The title of this chapter comes from Paul Sharrad's description of the relationship between the Caribbean and Australia in view of the sequence of their discovery and colonization by Europe, which locates them as bookends of European imperial expansion (1993, 58). Columbus (it is believed) first landed on Guanahani Island, which he renamed San Salvador, in 1492, and which he thought was one of the 7,449 islands of the Sea of Cin, Japan and Cathay (Clay 1992, 617). Cook landed in Ka-may, which he renamed Botany Bay, on continental Australia in 1770 – nearly three hundred years later in a very different world and on a very different topology. The Caribbean/Australian connection focuses both the continuities and discontinuities between these two ‘discoveries’ and illustrates the process Mariano Siskind terms ‘a genealogy of globalization’, which ‘begins with the territorial spatialisation of the universal premises of modernity; what is conceptually universal must be geographically universal’ (2005, 2). This chapter examines the relationships among the concept, geography and literary representation to trace at least some of the formulations that have shaped successive understandings of universe, planet and globe. As Denis Cosgrove attests in Apollo's Eye, ‘earthbound humans are unable to embrace more than a tiny part of the planetary surface. But in their imagination they can grasp the whole of the earth’ (2001, ix).

The island is a figure of this graspable planet, the world as a coherent and comprehensible form, and the ensuing discussion will chart the shifting relationships among geography, politics and representation through the changing status of islands and continents between Europeans’ discovery of the first New World and the last. The alignments and misalignments between conceptual and material accounts of these two topologies continuously form and re-form the world. Much is at stake in this grid of relationships.