It was a turning point for one particular island – and, arguably, for the whole world. In 1609, an English ship, the Sea Venture, foundered on reefs 600 miles off the coast of America, and its passengers, who were on their way to bolster the colony of Virginia, set up temporary camp on the island of Bermuda. The shipwreck could have ended in disaster for the colonisers, but over 10 months on the island, they feasted on so many turtles that an act of parliament had to be passed to condemn their example, and they decimated the population of the cahow, a native seabird. Once the colonisers had been rescued, Bermuda’s larder became a lifeline for Virginia, which was on the brink of annihilation through starvation and disease. Financiers increased their investments. But the colonisers’ gain was the natural world’s tragedy, and the episode marked the beginning of what Alice Albinia calls “the age of species loss, particularly through island colonisation”.
We are used to thinking of islands as peripheral, as dumping grounds for the mainland’s waste or suppliers of its riches (as in Bermuda, and the Scottish islands whose native birdlife was driven to extinction by Victorian collectors, taxidermists and hunters). But small islands are rarely seen as places with their own identities, languages, histories and prerogatives. In The Britannias, Alice Albinia tilts the map so that mainland Britain fades and the archipelago of its surrounding islands comes into focus. In relation to London, the Shetland Islands may feel like “the most remote inhabited place in the British Isles”, but when the mind’s internal map is turned “east-west rather than north-south you will find that the islands sit in the middle of a busy international shipping route, as important now as it was a thousand years ago”.
