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”.
On her quest to illuminate Britain’s islands Albinia accompanies a travelling circus to Thanet, a mackerel trawler to Shetland and a sailing charity for underprivileged young people to St Kilda. She makes a pilgrimage to Lindisfarne, stays with a women’s retreat on Iona and visits a kelp-growing laboratory on Rathlin. Her lavish research is shaped by ambitious historical claims. Each chapter inches forwards in time, from Neolithic Orkney to 21st-century Westminster (once moated by the rivers Tyburn and Thames), but she shows how social progress is anything but smooth and linear. Instead, the history of island cultures is one of progress followed by reversal, invasion followed by destruction, in which whole islands’ languages, rituals, beliefs, artefacts and stories – as well as entire populations of flora, fauna and humans – are routinely wiped from the historical record.
Women’s histories are particularly vulnerable to such regressions. Anglo-Saxon Christianity respected female leaders, and on the island of Thanet, there was a “double” (mixed-sex) monastery in which abbess Domne Eafe wielded considerable power. But then the Normans exacted “a full-blown patriarchal riposte to female religious expression” and male monks monopolised the written record, rendering holy women largely invisible.
Polyannaish Enlightenment philosophers fantasised that societies move, inexorably, towards “perfectibility”, just as political commentators today hurl blithe, lazy insults about opponents residing “on the wrong side of history”. Accounts such as Albinia’s – which stress the fragility of feminist gains, their vulnerability to violent backlash – are vital correctives and, indeed, warnings for defenders of women’s rights, past and present. But these tides are not peculiar to Britain’s islands. The pattern of progress and reversal of women’s power occurs globally, as the Taliban’s violations of women’s rights demonstrate.
The Britannias’ most tantalising suggestion is that, prior to eras in which “patriarchy tightens its grip”, there might have been halcyon ages of female emancipation in the British archipelago: islands of revered women. As Albinia admits, it requires a healthy dose of fantasy to “gather together the seeds of evidence … and allow them to bloom”. Her testimonies are mainly drawn from mythology, rather than examples of real women possessing actual economic, political or social power. “The simple fact of women being seen” – of women featuring in stories and rituals – is taken as proof of matriarchal authority. But is it really straightforwardly reverential when a hill or river is given a female name, or when women such as Medusa or witches appear in an island’s literature? This thread – interwoven with an autobiographical narrative in which Albinia, dreaming about British island matriarchies, leaves her marriage and sets up a “three-way gynocracy” with her daughters – is positioned as the book’s “mainland”. But as she herself demonstrates, sometimes the richer material lies in the surrounding territory.
• The Britannias: An Island Quest is published by Allen Lane (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
