Outposts

by Simon Winchester

  But generally the islands have suffered—either from neglect, or from that invariable error of the Imperial design, the one-crop economy. Whatever efforts have been made to rear conch and lobster, crabs or cotton, they have been minimal compared to the colony’s reliance on salt. And when, in 1964, the Bahamians established a massive, fully mechanised salt plant, mechanically raked, with a deep-water port for the ships that would collect it, the Turks economy collapsed—just as the St Helenian economy collapsed when demand for flax evaporated, just as the Gibraltarian economy did when the Admiralty closed the local dockyard. The islands present a sorry sight today.

  I flew from Provo one morning, leaving behind the tourists and the sailing crowd, the rich American investors and the diving teachers, and into another, older, decaying world. Twenty minutes later we bumped down at the airstrip at the colony’s capital Cockburn Town on Grand Turk: an ancient Haitian collected me in a taxi, a twenty-year-old Buick that bucked and reared around the potholes like a maverick pony.

  Cockburn Town was utterly worn out. The tin roofs rusted and sagged; weatherboards had warped, and flapped in the steady wind; there was barbed wire and broken glass, sleeping dogs, and a clutch of bored-looking donkeys standing in the sun. The sea wall was cracked, and water was splashing on to the front street; the government buildings, creaking venerably, were flyblown and dusty, and the electricity kept failing. And dominating everything, the great Town Salina, where once ten thousands pounds’ worth of salt had been raked and boxed each year, and which hasn’t produced a cellarful since 1964. The shallow pans are brown with mud today, the low walls between them chipped and broken. A windmill that had once pumped the saline water from pound to pound had broken long ago, and its blades swayed uselessly back and forth, with a screech of rotten iron and a shower of rust.

  There were some new buildings, true: a determined effort was being made to turn the islands into a tax haven, and one lawyer I knew had noticeboards outside his office showing him to be the headquarters of some 4,200 companies, mostly American. The Government charges five hundred dollars a year as a registration fee, and my friend takes another hundred or so: the Chief Minister went off to Hong Kong in 1984, looking for firms who are nervous about that colony’s reversion to China in 1997, and who might like to set up in Grand Turk. He was optimistic, though some of his colleagues wondered about their pride: the Turkmen and the Caiconians had been fishermen and salt rakers once, he said, and had liked hard work, and sweat; merely to sit back and earn fees from so dubious a business as offshore finance seemed, they said, a little ‘undignified’. There was something rather pleasant, an old fisherman said, ‘in being the least developed of the colonies. No one comes and bothers us here. That used to be the case, and now it’s changing. Once the bankers and the insurance men discover us, and the Americans, we’re done for.’

  He might have added to his list the drug smugglers. The lonelier islands of the Caicos group, unpoliced, unsupervised, and lying temptingly midway between Florida and the Colombian marijuana and cocaine farms, have become one of the world’s great trans-shipment points for narcotics. Billions of dollars’ worth pass through each year—cocaine from Bogota to Miami, heroin from Paris (via Haiti) to New York, marijuana from Caracas to Atlanta (via Nassau). Planes fly in and out of the South Caicos aerodrome at night; some are intercepted, most are untroubled. A very few islanders make a few dollars turning on the lights, or turning blind eyes; some of the offshore banks swell their accounts a little with drug commissions. But in general the big money stays away from the Turks and Caicos, and whatever their role in the distribution of the world’s drugs, the islanders remain generally poor.

  Chris Turner, the Governor, who lives in a wonderful mansion named Waterloo (it was built in the same year), and who drives a London taxi as his official car (its mirrors are gnawed off by the wild horses) can do little—either to clamp down on the drugs trade, or perk up the economy. Like all colonial governors he seems perpetually frustrated by the lack of interest shown in London. When I asked his deputy whether his colleagues in the Foreign Office responded quickly to queries he immediately said, ‘Oh yes! very quickly,’ and went on to say that his recent request for compassionate leave had been answered on the same day he had asked. But when I explained that I had not meant that at all, but was interested in whether they answered queries about serious island problems—more money needed for a school, perhaps, or a much-wanted scholarship for a medical student, extra medicine for the hospital, he had to change his tune. ‘I see what you mean. Well, no, I’m afraid not. It takes weeks, sometimes months. We’re at the bottom of every in-tray, I sometimes think. They look after the diplomats all right. We’re part of what we call the Coconut Mafia, and they keep us happy. But the island—it seems that London just forgets we exist.’

  The islanders, who have known this for many years, now try to make a virtue out of the unpleasant reality. ‘Where on earth are the Turks and Caicos Islands?’ ask the advertisements put out by the tourist board. ‘As close to paradise as this world offers,’ comes the reply, meaning Provo, presumably, rather than Cockburn Town. For our friends from Bayonne, New Jersey, the colony probably does appear a temporary paradise; for many of the islanders, forgotten, not paid, it must appear rather considerably less.

  The journey from Grand Turk to the next way-station on this Imperial Progress, the Virgin Islands, was not easy. Only a few miles of sea separate the two colonies, but LIAT, the main inter-island airline, does not fly on this route, arguing that those who might want to travel can’t afford the fare, and those who can afford it don’t want to go. So I had to return to America, wait endless hours in Miami airport, take one aircraft to Puerto Rico, and finally step on to another to the colonial aerodrome on Beef Island. Since the initials LIAT, which officially mean Leeward Islands Air Transport, are also said to stand for ‘Luggage in Another Town’ it may well have been a blessing.

  Beef Island’s airport is a travellers’ airport, the kind of place where men in bomber jackets and white silk scarves hang round the bars waiting for little men named Nobby or Curly, who have cotton waste in their fists and grease on their cheeks, to tell them that the kite’s ready, but go easy on Number Three today because there’s a bit of a leak in the pilot head. The first man I met came from Surbiton, was covered in oil, and was asking the black lady at the tea stand if she thought it was possible to die of tannin poisoning, since the cup he was ordering was the tenth of the day, and it was only half past nine.

  Air-BVI had a couple of Dakotas parked on the apron; one was built in 1937 and had logged 72,000 hours. ‘A little corrosion in places, but basically she’s a solid old thing,’ said her captain, who had taken her to every Caribbean airport over the last twenty years. ‘You should see the log. Must be over five inches thick. It’s basically not your one lady driver, not this one!’ He climbed aboard and the grease-monkey swung the engines, which poured black smoke for a few seconds before settling down to a sweetly contented gurgle. He took off into the morning sun, to collect an American lady from the island of Anegada up north, an island which, he said, was mercifully quite devoid of hills.

  There were other pilots waiting in the bar. One man, from Manchester, had just delivered a second-hand Hawker-Siddeley to the island Government. The trip had taken him the best part of a fortnight: his route had been from Manchester to Stornoway in the Outer Hebrides, then to Reykjavik, then the American airfield at Sondre Stromfjord in West Greenland, Goose Bay in Labrador, and finally Bangor in Maine, and Wilmington in Delaware, before making the crossing to the colony. His co-pilot, a Mr Patel, used to work for a small charter company in Calcutta, and had spent many recent months dropping food supplies to the victims of the Brahmaputra floods in Assam. He was amused, being a good Hindu, to find himself based on Beef Island.

  The Queen Elizabeth Bridge, complete with toll-booth and smiling toll-collector, connects Beef Island and its ten acres of flat land (hence the airfield) with Tortola, which is the upper p
art of a long and very rugged mountain chain, and on which there is no space to stand a pencil, let alone land a plane. Tortola is, thanks to the ever-warm seas, surrounded by coral reefs, but it is not a coral island: the hills are carved from crushed and twisted sandstones, there are peaks of volcanic breccias, veins of coarsely crystalline pegmatite and cliffs of fine grey diorite, and everything is overgrown with deep green vegetation, with frangipani and ‘ginger Thomas’, scrub and palm and patches of rain forest. From the bridge Tortola looks as though a few square miles of the Matto Grosso had been snatched up and crumpled by a giant’s hand and tossed carelessly into the dark blue waters of the Caribbean Sea; but there are white sand beaches, banana groves, mango trees and coconuts, and the Union flag flutters from a pole on a small flat building, which turns out to be the local station of the Royal Virgin Islands Police.

  Virgin Islands—not ‘British’ Virgin Islands. There is some confusion over the name of this particular territory, and which will take a little explaining.

  Until the Sixties the Virgins were administered as a British West Indian Presidency, a rather anonymous entity that was buried in the complicated edifice of the colony of the Leeward Islands, which had its headquarters on the island of Antigua, and looked after more than a hundred islands sandwiched between Puerto Rico in the north, and Guadeloupe in the south. Until 1917 they had every right to call themselves the Virgins: Columbus, who found them in 1493, was so delighted to see so many little islands and rocks clustered together in the shadow of one great all-protecting mother that he named them after the legend of St Ursula and the 11,000 virgins whom the Huns supposedly murdered outside Rome. Columbus was probably trying to impress his royal Spanish sponsors, Ferdinand and Isabella, by naming his discovery ‘Las Once Mil Virgines’: there are only about eighty islands in the group, and he had exaggerated five hundred-fold.

  During the seventeenth century the ownership of Tortola and its neighbour islands to the north, up to and including the flat coral island of Anegada and an important little uninhabited rock called Sombrero—it now belongs to Anguilla, and is still very important to some—passed back and forth between Spaniard, Dutchman and Briton according to the byzantine rituals of Caribbean history. But in 1666 newcomers to the region announced themselves: the Danes, buoyed by a wave of mercantile zeal, were busily colonising small morsels of the world, in India, on the Guinea coast, and in the West Indies. They took possession of St Thomas, an island that was technically a Virgin—one of Columbus’s 11,000—and was only ten miles from Tortola.

  Stern messages passed out from Government House, Antigua, but the Danes ignored them. The British were not keen to fight, the Danes not eager to conquer any island which the British particularly wanted. They set up indigo and cotton plantations, annexed St John (which was just a mile from Tortola) and then bought St Croix from the Knights of Malta. But they seemed not to have taught anyone Danish: no trace of a Creole Dansk remains today, anyway. And the name of their colony was written in English: the Danish West Indies. The Virgin Islands, in the strict official sense, were now wholly British.

  But in 1917 the Danish sold out to the Americans, for twenty-five million dollars, and St Thomas and its sister islands became an extension of the United States, run at first by the Navy, then by the Department of the Interior, and finally by the people themselves. And—the final complication—the Americans decided to rename the collection of islands ‘the United States Virgin Islands’. Britain grumbled—not too much back in 1917, since Tortola and her sister islands were but an unimportant presidency of the Leewards, but much more later, when the islands began to try to stand up on their own. London suggested, with great politeness, that the Americans might have inadvertently misappropriated the islands’ title, and forecast great confusion for anyone wanting to go to the Virgin Islands and turning up in the town of Charlotte Amalie (which is the capital of the United States territory) while actually wanting to go to the Imperial capital, the far less charmingly named Road Town.

  The Colonial Office in London might well have swallowed its pride and renamed the colony, to avoid mistakes of this kind. But it would not countenance such a thing. It was left to the islands’ tourist board to make the change: in the mid-Seventies it took upon itself the task of retitling the colony ‘the British Virgin Islands’, and adding the slogan ‘Yes, we’re different’, to show tourists that Tortola offered charms that were not at all the same as the gaudier delights on show in the US territory. Informally, London has now concurred, and the Colonial Governor heads his annual report with the word ‘British’. But legislation continues to be passed under the old name, official instruments are still issued by the colony of the Virgin Islands and the police are not the Royal British Virgin Islands Police, but simply the RVIP, their Britishness unspoken, though undisguised.

  I came to know something of the Virgin Islands Police on almost my first day on the colony, when I stepped straight into what might well one day be called ‘the mysterious affair at Brandywine’.

  There was a Canadian woman on Tortola, a wealthy divorcee whose principal home was on Grand Cayman, where she sold dresses to passengers on the passing cruise liners. For the past five years she had also owned a modern and spectacularly sited house outside Road Town, from where, when she chose to take a break from the arduous tasks on Cayman, she could come to read and swim, or watch the yachts schooning down the Sir Francis Drake Channel, 400 feet below the cliffs. The house must be one of the loveliest in the Caribbean, and when she was away—which was for about nine months of the year—she rented it, at a premium, to wealthy Americans. On the day we met she was about to take it over after an absence of three months: a young and reportedly delightful couple from Philadelphia had taken it for a thirteen-week honeymoon, and were due to leave on the Wednesday.

  But no one turned up with the keys on the Wednesday, nor on the Thursday, nor by the weekend. On Sunday, by which time we had convinced ourselves that the young couple, delightful or otherwise, were clearly no longer in residence, we broke in.

  It was like stopping a film in mid-frame. The couple had been there, living a full and energetic life in one frame, and by the next they had vanished. The bed was unmade. There were magazines, open, on the tables. Letters, half-written, were on desks. A can of warm beer, open, was on the kitchen bench. A lipstick, just used, had rolled to the side of the dressing table. A crumpled négligée, a pair of stockings, a tee-shirt lay at the foot of the bed. Someone had been reading Elspeth Huxley’s The Flame Trees of Thika.

  We read their letters, examined their bills, looked at the photo albums. They spoke of ‘shipments’ which customers were meant to have received in Boca Raton, Fort Lauderdale and Phoenix. They had checked into hotels in Caracas and Bogota, using false names, always paying in cash. They had taken pictures of each other naked, and standing beside the light plane they owned. They wrote that they used cocaine a great deal, and we found several pounds of hashish hidden in boxes.

  And they were never heard of again. The Virgin Islands Police inquired. So did the Virgin Islands Governor. And the FBI, and the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the Pennsylvania State Police. Everyone on the island seemed to think they were running drugs, using their little Comanche to ferry cocaine from Colombia to Florida, perhaps even going via South Caicos as so many Americans before them had done. Everyone seemed to think they had crashed into the sea one afternoon, on their way home to Brandywine House. They hadn’t looked a very appetising couple, my friend had said, but even so, it was a rotten way to end a honeymoon. ‘The main business of the Caribbean these days,’ said a policeman. ‘Things have changed a great deal.’

  My friend never received her last month’s rent for the house. Instead a lawyer in Philadelphia offered her all the personal belongings of the vanished pair. She sold the radios and the records, read the books, and tried to sell the girl’s clothes to the cruise line passengers on Grand Cayman. Finally she sold the house; it had been spoiled, she said. It felt cursed by
a strange spell. There used to be voodoo in Tortola, when the Arawaks were there; some of the older people in Road Town wondered if it had reared its head again, briefly, in the mysterious affair at Brandywine.

  The air of somnolent decay which had been so evident in Cockburn Town was very much abroad in Road Town, too. The streets were potholed and dusty, the houses peeling and shabby, with cracked window-panes and broken verandahs. Rusting cars, their tyres long since stripped off by fishing-boat crews, who used them as fenders, were sprawled on the waste land, grass growing up through the seats. There was a clatter of thin applause from behind a small supermarket: schoolchildren were playing cricket in the evening sun, their parents lying on sandy grass, drinking beer and clapping lazily as one child hit a four, and the ball rolled into the ditch.

  The smell of the sea was very rich and heavy here, and the cobles bobbed up and down on the scummy water, in a foam of weed and peelings and a litter of styrofoam fragments. Three ancient men sat in the twilight, fishing idly, smoking, talking in low tones. A pair of snappers, still glistening scarlet, twitched on the timbers. One of the men pulled out a piece of crumpled paper and tried to read it in the fading light; it was in Spanish—he was hoping to do some small deal with a man in Puerto Rico—and I had to translate it for him. It had something to do with an ice-cream maker which the man thought he might like to buy.

  Up in the hills lights twinkled like fireflies, and there was a sudden burst of distant music as the wind shifted, and blew us a song from a cruising yacht moored out in the Roads. But then it fell silent, except for the water lapping against the pier, and the low buzz of talk among the fishermen. A lovely, sleepy cul-de-sac of Empire, content in its own oblivion.