The Islanders Read Online Free Page B

has created its own navigation charts of the seas, navigable passages, tidal surges, bays and shallows in its area. Each such chart or marine almanac contains information, often incorrect or distorted or based on guesswork, about the dominant winds in that region. However, these charts, almanacs and shipping logs also contain a wealth of vernacular first-hand accounts of great winds, sudden calms, bitter storms, as well as much documentary recording of the trade winds, the antitrades, the doldrums, the squalls, the headwinds.
    Geography and Topography – the effects of equatorial heat and the creation of localized storm winds, mountainous islands with cliffs and ravines, the horse latitudes, Coriolis, the cooling of the poles, the temperate weather systems of high and low pressures, differential sea temperatures, the effects of the gravitational impact of the sun and the moon.
    Esphoven Muy did not live to see the expansion of the Academy, because although she lived to a great age she departed from Aay in unexplained circumstances and never returned.
    She was in her thirty-seventh year when the artist Dryd Bathurst arrived on Aay and set up a studio in the artists’ quarter of Aay Port. At this time the Academy was still based around her own house. Town records show that Bathurst was resident on the island for less than a year, but during that period he created three of his most celebrated paintings.
    Two of them are huge canvases. The first is what many people consider to be the masterwork of his early period: The Raising of the Hopeless Dead . This is an apocalyptic vision of a mountainous landscape – once you know that Bathurst was on Aay when he painted the picture, it becomes obvious that the terrible peaks are based on Aay’s central range. In the painting, the mountains are being torn apart by a violent electric storm, with cascades of water, rock and liquid mud flooding down the slopes to engulf a fleeing population.
    The second painting is no less epic and is held by some critics to be the greater of the two. Final Hour of the Relief Ship depicts a storm at sea: a sailing vessel is foundering amid gigantic waves, her sails torn into ribbons and two of her masts broken. A huge sea-serpent is apparently about to consume the passengers and crew leaping from the decks into the sea. Both of these major works are in the permanent collection of the Covenant Maritime Gallery, on the island of Muriseay.
    The third painting from Bathurst’s Aay period was a portrait of Esphoven Muy herself, and its whereabouts is unknown to this day.
    Although the original painting was never exhibited on Aay, colour reproductions based on Bathurst’s own print of it are familiar. It is on a significantly smaller scale than the massive oil paintings which were Bathurst’s usual stock in trade. The painting of Muy was executed in tempera, the subtle colours employed to render her as a stunningly attractive woman, her light clothes in suggestive disarray while a mocking wind teases at her hair. Her smile, and the expression in her eyes, leaves little doubt in the mind of the viewer about what her relationship with the painter must have been. The painting, called E. M. The Singer of Airs , is unique in Bathurst’s body of work: no other picture of his is so intimate, so sensual, so revealing of his love and passion.
    Esphoven Muy is believed to have left Aay at around the same time as Bathurst moved on. She was popularly assumed to have followed him, and that her absence would therefore be short-lived.
    Even as early as this in Bathurst’s career, he was renowned not just for his fickle attachments to islands, but also to women. Work at the Academy continued but for the first two or three years after Muy departed the Academy seemed to lose a sense of direction. It was later reorganized when senior members of the academic body created a new managing foundation, and the Academy in its modern form started to take shape.
    Muy herself, though,