Please Find The Tone Of This Article. I Can’t Find It.?

Here is the article:
On my brother’s wall in Toronto are the false maps. Old portraits of Ceylon. The result of
sightings, glances from trading vessels, the theories of sextant. The shapes differ so much
they seem to be translations — by Ptolemy, Mercator, François Valentyn, Mortier, and Heydt
— growing from mythic shapes into eventual accuracy. Amoeba, then stout rectangle, and
then the island as we know it now, a pendant off the ear of India. Around it, a blue-combed
ocean busy with dolphin and sea-horse, cherub and compass. Ceylon floats on the Indian
Ocean and holds its naïve mountains, drawings of cassowary and boar who leap without
perspective across imagined ‘desertum’1 and plain.
At the edge of the maps the scrolled mantling depicts ferocious slipper-footed elephants,
a white queen offering a necklace to natives who carry tusks and a conch, a Moorish king
who stands amidst the power of books and armour. On the south-west corner of the island,
their tails writhing in the waves.
The maps reveal rumours of topography, the routes for invasion and trade, and the dark
mad mind of travellers’ tales appears throughout Arab and Chinese and medieval records.
The island seduced all of Europe. The Portuguese. The Dutch. The English. And so its
name changed, as well as its shape, — Serendip, Ratnapida (“island of gems”), Taprobane,
Zeloan, Zeilan, Seyllan, Ceilon, and Ceylon — the wife of many marriages, courted by
invaders who stepped ashore and claimed everything with the power of their sword or bible
or language.
This pendant, once its shape stood still, became a mirror. It pretended to reflect each
European power till newer ships arrived and spilled their nationalities, some of whom stayed
and intermarried — my own ancestor arriving in 1600, a doctor who cured the residing
governor’s daughter with a strange herb and was rewarded with land, a foreign wife, and a
new name which was a Dutch spelling of his own. Ondaatje. A parody of the ruling
language. And when his Dutch wife died, marrying a Sinhalese2 woman, having nine
children, and remaining. Here. At the centre of the rumour. At this point on the map.
The article ends here. Ive read it a few times and really can not find out what the tone is…I dont even understand the plot or theme…