I'm surrounded by four hundred people
clinging to a volcano two thousand kilometres deep into the Atlantic.
Corvo, the island of the crow, although really there are no crows here.
They mean to say cormorant, although, there aren’t really any cormorants either.
The truest name that this little rock ever had is the island of the statue.
Because for all the history here, the most important thing that humans ever did happened before it was even discovered.
In the 15th century, Portuguese sailors returning from Newfoundland
stumbled across a yet uncharted island in the Azores.
A small volcanic crater sticking up out of the ocean a few hundred metres, seemingly untouched by man.
But as they sailed around that island, a lone figure in the hills caught their eye.
On the top of a cliff on the far western shore was a carved statue, a sign of humanity long since worn down by the salt.
It was a saddleless horseman riding atop a stone pedestal,
his left hand on the back of his animal and his right pointed out deep into the abyss of the Atlantic.
As if he was calling people forward to a world they had only just found.
At his feet were carvings that none could recognize. Not then, not ever.
And I can only imagine the thoughts that must have crossed those sailors' minds:
Nobody had ever been here. And yet there it was.
It was more than a mystery.
It must have felt like a fantasy come to life. Like a mirage that they couldn’t wipe away from their eyes.
It's as if we get to Mars and the first thing we see there is a statue of a man on a horse.
What types of stories would we tell? How would it affect the community that grew up around it?
It would still be a lifetime before anybody actually settled here, and even when they did
it was as subsistence farmers barely capable of survival.
This island would never become anything more than a footnote in Azorean history,
completely unknown to the vast majority of mainland Portuguese even to this day.
There’s nothing here to differentiate them from the rest of these islands, well, except how much harder it was to survive.
How little they had in comparison. That statue was the one thing that they had that nobody else did.
And in a way, it defines these islands far better than anything else ever could.
But this was a colony, and it didn’t matter that the settlers were Portuguese,
it wasn’t long before the mainlanders stripped Corvo of everything that it valued.
They demanded that that statue be brought back to Lisbon.
It was broken into pieces and shipped to an indifferent king,
uncared for by a people with little desire to even admit it existed.
After all, it was proof that they weren’t first.
So there, locked away, it remained a curiosity of the court until it was lost and turned to legend.
There are no pictures of it. No drawings. No representations of any type.
No proof that it ever truly was here at all.
Just a memory hidden in the fantasies of people on a volcano deep in the ocean.
Yet, by not existing that statue has almost gained more power than if it did.
Fantasy is far more tenacious than reality could ever hope to be.
Mainlanders might have stolen and destroyed the physical item, but here on Corvo they remember the myth that it represents.
In this way it can change with the generations here.
Each new iteration of the islanders can come up with a new meaning of their symbol.
It’s like a cloud on which they’ve built their society, nobody needs to look below to see what it's actually resting on
just so long as everything is still able to rest.
When Columbus found Hispaniola, the islanders here said that the only reason he knew it was there was that he stopped in Corvo,
saw the statue and followed where it pointed.
Which is definitely not true, we know that for a fact, but it doesn't stop the people here from saying it.
Similarly, when Cabral found Brazil they said the same thing.
He stopped here, looked at the statue. Only this time, it pointed towards South America.
Which again, wasn’t true, but it didn't stop them from saying it.
That cycle continued throughout this island’s history.
Whatever seemed important, whatever happened in the West, this was how they felt connected to it.
When American whalers came to pick up the Corvoese to fill their ships, they claimed that the statue pointed towards Boston.
By that time it was no longer a man on a horse, but the Virgin Mary.
The text below her feet no longer said something unintelligible in a foreign language, but it was Latin. And it said “go forth, Jesus”.
Every new generation came up with their own lie. Their own myth to keep this island's importance alive,
not to others, but to themselves. They lie about it to this day.
And I can understand why.
It isn’t just the pride of having an important monument in a tiny community.
That statue was a near-perfect symbol of the history of these islands.
It was a physical manifestation of the dawn of colonization, of the conquest of the new world.
This island might be Portugal on paper, but underwater, in the plate tectonics, this is the furthest east you can get in North America.
The history, the identity, hell, the land itself points West. Of course the statue would too.
It lets them feel greater than some poor souls locked on a forgotten rock. This isn’t about a statue, it’s about them.
In the eyes of the people who populate this island, Corvo has always been a stepping stone
to the most important moments of history.
A beacon of some future long since covered by the reality of the past.
And even if in fact those original boats heading towards Brazil didn’t actually stop here,
even if in fact Columbus never learned their name, when you ask these locals, they’ll tell you otherwise.
Because long before those early explorers raised their sails the horseman of Corvo pointed their way.
It doesn't really matter if they saw it or not. Even if this was reality,
an artifact to be studied of the ancient past, by now it’s just a harmless myth.
It lets them see themselves as important to a world that simply doesn’t care if they exist.
So it's not all that important what the mainlanders decide to call this community,
because they know what they are.
They’re the island of the statue. And it doesn’t really matter who built it.
The only thing that truly matters here is: where’s it going to point to next?
This is Rare Earth.