The Bay of All Saints covers 1,223 square kilometres, the largest bay in Brazil, and Itaparica sits at its mouth roughly ten kilometres from Salvador. The island runs more than 36 kilometres from end to end but barely rises above the water; its highest point is about fifteen metres, so from a boat it reads as a long green line broken by church towers and palms. Forty kilometres of beach edge it. Two municipalities share the ground - Vera Cruz holds 87 percent of the land, the town of Itaparica the remaining 13 - a division that dates from 1962, when the old single municipality was carved up. Getting there means choosing a boat. The small passenger ferry leaves from near the Mercado Modelo in Salvador; the car ferry runs from a terminal a couple of kilometres north across to Bom Despacho. Once ashore, vans work the island routes, and flagging one down from the correct side of the road remains the cheapest way to travel.

Nobody agrees on the name. The Tupi scholar Eduardo de Almeida Navarro reads Itaparica as itápirika, flint - stone that throws sparks. Teodoro Sampaio argued instead for 'stone enclosure.' Frederico Edelweiss suspected Portuguese settlers bent whatever they heard toward Caparica, a place they already knew outside Lisbon. What is certain is the date the Europeans arrived: Amerigo Vespucci entered the bay on All Saints' Day, 1 November 1501, which is how the water got its name. Jesuits founded a settlement at Baiacu on the island in 1560. Itaparica was never allowed to become a backwater after that. It sat too close to the colonial capital, too plainly in view from the Cidade Alta, and too squarely across the shipping channel to be ignored.

The Recôncavo around the bay grew cane, and Itaparica grew it too, on estates worked by enslaved Africans and their descendants. Whaling ran alongside the sugar and continued into the middle of the nineteenth century, the bay's whales taken and rendered within sight of the plantations. Then, in 1815, the Ingá-Açu estate installed the first steam engine in Brazil - an industrial revolution arriving on an island most maps treated as scenery. The machine gets remembered. The people who cut the cane that made the estate rich enough to buy it usually do not, and Ribeiro's novels are in part an argument about exactly that omission.

The war for Brazilian independence was decided in Bahia later than anywhere else, and Itaparica ended up on the winning side of it. Portuguese forces came for the island on 7 January 1823 with a fleet of 42 vessels and were beaten off in three days by the Itaparica Battalion under Antônio de Sousa Lima, fighting from trenches dug across every landing beach. What the island got out of the victory was a permanent adjective. An imperial decree of 25 October 1831 named the seat Denodada Vila de Itaparica — the dauntless town — and the phrase is still in official use, which makes for an odd sort of memorial: a municipality going about its business under a compliment paid to its great-grandparents. Bahia's war ended on 2 July 1823, and the island keeps that date with the rest of the state.

Something over twenty thousand people live in the municipality of Itaparica, more again across the line in Vera Cruz, and the numbers swell every time Salvador decides it needs a weekend away. The town's original draw was medicinal — mineral water rising from a spring in the middle of it, taken by visitors who came for their health — and the modern one is plainer: forty kilometres of beach, warm shallow water, and a boat back to the city whenever you have had enough. The parish church of the Santíssimo Sacramento, finished in 1794, still anchors the centre. What Ribeiro understood, and put in the novel, is that none of this is scenery. Sugar, whales, war, church bells and ferry timetables all happened to the same families, on the same forty kilometres of sand, and mostly to people whose names never made it into the official account.