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Island Ecosystems: Challenges to Sustainability (Social and Ecological Interactions in the Galapagos Islands)
by Stephen J. Walsh Carlos F. Mena Jill R. Stewart Juan Pablo Muñoz PérezSustainable development is a process to improve the quality of life of people, while maintaining the ability of social–ecological systems to continue to provide valuable ecological services that social systems require. In the Galapagos Islands, the maintenance of amenity resources to support tourism and the quality of life of residents is explicitly linked to ecosystem goods and services, particularly, the accessibility to high-quality natural environments and the terrestrial and marine visitation sites that showcase iconic species.On June 26-30, 2022, the Galapagos Science Center celebrated its 10-Year Anniversary. As the crowning event of the anniversary celebration, the World Summit on Island Sustainability was held on San Cristobal Island, Galapagos Archipelago of Ecuador. The intent of the World Summit was to bring together leading experts on island ecosystems and, particularly, on island sustainability from across the globe to represent a diversity of perspectives, approaches, and stakeholder groups. The World Summit was an exclusive event that featured an “expert convening” of scholars and practitioners to address the social, terrestrial, and marine sub-systems of the Galapagos Islands and other similarly challenged island ecosystems from around the globe. The World Summit attracted 150 scientists to the Galapagos Islands to discuss projects conducted, for instance, in the Galapagos Islands, Hawaii, Guam, French Polynesia, Chile, Australia, and the Caribbean Islands. Island vulnerability, resilience, and sustainability were examined by scholars, for instance, from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Universidad San Francisco de Quito, Catholic University of Chile, University of Guam, James Cook University, University of the Sunshine Coast, North Carolina State University, North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, California Academy of Sciences, University of San Francisco, and the University of South Alabama as well as affiliated scientists from Exeter University, University of Edinburgh, University of Southampton, and the Galapagos National Park. The World Summit also included scholars from Re:wild, World Wildlife Fund, EarthEcho, and the East-West Center, Hawaii.
Island Endurance: Creative Heritage on Inishark and Inishbofin (Irish Culture, Memory, Place)
by Ryan LashMany look to Ireland's Atlantic islands as timeless places, resistant to change. Island Endurance offers an alternative perspective, examining two neighboring islands where people have cultivated their heritage to confront new challenges and opportunities across centuries. To the west, Inishark is a landscape of ruins, with monuments from a medieval monastery alongside the remnants of a village that endured privation and isolation before its evacuation in 1960. To the east, Inishbofin remains home to a small community of nearly 200 that bustles every summer with thousands of visitors drawn by the island's reputation for hospitality and distinctive local heritage. Combining archaeological discoveries with folklore and ethnography, author Ryan Lash explores how islanders from three different historical eras encountered, altered, and reimagined traces of the past. Fifteen years of fieldwork reconstruct more than a millennium of creativity—from the development of pilgrimage traditions at the shrines of monastic saints, to the reuse of medieval monuments for local devotions in the 19th and 20th centuries, to the repurposing of ruins for managing livestock and guiding tourist trails in the 21st century. Attuned to the sensory dynamics and other-than-human elements of landscapes, Lash illustrates the power of quartz pebbles, picnics, and sheep farming to generate vital perceptions of place, time, and belonging. Islanders have continually and creatively adapted their heritage to foster shared experiences, negotiate collaborative relations, and sustain livelihoods amid adversity. Island Endurance shows us that the illusion of timelessness has always relied on the creativity of heritage.
Island Futures: Caribbean Survival in the Anthropocene
by Mimi ShellerIn Island Futures Mimi Sheller delves into the ecological crises and reconstruction challenges affecting the entire Caribbean region during a time of climate catastrophe. Drawing on fieldwork on postearthquake reconstruction in Haiti, flooding on the Haitian-Dominican border, and recent hurricanes, Sheller shows how ecological vulnerability and the quest for a "just recovery" in the Caribbean emerge from specific transnational political, economic, and cultural dynamics. Because foreigners are largely ignorant of Haiti's political, cultural, and economic contexts, especially the historical role of the United States, their efforts to help often exacerbate inequities. Caribbean survival under ever-worsening environmental and political conditions, Sheller contends, demands radical alternatives to the pervasive neocolonialism, racial capitalism, and US military domination that have perpetuated what she calls the "coloniality of climate." Sheller insists that alternative projects for Haitian reconstruction, social justice, and climate resilience—and the sustainability of the entire region—must be grounded in radical Caribbean intellectual traditions that call for deeper transformations of transnational economies, ecologies, and human relations writ large.
Island Geographies: Essays and conversations (Routledge Studies in Human Geography)
by Elaine StratfordIslands and their environs – aerial, terrestrial, aquatic – may be understood as intensifiers, their particular and distinctive geographies enabling concentrated study of many kinds of challenges and opportunities. This edited collection brings together several emerging and established academics with expertise in island studies, as well as interest in geopolitics, governance, adaptive capacity, justice, equity, self-determination, environmental care and protection, and land management. Individually and together, their perspectives provide theoretically useful, empirically grounded evidence of the contributions human geographers can make to knowledge and understanding of island places and the place of islands. Nine chapters engage with the themes, issues, and ideas that characterise the borderlands between island studies and human geography and allied fields, and are contributed by authors for whom matters of place, space, environment, and scale are key, and for whom islands hold an abiding fascination. The penultimate chapter is rather more experimental – a conversation among these authors and the editor – while the last chapter offers timely reflections upon island geographies’ past and future, penned by the first named professor of island geography, Stephen Royle.
Island Historical Ecology: Socionatural Landscapes of the Eastern and Southern Caribbean
by Peter E. SiegelIn the first book-length treatise on historical ecology of the West Indies, Island Historical Ecology addresses Caribbean island ecologies from the perspective of social and cultural interventions over approximately eight millennia of human occupations. Environmental coring carried out in carefully selected wetlands allowed for the reconstruction of pre-colonial and colonial landscapes on islands between Venezuela and Puerto Rico. Comparisons with well-documented patterns in the Mediterranean and Pacific islands place this case study into a larger context of island historical ecology.
Island Historical Ecology: Socionatural Landscapes of the Eastern and Southern Caribbean
by Peter E. SiegelIn the first book-length treatise on historical ecology of the West Indies, Island Historical Ecology addresses Caribbean island ecologies from the perspective of social and cultural interventions over approximately eight millennia of human occupations. Environmental coring carried out in carefully selected wetlands allowed for the reconstruction of pre-colonial and colonial landscapes on islands between Venezuela and Puerto Rico. Comparisons with well-documented patterns in the Mediterranean and Pacific islands place this case study into a larger context of island historical ecology.
Island In Trust: Culture Change And Dependence In A Micronesian Economy
by James G. PeoplesThis book is a case study of economic change on a small Pacific island. The island, called Kosrae by the inhabitants, lies in the eastern Caroline Islands, which are part of the geographic and culture area known popularly as Micronesia. The author’s major aim is to show how economic change in one of the island's four villages is affected by the recent policies of the United States government, which has administered the widely scattered islands of Micronesia since 1947.
Island Musics: Performance And Ethnography In A Mediterranean Island Society
by Kevin DaweWhat does the music of Madagascar or Trinidad tell us about the islands themselves and their inhabitants? Is there something unique about island musics? How does island music differ from its mainland counterparts? Drawing on a range of diverse examples from around the globe, this book examines the culture of island music and offers insight into local identities. Case studies look at how music, tradition, popular culture and islander life are linked in modern maritime societies. The islands covered include Crete, Ibiza, Zanzibar, Trinidad, Cuba, Madagascar and Papua New Guinea. In revealing the current practice behind modern island musics, the book considers the role of world music, exotica, global tourism, novels and travel writing in constructing fanciful images of islanders and island life. Island Musics throws into question some of our most basic notions and assumptions about island societies. There are a number of problems common to all island societies that vary in significance depending on an islands size, demographics and its proximity to the mainland. Problems include remoteness and insularity, peripherality to centralized sites of decision-making, a limited range of natural resources, specialization of economics, small markets, a narrow skills base, poor infrastructure and environmental fragility. These issues are discussed in relation to the creation of music in the construction of an islander identity. Of particular interest is the way in which islanders discuss their music and how it articulates the idea of the other and diaspora. Finally, Island Musics considers the musical industry, music education and the preservation of musical cultural heritage.
Island Nights' Entertainments
by Robert Louis StevensonFirst published in 2006. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Island Of Bali (Periplus Classics Ser.)
by CovarrubiasFirst published in 1986. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Island People: The Caribbean and the World
by Joshua Jelly-SchapiroA masterwork of travel literature and of history: voyaging from Cuba to Jamaica, Puerto Rico to Trinidad, Haiti to Barbados, and islands in between, Joshua Jelly-Schapiro offers a kaleidoscopic portrait of each society, its culture and politics, connecting this region's common heritage to its fierce grip on the world's imagination. From the moment Columbus gazed out from the Santa María's deck in 1492 at what he mistook for an island off Asia, the Caribbean has been subjected to the misunderstandings and fantasies of outsiders. Running roughshod over the place, they have viewed these islands and their inhabitants as exotic allure to be consumed or conquered. The Caribbean stood at the center of the transatlantic slave trade for more than three hundred years, with societies shaped by mass migrations and forced labor. But its people, scattered across a vast archipelago and separated by the languages of their colonizers, have nonetheless together helped make the modern world--its politics, religion, economics, music, and culture. Jelly-Schapiro gives a sweeping account of how these islands' inhabitants have searched and fought for better lives. With wit and erudition, he chronicles this "place where globalization began," and introduces us to its forty million people who continue to decisively shape our world.From the Hardcover edition.
Island Practice: Cobblestone Rash, Underground Tom, and Other Adventures of a Nantucket Doctor
by Pam BelluckIf you need an appendectomy, he can do it with a stone scalpel he carved himself. If you have a condition nobody can diagnose--"creeping eruption" perhaps--he can identify what it is, and treat it. A baby with toe-tourniquet syndrome, a human leg that's washed ashore, a horse with Lyme disease, a narcoleptic falling face-first in the street, a hermit living underground--hardly anything is off-limits for Dr. Timothy J. Lepore. This is the spirited, true story of a colorful, contrarian doctor on the world-famous island of Nantucket. Thirty miles out to sea, in a strikingly offbeat place known for wealthy summer people but also home to independent-minded, idiosyncratic year-rounders, Lepore holds the life of the island, often quite literally, in his hands. He's surgeon, medical examiner, football team doctor, tick expert, unofficial psychologist, accidental homicide detective, occasional veterinarian. When crisis strikes, he's deeply involved. He's treated Jimmy Buffett, Chris Matthews, and various Kennedy relatives, but he makes house calls for anyone and lets people pay him nothing--or anything: oatmeal raisin cookies, a weather-beaten .44 Magnum, a picture of a Nepalese shaman. Lepore can be controversial and contradictory, espousing conservative views while performing abortions and giving patients marijuana cookies. He has unusual hobbies: he's a gun fanatic, roadkill collector, and concocter of pastimes like knitting dog-hair sweaters. Ultimately, Island Practice is about a doctor utterly essential to a community at a time when medicine is increasingly money-driven and impersonal. Can he remain a maverick even as a healthcare chain subsumes his hospital? Every community has--or, some would say, needs--a Doctor Lepore, and his island's drive to retain individuality in a cookie-cutter world is echoed across the country.
Island Queens and Mission Wives
by Jennifer ThigpenIn the late eighteenth century, Hawai'i's ruling elite employed sophisticated methods for resisting foreign intrusion. By the mid-nineteenth century, however, American missionaries had gained a foothold in the islands. Jennifer Thigpen explains this important shift by focusing on two groups of women: missionary wives and high-ranking Hawaiian women. Examining the enduring and personal exchange between these groups, Thigpen argues that women's relationships became vital to building and maintaining the diplomatic and political alliances that ultimately shaped the islands' political future. Male missionaries' early attempts to Christianize the Hawaiian people were based on racial and gender ideologies brought with them from the mainland, and they did not comprehend the authority of Hawaiian chiefly women in social, political, cultural, and religious matters. It was not until missionary wives and powerful Hawaiian women developed relationships shaped by Hawaiian values and traditions--which situated Americans as guests of their beneficent hosts--that missionaries successfully introduced Christian religious and cultural values.Incisively written and meticulously researched, Thigpen's book sheds new light on American and Hawaiian women's relationships, illustrating how they ultimately provided a foundation for American power in the Pacific and hastened the colonization of the Hawaiian nation.
Island Shores, Distant Pasts: Archaeological and Biological Approaches to the Pre-Columbian Settlement of the Caribbean (Bioarchaeological Interpretations of the Human Past)
by Ann H. Ross Scott M. Fitzpatrick"An excellent compilation of new methods and theories in Caribbean archaeology. . . . Not only materialize[s] the methodological advance in Caribbean archaeology, but also signif[ies] the strong theoretical progression that this discipline is experiencing."--Journal of Caribbean Archaeology "Look[s] beyond the field of archaeology to include new techniques from genetics, computer simulation, and physical anthropology. . . . Unquestionably moves our understanding of the settling of the Caribbean forward and provides several new provocative avenues for further exploration."--New West Indian Guide "Demonstrate[s] various methods that introduce new insights into the investigation of Caribbean prehistory, revealing the complexity of pre-Columbian cultures, peoples, and their movements. . . . [and] contributes to a totalizing view of the colonization process in the Caribbean."--Caribbean Quarterly "Can be considered as a real starting point for a biological approach of the pre-Columbian settlement of the Caribbean."-- Benoit Berard, Universite des Antilles For more than a century, archaeologists and anthropologists have searched for evidence of when and how peoples first settled the Caribbean islands. Research on this area is pivotal for understanding the migration of peoples in the New World and how small and large populations develop biologically and culturally through time. This unique collection synthesizes our archaeological and biological knowledge about the pre-Columbian settlement of the Caribbean and highlights the various techniques we can use to analyze human migration and settlement patterns throughout history. Newer and well-established techniques, like computer simulations of seafaring, radiocarbon dating, three-dimensional and traditional craniometrics, stable isotopes, and ancient and modern DNA analysis, show great promise for helping us better understand pre-Columbian Caribbean population expansions, while demonstrating the utility of integrating and comparing biological markers with the archaeological record. Surprisingly little attention has been paid to migrations, population movements, and island colonization in the Caribbean islands. This volume fills that void. Scott M. Fitzpatrick is professor of archaeology at the University of Oregon and founding coeditor of the Journal of Island and Coastal Archaeology. Ann H. Ross is professor of biological sciences at North Carolina State University. She is a contributor to Digging Deeper: Current Trends and Future Directions in Forensic Anthropology and Archaeology. A volume in the series Bioarchaeological Interpretations of the Human Past, edited by Clark Spencer Larsen
Island Songs
by Alex Wheatle**As featured on BBC2's INSIDE CULTURE with Mary Beard** "Alex Wheatle is the real deal; he writes with heart and authenticity" Kit De Waal"Island Songs grabs your heart, not with pity but with wonder that such beauty can come from such a life" Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, Independent"Alex Wheatle writes from a place of honesty and passion" Steve McQueen, director of Small AxeShe wondered what kind of world she had brought her two daughters into, the arduous cycle of rural Jamaican life. No chance for them to set off upon adventures and see the outside world.But sisters Jenny and Hortense Rodney, descendants of the fierce Maroon people, do get to see the outside world, and Island Songs is their story. Growing up in rural Claremont, working amid the hustle and bustle, lawn parties and houses of joy in Trenchtown, the two sisters take a chance and move to England with their husbands, that far-off land of riches, where they settle down to motherhood among the jazz cafés and bleak streets of Brixton.A hauntingly beautifully written evocation of twentieth-century Jamaica, its history and traditions, Island Songs is an epic of love, laughter and sorely tested family loyalties. Many stories are told, but many more secrets are never revealed.By the author of Brixton Rock, East of Acre Lane and Homeboys, and several bestselling, prizewinning novels for younger readers
Island Story
by J. D. TaylorWhat is life like on this island? With a tent and a rusty bike, J.D. Taylor set off to find out.No other subject has spilt so much ink as Britain today. But whilst assuming a monopoly on national identity, a London-based elite has proven a poor forecaster of the political weather around the island.Skeptical and inquisitive, Taylor instead cycled all round Britain, interviewing and staying with strangers from all walks of life. Without a map and travelling with the most basic of gear, the journey revels in serendipity and schadenfreude.Island Story weaves histories, experiences and ideas to tell another kind of story: one of rebellion and retail parks, migration and inertia, pessimism and disappearing ways of life, and a fiery, unrealized desire for collective belonging and power.Think you know the island? Island Story will have you think again.From the Trade Paperback edition.
Island Thinking: Suffolk Stories of Landscape, Militarisation and Identity
by Sophia DavisIsland Thinking is a cultural historical and geographical study of Englishness in a key period of cultural transformation in mid-twentieth century Britain as the empire shrank back to its insular core. The book uses a highly regional focus to investigate the imaginative appeal of islands and boundedness, interweaving twentieth-century histories of militarisation, countryside, nature conservation and national heritage to create a thickly textured picture of landscape and history. Referred to as an ‘island within an island’, Suffolk's corner of England provides fascinating stories displaying a preoccupation with vulnerability and threat, refuge and safety. The book explores the portrayal of the region in mid-century rural writing that ‘rediscovered’ the countryside, as well as the area’s extensive militarisation during the Second World War. It examines various enclosures, from the wartime radar project to ‘make Britain an island again’ to the postwar establishment of secluded nature reserves protecting British birds.
Island Time: Speed and the Archipelago from St. Kitts and Nevis (Chicago Studies in Ethnomusicology)
by Jessica Swanston BakerA close look at how wylers, a popular musical style from the island of St. Kitts and Nevis, expresses a unique mode of relation in the postcolonial Caribbean. In Island Time, ethnomusicologist Jessica Swanston Baker examines wylers, a musical form from St. Kitts and Nevis that is characterized by speed. Baker argues that this speed becomes a useful and highly subjective metric for measuring the relationship between Caribbean aspirations and the promises of economic modernity; women’s bodily autonomy and the nationalist fantasies that would seek to curb that autonomy; and the material realities of Kittitian-Nevisian youth living in the disillusionment following postcolonial independence. She traces the wider Caribbean musical, cultural, and media-based resonances of wylers, posing an alternative model to scholarship on Caribbean music that has tended to privilege the big islands—Trinidad, Jamaica, and Haiti—thus neglecting not only the unique cultural worlds of smaller nations but also the unbounded nature of musical exchange in the region. The archipelago emerges as a useful model for apprehending the relationality across scales that governs the temporal and spatial logics that undergird Caribbean performance. The archipelago and its speeds ultimately emerge as a meaningful medium for postcolonial, postmodern world-making.
Island and Empire: How Civil War in Crete Mobilized the Ottoman World (Stanford Ottoman World Series: Critical Studies in Empire, Nature, and Knowledge)
by Uğur Z. PeçeIn the 1890s, conflict erupted on the Ottoman island of Crete. At the heart of the Crete Question, as it came to be known around the world, were clashing claims of sovereignty between Greece and the Ottoman Empire. The island was of tremendous geostrategic value, boasting one of the deepest natural harbors in the Mediterranean, and the conflict quickly gained international dimensions with an unprecedented collective military intervention by six European powers. Island and Empire shows how events in Crete ultimately transformed the Middle East. Uğur Zekeriya Peçe narrates a connected history of international intervention, mass displacement, and popular mobilization. The conflict drove a wedge between the island's Muslims and Christians, quickly acquiring a character of civil war. Civil war in turn unleashed a humanitarian catastrophe with the displacement of more than seventy thousand Muslims from Crete. In years following, many of those refugees took to the streets across the Ottoman world, driving the largest organized modern protest the empire had ever seen. Exploring both the emergence and legacies of violence, Island and Empire demonstrates how Cretan refugees became the engine of protest across the empire from Salonica to Libya, sending ripples farther afield beyond imperial borders. This history that begins within an island becomes a story about the end of an empire.
Island in the Stream: An Ethnographic History of Mayotte (Anthropological Horizons)
by Michael Lambek Michael D. JacksonIsland in the Stream introduces an original genre of ethnographic history as it follows a community on Mayotte, an East African island in the Mozambique Channel, through eleven periods of fieldwork between 1975 and 2015. Over this 40-year span Mayotte shifted from a declining and neglected colonial backwater to a full département of the French state. In a highly unusual postcolonial trajectory, citizens of Mayotte demanded this incorporation within France rather than joining the independent republic of the Comoros. The Malagasy-speaking Muslim villagers Michael Lambek encountered in 1975 practiced subsistence cultivation and lived without roads, schools, electricity, or running water; today they are educated citizens of the EU who travel regularly to metropolitan France and beyond. Offering a series of ethnographic slices of life across time, Island in the Stream highlights community members' ethical engagement in their own history as they looked to the future, acknowledged the past, and engaged and transformed local forms of sociality, exchange, and ritual performance. This is a unique account of the changing horizons and historical consciousness of an African community and an intimate portrait of the inhabitants and their concerns, as well as a glimpse into the changing perspective of the ethnographer.
Island of Bali
by Adrian Vickers Miguel CovarrubiasIsland of Bali is now available with a foreword by Professor Adrian Vickers which puts the book into context for a modern audience.<P><P>First published in 1937, Island of Bali is still regarded by many as the most authoritative text on Bali and its fascinating people. Included is a wealth of information on the daily life, art, customs and religion of this magical "Island of the Gods." In the author's own words it presents a "bird's-eye view of Balinese life and culture."Miguel Covarrubias, the author, was a noted painter and caricaturist as well as a student of anthropology. He lived in Bali for a total of three years in the early 1930s, and today his account is as fresh and insightful as it was when it was originally published. Introducing the island with a survey of hits history, geography and social structure, Covarrubias goes on to present a captivating picture of Balinese art, music and drama. Religion, witchcraft, death and cremation are also covered.Island of Bali will appeal to anyone with an interest in this unique island, from general Eat, Pray, Love readers to serious anthropologist alike. Complementing the text are 90 drawings by Covarrubias and countless others by Balinese artists. Also included are 114 half-tone photographs, and five full-color paintings by the author.
Island of Hope: Migration and Solidarity in the Mediterranean
by Megan A. CarneyWith thousands of migrants attempting the perilous maritime journey from North Africa to Europe each year, transnational migration is a defining feature of social life in the Mediterranean today. On the island of Sicily, where many migrants first arrive and ultimately remain, the contours of migrant reception and integration are frequently animated by broader concerns for human rights and social justice. Island of Hope sheds light on the emergence of social solidarity initiatives and networks forged between citizens and noncitizens who work together to improve local livelihoods and mobilize for radical political change. Basing her argument on years of ethnographic fieldwork with frontline communities in Sicily, anthropologist Megan Carney asserts that such mobilizations hold significance not only for the rights of migrants, but for the material and affective well-being of society at large.
Island of Shame: The Secret History of the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia
by David VineThe American military base on the island of Diego Garcia is one of the most strategically important and secretive U.S. military installations outside the United States. Located near the remote center of the Indian Ocean and accessible only by military transport, the little-known base has been instrumental in American military operations from the Cold War to the war on terror and may house a top-secret CIA prison where terror suspects are interrogated and tortured. But Diego Garcia harbors another dirty secret, one that has been kept from most of the world--until now.Island of Shame is the first major book to reveal the shocking truth of how the United States conspired with Britain to forcibly expel Diego Garcia's indigenous people--the Chagossians--and deport them to slums in Mauritius and the Seychelles, where most live in dire poverty to this day. Drawing on interviews with Washington insiders, military strategists, and exiled islanders, as well as hundreds of declassified documents, David Vine exposes the secret history of Diego Garcia. He chronicles the Chagossians' dramatic, unfolding story as they struggle to survive in exile and fight to return to their homeland. Tracing U.S. foreign policy from the Cold War to the war on terror, Vine shows how the United States has forged a new and pervasive kind of empire that is quietly dominating the planet with hundreds of overseas military bases.Island of Shame is an unforgettable exposé of the human costs of empire and a must-read for anyone concerned about U.S. foreign policy and its consequences. The author will donate all royalties from the sale of this book to the Chagossians.Some images inside the book are unavailable due to digital copyright restrictions.
Island of the Lost: Shipwrecked at the Edge of the World
by Joan DruettAuckland Island is a godforsaken place in the middle of the Southern Ocean, 285 miles south of New Zealand. With year-round freezing rain and howling winds, it is one of the most forbidding places in the world. To be shipwrecked there means almost certain death. In 1864 Captain Thomas Musgrave and his crew of four aboard the schooner Grafton wreck on the southern end of the island. Utterly alone in a dense coastal forest, plagued by stinging blowflies and relentless rain, Captain Musgrave—rather than succumb to this dismal fate—inspires his men to take action. With barely more than their bare hands, they build a cabin and, remarkably, a forge, where they manufacture their tools. Under Musgrave's leadership, they band together and remain civilized through even the darkest and most terrifying days. Incredibly, at the same time on the opposite end of the island—twenty miles of impassable cliffs and chasms away—the Invercauld wrecks during a horrible storm. Nineteen men stagger ashore. Unlike Captain Musgrave, the captain of the Invercauld falls apart given the same dismal circumstances. His men fight and split up; some die of starvation, others turn to cannibalism. Only three survive. Musgrave and all of his men not only endure for nearly two years, they also plan their own astonishing escape, setting off on one of the most courageous sea voyages in history. Using the survivors' journals and historical records, award-winning maritime historian Joan Druett brings this extraordinary untold story to life, a story about leadership and the fine line between order and chaos.
Island on Fire: The Revolt That Ended Slavery in the British Empire
by Tom ZoellnerFrom a New York Times bestselling author, a gripping account of the slave rebellion that led to the abolition of slavery in the British Empire. For five horrific weeks after Christmas in 1831, Jamaica was convulsed by an uprising of its enslaved people. What started as a peaceful labor strike quickly turned into a full-blown revolt, leaving hundreds of plantation houses in smoking ruins. By the time British troops had put down the rebels, more than a thousand Jamaicans lay dead from summary executions and extrajudicial murder. While the rebels lost their military gamble, their sacrifice accelerated the larger struggle for freedom in the British Atlantic. The daring and suffering of the Jamaicans galvanized public opinion throughout the empire, triggering a decisive turn against slavery. For centuries bondage had fed Britain’s appetite for sugar. Within two years of the Christmas rebellion, slavery was formally abolished. Island on Fire is a dramatic day-by-day account of this transformative uprising. A skillful storyteller, Tom Zoellner goes back to the primary sources to tell the intimate story of the men and women who rose up and tasted liberty for a few brief weeks. He provides the first full portrait of the rebellion's enigmatic leader, Samuel Sharpe, and gives us a poignant glimpse of the struggles and dreams of the many Jamaicans who died for liberty.