Outposts

by Simon Winchester

  The dark bulk of the American Virgin Islands could still be made out to the south. The guidebooks spoke proudly of their achievement, and politicians I had encountered there liked to compare the relative sophistication and economic development of the American islands with the insouciant backwardness of their British neighbours. Highest per capita income in the Caribbean! Five hundred million dollars a year from tourists! Three hundred miles of roads! Thirty thousand cars! An elected governor! American citizenship for the islanders!

  And it was true, comparing statistic for statistic, that our colony had a forlorn and lacklustre sound to it. Income was woefully low, the islanders lived simply, the yachts and the cruise liners brought in less than a fifth the number of dollars generated across the Narrows. And only seventy miles of road, and less than a thousand cars, and a governor who was appointed by London without any islander being asked what he thought, and a passport that, unlike that issued to the Gibraltarians, gave no right of free access to the mother country, and was regarded by most islanders as almost useless, though handsome. The only statistic about which the British islanders could feel proud was the literacy rate: everyone in Tortola could read, but in the US territory only nine in ten could. The Americans, mind you, had a university, paid for by the Federal Government.

  But the figures conceal the reality, of course, and the islanders seem proud of their home. ‘Ah born here’ is the slogan on many tee-shirts, and, rubbing the point home, the shops sell tourists others with the words ‘Ah wish Ah born here’. The American islanders have no such affection for their home. Their territory is a dreadful place, flashy and gaudy, loud and vulgar, with nightclubs and casinos and a thousand profitable diversions for the overworked young of the Eastern seaboard. The charm went with the Danes, seventy years ago, and not a few islanders wish, for all the pleasures of owning an American passport, that the cool administrators from Copenhagen would come back and bring some dignitas with them. In the British territory the dignitas—which, admittedly, buys no bread—is still in evidence. There is silence and a sort of peace on Tortola; maybe the boardwalks are a little splintered, and the door of your hotel room does sag from a single hinge, and the goats wake you up in the morning, and the maid sings too loudly as she sluices water over the cool flagstones—but there can be serenity in an undiscovered place, and Tortola still has serenity in great abundance.

  A number of the outer islands trade on the peace. One of the Rockefellers built an inn on the Virgin Gorda where, he promised, the only strenuous activity was cracking a lobster shell or pouring a glass of wine. On Peter Island a hotel owned by a Welshman charges three hundred pounds a day for each guest, and suggests that they do ‘what you’ve always wanted to do—nothing’. The scenery is described by one enthusiastic copy-writer as ‘the kind God would have made if He’d had the money’. Advertisements for the secret hideaway hotels of the Virgin Islands are to be found in the back pages of the New Yorker, among all those other carefully vetted notices for tie narrowers, ancestors traced and hand-tooled leather bookbindings. The customers tend to be an altogether better class—no riffraff from New Jersey need apply to come to Virgin Gorda.

  The long-distance cruising yachts drop in on the Virgins, which have become one of the West Indies’ main sailing centres. The mountains rearing straight out of the sea provide easy landmarks—far more visible than the flat coral islets of the Bahamas—and cause interesting eddies and eccentric winds. The sailing in Virgin Islands’ water is testing, and enormous fun. Hurricanes are a problem in the summer season. People still talk with awe about the great blow of 1772, ‘the greatest hurricane in the history of Man’, and wonder when the islands are due for another. Standing instructions to islanders urge them to remove all coconuts from the trees near their houses: in a fifty mph gale the nuts can smash through a wall like machine-gun bullets.

  I gave a lift in my car one day to the daughter of a Welsh Member of Parliament; she was crewing on board a sixty-foot sloop that her boyfriend had been asked to deliver from Auckland to New Orleans. They had already been a month on Tortola, and had just about exhausted their money—‘most of it went on pina coladas and lobster, I’m afraid,’ she laughed. The pair were going on an economy drive from now on: only pineapples and papayas, she said, and such fish as they could catch from the marina wall. And draught Guinness, laid on at this particular marina because the Guinness company owned the place.

  The smaller Virgin Islands occasionally come up for sale; Lord Cobham, a wealthy Worcestershire farmer, sold Necker Island to a record producer (via a firm in Newcastle upon Tyne which specialises in selling islands); a British businessman bought Anegada and tried to sell it off in square-foot chunks via the personal columns of the New York Times, earning him much disapproval from the British Government; but Fallen Jerusalem and Dead Man’s Chest and Jost van Dyke have not been recently traded, nor Ginger, Cooper and Salt Islands, which the locals know, because of the initials, as Grand Central Station.

  And if not for sale, then the site for a story. Dead Man’s Chest is said to have provided inspiration for Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (he never came to the Virgin Islands but his father, the builder of lighthouses, knew the Caribbean well). The island dignitaries make an annual summer journey—under the terms of the Salt Ponds Ordnance, 1904—to Salt Island, where they watch those islanders fortunate enough to have licences gather their salt for the coming twelve months. A policeman fires a gunshot to start the collectors sifting through the muddy brine.

  And Jost van Dyke, now a pretty resort island, is best known to the locals as the island of the fiercest of all planter slave-owners, the Quaker minister John Coakley Lettsom, of whom it was said:

  I, John Lettsom,

  Blisters, bleeds and sweats ’em,

  If after that they choose to die

  I, John, Lettsom.

  The British may not have as liberal a reputation as some for ending slavery in the Caribbean (the Danes abolished the practice on their Virgin Islands twenty years before the slaves were freed on Tortola); and they may wince today at papers in the Virgin Islands’ library advertising the arrival of a boat at Road Town ‘bearing three tons of Negro’. But the fact that they did abolish it remains as one persistent reason for the affection with which Britons are still held. ‘Queen Victoria was de bestest of all de kings in de world,’ a Road Town boatman remarked to a visitor in the 1940s. He thought, wrongly, that Victoria had freed his great grandfather.

  On August Monday—like Britain’s summer bank holiday—each year the islanders organise a big parade along Main Street to give thanks for their freedom. They march past the great old prison, built in 1859, and in which murderers are still hanged, and in which prisoners are still flogged (both capital and corporal punishment being on the Virgin Islands’ statute book, and used from time to time); they march past the equally antique Government Buildings, where the little elected legislature sits, and from where the British Governor, kitted out in his white finery and his goose-feathered topee, proffers his salute.

  By some Caribbean standards the Virgin Islanders may be thought less well-off, or perhaps less free, and perhaps less fortunate; but they are a happy and untroubled people, and believe they have little cause for complaint. Whatever the text books and the politicians and the statistics may say, the Virgin Islanders remain proud, indomitably so, of the fact that it is still the Union flag which flies above Government House, high up on the jungle hills, above their dusty and old-fashioned little town.

  Until the early hours of 19th March 1969, the eel-shaped sliver of coral limestone known as Anguilla was no more than a footnote in British Imperial geographies. You could rarely look it up in a book without being referred to its colonial superiors of St Kitts and Nevis, or to its mother-colony of the Leeward Islands. It was an utterly insignificant morsel of Crown land, peopled by peasants, covered with scrub, infertile, thick with mosquitoes, rarely visited, unheard of, unremembered and vastly unimportant.

  But
before the dawn broke on that calm spring morning something rather peculiar happened. Two Royal Navy frigates, HMS Minerva and HMS Rothesay, stole silently into Anguillian waters. They dropped a flotilla of rubber boats, cranked up a helicopter or two and unleashed a force of 315 members of the second battalion, the Parachute Regiment, who landed complete with their red berets, machine-guns and blackened faces and tried to make friends with the local goats. A group of Scotland Yard policemen, some still in their blue serge uniforms, were landed too. For a few moments Crocus Beach, Anguilla, must have looked like Omaha Beach in Normandy: the British forces on this occasion were storming ashore to still a rebellion that had broken out among the 6,000 islanders.

  The invasion, planned with deep seriousness by the Cabinet in London, was given the codename Operation Sheepskin. It was probably the last strictly Imperial military task ever performed by the British, it was a total failure, and it made a delicious farce in which no shots were fired, no one was hurt and which the whole world—except the British Government—enjoyed hugely. Its only consequence was that a small cameo of Caribbean history took a sudden and unexpected swerve, and the name of Anguilla has been well-known ever since.

  Well-known, but still not easy to reach—at least, not from Tortola, not on the day I needed to travel. Thanks to the caprices of Europe’s various West Indian dominions I had to pass through the passport and customs checks of no fewer than three great powers before landing on Anguilla, and had to cross the only land border anywhere in the world that is shared by France and Holland.

  The linear distance between Road Town and The Valley—British colonial capitals have the most wretchedly prosaic names!—is almost exactly 100 miles. It took me six hours, via aircraft, car and speedboat. First, I flew from Beef Island to the island of St Kitts, the first West Indian island to be colonised by Britain with, confusingly, a capital with the very non-British name of Basseterre. After a cup of coffee at Basseterre airport matters became more confusing still. The plane, which was so small it looked more suitable for entomology than for aviation, turned back northwards to the extraordinary island of Saint Martin—extraordinary because the island’s southern half, where the plane landed, is still run by the Dutch under the name Sint Maarten, and the northern half is run by the French. Technically it is French, an arrondissement of Guadeloupe. It sends deputies to Paris, has a prefect, and its citoyens are as French as if they were born in Marseille.

  I landed at Queen Juliana airport, was checked by a dour Dutchman who stamped my passport, took a taxi via a dusty little hamlet called Koolbaai—in fine rolling countryside; it reminded me of Cape Province, and the hills near Stellenbosch—and was driven up to the frontier. I would like to have seen a red-and-white pole, members of the Staatspolizei on this side, kepi-wearing gendarmerie on the other, but there was only a boundary stone and a couple of flags that I had great difficulty telling apart (both having the same colours, the one being horizontal, the other vertical). There was no one to look at my passport, but when, eventually, I was taken to the quai at the French capital of Marigot—after a quick snack, some shrimp, half a baguette, and a glass or two of chilled Sancerre—and found the boat to Anguilla, I was duly inspected, my bags checked and a stamp affixed, all with great Gallic flourish. The boat, driven by a pair of excitable youths who appeared to have had the odd glass or two of Sancerre as well, took off northwards at about sixty knots. We rose out of the water, and seemed to fly. The service, I learned later, was by hydrofoil.

  Anguilla lay low and white on the water, like a submerged whale. It is a long, narrow island with no hills, except for a 158-foot peak on the eastern tip, named Navigation Hill because of its use as a sea mark, and a 200-footer in the middle. The island’s axis lies parallel to the ever-wafting trade winds, which is said to be the reason there are no forests, and little rain: the winds just divide and waft on, leaving nothing (whereas on Tortola they are forced up, form clouds, and burst out with rainstorms). From afar Anguilla looked strangely empty and lifeless. Sand beaches glittered brilliant white, with a line of low palms beyond. A tiny blue yawl bobbed at anchor by the pier. A Land Rover arrived, scrunching over the coral pebbles. The immigration inspector, wearing the crown of office, welcomed me ashore. ‘Not too many people come by sea and stay,’ he said. ‘Nice to have you here. Rare thing.’

  Anguilla is Britain’s newest inhabited colony—new in the sense that, while it has been British territory, and in the cadet branch of far grander West Indian possessions for many years, it has only lately been a colony in its own right. (The very last piece of real estate that was subsumed into the Empire was actually the island of Rockall, out in mid-Atlantic, in 1955. London felt it vital to annexe the lonely chunk of guano-crusted rock because, just perhaps, it might have oil nearby; so it ordered out the Royal Navy, and matelots clambered up the slippery cliffs and fixed a brass plate to its granite summit. An expedition went there a few years later, and found the plate had been unscrewed, and taken away. Britain still claims Rockall, though, brass plate or not.)

  Anguilla—or ‘Malliouhana’ as the Caribs named it—was formally made into a Crown colony and given a constitution, and a fully-functioning governor, in December 1982: she thus became the last colony 399 years after Britain took her first, Newfoundland. The reason for the establishment of a new colony—bucking the trend of twentieth-century decolonisation in no uncertain manner—has much to do with Operation Sheepskin, and the events that led up to it.

  Anguilla has always been a poor island. The soil is thin, the rainfall scarce, the possibilities for livestock or agriculture minimal. There was precious little that the Britons who settled there could exploit, and very little work that their slaves could do for them. Across in Barbados, or down in Montserrat there was sugar to cut, or limes to pick, or tobacco to cure. In Anguilla there was nothing, and the slave-owners took a decision that was to have far-reaching consequences. They gave their workers four days off each week—the Sabbath, as was customary, and three other weekdays to allow them to cultivate their own patches of thin ground. When the Britons departed, for more fecund islands, and for their old home, the slaves that remained were more accustomed to working their own land, more familiar with the idea of freedom—even if it had only been of the four-day-a-week variety, it was more than their fellow slaves in the neighbour islands.

  Thanks to this oddly gifted freedom, the ability to till land that was their own, and finally the hasty departure of the uninterested Britons, so the Anguillians, uniquely among the Leeward Islanders, evolved a rugged kind of independence. They proved awkward to rule, eager to mind their own business, and would brook no nonsense from any colonial master. In 1809 the Government told the Anguillians to build a prison at The Valley; yes, they replied, they would build one if and when they had anyone to put in it. And not before.

  They had their own government, known as the Vestry, with four nominated members, and three elected. A dull little place, maybe, but it had rudimentary democracy earlier than most—another good reason for the islanders to feel determined, and a little aloof.

  All raiders were repulsed. The French tried twice; the first time, in 1745, they were driven off at the battle of Crocus Bay by sheer mass of numbers, and number of island cannon. On the second occasion, fifty years later, the Anguillians showed gentlemanly restraint: the French powder was damp and, thinking they were out of the islanders’ sight, they spread it out on sheets to dry, right along the beach at Rendezvous Bay. The islanders planned to toss burning staves at the powder, and blow it up, but their leader said that would neither be fair, nor British, and so they melted down all their fishing weights, made new bullets and fired away at the French with those, and drove them off, too. A determined, indefatigable people.

  The British failed to recognise this ‘passionate devotion to independence’ when they came to organise the colonial arrangements for the region. No thought was ever given to creating Anguilla as a separate presidency, able to run itself under the general invigilati
on of the Leewards’ Governor. No suggestion was made that Anguilla be linked with Tortola, which was at least notionally in its line of sight. Instead, for some unfathomable reason, Anguilla was formally linked with—and run from—an island a hundred miles to the south, separated from it by four other groups of islands that were run by the Dutch and the French, and peopled by natives whom the Anguillians cordially loathed.

  The British, for administrative convenience, chose St Kitts to be the titular head of the presidency—it was called St Kitts-Nevis-Anguilla, and under the new arrangement Anguilla was very much the junior partner. The medical officer now ran the island, and doubled up as the beak; one Anguillian was sent to St Kitts to represent the island on the council; there was never enough money to build proper roads or a decent airfield, and there never was a secondary school, although the other islands shared four.

  All this was just bearable so long as the British remained in power. The essential fairness of the Colonial Office and of the British establishment in St Kitts meant that the Anguillians were at least reasonably well provided for. But in 1967, after lengthy negotiations in London, St Kitts-Nevis-Anguilla became an independent nation—day-to-day rule over Anguilla moved from the British to the detested men of St Kitts. The Kittitian who was in the unhappy position of being his Government’s official representative in The Valley on Independence Day decided to make as little fuss as possible: he got out of bed at four, raised the independence flag in his living room, saluted it while still in his pyjamas, and then crept back to bed.

  One man in particular, the St Kitts’ Chief Minister, Robert Bradshaw, became the focus of Anguillian venom. Hardly surprising, perhaps: he had once publicly vowed to ‘turn Anguilla into a desert’. The islanders threw out his police force (there was not a single Anguillian policeman) and called in a motley crew of advisers—mostly Americans, and not always men of the most savoury reputations—to lead them to the state that Rhodesia had recently adopted: a Unilateral Declaration of Independence.