Outposts: Journeys to the Surviving Relics of the British Empire

by Simon Winchester

  Sailing is not, perhaps, as noisy a means of transport as some, but it is not quiet. The halyards creak, the sails slap, the bows hiss as they cut through the waves, and a hundred unsecured bits of would-be jetsam bump and jostle below with the endless movement of the sea. These are familiar sounds, and before long they fade into a kind of silence, noticeable only if they change in pitch or rhythm or volume.

  After three hours of this muted concert, a new sound suddenly intruded. At first it was like a distant train, rumbling through a marshalling yard at night, its power magnified by the prevailing breeze. As the miles fell away it became ever louder and changed, until it was like a dull, deep-throated growl, as though some gargantuan beast were lurking in the waters ahead, full of menace. I peered into the distance, but saw nothing, just a whirling flock of petrels.

  From twenty feet up the mainmast ratlines the picture was very different. The birds were flying above a long and almost unbroken line of white foam, stitched on to the horizon itself. As my eyes became accustomed I could see huge ocean curlers throw themselves on to the ragged line, breaking and hurling spray and spindrift high into the air, and booming with raw power as they did so. We edged closer and closer to the reef. Occasionally, behind the white, boiling waters, we could spy a flash of coal-black coral and, oddly vertical in this domain of the horizontal, the remnant skeletons of steel ships that had driven on to the razor-wall of rock, and had long ago been ripped apart and had died where they so unexpectedly stranded.

  Below us the water was still two miles deep. A mile ahead, rising sheer from the abyss, was Blenheim Reef, ‘drying’, as the appropriate volume of the Admiralty Pilot puts it, ‘very rarely, but breaking always’. This, whatever the romantic attractions of discovering a monument to the Duke of Marlborough’s great victory so far from home, was a place to avoid, and I swung the boat hard south. The reef became a slim white line on the starboard horizon, more and more broken as we sailed along its length, until just a pair of tiny rocks remained, and then it was gone, with only the growling boom evidence of its sinister existence.

  But now, in its place ahead, a smudge of green. It uncoiled before us, became two smudges, then three distinct patches, then five. The green patches became trees—coconut palms, heeling over in the wind. A new line of boiling reefs appeared below the palms and, as we closed to within a mile of the shore, there were sand beaches, and, half-hidden by the barricades of palm trunks, huts of grey wood, with verandahs from which, we mused, old men sucking on their pipes were even now watching us dipping lazily through the waves towards them.

  That was a fancy, we knew, having some idea of the strange history of this corner of the British Empire; but the mere presence of the old houses, brooding in the afternoon sun and yet, as I well knew, quite empty but for a few rats, crabs and rhinoceros beetles, cast a chill of sudden excitement. We rounded the reef entrance—the island at the atoll’s northern tip is called Ile de la Passe, as is the island at almost every reef entrance in every atoll in the Indian Ocean, thus making it one of the commonest of our Imperial names—and made our way, with infinite navigational caution, into the lagoon itself. Blenheim Reef may have always been a vacant plot in the Imperial landscape; Salomon Atoll, until very recently indeed, was a lively home to 300 thriving and happy subjects of the British Crown—perhaps the most isolated of all the outposts London had ever sought to control.

  The lagoon was mirror-calm, and cool green. The charts showed innumerable hazards—a sandbank here, a coral head there, a channel barely a yard wide leading to this island, another ending in a cul-de-sac beside that. The dolphins cared not one whit, of course: a score of them swam out to meet us, and chirped gaily as they leaped and dived alongside, or played under the bowsprit. I had become accustomed to their habits in recent ocean nights: they would sidle up to the beam, leaving yellow trails of phosphorescent fire, and listen—I could swear it—to our soft conversations in the cockpit. If we moved up to the bow flat, and talked there, the swimmers would edge alongside; if we stopped talking, or if only one of us stayed on deck, they would become bored with the lack of discourse, and slip away in a flash of irritated tedium, an illuminated harrumph! and try again later. If these dolphins were the clubbable beasts from the ocean then, I promised, I’d have a word with them, later.

  They led us in—or so it appeared, as they were always a few inches from the bow, no matter which way we turned. As we nosed more deeply into the lagoon, and the boom of the surf quietened behind, so the scale of the atoll began to appear. Eleven distinct islands: the Ile de la Passe now a little behind on the port side; English Island on the starboard quarter; Shearwater, Jacobin, Salt, Hen, Cemetery, Devil’s, Mapor and Tatamaka Islands on the atoll’s gently curving flanks and then far ahead, at the southern tip, Boddam Island, the half square mile of territory recognised by those faraway administrators in Downing Street as being the atoll’s tiny capital.

  From here Boddam looked no different from her neighbour islets—a high horizon of palm fronds, the irruption of the leafy mass of giant breadfruit trees, the occasional glint of an orange flower, or a banana fist, or a ficus. The beaches were short and steep, littered with branches and fallen coconuts, and with occasional outwashes of black sand where some root had become dislodged and spilled humus into the sea. Dead corals—all in a spectrum of reds ranging from the palest of pinks to the richest of carmines—lay half-buried in the shell sand, tugged at gently by the ever-lapping waters of the lagoon.

  But then I began to see that Boddam was not quite the same. There was a small wooden pier jutting from a mass of bushes; a tall Calvary, overgrown with greenery, stood behind, as testament to the evident faith of the islanders; and, deep in the interior gloom, the outlines of a grand petit château, all fretwork and wrought iron, and seemingly brought here from the Loire a century back and left to decay among the steam and the ants of mid-ocean.

  We anchored in two fathoms—a mooring accomplished only after we had hit, and briefly stranded upon, a head of brain coral that rose unpredictably to within a yard of the surface, and of which even the dolphins were ignorant. We were not entirely alone: a small sloop from Marseille lay off the dock, and a catamaran registered in San Francisco bobbed at anchor half a mile off. The skipper rowed across to say hello: he was a postman from the suburb of San Mateo, and had left home—wife, children, dogs—to sail around the world.

  ‘Figured it’d take me five years to go right round,’ he grinned. ‘Only managed to get halfway, and I’m eight years behind schedule already. So damn pleasant, places like this.’ He asked how long I was staying, and when I told him a week, give or take, his grey beard shook with amused outrage. ‘Chrissake! A week! I’ve been here three months so far and I’ve only been to half the islands. This is undiscovered territory here, friend. You stay a good long time!’ And he rowed his dinghy away at a furious pace, stirring up the water and alarming small schools of silvery fish.

  He stayed on his boat for the rest of the week, as did, for most of the time, the young couple from France. They had some mysterious problem with their engine, and laboured all day, covered in grease and sweat. The man rarely swam over to the island—though the girl, a lithe and dusky creature from Paris, sometimes came ashore for coconuts. I would find her in a clearing, machete in one hand, a fresh coconut to her lips, drinking the milk. She giggled when she saw me, and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. ‘You like some?’ she would ask, and offer the green globe, neatly cut at the top. It was very hot, and the liquid was cool and soothing, especially when it spilled from the sides of the cut and down on my chest. ‘Feel good, no?’ she would ask, and then run back to the tree, and climb the trunk with all the agility of Mowgli, and thwack! and thud! with her knife until a small pile of fresh nuts lay on the sea-grass below. ‘Take what you want,’ she would offer. ‘Now I go to get some limes. Have you found the chickens yet?’

  Once there had been chickens on Boddam Island. There had been a great many chickens, and pigs, and don
keys, and people. Some 289 islanders at the last count, made in 1966. Almost all of them had been British subjects, and loyal subjects at that: a visitor in 1955 noted that the islanders were ‘lavish with their Union Jacks’, and a choir had sung a ragged version of the National Anthem to him, heavily accented in French.

  A long time ago there had been a plan to turn Boddam Island into the greatest free port in the entire Indian Ocean—a port to rival Hong Kong, and where all transoceanic liners would be bound to call so their passengers could buy silks and perfumes and wines—and coconut milk and coir placemats. But nothing came of it, and the islanders continued with their unending attentions to the products of the coco palm—oil, copra, milk and wood—and dispatched them all to the north isle of Mauritius, 1,200 miles away to the south-west.

  At the end of the Sixties something very strange happened to the people of Boddam Island, and to their neighbours, too. Exactly what fate befell them belongs to a later chapter; its consequence, though, is what now remains—an utterly deserted desert island, yet reliquary to an old town that still clings on, wind-torn and ravaged, but recognisable—inhabitable, even—in the tiny palm jungle.

  There is a main street, lined with little cottages. A church, roofless, but made of coral rock and with its stained-glass still in place, stands in a clearing. The cemetery records the deaths of islanders through the two centuries of habitation: a Mrs Thompson died there in 1932, though in what circumstances her tomb does not record. There is a small railway, and a couple of little trucks I found I could just push through the shards of accumulated rust. A long warehouse, lined with jars and hooks and old tin boxes, stands at the end of the track.

  And, behind a low wall, ringed by flower beds that had long since resumed their feral patterns, a mansion. This was clearly where the man who ran the island—or woman, it being a woman who had the idea of turning Boddam into a free port—made his home. It was once a rather splendid place: three floors, verandahs, balconies, shuttered windows, a pergola by the lawn. Now the whole place sagged at an alarming angle; when I climbed up the main staircase the house shook, and when I climbed down the stairs collapsed with a roar and in a cloud of grey wood-dust, and I had to jump the last six feet.

  Not long ago a family had lived here. It had been a simple life, undemanding, pleasant. There had been no grand balls or diplomatic receptions at this corner of the Empire; but no doubt they had raised a glass on the occasion of the Queen’s birthday. Once in a while there was a radio message from London; and a ship would come every couple of months to collect the oil and the copra; and perhaps every three years His Excellency the Governor would come in his launch, and the children would be lavish with their flags and sing the one English song they knew to him.

  But there was little evidence of that today. Tacked to the wall of one cottage I found a photograph of a debutante that had been cut from a copy of Country Life—a rather stern-looking girl from Wiltshire. And in another bungalow, four volumes of The Times History of the War, mildewed and yellow with age, but readable still, and with portraits of Kitchener, and stirring accounts of the Somme.

  Boddam was always a small cog in the Imperial machine—one of the least islands of a lesser dependency of a colony whose best-known inhabitant—the dodo—had become a symbol of the extinct. And yet the island, though apparently dead and inhabited by ghosts, still remains today in London’s charge, still vexes the occasional civil servant. One might suppose it does not vex him much, since it has no permanent inhabitants, and thus neither products nor needs; but it is, incontrovertibly, a piece of British territory for which the Crown is responsible and which ultimately, one might suppose further, a government in London would still wish to protect and defend with a degree of passion, verve and style.

  In fact, in the specific case of Boddam Island and her neighbours—and in particular one neighbour a few hours’ sailing time away to the south—London wishes rather more than that. The colony of British Indian Ocean Territory, which spreads in a wild profusion of atolls and lagoons and reefs over twenty-one thousand square miles of ocean, is at the same time one of the least-known, and in many ways the most important of those that are left. It is a place of great beauty, and until recently it enjoyed the perfect peace of a tropic backwater, unremembered, but unencumbered. However today it is all very different. It is a place of considerable and unnecessary sadness—a territory wrapped in official mystery and internationally directed secrecy, its people and its history victims of a wretched and all-too-little-known scandal. Although its official title is the British Indian Ocean Territory its repute stems from the name of one very large island at the southern tip of the colony, a hundred miles from Boddam, and first discovered four centuries ago by a Portuguese sailor who gave it his name: Diego Garcia.

  It is the only colonial possession which it is not legally possible for ordinary civilians to visit—unless they have government permission, which is seldom given. To get there I had to sail for some three weeks in a tiny and comfortless schooner. When I arrived I was brusquely shown the door, and only managed to stay for a few hours. It is not a place whose charms and problems Britain wishes to have advertised around the world. And small wonder, for the history of Britain and her Indian Ocean Territory is an unattractive story at best, and to many critics is a saga of terrible cruelty, best forgotten and wisest ignored.

  The background is more complicated than it ought to be and involves, initially, the two large Indian Ocean islands of Mauritius (famous for the dodo) and the Seychelles (best known for a remarkable type of coconut which is formed in the shape of the female buttocks). Both islands were made British colonies in 1814 under the terms of the Treaty of Paris; at first the Seychelles was a dependency of Mauritius, and then, in 1903, it became a fully-fledged colony in its own right.

  The two colonies also looked after a number of distant barely populated tropical islands as dependencies. The Seychelles Governor had under his wing such obscure Imperial particles as Desroches Island, a sandy spit planted with 800 acres of coconut palms; Aldabra, known for its giant tortoises, frigate birds, and sacred ibises; and the Farquhar Group, just to the north of Madagascar. Mauritius cared for the minute rock of Rodriguez, 200 miles to the east; and the Chagos Archipelago, known by the more Imperial title of the Oil Islands, and which the Colonial Office List described as being ‘four days’ steaming’ from Mauritius.

  Such was the situation in early 1965, when Mauritius was beginning to make noises about becoming independent. A Labour Government was in office in London (nearly all the protagonists in this story are members of the Labour Party, the significance of which will become clear later), and its then Colonial Secretary, Anthony Greenwood, flew to the Mauritian capital with some startling news. The islanders, he said, could indeed have their independence from Britain, but only on condition that they gave up their claim to the islands of the Chagos Archipelago, 1,200 miles away, and in perpetuity: Mr Greenwood gave no reason, but offered three million pounds in compensation, which the local politicians eventually decided to accept.

  This accomplished, the Colonial Secretary then flew north to the Seychelles, and informed the Colonial Government there—which was not yet thinking of independence—that its three principal dependencies of Farquhar, Desroches and Aldabra were also being removed from the bailiwick, and the sovereignty of these scraps of sand and coral and giant tortoises was being passed back to London herself. No one knew why, until November, when a brief announcement was made in the House of Commons. The four island groups were to be made into a brand-new colony, to be named British Indian Ocean Territory; they would be administered by a Commissioner, who would be based at Victoria, in the Seychelles; they would use the currencies of the Seychelles and Mauritius and the stamps of Mauritius; and they would be run according to British colonial law ‘unless modified by the Order in Council of 8th November 1965’, the document that formally established this new, self-standing possession.

  It was more than a year before anyone realised
why London had gone to the time and trouble to set up a new dependent territory that was so scattered and so seemingly useless. On 30th December 1966, all was answered: Britain and the United States signed an Exchange of Notes ‘concerning the availability for Defence Purposes’ of the islands. The Notes were voluminous—eleven main sections, and two annexes with more than fifty sub-paragraphs (which covered all known contingencies, including a specific ban on the United States executing anyone on the islands)—but essentially said one thing. America was given permission to lease the islands for fifty years (with an option on a further twenty) without payment, and to build a defence installation there, to suit such needs ‘as might arise’.

  Lord Chalfont, another Labour minister, signed the Government’s acceptance of the Notes (on behalf of his Foreign Secretary, George Brown) and the matter became law—without even the most perfunctory debate in Parliament, and with virtually no publicity. It was in any case generally accepted that to have some Western defence outpost in the region was prudent: the only other bases in the Indian Ocean at the time were the RAF base at Gan, an atoll in the southern part of the Maldive Islands chain, and Aden. Even the least prescient Imperialist would realise that these would eventually be abandoned (as indeed they were: the British were forced out of Aden in November 1967, and voluntarily left Gan in March 1976). Given the general instability of the region, and the absolute necessity of guaranteeing the free flow of Gulf oil, Washington and London seized on the notion of keeping the islands of BIOT for their very own, in case the need arose.

  Inexorably and, perhaps, inevitably, the forces moved in. First there was an agreement signed in 1972 (under a Tory government—the only publicly admitted deal that involved a Conservative administration) to allow the US Navy to erect ‘a limited communications facility’ on the island of Diego Garcia, at the southern end of the Chagos island group. Then, two years later another deal was signed, for expansion of the facility—but it was still only to be what the then Labour Defence Secretary, Roy Mason, called ‘very austere’. Indeed, so confident was Mason of the unimportance of the island that he publicly assured the Mauritians, who were by this time becoming rather exercised at the idea of a large superpower fortress being built in their neighbourhood, that ‘Diego Garcia will not be used as a military base’.