Tell your favorite stories set on and around islands, archipelagos, atolls, and other small landmasses in the sea!
That whole business with the wreck of the Batavia in 1628.
In brief, a Dutch East India Company merchant ship, the Batavia, crashed and sank off the Abrolhos Islands off the west coast of Australia. After getting (almost) everyone ashore onto Beacon Island, Ship Captain Francisco Pelsaert set off on a dangerous trip to the City of Batavia (now Jakarta) on the Island of Java in a small boat to get help, leaving ranking company official Jeronimus Cornelisz to be the leader of the survivors--side note: it turned out that Cornelisz was in the process of planning to mutiny, seize the ship, and turn to piracy; the shipwreck interrupted his plans.
At this point, Cornelisz goes completely bonkers on the mother of all powertrips. He and his followers started by killing the sick and the weak (ostensibly to save on supplies), but they eventually just started wantonly massacring and raping people (there were lots women and children who booked passage on the ship) for their own entertainment.
Cornelisz and his men took to wearing gaudy clothes from the wreck, parading in what Pelsaert later described as “silk stockings, garters with gold laces, and … suchlike adornments”. They resolved that should a rescue ship appear they would seize it so as to continue their new lifestyle as pirates. In the interim, the younger women were kept as sex slaves, with Lucretia Jans installed in Cornelisz’s own tent.
The others on the island faced a choice of either joining the extermination or dying from it. Some, like the cabin boy, Jan Pelgrom, pleaded to be allowed to murder. The survivors later spoke of the 18-year-old patrolling the tiny island, waving his sword and shouting, “Who wants to be stabbed to death? I can do that very beautifully!”
Meanwhile, on a nearby island, a group soldiers led by Wiebbe Hayes found out what was happening from the stories from fleeing survivors. Cornelisz originally left Hayes and his men on his island to look for water, hoping that they fail in their task and all die of thirst (instead, Hayes found the only source of fresh water and food on the Abrolhos). Realizing that he was trapped on an archipelago with a bunch of nutjobs, Hayes immediately had a fort (the first permanent European structure in Australia) built for defense. Cornelisz tried to assault Hayes' island multiple times but was defeated each time, and was eventually taken prisoner after one of the battles.
While all this was going on, Pelsaert managed to make it to the East India Company outpost and a relief ship was sent. The mutineers surrendered at the sight of the fully armed ship, and after 10 days of continuous torture, Cornelisz was hanged (after having of his two hands hacked off with a chisel), his second in command was broken and killed on a Catherine Wheel, the remaining mutineers were either hanged, thrown off the ships yard arm, flogged, marooned on mainland Australia (becoming the first white settlers on the continent), or some combination thereof.
Of the 341 passengers who set out, only 68 made it home. At least 110 people (mostly women and children) were murdered.
There is a great Dollop Episode on it, and Jacob's Loyalty Mission in the video game Mass Effect 2 was loosely based on the event.
edited: spelling and some factual errors
As someone who's interested in British naval history, I'm somewhat spoilt for choice on this. The story I'm going to tell comes from the British Pacific Fleet, the Royal Navy force operating alongside the United States Navy in the Pacific in 1944-45.
On the 29th May 1945, the new carrier Implacable, along with several cruisers, arrived in the Pacific. This group, needing time to work up and gain combat experience, was deployed to make strikes against the bypassed Japanese bastion at Truk. On the 14th-15th June, the group struck against airfields and installations on two islands in the Truk archipelago; Dublon (Tonowas) and Eten. Carrier aircraft carried out the strike on the 14th, followed up on the 15th by a bombardment from the escorting cruisers. This bombardment proved to be somewhat of a comedy of errors.
On the 15th, the four cruisers headed towards the island in three groups, each escorted by a single destroyer. Swiftsure and Newfoundland operated alone, while Uganda and Achilles operated together (interestingly, Uganda was an RCN ship, while Newfoundland was not). As the ships opened fire, the first problem became apparent; the ships had added dye packs to their shells to mark their own fall of shot by colouring the smoke plume produced. Unfortunately, these turned out to only work when they fell in water.
Newfoundland ran into no other problems, and carried out all her shoots promptly. Uganda and Achilles suffered from a number of communication failures, and withdrew early. Swiftsure had an embarrassing performance. Her first shots missed by miles, and further corrections had little effect, despite the fact that her spotter was one of the most experienced in the RN. Her fire control computer had broken down, thanks to a failure of a single split pin, which had allowed a cog to fall out, and making the whole thing give ridiculous answers. To solve this problem, the gunnery officer switched to local control, letting the turret crews pick their own targets. But the gunners couldn't see the well-camouflaged Japanese positions. As such, it was decided to use the ship's 4in secondary armament to target some more obvious positions, sitting under some palm trees. The first volley turned out to have been using AA ammunition with proximity fuses; these were activated by the trees. The ensuing ripple of explosions in the tree-tops brought down the palm fronds right onto the targeted positions, effectively camouflaging them. Swiftsure withdrew, ignominiously.
The small little of Isle of Wight according to Bede was the site of ethnic cleansing on the part of the Christian Anglo-Saxons against the last pagan Anglo-Saxon kingdom. The invaders slew the king, Arwald, in battle and drove away or killed the remaining pagans. However the old king's two brothers were spirited away from the killing and hidden. They were found out and the king of Wessex demanded their executions, but before the sentence was carried out, they were baptised and later canonized as St. Arwald, because the middle ages made sense~
In sea of too many atrocities perpetrated by the Portuguese during their period of expansion, one particular episode fits the theme.
In 1492, Spanish expulsion of Jews made many seek out refuge in neighboring Portugal. King Joao II employed Jews as his own court doctors and astronomers and cartographers and cosmographs, and his acceptance of admittance of Jewish refugees might make him seem tolerant and accepting of the minority, however that would certainly not be case. Joao II was a pragmatist of cold heart, and when the jewish population asked to be admitted, he accepted if they pay for their entry. Payment was postponed for some grace period, but as you could imagine many were not able to pay the fee even after the period expired.
Joao's reposnse was cruel. He took, kidnapped,children of the people unable to pay, and then proceeded to forcefully baptised them as Christians. At the time Portuguese had recently discovered uninhabited islands of Sao Tome and Principe near the equator, and were designed to be colonized. The taken children, their number given as 2000 were sent to the islands to populate it. As you can imagine, the young children, anyway unfit for survival on a remote island, were soon stricken with tropical diseases and most of them died soon afterwards...
This wouldn't be the only bad mark of Sao Tome. Soon the islands were filled with first real large slaving sugar plantations (some already existed on Madeira and Europe but not on such a huge scope) that would soon be exported to Americas and cause the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade
I’ve talked before about how Edo Period political history is very much a “No Girls Allowed” affair, both according to guys in charge at the time (though to be fair they were also trying to keep most people uninvolved), and modern accounts which often skip over the ways women were active or influential. So I have a particularly soft spot in my heart for a handful of female political activists of the Bakumatsu: the last years of the shogunate, 1853-1868. They weren’t supposed to exist, they’re all tough older ladies, and since their side won in the Meiji Restoration, the Meiji-era narratives of their lives struggled trying to recast them as model well-behaved women who always respected male authority.
But on to the island adventure of Nomura Boto! This story doesn’t start on an island, but in the quiet mountain village of Hirao just outside Fukuoka in Northern Kyushu. In 1859, fifty-four year old Nomura Moto’s samurai husband died and she shaved her head and became a Buddhist nun under the name Boto: a position of independence for a well-off widow. In 1861, Boto decided to take a literary trip to Kyoto, meet up with an old poetry tutor of hers in Osaka, arrange for her husband’s poems to be published and see all the sights. On December 27, 1861, she was preparing to cross the strait from Kyushu to Honshu and she had a dream. Laura Nenzi provides a translation of her travel journal's entry:
"The night we spent [at the Sakuraya] I had a dream. In the company of men not from this world [yo ni naki hito ] I tried to board a ferry."
Hakanashi to
omoi nasedomo
uranami no
kokoro ni kakaru
tabi no yume kana
It was but a fleeting
thought, but
did the dream mean
I am anxious about a journey
upon waves breaking on the shore.
- p. 12, "Portents and Politics: Two Women Activists on the Verge of the Meiji Restoration", The Journal of Japanese Studies Vol. 38, No. 1 (WINTER 2012)
Well, yes, that seems like a reasonable interpretation. What else could she possibly dreaming about? It’s not like her dreams were prophetic, right?
Nomura Boto got to Kyoto, met up with friends, made new ones, and became a strong Imperial loyalist, committed to “restoring” the Emperor’s authority in Japan, and to expelling the Western barbarians from Japan’s soil. She kept writing poetry, often expressing her political and patriotic views in terms of dreams and visions. However, Kyoto was getting violent so in spring 1862 she headed back home, leaving a standing invitation to the young hot-headed samurai activists she’d met to come visit if they were ever in the neighbourhood.
And visit they did, to the growing disapproval of her domain’s authorities. Most famously, in the wake of Choshu domain’s 1864 clash with the shogunate, quite a few radical Choshu men crossed the strait from their domain to hide out at Boto’s mountain retreat. And most famous of these was young samurai Takasugi Shinsaku, who is not so secretly one of my favourite people in history.
It’s hard to sum up what a magnificent mess this man was. He was a militia leader and military reformer, violent, headstrong, rude, stubborn, a total samurai snob, loyal to his friends and unforgiving of his enemies, a man all too aware of his many vices: womanizing, alcoholism, smoking, and a rather casual relationship with other people’s money. He was very plain-faced and shorter than many of his samurai peers. His friends teased that his long sword trailed in the dust when he walked. He had an eccentric range of accomplishments and interests. He played the shamisen, wrote a lot of poetry, organized several fruitless terrorist conspiracies, tried to learn English but never got far. He even negotiated a peace treaty with the Western nations. But when he came to hide at Boto’s place in late 1864, he was at the lowest point of his career, fleeing for his life. He relaxed in Hirao for a while, trading poems with Boto. The two became fast friends. Then he crossed the strait back to the port of Shimonoseki, rallied his allies and began a short civil war within his home domain Choshu to take control of its government. He and his comrades won.
The local authorities were increasingly unhappy with Nomura Boto’s behaviour. She and her friends had been supporting political mischief makers who were defying the shogunate and spreading disorder. In August 1865, she was placed under a relative’s house arrest. On December 13, she received an official sentence of imprisonment on a small island off the Fukuoka coast.
For attending on scheming fellows and giving them shelter where they would secretly meet with like-minded individuals, for concealing those on the move, and for other such acts of misconduct, not a few of which were utterly inappropriate for a woman and extremely insolent, she must receive a heavy punishment. [However,] out of exceptional benevolence, it is decreed that she is exiled to Himeshima and therein imprisoned.
- p. 17, Ibid
There she would stay for nearly a year. Then on October 24, 1866, six men landed on the island. Their leader produced an official letter pardoning Boto for her crimes, and said they were supposed to take her back home. The official on duty, Sakada Kazaemon, didn’t exactly buy this, but while he was discussing this with their leader, the other men slipped away and broke Boto out of jail. They got her to a boat before anyone on the island figured out what was going on.
The guards tried to catch up with the fugitives but to no avail. The boats sailed off into the open seas and the loyalists disappeared into the night. As Sakada later admitted, "They snatched [her] from under our noses." The Himeshima officials were only able to determine that the boats had sailed in a northeastern direction but were clueless as to where the final destination might be. What Sakada did know, however, was that "this is out-and-out the work of Chöshü renegades"
- p. 19, Ibid
Indeed, it was Takasugi Shinsaku who’d sent these six men to rescue her. All of them had previously stayed at her refuge in Hirao. They sailed back to their base in Shimonoseki, where she was reunited with her friends and allies. Takasugi, who’d at last won all his battles, was dying of tuberculosis, and she brightened his last months visiting and exchanging poems. He died May 1867, at the age of twenty-seven. Several months later, in December, Nomura Boto died as well, age sixty-two.
Remember the dream she had upon setting out?
In the company of men not from this world [yo ni naki hito ] I tried to board a ferry
Laura Nenzi comments:
The trajectory that had begun five years earlier, with the dream Nomura described at the onset of her Kyoto trip, comes here to a conclusion. She had boarded a boat with yo ni naki hito - "men not of this world" or, in another plausible reading (ambiguity, after all, is the very foundation upon which prophecy is predicated), with "exceptional men."
- p. 19, Ibid
Dramatically, that is where the story should end, but academic integrity compels me to explain it was accepted practice at the time to revise and rewrite one’s diary entries when compiling a final travel journal. Nomura Boto the writer began her story with a prophecy of the extraordinary men who rescue her by boat at its climax. So, we can’t know if she really had such a dream, or if she attached such deep importance to it at the time. We can see how she weaved that dream into a meaningful story arc of her life. Nenzi’s paper on Nomura Boto and other activist women explores in full how they navigated their precarious situations with poetry and mysticism, but in short,
as Sumie Jones reminds us, Tokugawa-period authors often exploited the trope of the dream to vent off criticism without fear of retaliation. As a rhetorical device, the dream enables flights of the imagination and allows for outrageous scenarios, all the while exonerating the author/dreamer from responsibility. [. . . ] dreams also enabled Nomura to elevate her activism above the ordinary into the realm of the quasi-divine and invulnerable.
- p. 18, Ibid
Poetry gave Nomura Boto power and authority to stand up in the highly gendered and enforced arena of political activism.
There are, to my knowledge, very few islands that have been totally obliterated by human action.
I don't mean killing everything on it — I mean, TOTAL DESTRUCTION.
The island of Elugelab, part of the Enewetak Atoll of the Marshall Islands, however, was totally destroyed by the first American test of a hydrogen bomb in November 1952. Now you see it — now you don't. Elugelab today (one will notice that Teiter and Bogarikk were also destroyed from testing — and a chunk of Bogon is missing from a smaller test).
The bitter irony is that rising tides threaten many parts of the Marshall Islands. Small, island-based atolls of the sort that make up the now-independent country are disproportionately affected by climate change, and the people I have known who live there say it is obvious from year to year that they are losing ground to the sea. So in some sense, the destruction of Elugelab heralded an even greater loss to come...
In 1972, Cuba signed some documents that purportedly transferred Ernst Thälmann Island (a small, uninhabited island off the southern coast of Cuba) to East Germany, as a token of warm Cuba-DDR relations. The island is named for a German Communist leader who died at Buchenwald.
After German reunification, some journalists remembered the transfer ceremony and wondered whether this island remained vestigial DDR territory. (It didn’t. Both the Cuban and German governments explained that the purported transfer was symbolic only.)
The military affairs of the First Opium War involved a number of islands, albeit ones not too far offshore – Hong Kong, Zhoushan, the forts of the Pearl River islets and so forth. There's something interesting to say about each of them, but I'll focus on Zhoushan in particular.
Zhoushan had gradually been built up as a trade port, and had been a relatively thriving area. Whilst the Canton System cut off all Western trade there in theory, in practice it was quite different – one local recorded that, before the war, everyone on the island was eager to receive British opium ships. Why? Because when the opium ships came, so too did bribes, going 'from the Commandant to the Prefect and sub-Prefect, down to sedan chair bearers and yamen runners,' intended to keep everyone's mouths shut. Opium was, after all, illegal. In theory. And, the possibility remained open for Zhoushan to be reopened, even made a Macau-style concession – the infamously mishandled Macartney embassy of 1793 included in its stipulations the cession of a 'small unfortified island near Zhoushan' to Britain. Still, illicit trading continued.
That is, of course, until the First Opium War broke out. Now the British needed to make a proper show of strength. Zhoushan seemed the perfect target, housing a small Chinese squadron. The armed flotilla arriving at Zhoushan in July 1840 was initially mistaken for a group of opium ships, but the reality soon became apparent when they gave the Qing admiral an ultimatum – they had six hours to surrender, or else. The admiral stuck to his guns, and so the British stuck to theirs. At 2:30 on 5 July, the British fleet opened fire on Zhoushan. At 2:39, they stopped. All resistance had disintegrated, and the British occupied the island without any further trouble. Total Chinese dead? 26, including the admiral. The rest, military or civilian, simply ran for cover. Zhoushan would be the first of numerous First Opium War battles decided more or less by a brief bombardment from the British fleet and followed up by an amphibious landing against the utterly demoralised garrison. And this was before the iron-hulled Nemesis with its Congreve rocket batteries turned up. Once that came along, some began to believe that the British had some kind of supernatural powers – one general proposed floating ladies' chamber-pots towards them on rafts as some kind of ward, whilst some civilians in occupied towns feared that the British were kidnapping them and using the dark arts to change them into Indians, feeding their war machine.
If this seems War of the Worlds-esque to you, don't worry. It gets even more uncanny. The British military hospital at Zhoushan went on to record nearly 5500 cases of malaria and dysentery among the troops during the occupation, around 1 in 12 of which was fatal.
Aside from exposing Chinese military weakness, Zhoushan does actually reveal something quite interesting about China at the time. One common complaint among the Zhoushan residents was that they were being punished for actions taken in Canton – in other words, the idea of a monolithic China was (pretty unsurprisingly) not really one worth considering.
Zhoushan went on to be the scene of other incidents. Charles Elliot, the British plenipotentiary, agreed to evacuate it in exchange for Hong Kong, but it was then retaken in September 1841 after Elliot's replacement by Charles Pottinger. In the interim, the official placed in charge, Yuqian, began a reign of terror. He executed four collaborators, and at one point captured the captain of a British supply ship who had missed the memo, and an Indian servant. The Indian was beheaded and flayed. The captain was flayed alive and then subjected to death by slow slicing (the One Thousand Cuts), and the flayed skin was fashioned into reins for his horse. No, this was not British scaremongering. Yuqian reported all of this in an official memo to the emperor. His response? 'You did the right thing.' 'Admirable fixity of purpose.'
When the island was recaptured, those collaborators who were not killed (which according to British sources meant basically everyone) came out in droves and re-established normal trade and services. 'Everything went on quietly as if we had never abandoned the place.'
One attempt was made to retake the island as part of Yijing's early 1842 offensive, infamous for its emphasis on tigers (which I will be more than happy to divulge but would be a digression here), but this was a complete shambles. The men sent to take it were mostly from inland provinces, whilst the fishermen hired to help guide the ships were from the smooth coastlines of Jiangsu rather than the cliffs and shoals of Zhejiang, and proved incapable of assisting, and so the assault never materialised – perhaps a blessing rather than a curse, as the attacks on Zhenhai and Ningbo that did occur were repulsed with serious casualties.
Zhoushan would never be occupied permanently. Instead, Britain got to keep Hong Kong for a while, which (given that I wouldn't exist otherwise) seems like a pretty good deal in the end.
