Atlantus: Jersey – New Jersey

UK
Atlantus: Jersey – New Jersey

Located in the Bay of St Malo the island is protected by the peninsulas of Brittany to the south and Cornwall to the north. While the Channel Islands owe their cultural identity to forces located on either side of the English Channel, insular experiences are strongly influenced by the presence of the Atlantic Ocean. The view out over this vast oceanic space imagined by islanders looking westward, uninterrupted by landfall before the coast of North America, set against the island’s tiny geography exerts its own powerful force. It is to this cultural and historical force that photographer Martin Toft responds in this project. It was the force of politics and civil war in England that led to Sir George Carteret (1609-80), arguably Jersey’s most famous mariner, transmitting the island’s name 3500 miles across the Atlantic to the American State that now bears its name. In return for Carteret’s ardent support of the royalist cause during the English Civil War, James, Duke of York granted to him a large tract of land on the Eastern Seaboard of North America in 1664. Carteret named it New Jersey.