Watching the television pictures of 20ft waves battering the islands of the Caribbean last week made it almost possible to believe in those stories of mythical islands and lost continents overwhelmed by the sea — Atlantis, described by Plato as lying somewhere beyond the Pillars of Hercules (the Strait of Gibraltar), recalled now in the name of the Atlantic Ocean; Lyonesse, the fabled land bridge between Cornwall and Scilly, remembered in the Arthurian chronicles of Malory and the poetry of Tennyson and Hardy; and Antilla, sometimes identified with Atlantis itself, recalled in the collective name for the Caribbean islands, the Antilles.
On the map, the Antilles do look like an ancient drowned landscape. And indeed this is partly true. The islands of the Greater Antilles — Cuba, Jamaica, Puerto Rico and Hispaniola (divided between Haiti and the Dominican Republic) — are the tips of a great range of sunken mountains, formerly joined to the Yucatan peninsula and perhaps Florida. Trinidad and Tobago, at the southernmost end of the Lesser Antilles, were similarly linked by a land bridge to the South American continent. But the Windward and Leeward Islands which make up the rest of the Lesser Antilles are volcanic and were never connected to any continental land mass.
This has fascinating ecological consequences. Each one of the Windward and Leeward Islands, for example, is home to unique species and sub-species of plants. Plants and animals — in the absence of man — can colonise such places only by chance, borne on the currents of wind and sea; and then, isolated from evolutionary trends elsewhere, may develop in a quite different direction from the population on the mainland.
The most celebrated example of this process is the Galapagos Islands, off the northwest shoulder of South America, where birds, reptiles and plants have developed independently on each island for millennia. But the process can be seen happening before our very eyes on Surtsey, a new volcanic island which rose from the sea off Iceland on November 14, 1963 — a sterile environment into which came first microbes, then lichens and mosses, and then plants, arriving in the tidewrack or undigested in the gut of a migrant bird, or, in one celebrated incident (a tomato) deposited as a seed from the bowels of a visiting scientist.
The ecology of such places is fragile. Species introduced from the mainland can, without their usual predators or competitors, wreak havoc, like the hedgehogs introduced to the Hebridean islands of North Uist and Benbecula which decimated populations of native wading birds, or the elephant grass introduced to the Galapagos Islands as forage, which now crowds out native species and is encroaching on forest remnants. Once damaged, such eco-systems cannot easily regenerate themselves.
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I remember once standing on the narrow summit of Mt Qua Qua in Grenada — the tiny island at the southernmost tip of the Windward Islands, which last week took the full force of Hurricane Ivan — talking to the veteran walker Telfor Bedeau. The brilliant green of the rainforest fell vertiginously away beneath my feet to the white sand and blue sea of the Caribbean on one side, and to the rocks and crashing surf of the Atlantic on the other. He told me how the natural vegetation of Grenada had been profoundly damaged by the felling of valuable trees for timber in the 19th century, and how, as a result, most of the original tree species had become extinct and been replaced by species imported from elsewhere. “Almost everything you see here was brought by man,” he said, “even us, the people.”
This includes the nutmeg trees on which the island depends for much of its livelihood, brought to Grenada from the East Indies. With their heavy heads and shallow root systems, they are particularly susceptible to wind. In 1955 Hurricane Janet uprooted 75 per cent of the nutmeg trees. Now Hurricane Ivan has devastated the island again. It is already known that the entire nutmeg crop and at least one principal area of nutmeg trees have been destroyed, in addition to 90 per cent of homes. Two thirds of the population is reported to be homeless. Grenada may not have sunk below the waves, but its people, and the people of the Cayman Islands and Jamaica, are still going to need all the help they can get.
Donations, with cheques made payable to Disaster Relief Fund, can be sent to The Grenada High Commission, 5 Chandos Street, London W1G 9DG.
More information on www.grenada-at-chelsea.org.uk
katherine.swift@thetimes.co.uk