I have already made a kind of curved helmet on the same principle, for the use of our galleys, which, when placed on the head of the observer, and a telescope being placed upon it, adjusted in such a way that it was always directed towards the same point at which the other free eye was looking, without doing anything else, the object that he was looking at with his free eye was always to be found through the telescope. A similar machine could be built which is not just held on the head but over the shoulders and bust of the observer, on which is fixed a telescope of the size necessary to clearly distinguish the stars of Jupiter.
In order to resolve the problem—with all due respect to Galileo, whose extraordinary invention no one had the courage to finance, and to the whole plethora of inventors of other extraordinary methods for fixing longitude—we had to wait for Harrison’s invention of the marine chronometer, or rather, his final version in the 1770s. From then on, even during storms, the clock would keep the correct time for the point of departure. But before that moment the insulae were fatally perditae.
Before then, the history of Pacific exploration is the history of people forever discovering lands they were not looking for. Abel Tasman, for example, while searching for the Solomon Islands in 1643, arrives at Tasmania (which is forty-two degrees latitude farther south, as if that were nothing), sees New Zealand, passes Tonga, arrives in Fiji without disembarking, where he sees only a few small islands, and reaches the coast of New Guinea, without realizing that inside that loop he had made stood Australia. No mean achievement. He had gone from point to point like a billiard ball, and for many years after, other navigators came extremely close to Australia without seeing it.
In short, it was a madcap voyage between islands, coral reefs, and continents, without any apparent plan. And poor them. We can set a course today using the maps created after Cook, but they were all basically wandering about like Captain Bligh, in a ship’s launch, heading toward the Moluccas, and the most important thing was not to bump into the Bounty again.
But even after the problem of longitude had been solved, it was still easy for ships to lose themselves among such islands. Look at the voyages of Corto Maltese and Rasputin in Ballad of the Salt Sea. The characters in the Ballad are avid readers. At one point, Pandora seems to be happily immersed in the complete works of Melville while Cain is reading Coleridge, the author of another ballad, the one about the Ancient Mariner—curiously he finds it on the German submarine of Slütter who, when he dies, will also leave his copies of Rilke and Shelley at Escondida. And toward the end, Cain quotes Euripides.
And even an old jailbird like Rasputin, at the very beginning, is reading Voyage autour du monde par la frégate du roi La Boudeuse et la flûte L’Étoile. I can guarantee that this is not the first edition of 1771, which does not carry the author’s name on the title page and is not in three columns.
The book is open about halfway through and, at least in the original edition, of the same size, this is the point where chapter 5 begins: “Navigation depuis les grandes Cyclades; découverte du golfe de la Louisiade . . . Relâche . . . la Nouvelle Bretagne.”
If he was up-to-date with the techniques of 1913, Rasputin ought to know that he is on the 155-degree meridian west (according to Hugo Pratt’s map), but if he relies on Bougainville he should be on the crucial 180-degree meridian, the date line. There again, Bougainville referred to the “Isles Salomon dont l’existence et la position sont douteuses.”
When the Dutch cargo ship meets Rasputin’s catamaran, the first thing the officers and the Fijian sailor notice is that the boat seems rather off course for a Fijian vessel, since the Fijians usually head east and south. And this is what they should have done, as we shall see later, since the Monk’s island is much farther southeast.
Tell me why Corto should find Slütter’s submarine below the western point of New Pomerania—he is sailing west, having departed from Kaiserine, whereas the submarine’s destination is Escondida, and the Monk’s island of Escondida (19 degrees south and 169 west) ought to be south of the Solomon Islands and west of Fiji. A German naval officer who sails toward New Guinea to get to Escondida and says (as he does) “We’ll be arriving shortly at Escondida” (which is 20 degrees away) is caught in Rasputin’s net, a dreamer who has confused the frontiers of space. The fact is that Rasputin or Pratt, or both, are also trying to confound the frontiers of time.
Cain and Pandora are captured by Rasputin on November 1, 1913, but they all arrive at Escondida after August 4, 1914 (the Monk tells them that war has broken out on that date), at some time between September and the last ten days of October, when the English appear on the scene. After two pages of Coleridge and a few discussions with Slütter, a year has passed, during which time the submarine navigates vague routes, with the curious indolence, the thirst for drifting, of seventeenth-century buccaneers, the Ancient Mariner, and Captain Ahab.
All of the main characters in the Ballad act as though they are living in the times of Bougainville, or even Mendaña: they travel in the archipelago of uncertainty.
The fascination of islands is precisely that of losing ourselves. Heaven help us if we find our way straight back, like taking one of those wretched ferry crossings from Manhattan to Ellis Island. The eternal fascination of the island is still that celebrated by Guido Gozzano.
But more beautiful than all, the Island Never Found:
The one the king of Spain had from his cousin
the king of Portugal with sealed signature
and papal bull in Gothic Latin.
The Infante sailed off for the legendary realm,
saw the Fortunate Isles: Iunonia, Gorgo, Hera,
and the Sargasso Sea and the Dark Sea
searching for that isle . . . But the island was not there.
In vain the round-bottomed sailing galleys,
in vain the caravels armed their bows:
with due respect to the pope, the isle is hidden,
and Portugal and Spain still search for it.
The isle exists, appearing sometimes from afar
between Teneriffe and Palma, suffused in mystery:
“ . . . the Island Never Found!” From the high peak of Teide
the good Canarian points it out to the foreigner.
Marked on the ancient maps of the corsairs.
. . . Hifola to—be found? . . . Hifola pilgrim? . . .
The magic isle that glides over the seas;
mariners sometimes see her near . . .
And point their bows toward her blessed shore:
Among unfamiliar flowers soar lofty palms,
The divine aromatic forest, thick and lush,
Weeping cardamom, seeping rubber sap . . .
Herald like the arrival of a perfumed courtesan,
the Island Never Found . . . Yet, if the pilot draws closer,
it rapidly fades away, like a vain shadow,
tinged with the azure color of faraway . . . (“La più bella”)
I don’t suppose Gozzano had in mind some of the maps we find in eighteenth-century books on sea travel, but this idea of the island that “fades away, like a vain shadow, tinged with the azure color of faraway” makes us think about the way in which, before the problem of longitude had been solved, islands were identified using drawings of their profiles as they had been seen for the first time. Arriving from a distance, the island (whose shape did not exist on any map) was recognized from its skyline, as we would say of an American city today. And what happened if there were two islands with very similar skylines, as if there were two cities, both with the Empire State Building and (at one time) the Twin Towers south of it? They would land on the wrong island, and who knows how many times this happened.
Moreover, the profile of an island changes with the color of the sky, the haze, the time of day, and perhaps even the time of year, which alters the appearance of the vegetation. Sometimes the island is tinged with the azure color of faraway, it can disappear in the night or in the mist, or clouds can hide the shapes of its mountains. There is nothing more elusive than an island about which we know only its profile.
Arriving on an island for which we have neither map nor coordinates is similar to moving about like one of Edwin Abbott’s characters in Flatland, where there is only one dimension and we see things only from the front, like lines with no thickness—with no height and no depth—and only someone from outside Flatland could see them from above.
And it was said, in fact, that the inhabitants of the islands of Madeira, La Palma, La Gomera, and El Hierro, deceived by the clouds or by the mirages of the fata morgana, sometimes thought they had seen the insula perdita toward the west, shimmering between the water and the sky.
Thus, in the same way that an island that didn’t exist
