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PALGRAVE SERIES
IN INDIAN OCEAN
WORLD STUDIES

CONNECTIVITY
IN MOTION
Island Hubs in the
Indian Ocean World
Edited by Burkhard Schnepel
and Edward A. Alpers
Palgrave Series in Indian Ocean World Studies

Series Editor
Gwyn Campbell
McGill University
Montreal, Canada
This is the first scholarly series devoted to the study of the Indian Ocean
world from early times to the present day. Encouraging interdisciplinar-
ity, it incorporates and contributes to key debates in a number of areas
including history, environmental studies, anthropology, sociology, politi-
cal science, geography, economics, law, and labor and gender studies.
Because it breaks from the restrictions imposed by country/regional
studies and Eurocentric periodization, the series provides new frame-
works through which to interpret past events, and new insights for pre-
sent-day policymakers in key areas from labor relations and migration to
diplomacy and trade.

More information about this series at

http://www.springer.com/series/14661
Burkhard Schnepel · Edward A. Alpers
Editors

Connectivity in
Motion
Island Hubs in the Indian Ocean World
Editors
Burkhard Schnepel Edward A. Alpers
Institute for Social and Cultural Department of History
Anthropology University of California, Los Angeles
Martin Luther University of Los Angeles, CA, USA
Halle-Wittenberg
Halle, Germany

Palgrave Series in Indian Ocean World Studies

ISBN 978-3-319-59724-9 ISBN 978-3-319-59725-6 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-59725-6

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017943667

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights
of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction
on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and
information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication.
Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied,
with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have
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Cover credit: © Hemis/Alamy Stock Photo

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
 Contents

Part I Themes

1 Introduction 3
Burkhard Schnepel

2 Islands Connect: People, Things, and Ideas Among the

Small Islands of the Western Indian Ocean 33
Edward A. Alpers

3 Small Island Hubs and Connectivity in the Indian Ocean

World: Some Concepts and Hypotheses from Historical
Anthropology 57
Andre Gingrich

4 Displaced Passengers: States, Movements,

and Disappearances in the Indian Ocean 93
Godfrey Baldacchino

v
vi Contents

Part II Case Studies: Swahili Coast, Zanzibar and the Comoros

5 The Role of Kilwa in the Trade of the

Western Indian Ocean 111
Gwyn Campbell

6 Zanzibar, the Indian Ocean, and Nineteenth-Century

Global Interface 135
Jeremy Prestholdt

7 Ali Mfaume: A Comorian Hub in the Western Indian

Ocean 159
Iain Walker

8 Multifaceted Identities, Multiple Dwellings:

Connectivity and Flexible Household
Configurations in Zanzibar Town 181
Kjersti Larsen

Part III Case Studies: Mid-Ocean Archipelagos

9 A Hub of “Local Cosmopolitans”: Migration and

Settlement in Early Eighteenth to Nineteenth-Century
Port Louis 209
Vijayalakshmi Teelock

10 The Making of a Hub Society: Mauritius’ Path from

Port of Call to Cyber Island 231
Burkhard Schnepel

11 Dis/Entangled Hubs: Connectivity and Disconnections

in the Chagos Archipelago 259
Steffen F. Johannessen

12 Big Men Politics and Insularity in the Maldivian

World of Islands 289
Boris Wille
 Contents vii

13 Considering the Island Capital Male’ as a Hub for

Health-Related Mobilities 319
Eva-Maria Knoll

Part IV Case Studies: South and Southeast Asia

14 From Salsette to Socotra: Islands across the Seas

and Implications for Heritage 347
Himanshu Prabha Ray

15 Serendipitous Connections: The Chinese Engagements

with Sri Lanka 369
Tansen Sen

16 Changing Connectivity in a World of Small Islands:

The Role of Makassar (Sulawesi) as a Hub Under Dutch
Hegemony 397
Jürgen G. Nagel

17 Ambon, a Spicy Hub: Connectivity at the Fringe

of the Indian Ocean 421
Keebet von Benda-Beckmann

Index 447
 Editors and Contributors

About the Editors

Burkhard Schnepel is a Professor of Social Anthropology at the Martin

Luther University in Halle, Germany, and a Fellow at the Max Planck
Institute of Social Anthropology. His research has focused on East Africa,
east India, and the Indian Ocean world, as well as on theories and the
history of social anthropology.

Edward A. Alpers is a Research Professor in the Department of History

at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of East
Africa and the Indian Ocean (2009) and The Indian Ocean in World
History (2014).

Contributors

Godfrey Baldacchino is a Pro-Rector (International Development

and Quality Assurance) and Professor of Sociology at the University of
Malta, Malta; UNESCO Co-Chair (Island Studies and Sustainability)
at the University of Prince Edward Island, Canada; Editor Emeritus,
Island Studies Journal; and President, International Small Islands Studies
Association (ISISA).
Keebet von Benda-Beckmann is a Professor emerita of Social
and Legal Anthropology. She was head of the Project Group Legal

ix
x Editors and Contributors

Pluralism and currently is an associate of the Department of Law and

Anthropology at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in
Halle, Germany. Her research in Indonesia and the Netherlands focuses
on legal pluralism, social security, governance, and on the role of religion
in disputing processes.
Gwyn Campbell is a Canada Research Chair and Founding Director
of the Indian Ocean World Centre, McGill University. Specializing
in Indian Ocean world history, his publications include An Economic
History of Imperial Madagascar, 1750–1895 (Cambridge, 2005) and
David Griffiths and the Missionary “History of Madagascar” (Brill, 2012).
Andre Gingrich is a Director of the Institute for Social Anthropology at
the Austrian Academy of Sciences, and a member of the Royal Swedish
and Austrian Academies of Sciences. His research focuses on the anthro-
pology and history of southwestern Arabia (Saudi Arabia and Yemen)
and the methods and history of social anthropology.
Steffen Fagernes Johannessen is a Postdoc in Industrial Heritage
at the Department of Culture, Religion, and Social Studies, University
College of Southeast Norway, and Assistant Professor at BI Norwegian
Business School, Department of Communication and Culture. He
received his Ph.D. from the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg,
Germany, with a thesis on the Chagossian Diaspora in 2016.
Eva-Maria Knoll is a researcher and group leader at the Institute for
Social Anthropology, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna. Her
research focuses on medical anthropology, anthropology at the intersec-
tion with life sciences, health-related mobility, and tourism. Currently
she investigates the impact of inherited anemia in the Republic of
Maldives.
Kjersti Larsen is a Professor of Social Anthropology and African
Studies at the Department of Ethnography, Numismatics, and Classical
Archaeology, Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo. Her
research focuses on ritual and performance; knowledge, morality, and
gender; identity, mobility, and belonging in African societies and the
Indian Ocean Region.
Jürgen G. Nagel is a Professor of History with a special focus on the
subject “History of Europe in the Wider World” at the FernUniversität
Hagen, Germany. His research includes the history of cross-cultural
 Editors and Contributors xi

relations in the Indian Ocean World, of Islam in imperialistic context and

of societies in southern Africa.
Jeremy Prestholdt is a Professor in the Department of History at the
University of California, San Diego. He specializes in African, Indian
Ocean, and global history with emphases on consumer culture and politics.
Himanshu Prabha Ray is Anneliese Maier Fellow, Ludwig Maximilian
University, Munich; former Chairperson, National Monuments
Authority, Ministry of Culture and former Professor, Centre for
Historical Studies (CHS), Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New
Delhi. Her research interests include maritime history and archaeology;
archaeology of religion in South Asia and heritage.
Tansen Sen Director of the Center for Global Asia, Professor of
History, NYU Shanghai; and Global Network Professor, NYU. He is the
author of Buddhism, Diplomacy, and Trade: The Realignement of Sino-
Indian Relations, 600-1400 (2003; 2016) and India, China, and the
World: A Connected History (2017). He has co-authored (with Victor H.
Mair) Traditional China in Asian and World History (2012) and edited
Buddhism Across Asia: Networks of Material, Cultural and Intellectual
Exchange (2014). He is currently working on a book about Zheng He’s
maritime expeditions in the early fifteenth century and co-editing (with
Engseng Ho) the Cambridge History of the Indian Ocean, volume 1.
Vijayalakshmi Teelock is an Associate Professor of History at the
Department of History and Political Science at the University of
Mauritius. She teaches and researches Mauritian and Indian History,
with a focus on labor migrations. She has published Bitter Sugar (1998),
Mauritian History (2008) and is currently researching on eighteenth
century French slavery in Mauritius.
Iain Walker has held positions at the University of New South Wales,
SOAS, the University of Oxford and the Max Planck Institute for Social
Anthropology in Halle, Germany. He is currently project leader on a
DFG-funded research project on identities in Mayotte based at Martin
Luther University in Halle-Wittenberg.
Boris Wille is a Researcher and Lecturer at the Institute for Social and
Cultural Anthropology, Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg. His
research focus is on the Maldives, maritime societies, political anthropol-
ogy, anthropology of media, and visual culture.
 List of Figures

Fig. 9.1 Plan of Port Louis Mauritius, adapted from J. G. Milbert

(1812) Voyage pittoresque à l’Ile-de-France, au cap de
Bonne-Espérance et à l’île de Ténériffe. Paris: A. Nepveu. 223
Fig. 13.1 Male’ (down right) with its urban satellites Vilingili
(in the foreground) and Hulhumale’. In 2015,
the most recent completed land reclamation incorporated
the island Farukolhufushi (upper left), which until recently
was run as a resort island, into the urban capital
of the Maldives. At that time the capital already
comprised four islands (photograph: E.M. Knoll) 327
Fig. 15.1 The Maokun Map Section showing Sri Lanka, India,
and Africa; on the left the Chinese map and on the
right a sketch rendition (after Mills [1970/1997]) 384

xiii
 List of Maps

Map 0.1 and 0.2 The Indian Ocean World xxiv–xxv

Map 11.1 Map of islands in the Chagos Archipelago
(reproduced with kind permission of the Max
Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle (Saale)) 262

xv
 Prologue

With one exception, the chapters in this collection were first presented at
the international conference on “The Art of Hubbing: The Role of Small
Islands in Indian Ocean Connectivity,” held on October 15–17, 2015
at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle, Germany.
The conference was the second such gathering organized by Burkhard
Schnepel as part of the Max Planck Fellow Group on “Connectivity in
Motion: Port Cities of the Indian Ocean,” of which he is the Director. 1
The exchanges at the conference were lively and substantive, as have
been those between the two editors and the individual contributors to
this volume. One consequence of these exchanges is that the title of
the book has been changed from that of the conference. Thus, while
we have not abandoned the notion of “hubs”—highly frequented and
energized nodes along the routes taken by transmaritime movements—
as an important conceptual frame for studying and understanding
Indian Ocean islands, we agree that “connectivity in motion” is a more
critical analytical tool than “the art of hubbing.” Accordingly, the con-
tributions in our collection focus primarily on different elements of con-
nectivity, mobility, and hubs as they relate to both broad methodological
approaches and specific regionally and historically framed case studies.
One other significant change is the decision to drop “small” from our
definition of the islands studied here. Smallness is, after all, a relative
matter of comparison, though, as some authors in this volume argue,
at some point size also matters in an absolute sense, especially when it
becomes miniscule, as is the case with some of the islets discussed in the

xvii
xviii Prologue

volume. In any case, there are no papers on the really big islands in the
Indian Ocean—such as Madagascar, Sumatra, and Java—so the focus of
the chapters is mainly on relatively small islands.
The contributors bring a range of methodological approaches and
tools to their chapters, which, taken together, reveal the rich possibilities
for studying islands in the Indian Ocean World (IOW). Most contribu-
tors have been trained as either social anthropologists or historians, but
virtually all of them straddle these methodologies in one way or another.
Similarly, although we have organized the contents into two broad parts,
namely “Themes” and “Case Studies” (the latter with what we hope are
four appropriate regional subheadings), virtually all the authors make
good use of a variety of approaches and bring a wide range of evidence
and methodological perspectives into play. In particular, in the context
of our connectivity in motion-focus, all our authors also look beyond the
limited geographical frame of the islands or archipelagos they are study-
ing to discuss the many movements and links of even the remotest island
to other places in the Indian Ocean World.
We draw several main conclusions from this collaborative effort. First,
the literature and the common imaginaries that emphasize isolation as a
factor notwithstanding, there is compelling evidence in these contribu-
tions that many if not most islands do indeed connect, no matter how
small and remote they are. Second, even when one describes the char-
acter of island connectivity as a form of network, the actual connections
involved are much more complex, nuanced, and historically change-
able than a rigorous application of network theory might imply. Third,
the concept of “connectivity in motion” is central to the ideas that run
through the entire volume, whether we are speaking of the movement
of people, flora and fauna, things, political systems, languages, rituals,
forms of art, beliefs, or ideas. Last, the interplay between ethnographic
and historical approaches is especially rewarding in the former’s ability
to engage directly with islanders whose lives are usually as messy, cos-
mopolitan, multifaceted, and mobile as are those of the contributors
themselves, as well as in the latter’s ability to add historical depth to any
observations of contemporary life.
This volume, then, is a contribution to the ever-growing and devel-
oping scientific literature and research concerned with transmaritime
exchanges across the Indian Ocean World and with the various kinds of
connectivities that are created through these movements and exchanges.
 Prologue xix

One important dimension that quite naturally stands to the fore of many
of these investigations is constituted by the very places and agents that
function as the entry and exit points of such movements. Among these
are, of course, the various port cities of the Indian Ocean World, with
all their innumerable variations in size, function, character, and other
respects. Such a focus on ports and port cities constitutes precisely the
point at which the present volume is located, though it specifically con-
centrates on hubs that are located on islands. This focus on “island
hubs” makes the volume special, given the fact that, even though islands
have not, of course, escaped scholarly attention so far, “islandness” has
seldom been turned into an explicit empirical and methodological issue,
as the authors assembled here have sought to do.
To provide a short overview of the chapters that follow, the “Themes”
section contains contributions by Burkhard Schnepel, Edward A. Alpers,
Andre Gingrich, and Godfrey Baldacchino. It is worth noting that three
of these scholars were trained in anthropology and/or sociology, while
Alpers was trained in history. Schnepel’s paper reflects his deep thinking
about the issues around which the Max Planck Fellow Group is organ-
ized. As an introduction to the themes of this volume, his contribu-
tion reflects the input of many voices and has served as a touchstone for
individual contributions. Specifically, Schnepel builds on Alpers’ idea of
the significance of “the island factor” in the Indian Ocean by pointing
out the centrality of islands in the history of maritime movements and
exchanges in the Indian Ocean World, suggesting that they have served
as critical hubs in the circulation of people, things, and ideas. He also
argues for the relevance of the concept of “islandness” to both the his-
torical and contemporary practice of islanders and to island imaginaries.
We believe that this introduction provides a thread of intellectual coher-
ence throughout the volume. Of course, not all contributors agree with
everything that Schnepel has to say in this major intervention, or specifi-
cally refer to his chapter, but even differences with him demonstrate the
significance of his ideas.
Alpers takes up the central themes of the volume by testing the ideas
of connectivity, smallness, translocality, and the unique situation of
islands against case studies of the Comoro and Mascarene Islands. His
chapter thus both enters into an intellectual exchange with Schnepel’s
introductory chapter and anticipates other chapters in the volume.
Gingrich brings a critical perspective to the central themes of the Max
Planck Fellow Group Program by exploring both the terminology of
xx Prologue

its central ideas and the sources available for studying them. His deep
knowledge of medieval Arabic sources suggests a number of possible
channels for future research. In addition, Gingrich discusses two con-
ceptual notions of “network-based” approaches that imply different ways
of understanding maritime movements and local knowledge. Ranging
across the northern reaches of the Indian Ocean, his illustrative examples
add significant historical depth to our appreciation of exchanges across
that part of the Indian Ocean World. Against the background of his long
and deep involvement with, and seminal influence on, “island studies,”
both more generally and beyond the Indian Ocean World, Baldacchino
offers a chronological contrast to Gingrich by organizing his thoughts
on modern Indian Ocean island states and the still mysterious disappear-
ance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. His analysis of “passengers” and of
islands as “taskscapes” provides the reader with new ways of considering
both islands and movement in the Indian Ocean World.
The broadly defined part of the volume entitled “Case Studies”
begins with four very different papers—the first two by historians, the
remainder by anthropologists—that examine the Swahili-Comorian
world. Gwyn Campbell opens the section with an overview of the long
history of Kilwa’s place in the trading networks of the western Indian
Ocean. Drawing upon extensive scholarly literature and published pri-
mary sources, as well as on an important unpublished mid-nineteenth-
century French report on the slave trade at Kilwa, Campbell situates
Kilwa squarely at the southern limits of the Indian Ocean monsoon sys-
tem, including its trading extensions across the Mozambique Channel to
northwest Madagascar. Jeremy Prestholdt examines the place of Zanzibar
Town as a critical hub connecting East Africa, the western Indian Ocean,
Europe, and the United States to this longstanding multicultural, cos-
mopolitan island–city. He reveals how the movement of merchan-
dise, people, and ideas about how to dress, speak, or worship reveals
a world of connections that all came together in this suddenly vibrant
East African port city. Iain Walker offers a quite different notion of what,
or who in this case, constitutes a hub. His microstudy of a Comorian
Zanzibari named Ali Mfaume shows him to be at the center—the hub,
he argues—of a set of personal connections stretching from Zanzibar
to Ngazidja (Grande Comore) to Madagascar to South Africa. Thus, by
examining the life of a unique individual, Walker makes us think about
different ways to conceive and define hubs as crucial agents of connectiv-
ity in motion. Similarly, Kjersti Larsen probes the shifting identities of
 Prologue xxi

a different Comorian Zanzibari family in Zanzibar Town. Basing herself

on a long period of ethnographic fieldwork, she analyzes how religious
identities were defined by death and inheritance as the men of the fam-
ily moved away from Zanzibar to Ngazidja and Muscat, Oman. She also
describes how spirit possession, here involving spirits from Madagascar,
provides yet another realm in which the movement of people and ideas
demonstrates connectivity in motion.
A further section we call “Mid-Ocean Archipelagos” contains chap-
ters on Mauritius, the Chagos Archipelago and the Maldives as seen
from quite distinct perspectives. We begin with a chapter by histo-
rian VijayaTeelock on the process whereby Port Louis, the capital of
Mauritius, took shape both spatially and socially in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries. Her chapter represents the first step in what she
anticipates will be a major study of how space, power, and ethnic identity
were formed and formulated in colonial Mauritius. Burkhard Schnepel
initiates four chapters by very differently oriented ethnographers. He
traces the rise of Mauritius as a hub from its earliest phase as a mari-
time port of call through different stages of existence, first as a source
of provisions and a rest area for colonial sailors, then as a mercantile hub
and colonial plantation economy, more recently as a service hub cater-
ing to tourists and textile manufacturers, and finally as a contemporary
financial and communications hub for the southwestern Indian Ocean
and beyond. Next Steffen F. Johannessen argues that the Chagos Islands,
which have become notorious for the way in which Anglo-American geo-
political concerns led to the removal of its native inhabitants to exile in
Mauritius, have a complex history and present that involve overlapping
issues of strategic military power focused on Diego Garcia and the envi-
ronmental protection of threatened maritime resources. Like other schol-
ars who have worked on the Chagos situation, he pays close attention to
the actions and aspirations of Chagossians themselves, most interestingly
the way in which they have come to re-imagine their homeland in reli-
gio-ecological terms (“the Garden of Eden” effect). While he does not
try to identify the Chagos Archipelago as a hub in general, he contends
that it has become both a military hub and an eco-hot spot, that is, an
environmental hub.
Boris Wille approaches the Maldive Islands in terms of their insular-
ity and the historical dominance of a kind of Big Man politics that has
come to dominate political and economic life across this vast archipel-
ago. Because of the isolation of virtually all the different Maldive Islands,
xxii Prologue

Wille argues that these “Big Men” have also served as hubs, though in
a very different way from Walker’s account of Ali Mfaume, who was
anything but a powerful economic or political figure. In terms of con-
nectivity in motion, what makes the role of these men as both nodes
and centers significant is the way in which they dominate movement,
not (just) from Male’ to South Asia, but also, and most prominently in
this account, among and between the innumerable inhabited Maldive
Islands, including the tourist resorts, with Male’ as their hub. Eva-Maria
Knoll begins her chapter by describing the existence of a potentially fatal
medical condition called thalassemia that developed historically from
malaria and by showing how this disease affects a whole range of socio-
medical issues in the Maldives. Because of the accelerating centralization
of services and wealth on the capital Male’ (and here there is certainly a
kind of parallel to Wille’s argument about nodes and centers), medical
services are equally integrated into the hub functions of the capital. As
only limited medical services are available on the outlying islands, thalas-
semia patients must first travel to Male’ and in many cases on to medical
centers in Sri Lanka and south India that specialize in treating Maldivian
patients. Thus, Male’ has become both an internal and an external hub,
as well as a source of connectivity in motion, for a medically defined
group of Maldivians.
The final section of chapters includes a wide range of studies on South
and Southeast Asia. Utilizing both archaeological and literary sources,
archaeologist Himanshu Prabha Ray follows cultural routes across the
northern Arabian Sea that link the island of Socotra, off the tip of the
Horn of Africa, and Salsette, one of the constituent islands that was con-
solidated into Bombay in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Her
chapter pushes our ability to consider notions of both connectivity and
hubs in the Indian Ocean back in time, as well as the ways in which these
ancient sites are regarded today as UNESCO Heritage sites. Historian
Tansen Sen’s knowledge of ancient Chinese sources provides a per-
spective on how the Chinese understood the larger island of Sri Lanka
between the fifth and fifteenth centuries. He situates these sources in the
context of Buddhist religious and economic networks linking the Bay of
Bengal to China, as well as diplomatic exchanges between Sri Lanka and
the Chinese court after the tenth century.
The last two chapters explore different aspects of the colonial his-
tory of island port cities and connectivity in the Indonesian Archipelago.
Jürgen G. Nagel looks at Makassar on Sulawesi Island from its origins as
 Prologue xxiii

an independent Muslim state linking the major powers of Sumatra and

Java with the more diffuse societies of eastern Indonesia through con-
trol of the spice trade and its conquest and colonization by the Dutch
East Indies Company (VOC). He then goes on to show how, even under
these new constraints, Makasssar continued to play a role as a regional
hub, especially in the slave trade. Finally, Keebet von Benda-Beckmann
takes us still further east to Ambon, from which she seeks to appreciate
the same kind of transition from a dominant spice-trade hub to a stra-
tegically important outpost of first the Dutch colonial regime and, ulti-
mately, of independent Indonesia. Discussing some of the same themes
as Nagel in his chapter, her account connects the colonial past of Ambon
to the present and helps us to appreciate its place in both modern
Indonesia and the wider Indian Ocean world.
Taken together, this diverse set of essays struggles with the important
analytical and methodological issues set out in Schnepel’s introductory
chapter at several levels and from a variety of quite distinct perspectives.
In addition, they provide a wide range of case studies across time and
space that, we believe, contribute significantly to the development of
Indian Ocean studies

Edward A. Alpers
Burkhard Schnepel
xxiv Prologue

Map 0.1  The Indian Ocean World

 Prologue xxv

Map 0.2  The Indian Ocean World

xxvi Prologue

Note
1. We would like to express our gratitude to the Max Planck Society, Munich,
as well as to the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle, for
generously supporting the program and its conferences financially and
organizationally. We also like to thank Dr. Robert Parkin, Oxford, and
Cornelia Schnepel, Halle, for their expert work in making this volume lin-
guistically and stylistically coherent.
 PART I

Themes
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Burkhard Schnepel

The “Island Factor”

For many centuries, even millennia, the Indian Ocean has been tra-
versed in all directions by vessels not only transporting human beings
and commercial goods of many diverse kinds, but also circulating flora,
fauna, ideas, ideologies, deities, rituals, charities, materia medica and
therapeutics, sociocultural practices, habitus, performances, art genres,
political systems, technologies, languages, and unfortunately also waste
and diseases. These movements, and the maritime exchanges that have
accompanied them, have been enthusiastically investigated by histori-
ans, geographers, anthropologists, archaeologists, and scholars of other
disciplines. Their studies, too numerous to mention,1 have thrown light
on the various means and modes of circulating these animate and inani-
mate “things” across the sea, as well as providing insights into the vari-
ous translations in meaning and function which they experience before,
during, and after their journeys. Thus far, Indian Ocean Studies have also

B. Schnepel (*)
Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology, Martin Luther University
of Halle-Wittenberg, Halle, Germany

© The Author(s) 2018 3

B. Schnepel and E.A. Alpers (eds.), Connectivity in Motion,
Palgrave Series in Indian Ocean World Studies,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-59725-6_1
4 B. Schnepel

given us a useful picture of the various more or less stable networks that
have arisen out of these movements and exchanges over time. This, by
and large, is the field of knowledge, which we wish to capture by the
concept of “connectivity in motion.”2
To be sure, much more collaborative work still needs to be done
on such a vast region with such a long history. Among other fields of
inquiry, there is the continuing challenge to look more closely at the
very places and their inhabitants who are instrumental in circulating peo-
ple, objects, and ideas and whose sociocultural, politico-economic, and
mental characteristics have, in turn, been shaped by these activities, func-
tions, and ideational arrangements in typical ways. Here, these s­pecial
places-cum-people—paradigmatically port cities and certain islands
(including their ports and even port cities)—are identified by the term
“hub,” by which is meant an agentive knot in a network of transporta-
tion systems, including the transportation of information and knowledge
through the World Wide Web. As “the effective center of an activity,
region, or network” (Oxford Dictionary Online), hubs are significant
points, indeed “actants,” of convergence, entanglement, and divergence
in the global streams of human beings, animals, finances, ideas, and other
matters, as well as being instrumental in the networks that these streams
create. Hubs, then, are understood as crucial elements of “connectivity
in motion.” The activities of these hubs could be called, for matters of
convenience, “hubbing.”
This volume looks at connectivity in motion across the Indian Ocean
with a special look at the significant role, which islands or, better, “island
hubs,” have played in history and today in maritime exchanges, trans-
lations and networks across the Indian Ocean world. In an article first
published in 2000, Edward A. Alpers (2009, 39–54) identifies what he
calls “the island factor.” Writing especially with regard to studies of the
premodern economic history of the Indian Ocean, he deplores “the
continental perspective” (ibid., 41), which “only discusses islands in
­
­passing” (ibid.). In fact, his own main focus is on the African side of the
Indian Ocean. Nonetheless, his statement that “although islands have
certainly been recognized as an important factor in the Indian Ocean
world by any number of scholars, no one has previously attempted to
locate all the islands of the Indian Ocean in their relationship to the his-
tory of eastern Africa” (ibid., 40) can be extended to the history of the
Indian Ocean world at large. Furthermore, his observation can also be
used to draw attention to a gap in scholarship with regard not only to
history, but to other dimensions and fields of knowledge as well, such
 1 INTRODUCTION 5

as human geography, social anthropology, the study of political and eco-

nomic relations, or investigations into the geostrategical and military
dimensions of the Indian Ocean world.
I therefore suggest that it is time to draw encouragement from Alpers’
observation and tackle the “island factor,” that is, “the integral role that
these islands have played and continue to play over several millennia in
the history of Indian Ocean Africa” (ibid., 54). By extension, I suggest
doing so with regard to the Indian Ocean as a whole, and doing so in
more all-embracing interdisciplinary as well as systematic terms. This
endeavor will be undertaken here with a focus on those islands in the
Indian Ocean that count as “small.” This special focus is not meant to
neglect the importance and the “insular” role of larger islands such as
Madagascar, Sri Lanka, or Sumatra, which will not be left unacknowl-
edged in the articles that follow. However, our prime attention will be
drawn to “smallness” not just empirically, but also methodologically,
by inquiring whether the criteria of size has made a difference and, if
so, how. Smallness may count in other ways than a sense of size alone.
Island identities and island imaginaries, which are significant when it
comes to considering the role of islands in Indian Ocean connectivity,
are ideal typically linked to small islands, while on large islands such as
Madagascar or Java, a quite substantial number of people can lead and
experience their lives without experiencing a sense of insularity.3
This volume includes scholars who are delving deeply into the history
and sociocultural, politico-economic, geostrategic, and religious worlds
of particular Indian Ocean islands and who are inquiring especially about
their structural and historical roles as hubs in the Indian Ocean world.
In order to enable the reader, who may not be familiar with the overall
image of islands in the Indian Ocean, to locate these studies of specific
places and historical periods within a larger framework, this introduction
continues with an overview of the Indian Ocean world islands before rais-
ing some theoretical and methodological issues concerning islands, island
hubs, and the issue of connectivity in motion in the sections that follow.

The Indian Ocean World of Islands: An Overview

There are various criteria according to which the extremely manifold and
heterogeneous Indian Ocean world of islands could be envisaged in a
holistic and systematic way.4 One criterion is their “whereabouts” within
the ocean which the maps provided in this volume will help to identify
if unknown before. Furthermore, looking at their geophysical origins
6 B. Schnepel

and constitutions, the Indian Ocean islands can be divided into three
types. Some have been built up, often over millennia, by the growth
of corals, one well-known example being the Maldives. Others, such as
Réunion, the Comoros, or the northern Moluccas, have emerged more
rapidly from volcanic eruptions; and yet others are granite-based islands
that have split off from continental or subcontinental landmasses. To
this group belong Madagascar and Sri Lanka, as well as smaller islands
such as Socotra in the Gulf of Aden and parts of the Seychelles. To
apply yet another criterion: Size undoubtedly matters in many respects,
even though any absolute determination of whether an island is small
or large is complicated by the fact that there are so many different sizes
on a putative scale that it is hard to draw a distinguishing line between
larg(er) and small(er) islands. Most of the islands in the Indian Ocean
(as indeed in the other oceans of the world)5 are indeed small(er), so that
under this criterion of size, it is easier to single out those islands which
are undoubtedly large. Under this heading one must, of course, subsume
Madagascar, which, with an area of just under 600,000 square kilometers
and a population of roughly 24 million, is the third-largest island in the
world. Then, there are the larger islands of Sri Lanka in South Asia as
well as the so-called Greater Sunda Islands of Sumatra, Java, Borneo, and
Sulawesi in Southeast Asia.
To take a further possible criterion of systematization, any empirical
overview of the Indian Ocean world of islands could distinguish between
those islands which are close(r) to the mainland and those which lie
­further out in the sea. To the first category belong the numerous islands
that stretch along the East African coast, also known as the Swahili
coast, from Somalia in the north to the mouth of the Zambezi River
in the modern nation state of Mozambique in the south. These islands
and their port cities, such as Mombasa, Lamu, Kilwa, or Mozambique,
are often so close to the mainland that, at the scales that most maps
use to depict this coast, they are not easily discernible as being islands
at all. Similar to these inshore islands along the Swahili coast, one finds
numerous coral islands situated close to the western shore of the Red
Sea. Some of these Red Sea islets functioned and still function as the
seats of regionally important port cities, with Suakin in the Sudan and
Massawa in Eritrea representing two prime examples. Further east, and
still belonging to this “coastal group,” there are the (originally) seven
islands out of which was formed the present megacity of Mumbai
(Bombay), while further south on the western Indian coast, we also find
 1 INTRODUCTION 7

the port city of Cochin, hardly ever recognized on maps as being located
(in part) on an island. Then, there are the innumerable small islands
stretching close inshore along the Southeast Asian coasts of Bangladesh,
Burma, Thailand, Malaysia, and Sumatra. Some of the latter have only
acquired significance in the age of tourism, while others have remained
perpetually in oblivion, and yet others have acquired some role in his-
tory, such as Penang in Malaysia, with its port city of George Town.
Comparable to these coastal islands and still within this category are
a) those islands which lie in the mouths of rivers, such as Sofala at the
entrance to the Buzi River; b) located in or close to gulfs, such as the
island of Kharg in the Persian Gulf or Diu at the entrance to the Gulf of
Khambat in northwest India; or c) “choke-point islands,” such as most
prominently represented by Hormuz in the Persian Gulf or Singapore
at the southeastern tip of the Straits of Malacca. This category can be
complemented, if one adds those islands that lie close to the “mainland”
of larger islands. For example, “la grand île” of Madagascar has many
small islands immediately off its coasts, such as Nosy Boraha (Île Sainte
Marie) to the northeast and Nosy Be to the northwest.
As far as the other part of this criterion of closeness or distance to
a given mainland is concerned, there are a number of archipelagos
­scattered all over the Indian Ocean at some distance away from any ter-
ritorial landmasses. In Southeast Asia, roughly 25,000 islands form the
Malay Archipelago. Most of them, around 18,000 (of which approxi-
mately 6,000 are inhabited), today belong to the Republic of Indonesia,
with its more than a quarter of a billion inhabitants. Stretching roughly
northwest to southeast, the Sunda Islands include the (physically
smaller) “Lesser Sunda Islands” of Bali, Lombok, Flores, and Timor.
East of Sulawesi and west of New Guinea are the roughly one thousand
Moluccas (Maluku) Islands, with their approximately two million inhab-
itants, to mention here only the larger islands of Halmahera in the north
and Ceram in the south of this archipelago as well as the smaller but
arguably more important islands of Ternate and Tidore in the northern
Moluccas and the Banda Islands and Ambon in the south.
In the southwest subregion of the Indian Ocean, there are three
archipelagos, namely the Comores, the Seychelles, and the Mascarenes,
which, apart from their relative geographical proximity to each other,
form some kind of unity for three reasons. First, initially, they all came
to be inhabited in significant numbers by Africans. This factor has
shaped the demography of these islands so significantly that there is
8 B. Schnepel

some justification for regarding them as “Africa in the Indian Ocean.”6

Secondly, notwithstanding the many historical particularities and
contingencies that these islands have experienced, eventually they all
­
came under French colonial influence and rule.7 Therefore, a French
legacy and continuing impact are quite marked on these islands until
today, not only in language and culture, but in important social, political,
military, economic, and legal respects as well. Thirdly, they all had and
still have important plantation economies, which did not just determine
the economic fate of these islands, but also their settlement histories and
present-day sociocultural arrangements. The four islands of the Comoros
Archipelago, namely Grande Comore (Ngazidja), Mohéli (Mwali),
Anjouan (Ndzuani), and Mayotte (Maore), found themselves at the
southernmost limit that sailors could still reach and depart from using
the regular pattern of the monsoon winds. The three main islands mak-
ing up the Mascarenes lying 700, 900 and 1,500 kilometers, respectively,
east of Madagascar, namely Réunion, Mauritius, and Rodrigues, had not
been settled before Europeans arrived in the region from the seventeenth
century onwards, so that their human history is essentially a colonial
one. They were not only meant to function as ports of call for succes-
sive European East Indiamen, but eventually also came to host extensive
plantations, a fact which required large masses of imported labor, u­ sually
African slaves, in the eighteenth century and Indian “coolies” in the
nineteenth. While Mauritius, Rodrigues and a number of smaller islands
now form the Republic of Mauritius with altogether just over 2,000
square kilometers and roughly 1.3 million citizens, the island of Réunion
(approximately 2,500 square kilometers; 835,000 inhabitants) opted to
stay with France as “Département d’outre-mer” (as did the Comorian
Mayotte). More than one thousand miles northeast of the Mascarenes
and for a long time belonging to the British colony of Mauritius as
dependency, one finds the Chagos Archipelago. Shortly before Mauritius
was granted independence from the British, the latter, in a move that is
still controversial today, established a “British Indian Ocean Territory”
(BIOT) out of these 65 coral islands and the waters surrounding them.8
Situated at about the same latitude as the Chagos Archipelago, namely
immediately south of the equator, and around 1,500 kilometers away
from the East African coast lies the Seychelles Archipelago, consisting
of more than a hundred islands spread over a vast maritime region. The
three “Inner Islands” of Mahé, Prasline, and La Digue contain the great
majority of the Seychellois population of just over 90,000. In terms of
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unnerved me in the contemplation of the House of Usher? It was a
mystery all insoluble; nor could I grapple with the shadowy fancies
that crowded upon me as I pondered. I was forced to fall back upon
the unsatisfactory conclusion that while, beyond doubt, there are
combinations of very simple natural objects which have the power of
thus affecting us, still the analysis of this power lies among
considerations beyond our depth. It was possible, I reflected, that a
mere different arrangement of the particulars of the scene, of the
details of the picture, would be sufficient to modify, or perhaps to
annihilate its capacity for sorrowful impression; and, acting upon this
idea, I reined my horse to the precipitous brink of a black and lurid
tarn that lay in unruffled lustre by the dwelling, and gazed down—but
with a shudder even more thrilling than before—upon the remodelled
and inverted images of the gray sedge, and the ghastly tree-stems,
and the vacant and eye-like windows.
Nevertheless, in this mansion of gloom I now proposed to myself
a sojourn of some weeks. Its proprietor, Roderick Usher, had been
one of my boon companions in boyhood; but many years had
elapsed since our last meeting. A letter, however, had lately reached
me in a distant part of the country—a letter from him—which, in its
wildly importunate nature, had admitted of no other than a personal
reply. The MS. gave evidence of nervous agitation. The writer spoke
of acute bodily illness, of a mental disorder which oppressed him,
and of an earnest desire to see me, as his best, and indeed his only
personal friend, with a view of attempting, by the cheerfulness of my
society, some alleviation of his malady. It was the manner in which all
this, and much more, was said—it was the apparent heart that went
with his request—which allowed me no room for hesitation; and I
accordingly obeyed forthwith what I still considered a very singular
summons.
Although, as boys, we had been even intimate associates, yet I
really knew little of my friend. His reserve had been always
excessive and habitual. I was aware, however, that his very ancient
family had been noted, time out of mind, for a peculiar sensibility of
temperament, displaying itself, through long ages, in many works of
exalted art, and manifested, of late, in repeated deeds of munificent,
yet unobtrusive charity, as well as in a passionate devotion to the
intricacies, perhaps even more than to the orthodox and easily
recognizable beauties, of musical science. I had learned, too, the
very remarkable fact that the stem of the Usher race, all time-
honored as it was, had put forth, at no period, any enduring branch;
in other words, that the entire family lay in the direct line of descent,
and had always, with very trifling and very temporary variation, so
lain. It was this deficiency, I considered, while running over in
thought the perfect keeping of the character of the premises with the
accredited character of the people, and while speculating upon the
possible influence which the one, in the long lapse of centuries,
might have exercised upon the other—it was this deficiency,
perhaps, of collateral issue, and the consequent undeviating
transmission, from sire to son, of the patrimony with the name, which
had, at length, so identified the two as to merge the original title of
the estate in the quaint and equivocal appellation of the “House of
Usher”—an appellation which seemed to include, in the minds of the
peasantry who used it, both the family and the family mansion.
I have said that the sole effect of my somewhat childish
experiment of looking down within the tarn had been to deepen the
first singular impression. There can be no doubt that the
consciousness of the rapid increase of my superstition—for why
should I not so term it?—served mainly to accelerate the increase
itself. Such, I have long known, is the paradoxical law of all
sentiments having terror as a basis. And it might have been for this
reason only, that, when I again uplifted my eyes to the house itself,
from its image in the pool, there grew in my mind a strange fancy—a
fancy so ridiculous, indeed, that I but mention it to show the vivid
force of the sensations which oppressed me. I had so worked upon
my imagination as really to believe that about the whole mansion
and domain there hung an atmosphere peculiar to themselves and
their immediate vicinity—an atmosphere which had no affinity with
the air of heaven, but which had reeked up from the decayed trees,
and the gray wall, and the silent tarn—a pestilent and mystic vapor,
dull, sluggish, faintly discernible, and leaden-hued.
 Shaking off from my spirit what must have been a dream, I
scanned more narrowly the real aspect of the building. Its principal
feature seemed to be that of an excessive antiquity. The
discoloration of ages had been great. Minute fungi overspread the
whole exterior, hanging in a fine, tangled web-work from the eaves.
Yet all this was apart from any extraordinary dilapidation. No portion
of the masonry had fallen; and there appeared to be a wild
inconsistency between its still perfect adaptation of parts, and the
crumbling condition of the individual stones. In this there was much
that reminded me of the specious totality of old wood-work which has
rotted for years in some neglected vault, with no disturbance from
the breath of the external air. Beyond this indication of extensive
decay, however, the fabric gave little token of instability. Perhaps the
eye of a scrutinizing observer might have discovered a barely
perceptible fissure, which, extending from the roof of the building in
front, made its way down the wall in a zigzag direction, until it
became lost in the sullen waters of the tarn.
Noticing these things, I rode over a short causeway to the house.
A servant in waiting took my horse, and I entered the Gothic archway
of the hall. A valet, of stealthy step, thence conducted me, in silence,
through many dark and intricate passages in my progress to the
studio of his master. Much that I encountered on the way
contributed, I know not how, to heighten the vague sentiments of
which I have already spoken. While the objects around me—while
the carvings of the ceilings, the sombre tapestries of the walls, the
ebon blackness of the floors, and the phantasmagoric armorial
trophies which rattled as I strode, were but matters to which, or to
such as which, I had been accustomed from my infancy—while I
hesitated not to acknowledge how familiar was all this—I still
wondered to find how unfamiliar were the fancies which ordinary
images were stirring up. On one of the staircases, I met the
physician of the family. His countenance, I thought, wore a mingled
expression of low cunning and perplexity. He accosted me with
trepidation and passed on. The valet now threw open a door and
ushered me into the presence of his master.
 The room in which I found myself was very large and lofty. The
windows were long, narrow, and pointed, and at so vast a distance
from the black oaken floor as to be altogether inaccessible from
within. Feeble gleams of encrimsoned light made their way through
the trelliced panes, and served to render sufficiently distinct the more
prominent objects around; the eye, however, struggled in vain to
reach the remoter angles of the chamber, or the recesses of the
vaulted and fretted ceiling. Dark draperies hung upon the walls. The
general furniture was profuse, comfortless, antique, and tattered.
Many books and musical instruments lay scattered about, but failed
to give any vitality to the scene. I felt that I breathed an atmosphere
of sorrow. An air of stern, deep, and irredeemable gloom hung over
and pervaded all.
Upon my entrance, Usher arose from a sofa on which he had
been lying at full length, and greeted me with a vivacious warmth
which had much in it, I at first thought, of an overdone cordiality—of
the constrained effort of the ennuyé man of the world. A glance,
however, at his countenance convinced me of his perfect sincerity.
We sat down; and for some moments, while he spoke not, I gazed
upon him with a feeling half of pity, half of awe. Surely, man had
never before so terribly altered, in so brief a period, as had Roderick
Usher! It was with difficulty that I could bring myself to admit the
identity of the wan being before me with the companion of my early
boyhood. Yet the character of his face had been at all times
remarkable. A cadaverousness of complexion; an eye large, liquid,
and luminous beyond comparison; lips somewhat thin and very
pallid, but of a surpassingly beautiful curve; a nose of a delicate
Hebrew model, but with a breadth of nostril unusual in similar
formations; a finely moulded chin, speaking, in its want of
prominence, of a want of moral energy; hair of a more than web-like
softness and tenuity; these features, with an inordinate expansion
above the regions of the temple, made up altogether a countenance
not easily to be forgotten. And now in the mere exaggeration of the
prevailing character of these features, and of the expression they
were wont to convey, lay so much of change that I doubted to whom
I spoke. The now ghastly pallor of the skin, and the now miraculous
lustre of the eye, above all things startled and even awed me. The
silken hair, too, had been suffered to grow all unheeded, and as, in
its wild gossamer texture, it floated rather than fell about the face, I
could not, even with effort, connect its arabesque expression with
any idea of simple humanity.
In the manner of my friend I was at once struck with an
incoherence—an inconsistency; and I soon found this to arise from a
series of feeble and futile struggles to overcome an habitual
trepidancy, an excessive nervous agitation. For something of this
nature I had indeed been prepared, no less by his letter than by
reminiscences of certain boyish traits, and by conclusions deduced
from his peculiar physical conformation and temperament. His action
was alternately vivacious and sullen. His voice varied rapidly from a
tremulous indecision (when the animal spirits seemed utterly in
abeyance) to that species of energetic concision—that abrupt,
weighty, unhurried, and hollow-sounding enunciation—that leaden,
self-balanced and perfectly modulated guttural utterance, which may
be observed in the lost drunkard, or the irreclaimable eater of opium,
during the periods of his most intense excitement.
It was thus that he spoke of the object of my visit, of his earnest
desire to see me, and of the solace he expected me to afford him.
He entered, at some length, into what he conceived to be the nature
of his malady. It was, he said, a constitutional and a family evil, and
one for which he despaired to find a remedy—a mere nervous
affection, he immediately added, which would undoubtedly soon
pass off. It displayed itself in a host of unnatural sensations. Some of
these, as he detailed them, interested and bewildered me; although,
perhaps, the terms and the general manner of the narration had their
weight. He suffered much from a morbid acuteness of the senses.
The most insipid food was alone endurable; he could wear only
garments of certain texture; the odors of all flowers were oppressive;
his eyes were tortured by even a faint light; and there were but
peculiar sounds, and these from stringed instruments, which did not
inspire him with horror.
To an anomalous species of terror I found him a bounden slave.
“I shall perish,” said he, “I must perish in this deplorable folly. Thus,
thus, and not otherwise, shall I be lost. I dread the events of the
future, not in themselves, but in their results. I shudder at the thought
of any, even the most trivial, incident, which may operate upon this
intolerable agitation of soul. I have, indeed, no abhorrence of danger,
except in its absolute effect—in terror. In this unnerved—in this
pitiable condition—I feel that the period will sooner or later arrive
when I must abandon life and reason together, in some struggle with
the grim phantasm, Fear.”
I learned, moreover, at intervals, and through broken and
equivocal hints, another singular feature of his mental condition. He
was enchained by certain superstitious impressions in regard to the
dwelling which he tenanted, and whence, for many years, he had
never ventured forth—in regard to an influence whose supposititious
force was conveyed in terms too shadowy here to be restated—an
influence which some peculiarities in the mere form and substance
of his family mansion, had, by dint of long sufferance, he said,
obtained over his spirit—an effect which the physique of the gray
walls and turrets, and of the dim tarn into which they all looked down,
had, at length, brought about upon the morale of his existence.
He admitted, however, although with hesitation, that much of the
peculiar gloom which thus afflicted him could be traced to a more
natural and far more palpable origin—to the severe and long-
continued illness—indeed to the evidently approaching dissolution—
of a tenderly beloved sister, his sole companion for long years, his
last and only relative on earth. “Her decease,” he said, with a
bitterness which I can never forget, “would leave him (him the
hopeless and the frail) the last of the ancient race of the Ushers.”
While he spoke, the lady Madeline (for so was she called) passed
slowly through a remote portion of the apartment, and, without
having noticed my presence, disappeared. I regarded her with an
40
utter astonishment not unmingled with dread; and yet I found it
impossible to account for such feelings. A sensation of stupor
oppressed me, as my eyes followed her retreating steps. When a
door, at length, closed upon her, my glance sought instinctively and
eagerly the countenance of the brother; but he had buried his face in
his hands, and I could only perceive that a far more than ordinary
wanness had overspread the emaciated fingers through which
trickled many passionate tears.
The disease of the lady Madeline had long baffled the skill of her
physicians. A settled apathy, a gradual wasting away of the person,
and frequent although transient affections of a partially cataleptical
character, were the unusual diagnosis. Hitherto she had steadily
borne up against the pressure of her malady, and had not betaken
herself finally to bed; but, on the closing in of the evening of my
arrival at the house, she succumbed (as her brother told me at night
with inexpressible agitation) to the prostrating power of the
destroyer; and I learned that the glimpse I had obtained of her
person would thus probably be the last I should obtain—that the
lady, at least while living, would be seen by me no more.
For several days ensuing her name was unmentioned by either
Usher or myself; and during this period I was busied in earnest
endeavors to alleviate the melancholy of my friend. We painted and
read together; or I listened, as if in a dream, to the wild
improvisations of his speaking guitar. And thus, as a closer and still
closer intimacy admitted me more unreservedly into the recesses of
his spirit, the more bitterly did I perceive the futility of all attempt at
cheering a mind from which darkness, as if an inherent positive
quality, poured forth upon all objects of the moral and physical
universe, in one unceasing radiation of gloom.
I shall ever bear about me a memory of the many solemn hours I
thus spent alone with the master of the House of Usher. Yet I should
fail in any attempt to convey an idea of the exact character of the
studies, or of the occupations in which he involved me, or led me the
way. An excited and highly distempered ideality threw a sulphurous
lustre over all. His long improvised dirges will ring forever in my ears.
Among other things, I hold painfully in mind a certain singular
perversion and amplification of the wild air of the last waltz of Von
Weber. From the paintings over which his elaborate fancy brooded,
and which grew, touch by touch, into vaguenesses at which I
shuddered the more thrillingly because I shuddered knowing not
why;—from these paintings (vivid as their images now are before
me) I would in vain endeavor to educe more than a small portion
which should lie within the compass of merely written words. By the
utter simplicity, by the nakedness of his designs, he arrested and
overawed attention. If ever mortal painted an idea, that mortal was
Roderick Usher. For me at least, in the circumstances then
surrounding me, there arose out of the pure abstractions which the
hypochondriac contrived to throw upon his canvas, an intensity of
intolerable awe, no shadow of which felt I ever yet in the
contemplation of the certainly glowing yet too concrete reveries of
Fuseli.
One of the phantasmagoric conceptions of my friend, partaking
not so rigidly of the spirit of abstraction, may be shadowed forth,
although feebly, in words. A small picture presented the interior of an
immensely long and rectangular vault or tunnel, with low walls,
smooth, white, and without interruption or device. Certain accessory
points of the design served well to convey the idea that this
excavation lay at an exceeding depth below the surface of the earth.
No outlet was observed in any portion of its vast extent, and no
torch, or other artificial source of light was discernible; yet a flood of
intense rays rolled throughout, and bathed the whole in a ghastly
and inappropriate splendor.
I have just spoken of that morbid condition of the auditory nerve
which rendered all music intolerable to the sufferer, with the
exception of certain effects of stringed instruments. It was, perhaps,
the narrow limits to which he thus confined himself upon the guitar,
which gave birth, in great measure, to the fantastic character of his
performances. But the fervid facility of his impromptus could not be
so accounted for. They must have been, and were, in the notes, as
well as in the words of his wild fantasias (for he not unfrequently
accompanied himself with rhymed verbal improvisations), the result
of that intense mental collectedness and concentration to which I
have previously alluded as observable only in particular moments of
the highest artificial excitement. The words of one of these
rhapsodies I have easily remembered. I was, perhaps, the more
forcibly impressed with it, as he gave it, because, in the under or
mystic current of its meaning, I fancied that I perceived, and for the
first time, a full consciousness on the part of Usher, of the tottering of
his lofty reason upon her throne. The verses, which were entitled
“The Haunted Palace,” ran very nearly, if not accurately, thus:

I.
In the greenest of our valleys,
By good angels tenanted,
Once a fair and stately palace—
Radiant palace—reared its head.
In the monarch Thought’s dominion—
It stood there!
Never seraph spread a pinion
Over fabric half so fair.

II.
Banners yellow, glorious, golden,
On its roof did float and flow;
(This—all this—was in the olden
Time long ago)
And every gentle air that dallied,
In that sweet day,
Along the ramparts plumed and pallid,
A winged odor went away.

III.
Wanderers in that happy valley
Through two luminous windows saw
Spirits moving musically
To a lute’s well-tunèd law,
Round about a throne, where sitting
(Porphyrogene!)
In state his glory well befitting,
The ruler of the realm was seen.
 IV.
And all with pearl and ruby glowing
Was the fair palace door,
Through which came flowing, flowing, flowing,
And sparkling evermore,
A troop of Echoes whose sweet duty
Was but to sing,
In voices of surpassing beauty,
The wit and wisdom of their king.

V.
But evil things, in robes of sorrow,
Assailed the monarch’s high estate
(Ah, let us mourn, for never morrow
Shall dawn upon him, desolate!);
And, round about his home, the glory
That blushed and bloomed
Is but a dim-remembered story
Of the old time entombed.

VI.
And travellers now within that valley,
Through the red-litten windows, see
Vast forms that move fantastically
To a discordant melody;
While, like a rapid ghastly river,
Through the pale door,
A hideous throng rush out forever,
And laugh—but smile no more.

I well remember that suggestions arising from this ballad led us

into a train of thought wherein there became manifest an opinion of
Usher’s which I mention not so much on account of its novelty (for
 41
other men I have thought thus) as on account of the pertinacity
with which he maintained it. This opinion, in its general form, was
that of the sentience of all vegetable things. But, in his disordered
fancy, the idea had assumed a more daring character, and
trespassed, under certain conditions, upon the kingdom of
inorganization. I lack words to express the full extent or the earnest
abandon of his persuasion. The belief, however, was connected (as I
have previously hinted) with the gray stones of the home of his
forefathers. The conditions of the sentience had been here, he
imagined, fulfilled in the method of collocation of these stones—in
the order of their arrangement, as well as in that of the many fungi
which overspread them, and of the decayed trees which stood
around—above all, in the long undisturbed endurance of this
arrangement, and in its reduplication in the still waters of the tarn. Its
evidence—the evidence of the sentience—was to be seen, he said,
(and I here started as he spoke), in the gradual yet certain
condensation of an atmosphere of their own about the waters and
the walls. The result was discoverable, he added, in that silent, yet
importunate and terrible influence which for centuries had moulded
the destinies of his family, and which made him what I now saw him
—what he was. Such opinions need no comment, and I will make
none.
Our books—the books, which, for years, had formed no small
portion of the mental existence of the invalid—were, as might be
supposed, in strict keeping with this character of phantasm. We
pored together over such works as the Ververt et Chartreuse of
Gresset; the Belphegor of Machiavelli; the Heaven and Hell of
Swedenborg; the Subterranean Voyage of Nicholas Klimm by
Holberg; the Chiromancy of Robert Flud, of Jean D’Indaginé, and of
De la Chambre; the Journey into the Blue Distance of Tieck; and the
City of the Sun of Campanella. One favorite volume was a small
octavo edition of the Directorium Inquisitorium, by the Dominican
Eymeric de Gironne; and there were passages in Pomponius Mela,
about the old African Satyrs and Œgipans, over which Usher would
sit dreaming for hours. His chief delight, however, was found in the
perusal of an exceedingly rare and curious book in quarto Gothic—
the manual of a forgotten church—the Vigiliæ Mortuorum secundum
Chorum Ecclesiæ Maguntinæ.
I could not help thinking of the wild ritual of this work, and of its
probable influence upon the hypochondriac, when, one evening,
having informed me abruptly that the lady Madeline was no more, he
stated his intention of preserving her corpse for a fortnight
(previously to its final interment) in one of the numerous vaults within
the main walls of the building. The worldly reason, however,
assigned for this singular proceeding was one which I did not feel at
liberty to dispute. The brother had been led to his resolution, so he
told me, by consideration of the unusual character of the malady of
the deceased, of certain obtrusive and eager inquiries on the part of
her medical men, and of the remote and exposed situation of the
burial-ground of the family. I will not deny that when I called to mind
the sinister countenance of the person whom I met upon the
staircase, on the day of my arrival at the house, I had no desire to
oppose what I regarded as at best but a harmless, and by no means
an unnatural, precaution.
At the request of Usher, I personally aided him in the
arrangements for the temporary entombment. The body having been
encoffined, we two alone bore it to its rest. The vault in which we
placed it (and which had been so long unopened that our torches,
half smothered in its oppressive atmosphere, gave us little
opportunity for investigation) was small, damp, and entirely without
means of admission for light; lying, at great depth, immediately
beneath that portion of the building in which was my own sleeping
apartment. It had been used, apparently, in remote feudal times, for
the worst purposes of a donjon-keep, and, in later days, as a place
of deposit for powder, or some other highly combustible substance,
as a portion of its floor, and the whole interior of a long archway
through which we reached it, were carefully sheathed with copper.
The door, of massive iron, had been, also, similarly protected. Its
immense weight caused an unusually sharp grating sound, as it
moved upon its hinges.
Having deposited our mournful burden upon tressels within this
region of horror, we partially turned aside the yet unscrewed lid of
the coffin, and looked upon the face of the tenant. A striking
similitude between the brother and sister now first arrested my
attention; and Usher, divining, perhaps, my thoughts, murmured out
some few words from which I learned that the deceased and himself
had been twins, and that sympathies of a scarcely intelligible nature
had always existed between them. Our glances, however, rested not
long upon the dead—for we could not regard her unawed. The
disease which had thus entombed the lady in the maturity of youth,
had left, as usual in all maladies of a strictly cataleptical character,
the mockery of a faint blush upon the bosom and the face, and that
suspiciously lingering smile upon the lip which is so terrible in death.
We replaced and screwed down the lid, and, having secured the
door of iron, made our way, with toil, into the scarcely less gloomy
apartments of the upper portion of the house.
And now, some days of bitter grief having elapsed, an
observable change came over the features of the mental disorder of
my friend. His ordinary manner had vanished. His ordinary
occupations were neglected or forgotten. He roamed from chamber
to chamber with hurried, unequal, and objectless step. The pallor of
his countenance had assumed, if possible, a more ghastly hue—but
the luminousness of his eye had utterly gone out. The once
occasional huskiness of his tone was heard no more; and a
tremulous quaver, as if of extreme terror, habitually characterized his
utterance. There were times, indeed, when I thought his unceasingly
agitated mind was laboring with some oppressive secret, to divulge
which he struggled for the necessary courage. At times, again, I was
obliged to resolve all into the mere inexplicable vagaries of madness;
for I beheld him gazing upon vacancy for long hours, in an attitude of
the profoundest attention, as if listening to some imaginary sound. It
was no wonder that his condition terrified—that it infected me. I felt
creeping upon me, by slow yet certain degrees, the wild influence of
his own fantastic yet impressive superstitions.
It was, especially, upon retiring to bed late in the night of the
seventh or eighth day after the placing of the lady Madeline within
the donjon, that I experienced the full power of such feelings. Sleep
came not near my couch, while the hours waned and waned away. I
struggled to reason off the nervousness which had dominion over
me. I endeavored to believe that much, if not all of what I felt, was
due to the bewildering influence of the gloomy furniture of the room
—of the dark and tattered draperies, which, tortured into motion by
the breath of a rising tempest, swayed fitfully to and fro upon the
walls, and rustled uneasily about the decorations of the bed. But my
efforts were fruitless. An irrepressible tremor gradually pervaded my
frame; and, at length, there sat upon my very heart an incubus of
utterly causeless alarm. Shaking this off with a gasp and a struggle, I
uplifted myself upon the pillows, and, peering earnestly within the
intense darkness of the chamber, harkened—I know not why, except
that an instinctive spirit prompted me—to certain low and indefinite
sounds which came, through the pauses of the storm, at long
intervals, I knew not whence. Overpowered by an intense sentiment
of horror, unaccountable yet unendurable, I threw on my clothes with
haste (for I felt that I should sleep no more during the night), and
endeavored to arouse myself from the pitiable condition into which I
had fallen, by pacing rapidly to and fro through the apartment.
I had taken but few turns in this manner, when a light step on an
adjoining staircase arrested my attention. I presently recognized it as
that of Usher. In an instant afterward he rapped, with a gentle touch,
at my door, and entered, bearing a lamp. His countenance was, as
usual, cadaverously wan—but, moreover, there was a species of
mad hilarity in his eyes—and evidently restrained hysteria in his
whole demeanor. His air appalled me—but anything was preferable
to the solitude which I had so long endured, and I even welcomed
his presence as a relief.
“And you have not seen it?” he said abruptly, after having stared
about him for some moments in silence—“you have not then seen it?
—but stay! you shall.” Thus speaking, and having carefully shaded
his lamp, he hurried to one of the casements, and threw it freely
open to the storm.
The impetuous fury of the entering gust nearly lifted us from our
feet. It was, indeed, a tempestuous yet sternly beautiful night, and
one wildly singular in its terror and its beauty. A whirlwind had
apparently collected its force in our vicinity; for there were frequent
and violent alterations in the direction of the wind; and the exceeding
density of the clouds (which hung so low as to press upon the turrets
of the house) did not prevent our perceiving the life-like velocity with
which they flew careering from all points against each other, without
passing away into the distance. I say that even their exceeding
density did not prevent our perceiving this—yet we had no glimpse of
the moon or stars—nor was there any flashing forth of the lightning.
But the under surfaces of the huge masses of agitated vapor, as well
as all terrestrial objects immediately around us, were glowing in the
unnatural light of a faintly luminous and distinctly visible gaseous
exhalation which hung about and enshrouded the mansion.
“You must not—you shall not behold this!” said I, shudderingly, to
Usher, as I led him, with a gentle violence, from the window to a
seat. “These appearances, which bewilder you, are merely electrical
phenomena not uncommon—or it may be that they have their
ghastly origin in the rank miasma of the tarn. Let us close this
casement—the air is chilling and dangerous to your frame. Here is
one of your favorite romances. I will read, and you shall listen;—and
so we will pass away this terrible night together.”
The antique volume which I had taken up was the Mad Trist of
Sir Launcelot Canning; but I had called it a favorite of Usher’s more
in sad jest than in earnest; for, in truth, there is little in its uncouth
and unimaginative prolixity which could have had interest for the lofty
and spiritual ideality of my friend. It was, however, the only book
immediately at hand; and I indulged a vague hope that the
excitement which now agitated the hypochondriac, might find relief
(for the history of mental disorder is full of similar anomalies) even in
the extremeness of the folly which I should read. Could I have
judged, indeed, by the wild, overstrained air of vivacity with which he
harkened, or apparently harkened, to the words of the tale, I might
well have congratulated myself upon the success of my design.
I had arrived at that well-known portion of the story where
Ethelred, the hero of the Trist, having sought in vain for peaceable
admission into the dwelling of the hermit, proceeds to make good an
entrance by force. Here, it will be remembered, the words of the
narrative run thus:
 “And Ethelred, who was by nature of a doughty heart, and who
was now mighty withal, on account of the powerfulness of the wine
which he had drunken, waited no longer to hold parley with the
hermit, who, in sooth, was of an obstinate and maliceful turn; but,
feeling the rain upon his shoulders, and fearing the rising of the
tempest, uplifted his mace outright, and, with blows, made quickly
room in the plankings of the door for his gauntleted hand; and now
pulling therewith sturdily, he so cracked, and ripped, and tore all
asunder, that the noise of the dry and hollow-sounding wood
alarummed and reverberated throughout the forest.”
At the termination of this sentence I started, and for a moment
paused; for it appeared to me (although I at once concluded that my
excited fancy had deceived me)—it appeared to me that, from some
very remote portion of the mansion, there came, indistinctly, to my
ears what might have been, in its exact similarity of character, the
echo (but a stifled and dull one certainly) of the very cracking and
ripping sound which Sir Launcelot had so particularly described. It
was, beyond doubt, the coincidence alone which had arrested my
attention; for, amid the rattling of the sashes of the casements, and
the ordinary commingled noises of the still increasing storm, the
sound, in itself, had nothing, surely, which should have interested or
disturbed me. I continued the story:
“But the good champion Ethelred, now entering within the door,
was sore enraged and amazed to perceive no signal of the maliceful
hermit; but, in the stead thereof, a dragon of a scaly and prodigious
demeanor, and of a fiery tongue, which sate in guard before a palace
of gold, with a floor of silver; and upon the wall there hung a shield of
shining brass with this legend enwritten—

Who entereth herein, a conqueror hath bin;

Who slayeth the dragon, the shield he shall win;

And Ethelred uplifted his mace, and struck upon the head of the
dragon, which fell before him, and gave up his pesty breath, with a
shriek so horrid and harsh, and withal so piercing, that Ethelred had
fain to close his ears with his hands against the dreadful noise of it,
the like whereof was never before heard.”
Here again I paused abruptly, and now with a feeling of wild
amazement—for there could be no doubt whatever that, in this
instance, I did actually hear (although from what direction it
proceeded I found it impossible to say) a low and apparently distant,
but harsh, protracted, and most unusual screaming or grating sound
—the exact counterpart of what my fancy had already conjured up
for the dragon’s unnatural shriek as described by the romancer.
Oppressed, as I certainly was, upon the occurrence of this
second and most extraordinary coincidence, by a thousand
conflicting sensations, in which wonder and extreme terror were
predominant, I still retained sufficient presence of mind to avoid
exciting, by any observation, the sensitive nervousness of my
companion. I was by no means certain that he had noticed the
sounds in question; although, assuredly, a strange alteration had,
during the last few minutes, taken place in his demeanor. From a
position fronting my own, he had gradually brought round his chair,
so as to sit with his face to the door of the chamber; and thus I could
but partially perceive his features, although I saw that his lips
trembled as if he were murmuring inaudibly. His head had dropped
upon his breast—yet I knew that he was not asleep, from the wide
and rigid opening of the eye as I caught a glance of it in profile. The
motion of his body, too, was at variance with this idea—for he rocked
from side to side with a gentle yet constant and uniform sway.
Having rapidly taken notice of all this, I resumed the narrative of Sir
Launcelot, which thus proceeded:
“And now the champion, having escaped from the terrible fury of
the dragon, bethinking himself of the brazen shield, and of the
breaking up of the enchantment which was upon it, removed the
carcass from out of the way before him, and approached valorously
over the silver pavement of the castle to where the shield was upon
the wall; which in sooth tarried not for his full coming, but fell down at
his feet upon the silver floor, with a mighty great and terrible ringing
sound.”
 No sooner had these syllables passed my lips, than—as if a
shield of brass had indeed, at the moment, fallen heavily upon a floor
of silver—I became aware of a distinct, hollow, metallic and
clangorous, yet apparently muffled reverberation. Completely
unnerved, I leaped to my feet; but the measured rocking movement
of Usher was undisturbed. I rushed to the chair in which he sat. His
eyes were bent fixedly before him, and throughout his whole
countenance there reigned a stony rigidity. But, as I placed my hand
upon his shoulder, there came a strong shudder over his whole
person; a sickly smile quivered about his lips; and I saw that he
spoke in a low, hurried, and gibbering murmur, as if unconscious of
my presence. Bending closely over him, I at length drank in the
hideous import of his words.
“Not hear it?—yes, I hear it, and have heard it. Long—long—
long—many minutes, many hours, many days, have I heard it—yet I
dared not—oh pity me, miserable wretch that I am!—I dared not—I
dared not speak! We have put her living in the tomb! Said I not that
my senses were acute? I now tell you that I heard her first feeble
movements in the hollow coffin. I heard them—many, many days ago
—yet I dared not—I dared not speak! And now—to-night—Ethelred
—ha! ha!—the breaking of the hermit’s door, and the death-cry of the
dragon, and the clangor of the shield!—say, rather, the rending of her
coffin, and the grating of the iron hinges of her prison, and her
struggles within the coppered archway of the vault! Oh whither shall I
fly? Will she not be here anon? Is she not hurrying to upbraid me for
my haste? Have I not heard her footstep on the stair? Do I not
distinguish that heavy and horrible beating of her heart? Madman!”—
here he sprang furiously to his feet, and shrieked out his syllables,
as if in the effort he were giving up his soul—“Madman! I tell you that
she now stands without the door!”
As if in the superhuman energy of his utterance there had been
found the potency of a spell—the huge antique pannels to which the
speaker pointed threw slowly back, upon the instant, their ponderous
and ebony jaws. It was the work of the rushing gust—but then
without those doors there did stand the lofty and enshrouded figure
of the lady Madeline of Usher. There was blood upon her white
robes, and the evidence of some bitter struggle upon every portion of
her emaciated frame. For a moment she remained trembling and
reeling to and fro upon the threshold—then, with a low, moaning cry,
fell heavily inward upon the person of her brother, and in her violent
and now final death-agonies, bore him to the floor a corpse, and a
victim to the terrors he had anticipated.
From that chamber, and from that mansion, I fled aghast. The
storm was still abroad in all its wrath as I found myself crossing the
old causeway. Suddenly there shot along the path a wild light, and I
turned to see whence a gleam so unusual could have issued; for the
vast house and its shadows were alone behind me. The radiance
was that of the full, setting, and blood-red moon, which now shone
vividly through that once barely-discernible fissure, of which I have
before spoken as extending from the roof of the building, in a zigzag
direction, to the base. While I gazed, this fissure rapidly widened—
there came a fierce breath of the whirlwind—the entire orb of the
satellite burst at once upon my sight—my brain reeled as I saw the
mighty walls rushing asunder—there was a long tumultuous shouting
sound like the voice of a thousand waters—and the deep and dank
tarn at my feet closed sullenly and silently over the fragments of the
“House of Usher.”
 NATHANIEL PARKER WILLIS
1806–1867

Town talk sums up much of Willis, both what he was and what he wrote. He lived
in the public eye; he wrote of the hour, for the hour. Naturally, therefore, his work
was dying while he was yet alive. Now he is hardly more than a name. Of Andover
and Yale what little impress he received was soon rubbed away by a life in which
the daily cultivation of eminent society was industriously made to yield the daily
crop of journalism. Indeed, a man so quick to take every new impression was
hardly the man to bear the marks of many old ones. And of course the happy
fluency that gave him even in youth a current popularity could dispense with that
other and more deliberate merit of form. Form, since he had no native sense of it,
and could get on swimmingly without it, he never seriously pursued. Few story-
writers have spoiled so many good plots. Not only is he chatty, digressive,
episodic, but he rarely has any clear solution and he never culminates. Such merit
as The Inlet of Peach Blossoms has in this aspect is quite exceptional. Piquant,
even vivid sometimes, in sketchy description, he has no composition. This,
doubtless, is why of the hundred tales that pleased his public not one is read by
ours.
Pencillings by the Way were supplied from Paris and London in the early ’30’s
to the New York Mirror, and in collective form entertained both Britons and
Americans. The characteristic title would serve as well for his subsequent
collections. A list is appended to the biography in the American Men of Letters
series by Professor Beers, who has also edited a volume of selections. A New
York editor for many years, Willis touched at so many points the literary life of his
time that this biography has been made admirably significant of its main social
aspects. In fact, the life of Willis has more enduring interest than his works.