Glimpses of the Island

Glimpses of the Island

Prologue

Isla Del Sur, known simply as the Island to its inhabitants, was first discovered in the 16 ^th century when a Portuguese merchant ship bound for Japan went off course after rounding Africa. Lost in the Indian Ocean, the ship stumbled across the uninhabited island group. The captain marked it on a chart, refreshed his supplies of food and water, and headed due west, eventually finding the African coast, where he continued on his way. Upon his return to Portugal the chart of the new discovery was forwarded to the Royal Archives and became one more state secret among many. It was lost until the 19 ^th century when a minor clerk checking old archives discovered the well-preserved chart with the hand-written notes detailing how the islands were found. He immediately recognized the worth in what he had found and sold the secret to an English businessman, one of the many who came to Portugal each year to buy port wine.

The islands had no obvious value. The archipelago was too far off any shipping lanes to be of use. There were no natural resources to exploit, and the location had no strategic or military significance. What it did offer was isolation. The largest island, Isla Del Sur, had enough land and fresh water to support a settlement. The businessman knew of many dissident groups looking for some remote area to colonize and escape repression in modern Victorian society. He had bought the location purely on speculation and did manage a modest profit when he sold it to the founder of the League to Preserve Tradition.

The League was a loose organization of people who had not prospered from the Industrial Revolution. They managed to raise enough money to buy a ship and set sail for their new homeland. Like many great social experiments of that era, the hoped for agrarian utopia fell victim to a combination of poor planning, infighting and homesickness which resulted in the abandonment of the colony after only a few years. Isla Del Sur was uninhabited for nearly a century until rediscovered by one of the ancestors of the original League members, when going through papers inherited from an estate. This man was also a misfit of sorts, but he had the resources and contacts to make better use of the Island.

And so began the modern history of the Island, when a freighter arrived with the first of a brand new set of colonists. But these were no ordinary people. As with the League so many years ago, they were unhappy with the way modern society was evolving and looked for a place of their own, where they could escape to a more traditional way of living.

Over the course of years a small town was built up, along with homes scattered across the largest islands. The backers were men of power and influence who had access to resources to build a modern infrastructure including electricity, water, roads, communications, and commerce. The Island became a vacation and retirement community for them, a place where they dictated the law of the land, with no outside interference.

The closed society that grew from their efforts appeared to be a small slice of modern life to the untrained eye, but there were some crucial differences. The founders were strong powerful men, men who chose to lead rather than follow, men who desired and sought out a certain kind of woman, one willingly submissive to their authority. As the outside world struggled to erase gender-based roles, the Island moved in the opposite direction, striving to preserve the sharply delineated positions of man and woman in society.

With the advent of satellite mapping the existence of the Island could no longer be kept secret. The leaders recognized that without some form of national sovereignty they could not prevent a land grab by any nation with even a modest navy. Isla Del Sur could not remain independent, nor could its unique culture be maintained as a territory of any major world power. But the inhabitants wielded immense economic power and used that influence to develop alternatives. After some internal debate the community sought out and eventually became a protectorate of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

There were no troops, no military bases, and no naval warships to protect the Island. Instead there was the much more powerful threat of an oil embargo against any belligerent power. And behind that the indirect threat of intervention by Saudi allies. The future of the Island culture was secure, and the Saudi kingdom benefited from the goodwill of some very powerful newfound friends. Technically Isla Del Sur operated under the Saudi legal system, but this presented no problem to the inhabitants. A few even joked about how it was too liberal.

The island group does not appear on maps or atlases. There are no encyclopedia entries, tourists are not welcome, and the inhabitants do their best to ensure no publicity about their life appears in the outside world. Media stories are quietly killed with a few words between friends, or in extreme cases by pressure on stock prices. Visitors are few and by invitation only. The only way to get to the Island is by sea, and the handful of ships that do go there are owned by the residents. It is closed to outsiders and free of the need to answer to world public opinion.