Found, Lost, Paved and Sunk: Paradise

By Jay Maclean

Where is paradise on earth? Somewhere far from the maddening crowds, the cold, the politics, work, of course.People have been searching for their paradise for centuries, even before taxation was invented. The stories of those who wrote about their exploits often reveal more about themselves than the nature of the paradises they sought and sometimes found. Did you know that Sir Walter Raleigh was the world’s first pusher of paradise real estate? Or that among the explorers of tropical paradises, the infamous Captain Bligh of the Bounty was quite humane and considerate? Or that Captain James Cook was the first westerner to get a tropical, full body massage—and was pretty coy about describing it? That the original Shangri-La paradise was a mix of ascetic monks on top of a Tibetan mountain and a tropical village of loose women at its foot? That Thor Heyerdahl and his first wife honeymooned for a whole year in a remote tropical paradise, leading to his Polynesian migration theory and the Kon Tiki expedition?

Found, Lost, Paved and Sunk: Paradise explores the mind set of artists, beachcombers, colonial administrators, developers, explorers, hermits, missionaries, mutineers, philosophers, scientists and writers, not to mention the native residents who were already living in the paradises they sometimes describe. Learn about the mechanics and problems of living in a paradise, dealing with neighbors both onshore and offshore, housing, water, and health. Learn about the fate of paradises under colonialism and climate change. Learn also about the opinions of other animals and plants; where is their paradise?

The world is changing irreversibly. Where and how does paradise fit into its future? And finally, what does it all really mean?

Found, Lost, Paved and Sunk: Paradise tells all. The book is punctuated with tongue-in-cheek tips for paradise seekers but is entirely factual and extensively referenced with about 200 sources, from exploits of early explorers and travelers to the writings of prominent philosophers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Publishdrive
• Release date: Jan 3, 2018
• ISBN: 9781537877211

Book preview

Islands.

INTRODUCTION

WHERE IS YOUR PARADISE? WHERE do you long to be when you daydream? These days, it has to be somewhere away from all the pollution, away from overcrowded streets and cities, away from conflicts and terrorism; somewhere peaceful, but where?

I can clearly remember where paradise crystallized for me. I was holding a small, black triangular stone, smoothed and rounded from the caresses of the sea, as I sat alone under an immense, sparkling night sky on a coconut-tree studded beach on Rarotonga, the main island of the Cook Islands group, many years ago. The stone looked vaguely like a sitting lion. I told it my dream—the chances were too remote to call it a plan—that I would someday come back to the tropics and stay ‘forever’ by a beach on some island. Everything around me said ‘this is paradise’.

My whispered wish to the stone was not the result of some new intoxication. Several years before that, I built a yacht in Brisbane with the express purpose of working, cruising and living in tropical seas. The yacht project floundered before the boat reached water because I was posted from coastal subtropical Brisbane to Canberra, a chilly inland city in the southeastern Australian highlands. Then I lived in Papua New Guinea, my first tropical island, for a little more than two years; learned to dive there and roamed enamored, in the course of work as a marine biologist, around much of the main and outer islands. But the then Australian territory was heading for independence, becoming dangerous for family life, and I was obliged to retreat with my wife and children to Canberra.

Fate in various forms led me, alone, to the Philippines in 1980. My new wife and I traveled among the 7,000 Philippine islands and other tropical islands for two decades searching for our own paradise and now have a hut and our own coconut trees in a plot of land we call the Melon Patch by a beach near Anilao, on the island of Luzon. The hut fronts one of the richest coral reefs in the world. The Melon was in Margie’s tummy and became our son Marlon. I still have the stone.

The extraordinary aspect of our largely backpacking exploits in the Philippines was that very few travelers before us had been to the wonderful locations that we visited. At the time, it seemed quite natural to sleep on the ground, on tables, on small boats, even in a tiny hut in a small zoo. We were seeing these locations in near pristine state, meaning undisturbed by tourism or urban infrastructure, unaware that nearly all would be overtaken by the tourism tsunami of the late twentieth century. Fortunately, I wrote down my impressions. Those accounts, I felt, were a useful record, a baseline against which to view later developments.

I began to think about what I was really looking for, sitting on a beach in the Cook Islands all those years ago. There wasn’t any particular goal at the time; I was searching for uncomplicated contentment. The dream of a tropical island life isn’t something you immediately think through or dissect into positive and negative elements. The idyllic aspect of it is so overwhelming: coral reefs in warm emerald waters, white beaches with tall coconut trees shading them at the edge of lush jungles; and waterfalls tipping from inland jungle peaks to provide natural bathing and drinking water forever; never too hot or cold. Anything negative in such a scenario is assumed to be of little consequence.

It is not for everyone, even this dream, this interpretation of paradise. However, the majority of people, it seems, have something in common when fantasizing about where they would like to live, that is: on a rise looking down, a vista of parkland comprising grassland sprinkled with trees and copses, and proximity to a body of water, which, in fact, coincides with the African savannas where our ancestors were said to have lived and evolved.¹ It is also a description of the view from many tropical islands, and, well, our African forebears had yet to discover the tropics.

Over the years, I have met many other tropical island dreamers, some whose dreams came to fruition; others whose dreams were dashed against one of the inevitable rocks of reality that sometimes mar the dream. As Joni Mitchell sang,

"Where some have found their paradise,

others just come to harm."

I began to think about the tropical paradise syndrome. What did it really mean? Where did it begin? Does such a paradise still exist?

A BRIEF HISTORY OF PARADISES

PARADISE HAS HAD SO MANY interpretations over the millennia that it has come to mean almost any place better than where we are living now. Many see it as an after-death physical location. For them, even the wildest stories can be told and believed. After all, no one has been back to validate or dispute them.

Wherever, paradise has always been portrayed in an earthly setting since we have no other basis on which to describe it. Paradise is as old as the earliest known civilization, that of the Sumerians, although that is only because they were the first to develop a form of writing and left records, mainly on stone tablets. Sumer, later called Babylonia, was part of the present-day Iraq. One interpretation of the tablets is that their history extended back nearly half a million years and included a city that was an earthly paradise of gods and men.² Estimates of the age of their earliest writings, however, are only around 3,200 BC and more authentic descriptions of their paradise, Dilmun—a land of the living that knows no sickness or death and a divine garden, green with fruit-laden fields and meadows—closely match that of the biblical Garden of Eden, which we will visit shortly. ³

The Elysian Fields of ancient Greek mythology, the Grecian view of paradise, were elaborated over centuries as the Fortunate Isles, which were said to be physically located in the ocean at the end of the world. Pliny, in the world’s first encyclopedia, written in the first century AD, discusses the Fortunate Islands surprisingly offhandedly, describing trees on one island from which people press water, a small chapel on another, yet another full of great lizards, another snow covered, and another full of large dogs. But all these Islands abound plentifully with fruitful Trees and Birds of all sorts, so this is replenished with palm-trees that bear Abundance of Dates… However, these Islands are much infested with great Animals, that are very often cast out in a Putrid Condition.⁴ Those great Animals would tend to take the shine off the Greeks’ paradise, while the date palms suggest somewhat arid surroundings. (Pliny relied on previous writings and authors, sometimes indiscriminately, as for instance, asserting that bodies, when dead, are more heavy than when alive; and the same Parties sleeping weigh more than when awake.)

Many writers have invented paradises based on their beliefs or desires, focusing on creating the best social conditions on earth, while usually including an unspecified after-death paradise as well. Utopia, by Thomas More in 1516, set the tone for such conditions. Utopia is a fictional island of 54 cities set in a temperate climate. In the guise of a traveler, Raphael Hythlodeaus, More gives us his ideas on a ‘Utopian’ society, one in which there is no ownership; doors have no locks, Whoso will, may go in, for there is nothing within the houses that is private, or any man’s own. And every tenth year they change their houses by lot, and their clothes throughout all the island be of one fashion; (saving that there is a difference between the man’s garment and the woman’s; between the married and the unmarried). There are few laws and utterly excluded are attorneys, lawyers and other agents, whilst the judge with a discreet judgment doth away the words of him, whom no lawyer hath instructed with deceit. No one would have known better than More about the tactics of lawyers in those days. More himself was a lawyer under Henry VIII; he became embroiled in the then fermenting schism in the Catholic Church led by Martin Luther. Not too surprisingly, he was finally beheaded—on a technicality, perjury. More married twice. I doubt he asked either wife about his utopia. They may have had something to say about fashion, not owning their own make-up kits and having to move house every decade.

Utopias, it has been observed, generally appear in times of great social and political unrest.⁵ Thomas More’s was the first, giving the generic name, and written in a century of religious and social upheaval. Two other major books on utopias appeared in the next (17th) century—Tommaso Campanella’s City of the Sun in 1623, and Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis in 1627.⁶ Both were set in tropical islands.

Campanella became a Dominican monk while still young and his view of a perfect state was one based not on equality but on scientific endeavor. His City of the Sun was an impregnable fortress, described by the captain of a vessel who comes ashore on an island with a large plain immediately under the equator, a tropical island. The great ruler is a priest called the Metaphysic, assisted by three princes called Power, Wisdom and Love. Campanella was futuristic in tablets setting forth for every separate country the customs both public and private, the laws, the origins and the power of the inhabitants; and the alphabets the different people use, a kind of encyclopedia or Wikipedia forerunner. It extended to biology, ecology, mechanical arts, and world history. Campanella was more of his time in describing old stored liquids that could cure all diseases. Fairness was foremost: no one receives more than he deserves. Yet nothing necessary is denied to anyone. His views on the nature and role of authorities other than in the City of the Sun—ignorant persons….consider them suitable merely because they have sprung from rulers or have been chosen by a powerful faction—landed him in prison where he spent 27 years and was tortured on several occasions. The lesson was that the ‘haves’ are less likely to want a utopia than the ‘have nots.’

Curiously, Francis Bacon was also enamored of science and was perhaps the first to describe a government scientific institution in detailed concrete terms, covering everything from medicine to machinery. And his New Atlantis was the happy island of Bensalem, somewhere in the South Sea, again implying a tropical location, where the first strangers to reach their shores in 37 years are allowed a brief stay while the country is described to them. Noteworthy was that they could make divers new plants, differing from the vulgar, and to make one tree or plant turn into another, and could make a number of kinds of serpents, worms, flies, fishes of putrefaction, whereof some are advanced to be perfect creatures, like beasts or birds...Neither do we this by chance…

This was heady, futuristic stuff from Bacon, presaging hybridization and modern molecular genetic techniques. His Atlantians had sound-houses, where we practice and demonstrate all sounds and their generation, as well as engine-houses, perfume-houses, a mathematical house, etc. Bacon wallowed in a sort of scientific utopia that could never be. Look around; we now have his predicted houses of sound, from opera houses to karaoke bars (alas); power stations; cosmetic factories, etc.; but whether we turn to the West or East, North or South, today’s societies are far from the most euphemistic interpretation of utopia. As for the acceptance of a society embracing science, I need only mention how present climate change-houses (led by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) are received by many skeptics in this far more scientifically-based era. People only believe the science that suits them.

What about the ‘old’ or original Atlantis, fabled lost city that sank beneath the waves? There is good archeological evidence in Göbekli Tepe, Turkey, of a sophisticated civilization that was in existence more than 12,000 years ago. Megaliths uncovered there in the last few years are twice as old as Stonehenge and far more sophisticated. The disappearance of that civilization coincides with a rapid warming of the planet about 9,600 years ago. Rapid warming would have released massive amounts of water that overlaid much of the continents as ice. The event lends credence to the ‘myth’ of the great flood in the bible, in 2,000-year-old Sumerian tablets and in Mayan legends.

No, I have not lost the thread of the paradise story. This account is simply background to the more fascinating conclusion (opinion, if you prefer) by some archeologists based on pyramid-like megalith findings in Indonesia, that somewhere under the sea between the Indian and Pacific oceans, an area dotted with thousands of tropical paradisiacal islands, lies…. Atlantis.⁷

Plato is to blame for the vast sums spent on looking for this ‘lost city.’ His character Critia (great grandson of another Critia from whom the story came) describes it as a marvelous utopian civilization based mainly in an island paradise somewhere in the Atlantic near the entrance to the Mediterranean Sea. Atlantis sinks beneath the waves in monumental storms—intriguingly, 9,600 years before the present time.⁸

The eastern Atlantic is a long way from the Indo-Pacific. One can conclude that for the different civilizations, an earthly paradise was somewhere remote from them, not unimaginably far, but saved from being pinpointed by rapid global sea level rise, something that nowadays we find quite credible.

~

In the 18th century, the French populace was realizing that the country had slid to the wrong end of the equality spectrum envisioned in contemporary literature on utopia. That precipitated the French revolution of 1789. Among the ‘philosophes,’ the influential thinkers who influenced the national mood, was Jean-Jacques Rousseau with his book The Social Contract in 1762. The compact was between the individual people in yielding themselves to be subject of the common will, arguing that each giving himself to all, gives himself to nobody; and as there is not one associate over whom we do not acquire the same rights which we concede to him over ourselves, we gain the equivalent of all that we lose, and more power to preserve what we have. You can see where that could lead, given frail human nature—Animal Farm⁹ was one famous example.

Rousseau piously or naively argued that whoever refuses to obey the general will shall be constrained to do so by the whole body, which means nothing else than that he shall be forced to be free… His work became a rallying ideal for the revolution and the French constitution a decade later was said to be an attempt at making France a Rousseau-like utopia (hence Freedom, Equality, Brotherhood). However, on its first publication, the book was burned by the powers that were;¹⁰ Rousseau learned the lesson of Campanella. Not that I would be keen about being forced to be free either.

Shangri-la is a more recently discovered, albeit fictional, earthly paradise, this one in Tibet in the Himalayas, and only for those who yearn to live at the summit of a frigid mountain. Monks are in charge of Shangri-la and the rooms of their monastery have to be heated, which is no surprise; the monks can live for up to 200 years (if there are not too many power outages). Yet, the Blue Moon valley a mile below them and part of Shangri-la is nothing less than an enclosed paradise of amazing fertility, in which the vertical difference of a few thousand feet spanned the whole gulf between temperate and tropical. The monks and the valley population live by the principles of moderation and the women of the valley have happily applied the principle of moderation to their own chastity. This is the original Shangri-la, situated beneath the loveliest mountain on earth…almost a perfect cone of snow, as described by James Hilton in his 1933 fictional novel The Lost Horizon. Not to be outdone, the Chinese government in 2001 renamed an old whistle stop on the Silk Road called Duzekong, as the official Shangri-La; but that Shangri-La burned down in early 2014.¹¹ No doubt another will pop-up to maintain the flow of tourist dollars.

The new Shangri-la will also be open to all comers as long as they have spending money, unlike Hilton’s very exclusive paradise. The High Lama tells the story’s hero that We are a single lifeboat riding the seas in a gale; we can take a few chance survivors, but if all the shipwrecked were to reach us and clamber aboard we should go down ourselves.

The Lost Horizon author Hilton was uncannily prophetic in that lifeboat analogy. Forty years later, the world, our world, was in the midst of a severe food crisis. There was a strong likelihood that millions in Asia, particularly, would starve to death. In 1959, the Ford Foundation issued a report warning India that unless a drastic turn were taken, by 1966, the Indian birth rate would have so outstripped food production that literally millions would starve to death in a crisis that no conceivable program of imports or rationing can meet. In fact, in 1966, the United States was shipping up to 50,000 tons of surplus wheat to India per day, in an effort to avert that crisis.

Back home, in the US, it gave rise to the infamous lifeboat strategy, elaborated by well-known American ecologist Garret Hardin, whose major concern was overpopulation. He likened the rich nations to a small number of well-run and stocked lifeboats and the poor nations to many overcrowded lifeboats. If all the people who fall from the poor lifeboats are picked up by those in the rich lifeboats, the rich lifeboats themselves will become overcrowded and all will drown.¹² Here we can liken the rich nations to the paradise to which the poor were striving. Hardin’s advice was to let the others drown. Fortunately, he was ignored. The answer to the crisis was not to stand by and let poor nations starve; a global research effort to grow more crops swung into action, resulting in the so-called green revolution, which quite probably averted wars. But it did not bring poor nations into a more paradisiacal state either. Neither has overpopulation gone away.

There are probably thousands of extant books to choose from by now to broaden our knowledge and choices of paradises. Many are diversionary though. Back in 1759, famous philosopher Voltaire (real name François-Marie Arouet) wrote the satire Candide,¹³ on the expulsion of a young man (Candide) from an earthly paradise in a castle in Westphalia, Germany, as the result of an amorous incident with the Baron’s daughter. Led by his tutor to believe that the province is the best of all possible worlds and that everything is for the best, he undergoes extreme hardships while remaining optimistic. Along the way, Candide finds El Dorado in Peru, a paradise if not tropical, where there is no crime, people are long-lived and gold and jewels are literally as common as dirt. As in Shangri-la, no inhabitant is allowed to leave. But Candide and his companion are permitted to leave, with 102 sheep laden with jewels that are soon lost. The book ends with Candide exonerated in Danish society and his optimism tempered: Everything is not so good as in El Dorado; but everything is not too bad.

A short, hilarious story by Andrew Lang, In the wrong paradise,¹⁴ concerns his (fictitious) nightmare, in which he visits misfits in various paradises of their own choice. In the ancient Greek paradise, the Fortunate Isles, he comes across a languid photographers’ and artists’ model, a young man who, without knowing anything of the Greek language, spent much time writing poems praising the ways of the ancient Greeks. Now dead, he is totally disillusioned in the Elysian Fields, not being able to understand the language and forced to take part in their vigorous ‘Olympic’ lifestyles.

Nobel Prize winner for literature (in 1910) Paul Heyse used a romantic novel In Paradise¹⁵ to project the Eden-like condition of a life devoted to art. His (their) paradise, however, was nothing more than a Sunday night artists’ club.

Returning to the overpopulation theme, H.G. Wells elaborated the design of a modern (that is, 1905) Utopia, a single world society, in which population control is a given. His Utopia was quite farsighted, envisaging an equal role for women, especially mothers, airplanes, bullet trains, a tunnel under the English Channel and the use of renewable energy sources, inter alia. However, Without the determination and ability to limit [population] increase as well as to stimulate it whenever it is necessary, no Utopia is possible.¹⁶ We will revisit this theme later. Not by coincidence was population control a feature of life in the epicenter of real-life tropical paradises. As a final note, another famous futurist, George Orwell (author of Animal Farm, etc.) dismissed the possibility of Wells’ modern Utopia, not because of its principles but because by Orwell’s time, societies had changed and nationalism, religious bigotry and feudal loyalty are far more powerful forces than what he himself [Wells] would describe as sanity.¹⁷

~

The era of navigators sent by the major European powers and England, beginning in the 16th century, to find and claim distant lands, spawned a myriad island paradises. Of the plethora of island paradises they uncovered and whose successors despoiled, much more will be said.

One fictitious island became famous as the subject of O Paradiso, the best known song of the opera L’Africaine by Giacomo Meyerbeer, first performed (posthumously) in 1865. Sung by an imprisoned Vasco da Gama,¹⁸ the lyrics in part reflected the acquisitive outlook of those powerful countries during the ‘Age of Discovery’ in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries: …this fertile earth is ours, which can enrich all of Europe.

The Garden of Eden is arguably the most familiar paradise—a lush garden in which there were only two inhabitants, Adam and Eve. Being the most popular account of paradise at present and the basis of comparison of all the early navigator explorers who sailed out of ports in England and Europe, it deserves closer inspection.

John Milton’s epic poem of 1667, Paradise Lost, became a benchmark description of Adam and Eve’s paradise: Nature’s bounty was wilde above Rule or Art; enormous bliss. Following the biblical account, Adam comes first. He receives a visit from an angel, Raphael, and tells Raphael his brief, uneventful, life story, observing that his paradise is lacking in something, although he could not describe what it was, that je ne sais quoi. He tells the angel:

Thus I have told thee all my State, and brought

My Storie to the sum of earthly bliss

Which I enjoy, and must confess to find

In all things else delight indeed, but such

As us’do or not, works in the mind no change,

Nor vehement desire, these delicacies

I mean of Taste, Sight, Smell, Herbs, Fruits and Flours,

Walks, and the melodie of Birds.

The missing element is, of course, a woman (I hope you guessed right; had Adam been gay, the world would be a very different place). When Eve appears, Adam finally finds a target for his vehement desire, and paradise becomes complete, for both of them.

Milton’s paradise is not an idle one, however. Wisely, he includes provision for maintenance of Eden, as Eve points out, becoming the first nagger:

Adam, well may we labour still to dress this

Garden, still to tend Plant, Herb and Flour,

Our pleasant task enjoyn’d, but till more hands

Aid us, the work under our labour grows,

Luxurious by restraint; what we by day

Lop overgrown, or prune, or prop, or bind,

One night or two with wanton growth derides

Tending to wilde.

Here Milton’s Eve is also hinting at the need to hire some help around the garden, which to me is whittling away at the original concept, although perhaps she is instead hinting at the idea of raising a family to run the farm. In any event, Adam and Eve were evicted.

There is one other important consideration in the Garden of Eden as paradise. Adam and Eve were essentially naked as they romped around. This paradise must, then be a tropical one. But where? Where would you locate a tropical paradise, an Eden, the Elysian Fields? Campanella and Bacon voted for tropical islands as sites of their utopias, their social paradises.

A different world ‘history’ that separates Paradise and Eden and casts Adam and Eve in very different roles, is depicted in The Urantia Book of 1955.¹⁹ The book grew from alleged communications by an unconscious person who voices an authoritative history of Earth by an extraplanetary spokesperson of the universe and Christianity, transcribed in a long series of ‘papers’ between the 1920s and 1950s, and in which then current astronomical theory and other scientific knowledge are embedded. These add to the credibility of the book, although some papers were later found to have been plagiarized and some scientific concepts later proved wrong.²⁰

Urantia is Earth, an outlying planet in one of the sub-universes that revolve around the island of Paradise occupied by God in the center of the whole universe. The peoples of Urantia undergo social evolution in various groups that interact sometimes in peace, others in war, and more often in minor feuds. The leading group, the Amadonites, believed in the coming of a promised Son of God to improve matters, a racial uplifter, a teacher of truth. Such persons, they knew, liked to live in in simple but charming garden homes, and they made a massive search to find the best location for this garden, finally choosing a long narrow peninsula…projecting westward from the eastern shores of the Mediterranean Sea. This Eden was not Paradise; it had to be developed and walled off from the mainland. It became a poem of exquisite and perfected landscape glory, and was shared with the cream of Urantian civilization.

In this depiction, Adam and Eve do well—they have children who attend school, etc.—until Eve is seduced by an Edenic advisor who comes from the neighboring Nodite tribe, in a sincere effort to do her share of ‘racial uplifting.’ She confesses to Adam, however, and the next day he seduces a prominent Nodite woman so he can share the same fate as Eve. All in all, a juicier story than the one about being evicted for eating an apple.

The residents of Eden are infuriated by the seduction of Eve and annihilate the nearby Nodites. Other Nodites gather to storm Eden and the disgraced couple leave Eden in a caravan of followers. The overrun Eden is eventually submerged through natural tectonic processes. However, "for thousands of years the sons of Adam labored along the rivers of Mesopotamia, working out their irrigation and flood-control problems to the south, perfecting their defenses to the north, and attempting to preserve their traditions of the glory of the first Eden. This second Eden, as it was called—without Adam and Eve—seems to be located to conform with the biblical Eden; at least with the generally held belief that Eden was in Mesopotamia associated with particular rivers.

The most exhaustive treatise on Eden’s location to date appeared long before Urantia, in 1885²¹ and based its compelling findings on scientific geogony (study of the earth’s formation); astronomical geography; physiographical geology; prehistoric climatology; and paleontological anthropology, botany and zoology; backed up by ancient cosmology and mythical geography; supported by beliefs in ancient Assyria, Babylonia, Japan, China, Egypt, Greece, India and Iran; and by application of the findings to biology and physics, and on the study of ancient literature, early religions, and the development of civilization.

Surprise! The overwhelming conclusion of the author, William Warren, was that the Garden of Eden was situated right at the North Pole. He packed a massive library of then current knowledge across all these fields into his book on the findings. It was a marvelous palace of cards, resting on the unfortunate assumption that there was, in fact, a submerged continent at the pole and that life began there as the cooling earth’s crust made conditions livable at the North Pole before anywhere else, and spread southward thereafter.

Warren’s book, however, is but the tip of a huge iceberg of literature about the physical location of the biblical Garden of Eden. Warren himself summarizes much of it, and the story is taken up thereafter by Brook Wilensky-Lanford in Paradise lust,²² who takes the reader on a tour of prominent Eden locations around the world and the people who discovered them up to the present time, from the Middle East to China and the USA.

But these are all Edens past, abandoned or submerged in a deluge. Those set in their authors’ present time, such as the City of the Sun, New Atlantis, and lower Shangri-la are all tropical. Even Warren’s pre-deluge North Pole site possessed of a tropical flora of the most beautiful and luxuriant sort, and that at the time of the advent of man the climate at the arctic Pole was all that the most poetic legends of Eden could demand.

In these pages, we are looking for present-day paradises that meet the demands of such poetic legends. It goes almost without saying that they must be tropical.

Of late, the Maldives, comprising about 1,200 tiny islands in the tropical Indian Ocean, has become the most trumpeted present-day paradise for its luxury resorts, often built over the water in fish-encrusted lagoons. These are paradisiacal without doubt but at a high price for a short time; they have become ‘hotel tropics,’ and not without their downside as we will see later. The Maldivians themselves, when not working in tourist resorts, live jam-packed in Malé, the very tiny capital island.

Elsewhere around the tropics, there are three concentrations of likely paradise islands, in the Caribbean, the western Pacific and tropical Southeast Asia. If one can believe the travel agents, there are among them not one but a thousand paradises, even if they make the claim for each one that it is the one, or if not, a piece of it.

THE CARIBBEAN

Sir Walter Raleigh was one of the earliest travel agents to describe the paradise of the world, but he was describing the colony he named Virginia in the now USA in 1583.²³ Raleigh did not set foot in North America himself. He was an organizer and financier of expeditions. By the end of the 1580s, he no doubt rued the idea. Most of the English colonists he happily sent to settle along the eastern seaboard from North Carolina to Chesapeake Bay were either massacred by the local Indians or died of various diseases. It was not an auspicious start to the paradise travel industry.

We can therefore dismiss his statements as hype, no different from the glowing descriptions of anywhere-you-haven’t-been that form the fodder of tourist and real estate brochures and websites today. Some things never change.

Should you be wondering, Raleigh was only indirectly responsible for giving the world the Marlboro Man and French fries. The tobacco and potatoes were brought back by his starving Virginian colonists when they were rescued by Sir Francis Drake, who was returning from patriotic raiding of Spanish Caribbean ports.²⁴

Raleigh’s description lived on though, by moving south to the tropics and being applied to Jamaica. To see how that happened, we need to go back nearly a century before Raleigh.

In the 1490s, Christopher Columbus discovered and was traveling around what are now the West Indies in the Caribbean. Unlike Raleigh, he was on-site and founded colonies on his first (1492) and second voyage (1494) on behalf of Spain. In a letter to their Catholic majesties King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, he is lyrical in his descriptions. Of a river in the now Cuba, he observed such was the delightfulness of the place that I could have been tempted to remain there for ever…The finest and tallest palm trees I had ever seen were in great abundance…This country…is so wonderfully fine, and so far excels all others in beauty and delightfulness…²⁵ Columbus made a third voyage in 1498, through the Caribbean Sea to the Venezuelan coast, where the huge mouth of the Orinoco River eclipsed Cuban vistas and led him to believe it emanated from the Garden of Eden.²⁶ A mix of confused theology and geography—he thought he was somewhere in Asia—he tells the Spanish royal couple that the earth is pear shaped, complete with a stalk; Eden is at the unapproachable summit of the stalk (Columbus also called the stalk a woman’s nipple; he may have been homesick).²⁷

Columbus’s earlier reports and the small gold ornaments on several natives whom he took back to Spain with him already had the desired effect. Spanish military and settlers by the galleon-full were soon bobbing across the Atlantic and occupied a number of the larger islands. Jamaica, the ‘epicenter,’ was settled in 1509.

The Caribbean islands were then paradisiacal jewels, lush tropical islands washed in constantly warm seas. The Arawaks from the South American mainland were the first people to have found them and, realizing their bounty, settled on them—several thousand years ago. They were said to lead untroubled lives until in about 1200 AD, warlike Caribs, also from the mainland, began to raid and settle in the islands, making things less than paradisiacal for the Arawaks. Columbus described the natives of the first island he discovered, San Salvador, as poor and naked, their figures handsome, and their faces agreeable, and they were peaceful, presumably Arawaks; some had scars from being attacked by the more warlike Caribs from neighboring islands.

The Spanish colonists were seeking, not paradise, but wealth. This meant wiping out most of the Caribbean islands’ populations. Having done that, the colonists concluded that the islands weren’t so rich or alluring and eventually many of them headed further south to the mainland of South America where there certainly was, if not El Dorado, plenty of gold in them there hills.

The declining Spanish presence around the Caribbean islands as colonists moved out, with fewer servants to be had, did not go unnoticed by the English. They found Jamaica an easy target. Virginia Woolf was probably referring to Jamaica when she wrote rather dramatically, The Spaniards, bloated with fine living upon the fruits of the miraculous land, fell in heaps; but the hardy Englishmen, tawny with sea-voyaging, hairy for lack of razors, with muscles like wire, fangs greedy for flesh, and fingers itching for gold, despatched the wounded, drove the dying into the sea, and soon reduced the natives to a state of superstitious wonderment.²⁸

Jamaica fell to the English in 1655 and they did not release it until 1962. They replaced the locals with slaves from Africa. Jamaica soon became England’s largest slave-owning colony. By the end of the 17th century 4 out of every 5 persons in the Caribbean was an African slave.²⁹ It also became a paradise of a different sort—for pirates–and before the end of the 17th century, characters like Henry Morgan and ‘Calico’ Jack Rackham ruled the Caribbean Sea.

Edmund Hickeringill, an early settler in Jamaica after the British takeover, published in 1661 a book called Jamaica Viewed, which quickly rose to fame. Within its pages, he invoked Raleigh’s paradise of the world phrase to describe Jamaica. And Hickeringill was no flowery poet. He was at one time or another a Baptist minister, Quaker, ‘deist,’ military captain, and finally vicar in the English countryside where he excelled in writing fire and brimstone pamphlets, like The Survey of the Earth in Its General Vileness and Debauch with Some New Projects to Mend or Cobble It.

Hickeringill republished his book on Jamaica without amendment in 1705, when conditions on Jamaica were even further from paradisiacal. The capital city of Kingston, by then called the richest and wickedest city in Christendom, had been completely destroyed by an earthquake in 1692. At the time, there were more slaves than free persons.

Hickeringill