Valmorain, who regards himself as an enlightened rationalist, calls in a veterinarian to treat his slaves.Ī splendid historical pageant set in a world where life is ruled by race and colour to the most rigorous degree, Island Beneath the Sea is in equal parts fascinating and frustrating. French Republican ideals of equality and liberty don’t apply to black slaves, who are not seen as human. Understated irony illustrates the philosophical and moral anomalies of the time. Together, Tété and her master escape the bloody slave revolution of 1793, fleeing to New Orleans in French Louisiana. Through the entwined stories of aristocratic French plantation owner Toulouse Valmorain and his slave concubine, Tété, Island Beneath the Sea personalizes the wider drama of Haiti’s struggle to become an independent black nation. Slaves seek consolation in voodoo, their owners in rum and slave girls. The very air seems filled with a miasma of fear and anguish. The island's wealth lay in sugar-plantations owned by Frenchmen and worked in horrific conditions by a seemingly endless supply of African slaves. In France the existing order was overthrown by violent revolution, echoed on its Caribbean possession, the island of Saint Dominigue, which would become Haiti. Haiti was born in the late eighteenth century, a time of great social upheaval. It can be pierced by voodoo ritual to allow communication with the gods and the dead. The ocean’s reflected surface represents a mirror dividing the parallel worlds of the living and the dead. To Haiti’s African slaves the 'island beneath the sea' is a mystical otherworld.

Island beneath the sea book