination. Inherently evasive to being fully grasped in data or models, island environments humbly put us in our place, in a living landscape surrounded by difficult currents flowing all around us. As they did for pirates, islands form places to which we are returning, always returning. |
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