Outposts: Journeys to the Surviving Relics of the British Empire

by Simon Winchester

  For what I wrote in this book about the island of Tristan da Cunha I have been banned, and have never landed there since. I have been to the colony’s territorial waters a number of times, but the local police have kept me away—the islanders still vexed that I had written about the war-time romance of one of their number, now an elderly (and contentedly married) lady. Whenever I have since visited I have had to content myself with lying offshore in a boat, gazing at the black rocks and the potato fields I liked so well, from a floating vantage point half a mile away.

  The people of St Helena, surely one of the world’s most pleasing and civilised islands, now have a near-absolute right to settle in Britain—a right that had long been denied them (but which, to the credit of the French Government, had for years been enjoyed by all subjects of the remnant specks of the Empire of France).

  And the vexed question of Gibraltar rumbles on—with the British Government now seeking to accommodate Spain’s claims, to the furious vexation of the overwhelming majority of those colonials who huddle on the immense rock which for three centuries seemed so secure a symbol of eternal Imperial stability. The thought that Gibraltar might one day crumble, metaphorically, is perhaps the most potent reminder that this is the age of Empire’s death, its oolite being the capstone of the Imperial tomb.

  But it was the long-expected, long-awaited return to China of Hong Kong that most powerfully symbolised the true ending of an Empire that Lord Rosebery once called ‘the greatest secular force in history the world has ever known’.

  As I have mentioned, I was there at what the British would call the end, and what all right-thinking Chinese would regard as the new beginning. My feelings during those last few hours were mixed indeed.

  It was sentiment that made me wonder, when the final parade of British soldiers, sailors and airmen gave the last salute that night, and at the moment when the bugles began to play ‘Retreat’—when the skies opened and the men in their gleaming uniforms had to stand in a drenching summer downpour—it was sentiment that made me think this an appropriately melancholy moment, full of divinely ordained symbolism. It was concern and apprehension that I felt when I listened to political activists broadcast their worries for the future of free speech and democracy once China had taken over the controls. It was affection I felt when the last Union flag was taken down, and the red flag of China and the emblem of the bauhinia flower rose up to take its place. And it was pride I felt when the Royal Navy escort warships left, as they steamed down through the Li Yue Mun Gap, when their navigation lights finally became invisible under the beam of the Waglan Island lighthouse, and as they sailed off into the black tropical night beneath the beacon they used to call ‘The Light at the End of the Empire’.

  Pride, concern, sentiment and affection: all of these things I felt, and felt acutely, on that hot and rainy Chinese night in June, now six years past. Not a very different range of feelings, in fact, from those I experienced when I first wrote this book nearly twenty years ago—notwithstanding the very much altered mood of the world and its thinking today.

  And I can only conclude that my feelings remain much the same because I still believe today, as I believed both when I travelled and when I wrote, that while there can be no doubt that in running the British Empire we seized and we expropriated and we annexed and in many places we ruled harshly, once we had the territories in our grasp, and once we settled to govern, we had a serious, if somewhat naive belief in our ability to improve each of the countries and territories we now found ourselves ruling. We had, I rather fancy, an optimistic faith that we might leave behind at least some of our possessions in a marginally better condition than when first we found them. And, by and large, I think we did.

  Perhaps there is a brand-new form of American-led colonialism around the corner. Perhaps its intentions, if still unstated and relentlessly undefined, are ultimately malevolent. Perhaps it will one day overwhelm us, and in doing so will justify all the fears of those who look at past Empires to offer a warning of what might yet come about. But all of that will be very many years ahead. In the pages that follow you will not find much by way of a warning. This is instead, quite simply, one final and genial look around an Empire that had much to commend it; and in the stories of its vestiges and relics I hope that some of you, despite the ideologically troublesome principles involved in doing so, may yet discern aspects of its existence that it is possible to enjoy discovering or remembering, to admire, and even, with the benefit of time and hindsight, and to a degree, to respect.

  S. B. A. W.

  Sandisfield,

  Massachusetts

  March 2003

  1

  The Plan

  Like most long journeys into the unknown, this one began with an idea—an idea that was triggered by a strange story I read one wet Sunday afternoon in a recent early spring, on the front page of a London newspaper. It was all about the alleged ‘invasion’ of an island known as Southern Thule, which was said to be 10,000 miles away from England in chilly wastes of the Southern Ocean.

  The island of Southern Thule is quite barren, windswept, bitterly cold, uninhabited and, to all intents and purposes, useless. The Admiralty’s Antarctic Pilot says that it is part of an old sunken volcano, and is covered with ash and penguin guano. There are seals, a variety of petrels and a bank of kelp weed a few hundred yards offshore, especially around a small inlet called Ferguson Bay. Of other possible delights the Pilot is silent.

  The central fact of this curious tale is that Southern Thule belongs now, and belonged at the time of the ‘invasion’, to Britain. It was, and is, a part of a British Crown colony—one of the South Sandwich Islands, which are themselves dependencies of the Falkland Islands. Southern Thule was, indeed, part of the British Empire. It was given its name because it must have seemed to its first finders at very much the extreme end of the discoverable world.

  Some time during the November of 1976—no one is certain of the exact date—a party of fifty members of the Argentine Air Force landed on this remote British rock and, with neither notice, permission nor publicity, constructed a small military base. They built barracks, and a small concrete landing pad for their helicopters. They set up weather-recording machinery and a radio station. They built a plinth, and erected a flagpole, and they flew their flag—the blue and white bandera of the Argentine Republic. So far as they and their commanders were concerned the island, hitherto British, was now an integral part—de facto if not de jure—of Argentina.

  It was a month before the British Government discovered what had happened. Ham radio operators on the Falkland Islands, a thousand miles away to the west, heard chatter between Argentine naval vessels and the Thule air force detachment. On the orders of the Ministry of Defence the local Royal Naval guard ship—HMS Endurance—was sent down to investigate. Five days before Christmas a helicopter from the ship spotted the Argentinians, and the extraordinary news of what was at the very least an act of the most immense cheek, was flashed to London.

  But what initially intrigued me about the story is that London did almost nothing about it. More than a year was to go by before word of the seizure was to leak out to the British public—via the Sunday newspaper—or to the British Parliament. The then Prime Minister, James Callaghan, admitted to a House of Commons that was by turns amused and outraged that yes, he had known all about the affair and that no, he was not planning to send in the Marines to dislodge the Argentinian trespassers. Patient negotiations would continue, he said, to try to persuade them to go away, and in the meantime the interests of regional serenity, diplomatic practice and protocols would be better served if everyone remained calm, and made light of the incident.

  The Argentines remained on Southern Thule until six days after the Falklands War was ended, on 28th June 1982. The same HMS Endurance that had first sighted the men six years before, turned up with a recovery party. HMS Yarmouth, a frigate, dropped a salvo of shells on to a bluff not far from the Argentine base. A Royal Naval tug a
nd a Royal Fleet Auxiliary stood by, giving the whole exercise a properly Imperial appearance. And the Argentines, outnumbered and outgunned, surrendered and handed over their weapons to the Royal Marines. The Union flag was hoisted, and everyone—British victors and Argentine vanquished—sailed away and left Southern Thule to a customarily lonely winter of gales, ice storms and blizzards.

  The story did not quite end there. Six months later a passing British warship noticed, to general astonishment, that the Union flag had been taken down from the jackstaff and the blue-and-white Argentine flag run up in its place. Wary sailors clambered on to the island, finding it deserted, but noticed that whoever had taken the British flag down had folded it with commendable neatness and stuffed it under a nearby boulder. There was general agreement that the new invader was a wit, if nothing else.

  The sailors’ amusement was not matched back in London: a signal was sent to HMS Apollo ordering its men to destroy all buildings on Southern Thule, leaving none fit for prolonged habitation. Demolition crews moved in with plastic explosive, and by Christmas 1982 every barrack block and mess room and met station was reduced to a pile of concrete rubble.

  Only a tiny refuge hut was left, stocked with rations, in case a British survey team should ever find itself benighted on the island. And to give such stranded men solace, a Bible, presented by the Scottish Commercial Travellers’ Christian Union, was tucked in with the food. As a final act the helicopter crew from Endurance raised yet another Union flag, though since the halyards had been destroyed it could only flutter at half mast, where it possibly remains to this day, whipped by the freezing winds, to declare to all the world that this minute speck of worthless land is British, and that, as stated in the best-known of all British Imperial axioms, ‘What we have, we hold.’

  The story intrigued me, for one reason above all. I had thought—to the extent that I had ever thought about the matter at all since schooldays—that we had no longer had an Empire. I had watched so many television newsreels, I thought, about this place being made independent, and that place, and this island, and that peninsula, with this member of the royal family going here, and that one there…surely, I had said to myself—surely it was all gone. And yet, if this story were true, we still had some sort of an Empire out there, and what was more, it was still big enough and complicated enough and still so far-flung and unruly and unmanageable that we occasionally misplaced, misfiled or plain forgot some of its more remote members, and didn’t worry too much if someone else took a fancy to them, invaded them, and took them away.

  What others did we have? How, as King George V is believed to have inquired from his deathbed—how is the Empire? And not just how—what was the Empire, and where, indeed, its members?

  Here came the fateful step. I had raised the question in a roomful of friends: which—it was rather like one of those baffling queries from ‘Trivial Pursuit’—which were the colonies still run, at heaven’s command, from London? No one was quite sure. Fiji, someone ventured—wasn’t Fiji ‘one of ours’? And what about Tonga, and the Isle of Man, and didn’t we still have Christmas Island? In fact weren’t there two Christmas Islands, and didn’t both belong to us?

  Then someone remembered she had an uncle who worked on a cable station that was still British—Assumption Island, she said, a name like that. No wait, Ascension, that was it! ‘Gibraltar!’ somebody else piped up. ‘Malta—and Cyprus!’ said a third.

  To the atlas, but the maps had been drawn in the early Seventies and were long out of date. Thin red lines were etched under some dozens of mid-ocean islands that I knew—even if my visitors did not—had long since become free of what their islanders had come to regard as the British yoke. The tides had ebbed from the high-water mark of Empire far too rapidly for the cartographers at Bartholomew or Oxford to capture, and so their maps, while no doubt topographically accurate, were monuments for the nostalgic, tempting us to assume that our Imperial manor was far grander than reality allowed.

  It was Whitaker’s Almanack that finally did the trick. There were just eight pages, sandwiched between the statistics of cattle ownership in Zimbabwe and the name of the Chancellor of the University of Adelaide—for how, indeed, had the Empire faded away!

  They were in alphabetical order, the forgotten names of Imperial might. There was Anguilla, set in the shallows of the Caribbean Sea. There was—the visitor had been quite right—Ascension Island, tucked into the fold of Africa in the equatorial Atlantic. Bermuda still belonged, and had like most of the others a colonial governor, noted by the Almanack as being a peer of the realm. British Antarctic Territory was still ours, though only penguins lived there full-time, and there was no native population, and no government. We had a curious entity known as the British Indian Ocean Territory, and another, less curiously named, and more Imperially enticing in the British Virgin Islands.

  There was the Crown colony of the Cayman Islands—these three clumps of coral had, at the zenith of the Empire, been mere dependencies of Jamaica, but Jamaica had gone her own way now, and the Caymans stood colonially alone, their islanders proud to be British in the Caribbean Sea.

  The Falkland Islands we knew a little about: the son of the Port Stanley harbourmaster had been in my class at school, and he used to tell me stories of the storms and the moorland and the sheep, and how he longed to go back to the peace of it all during the summer holidays, even though it was winter ‘down there’. He had not spent an Easter or a Christmas in the Falklands since he had been sent off to England for his schooling, and that bothered him, as I remember.

  There were the Falkland Islands dependencies, too—memories of stamp collecting, and the Stanley Gibbons Catalogue, the thickest book a schoolboy ever owned, came flooding back. The dependencies had always issued colourful stamps, with maps outlined in orange, and sketches of seals and enormous polar birds.

  But there were still more. We ran Gibraltar and Hong Kong. We administered Montserrat and the Pitcairn Islands, as well as the exile-island of St Helena, where Napoleon Bonaparte spent the last six miserable years of his life. We had charge of the volcanic morsel of Tristan da Cunha, which had been evacuated in the 1960s when one of the cones suddenly erupted. The islanders, who knew little of ‘civilised’ life, were all brought to Britain, but loathed the place, and eventually decided that, volcano or not, they would all go back home.

  And finally, in this alphabetic list, one colony of which no one in the room seemed to have heard: the Turks and Caicos Islands, utterly overlooked and puzzlingly named, and set in the pleasant waters of the western Atlantic, not far from the Bahamas, 200 miles from Florida.

  So, from Anguilla to Grand Turk, just sixteen groups of rocks and atolls and ice-islands were still officially classified as ours, as dependent territories of the British Crown. Not a massive Empire, maybe, but an Empire nonetheless, and more than any other Imperial power of the past had managed to cling on to, were that anything of which to be particularly proud.

  But there are lesser islands, too—chunks of rock and ice and coral not large enough to be listed in the gazetteers of the relict Empire, morsels and specks found only on the maps, in the charts, in the sailing directions and in the catalogues furnished by the Directorate of the Overseas Survey, and the Defence Mapping Agency of America, who keep tabs on all the world’s dry land, and who, from day to day, claims to own it. So there are many such—many more than even the keenest student of political geography might suppose.

  At the time of writing it seems that Her Majesty’s writ runs in some 200 named islands of any size, and a thousand smaller rocks and skerries besides. But it is in the fine print of the gazetteers that the true extent of Her Majesty’s realms becomes clear. ‘Citizen of United Kingdom and Colonies’ say the blue-and-gold passports. How many bearers are aware that they are, by virtue of holding such a document, subjects of the British Crown and, technically, proud citizens also of an Empire that includes the island of Zavodovski, the rock of Stoltenhoff, of Elephant Island, Junk Isla
nd, of Spectacle Reef and Prickly Pear Cay?

  Tireless administrators can still, if their tasks allow, outline in Imperial pink the perimeters of two Dogs, a Swan, a Hen, a Parrot, an Eagle, a Bosun Bird, a Sealion, a Rabbit, a Nightingale, a Shag, a Carcass and a Rat. There are islands called Alpha, Gamma and Lamda; there are skerries named after Robert, George, Peter, Norman and Nelly. London salutes in islet form the memories of Nelson, Henderson, Livingston, Hawkins, Golding, Willis and Pickersgill. Union flags can still, in theory and in good weather, fly proudly over Coronation, King George, English and St George’s. The Royal Navy may by right lie less than three miles off Inaccessible, Astrolabe, and Shelter.

  There is an Isle Parasole that is British. There are two islands of the Empire, rather inconveniently close to each other, both named I’lle Anglaise. Westminster presides in ultimate authority over Three Brothers, a Necker and a Virgin, one Lively, one Barren, one a Danger. British civil servants in Whitehall have technical authority over the fates of places with the unfamiliar names of Po Toi and Shek Kwu Chau, Jost van Dyke and Visokoi, Takamaka, Beauchene and Providenciales.

  And, in a serried line stretching through the freezing seas from fifty-six degrees south to the formal boundary of the Antarctic, at latitude sixty, the rocky outcrops of South Sandwich—Leskov, Candlemas, Saunders, Montagu, Bristol, Cook and, most vulnerable of all, the dependent colonial Island of Southern Thule.

  We still had, it seemed, dominion over palm and pine.

  No, not a bad collection, someone said. And was it not true—yes, it was! we discovered as we studied the maps—that thanks to happy coincidences of history and geography the islands and peninsulas that Britain had not given up were still draped around the oceans and the time zones in such a way that it was still technically correct to say that the sun never sets on the Crown dominions. While it was sinking into the sea over one island in the West Atlantic so, at that same moment, it was rising to a bugle call and a flag-hoisting ceremony half a world away, in the Indian Ocean, or the China Sea.