Outposts: Journeys to the Surviving Relics of the British Empire

by Simon Winchester

  The Britain I got home to was more amused than interested in what seemed to be happening on South Georgia. I knew a little about the place, because I had once contemplated applying for a job with the British Antarctic Survey, and had seen pictures of the old granite cross, the memorial to Shackleton, who had died there of a heart attack in 1922. The capital, if such it could be called, was Grytviken, and a small party of BAS men worked there, with their leader nominated as magistrate and representative of the Falkland Islands’ Governor. What appeared to have happened on this occasion was that a small party of Argentinians had landed at Leith, twenty miles up the coast, and were busily dismantling the rusting hulk of the whaling station. The problem, so far as the Foreign Office was concerned, was that the scrap dealers had ignored instructions to check their way through British immigration and customs; a Royal Navy patrol vessel had been dispatched to scare them off, the Argentine Navy had in consequence landed marines and sent in two frigates, ostensibly to support their civilian scrapmen, and both governments were angrily sending Notes to one another demanding discipline, respect for sovereignty, and withdrawal of respective threats.

  And so, six days after coming home from India, I was aboard another plane, heading south to write about this ridiculous little argument and, as it was to turn out, an unimagined and unimaginable war. It was a Sunday night, we were droning across the Atlantic between Madrid and Buenos Aires, and I was attempting a crash course on Falkland Islands’ history.

  Few seemed to have cared very much for the islands. To the first navigators they must have been terrifying: huge rock-bound monsters, looming out of the freezing fog and giant waves, bombarded by furious winds that screamed out of Drake Passage and howled unceasingly from around Cape Horn. The seas are almost always rough, the air is filled with flying spray, visibility is invariably poor, and navigators and steersmen on passing vessels always had too many tasks to perform at once to enjoy their leisure of island-spotting—the consequence being, uniquely in British Imperial history, that we have no real idea who first came across the Falkland Islands. The surviving records are confusing—was Hawkins’ Maidenland, discovered by Richard Hawkins in 1594, the north shore of East Falkland? Did Magellan’s expedition discover them, or are those insignificant patches on Antonio Ribero’s maps of 1527 and 1529 records of the Spaniards’ having found them at the start of the sixteenth century? The maps certainly give them a variety of names—the Seebalds, the Sansons, the Malouines, the Malvinas; and only when Captain John Strong was blown into the island waters by a mighty westerly gale in January 1690, and landed and killed geese and ducks, did they assume the name by which the British still call them today: Strong named them Falkland’s Land, in honour of the Navy Treasurer, Viscount Falkland (a man whose career did not flourish, and who ended up committed to the Tower); seventy-six years later John McBride, who established the first British settlement, officially named the entire group the Falkland Islands.

  The jumbo jet thundered quietly on. From the flight deck we heard a hushed voice mention that we were a few miles south of Tenerife, in the Canaries. Dinner was over and the stewards moved silently through the aircraft, dimming the lights for a Spanish-dubbed version of The French Lieutenant’s Woman to be shown to those few passengers still awake. My reading lamp illuminated the pile of papers I had gathered up before I left London, and I read on.

  There were innumerable references to the firm Argentine belief that she had sovereign rights to the Falklands (and persisted in calling them Las Islas Malvinas, after the French from St Malo who had established the first formal settlement, in 1764, and who had claimed them in the name of Louis XV). Of course I was in no position to judge the strength of the various claims: but I remember being impressed by the vigour and constancy with which Argentina asserted her title to the islands, and wondering if there was much more than obstinacy in the tone that successive British Governments had adopted towards the idea of any real negotiations over the islands’ future. I was struck too by the suggestion that every Argentine schoolchild from the age of four knew in the minutest detail the history of the Malvinas, and had an unswerving belief in his country’s entitlement to the islands; I cannot recall ever having heard anything about them at school at all, other than as a name in the stamp album. (The penny black-and-carmine issue of 1938, with the black-necked swan, and the halfpenny black-and-green with the picture of two sets of whale jaws, were my particular favourites; I promised myself I would look them out when I got back home in a week or two.) Like most Britons I neither knew much about the islands, nor cared greatly about their fate, nor who owned title to them.

  Few of the early settlers seemed to have liked the islands. ‘A countryside lifeless for want of inhabitants…everywhere a weird and melancholy uniformity’ was the verdict of Antoine de Bougainville, the leader of the settler band from St Malo. Dr Johnson established the colony’s reputation in 1771, noting that it had been ‘thrown aside from human use, stormy in winter, barren in summer, an island which not even the southern savages had dignified with habitation’. ‘I tarry in this miserable desert,’ wrote the first priest of the Spanish community, Father Sebastian Villaneuva, ‘suffering everything for the love of God.’ And again, one of the first Britons to live on East Falkland Island, an army lieutenant, recalled some years later that the colony was ‘the most detestable place I was ever at in all my life’. ‘A remote settlement at the fag end of the world,’ said one Governor in 1886; ‘the hills are rounded, bleak, bare and brownish,’ wrote Prince Albert Victor, who had sailed in aboard HMS Bacchante. The hills, he added, ‘were like Newmarket Heath’.

  Charles Darwin went to the Falklands aboard the Beagle in 1833, the same year that the Union flag was first raised by a visiting naval vessel. He knew that the existing Argentine garrison had been ordered to leave, and was scornfully dismissive of the Admiralty’s action. He delivered a judgement as haunting as it was economical: ‘Here we, dog in manger fashion, seize an island and leave to protect it a Union Jack.’ Ten years later the islands were formally colonised—an Act of Parliament in London, twenty-eight-year-old Mr Richard Moody came south on the brig Hebe to be the first Governor, a Colonial Secretary and Colonial Treasurer were appointed and the dismal new possession was inserted into the Colonial Office List, sandwiched between British Honduras and Gambia (although by the beginning of this century Cyprus and Fiji had become its closest alphabetical neighbours). Port Stanley was chosen as the capital, thirty pensioners were sent down from Chelsea Barracks, and thirty-five Royal Marines and their families followed shortly afterwards. Governor Moody’s first Imperial decision was to curb the colonials’ keen liking for strong drink. Spirits, he declared, ‘produce the most maddening effects and disorderly excesses’, and he slapped a pound a gallon on liquor brought in to the islands from home.

  I must have slept fitfully for a while, for it was morning when I next looked out of the windows, and we were coming in to land at Rio. The Brazilian newspapers were full of news about the Malvinas, and there were pictures on the front pages of the warships Drummond and Granville, the two Argentine destroyers (despite their names) that were even now cruising around the fjords of South Georgia. Both ships had been built in Barrow-in-Furness, and sold to the Argentine Navy—a measure, it was said, of the enduring amity between Britain and Argentina. Back in London politicians and diplomats set great store by this long-established friendship: here, to the extent I could translate the Portuguese headlines, it seemed to count for rather less. There was definitely the smell of trouble.

  A day later and I was in deepest Patagonia. This was very different from the steamy warmth of the River Plate. Here it was very much a high latitude autumn. The wind howled down from the Andes, and whipped up the dust in cold, gritty flurries. I was in Comodoro Rivadavia, a town which I had long thought to be blessed with one of the prettiest names in the Americas. I had tried to get there two years before to write about a simmering dispute between Chile and Argentina over the ownership of a gr
oup of small islands off the coast of Tierra del Fuego; but the Pope stepped in to moderate, and the dispute collapsed, and there was no reason to go. Now I was here, and the place was a terrible disappointment. It was littered with the accumulated debris of the oil drilling business—rusty iron girders, enormous pulley blocks, barrels, abandoned lorries, stores dumps behind barbed-wire fences. The buildings were modern, and ugly, and the people walked bent over into the cold gales that blew along the alleys. (It was the second time that I had come to expect too much from a lovely city name: years before I had spun wondrous fantasies about a place called Tucumcari in New Mexico; but when I got there it was just an oily little truckstop on Route Sixty-six, best avoided. I felt much the same way about Comodoro Rivadavia.)

  Flying to the Falkland Islands has never been easy. In 1952 a seaplane made a remarkable journey all the way from Southampton to Port Stanley, by way of Madeira, the Cape Verde Islands, Recife and Montevideo. She took seven days, turned round a few days later and flew home. Then in 1971 a lighthouse keeper—the Cape Pembroke Light on East Falkland was one of the few remaining outposts of the Imperial Lighthouse Service—fell ill, an amphibious aircraft of the Argentine Navy flew in to evacuate him, and then agreed to fly to and from Port Stanley twice a month with passengers and mail. A year later the state-run Argentine civil airline took over the task, and ran a weekly service to the islands. It was an excellent arrangement for both sides: the Falkland Islanders had an air service, and the Argentines could keep an eye on the colony. Moreover, with a small office in Port Stanley, manned by a serving naval officer (to which the colonial authorities seemed to express no objection), the Argentine military had a foothold—one that was to prove useful just a few days after I arrived.

  It was Tuesday, 30th March when I presented my ticket at Comodoro airport, and the political atmosphere had become electric. Two days before—the Sunday—the intelligence community had told the British Prime Minister that Argentina was probably going to take action against the Falkland Islands; three atomic-powered submarines had been ordered to proceed with all deliberate speed to the South Atlantic; one, HMS Spartan, was being loaded with live torpedoes in Gibraltar dockyard at the very moment I was walking up to the ticket counter.

  I knew nothing about this, nor did I know that the Argentine authorities had decided to invade the islands—though the Comodoro aerodrome was filled with Hercules transport planes, and fighters were flying overhead for much of the day. My only inspiration had come the day before, via a chance remark from a Royal Navy officer I had met at the British Embassy in Buenos Aires. I had asked him if, in his view, it was worth my while trying to get to Port Stanley—the BBC had said that no journalists were going to be allowed to go, and I would have to use some degree of subterfuge to get aboard the plane. The Argentine authorities might be rather annoyed if they found out—so, was it worth the risk? ‘Go,’ was all he said. ‘It should be worth it.’ (Some months later he told me that, having a fair idea of what was going to happen over the coming days, he had wondered guiltily how I ever planned to get back.)

  But no complicated subterfuge was necessary. The little plane took off on time, and all the passengers who had queued were aboard. No matter that task forces and battle fleets were even at that moment assembling at the two ends of the Atlantic Ocean, and satellites were being interrogated hourly for information on troop movements and diplomatic messages, no matter that the world’s spying community was working overtime, and that presidents and prime ministers were engaging in urgent late-night telephone calls for advice and support—of all of these events that history now insists were taking place that day, the plane’s passengers were quite insensible. I had lengthy conversations with three men aboard who had come to the Falkland Islands to buy land. One was a minor Spanish count; one was a High Tory gentleman farmer from Shropshire; the third was a Scotsman who lived in Egypt. Each one had the fullest confidence in the ability of the mother-country to prevent any unpleasantness: no one in the plane was thinking of war, except perhaps the uniformed men in the cockpit, who may well have known what we did not. Only London was expecting trouble, and Buenos Aires was less than sixty hours away from delivering it.

  I felt a thrill of excitement as the plane bumped its way downwards an hour later, and the seat-belt signs snapped on. There was a thick and dirty layer of cloud, and it was several minutes before I could see anything below through the Lockheed’s picture windows. But then, grey and heaving and white-veined in the gale, there was the sea. It had everything I expected of a Cape Horn sea. It was shallow—the South American continental shelf was only thirty fathoms down—and the waves were short, and steep. The sea here had a vast emptiness, and a subdued fury to it—not at all like the North Sea, for instance, across which ships of all kinds are for ever making way. This was a deserted quarter of the ocean, and the clouds were very low, and ragged wisps blew down to the crests of the swell, where big seabirds—albatross, I imagined, or the southern ocean mollymauks—whirled lazily on the storm.

  We were coming in north of the islands, and making a tight turn into the wind, landing from the east. The charts (‘Islands Surveyed by Captains R. Fitz Roy and B. J. Sulivan, RN, 1838–1945’) were not entirely helpful. Macbride Head, for which I looked in vain, had a notation beside it. ‘Reported to lie one mile further northward, 1953’. The cliffs around Cape Bougainville were said to be a mile and a half further south than depicted by the Victorian captains. And the interior of East Falkland, which they either never took time to see, or else found too intimidating to describe, was curtly dismissed as being crammed with ‘Rugged mountain Ranges and impassable Valleys’. I trusted that the Air Force men up front were using more accurate maps.

  And as we turned for the final approach, so I spotted my first glimpse of this uttermost outpost of the old Empire. A chain of black rocks, streaked with white foam, surrounded by a tangled web of weed, heaved up from the seabed. There was a tiny beach, and on it the lumbering forms of seals, frantically racing into the comfort of the surf to escape our noisy approach. There were said to be four types of pinnipeds on the Falklands—the southern elephant, the southern sea lion, the South American fur, and the leopard. True seals walk by flexing their stomach muscles (unlike sea lions, which use their flippers) and furs are the most common Falkland seals, and as these below seemed to be both numerous and heaving themselves about on their bellies, I assumed these to be furs. But before I could be sure two more islands, these covered with tall bushes of tussac grass, flashed by and we bumped down on the most southerly governed dominion of the United Kingdom.

  The rain lashed cruelly out of the rugged ranges and impassable valleys to the west, though it was not cold. Two bedraggled and dejected baggage men waved us into the low block of the arrivals’ hall, where there was the smell of cigarette smoke and damp corduroy, and where a rather dated picture of the Queen and Prince Philip hung, steamed up, on a whitewashed wall. A small and cheerful man in blue oilskins welcomed us, said his name was Les Halliday, customs and immigration officer and harbour master, and could he have our passports? Much inspection, and questioning followed—how long was I staying, did I have enough funds to support myself, where was my return ticket, what was my business—before Mr Halliday felt confident that I was not an Argentine zero pilot out on the islands for a recce, and he chalked my dripping bags and stamped my passport.

  A small oblong stamp in blue-black ink: ‘Immigration Department 30 March 1982 Falkland Islands’. Neither Les Halliday nor I knew that was to be the last mark he would put in a passport for a long while, and that the plane even then refuelling in the storm outside would be the last international civil flight into the Falklands for five years, at least. The next foreign aircraft to land at Stanley airfield would arrive in three days’ time; it would fly the blue-and-white flag of Argentina, all of its guns would be loaded with shells, and Mr Halliday would be under strict curfew, ordered to stay indoors and pay the arrival no official heed at all.

  A cl
utch of mud-spattered Land Rovers stood outside, and a pleasant-faced girl took my bags and led me to one of them. Her voice sounded vaguely Australian, though she was rather shy, and clearly rather uneasy with the strangers who piled into the cab. She unbuttoned her anorak once the heater got going, and she was wearing a tee-shirt with a Union Jack, and the slogan ‘British and Proud of It’ over an outline of the islands. We lurched forward with a belch of diesel smoke and crunch of wet gravel, and set off for the colony’s capital.

  A few weeks before I had been on the island of Lewis, in the Outer Hebrides, and the similarities were remarkable. No trees. Bare rocks, ever wet from the rain and salt spray. Endless stretches of green bogland, fading into the fog and the drifting squalls. Lines of black diggings, some with tiny figures in black plastic coats moving slowly among the pools of inky water, stacking fuel for the coming winter. Gulls mewed and squawked as they wheeled in the eddies. Discarded cars lay rusting beside the road, which was either deeply rutted, or covered with thick patches of beach sand scattered by the last storm waves. And through the holes torn in the Land Rover’s canvas top, the sweet smell of peat smoke, and, as we rounded a bend and breasted a low rise, the sight of it blowing in blue streams from a hundred mean cottage rows in Port Stanley herself.

  We passed a small forest of radio aerials: this was where the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company had set up its first transmitter in 1912, and had sent a message in morse to King George. The Admiralty built a second set of mighty aerials just before the Great War, in the mountains to the west of the capital; the first time they were tested some hapless matelot turned on too much power and miles of wiring burned out in a flash and a drizzle of sparks. A submarine cable laid to Montevideo snapped, twice. Then a set of rhombus aerials was built for a space-research team that came to the Falklands in the mid-Sixties, and a private circuit was established between the unlikely twin towns of Stanley and Darmstadt, in West Germany. But after seven years it closed, too—leaving behind, as seems the custom here, a cluster of odd-shaped radio masts. There may be no native trees on the Falklands, but the twentieth century’s sterling efforts to allow the colonists to talk to the outside world has left many rusting iron masts and rotting hawsers that, from a distance and in a mist, look much the same.