Outposts: Journeys to the Surviving Relics of the British Empire

by Simon Winchester

  I felt, quite suddenly, gripped by a terrible sadness for these people. I could imagine a little of how they felt. Here I was, on the verge of becoming witness to a classic episode of Imperial history, excited, absorbed, all the instinctual routines of journalism swinging into their familiar actions; and here were the Kings, and their neighbours and their friends, who had come here to this bleak and windswept rock because they thought it would be safe, and peaceful, and because they loved the land and the wind and the kindred spirits, and because they wanted somewhere that was securely British, with all the essential decencies and protocols of an England that was herself slipping away from the things they had come to love.

  I once bought a house in an Oxfordshire village from a pair of elderly ladies who had decided to emigrate to New Zealand, because, they explained, ‘it is like England was in the Fifties, and that’s the time we liked so much. We don’t like England today. We want to find a place that’s like it used to be.’ And as with New Zealand, so with the Falkland Islands. What these people had wanted, when they or their fathers set out on the ship so long ago, was just what my old ladies wanted: a country with no crime, no television, no permissiveness, no coloured people, no disco music, no drugs…These were a people for whom Carnaby Street meant the beginning of the end, and for whom progress was a dirty word. And the land they had found, and for all its faults the world to which they clung so eagerly, was about to be desecrated. I remember thinking, as I spooned up the last morsels of sponge and custard and poured a cup of watery coffee from the cheap steel pot, that this would be the last night ever during which all those things for which these people had become colonists would survive. I was not quite sure exactly what was about to happen, but I knew, and I could see these people knew, that from this moment on, in just a matter of hours, or minutes from now, nothing on the Falkland Islands would ever be the same again. It made the fact of this particular reliquary of Empire, with all its reasons and its history, seem suddenly to have been a pathetic waste of time.

  Events then moved swiftly, in a blur. The announcer at the radio station had not quite grasped the urgency of the moment, and tried for a ribald tone. ‘Lay your ears back, folks, for His Excellency the Governor!’ And Rex Masterman Hunt, the man who had taken down the flag on the British Embassy in Saigon and who thus knew some of the rules of diplomacy in extremis, was on the air, with every house in Stanley and every settlement in the Camp hanging on his every word. Not a sheep was shorn, not a word was said, until the news was delivered.

  The islands were going to be invaded. (Dick Baker was to say later that up until Thursday afternoon London insisted they would not be.) A battle group of Argentine warships—led by that former British carrier, the Venerable—was on its way. There were frantic discussions in the world’s interested capitals, but no one held out much hope. The first units of the force could probably be seen by the keeper at Cape Pembroke in two hours’ time. The first men might be ashore by dawn. The local Defence Force was being called up. There was no need for alarm.

  Nor was there any. Stanley was stunned into silence. A curfew had been declared, and only soldiers were abroad. I walked the deserted streets, which were like any working-class English town during the screening of Match of the Day—every single person was inside. Everyone was awake. The Governor was back on the radio at four, declaring—as colonial governors have the perfect right to do—a state of emergency. All the Argentines staying at the Upland Goose were arrested and led away by marines, lest they try to give some help to their arriving colleagues.

  But the colleagues had already arrived. The first party was ashore by four; the first shots were heard at eight minutes past six. By this time I was in the small frame building beside Government House, under a bed upstairs. Don Bonner’s foot was in my ear, and a tabby cat, terrified by the rattle and pounding of the guns, was huddled under a mess of candlewick bedspread. A small island nation was busily changing hands.

  The surrender came three hours later; the Union flag came down, the blue-and-white banner of the Republic of Argentina went up in its place. The Falkland Islands were instantly transmuted into Las Islas Malvinas, Port Stanley became Puerto Argentina, the British colony, together with her dependencies and the Antarctic Territory were, in the minds of millions of jubilant Argentinians, part of the device that had for years been printed on all Spanish-language charts of the area: ‘Territorio National de la Tierra del Fuego Antártida e Islas del Atlántico Sur’. After a century and a half of argument, this windy quarter of the southern seas was now a province of Argentina.

  The British Colonial Government was kicked out; Rex Hunt and his colleagues were on an Air Force plane to Montevideo by sunset. As a final humiliation he had been ordered to take off his white Imperial uniform and dress instead in sober style. He had to change behind a curtain in the Stanley airport, while impatient and unamused soldiers fingered their trigger-guards, and muttered Spanish imprecations under their breath.

  Next morning the islanders awoke to find new road signs being painted: from now on they would drive their Land Rovers on the right, said the commanders. They were, after all, a part of Argentina, and it did not behove them to be different, in any way. And Spanish lessons would be started in all the schools, with immediate effect.

  I stayed around for two more days, until the Argentine officials on the island expressed their irritation and deported us, back to Comodoro Rivadavia on the mainland. The following day I was in Buenos Aires, one of the hundreds of reporters assigned to cover the story from the perspective of the jubilant Argentine capital, wondering, like half the world, how it would all turn out. And to judge from the sounds of outrage howling down from London, the Empire, after years when it had seemed well on the way to becoming a wholly moribund and insignificant institution, was coming very much to life once again.

  This is not the place in which to recount the events of the early northern summer of 1982—the Falklands ‘war’ or ‘operation’ or ‘recovery’ has been well chronicled elsewhere, and for reasons I will explain in a few moments, I was not in the best position to report them. It will be sufficient to say that the Government in London responded with deliberate and brilliantly schemed ferocity, just as it might in times of earlier and more classically Imperial crises.

  A massive battle fleet put out from Portsmouth, scores of civilian ships—liners, container vessels, tugboats, tankers—were requisitioned, soldiers, sailors, marines and airmen were brought from every corner of the world, arms and diplomatic assistance were sought and won from the Allies. And all with one single, uncomplicated end—to regain what had been so brusquely snatched from British hands. ‘The Empire’, Newsweek magazine perhaps inevitably wrote on its cover, ‘Strikes Back!’

  The British troops, replaying the grand manoeuvres of Normandy and Sicily and the Italian beaches, landed on East Falkland Island in mid-May. The next day one Falkland farm was liberated, and the Union flag flew on British soil once again. Some three weeks after that all of the island group was wholly dominated by the British forces.

  The Argentine dream had lasted just seventy-four days and a little over sixteen hours. On 14th June, at 9 p.m., local time, the warring generals put their signatures to an Instrument of Surrender. Twelve minutes later a message was received in Whitehall, from Major-General Jeremy Moore. ‘In Port Stanley at 9 o’clock p.m. Falkland Islands time tonight 14 June 1982 Gen. Menendez surrendered to me all the Argentine armed forces in East and West Falklands together with their impedimenta. The Falkland Islands are once more under the government desired by their inhabitants.’ It had taken thirteen hundred deaths to accomplish the ending of this Argentine dream and this Falklands nightmare.

  But I was not to see any of that. A week after I had returned to Buenos Aires—long before the British forces had landed at the Falkland settlement of San Carlos—I travelled down to Tierra del Fuego, in company with two friends, both from a rival newspaper. We were arrested in southern Patagonia, charged with spying, and s
pent the better part of three months locked up in a tiny cell in gaol in the small town of Ushuaia, the most southerly town in the world.

  But once the British victory was announced, and once enough bail money had been collected to satisfy the pride of the local magistracy, we were released and flown back to London. The war had happened without us. I had been there at the beginning, but had never been allowed to witness the end. I felt slightly cheated, as if a mission had been left incomplete, and the journey had no symmetry to it. The paper sensed this, and suggested I go back down to the islands as soon as possible, to see what the war had done to the place I had thought so very peaceful and so serene.

  And it changed everything, of course, and for always. It was a month later when I returned, in a Hercules transport plane. The airport at Stanley had been shattered by bombing and shellfire. There was torn metal and oil and devastation on every side, and a crush of soldiery with their tents and their radios and their portable latrines and all the other toys of military occupation. Stanley’s roads were pitted, fences had been knocked down, tank-tracks and minefields and depot flags spoiled every view, and the air was constantly filled with the whirring and chugging and buzzing of helicopters as they carried the new residents back and forth over the once-peaceful little town.

  I flew out to the Camp. The helicopter pilot and the army public relations men and the foreign office news managers pointed out the famous battlesites, as though they were Blenheims and Trafalgars and the salient at Ypres. There was Mount Tumbledown, and there Wireless Ridge; that’s where Colonel ‘H’ Jones fell; that hut at Goose Green was where the bastards locked up the entire settlement; and that’s where they kept the napalm, evil sods!

  We stopped at the settlement at San Carlos, and had a cup of Typhoo and a bacon sandwich in the farmhouse kitchen. Woollen socks were drying over the Raeburn, and a small child came in with peat for the fire. The family sheepdog lay curled up on the floor. There were copies of the Daily Express on the table, and a bag of Tate and Lyle sugar, and a box of Capstan cigarettes. The islanders who stood beside the range said they were thankful for what had been done, and would now like to be left in peace again. It had been a trying time, and still was.

  I walked outside, into the sunshine and the wind. The field, beyond the gorse bush, was rutted with tyre marks, and the helicopter sat to one side, its rotors bouncing in the breeze. Up the hill a Nigerian gunnery sergeant was shouting abuse at a squaddie: there was a Rapier missile battery near the summit, and something had gone wrong with the tracking computer. The squaddie set off on a khaki-painted motorbike, to seek out a spare part.

  To the west, shining gold in the afternoon sun, lay San Carlos Water, and Falkland Sound. Three months ago there would have been nothing there but the water and the birds—perhaps the little island packet, or a yacht, or a child in a rowing boat off for a day’s fishing. This afternoon six warships steamed at anchor, their guns ranged high, their radars swinging round and round on perpetual watch. But no Admiral Sturdee here, with battleships and cruisers bent on some mighty task; these were mere sentry ships, stationed to ensure that for the time being there was some truth in the old Imperial axiom about Holding what we Have.

  ‘Come on—no time for gazing!’ shouted the man from the Ministry of Defence. The helicopter rotors were up and running, and it was time to whirl away and leave the islanders to their own devices. Their lives had been shattered, and changed for ever—and all for the preservation of a sad corner of Empire which, by rights and logic and all the arguments of history should, by some device or other, be permitted and encouraged to fade away. Arguments were later to be advanced about the need for keeping the Cape Horn passage in safe hands, for the day when Panama fell to the other side. But most of the world, perhaps less sophisticated and more cynical than it should be, saw this as quite simply the pointless preservation of Imperial pride. And yet the preservation could only last a few more years, or a few more decades; when finally it was allowed to die, how senseless this tragedy would all appear, how wasted all the lives.

  And then I was aboard the plane again, and the islands were falling away below, and had become a small green patch in the great grey ocean, with a British flag still flying, the guardian of the useless.

  11

  Pitcairn and other Territories

  11

  Pitcairn and other Territories

  After three long years, and tens of thousands of miles, the Progress was almost over.

  At the very start, when I first hauled out all the almanacs and atlases and diplomatic lists and gazetteers I counted rather more than 200 islands of any significant size that still belonged to the Crown—and thousands more, if you bothered to count every last skerry and reef where England’s writ still ran and England’s sovereign ruled. But I had done what I had wanted to do: I had managed to get myself to every colony that still had a British Imperial representative, and still had a population—everywhere, in other words, that was likely still to have the feel of Empire to it.

  But I had had to make some hard decisions. One of the most difficult concerned whether or not I should go to Britain’s sole remaining possession in the Pacific Ocean, the group of four tiny and barely inhabited rocks made notorious two centuries ago as the refuge of the Bounty mutineers—the Pitcairn Islands.

  Three of the four islands of the colony have no population at all; the fourth, Pitcairn itself, has but forty-four islanders, and the number is declining slowly but steadily. There is no resident representative of the British Crown. (The Governor is also the British High Commissioner in Wellington, and he tries to make a brief visit every two years. The Island Administrator doesn’t live on Pitcairn either, but in Auckland, 3,000 miles west.)

  There is precious little communication between the Pitcairners and the motherland. Adamstown, the tiny capital named after one of the mutineers (and peopled by more than a dozen islanders whose surname is Christian, and can trace their roots back to Fletcher, the architect of the whole affair), does not rank high on Whitehall’s diplomatic priorities. Hardly any British money is spent on the place: if the Pitcairners need anything urgently they have to talk to Auckland by morse code, though they have been helped in recent years by a market gardener near London, who listens out for the islanders on his ham radio set. If they want anything particular he will buy it out of his own pocket and see that it is loaded on to the twice yearly supply ships. There is no island doctor; when Betty Christian fell victim to a particularly pressing gynaecological problem the island pastor (a Seventh Day Adventist, to which church all the islanders belong) had to operate. He had never carried out surgery in his life before, and the instrument needed for the operation was not in stock among the rusty scalpels and plasters in the Adamstown dispensary. So they hand-forged the necessary item, and the pastor was led through the operation, step by step, by a surgeon speaking by radio from California, 8,000 miles away. At moments like this Pitcairners have good reason to think they and their tiny island are being shunned by the policy-makers and the bureaucrats in London.

  The two supply ships usually call at Pitcairn while on their way somewhere else. Most of their skippers are reluctant to stop at all, and when they heave to off the lonely cliffs to take off stores they are invariably impatient to get under way again. A visitor who chooses this means of arriving is lucky if he gets ten hours on the island unless, by accident or design, he misses the boat, in which case he stays for the next six months. When I came to plan the journey the ten-hour option seemed worthless, the six months excessive. I decided, with some sadness, that I would not go at all.

  I went instead to the village of Frog Level, Virginia. The connection between the tiny Pacific Crown colony and a rundown community in the Appalachian Mountains—not one that is immediately obvious, it has to be admitted—was provided by one of the local residents. He was named Smiley Ratliffe, and he lived in an extraordinarily vulgar mansion with fences, guntowers and a collection of five Rolls-Royces, each equipped with spittoon
s to accommodate his soggy plugs of Work Horse tobacco.

  Mr Ratliffe, who knew nothing of the mutiny story and confessed to not having read a book since he was a GI in 1945, was a lonely and unhappy millionaire. He had made his fortune from running coal mines in the hills of Virginia and Tennessee and Kentucky, and he had developed a profound, almost pathological loathing for the insidious evils of Communism, Freudian analysis, big government, narcotics and Elvis Presley. For most of the 1970s he had spent his days flying and cruising around the world in search of a deserted and idyllic island where he could be guaranteed total freedom from all taint of the Red Menace, and all the other evils that disturbed his tranquil routines. In 1981, towards the end of another long and fruitless quest, when he was heading sadly homewards from Tahiti, he stopped by to see the good folks of Adamstown, liked them mightily and proceeded, as he tells the tale, to one of the three other islands that make up the Pitcairn group.

  It was called Henderson Island, was four miles long, two miles wide, was surrounded by vertical cliffs forty feet high and was almost perfectly flat. Most mariners would not give the place a second thought. Pitcairners occasionally stopped by to pick up wood to carve, but thought little of their neighbour. Like Ducie and Oeno, the others of the forgotten Imperial quartet, Henderson was just another coral island, with nothing to commend it, and no particular quality aside from its isolation. A man had been put ashore there with a chimpanzee some years before, but had gone mad inside three weeks, and had to be taken off by a passing ship.

  But Smiley Ratliffe very much liked what he saw. He had no doubts from the moment he first spotted her, that this was to be his island home. He had a sudden dream, a veritable vision. He saw his now-beloved Henderson Island nurtured and brought to civilisation by the best efforts of the fine folk of Frog Level. He saw an airstrip, a mansion, lovely ladies dancing under the Pacific stars, endless supplies of Work Horse tobacco, no taxes, no psychologists and, best of all, no Communists. And so, fired with evangelic fervour as befits a man who has discovered paradise, Smiley Ratliffe returned home to America, and with all the uncomplicated enthusiasm that is peculiar to the rural American millionaire sat down and wrote a letter: he wanted to buy Henderson Island, price (more or less) no object.