Outposts_ Journeys To The Surviving Relics Of The British Empire Part 2

And I loved the little church. There was no roof-probably never had been. The altar was gone, but the heavy old door still swung slowly open, and inside there were a dozen pews, and a window of blue stained-gla.s.s, and a candleholder, and the notice-board that gave the hymn numbers and the psalms. The acoustics were perfect, and one evening I stood at the spot the old priest must have liked, and listened to the boom of the surf and the whisper of the wind through the palms above, and wondered how on earth the bureaucrats 8,000 miles away in London could ever have used such phrases as 'rotating contract personnel' to describe the people who had lived and loved and wors.h.i.+pped here. This was a community, without doubt. The church had been built in 1932-a slab of stone by the west door said so. There was a little schoolhouse, and the shop, and the warehouse and the manager's mansion. There was said to be an inn, where the workers bought their rum and their coconut toddy; and a small hospital, where the doctor prescribed medicines with names like 'Eau de Saturne', 'Onguent de la Mer' and 'Pierre Infernale'. This was an island of labourers and millmen, rat-catchers, toddy-makers and fowl-keepers, where wives worked on the copra dryers and the children went to school, and the whole island went to church on Sunday. And now, thanks to a sale and a deal and a handshake and the exchanges of Notes between politicians in Whitehall and Foggy Bottom, this community was smashed and wrecked for ever, and the island was forcibly stripped of its people, to lie empty and half-silent, echoing only to the memories, and with the shuffling and sc.r.a.ping of the hermit crabs, and the endless sounds of wind and ocean.

And then the plane flew over.

It came suddenly out of a silent sky-a low hum, then an ominous growl, and a fierce roar as it swept overhead, no more than 200 feet above. It had four propellers, a bulbous nose and a trailing tail-I had seen just the same type of plane a few weeks before, on Bermuda. It was a Lockheed Orion anti-submarine reconnaissance aircraft, belonging to the United States Navy. On board would be twelve men: three in the c.o.c.kpit, six hunched over screens and dials and gauges in the mid-section, one preparing to drop 'ordnance'-detection buoys, flares, transponders-one manning a camera deep in the aircraft belly, and one man waiting in reserve in the galley, cooking hamburgers for his companions.

The cameraman spotted the yacht, and the plane began a low and lazy circle, dipping down to examine us on each pa.s.s, waggling its wings when we waved up at him. After half a dozen times it straightened up and flew around the other ten islands of the group, checking each one for intruders. But there were none: Dog Island, Ile de la Pa.s.se, every tiny circle of palm and sand was utterly empty, and the plane soon tired of looking. It flew back over Boddam, roared so low the tops of the Afzelia trees rocked in its slipstream, and then soared high over the ocean and headed due west, for the next atoll of the colony.

The oceanic quiet resumed; but the sense of utter isolation did not. We had been spotted. Our plan had been rumbled. The Americans knew we were in the vicinity, that the area they demanded be 'swept clean' was now contaminated by-I could read their report in my mind's eye-unauthorised civilian personnel. When, we wondered, would the little gunboat appear over the horizon, and order us off?

We stayed four more days on Boddam, pinned down by storm waves cras.h.i.+ng deafeningly against the reef wall, and by the sight of thick, mola.s.ses-black clouds welling up from the south. A small cutter sailed into the lagoon one afternoon; it, too, had come from the north, and had been battered in a terrible storm; his batteries were soaked and his engine would not seem to work. He was French, and imperturbable, and he and his girlfriend swam, brown and naked, in the clear waters, caught fish and baked them, with freshly made bread, on a palm-log fire they built on the beach. They said it didn't matter how long it took for the battery to dry. 'I 'ave no work in Paris,' said the girl, who was called Emanuelle. 'So I am in no 'urry. This is ver' lovely, no?'

We walked together, silent and content, along the old island paths. The plane came by twice a day, morning and evening, circling, taking more pictures, reporting the various arrivals and our various doings. I built a fire one evening, and banked it with leaves and old breadfruit and coconut husks, and a thick plume of smoke rose over the island. The plane scented it within moments and roared in from the west, radars locked on and engaged. I began to feel the plane was hovering over my right shoulder, watching my every move. If I undid my shaving kit and boiled up some water, there was the Orion, swooping in to have a look; if I read a book somewhere deep in the shade, a black insect-like shape would appear on the far horizon and buzz towards me and dive so low its crew could read the page number. 'Unauthorised civilian reading Pushkin', would go the message, back to the Pentagon. Obvious Commie ploy.

One evening I stumbled on a tiny steel plinth set into the ground. '512 Specialist Team, Royal Engineers' was engraved on the top. 'May 1984-Survey Mark'. The Army had been on Boddam Island only a few weeks before. They might well be back. The weather was better outside, and we realised we had taken to calling the island 'G.o.ddam Boddam' because of the heat, and the mosquitoes, and the arrival of yet more long-distance yachts. We decided to weigh anchor, and set sail for Diego Garcia itself, little more than a hundred miles south. Emanuelle could not understand why we were going. 'Stay for a little while more!' she pleaded, swimming behind us. But we waved our farewells, and swung and weaved our way out of the lagoon between the shallows and the coral-heads. The dolphins joined us near the lagoon mouth, and leaped and twisted under the bows as we started to pitch gently in the swells. I hoisted the mainsail and Ruth hoisted the head and the foresails, and we b.u.t.ted through a sloppy sea and into the night and a rising full moon.

The princ.i.p.al feature of the Chagos Archipelago is under water. The islands, such as Boddam, and Peros Banhos, the Eagle Islands and Diego Garcia may all be, in a political sense, important; but to the geographer they are almost irrelevant. The Great Chagos Bank is all that really matters-an immense circle of ocean, sixty miles across, where the water can be as little as six feet deep, which is affected by bizarre currents, strange waves, peculiar fish and birds and animals. It is a frightening place, if only because it is so unexpected. There is no land in sight, and the great gla.s.sy swells of the deep sea have given way to the riffles and chops of the shallows; this water is not blue, but light green, and coral-heads of pink and orange suddenly thrust upwards from the sand, and scratch ominously against the hull. Most s.h.i.+ps give the bank a wide berth; the currents are unpredictable, the air is filled with crowds of birds, the sea heavy with bonito and flying fish, and an occasional white breaker suggesting a reef that could tear your hull in two. We kept to the eastern edge of the bank, with the echo-sounder on, and every time the dancing lights of the display showed less than a hundred metres below the keel, we steered further eastwards, to keep ourselves in the comfort and security of the deep.

It was shortly before dawn on our second night out from Boddam that we spotted the loom of lights of Diego Garcia. Ruth, who had an infallible eye for such things, saw it first-a vague, pale discoloration of the night horizon, the yellowish blur from a thousand lights of a small city. Otherwise the sea and the sky were black-the moon had set-and the loneliness of the setting was profound. I unwrapped the direction-finding radio and tuned in to the Diego Garcia beacon-a faint bleeping pattern of morse sounded from a few points off the starboard bow. We sheeted in the sails, edged a few degrees closer to the breeze, and made directly for this most secret of British islands.

When dawn came up, and the lights went off, so the loom of the colony vanished. But the beacon kept sounding, and by breakfast-time I could pick up a radio signal which was unmistakably American. It was Sunday morning. 'Hi everybody!' said the voice, crackling and fading as we dipped into troughs between the swells, 'Hi! This is Reverend Harry of the G.o.d Squad wis.h.i.+ng you-all a very Happy Sunday!'

And Reverend Harry, with his Oklahoma accent, his fervour and his enthusiasm, went on to catalogue the miseries and pitfalls of modern service life, and how best to avoid them. Only s.n.a.t.c.hes of his sermon filtered across to us. 'Let's all pray for Marion, of Waxahatchie. She's sick-and I don't mean no cold or headache, folks. I mean major-league misery.' 'And now folks, don' any of you get into drugs, d'you hear? 'Cause you drug-users are gonna die-no doubt about it. And when you die, well, man-that's for a long, long time...'

And just in case we had any doubts, the station broadcast its identification, over and over again. 'Yessir, this is Radio Fourteen-Eighty-Five-the American Forces Radio and Television Service, Diego Garcia, in the big wide wastes of the good ol' Indian Ocean.'

We had gone below for breakfast, leaving the boat to steer herself. The water rumbled and chuckled under the hull-we were making good progress, and we had been doing so for about an hour when I decided to go above, and check the horizon. I very nearly fell overboard. The sea, which had been quite empty when I went below, was now seething with s.h.i.+ps. Two long container s.h.i.+ps were bearing down on us from the east; there was a strangely shaped vessel, painted a brilliant white, about five miles ahead; two destroyers sailed away northwards; and heading on a direct collision course for us, and no more than a mile away, were the black, weed-covered bows of a ma.s.sive ocean-going tug. A dozen men cl.u.s.tered around the wheelhouse, all apparently staring in our direction.

She bucked and reared in the swell, pa.s.sed on our starboard quarter, and made a wide turn behind us and came alongside. She was called the Robert W Robert W. and was registered in Seattle. I imagined she was on charter to the Navy as the base perimeter patrol s.h.i.+p, and that this was as far as we were likely to get. I cursed silently. Three weeks at sea, to be turned away within sight of the place. b.l.o.o.d.y bad luck. Ruth looked glum, too; I suspected she thought the same.

'Where you from?' barked a voice from the wheelhouse. We yelled our reply, and saw the entire audience react with stunned, but friendly, disbelief. These were big-s.h.i.+p sailors, and our little schooner must have looked too tiny to accomplish a pa.s.sage across the average lake, let alone an ocean as wide and difficult as this. 'For Chrissake! All that way in that tub!' exclaimed the skipper. 'You wanna beer?' And almost as he said this, two cans of Olympia Lite Beer whistled across the green and heaving gap, each from a different member of his crew. I stopped mine, and Ruth caught hers, the tug erupted in a burst of wild applause, and we began a fifty-decibel conversation as both boats struggled to keep on course, and avoid a collision.

No, they were not on patrol; they were simply taking a group of sailors on a Sunday morning fis.h.i.+ng expedition. As far as they were concerned we could go and crawl over Diego Garcia about as much as we wanted. 'It's not us who give the trouble,' the skipper explained, with a sympathetic grin. 'It's the b.l.o.o.d.y limeys here. They run the place, and they're mean as h.e.l.l. But you want to get in to Diego? Well, we got a plan.' And he went on to tell us to fake a mild emergency-'appendicitis, engine trouble, something like that-in fact, why not throw out all your water? They're sure to let you in if they think you're out.'

We had taken on six jerrycans of fresh water at Boddam-most of it not so fresh, in fact, and alive with wriggling red worms-and had plenty of spare in the bilge tanks. So we opened all the deck containers and dribbled the water out into the sea, to the ironic cheers of the tugboat crew. When the last one was empty, the skipper disappeared, and could be heard chattering on the radio. Finally he appeared again and gave a thumbs-up. 'They'll let you in to fill up-so come on in. Follow us!' And he turned south, and roared off at ten knots, the skipper obviously delighted with the success of his small deception. We fell in beside his wake, let our sails fill out, cranked up our tiny Lister diesel engine to give us the extra knot or two, and made pa.s.sage for Diego Garcia.

It came into view after only a few minutes, though the first sight was not of a dusting of green palm trees, but of a single white tower, and a cl.u.s.ter of s.h.i.+ps' masts. The tower was marked on the chart-'Wht. Twr. Conspic.'-and as we came closer, and began to see the lines of palms heeling over in the wind, and the upper-works of a veritable flotilla of vessels, we could see it was a water tank, and had words stencilled on the side: 'Welcome,' it said, as we expected, 'to the Footprint of Freedom'.

The reef entrance was marked by lights and buoys, and we pa.s.sed two islands where there had been a leper colony a century ago. Inside, the channel was deep and wide-no danger of running aground on a coral-head, as we had with such ignominy up in Boddam. The channel had first been widened a hundred years before, when the Orient Steam Navigation Company decided to abandon Aden as a coaling station, and make Diego Garcia the main refuelling stop between the Red Sea and Cap Leeuwin.

Messrs. Lund and Company worked the coal bunker, employing forty Somalis and seventeen Europeans to operate the depot and its 15,000 tonnes of Welsh steam coal. It took about forty-eight hours to coal a liner, and the pa.s.sengers were asked not to disembark, because of the 'lack of facilities' on the atoll. A Lund and Company official once reported great excitement among the native islanders when the liner Lusitania Lusitania called; generally, however, coaling staff and copra-gatherers kept themselves apart, and there has never been any persuasive evidence of Somali blood in the Diego Garcian stock. called; generally, however, coaling staff and copra-gatherers kept themselves apart, and there has never been any persuasive evidence of Somali blood in the Diego Garcian stock.

The Robert W Robert W. led us to a buoy in Eclipse Bay, just beneath the water tower and no more than a hundred yards from the sh.o.r.e. There was a satellite dish and cl.u.s.ter of domes and aerials and a cafe, with people sitting on a verandah out over the water. They waved and I thought I heard someone inviting us over for a beer.

The tug meanwhile had tied alongside, and the cook was busily pa.s.sing over to Ruth a bewildering and wonderful a.s.sortment of food and drink. For the last two weeks it had been lentils and corned beef; now we had legs of frozen pork, fresh orange juice, beer, strawberries, tinned peaches, fresh pears...until suddenly the buzz of friendly American voices gave way to the stern and unmistakable accent of a British Government official. 'Break away, please! Break away! Her Majesty's Government orders. Break away!'

The two men, both in khaki shorts and s.h.i.+rts, with their epaulettes emblazoned with the letters 'BIOT', stepped off a power boat and on to the tug. The crew members took immediate fright: water pipes were disconnected, hawsers were undone, springs released, bowlines untied and the Robert W Robert W. and Sketty Belle Sketty Belle began to drift apart. The two newcomers jumped nimbly aboard the yacht and signalled to the tug to move well away. Her skipper waved to us and grimaced at the back of the two, who were now arranging themselves, and opening their government-issue briefcases, in our main cabin. began to drift apart. The two newcomers jumped nimbly aboard the yacht and signalled to the tug to move well away. Her skipper waved to us and grimaced at the back of the two, who were now arranging themselves, and opening their government-issue briefcases, in our main cabin.

Neither man smiled. One was named John Eddington, the other Jan Gover, and they had no interest in small talk. Pa.s.sports were produced, forms were pulled from cases, and all the usual questions were asked-what firearms did we carry, did either of us suffer from malaria or measles, what duty-free alcohol was on board, were we carrying cocaine or marijuana. And then Mr Gover a.s.sumed an even more stern expression and asked my profession. 'Representative,' I said, since that was the word on my pa.s.sport. 'Of what?' he asked. 'Publis.h.i.+ng,' I replied, thinking that sufficiently anodyne. 'Oh yes,' Gover scowled. 'Publis.h.i.+ng newspapers, by any chance. You wouldn't be a journalist, would you?'

The game was well and truly up. Yes, I said, I was. ('He's admitted it!' Gover whispered into the microphone of his radio, as though, after grilling me for three days, with liberal use of the thumbscrews and the rubber truncheon, he had finally heard me tell him where the gold was hidden.) Then Mr Eddington, the senior man, intervened. He waved a piece of typing paper, and became more formal. 'Last January, Mr Winchester, you wrote to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, requesting permission to visit this territory.' I nodded mutely. I had indeed written to the Commissioner, Nigel Wenban-Smith (who combined his somewhat less-than-onerous job with that of being head of the East African Department), and had received a polite, but firm refusal. Under the terms of the 1966 agreement with the United States, he said, no civilians, except those working for the Government, could travel to any of the islands. He promised to put my name on the list of applicants, but held out rather little hope.

'Why,' Mr Eddington thundered, clearly quite angry, 'did you disregard the instructions of Her Majesty's Government?' I stifled a chuckle. It all seemed so very comical-this utterly serious conversation taking place in so tiny a cabin, piled high with frozen pigs' legs and cartons of strawberries. I stuttered a reply. I had wanted to see if the Government's a.s.surances that only 'rotating contract personnel' lived on Diego Garcia were in fact true. I wanted to see if the graveyard still existed at Minni Minni, or if the wild horses from the islanders' old stables still ran on the beaches by East Point, and if there were any remanent members of the clutches of Muscovy ducks and Buff Orpington chickens that some islander set free on moving day ten years before, and I wanted to see if the hibiscus still grew by the manager's house, and if the pier still stood, from where the manager's wife once watched 'a giant ray, moving through the water like an animated army blanket'. I wanted to know, in short, whether our Government had been telling the truth when it took over the islands for the American forces to use, or whether the politicians had lied to the world, and dismissed the demands of the islanders like so much chaff in the wind.

All this cut no ice with Mr Eddington, and Mr Gover looked frankly contemptuous. 'You'll have to go,' he said. 'Right away.'

But Ruth had some shots left in her locker. No, she said, she was not prepared to go. As skipper of the vessel, she had a duty to see that neither it nor her crew were likely to be in any danger at sea. There were problems with the boat. The autopilot was not working. The stern gland on the propeller shaft was leaking, and needed to be repacked and tightened. The diesel tanks were almost empty. One of the sails was badly torn and needed patching. All this would take time, she said, and a brief sojourn in a British colony would be most convenient.

The officers left to seek instructions from the island Administrator, a Foreign Office man named John Topp. (The Administrator presides over surely one of the most curious a.s.semblages of Imperial rulers ever-Naval Party NP 2002, with a lieutenant-commander, twenty sailors and six female cipher clerks; a magistrate and a doctor; and six Scotland Yard policemen, who are permanently occupied trying to investigate the innumerable cases of narcotics use among the 2,000 Americans who live on their side of the cyclone fence. This may be an American base; but British justice rules, and so the Foreign Office has to see that the island does not succ.u.mb to utter lawlessness.) While we waited, we watched the vast panorama of the American war machine. Ahead, directly under the bow, was the runway-nearly three miles long (and being extended on stilts into mid-lagoon), and the best equipped between South Africa and Australia. There were six of the silver Lockheed spotter planes parked on the ap.r.o.n, and two more roared in as we watched; ten white-painted fighters, quite probably from a carrier lurking somewhere nearby, were cl.u.s.tered by the control tower; and at the far end, near the storage tanks and some ominous-looking mounds of earth, the gun-grey bulk of a B-52 bomber, all the way from California by way of Hawaii, the Philippines and Guam, and there to show the Middle East that America had the strategic ability to drop atom bombs, or launch cruise missiles, at a whim.

The base-and indeed all of the Indian Ocean, right up to Mombasa and Kuwait-comes under the command of the C-in-C Pacific, who is based in Honolulu. He remarked to me once that having a forward line as far away as the Persian Gulf, which his bombers took nearly a day to reach, was inconvenient, to say the least. If the Commander of US Forces in Germany wanted to know how it felt, the Admiral remarked, he should be based in St Louis, Missouri, and try to run a European war from there.

But the real impression of power came from the lagoon, and the gigantic a.s.semblage of naval power and supplies. I could count seventeen s.h.i.+ps riding at anchor. Thirteen were cargo vessels, stuffed to the gunwales with tanks and ammunition, fuel and water supplies, rockets and jeeps and armoured personnel carriers, and ready to sail at two hours' notice. There was an atomic submarine, the USS Corpus Christi Corpus Christi-a batch of crewmen were even now sailing by in their liberty boat, off to see the delights of the Rock and, presumably, to ferret out some of the eighty women a.s.signed to the base; there was the submarine tender USS Proteus Proteus, which I had last seen in Holy Loch, in Scotland, and which was packed with every last item, from a nut to a nuclear warhead, that a cruising submariner could ever need; and there was the strange white-painted former a.s.sault s.h.i.+p, the USS LaSalle LaSalle, now converted into a floating headquarters for the US Central Command, and in the bowels of which admirals and generals played 'Games of Survivable War in the Mid-East Theater', with the white paint keeping their electronic battle directors and intelligence decoders cool in the Indian Ocean sun.

But then Messrs. Eddington and Gover swept back in the Dunlin Express Dunlin Express. Their faces were set. No, we could not stay. London had directed that we leave the Territory forthwith, and the Royal Navy would tow us out to sea if necessary. If we had any repairs we would have to do them at sea.

But we formally refused to go, and said quite plainly that we were within our rights, could claim Diego Garcia as a port of refuge under an international convention to which Britain and her colonies were signatories. Off roared the Dunlin Express Dunlin Express once more; Mr Topp was consulted, London was telephoned, and back came the boat, with another one, the once more; Mr Topp was consulted, London was telephoned, and back came the boat, with another one, the Montrose Express Montrose Express, in tow. Four khaki-s.h.i.+rted men stood in the background as their senior stood to make an announcement: 'I, John Winston Eddington, Marshal of the Supreme Court of British Indian Ocean Territory, do hereby request and require you to remove yourselves and your vessel...' And at this point I suddenly realised we weren't playing games any more. We were going to lose-we could have the boat seized, enormous fines levied, possessions confiscated, charges brought under Secrets Acts. So, craven and briefly humiliated, I interrupted. We would go, of course, I said; but we were tired, the weather had been bad up north-could we perhaps stay until daybreak? There was some hurried consultation by radio, and John Eddington nodded his agreement. Till dawn, he said; no hard feelings-a drink in London one day perhaps? Only doing my job, y'know. And off the Expresses Expresses buzzed, leaving us bobbing in their wake, and then alone in the upper part of the lagoon, in a strange and quarantined kind of peace. buzzed, leaving us bobbing in their wake, and then alone in the upper part of the lagoon, in a strange and quarantined kind of peace.

The nights on Diego Garcia are brilliant affairs. The s.h.i.+ps are festooned with riding lights and deck lights and illuminations. The airstrip glows with sodium vapour lamps, and the satellite dishes scan the skies bathed in a soft white glow. Aerials wink red and white, strobe lamps flicker, the barrack blocks and the security fences are bright in the blue of the kliegs. Someone ordered that searchlights be directed at us, presumably to make sure we didn't try to swim ash.o.r.e; and throughout the night aircraft returning from patrol swept above us, colouring the water with their landing lamps. Kipling may have thought Calcutta was the city of dreadful night; this was the colony of perpetual day.

We didn't wake at dawn, and by eight the Express Express boats were back, and people were yelling through megaphones at us, telling us to move. We took our time, and ate our breakfast while the patrol boats circled us, like sharks; finally we slipped the buoy lines at noon. As we hoisted the sails we turned south, into the lagoon, and sailed around the boats were back, and people were yelling through megaphones at us, telling us to move. We took our time, and ate our breakfast while the patrol boats circled us, like sharks; finally we slipped the buoy lines at noon. As we hoisted the sails we turned south, into the lagoon, and sailed around the Corpus Christi Corpus Christi, and under the bows of the Proteus Proteus and the and the LaSalle LaSalle, while a party of Royal Navy men in a rubber boat escorted us to the lagoon mouth. They waved us out and turned back to base; we felt the pleasant calm of the shallows give way to the slow swell of the ocean once more, and then the wind took hold, and a strong current, and we were swept away from Diego Garcia for good.

Three hours later I heard a plane above us, and saw the familiar shape and the flash of silver. I turned to see if I could spot the Wht. Twr. Conspic.-but the island had vanished below the horizon. That night the glow was easily visible, and lasted until just before dawn, but it was missing the next night out, and the skyline was uniformly dark. Only the radio told of the American presence-Radio Fourteen-Eighty-Five, blaring its advice on aerobic workshops and US Savings Bonds and drug abuse programmes until it, too, faded in a crackle and a hiss of static, and the island disappeared back into the ocean-bound anonymity it so keenly savours.

It still dismays me that so little anger has been generated inside Britain about the sad saga of the Chagos Islands. It might have been different, of course, had the Labour Government not been the one to initiate the tragedy. We tend to a.s.sociate the Labour Party with the gentler principles of humanity and human dignity-it is a party that purports to stand for civil rights, self-determination, freedom from colonial tyranny, a slowing of the arms race. And yet it violated all of these precepts by its decisions over the Chagos Islands in 1965 and 1966, and by the actions its officers directed in the late 1960s and the early 1970s.

Had these things been done by a Tory administration, as one would perhaps have more easily accepted, the Roy Hattersleys and George Browns would no doubt have pilloried the decisions, condemned the Government for its barbaric cruelty and inhuman devotion to the arrogance of Empire. But, unhappily, it was these very politicians who directed the tragedy, and so are unable to criticise it in the political arena today. There is a time, of course, when expediency takes precedence over principle; and when that happens, as it clearly did over the formation of BIOT and the expulsion of the native islanders, there is a general understanding that not too much will be made of it all, and people will gradually forget.

And so they do. We reached Mauritius two weeks later, and found the islanders from Chagos a.s.similating themselves-with resignation, but without resistance-into their new home. They had been offered compensation, had accepted, and were moderately well off. They were beginning to forget that they were British subjects in an alien land; and the world was beginning to forget as well.

But those who run the colony are an unforgiving breed. A few weeks later I heard that the skipper of the Robert W Robert W. had been called back home, had been stripped of his command, and fired, for giving us help, advice and frozen strawberries out there in mid-ocean. He had helped us briefly delve into this most secretive part of the Empire; and the Empire, irritated and angered, had struck back.

3.

Tristan

It was an early November morning at the Zululand Yacht Club. The sky was pale blue and cloudless, and there was the feel of spring in the air. A fresh wind was blowing up from the south-west, and from the nine boats beside us came the familiar sounds of small craft in a port: the clinking of wire halyards against metal masts, the whirring of windvanes and the earnest slap of the tiny waves against well-anch.o.r.ed hulls.

The s.h.i.+pping channel was a hundred yards away, and, though this was a Sunday, the port was busy. The club is at Richards Bay, which the South African Government has decided is to be the pre-eminent bulk cargo terminal between Cape Town and Suez, and that Sunday, like any other day, the approach channels were alive with huge bulk carriers sliding to and fro, arriving empty from j.a.pan and Korea, from Seattle and Valparaiso and Darwin, and leaving full of aluminium, or grain, or copper ore from the mines of the Rand and the Veldt.

Every few moments a funnel would appear above the harbour wall and a long steel prow would ease its way between the buoys and down to the cranes and hoppers of the loading bays. And every other few moments an exactly similar funnel and steel nose would, with even greater solemnity and gravamen, lumber its way, fully laden, out into the long sea. These were not pretty s.h.i.+ps: they were quite characterless, immense steel boxes with prefabs for bridgeworks, a few contortions of pipes and a clutch of well-greased winches. Designed solely for the efficient transport of the world's raw materials-and fed not by stevedores, but by moving belts and computerised cranes-they had no evident concessions to maritime grace or beauty. And Richards Bay was the same: stark, modern, bright, efficient, and with none of the dirty charm and roguery of an old town by the sea.

Ruth and I had been stuck there for a week. The south-westerly wind, which all those unlovely bulk carriers could ignore and drive into with aloof impunity, was, for so small a schooner as ours, wickedly dangerous. So long as it was blowing, we had to remain in port. Tristan da Cunha was only 3,000 miles away-a month's steady sailing, if the wind was fair. But with the south-westerlies relentlessly piling up from the Antarctic, Tristan might have been three million miles away, and after this first week in Zululand I was beginning to fear that my trail to the most remote of Britain's colonial outposts might never even begin.

The charts and the Pilots Pilots had warned us. The eastern coast of South Africa, from the Mozambique border in the north to the rocky headland of Cape Agulhas-which, contrary to the popular a.s.sumption that the Cape of Good Hope is Africa's most southerly point, is itself the part of Africa closest to the Pole-has a fearsome reputation. Large, well-found s.h.i.+ps have broken up and vanished without trace in the seas beyond these harbour walls. Yachts that risked the coastal waters between Richards Bay and Port Elizabeth, 600 miles away, have, in their hundreds, been driven on to wild cliff-bound sh.o.r.es, have lost masts and sails, have turned turtle, have had great holes gouged in their hulls, or have never been found again. had warned us. The eastern coast of South Africa, from the Mozambique border in the north to the rocky headland of Cape Agulhas-which, contrary to the popular a.s.sumption that the Cape of Good Hope is Africa's most southerly point, is itself the part of Africa closest to the Pole-has a fearsome reputation. Large, well-found s.h.i.+ps have broken up and vanished without trace in the seas beyond these harbour walls. Yachts that risked the coastal waters between Richards Bay and Port Elizabeth, 600 miles away, have, in their hundreds, been driven on to wild cliff-bound sh.o.r.es, have lost masts and sails, have turned turtle, have had great holes gouged in their hulls, or have never been found again.

The coast's reputation arises from an unusual combination of circ.u.mstances. A powerful and very fast warm current-the Agulhas current-flows parallel to the coast, from the north-east to the south-west. In places it runs at five knots: it creates huge eddies and whorls in the water, and navigators can detect its malevolent presence simply by dipping a hand into the sea: if it is unusually warm, then that is current water, swirling and streaming south-westwards towards the southern cape. The current itself might not pose problems-except for s.h.i.+ps wanting to drive against it-were it not for the certainty that, for at least two spring days out of five, the prevailing wind that blows above is from from the south-west. A huge body of water is thus running down towards the south-west, and a huge body of air immediately overhead is running the exact opposite way. The charts, in a box outlined in red and displayed at intervals along the coast, explain what happens: 'Abnormal Waves' a warning declares. 'The coincidence of contrary wind and current patterns beyond the one-hundred-metre line can produce abnormal waves, with very steep leading edges and exceptional strength. Mariners are advised, in the event of winds from the south-westerly quadrant, either to remain within the hundred-metre contour, or remain in shelter, where available.' the south-west. A huge body of water is thus running down towards the south-west, and a huge body of air immediately overhead is running the exact opposite way. The charts, in a box outlined in red and displayed at intervals along the coast, explain what happens: 'Abnormal Waves' a warning declares. 'The coincidence of contrary wind and current patterns beyond the one-hundred-metre line can produce abnormal waves, with very steep leading edges and exceptional strength. Mariners are advised, in the event of winds from the south-westerly quadrant, either to remain within the hundred-metre contour, or remain in shelter, where available.'

I had read a little of these legendary waves. Other yachtsmen in the club bar added their own warnings. No one-not even the most carefree of the sailors who came in here-underestimated their power. There were magazines strewn around the bar, their pages opened to terrifying accounts of recent experiences. 'These waves are like nothing anywhere in the world,' one American magazine quoted a Dutch tanker captain as saying. 'They are not only enormously large. They are incredibly steep, so that when you reach the crest of one you tip down into what looks like a great black hole in the ocean, you slide down and down, and as you do so the next crest of the next wave breaks down on you and hundreds of millions of tons of water smashes on to your deck and drives you deeper still. Even the most well found steel s.h.i.+p can find it hard to survive an onslaught like this for long.' The master in question had suffered damage that looked more appropriate to a naval battle: his entire bow section had been ripped away, and all his deck equipment, his foremast and his capstans, had vanished. He had arrived in Durban a sober and frightened man, and, the magazine said, had been flown back by his owners, and was recovering from his ordeal, far from the sea.

And so we stayed in port, day after tedious day. Each morning we would walk to the public phone booth at one end of the dock and call the airport for the weather report. Each day the man on the other end would report back that low pressure zones at this point, and at that point, were causing strong south-westerly winds from Port Elizabeth north to the Mozambique Channel. He came to recognise my voice after a few such morning calls. 'b.l.o.o.d.y frustrating, isn't it? Best to keep out of the water, I think.' One day we did set out: the winds had died, and the coastal radio station thought we might have twenty hours of calms, enough time to get down to Durban. But within an hour after we had cleared the harbour entrance buoys I saw a long black line of cloud ahead of us, and a ferocious ma.s.s of dark water roared towards us, and within minutes we were plunging deep into troughs of sea and gales were howling through the shrouds. We dropped sails, turned about, and fled for home and the tedious comfort of our mooring.

After ten days, though, we had some success. One good day took us down to Durban, where we met a young sailor who was able to give us good advice for the next leg of the trip, to East London and Port Elizabeth. His plan, which he had followed on more than a hundred southbound ventures, was to wait until a stiff south-wester was blowing, and leave after it had been blowing for twenty hours-while, in other words, it was still still blowing. That way, he a.s.sured us, we would have an uncomfortable first few hours, would then run into a day of calms and light airs, and would then pick up the north-wester that inevitably came after the southerlies. blowing. That way, he a.s.sured us, we would have an uncomfortable first few hours, would then run into a day of calms and light airs, and would then pick up the north-wester that inevitably came after the southerlies.

He came down each morning with weather charts and new advice. One day we told the port authorities we would leave at four that afternoon, and the immigration and customs men came down and checked us, and stamped us out. But we were then told it might be better to leave at eight, and the customs and immigration men insisted on coming a second time, and charged a fistful of rand for the privilege. Finally, we left at midnight, on the tide: the men with their briefcases and sealing-wax embossers and lead-clamps-for the South African bureaucrat is a great one for paraphernalia-came down a third time, took another ten rand from us, and waved us off into the night, and watched us as we hoisted sails for the 300 miles ahead.

'Between Durban and East London there is nowhere to run,' we had been warned a score of times. The coastline-the 'wild coast', as the tourist brochures charmingly call it-has no safe harbours to run to in the event of trouble. The coast is, indeed, a fine example of the iniquity of the South African regime: most of it belongs to the Transkei, an artificial homeland for the blacks whom the whites don't wish to have living alongside them. And yet the coastline of the Transkei has no port: there is no way the Transkeians-who, the South Africans insist, are an independent people, with all the privileges of nationhood open to them-can fish, or trade, or develop useful harbours. There are South African ports to the north of the Transkei-Durban is one-and there are South African ports to the south-like East London and Port Elizabeth. But the land that has been given to the blacks is, from a maritime point of view, quite useless.

It was an uncomfortable journey, but a safe one. There is a point, off a small bluff known as Port St John's, where the hundred-metre contour comes to within five miles of the coast, and scores of s.h.i.+ps eager to keep out of the way of the dreaded waves were crammed into the pa.s.sage, making for an unpleasant degree of congestion. But once past that, the fair winds and a current that added its five knots to our four of sailing speed pushed us down to East London in two days. It was three weeks since my plane had touched down at Durban: we were just 600 miles down the coast, Tristan was more than 2,000 miles away, and Christmas was looming. I had brought Christmas post for the islanders: I began to wonder if I would be able to deliver it on time.

The winds were against us for four days in East London, though it was sunny enough, and warm, and the time went pleasantly as we idled in the suns.h.i.+ne, painting and varnis.h.i.+ng, repairing the headsail that had torn, lubricating the gaff rubbers with neatsfoot oil, reordering the charts, cleaning the autopilot and generally preparing the boat for the long run ahead. One Sat.u.r.day afternoon I saw a man sitting on the quayside with his small son, and begged a lift to a petrol station so that I could fill the carboy with fuel for our little Lister engine. He was an electrician, Martin Smyth; his son was Ralph, eight years old. The two came down to the docks every Sat.u.r.day afternoon 'just to look at the boats, and dream a little'.

I told him where we were going, and his eyes widened with delighted envy. He had wanted to visit Tristan all of his life-'leastwise, ever since that volcano that went off-when was that, '61 wasn't it? A most fascinating little place. I hope you'll write and tell us what it was like!' And he began to explain to Ralph, who wasn't bored at all, and shared in his father's very keen enthusiasm, precisely where Tristan was. He knew all about it: he knew the names of the other rocks in the group-Inaccessible, Gough, Stoltenhoff and Nightingale-and something of the names of the seven families who lived there. (He remembered Swain, Gla.s.s, Repetto, Lavarello and Rogers. The two he couldn't recall at first were Green and Hagan, but when I reminded him he then told me that Green was indeed a corruption of the Dutch surname Groen, and that the ancestral Tristan settler of that name was a crewman on the American schooner Emily Emily from Stonington, Connecticut, which was wrecked in 1836; he had been Pieter Willem Groen, and had come from the North Sea village of Katwijk aan See: when he decided to settle on Tristan and take British nationality he changed his name to Peter William Green. He became mildly notorious some fifty years later when a parson named Dodgson-Lewis Carroll's brother-came to the island and recommended evacuating the entire community for its own spiritual good. Green wrote a long letter to the Admiralty protesting at Dodgson's plan, and was allowed to stay on.) from Stonington, Connecticut, which was wrecked in 1836; he had been Pieter Willem Groen, and had come from the North Sea village of Katwijk aan See: when he decided to settle on Tristan and take British nationality he changed his name to Peter William Green. He became mildly notorious some fifty years later when a parson named Dodgson-Lewis Carroll's brother-came to the island and recommended evacuating the entire community for its own spiritual good. Green wrote a long letter to the Admiralty protesting at Dodgson's plan, and was allowed to stay on.) I spent the rest of the day with the Smyth family. A small daughter was collected from the local cinema, and the children spent hours clambering in the rigging while we sat in the c.o.c.kpit, drinking tea, and listening to their father's dreams. Ruth mentioned that once our voyage to Tristan was over she might be selling the little yacht, and she named a price: Martin fell to counting his a.s.sets, and wondering out loud if it might not be an admirable idea to leave his electrician's job and sell his house in East London, and take his wife and children around the world, and to all the little islands-like Tristan-about which he had read. He knew something of sailing: he had owned a small dinghy which he sailed at weekends on a lake in Rhodesia-he refused to use the more modern name-and he imagined he could handle this neat little schooner at sea. He called the children down from the mainmast, and the three went off happily, talking animatedly about what they might do.

We made the boat ready for sea shortly before sunset, and were about to cast off when there was the toot of a car horn, and the entire family-Mrs Smyth as well, on this occasion-arrived to wish us well. They had brought cakes and bottles of beer for us, and Mrs Smyth had made egg sandwiches. 'You wouldn't believe how excited they all were when they got home,' she said. 'Virginia came dancing in to the kitchen shouting, "Daddy's bought a boat! Daddy's bought a boat!" He knows as well as I do that we could never afford it. But it has made them all very happy. It's been a Sat.u.r.day afternoon like no other.'

They stayed for tea and then, as the sun began to slope down behind the lighthouse bluff, they said their goodbyes and waved us off from the quayside. We chugged slowly down the Buffalo River, past the rusting freighters and the derelict tugs-for East London is not the port it was, and handles only a few hundred tons of grain and ore each month-and past the yacht club and into the harbour mouth. There is a green light mounted on a tall steel pole on the end of the north mole, and as we rounded it and hurried to raise the sails to catch the evening breeze, so we spotted a familiar car under the flas.h.i.+ng lamp. Four tiny figures-two tinier than the others-were waving sadly, and I heard one voice blown thinly by the gathering breeze, 'Say...h.e.l.lo...to...Tristan!' Then the darkness enveloped them, and I thought I saw the pinp.r.i.c.ks of the car lights as it drove away to a quiet evening at home. I felt suddenly very forlorn, and I daresay they did, too. The children would be bouncing in the back of the car, talking at school next Monday about the boat that they were going to buy and the islands they were going to visit. But in the front seat there would be an uneasy silence, for the Smyths well knew the grim economics of it all, and how they would be bound to his job as an East London electrician for many years to come. But still, we said to one another as we rounded out into the rowdy ocean, they had had an afternoon of dreams.

We spent only three days in Port Elizabeth-a dirty dockyard, though with a collection of magnificent old steam engines which clanked and puffed their way between s.h.i.+ps and warehouses all hours of the day and night. A bracket on the autopilot had snapped within hours of leaving East London, and I had to find a mechanic to machine a new one. But we left at the end of the week. By Monday night we were rounding. Cape Agulhas, leaving the treacherous currents and the south-westerly winds behind, and entering the fresh south-easters that should blow us up to Cape Town. And we had left the Indian Ocean, too: the blue waters of the tropic isles were behind us, the grey and chilly waters of the South Atlantic ranged for thousands upon thousands of miles ahead. This was Tristan's Ocean, and according to the Admiralty Pilot Pilot the island was but 1,800 miles ahead. The worst part of the trip was abaft; South Africa was still abeam; our goal was a little way ahead. the island was but 1,800 miles ahead. The worst part of the trip was abaft; South Africa was still abeam; our goal was a little way ahead.

We put in to Cape Town the next day, revictualled, washed clothes, took advice from the local seamen on how best to approach the island. There were three s.h.i.+ps in Cape Town that went with some regularity to the Tristan group: the Tristania Tristania and the and the Atlantic Isle Atlantic Isle took supplies to the island, spent three months fis.h.i.+ng in local waters, and then took their fish, and such Tristanians as wanted to visit the Cape, back to port. The took supplies to the island, spent three months fis.h.i.+ng in local waters, and then took their fish, and such Tristanians as wanted to visit the Cape, back to port. The Agulhas Agulhas, a South African boat, travelled twice a year to relieve the meteorological station on Gough Island-a British possession, but unpopulated save for the South African met men-and then took freight on to Tristan if it were needed. The skippers of the various boats were stern in their warnings to us. Go to Tristan at your peril, they said with one voice: it is difficult to find, often shrouded in mist, has nowhere safe to anchor, is prey to sudden and ferocious changes of weather, and has just one landing beach from which the islanders are only able to set out on sixty days each year. A tiny harbour had been built in the mid-Sixties-named Calshot Harbour, in memory of the military camp at Calshot in Hamps.h.i.+re that housed the islanders for their year's exile after the volcanic eruption-but it was too shallow for a boat like ours. We drew about six feet: the harbour was perhaps four feet deep, and there was a bar to cross which shallowed to perhaps half of that.

It sounded an uninviting prospect. There was a band of kelp weed around the island, and it was strong enough to tie a small boat to, the skippers agreed. No good for big boats, which might get their propellers caught in it, but strong enough for us to lash a hawser to, so long as we dropped an anchor as well to limit our circular movement. But one warning dominated all the others: if the wind began to blow from the north-west-and gales from that quarter would arrive with precious little warning and at devastating speed-then move the boat into the island's lee. No matter how much kelp and how many anchor chains might try to bind us to the spot we had chosen as our mooring-a Tristan nor'wester would tear us away from it and hurl us on to the rocks. We were in a small office when the skippers told us this: a picture was brought out from one of the desks-a picture of a wall of sheer and jagged black cliffs, streaming with falling water, and at their base, patterned with vast lumps of broken stone, a hundred feet of wildly raging foam, blown into sheets by the downdraughts and whipped into a maelstrom by the gales. 'That,' the men said in an uncomfortably smug harmony, 'is what you'll hit if you forget.'

Although Tristan da Cunha is 1,800 nautical miles west by south of Cape Town, thanks to the meteorology of the South Atlantic Ocean and the patterns of currents, a sailing vessel cannot point its prow to a heading of two-sixty degrees and expect to fetch up at Edinburgh-of-the-Seven-Seas (Tristan's 'capital', named after the first Duke in 1867, visited again by the second ninety years later) after fifteen days. Would that matters were so simple. In the centre of the ocean-and the centre of the North Atlantic is similarly endowed-is an enormous, and very stable area of high pressure. No wind blows there-the charts indicate that totally calm weather prevails for at least one day in ten in December, and that light, variable and navigationally useless winds puff fitfully and occasionally. Of all the hours spent in a yacht, those spent becalmed are the most likely to induce madness. The boat lurches randomly, going nowhere; the sails bang and crump as they catch a molecule of breeze, and the booms swing idly and lethally with the swell. You come to loathe sails and all they stand for: you want the luxury of an engine (but hardly dare use yours for fear of wasting fuel) to take you to a strong and steady breeze; the fish dip cheekily up through the hot mirror of the still sea, as if to remind you that they are fine, and cool, and can propel themselves at will. To sail straight from the Cape to Tristan would be to risk a week-maybe a month-stuck in such unpredictable regions of the sea. We were already running late, and wanted none of that.

So we planned a longer, though more traditional route, which took us in a great loop, following the winds that blow anticlockwise round the high. For the first 300 miles we would follow the South African and Namibian coasts, driven north-westwards by the cold current that sweeps up from the Cape (and is the oceanic opposite of the terrible Agulhas current on the other coast), and by the prevailing December winds, from the south-east. We would then head up towards St Helena, where the winds begin to turn to easterlies, around the top of the high. We would pa.s.s a hundred miles south of St Helena-Imperial remnant herself, and one I would visit later on-heading westwards, until, two thousand miles shy of the Brazilian coast the winds would begin to turn into the northerly quadrant, and the current would too, and we would sweep down in their train.

The winds would become steadily stronger, with more of a north-westerly heading, driving us straight towards our goal. The seas would get grander, the waters colder, the skies greyer. After 4,000 miles-more than double the length of the direct route, and nearly twice the distance of the great circle route taken by motor s.h.i.+ps making the pa.s.sage-we should be able to see Tristan beyond the bowsprit. If, that is, our boat held out: she was a st.u.r.dy little steel schooner, 'a good gunwales-under performer' they said of her-she liked strong weather, and ploughing through heavy waters with the seas las.h.i.+ng over the guardrails, and with the mainmast boom dipping into the ocean. But she had her limitations. She was steel, and uninsulated, and would be very cold. Her mainsail and foresail were canvas, not too well-st.i.tched in places. There was a small but annoying leak in the stern gland, where the propeller shaft left the hull for the water outside-the gland was lubricated by water, which dripped into the bilges in tiny amounts; here, though, the drip occasionally became a steady stream, and we had to pump the bilges hourly, or else the boat became heavy and more sluggish than usual. The autopilot, too, was giving problems: it was a British-made device, used by weekend sailors in the easy waters of the Channel; out in the big ocean, where the rudder took continual pounding, and the winds blew strongly and unpredictably, the steel arm-we knew the device as 'Betty', and so worried ourselves over the fate of 'Betty's arm'-did strange things, and had given up completely on a journey through another ocean some months before. We were concerned, in other words, that we might not make it to Tristan, and wondered how wise we were to press on any further. My inclination-one more motivated by stubbornness than good sense, I came to think-was to carry on; we had already been five weeks in the getting there. To abandon the venture at this stage would sadden me.

So, in the pleasant fastness of the Royal Cape Yacht Club's little harbour, we waited for the wind to swing to the south-east. Table Mountain gives the first clue: when the wind is from the right quarter a low white cloud, one which almost seems to stick to the flat mountaintop, appears. Locals call it 'the Table Cloth', and as the wind begins to blow it starts to fall off the mountain in a wide sheet of whiteness, descending towards the upper suburbs of the Town. It was early on a Monday morning when the cry went up: 'Table Cloth's coming off!'-and we stowed our gear, untied the springs, cast off and said our farewells to Port Radio. 'Whither bound?' they asked. 'Tristan da Cunha,' we replied, c.o.c.kily-knowing full well that most yachts leaving the Cape in December aim for St Helena, Brazil and the Caribbean, and only the boldest and the bravest made for the wild waters and dreaded anchorage of Tristan. We felt a stirring of pride as the radio operator wished us well, a safe voyage, and urged us to take good care. Our expedition, we knew, was more valorous than most that left this port.

By nightfall, our pride had turned to ashes. We were back in port, the trip abandoned, the five weeks of sailing all wasted. There had been many problems. The autopilot had, indeed, begun to behave erratically, and we balked at the prospect of steering by hand over 4,000 miles of ocean. Keeping watch, turn and turn about, was tiring enough: to have to handle the tiller at night and through heavy seas would be utterly exhausting. The waters off the Cape were miserably cold, and we were chilled to the bone: the prospect of many more days and weeks spent s.h.i.+vering, above decks and below, suddenly seemed more miserable than it had from the warm bar of the Cape Yacht Club. The stern gland leak had been more serious than we feared, and the bilge was seriously awash after only a few hours' sailing. And it was brutally rough out there: the south-easterly had piled the waters up into lumpy, icy swells, and we slammed against them, making the slowest of progress.

It was the timetable that finally decided it. It was early December: if I was going to be home for Christmas I would have only twenty days to do the crossing, and get back. At the rate we were going on the first day out there was no possibility we would make Tristan by the New Year, nor be back before the end of January. And so, with more sorrow than reluctance, I swung the boat's head round and steered to where the coastline of Table Bay-the Lion's Head, the Lion's Rump, Table Mountain and the Twelve Apostles-had just vanished below the horizon. Robben Island light soon came on, and guided us in: by midnight we were pa.s.sing the outer markers, and reported, shamefacedly, to Port Radio. 'Difficult trip, that,' commented one of the wireless operators as he tore up our exit card. 'Thought you were being a bit optimistic.'

I was back in a dank and grey London a week later, certain now that Tristan was beyond my grasp. I felt wretched about it. True, we had made a vague promise that we would meet in South Africa later in the summer and try again. But it seemed more navigationally prudent to try to attack the island from the South American coast-from where you get a straight run, without having to bother about the high. But I had no friends with yachts in Montevideo or Rio, and spent the Christmas holidays morosely coming to terms with the fact that Tristan, for the next few years at least, was to remain a dream. I had wanted to go there since long before the 1961 eruption: the new Imperial Progress was but an excuse to fulfil a long-held ambition. I was cast into the deepest gloom.

But January brought an unexpected letter. Andrew Bell, who ran one of Britain's most enterprising little s.h.i.+pping lines, Curnow s.h.i.+pping, based in deepest Cornwall, wondered if I knew that his flags.h.i.+p was making a first-ever journey to Tristan da Cunha, leaving from Bristol in early March? He knew I had been trying to get there: would I by any chance care to go? I was on the telephone within seconds: my cabin was booked, my leave extended. This time I really ought to make it: the only warning came from an item I read in the paper a week later. The Royal Mail s.h.i.+p St Helena St Helena had caught fire off the coast of Senegal. She had drifted, powerless and without steering, for four blisteringly hot days before a German salvage tug had towed her into Dakar. The pa.s.sengers, who had spent some time in the lifeboats, were flown home, and the had caught fire off the coast of Senegal. She had drifted, powerless and without steering, for four blisteringly hot days before a German salvage tug had towed her into Dakar. The pa.s.sengers, who had spent some time in the lifeboats, were flown home, and the St Helena St Helena limped down to Cape Town for repairs. The RMS limped down to Cape Town for repairs. The RMS St Helena St Helena, of course, was Curnow's flags.h.i.+p: she was the vessel due to take me to Tristan da Cunha in eight weeks' time.

In the event she picked up her schedule quickly enough-by dint of cancelling one complete voyage, to the inconvenience of the population of the colony of St Helena, for whom she is the single lifeline to the outside world-and I arranged to meet her on her southbound voyage Number Thirty-Eight at the port of Santa Cruz de la Tenerife, in the Canary Islands. She swept in past the moles just after dusk one mild March Thursday: at four the following morning, after loading some ten tonnes of a.s.sorted cargoes and five pa.s.sengers, she slipped her moorings and rumbled out into the ocean, and the southern seas. I was in the company, I soon found out, of a strange a.s.sortment of travellers.

There was the lawyer from Akron, Ohio, named Parke Thompson who was listed in the American edition of the Guinness Book of Records Guinness Book of Records as 'the World's Most Traveled Man', and who was to break into a hysterical fury when told it would not be possible for him to set foot upon Ascension Island, even for the 'single split second' he considered sufficient for his next record attempt. There was David Machin, England's greatest expert in the feeding of pigs, and who had developed a diet of mashed fish heads and minced flax leaves, upon which the average porker apparently feasted with Caligulan abandon. There was a very dour man who ran the Rapid Results College, and turned out to be dour because some crane driver had seen fit to drop the Rapid Results College car into the depths of Number Four hold, and it was sitting down there all the while, a mute reminder that the first job he had to undertake when the boat arrived at the Cape was to spend hours waiting on the services of a panelbeater, when he could have been driving to the vineyards of Stellenbosch. as 'the World's Most Traveled Man', and who was to break into a hysterical fury when told it would not be possible for him to set foot upon Ascension Island, even for the 'single split second' he considered sufficient for his next record attempt. There was David Machin, England's greatest expert in the feeding of pigs, and who had developed a diet of mashed fish heads and minced flax leaves, upon which the average porker apparently feasted with Caligulan abandon. There was a very dour man who ran the Rapid Results College, and turned out to be dour because some crane driver had seen fit to drop the Rapid Results College car into the depths of Number Four hold, and it was sitting down there all the while, a mute reminder that the first job he had to undertake when the boat arrived at the Cape was to spend hours waiting on the services of a panelbeater, when he could have been driving to the vineyards of Stellenbosch.

There were also six Cheviot rams-immense beasts hauled down from Coquetdale to inject some life into the forlorn ewes of Tristan. They sat in cages on deck, nibbled grumpily at pieces of lettuce, and sweated in fleeces that must have been a foot thick until a shepherd from an island we pa.s.sed came out and sheared them. One of them managed to escape from its pen and leaped around the deck, cornering the captain near the anchor winches and charging him, until the bosun got near enough with a hawser and looped it around its leg. For the rest of the voyage they were more peaceable, glumly contemplating the wearying duties of their calling on the island far ahead.

Our cruising speed was fourteen knots. Three hundred miles of white foam unrolled beneath our stern each day, and on all sides the lonely sea stretched far away. Occasionally we glimpsed another s.h.i.+p-once it was a British tramper, and one night a squadron of six vessels, all moving very fast along the same course and keeping strict radio silence. But generally there was nothing to see but the bulging swell in the daytime, the empty green eye of the radar screens by night.

The chief officer taught me how to navigate by the stars-I already knew how to use the sun, but the stars, he promised me, were much more accurate, and considerably more satisfying. Soon I could repeat the mystic astral names by rote-Procyon and Regulus, Achernar and Betelgeuse, Sirius and Rigel and Zubenelgenubi: within a week I could find them all; and tried gamely to plot a position on the sheet which bore an approximation to what the satellite navigator told us was precisely correct. But my seven position lines from my seven stars invariably formed themselves into some weird kind of parallelogram on the chart, with our good Royal Mail s.h.i.+p somewhere inside the boundary, give or take five miles or so. It was only after a great deal of practice that the lines began to form themselves into the famous 'c.o.c.ked hat' of more competent navigation students. But I was never able to match my tutor, whose lines would all, as though by magic or by cheating, converge on a single spot, and he would write our lon