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‘On our landing quite a crowd of wild-looking men and women, all clad only in loincloth, met us on the beach.’ H. Wilfrid Walker (1909)

We have come to see islands through the prism offered by the accounts, genuine or fictionalized, of Westerners who went out to search, conquer and colonize them. The islands these adventurers and colonists describe are luscious or murderous, inhabited by wild animals or savages, ruled by sultans or sheikhs. Islands have come to be associated with notions “of bounty, of primitivism and paradisalism” (Zurick 1995) in Western eyes.