At the moment I’m reading an account of the Scottish Island of St. Kilda, written by George Seton in 1876. I have been interested in St. Kilda for a long time, but never got round to reading Seton’s classic account before. It occurred to me that this is now of those wonderful examples of a fruitful coincidence. I mentioned in a recent post that I had taken part in a celebration of the national independence days of Antigua and Nigeria. As I was reading Seton’s account this morning, in which he details the very rare contact between outsiders and St. Kilda since the seventeenth century, it occurred to me that throughout the many decades that have passed since his visit, Antigua has probably been more familiar to people in Britain than St. Kilda.
European contact with Antigua certainly was well-established by the middle of the seventeenth century, and by the time Seton wrote about St. Kilda Antigua was firmly established as a producer of sugar. In that interval, of course, its economy had been built up on the import of slaves from Africa. Without investigating the details, I am pretty certain that not only would middle-class Britons have heard about Antigua but many of them would have had shares in sugar estates there. If Seton is to be believed (and why not) virtually total ignorance prevailed in the greater part of Britain not only about St. Kilda but a good part of the Hebridean islands of Scotland. Mendelssohn’s celebrated voyage in 1830 took him nowhere near as far north as St. Kilda. (The island of Staffa, the inspiration for his Hebridean Overture, off the coast of Mull, is well over 100 miles south of St. Kilda.)
It is still the case, I’m sure, that many more British people will have been to the more popular Mediterranean islands than to the Outer Hebrides. One of the staple economic activities of Antigua is, there days, tourism. I wonder whether more of us have been there than have visited the remoter islands of Scotland. It makes you think.