Cape Town archivist Dan Sleigh’s epic historical novel Islands (2004) provides a detailed and comprehensive account of the Dutch East India Company’s colonial settlement of the Cape of Good Hope and of its outposts, including Mauritius, in the second half of the 17th century. Halfway between Europe and Batavia—the ‘Golden Orient’—the Cape is presented as a geographical, economic and cultural hinge between the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, between West and East, and also between the Dutch colonists and the indigenous Koina peoples. Against a backdrop of the war-stricken Netherlands and Germany, Sleigh’s fictional mapping concentrates on the Company’s economic and military domination, trade monopoly, exploitation of human life and environmental destruction. In a permeable zone between historiography and fiction, and fiction and metafiction, the narrative trajectory moves back and forth from the isolated Cape settlement and its penal outpost of Robben Island, across the Indian Ocean to the island outposts of Mauritius, Ceylon and Batavia. The interlinked stories of these various insular contact zones show that the colonising presence was no more monolithic than the colonised indigenes were homogeneous. Through the conceptual lenses of ‘hybridity’ (Bhabha), ‘cultural seams’ (de Kock), ‘entanglement’ (Nuttall), ‘complicity’, (Sanders) and ‘transitivity’ (Clingman), the essay examines the ethnic and cultural heterogeneity of the communities in these island ecotones by focussing on three generations of creolisation and diasporic dispersion in the stories of three historical figures: the Goringhaicona leader Autshumao, the Koina woman Krotoa/Eva, and Eva’s biracial daughter Pieternella.