A country needs a resource, and ours does not have one. No oil wells, no mineral deposits, no diamonds, no forests, no rich topsoil, no fast-running rivers available for electrical power. How could we have such resources, stuck far out in the ocean on a barren goat-infested lump of geology at a point equidistant from all places of importance?

We have, it is true, some history. In the old days, before radar, a lot of ships were wrecked on our shifting reefs and unreliable shoals. Our ancestors did quite well out of that, moving the beacons around, raiding the shattered holds, robbing the corpses. We’ve tried to make this history into a resource, without much result. The distances tourists must travel in order to view the narrow, stone-covered beaches where these deplorable outrages occurred are too great, the prices therefore too high. We’ve erected a few ruins, but they are not convincing, even from a distance.

Some accounts of us—in the more outmoded and spurious travel books—cite a legend according to which our island came into being—through the act of some god or other—at the point where the Icarus famed in Greek myth plunged into the sea, once his artificial wax wings had melted.