Outposts

by Simon Winchester

  And yet all they can see down there is the ocean, an unpleasant greyish-green colour flecked with white streaks, and looking not at all inviting. It is always this way: the great current of the Gulf Stream, which coils itself around the atolls and islets of the Bermudas, wrinkles and contorts the surface of the surrounding seas as though a storm were always brewing there. It is not a good advertisement for the delights that lie ahead.

  The sea’s colour begins to change, quite suddenly, from deep green to a paler aquamarine when the aircraft is about five miles distant. The white horses vanish, the water below assumes a calmer, more friendly aspect. In places there are shallows, with sandbars and spits and ridges of pink and yellow coral, and then, fringed by a line of white foam, the first small island heaves itself out of the Atlantic, showing itself with trees, grass and a lighthouse.

  There are dozens of small houses, their roofs pyramid-shaped, and whitewashed, their walls picked out in a variety of soft pastels—lemon, bluebell, lilac, primrose. It all looks very prim and ordered: the lawns look neat, the swimming pools glitter in the late morning sun, the sea is the palest of greens and splashes softly against low cliffs of pink and well-washed orange.

  As the plane bumps down on to the concrete of the runway at Kindley Field it will speed past a half-dozen silvery warplanes belonging to the US Navy—nothing too surprising, perhaps, for American visitors, who are accustomed to seeing squadrons of Hercules and Starfighters and Phantoms at their own airfields, and knowing them to be for the use of the military part-timers among them, the members of the National Guard. But perhaps a British visitor might have cause to wonder—what are American warplanes doing on what is, after all, soil that is still technically British? Yes, of course, there were American airbases back home, but he might be a little taken aback, especially since these planes were in the middle of what he assumed was a civil airport. It would be rather like him finding a squadron of Lockheed P-3 Orion surveillance aircraft—which is what these are—at an innocently civil aerodrome like Luton, or Manchester—why here?

  He would be even more surprised—perhaps a little dismayed—were he to have noticed a couple of white-painted American aircraft—Lockheed C-130 Hercules transports, specially modified, he might be able to say if he is a student of such matters—tucked at the other end of the runway, close by where his wheels had touched ground a few moments before. These planes, guarded by United States marines and deliberately kept well out of the public eye, are important, in a way that the Orions are routine. The Orions are based in Bermuda for the specific purpose of intelligence-gathering—shadowing the Soviet submarines which lurk in the shallow waters off the American Eastern seaboard; the Hercules, however, are instruments of total war.

  They are known as TACAMO aircraft, and they take off each day for twelve hours of patrolling across the North Atlantic, their crews talking to the American nuclear submarines lurking in the deeps of mid-ocean. TACAMO is an acronym for Take Charge And Move Out. These white-painted Hercules with their black wingtip tanks have on board the go-codes for launching the atomic weapons—the Tridents, the Poseidons, the Polaris—on board the big black subs that cruise endlessly hundreds of feet below the water. Should war break out, or be deemed about to break out, the controllers aboard these planes assume god-like powers, giving the machines below them the orders to destroy half a world. The squadrons of these aircraft are based in two American sites: Patuxent River, Maryland, and the island of Guam—and in one British Crown colony—Bermuda.

  With this knowledge—and I knew nothing of it until I visited the control tower, and one of the girls let slip a small morsel about one of the TACAMO planes that was leaving for patrol near Iceland—our British visitor might well begin to ask himself one question. He has heard that the air traffic controllers in Bermuda are women from the United States Navy: he has seen the small swarm of American surveillance aircraft parked at one end of Bermuda’s only runway, and he now knows that the third world war may conceivably be directed by aircraft dispatched from Bermuda. And yet he was told by the pilot of his aircraft that Queen Elizabeth, his own Queen, was Queen of Bermuda. Somehow it didn’t seem to fit; on paper the place was British—but in reality it sounded very American. His stewardess had mentioned that the drivers preferred the left, and tea was still taken at four, and The Statesman’s Year Book had said, he was sure, that Bermuda enjoyed the benign presence of a British Governor, and he could well imagine feathered helmets and Queen’s birthday parties on the lawns at Government House; and yet there was American nuclear power, and the Stars and Stripes, and a currency tied to the US dollar, and to dial to Bermuda on the phone you used an American dialling code. All of which prompts, perhaps not unreasonably, a question that positively nudges to be asked—Just whose colony really is this? Who really runs it? Who calls the shots?

  The same question has been asked many times before. Lady Daphne Moore, whose husband was Colonial Secretary in Bermuda in 1922, declared that ‘this place is a parasite of and absolutely dependent upon the States—not a very healthy position for a colony to be in…’ (The dependence was not exactly discouraged by the then Governor, General Willocks, who invited only Americans to parties at Government House because it was only the Americans, he said, who knew anything about horses.)

  Lady Moore was no slouch as a diarist, nor one to mince her words. ‘We only ask ourselves in wonder why England should wish to keep this rotten place, from which she can derive no profit and which is more than half American already. The United States could probably be prevailed upon to pay quite a decent price for the place…’

  Her dyspeptic view of Britain’s oldest remaining Crown colony might not be worthy of being taken seriously, did it not find echoes in the jottings of scores of the eighty-five grandees who have governed the place over the centuries. ‘The people of these islands are lazy, stupid, obstinate, small-minded and thoroughly objectionable,’ reported Governor Bruere in 1763; or else they are, as another official from London had it a century later, ‘a lot of close-fisted swindling swine…a tight little trade union of thieves and extortionists’.

  The combination is at first, quite frankly, puzzling. Here we have a group of coral islands, steeped in a warm sea of the palest green, caressed by trade winds of fragrant serenity (except, it must be admitted, in the summer hurricane season), constructed of rocks in pink, soft white or peach, with streams of bright, fresh water, with oleanders and pineapples and cedarwood groves; and a place, moreover, in which Britain has had a vested interest since the early years of the seventeenth century; and yet a good number of the Britons who stay on the islands—islands that many would think of as being almost paradisiacal—seem to come to loath them, to detest these people and find that while the colony is supposedly and unquestionably British—notionally, legally, officially—it is in very many senses dominated by the United States, is utterly dependent on the United States and can well be regarded, and not by cynics alone, as the only British colony which is more like an American colony, run by Bermudians, on Britain’s behalf, for America’s ultimate benefit.

  Bermuda’s use through all of its 400 years of habitation (it is Britain’s oldest surviving colony; Princess Margaret went to help it celebrate 375 years of British rule in the autumn of 1984) has been principally for defence. True, it produces fruit and vegetables for New York, it once dominated the world pencil-making industry, and cedar-hulled yachts with the classic ‘Bermuda rig’ were for many years the best on the ocean. But once, for Imperial Britain, and now for superpower America, Bermuda, despite her small size, her isolation and her position among evil reefs and evil Atlantic weather, was and is of considerable military importance.

  The protection of the shipping lanes was, for nineteenth-century Britain, an Imperial obsession, and dictated Imperial policy—small islands being snapped up, small ports being built up purely as guarantees of the preservation of untroubled passage rights for vessels flying the Ensign. Thus did Trincomalee and Bombay police and service the I
ndian Ocean; Esquimault and Hong Kong and Weihaiwei looked after the Pacific and the China Seas; Aden guarded the Red Sea; Malta and Gibraltar the Mediterranean; Simonstown the South Atlantic; and Halifax and Bermuda the North Atlantic, the Caribbean and the approaches to home.

  Bermuda was, after Malta, the most heavily fortified of the naval stations. (Protection was always overdone in Bermuda: dozens of forts, many of which survive for today’s tourists, were erected almost from the first months of settlement, but no one ever attacked. The surrounding reefs, one assumes, were good enough.) The Admiralty bought an entire island from the Bermudian Government (a purchase that serves to underline the fact that Bermuda was master in its own house, and not utterly subservient to the British Crown, as most other colonies were); Ireland Island, at the far western tip of the fish-hook shape of the colony, cost the Navy four thousand eight hundred pounds; some smaller islands with more than 5,000 cedar trees were bought as well; and a programme began in 1810 to build one of the mightiest naval stations the world had ever seen.

  An Admiral presided, with the splendid title of Commander-in-Chief America and West Indies Station. (The more pedantic geographers might find this odd, since Bermuda is not, strictly speaking, in the West Indies. For virtually all purposes of Imperial and military administration, however, it was regarded as being at one with Jamaica and Grenada, though most certainly not a Caribbean island, having neither Carib Indians, nor a shoreline on the Caribbean Sea.) Splendid names occasionally matched the splendid title: I came across a marble plaque listing past C-in-Cs and saw it had had to be extended a couple of inches at one point to accommodate the name of one Admiral Sir Reginald Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax and his string of appropriate honours.

  The old Royal Dockyard, closed since 1951—the Admiral was first transmuted into a lesser figure known as ‘SNOWI’, the Senior Naval Officer West Indies, and is now a humble Senior British Officer, based in a shoreside house called HMS Malabar—is a haunting place. Its buildings are vast, with towers and pinnacles, tunnels and embayments, wharves and anchor stands and a chapel and a ravelin tower and a clutch of caponiers, all hewn and blasted from the pink-and-white limestone, and sewn together with plates of rusting iron.

  It had a rotten reputation for thievery and idleness. Everything was stolen, it used to be said, except the lavatory seats and the storehouse clock—someone was always sitting on the lavatory, and everyone kept an eye on the clock.

  Nowadays it is a museum (although the Casemates, once the ordnance barracks, is now Bermuda’s maximum security prison, and where any island murderers are still hanged). The museum’s keeper is a merry old Newfoundlander named Doug Little who has a long beard and a wooden leg and looks as though he should have a parrot sitting on his shoulder. His appearance, though highly appropriate to a naval museum, is purely fortuitous: he lost his leg when he was three and a wagon rolled over it near Gander. He says he wears out his wooden stump in a couple of years; it is made of ash, not Bermuda cedar.

  The strategic position of the islands, reluctantly recognised by the eighteenth-century Admiralty, is even more readily accepted today. The Americans came in 1941, building an airfield and an army base which, once the war was over, became the islands’ civil airfield. The lease signed in London and Washington guaranteed the American forces rent-free use of the field and one other site at the western end of the colony for ninety-nine years; the United States Naval Air Station, Bermuda, is a crucial link in the anti-submarine ‘fence’ that now protects the Eastern seaboard from the attentions of the Soviet silent service. (A fine maritime irony has also made Bermuda a convenient hiding place for the very submarines the Pentagon is hunting: on any day, as the Orion spotter aircraft roar out from Kindley Field for their mid-Atlantic mission, three or four nuclear-powered, missile-carrying Russian submarines are lurking off the reefs of Bermuda, poised to hurl their weapons towards Washington, five minutes’ flight time to the north-west.)

  The matter of the bases is a sensitive one, for it opens up the nagging question of just who runs Bermuda—who needs Bermuda, in fact? The answer, inevitably, is that the United States needs Bermuda, much more keenly than does the United Kingdom; and that the Pentagon’s military involvement in and dependence upon the colony ensures that, so far as Russia is concerned, it is a perfectly legitimate target for attack—annihilation, in fact—in the event of an atomic war.

  The question of Bermuda’s own security became something of an island issue during the winter of 1984, after I had gone back to the island for a third time, and had decided to ask people what they thought about the dominant presence of the American military. It seemed to me slightly absurd that British foreign policy, so closely linked to that of the United States, required a colony whose people are not party to the East-West argument to keep American weapons on their soil and thus render themselves liable for attack, as America’s proxy. I came across dozens of young blacks in the seedier parts of Hamilton (for Bermuda does have slums, of a sort, and there are still small riots and strikes, and the place is far from crime-free) who were angry, but whose views never found expression in the island newspapers. There was a clever and articulate trade-union leader, Ottiwell Simmons, who spent an entire evening putting the case against the bases. ‘These are our islands. Yet we have no say whether or not the Americans put atomic bombs in their bases. They don’t have to ask us. They have to ask the British, and the British say yes. Of course they do. The constitution gives them that right, to decide on Bermuda’s foreign policy. But is that morally correct, do you think? If we are made a target for extinction by carrying these weapons on our soil, should we not have the right to say whether or not we want them? I think many ordinary Bermudians would want to keep the Americans at arms’ length, but we are never asked, or never listened to. It’s not that we are anti-American—not at all. We just want more control over our own destiny, particularly when it comes to things like defence, where all of us can die in an instant.’

  To answer this swell of disquiet I went to one of the island’s more prominent white citizens, a courtly banker named Sir John Cox, who had represented Bermuda’s interests at the Bases Conference, held in London in 1941. We met one afternoon in his sitting room, surrounded by antiques and by old clocks—for Sir John is an amateur horologist—and I told him that I had heard islanders speak critically of the American bases. He was scornful—particularly of the suggestion that his island might, in the event of nuclear war, be a target for attack.

  ‘In the event that there is an atomic war,’ he said, ‘we may or may not be the unlucky one. It is absurd to believe that an island of twenty square miles, 600 miles from the nearest continental land mass, can maintain its complete independence; but if it did so attempt, and successfully, can we be assured of immunity from nuclear obliteration? In such an event we would be open to being occupied by a power hostile to our present friends, and the latter might then be forced to eliminate us for reasons of self-preservation.’ It was difficult to realise that Sir John, with his curious brand of sanguine pessimism, was speaking about a place which holidaymakers are wont to think of as paradise.

  The disturbances that followed the hangings have not been repeated, though there are still strikes. There is a growing plague of lawlessness, a rash of drug-smuggling and addiction, and there are occasional demands among the poorer and more radically inclined black Bermudians—who are both in the majority on the islands and, thanks to a highly effective democracy and a manifestly fair constitution, now run the Government—for a greater degree of independence.

  Britain’s policy, voiced by successive Governors, is essentially that laid down by the Colonial Secretary in 1964—any territory that wants independence and is capable of sustaining it can have it, without let or hindrance from Britain. But the Bermudians, for all their occasional bouts of grumbling, seem either not to want it, or to regard themselves as not quite ready for it. Sir Edwin Leather, the forceful and eloquent former Tory MP who was made Governor after the murder of Sharp
les, and who still lives in retirement on the island (cable address Loyalty, Bermuda), pointed out to me one morning over coffee that, ‘Black Bermudians hold every single office of importance on the islands, except the Governor, and as the Government and opposition parties know full well, I publicly informed them in 1973 they could have that post too, any time they chose to declare their independence. In two subsequent elections the subject has never been mentioned…’

  And thus matters stand. The colony hangs on, the majority of its people—all of its whites, and most of its blacks—appearing to prefer to remain under Britain’s invigilation, if not under its control; the American Government is eager to see the island remain secure, in Allied hands, with American military needs guaranteed by treaty with a reliable friend. Only a few voices are raised in support of real independence—the matter of freedom from the colonial yoke is not one that appears significantly to interest the islanders, and would not be argued in such terms anyway.

  The tourists are as unaware of this as they are of the missions of some of the planes parked at the airport. For them, as they bounce down the gangplank from the cruise ships moored at Hamilton, or as they squeeze into taxis or wobble away on their newly acquired scooters, Bermuda’s image is just as Walt Disney might imagine a tropical England, a coral island set in an azure sea.

  There are British policemen—they wear shorts. The traffic drives on the left. You can buy tea in the afternoons. Old ladies with rosy cheeks and in Liberty print dresses are much in evidence. There is a Kennel Club, a Croquet Club, a Saddle Club, a Cricket Club, a Rose Society, a Girl Guides Association, a Keep Bermuda Beautiful association and the Meals on Wheels. Two clubs (Bermuda Yacht, and Hamilton Amateur Dinghy) can call themselves ‘Royal’. There is a fine cathedral, with a British bishop, and columns carved from granite quarried in Peterhead. There are British goldfinches in the trees, and a shearwater known as a Pimlico. There is a town crier in St George’s, and it would seem that every man and woman on the islands has a set of seventeenth-century clothes kept in a chest at home, and which is put on whenever there is a fete to attend or a busload of tourists to entertain.