Outposts_ Journeys To The Surviving Relics Of The British Empire Part 8

But the particular trial, so far as the island Governors are concerned, is that-the airport scandal aside-not one Britain in 10,000 appears ever to have heard of the colony of the Turks and Caicos Islands. It is the third largest inhabited colonial possession after the Falklands and the curious scattering of reefs south of Ceylon known as British Indian Ocean Territory (the British Antarctic is of course far larger than all the others put together, and with the British Isles thrown in for good measure, but neither has nor has had a permanent native population); it is one of the earliest discoveries in the New World, and indeed lays claim to having been found by Columbus himself, it is claimed, on his first voyage. Depending on which local account is the less incredible, he landed first on the island of East Caicos, or on the beach beside the present British Governor's mansion on Grand Turk.

Most modern scholars.h.i.+p suggests in fact that Columbus made his landfall either on Cat Island or, most probably, on Watling Island, both of which are in the Bahamas chain, a hundred miles to the north-west of Grand Turk. But one of his s.h.i.+ps, the Pinta Pinta, is supposed to have foundered on a Caiconian reef, and, along with hundreds of other Spanish galleons that also stranded nearby, is regularly explored by treasure-hunters. Conventional belief holds that it was Juan Ponce de Leon, searching for the fountain of youth-which turned up on Bimini-who formally discovered the islands in 1512, nearly a year before he found Florida.

The Turks-named after a local fez-like red cactus, the Turk's head-and the Caicos, or 'Cays', form, with their forty-two islands and skerries, two distinct archipelagos, separated from each other, and from their neighbours (the Bahamas to the west, Hispaniola to the south) by immensely deep channels. To see the drop-off into these much-used s.h.i.+pping lanes is impressive enough from the air, with the water's colour changing abruptly from the palest of greens to a vivid dark blue. But to swim out over the reef edge is a decidedly more dramatic, and a terrifying venture: I tried it one calm afternoon, lying flat on the surface with my face, suitably masked and snorkelled, below water.

The bottom was perhaps ten feet below, with pink and yellow corals and the waving fronds of tropical water plants. Small fishes glittered and glinted in the dappled sunlight. I paddled slowly onwards, out to the open sea, keeping my eyes fixed on the magical display below. The reef was still there, close enough to touch, glistening, gleaming-until suddenly, horrifyingly, it ended. It fell away, downward and vertical, into a bottomless black chasm. In an instant there was no coral, no fish, no light-just the edge, the beginning of the deep ocean. The charts said it was two miles deep here, and I shuddered with vertigo, and swam hurriedly back to the reef edge and to the lagoon beyond.

There had been Arawak Indians on the Caicos during the ninth and tenth centuries, and archaeologists from Pennsylvania regularly find potsherds and fishhooks buried in the limestone gravel. But the Arawaks vanished, inexplicably, and it was not until 1678, when sailors from Bermuda arrived in their fast cedarwood sloops, that the basal stock of today's 7,000 islanders was laid. The Bermudians discovered that the islands, perpetually warm, almost wholly flat, and pierced by small lakes and lagoons that had a tendency to dry in the heat, could produce one commodity of which they had little and which, moreover, they could sell: salt. An annual routine was established: Bermudians from St George's would arrive in March, when the daytime temperatures on Grand Turk, Salt Cay and South Caicos-the only islands where they constructed salinas-were creeping up into the high eighties, and through the summer they would collect the white crystal ma.s.ses and pack them in boxes. By November, at the end of the hurricane season, they would be on their way back, calling in at Charleston, or New York, or Boston, or Halifax, to sell the boxes of a salt that was said to be particularly suitable for packing beef and pork, its princ.i.p.al use at the time.

The salt industry was to dominate the Turks economy for three centuries. The islanders called it 'white gold', and many fortunes were made-negro slaves from West Africa raking in the crystals, their white Bermudian owners raking in the money. Island timekeeping was ordered by the whistle on the old Frith and Murphy steam-powered salt grinder, which blew at ten each morning and five each night, and could be heard, on a windless day, across the sound that separated Turks from Caicos, twenty miles away.

There were salt piles on the old colonial flag, though one can be forgiven for thinking that one of the piles looks like an igloo. The London flagmaker, as ignorant of the islands then as most Londoners are today, thought the sketches-two white dome-shaped objects in front of a three-masted merchantman-referred to some far-off British possession in the Arctic-Frobisher Bay, perhaps, or Point Barrow. So, without asking anyone, he obligingly touched up the sketch by adding a door to one of the salt piles so that any Eskimo could go in and out at will; the device was duly st.i.tched together and remained the colonial symbol for a century, until someone noticed, rubbed out the door and put two black salt rakers beside the s.h.i.+p to leave no room for doubt.

Salt raking was a risky business in the eighteenth century. The Bermudians were chased away by angry Spaniards from time to time, and in 1764 kidnapped by the French Navy, who then established a small settlement of their own. They told the rival powers that they had done so to stamp out piracy, and clamp down on the growing local habit of building false lighthouses, which caused s.h.i.+pwrecks which could then be plundered. The British would have none of it. The Bermudians were, after all, their own kith and kin, and under the principle of civis Roma.n.u.s sum civis Roma.n.u.s sum, whereby any Briton in trouble abroad, particularly at the hands of the dastardly French, was fully ent.i.tled to Crown protection. In any case by this time the British Empire itself was already firmly established in the West Indies (of which the Turks are not, technically, a part: they, like Bermuda and the Bahamas, think of themselves as Western Atlantic islands). London was moved to make a tough response, and for what was to be cla.s.sically Imperial reasoning.

Although the nine square miles of Grand Turk was made merely of mud, limestone and salt and thus of no great economic consequence to Britain, the island and its sister Cays did in theory have one vital function: they commanded the sealanes from the ocean to Cuba, and to Hispaniola, and Jamaica-and control of sealanes was central to the growing Imperial philosophy. George Grenville, the Foreign Minister, complained to the French in terms of unalloyed arrogance: 'The islands must and shall be restored. I shall wait for nine days for your answer. If I do not receive it, the fleet now lying at Spithead shall sail directly to a.s.sert the rightful claims of Britain.' The Falklands War thus had its antecedents; in this case, though, after a ludicrous suggestion from the French that the island be governed in a three-way condominium, with Spain, France and England each taking three square miles and building proper lighthouses, Paris capitulated, and Britain took over. A British official was sent out from the Bahamas 'to reside there and by his residence on the spot to insure the right of the islands to His Majesty'.

One might have expected the Bermudians to be well pleased. In fact they were furious. The appointment of Andrew Symmer as representative of the King's Governor at Na.s.sau meant that the islands were now, in effect, dependencies of the Bahamas, and no longer belonged to Bermuda. A century later they became official dependencies of Jamaica, and then when Jamaica became independent switched back to a.s.sociation with the Bahamas once more. It was not until 1973, once Na.s.sau took independence, that the islands became a fully-fledged Crown colony on their own; Bermuda hasn't had any official connection with the islands since 1764.

Up to this point the Caicos Islands had remained uninhabited, but for turtles and, down on South Caicos, the salt rakers who built a settlement called c.o.c.kburn Harbour. But the American War of Independence changed that, very suddenly. Flotillas of small boats brought hundreds of Loyalists out from the coast of Georgia: most settled in the Bahamas, but a number, with their slaves, made it out to Providenciales, and to North and Middle Caicos, and farmed cotton; but weevils, drought and, in 1811, a devastating hurricane that destroyed all the plantations, forced them to abandon the islands: only the negroes were left to get on with it, sinking rapidly into what one writer noted was 'a state little short of savagery'. The Caicos Islands remained the poor relation of the group, although the brief prosperity the salt rakers of the Turks enjoyed (at one stage during the American Wars salt was making forty-eight dollars a ton) fell back during the nineteenth century, and the colony subsided gently, an impoverished backwater, overlooked by London, ignored and forgotten.

The islanders, nearly all descendants of the slaves, have tried gamely ever since to make a living. They gathered sponges from the Caicos reefs, helped by divers from Kalymnos, one of the Greek Dodecanesian Islands, who were experts in sponge diving off the coast of Libya. The conch-various varieties, such as the Florida horse conch, the queen conch and the clam eating lightning conch-was harvested, and still is, by divers who can stay under water for two minutes on one breath. Lobsters and crabs, too, provided an income; and today there is considerable optimism that the spider crab, fed on plates of algae, will flourish, and provide crabmeat for the gigantic American market.

The Smithsonian Inst.i.tution from Was.h.i.+ngton, using a drug-smuggling boat that was captured by the local police, have been carrying out experiments with different kinds of crabs; the boat is crewed by a posse of girls from the Peace Corps, who seem to prefer the idea of diving off Grand Turk to some of the tougher tasks the Corps hands out.

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 ma.s.sive, fully mechanised salt plant, mechanically raked, with a deep-water port for the s.h.i.+ps 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 b.u.mped down at the airstrip at the colony's capital c.o.c.kburn 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.

c.o.c.kburn 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 gla.s.s, sleeping dogs, and a clutch of bored-looking donkeys standing in the sun. The sea wall was cracked, and water was splas.h.i.+ng 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 offsh.o.r.e 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-s.h.i.+pment points for narcotics. Billions of dollars' worth pa.s.s through each year-cocaine from Bogota to Miami, heroin from Paris (via Haiti) to New York, marijuana from Caracas to Atlanta (via Na.s.sau). 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 offsh.o.r.e 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 compa.s.sionate 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 scholars.h.i.+p 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 advertis.e.m.e.nts put out by the tourist board. 'As close to paradise as this world offers,' comes the reply, meaning Provo, presumably, rather than c.o.c.kburn 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 n.o.bby 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 ap.r.o.n; 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 a.s.sam. 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 part of a long and very rugged mountain chain, and on which there is no s.p.a.ce 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 coa.r.s.ely crystalline pegmat.i.te 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 s.n.a.t.c.hed 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 ent.i.ty 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 cl.u.s.tered 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 owners.h.i.+p 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-pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sed 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' t.i.tle, 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 ret.i.tling 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 pa.s.sed 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 princ.i.p.al home was on Grand Cayman, where she sold dresses to pa.s.sengers on the pa.s.sing 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 negligee, a pair of stockings, a tee-s.h.i.+rt lay at the foot of the bed. Someone had been reading Elspeth Huxley's The Flame Trees of Thika The Flame Trees of Thika.

We read their letters, examined their bills, looked at the photo alb.u.ms. They spoke of 's.h.i.+pments' 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 has.h.i.+sh 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 pa.s.sengers 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 c.o.c.kburn 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 fis.h.i.+ng-boat crews, who used them as fenders, were sprawled on the waste land, gra.s.s 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 gra.s.s, 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 sc.u.mmy water, in a foam of weed and peelings and a litter of styrofoam fragments. Three ancient men sat in the twilight, fis.h.i.+ng 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 s.h.i.+fted, 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I, John Lettsom, Blisters, bleeds and sweats 'em, If after that they choose to die I, John, Lettsom.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anguilla is Britain's newest inhabited colony-new in the sense that, while it has been British territory, and in the cadet branch of far grander West Indian possessions for many years, it has only lately been a colony in its own right. (The very last piece of real estate that was subsumed into the Empire was actually the island of Rockall, out in mid-Atlantic, in 1955. London felt it vital to annexe the lonely chunk of guano-crusted rock because, just perhaps, it might have oil nearby; so it ordered out the Royal Navy, and matelots clambered up the slippery cliffs and fixed a bra.s.s plate to its granite summit. An expedition went there a few years later, and found the plate had been unscrewed, and taken away. Britain still claims Rockall, though, bra.s.s plate or not.) Anguilla-or 'Malliouhana' as the Caribs named it-was formally made into a Crown colony and given a const.i.tution, and a fully-functioning governor, in December 1982: she thus became the last colony 399 years after Britain took her first, Newfoundland. The reason for the establishment of a new colony-bucking the trend of twentieth-century decolonisation in no uncertain manner-has much to do with Operation Sheepskin, and the events that led up to it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Anguillian leader, Ronald Webster, and a remarkably colourful and patriarchal figure named Jeremiah Gumbs pleaded their case to the world. Mr Gumbs appealed before the General a.s.sembly of the United Nations. Over in St Kitts Mr Bradshaw, who drove around in a vintage Rolls-Royce, appealed to the British to whip the Anguillians into line, and to halt the unseemly rebellion.

A parade of British officials came and went-one of them being brusquely turfed out because the Anguillians thought he was rude. He felt he was in danger of being lynched, so he gave an emergency message to the local Barclays Bank manager, who smuggled it through the islanders' lines in his shoe: the note was addressed to SNOWI-the Senior Naval Officer, West Indies, and asked for help.

In an act which half the world thought amusing, and which to the other half indicated that Britain was still an Imperial bully-boy, London decided to send in the troops. The second battalion of the Paras was alerted and sent to a holding base at Devizes. Forty policemen, members of the Metropolitan Force's Special Patrol Group, were kitted out in tropical uniforms (though not all of them; their leader was reckoned too fat for any of the cotton drills to fit) and joined them.

Fog delayed the group at their airfield in Oxfords.h.i.+re, and Fleet Street found out all about Operation Sheepskin. Reporters met the plane in Antigua-a foolish place to land, since the Antiguans liked what the Anguillians were doing; they expressed their irritation by tossing out their Prime Minister in the following year's election, saying he had 'connived' with the British.

The troops and the policemen were put on the Minerva Minerva and the and the Rothesay Rothesay, and left for the high seas. The reporters chose to invade at greater speed and in greater comfort: they flew across to Anguilla and waited. At 5.19 a.m. on the 19th March the first of the Red Devils landed. A series of blinding flashes greeted them as they reached the beach, and, as per their training, they threw themselves to the ground. They needn't have worried. Fleet Street was merely photographing the landing, for posterity.

Ronald Webster had no idea there would be a landing by British troops. He was in the bath when they arrived, and first got to learn of the invasion from a reporter, who asked him what he thought of it. Others were more prescient. An American lady confessed, with characteristic candour, that she had 'spent the entire night in my bra.s.siere to be ready for the invasion. I never did that before in my life.'

If there were an armed rebellion brewing in a remote British possession, they never found the arms. Four old Lee-Enfield rifles, not very well oiled, and securely locked up, seemed to represent the total armoury. (It was later suggested that the rebel leaders had buried the guns in the mountains of Saint Martin, but they have never been found.) A few people were arrested and taken off to the wars.h.i.+ps for a little talk. Some reporters said a shot had been fired at a plane they had chartered, but it was probably the perfervid imaginations of Fleet Street at work. In fact the little war must have been the most peaceful ever prosecuted, anywhere; and it made Britain look very foolish indeed. 'The Bay of Piglets!' jeered one American headline. 'The Lion that Meowed!'

The Imperial power was made to look even more ham-handed a few years later, when Anguilla and her 'rebel' leaders.h.i.+p were formally offered every last thing they had wanted. They were not forced to join up with St Kitts and Nevis. Kitt.i.tian policemen, and Englishmen who wanted Kitt.i.tian policemen, were not foisted upon the islanders. The island was given back its own parliament-larger than the Vestry, and with greater powers. And the British Government happily prised the island away from Mr Bradshaw's clutches by making it a Crown colony (although, with the word 'colony' no longer thought proper, the actual technical term used was British dependent territory). The senior Briton dispatched to run the place was no longer to be called a medical officer, nor a resident, nor a senior British official, nor an administrator, nor a magistrate, nor a commissioner: from 1st April 1982, thirteen years and two weeks since the arrival of the two tiny wars.h.i.+ps off Crocus Bay, Anguilla could relax under the benign rule of Her Majesty's representative, His Excellency the Governor, complete with white uniform, sword and a splendid hat, gold braid and feathers, all entwined. Nothing so grand had ever been seen.

'Coffins for Sale-No Credit.' The sign was the first I noticed as my car b.u.mped its way slowly up from the quayside, and to The Valley. It was, indeed, another shabby island, its capital another shabby town. Not forlorn, though, in the way that c.o.c.kburn Town had been forlorn; this looked like a place that had been overlooked for a long while, but was just being discovered, and was on the edge of better times.

'Bank of Nova Scotia' was the second sign I saw, and notices for banks and insurance companies turned out to be more numerous than any others. Small armies of workers were sawing and hammering away at rows of shops, twenty shops to a row, two rows to a complex. But on looking more closely the shops turned out to be little banks-some of them very odd banks, and from countries a very long way from Anguilla. But the building of them evidently gave the Anguillians work, and the Chief Minister-the same Ronald Webster who was sitting in his bath when the Red Devils burst in-promised me that many more would be invited over the coming years. (Mr Webster was defeated in an election soon afterwards, but the policy of turning Anguilla into a tax-haven was still being pursued with great energy.) Hotels, too, were springing up. Anguilla's coastline-seventy miles of it, almost untouched-had just been discovered by American entrepreneurs (and by a Sicilian, who had been flung out of Saint Martin and who was hoping to salt away his millions in a beach under the protection of the British Crown; he was asked to go elsewhere) and by a growing number of wealthy tourists. I fell in with a curious crowd one afternoon: he was a Greek-American, from Boston, and he said he was one of the leading potato brokers on the East Coast. He would keep me in close touch with happenings in the world of American potatoes for months thereafter, going so far as to send me a laudatory book about the Idaho variety, called Aristocrat in Burlap Aristocrat in Burlap. We sat on a pure white beach, under an umbrella, and spent a good hour watching a pelican as it flew lazily over the endless blue rollers. It was a wonderful, faintly terrifying sight as the bird did its trick. It would be flying along, quite calmly, rising and falling in the thermals. Suddenly without warning, it would crumple up, all bones and wings and disordered brown feathers, just as if it had been shot. Down, down it fell, into the sea. At first we thought it had died, but after ten seconds or so it would emerge from the sea with a splash and a shower of spray, like a watery Phoenix, and would fly off in happy triumph, with a blue-and-gold fish clamped in its beak. It repeated its act time and time again, and each time the Greek potato king would laugh till the tears came; and we looked further along the beach and other pelicans-Eastern Browns, the book said-were doing the same thing, raining down into the sea and flying off with their flapping harvest of fish. We wondered who was enjoying the more perfect idyll-we two, or the birds.

I had a friend on the island, a man who had been the Attorney-General on St Helena and who had married a Saint of exquisite and serene beauty, and had then decided to leave and look for work on another colonial possession. They had given him the job of 'A-G' on Anguilla, and he was having a rare old time-no murders on the island perhaps (the only prisoner in The Valley had been sent there for using bad language) but an exquisite dilemma over a drugs case in which he was deeply involved.

Off the eastern tip of Anguilla lies Scrub Island-a couple of miles long, with two low hills, a tiny lake and a rough gra.s.s airfield. The latter had no obvious legitimate use, since no one lives on Scrub Island, and hardly anyone goes there (the Baedeker Baedeker lamely reports Scrub Island as having 'much fissured coral rocks' and little else). But the airfield did have an important use for the cla.s.sic non-legitimate business that has become a mainstay of Caribbean commerce-the trans-s.h.i.+pment of cocaine. A plane would fly out from Florida, empty; another would fly in from Bogota, full; there would be a hurried mid-night transfer, whereupon the two aircraft would return to their respective lairs, and plan to meet again later. Scrub Island, Anguilla, became, in the early 1980s, one of the great unsung drug markets of the Western world. lamely reports Scrub Island as having 'much fissured coral rocks' and little else). But the airfield did have an important use for the cla.s.sic non-legitimate business that has become a mainstay of Caribbean commerce-the trans-s.h.i.+pment of cocaine. A plane would fly out from Florida, empty; another would fly in from Bogota, full; there would be a hurried mid-night transfer, whereupon the two aircraft would return to their respective lairs, and plan to meet again later. Scrub Island, Anguilla, became, in the early 1980s, one of the great unsung drug markets of the Western world.

Until one evening in November 1983. The American drug enforcement agencies got wind of a big transfer plan, and called Anguilla, and spoke to my friend who had just arrived from Jamestown. He alerted the Royal Anguilla Constabulary, advised them to draw guns from the armoury, sailed them out to Scrub Island and hid them behind the clumps of loblolly pine and seagrape that grew beside the airstrip.

A man arrived in a launch, and set about lighting small fires to mark the strip. Then the aircraft arrived, as expected-one from the west, one from the south. Two men climbed from the Colombian craft, one from the American machine, everyone shook hands, and the policemen could see bags being humped from one hold to another. They drew their service revolvers, switched on their arclights-and made the most spectacular arrest Anguilla had ever seen. Four big-time drug smugglers, and a haul of a quarter of a tonne of cocaine-the largest and most valuable capture ever made in the Caribbean. It was worth one thousand million dollars.

The sheer scale of the haul posed one immediate problem. The Governor, a pleasant and very quiet Scotsman who had been brought to Anguilla from a lowly post in the British Emba.s.sy in Venezuela, was deeply alarmed. What, he wondered, if the Mafia tried to get it back? A billion dollars' worth of drugs would make it worth some gangsters' while to take almost any steps imaginable. They might land in force, at night, armed with heavy weapons. He might be captured, the Chief Minister might be a.s.sa.s.sinated, the colony might revert to the suzerainty of some Lower East Side capo capo. It was too horrible to contemplate. He wondered whether to ask for a frigate to stand off the coast, but then decided the evidence would be much safer under the care of the Americans, and had it all s.h.i.+pped off to Florida, and breathed a sigh of great relief when it had gone.

The four prisoners, on the other hand, represented a very considerable windfall. All were released, on half a million dollars' bail. They were told to come back for trial three months later, and when I met my friend he was praying hard that they would decide to skip bail-he would take great pleasure in leading their prosecution, of course, but he and the colony would very much like the money as forfeit. And in any case-what if they were found guilty? Where could they be kept? What if their Mafia chums tried to free them? And the drugs would have to be brought back as evidence, too.