There are surprising exclusions from the club – Bermuda, for example, lies too far north, at 32 degrees N, to be part of the fraternity – but there are also numerous fêted inclusions. Together, these lines of latitude embrace vast swathes of the Indian and Pacific Oceans, as well as the Caribbean Sea – each of these expanses of water sprinkled with islands of varying size. It acts as a cummerbund around the planet, its north edge supplied by the Tropic of Cancer, which circumnavigates the globe at 23.4 degrees N its southern limit by the mirror image of the Tropic of Capricorn at 23.4 degrees S. Earth’s “tropical zone” takes up 40 per cent of its surface and 36 per cent of its land mass. The rarefied mental picture they conjure – lazy afternoons in fine conditions, the sun inching across the sky – is not rare at all. Of course, the joy of tropical islands is that they are not found solely in the Caribbean. And a tropical island is the perfect environment in which to find it (assuming you include a few accoutrements of the type Crusoe obviously lacks – cocktails, fluffy towels, air-conditioned suites) – waves tiptoeing up amber beaches, trees rustling overhead, birdsong high in the branches.īrazil’s “hidden secret”, Fernando de Noronha Credit: But for the 21st-century traveller, assailed by information overload, the solitude he decries can sound like heaven. In the story, Crusoe rails against his isolation, howling that “I am singled out and separated, as it were, from all the world, to be miserable”. Three centuries on, what would have been a dreadful extremity for stranded navigators is now a coveted possibility for holidays. The author put his protagonist on an uninhabited islet somewhere between Trinidad and the shoulder of Venezuela, roughly where the southernmost waves of the Caribbean Sea mesh with the open Atlantic. The outcrop where Crusoe is marooned for 28 years is imaginary, but its location is not. Which countries? Here, also, Defoe was ahead of his time. “It was sheltered from the heat every day,” he continues, “till it came to a west-and-by-south sun, or thereabouts, which, in those countries, is near the setting.” ![]() Except that, yes, Crusoe’s rudimentary new des-res has this, too. It lay like a green before my door – and at the end of it, descended irregularly, every way down into the low ground by the seaside.” All this description would need is a bright sunset, and it could be the prototype for a booklet touting eco-escapes to palm-fronded idylls. The plain was not above a hundred yards broad, and about twice as long. “On the flat of the green… I resolved to pitch my tent. “I found a little plain on the side of a rising hill,” Crusoe says – in an autobiographical style that led many 18th-century readers to see the book as document rather than fiction. It is all there in the early pages of his keynote literary statement published in 1719, Robinson Crusoe.įreshly shipwrecked, the titular hero is weary, broken, shocked to be the sole survivor of a maritime disaster – yet he cannot help but describe his surroundings in positive terms. It is completely possible that, as well as penning what is now considered one of the first great English novels, Daniel Defoe also invented the brochure for the epic beach holiday.
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