Pacific: Silicon Chips and Surfboards, Coral Reefs and Atom Bombs

by Simon Winchester

  We surfed in, dangerously, to the tiny concrete pier. I walked, painfully, up the viciously steep Hill of Difficulty, the one approach to the colony’s small shanty settlement of Adamstown. There was not the vaguest hint of anything untoward. The island was warm, sleepy, friendly. The walking—up and down red laterite roads onto green peaks from which all else was blue, an empty, cloudless pale blue sky and an empty, shipless deep blue ocean—was wearying, hot, lonely.

  But there were always stories to be found. At the top of one hill, for instance, I met a Japanese man with a pup tent and a large radio transmitter: he was a ham operator who had come to Pitcairn to broadcast messages and persuade those who heard him to write the so-called QSL “I have heard your transmission” cards, asking for a dollar or so each time in return. People had sent him ten thousand dollars thus far, he said, and felt it was time to go home. Could we take him on to Panama? The captain said no. The Japanese man, only a little crestfallen, crawled back into his tent with a book. He said he was content to wait for another passing ship, maybe in a month or so.

  There was a pineapple plantation in a nearby meadow, and a couple of Pitcairners with a Cryovac food packaging machine told how they once had had plans for exporting air-dried pineapple to the outside world. But then the French resumed testing nuclear weapons on Mururoa Atoll, six hundred miles to the west; and even though the prevailing winds were blowing away from Pitcairn, such of the world as might perhaps have been interested in buying Pitcairn pineapples decided, in short order, that Ecuadorian and Philippine pineapples were safer bets, less likely to be radioactive. Later experiments with Pitcairn honey—a New Zealand beekeeper was brought in to offer training—proved more successful, though; and Bounty products can be seen today in high-end grocery stores in London. Otherwise, only the sale of postage stamps and of carvings made from the rock-hard miro wood found on Henderson Island9 provide some islanders with a modest income. The island government, such as it is, canvasses for outsiders to come and settle. Few have taken the bait.

  The recent scandal hasn’t helped. It started to unfold in 1999, when a young female police officer from England was sent out to Pitcairn (which had never had a regular police force) for a six-month training exercise and discovered a widespread culture of sexual abuse. It seems that Pitcairn men regularly had sex with girls as young as ten, and it was not uncommon for girls to have their first pregnancies when they were as young as twelve. The islanders said they saw nothing unusual or improper about the practice, and claimed they were following established Polynesian custom—the British mutineers having brought Tahitian wives with them in 1789, and the island stock ever since being an admixture of Anglo-Pacific genes and cultures.

  When the police officer reported her findings, the British courts were not so understanding. Detectives promptly descended on the Pitcairn community; then lawyers—some to be involved in historical challenges over exactly who had sovereignty and legal jurisdiction over an island that had only infrequently paid more than lip service to any legal system at all—began what would amount to a five-year field day.

  Victims were found. Witnesses were identified. Charges were brought. Seven men, including the island mayor and longboat coxswain Steve Christian, a direct descendant of Fletcher Christian, were arrested. It was first argued that the case should be heard in New Zealand, but the courts decided it should be heard on Pitcairn—with the result that more judges, lawyers, witnesses, and reporters suddenly arrived in Adamstown to take part in the trial than lived in Adamstown in the first place. A satellite system was set up so that witnesses could testify remotely—it turned out that every one of the women involved now lived overseas. All the islanders’ guns were confiscated, to prevent any possibility of violence on an island that was now bitterly divided over the issue.

  The trial took forty days and cost some twelve million dollars. There was then a series of appeals, which wound their steady and convoluted way through the maze of the British legal system, right up to the then-supreme authority of the Privy Council in Buckingham Palace, which summarily rejected them. Six of the seven men charged were then sentenced to prison—except there was no prison on Pitcairn, and one had to be specially built.

  Fears were promptly expressed by many in Adamstown that the whole affair was a devilish plot that would enable Britain to get rid of the costly annoyance that was Pitcairn. For the six able-bodied men put in jail would now not be able to man the longboats that brought in vital cargo from the island supply ships—with the result that the settlement would wither and die, and the remaining islanders would head west to join the refugees from an earlier crisis (a famine, and overcrowding in 1856) on the former prison colony of Norfolk Island, off the Queensland coast.

  But wiser counsels prevailed. The men were locked into their cells in a jail they built themselves, from a prefabricated prison kit sent down from Britain. But every time a ship hove to off the island to unload cargo, the men were briefly freed (supervised by corrections officers) and paid to get out the island longboats and transfer goods to the quayside. After which they were marched back up the Hill of Difficulty and into their cells, and locked in again until the next smudge of smoke was spotted on the horizon.

  All six men eventually served out their sentences and were released back into the population. Since only one woman on the island is currently of childbearing age, and since these six presumably still fertile men are bound over to be exceptionally well behaved, it is now gloomily assumed that the colony of Pitcairn will wither and die anyway.

  Until it does—most demographers believe it can last only until about 2030—some small number of tourists will come, once in a while, to see the relics of the famous mutiny: HMS Bounty’s anchor, her Bible, and her cannon. They will sample the local honey. They will buy tchotchkes made of miro wood and postcards with postage stamps. And they will stay in the newly made but quite empty jail—which, since it is one of the few structures on Pitcairn to have proper plumbing, is thought best used as a guesthouse. And those who visit this most remote outpost of Britain’s former empire in the Pacific may choose to reflect, and wistfully, on the droll reality: that a place with such a lawless and inglorious beginning is now suffering, as a consequence of lawlessness, an inelegant and inglorious end.

  An end rather less celebrated and memorialized than that of its polar opposite in the Pacific, eight thousand miles farther northwest: Hong Kong.

  It was only toward the very end of London’s rule in the southern Pacific that those in the one colony in the northern Pacific started to question their own status. Hong Kong’s bankers in particular began to fret—especially those who held or gave or thought themselves likely to extend mortgages, fifteen-year mortgages most commonly. These anxious moneymen started to ask a simple but obvious question: would those mortgages still be valid after fifteen years if the government of Hong Kong were no longer capitalist and British, but Chinese and doctrinally Communist?

  They began asking this question in the spring of 1979, because fifteen years from that time very roughly spelled the date, in small print, on the half-forgotten last treaty that the British and Chinese had signed together, a treaty that, most important, had said that a major part of Hong Kong’s territory was to be ruled by the British as a lease. The document had been signed in June 1898. The lease was for ninety-nine years. The bankers were wise enough to know what many ordinary colonial citizens had forgotten, had never known, or had chosen to ignore: that this lease would expire at midnight on June 30, 1997.

  So the question the bankers wanted answered was: were the Chinese going to extend the deadline and allow Hong Kong to remain under British rule for some long and indefinable period far into the future?

  The bankers asked the then-governor of Hong Kong, Murray MacLehose, to put this question to his Chinese counterparts in the Chinese capital, in what was then generally known as Peking. His Excellency duly flew there and was given banquets and taken to the Great Wall, the Winter Palace, and the Forbidden City an
d was accorded appropriate respect. And he got the answer to the bankers’ question, from Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese leader at the time. It was not what he, the bankers, or anyone else in the colony wanted to hear.

  There was absolutely no question, the diminutive Deng declared, of extending any lease. Hong Kong was most assuredly being shepherded back to its motherland. The Chinese wanted all of their territory returned. They wanted the New Territories. They wanted Kowloon. They wanted Hong Kong Island. They wanted, in short, everything. There was no point in any clever British lawyers spluttering that the three treaties signed during Victorian times gave some of the territory to Britain in perpetuity. As far as Deng Xiaoping was concerned, all three treaties were unequal and unfair, had no standing in law or modern reality, and could be torn up and turned into confetti at will. Deng insisted that everyone understand that Hong Kong’s existence as a British overseas territory was coming to an end. June 30, 1997, was the fixed date when the bills came due. The timer was running down. Talks had better get under way to sort out the details.

  The only thing that gave MacLehose any kind of reassurance was a phrase from Deng, uttered just before the pair made their farewells, and that the British governor then went on to repeat endlessly to the nervous, skittish, unhappy millions he greeted upon his return home, after flying over the dark plains of China to the brilliantly lit jewel that was his colony: “Set your hearts at ease.” He said it a score of times. It was what the Chinese leader had asked him to tell Chinese citizenry down in Hong Kong. “Set your hearts at ease.”

  Yet this mantra was not at all helpful. The next years for Hong Kong would be an agony of a thousand cuts. Talks did indeed get under way, but they were dispiriting affairs. I flew to the Chinese capital for one of the earliest sessions, a mid-level British ministerial mission designed to prepare the ground for a visit the following year by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Ordinarily, if Britain has influence in such talks, they have a sense of style, brio, confidence, fun, purpose. But what I watched in Beijing was more like a solemn requiem in the key of gray, played out in the bitter cold of a northern Chinese winter week.

  The city was a place of dreary monochrome—and was gritty, cold, smoky, unnaturally quiet, as if everyone were half-hidden and spoke in whispers. This, in 1981, was the neon-less, barely prosperous, cold-comfort Communist China of quite another era: there were armies of bicycles everywhere; clusters of soldiers huddling for warmth around street corner coke burners, seething masses of laborers in hutongs of amiable slums; with hugger-mugger gatherings of workers clad in gray or dark-blue Mao suits and with exhortative Communist slogans everywhere.

  The officials who came in from Britain, men and women likewise swathed in gray (though some wore Savile Row pinstripes) would meet each day with lantern-jawed officials from the Chinese ministries, and then retire to their miserable gray-painted rooms in a huge gray-walled hotel on Chang’an Avenue, just along from Tiananmen Square. Each evening they seemed listless, unimpressive, puny—and to the extent that they talked out of school, it was to express their disappointment that the Chinese would not budge, would not agree to any kind of compromise or concession.

  When Mrs. Thatcher came to China, she looked puny and unimpressive, too, and she proved no match for her Chinese counterpart. She winced visibly when Deng told her in undiplomatic terms that he could march into Hong Kong anytime he wanted, and retake it in an afternoon if he was so minded—the implication being that he was doing her a considerable favor by restraining himself from doing so. Whatever the tenor of her retort, the spirit gods were not with her that day, for on her way out of the meeting, she tripped and fell onto the steps of the Great Hall of the People in a mess of gabardine and mussed hair, looking vulnerable and weak as she was hoisted upright again by her team of men in gray.

  Back at home, she may still have cut a heroic figure, fresh from having had her soldiers win the return of the Falkland Islands from their Argentine invaders. But this did not interest Mr. Deng. Not one whit. This Pacific colony was not one she was going to win back from history or from him, now or ever.

  This somber fact was eventually formalized by a joint declaration of the British and Chinese governments, made public shortly before Christmas 1984. All knew such a statement was coming, but a number of Hong Kong government officials wept openly at hearing the words. The only way of life they had ever known was coming to an end. Soothing nostrums were offered, suggesting that nothing would change, but everyone shrewd enough in matters Chinese knew that everything would, slowly but surely.

  A mood of deep pessimism then settled on the territory—especially now that the Tiananmen Square demonstrations in 1989 that ended with the killings of so very many protesters had reminded residents of the terrors of totalitarianism. Over the next several years, thousands of Hong Kong residents were prompted to leave; to settle in Canada, Australia, the United States, and, to a lesser extent than seemed proper, the United Kingdom, which did not exactly open wide its doors to its nonwhite colonial subjects.10

  Embassies and consulates in Hong Kong were thronged with visa applications. The lines outside the U.S. consulate snaked uphill for hundreds of yards. Sixty thousand people left in 1992. Parts of Vancouver changed their appearance almost overnight: sedate suburban houses on the airport road, which for decades had looked as though transplanted from Tunbridge Wells, were sold to fleeing Hong Kongers for many times their asking price. They were then torn down and replaced by enormous mansions, all marble and onyx, without the fringing flower gardens for which the newcomers had no use.

  As 1997 approached, an enormous digital clock was set up in Tiananmen Square, counting down the days and hours until the completion of what most people called “the handover.” (Official London called it “the retrocession.”) Fireworks were prepared, and local Beijing residents were urged to celebrate the territory’s return to the motherland after its century and a half away. Not a single Chinese could be found who wished the territory to remain British—and small wonder. Hong Kong, after all, was one of the spoils of the Opium Wars, a legatee of the time when cocksure Britain had tempted the impoverished Chinese with cheap drugs from India and then reacted violently when the emperor tried to ban the commerce, and had used warships and overwhelming force to press home the British right to trade.

  In Hong Kong the approach of its tryst with destiny—to use Nehru’s phrase in independent India, won from the British exactly a half century before—was regarded very differently. Few in the territory could be found who regarded with equanimity the ticking down of the clock, and as hot April became sweaty May and then sweltering June, there was widespread apprehension that something, unspecified but ominous, would occur when the deadline passed. Television journalists flooded in from all over the world, and there were scaremongers among them, who spoke of seeing Chinese heavy armor on the far side of the border, wild-eyed men of the kind who had perpetrated the Tiananmen tragedy eight years before, massing beyond the wire and ready to storm in and make dreadful mischief once the territory was restored.

  The British took months to pack and get ready to leave. I watched many of the details, most especially those involving the military, always a great component of maintaining any empire. Ammunition, thousands of tons of naval artillery shells and torpedoes, was taken from the tunnels on Stonecutters Island and put on ships to go back to armories in England. The Sikh security men who had acted as its guards for generations (chosen to preside over flammable explosives because of their absolute religious prohibition on smoking) were offered jobs elsewhere. (Local hotels liked to employ Sikh doormen because of their magnificent, guest-impressing headgear.)

  Likewise, thousands of Gurkha soldiers were stood down, and most of those who chose not to go home to Nepal were employed as security guards by one of the British firms that planned to remain in the territory post-handover. The doughty little motor yacht that used to take the official with the job of “District Officer, Islands,” on his enviable inspection tours
of the scores of little rocks and their fishing communities in his imperial charge, had its Union Jack replaced by a burgee sporting the insignia of the bauhinia, a sterile, orchid-like flower.

  The last keeper of the Waglan Island Lighthouse was retired and replaced by a machine: a sorry fate, though it meant that the “Light at the End of the Empire,” as we all knew the summit tower on the colony’s eastern tip, would continue to shine out long after its owners had departed, winking its reassurance to ships gliding into and out of one of the world’s busiest and richest ports.

  The British Forces Broadcasting Service transmitters were unbolted from their barrack block studios, where they had been transmitting to British soldiers and sailors since 1945, and moved onto a waiting destroyer. The plan was to continue to broadcast until midnight, when the ship would leave Hong Kong waters and the station’s final refrain (the national anthem, or maybe Vera Lynn’s “White Cliffs of Dover”) would fade into the ether as the craft moved away to sea.

  The royal yacht Britannia arrived in port, in the very last few days of British rule, tasked to take away Prince Charles and the governor and the various diplomats and officials who would participate in the final ceremonials. The weather on the afternoon and evening of June 30 was ferocious, and driving tropical rain and wind turned Britain’s final sunset military parade into a soggy maelstrom of misery, with the symbolism not lost on either side—either the skies were weeping for the departure of the British or the winds were raging to drive them from the scene.

  The ceremony of the transfer of sovereignty, choreographed to the microsecond around the midnight hour, was sturdily impressive. The Chinese leadership had been flown in from Beijing by 747. Some five hundred truckloads of Chinese soldiers came across the border three hours before the deadline. The tallest and best dressed of them took part in a performance of crisp goose-stepping discipline that was as chilling as it was majestic. And when they raised their national flag, the pictures, transmitted live onto giant screens a thousand miles to the north, prompted Tiananmen Square to erupt in paroxysms (whether enforced is still not known) of fireworks and wild enthusiasm. The British forces who then took part in the flag lowering, moments before midnight, looked by contrast worn, weary, and unkempt, their uniforms still damp from the rainstorm, their performance to be seen as either shabbily charming or unhappily threadbare.