Outposts_ Journeys To The Surviving Relics Of The British Empire Part 9

In the event they never did show up. The Government of Anguilla made a clear profit of half a million United States dollars, and was able to tell the British Government, which wearily and reluctantly hands out grants to poor islands like Anguilla each year, that on this occasion at least it would need less of a grant than normal. It might even be able to afford a new school, or an extension for the hospital, out of the proceeds. It is, my friend remarked, an ill wind...

In one cla.s.sically Imperial sense, Anguilla is a colony of some importance. Because of where she is, the colony controls-or, put another way, Britain controls-a vital sea lane. And this has come about because of a clever piece of sleight-of-hand which Whitehall played when St Kitts became independent, and Anguilla refused.

Thirty-five miles north-west of Anguilla is a tiny islet, two miles long, shaped like a Mexican hat, and called Sombrero Rock. It has a large deposit of phosphate, and because of that has been visited by quarrymen from time to time, and a few tonnes have occasionally been s.h.i.+pped away. The true importance of Sombrero is that it lies directly athwart one of the busiest deep channels between the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea, and it has a lighthouse. The Admiralty bible, Ocean Pa.s.sages for the World Ocean Pa.s.sages for the World, lists Sombrero among the world's great reference points (and gives specific routes from Sombrero to, among others, Bishop Rock, the Cabot Strait, Lisbon, Ponta Delgada and the Strait of Gibraltar).

The light on Sombrero-157 feet high, visible from twenty-two miles, and exhibiting a white flash every five seconds through the night-has always been British. It used to be run by the Imperial Lighthouse Service; it was one of the final three in use when the Service was abolished (the others were Cape Pembroke on East Falkland, and Dondra Head in Ceylon).

But Sombrero belonged to the presidency of St Kitts-Nevis-Anguilla, and, so logic dictated, should have moved to the newly independent St Kitts in 1967, since it had no population, other than a British lighthouse keeper. But-and here was the cunning move-London decided that Sombrero should remain British, and remain attached to Anguilla. For this one reason Britain was well pleased with the Anguillian rebellion-it enabled her to keep control of a lighthouse, and a sea lane, that would otherwise have fallen under the less predictable rule of a newly independent state.

The Board of Trade took over the light, turned it into an automatic station, and brought the keeper home. And then in 1984 Trinity House, which looks after all British home waters' lights, as well as Europa Point off the southern tip of Gibraltar, a.s.sumed control over Sombrero, too. Thanks to the existence of Anguilla and her minuscule limestone possession to the northwest it was still true, technically, and on a very small scale, that Britannia ruled the waves, or at least a small portion of them. No s.h.i.+p could pa.s.s conveniently between Europe's great ports and the Panama Ca.n.a.l without coming under the unseeing scrutiny of a lighthouse that belonged, firmly and for the foreseeable future, to Britain.

When you arrive in Montserrat they stamp your pa.s.sport with a shamrock. The signs say, 'Welcome to the Emerald Isle', and the coat of arms has a blonde lady holding a cross in one hand, and in the other a harp. There is a volcano called Galway's, a farm called O'Garra's, a town called St Patrick's and a mountain called Cork Hill. You can be forgiven for thinking that you have landed in altogether the wrong place.

It is even said that the islanders speak with a thick Irish brogue. A story is still told in the island pubs of a man from Connaught who arrived in Montserrat and was astonished to hear himself greeted in his native tongue by a man who was as black as pitch.

'Thunder and lightning!' exclaimed the newcomer. 'How long have you been here?' 'Three months,' said the native. 'Three months! And so black already! Blessed Jesus-I'll not stay among ye!' and he got back on to his boat, and had it sail all the way home to Connaught.

Ireland has the distinction of being known as a redoubtably anti-Imperial nation-struggling for most of her history against the rapacity of the English and the Scots. But early in the sixteenth century the Irish did colonise the island of Montserrat. They didn't discover it-Columbus did that, in 1493, and named it after a Catalonian monastery, because he thought the rugged hills and the needle-sharp peaks looked similar to the mountains beyond Barcelona. (The monastery of Santa Maria de Monserrate was where Ignatius Loyola saw the vision that prompted him to form the Jesuit movement-the island's name thus seemed an ideal refuge for Catholicism.) But the Spaniards made no attempt to annexe the little island, and it was left to Irishmen, in 1633, to take the place over.

They did so precisely because the name suggested refuge from the intolerance of Protestantism. There were Irishmen in Sir Thomas Warmer's newly growing colony on St Kitts-but Sir Thomas was a bluff Suffolk squire, not particularly eager to mingle with wild Irishmen, and he made life difficult for them. A party left by boat, and were blown by the trade winds to an island in which they saw 'land high, ground mountainous, and full of woods, with no inhabitants; and yet there were the footprints of some naked men'. The countryside was fertile, the weather pleasant, and, best of all, the place even looked like Ireland. So they named their landfall Kinsale Strand, and set about making the island into a new Irish home.

For a while it became a sanctuary. Irishmen arrived from Virginia, where the Protestants were busily establis.h.i.+ng an ascendancy in that new colony; and they came from Ireland, too, once Cromwell had started to busy himself there. By 1648 Montserrat had '1000 white families'-all of them Irish. There was an Irish Governor named Mr Brisket, and the islanders were eating Irish stew, which they called-and still call-goat.w.a.ter. Montserrat goats are said to have flesh tasting like the best of Galway mutton. ('Mountain chicken', another local dish, is actually breadcrumbed frog.) But charming though the idea of an Irish Caribbean colony might have been-think of the mournful ballads that might have been sung under a summer's moon to the lilting music of the harp and the steel drum, or the sad sagas of the O'Flahertys' sugar mill, the tales of Irish tobacco and Irish rum, the hurricane shelters at the s.h.i.+nty matches-it had not the wit to last. The Irish tried cunning, and it failed. They formed an uneasy alliance with the French, hoping that they might together drive the English out of St Kitts. But the English kept hold of St Kitts, and drove the French-who by this time had taken over Montserrat completely, having merely made use of the Irishmen-out of the area totally. Three years later, in 1667, the French were back, but then the Peace of Breda was signed, and England was given the island in perpetuity.

The French in les Indes de l'Ouest les Indes de l'Ouest were extraordinarily determined. They tried three times more to lay hands on Montserrat-in part for simple territorial ambition, in part because it was a stronghold of Catholicism, and thus more amiably disposed to the ways of France than the English or Dutch islands nearby. They attacked in 1712, and caused so much damage to British property that a special clause was inserted into the Treaty of Utrecht; and they attacked again in 1782, and captured the island (along with most of the Leewards), but were ordered off under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. The final French invasion came in 1805, when Montserrat was forced to pay a ransom of seven thousand five hundred pounds. After that everyone left the island alone, and the British ruled untroubled by any foreign rival. Including, of course, the Irish, who by now had been all but forgotten, except in the names of the towns, the stews, the shamrocks, and the strange habit of many Montserratians-which remains today-of adding the words 'at all' to the end of most sentences. were extraordinarily determined. They tried three times more to lay hands on Montserrat-in part for simple territorial ambition, in part because it was a stronghold of Catholicism, and thus more amiably disposed to the ways of France than the English or Dutch islands nearby. They attacked in 1712, and caused so much damage to British property that a special clause was inserted into the Treaty of Utrecht; and they attacked again in 1782, and captured the island (along with most of the Leewards), but were ordered off under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. The final French invasion came in 1805, when Montserrat was forced to pay a ransom of seven thousand five hundred pounds. After that everyone left the island alone, and the British ruled untroubled by any foreign rival. Including, of course, the Irish, who by now had been all but forgotten, except in the names of the towns, the stews, the shamrocks, and the strange habit of many Montserratians-which remains today-of adding the words 'at all' to the end of most sentences.

I flew to the island in a very small plane which had taken off from the neighbour-island of Antigua. My companion was a red-headed Scot from Kirkintilloch, a diplomat from the British High Commission in Barbados. He called the island 'Monster Rat', and was going there on a curiously non-diplomatic mission. The Governor's safe had a combination lock, and while he was admitting nothing, it seemed that someone had forgotten exactly what the combination number was. It wasn't written down on any piece of paper to be found, and so the Governor couldn't get at his secret papers (nor his hidden supplies of Marmite, or Glenfiddich, or whatever else this particular expatriate missed so far from home).

My friend, it turned out, had been sent out from Barbados with the specific task of opening His Excellency's safe and changing the combination, and making sure those in line to know it, knew it. The Governor had prudently chosen the time to take his leave, back home. The job only took the little Scotsman ten minutes, and he spent the rest of his diplomatic mission lying in the sun and enjoying the view.

For Montserrat is a spectacularly lovely place. It is a teardrop-shaped island, covered with dense, green rain forest, and dominated by three huge volcanoes (but only one active). The settlements are scattered along the coast, where the land makes an effort to be flat. But scores of little rivers course down from the jungles, and the road crosses dozens of bridges under which fierce torrents race busily down to the sea.

The airport is on the eastern side, with one runway jutting out into the ocean, and the islanders professing themselves certain that before long a plane will end up in the surf. (A Pan Am jet hit one of the volcanoes in 1965, and everyone on board was killed. The volcano, Chances Peak, is the only active one.) I was collected by an elderly driver called Rudolph, and when I asked him where I could hire a car he said he would gladly give me his for a few days, 'and don't you waste your money hiring no car, no suh!' I tried to protest, but he insisted, saying he wasn't planning to do any driving for the next few days. 'I won't need the car. I'll jes' cool my brains for a while.'

The road wound steeply up and over the range of hills, the views becoming ever more spectacular as we gained height. We stopped under a giant tree to let the radiator pressure ease. As the steam hissed from the radiator a pair of hummingbirds were floating in the warm afternoon air, wafting liquidly like tiny, brilliantly coloured kites tugged by invisible twine. Three types are said to live on Montserrat-one that is green with a curved beak, one just the same but with a crimson throat, and one that has a straight beak and a crest of pure emerald colour. These had long, aquiline beaks, and their crests were tiny feathers of deep angelica.

There were b.u.t.terflies, too, and lush carmine flowers with big waxy petals and leaves that were thick and rubbery, like great green ears. Rain had just fallen, and the asphalt was steaming in the hot sun. A rich and humid smell seeped lazily from the depths of the forest, but it was not a decaying smell, nor was it in the least bit sinister. This was a friendly, cosy, manageable jungle: no snakes, I remembered reading, nor any unpleasant animal or bird. Just doves and rabbits, a type of wild guinea pig, and a species of yellow oriole. Down in the valleys I could see islanders picking cotton bolls from the bushes, and on the hilltops the turrets of old sugar mills, like ancient fortresses silhouetted against the pale blue sky.

Islands in the northern tropics usually have their princ.i.p.al towns tucked down at the south-west corner. It is all a matter of the wind. In the northern tropics the trades blow almost constantly from the north-east, and the easterly coasts are thus lee sh.o.r.es, easy to be blown on to, difficult to sail away from. The western coast, by contrast, is a sheltered sh.o.r.e-sailing boats can come in to port without danger, and can get away with ease and speed. And there are always the sunsets-islanders like the idea of gazing into the setting sun: 'It's like I'm looking at tomorrow,' one old man said to me on a verandah one evening, as we watched the sun slip downwards and the sky change through salmon and orange to purple, and then into night.

While there are exceptions, most Caribbean islands do have their capital towns down in the south-west, or the west: Antigua, Grand Cayman, Aruba, Curacao, Dominica, Grenada, St Vincent, Martinique, and Nevis all do-and so does Montserrat.

Plymouth, the tiny Georgian town with well-proportioned houses made of Portland stone that was s.h.i.+pped in as ballast on the early sugar boats, is a pretty and dignified place-an Imperial capital that has been cared for, and of which the local people are proud. They are forever repairing the roofs and touching up the pointing, painting the old walls in whites and blues and yellows, keeping the place cheerful and spotless, even though they have few visitors and have very little money to spend.

It is a very English town, despite the supposed Irishness of the countryside. The suburbs are called Dagenham and Amersham and Jubilee Town, and there is a Richmond and a Streatham, and St George's Hill overlooks the place. In the town centre, where John Street and George Street meet Strand Street and Marine Drive, there is a war memorial. Nearby is the old Custom House, the market, the abattoir, the post office, the prison and the clock tower. There always is a war memorial, and here in Plymouth it is where the Boy Scouts and the Montserrat Volunteers and the Guides paraded on Empire Day each May, when the schools were all closed and the Governor could be seen in his white uniform and his feathery hat, and when the children sang 'G.o.d Save the King' and fidgeted during the speeches and then lined up for sticky buns and lemonade. Empire Day seems less appropriate now, so they celebrate the Queen's birthday instead, in June; but the war memorial is the focus of it all, as it is in every remaining outpost of the Empire. Some memorials are in shabby and forlorn corners; some, like those in Jamestown, the capital of St Helena, and here in Plymouth, the almost-perfect capital of Montserrat, seem more properly Imperial, and the children and their parents seem to have an extra spring in their step and sing just a little more heartily, believing, as they look around at all the lovely constructions of their mother country, that they do in fact possess something of which they can be proud.

The British Empire today sports only two active volcanoes: one, Chances Peak here in Montserrat, the other one is on Tristan da Cunha (it erupted in 1961, sending the entire colony into brief exile). Chances Peak is exactly 3,000 feet high. I walked there one afternoon, past the disused sugar mills of Galway's Estate, towards a long ochre scar of sulphur which smoked gently on the mountain's jungle-covered western flank.

The rocks were soft and crumbly, and there was a smell of cooking and bad eggs, and the place was warm and steamy, like a kitchen in which something was boiling on the range. The river-called the White River where it spilled into the sea, but it was yellow and cloudy where it gurgled here-was scalding hot. From tiny fumaroles that peppered the floors and walls of this tiny, enclosed valley, steam jetted in random bursts, and the sound of a groaning and cracking suggested some fearful being below ground, struggling to escape. Blobs of brilliant purple mud would suddenly erupt from nowhere, and I once set my foot on what I thought was solid ground and went through the crust into hot yellow mud, right up to the knee.

High above the valley and its steam and noise and cooking smell, the jungle was silent. Occasionally a bird, iridescent and cawing softly, would rise from the trees and flap its way towards the sea, and once a donkey appeared at the edge of a cliff and inspected me, chewing disconsolately. Otherwise all was peaceful on the borders of h.e.l.l. I suddenly had the terrible realisation that if I were to fall in one of the pools of bubbling mud, or became embedded in the hot yellow earth, I would roast away without anyone knowing, and would be folded into the bowels of the earth, become a small fixture in colonial geology and be regurgitated on a tectonic whim many millennia later. So I clambered, perspiring and panicky, up to the Galway's Estate road, and made my way back to Plymouth, and the rickety cosiness of the Coconut Hill Hotel, where I had tea on the verandah and tried to shake the sulphur out of my jeans.

Few tourists come to Montserrat. The volcano spews black sand on all the beaches, and those who wors.h.i.+p the sun feel that white sand is somehow better than black, and stay well away. There is one white sand beach at the northern end, where a few rich Americans congregate. One British record-maker has set up a studio above the bay, and rock-music stars come and live in his house for months at a time, secure in the knowledge that they won't be bothered by their public, and that the Montserratians, as a kindly and down-to-earth people, won't bother them either. Paul McCartney brought Stevie Wonder to Montserrat, and he played the piano in one of the Plymouth bars; and Elton John met his wife on Montserrat-so the island is well-known to students of the pop world, who a.s.sociate it wholly with the production of their particular kind of music.

Other generations will know it for its production of limes. Montserrat Lime Juice was world-famous. The Lancet The Lancet, quoted by the India Planters Gazette India Planters Gazette of 1885, said: 'We counsel the public to drink their lime juice either alone or sweetened to taste and mixed with Water or Soda Water and a little Ice if obtainable. Care should be taken that Montserrat Lime-fruit Juice only is used, as it has the delicate aroma and flavour peculiar to the Lime Fruit and found in no other Lime Juice.' One can imagine the burra-sahib planter of Darjeeling, sitting in the cool of an evening gazing at the slopes of Kanchenjunga, a cheroot smouldering in one hand, a gla.s.s of of 1885, said: 'We counsel the public to drink their lime juice either alone or sweetened to taste and mixed with Water or Soda Water and a little Ice if obtainable. Care should be taken that Montserrat Lime-fruit Juice only is used, as it has the delicate aroma and flavour peculiar to the Lime Fruit and found in no other Lime Juice.' One can imagine the burra-sahib planter of Darjeeling, sitting in the cool of an evening gazing at the slopes of Kanchenjunga, a cheroot smouldering in one hand, a gla.s.s of nimbu pani nimbu pani in the other. After 1885, no doubt, the in the other. After 1885, no doubt, the nimbu nimbu would have come across two oceans, all the way from Montserrat. would have come across two oceans, all the way from Montserrat.

The lime estates were started by a remarkable man-Joseph Sturge, a devout Quaker from Birmingham who insisted he would grow his limes without the use of any slaves and with the hitherto unprecedented policy of 'fair and just treatment of the native labourers' as a spur to profitable production. He loaned money to the freed slaves, helped them pay for school, went to America to agitate for their freedom there. He would describe his princ.i.p.al interests as 'peace, anti-slavery and temperance', campaigned against the Corn Laws and the war in Crimea, and founded the Friends' Sunday schools in Birmingham. The city fathers erected a fountain and a statue to his memory in Edgbaston; in Montserrat, though, there is no memorial, and the lime factories have all but closed down.

In 1885 the island sold 180,000 gallons of juice to Crosse and Blackwell, in 1928 some thirty-five puncheons puncheons went to Australia. They made lime oil, too, for perfume and soap. But the crop was badly damaged in a hurricane, and by 1931 cotton had taken over as the major commodity exported from Plymouth dock. Sturge's Montserrat Company was sold in 1961. When I ordered a gla.s.s of lime juice at the hotel one afternoon there was nothing fresh available. I was given a bottle of Rose's Lime Juice, with a label that said, 'St Albans and the West Indies' but the company later explained that this was a polite fiction, and that Rose's limes now came from Mexico and Ghana. went to Australia. They made lime oil, too, for perfume and soap. But the crop was badly damaged in a hurricane, and by 1931 cotton had taken over as the major commodity exported from Plymouth dock. Sturge's Montserrat Company was sold in 1961. When I ordered a gla.s.s of lime juice at the hotel one afternoon there was nothing fresh available. I was given a bottle of Rose's Lime Juice, with a label that said, 'St Albans and the West Indies' but the company later explained that this was a polite fiction, and that Rose's limes now came from Mexico and Ghana.

The cotton grown on the island is unlike any other. A sample of Carolina Sea Island cotton seed was brought to the island in 1909 and planted in an experimental field. It grew with tremendous vigour, and produced a fibre that was as soft as cashmere and as strong as silk. For a while exports boomed-three-quarters of a million tonnes were s.h.i.+pped in 1938, and Montserrat was second only to Barbados in the Caribbean cotton league. But then came the weevils, and the rain was erratic for a few seasons, and another hurricane flattened everything-the sad story of so many small West Indian islands-and cotton failed, too. Sugar had vanished from the island economy fifty years before for much the same reason; the lower slopes of the hills were, by the 1980s, littered with the ruins of abandoned projects-empty cane fields (which islanders used to burn by dipping a mongoose in petrol, setting it aflame and letting it run in between the cane stands), bedraggled cotton bushes, overgrown lime plantations.

Just as in Grand Turk, where the islanders feel somehow shamed that tax-avoidance and tourism have taken over from salt raking and fis.h.i.+ng, so the Montserratians today are saddened to realise that what they see as the n.o.bler labours a.s.sociated with lime, sugar and cotton have been subordinated to ign.o.ble schemes-the making of pop records, and (the biggest export at present) the manufacture, in a factory, of plastic sandwich bags. A Canadian plan to get cotton-growing under way again, and sell Montserrat Sea Island cotton as a luxury, is breathing a little hope into one old industry, but no one is very optimistic.

On my last day on Montserrat I came across something quite unexpected, and quite dreadful. An old resort hotel, built on a bluff to the north of Plymouth, had been bought by a group of young Americans who were running it as a clinic for cancer patients, men and women who were desperate to cling on to life at almost any cost, and at almost any risk. The clinic, which charged phenomenal sums of money, offered treatments with drugs that did not, at the time, have the approval of the American Government. Laetrile was one, dimethyl sulphoxide the other. Neither was a proven cure for cancer, but to a patient eager enough and financially able, they did offer a possibility of life, if nothing else. The old hotel had truly become, as a cynical Montserratian remarked, a last resort, and I should go and look at it.

So I walked up the hill, through the steel gates and the welcoming signs, and made for the bar. The ballroom next door opened out on to a terrace, which overlooked a still and silent sea. Inside the ballroom a band from Antigua was playing reggae music. Its leader, in red-and-yellow blazer, was doing his best to lighten the atmosphere of the place, giving encouraging smiles and imploring some of his audience to come on to the floor and dance.

But no one wanted to dance that night. Nor any night, I suspected. There were about twenty people in the room. Each was slumped back in an armchair, peering wanly at the band through eyes that were heavy with sleep, or narcotic drugs. Behind most chairs was a steel rod from which was suspended a bag of saline solution, a plastic tube carrying the liquid to each bandaged arm. One or two tapped fingers, or toes, to the rhythm. There was a strong smell of garlic, and when one of the 'guests', a woman in her fifties, saw me wrinkle my nose, she beckoned, and whispered an apology.

'I'm sorry about the smell. It's the drug-the dimethyl stuff. It goes through you so fast, and leaves this garlic smell. I guess it's bearable if you know the stuff is doing you good.'

And was it? She thought so, yes; she had put on three ounces in the first week she had been a resident, more than she had put on in the last month back home. She was no more than a bag of bones, her face was drawn and grey, her skin was translucent, yellowish, like parchment. She wasn't fifty at all: she was thirty-two and she had had cancer for a year. The visit to Montserrat was costing her three thousand dollars a week, and she was sure it was doing her good. An elderly man-or was he young?-in the next chair nodded his head in vigorous agreement. 'You tell 'em, Sal. You are getting better, sure you are.'

But Sal wasn't getting better. She died two weeks later on her way home. She was an ounce heavier on departure than when she arrived; she had spent nine thousand dollars. Perhaps she had been given a measure of hope, and considered her money well spent. I couldn't help but feel a sense of distaste, even anger; and most Montserratians loathe the clinic, and wonder how the Government ever allowed it to open for business. 'The death house on the hill' was how I heard it described down in Plymouth.

Six years ago the politicians in Plymouth were ruefully contemplating an indefinite future as a colony. 'The Last English Colony?' was the t.i.tle of a pamphlet published in 1978, and there was a general acceptance that, as it said, 'Montserrat will probably be a colony long after Britain has shed all her other responsibilities.' But after the American invasion of Grenada the perspective s.h.i.+fted. The Montserrat Chief Minister became chairman of a local power bloc, the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States; he asked if he could send a token force of the Royal Montserrat Police to Grenada, and Britain said no, he couldn't, since Britain was keeping strictly neutral and expected her colonies to do so as well.

That did it. Why, the Chief Minister asked, should Montserrat be subject to 'the overruling and sometimes myopic colonial power' any longer? Was it not embarra.s.sing and degrading? Should not the islanders accept 'the dignity of managing their own affairs'? He said he would be formally requesting independence from Britain; the Foreign Office, with the languid superciliousness for which it is renowned, simply replied that it was unaware of any request, but would study the matter in due course. And there the matter remains.

For the politicians doubtless the independence of Montserrat is of crucial import. For the islanders I suspect it is, and will be for some time, a matter of less immediate moment. They are as unhurried and untroubled a people as any in the West Indies, without much undue pa.s.sion, without a burning sense of injustice or a pervasive feeling of subjection.

Perhaps it has much to do with their Gaelic spirit. As a local columnist once wrote, from old Sweeney's sugar estate in the north to O'Garra's deep down in the south, this truly is 'our Ireland in the sun'. Every bit as content to be under the rule of Whitehall, or Plymouth, or even Dublin all over again.

There have been many government committees in Whitehall, and most of them have been deservedly forgotten. The people of the Cayman Islands, one of the wealthiest and most successful of British colonies, have good reason to remember, and indeed raise a gla.s.s to one of them-a committee which is generally regarded as having been a total failure, and which only stayed in existence for six years.

The Colonial Policy Committee was set up in 1955, by Sir Anthony Eden. Its avowed purpose was to suggest to the Cabinet how best Britain might accomplish the running down of Empire, and how the country might treat those colonies that remained; it was the body Sir Winston Churchill had meant when, some years earlier, he had said that the Colonial Office would have so little work to do that one day 'a good suite of rooms at Somerset House, with a large sitting room, a fine kitchen and a dining room' would be most suitable for the direction of Empire.

The CPC-with the Colonial Secretary, the Commonwealth Secretary, the Foreign Secretary and the Minister of Defence meeting under the chairmans.h.i.+p of the Lord President of the Council was a flop. The Cabinet complained that it never got any direction from the Committee; the Committee complained that it was bogged down in sorting out day-to-day problems, and never had an opportunity to make exhaustive a.n.a.lyses of Imperial policy. It was abolished in June 1962, and n.o.body appeared to miss it.

But lackl.u.s.tre though its overall performance may have been, the Committee enjoyed a spectacular success in what was almost the last decision it ever took. On 30th March 1962 it accepted the advice of the then Colonial Secretary, Reginald Maudling, and agreed that the Cayman Islands should be detached from the colony of Jamaica, which was then about to become independent, and become a new Crown colony, on their own.

The reasons had a lot to do with geography. The three Cayman Islands-Grand Cayman, Little Cayman and Cayman Brac-are tucked below the Great Antillean island of Cuba, and lie several hundred miles away from the island-arc chain of the Leewards and the Windwards. Jamaica, the Caymans' mother-colony, was in 1962 a member of the Federation of the West Indies, and the Caymans, having nothing in common with the other members of the Federation, wanted to pull out. There is an almost exact parallel between the Caymanian att.i.tude to the Federation, and Anguilla's hostility to St Kitts-in the case of Anguilla, Britain sent troops to try to stop the impending rebellion; in the case of the Cayman Islands the Colonial Policy Committee agreed that no islander should be forced to join anything he didn't want to. So the recommendation was made that the Caymans become a separate colony, with loyalty neither to Jamaica nor to the West Indian Federation (which in any case collapsed in an ugly shambles shortly afterwards), but only to the distant figure of the reigning British monarch. The full Cabinet agreed with the Committee, and so with cap-and-feathers, sword-and-spurs bought, Government House duly built and a suitable colonial servant duly appointed (at first styled 'Administrator', but a full-fledged Governor after 1971), the colony got shakily under way.

It has proved to be a quite extraordinary financial success-perhaps, in purely monetary terms, the most successful little country in the world. It is a success measured solely in numbers, maybe; the place has little charm, and even less culture; but in numbers-and that essentially means numbers of dollars-its triumph is unchallenged.

The islands are flat and, save for a modest hillock on Cayman Brac ('brac' is a Gaelic word for 'bluff', which on this islet is just 140 feet high), they are utterly featureless. Columbus spotted them in 1503, but decided not to bother landing, as they looked so uninspiring: he named them Las Tortugas, because of the enormous numbers of green turtles in the surrounding seas. They were renamed Las Caymanas because of the similar abundance of sea-crocodiles; but there are no crocodiles left today, and many islanders wish for the old name back, as the place still crawls with turtles.

The islanders-a mongrel mixture of races and nationalities, pirates and deserters, freebooters and buccaneers, a crew who knew no racial divisions then, and, almost alone in the West Indies, appear to harbour none today-built mahogany schooners, fished, and fattened turtles for export. But it was a poor living, and in the early years of this century hundreds left, to go to Jamaica, or even to Nicaragua, which lies temptingly close to the west. In 1948 there was just one bank on the island, and a collection of shanty towns and peasant farmers: the exchequer took in only thirty-six thousand pounds from the 7,000 inhabitants. They exported 2,000 turtles, at about three pounds a time; the total export income was twenty thousand pounds, and the Administrator had control of a Reserve Fund of thirty-eight thousand pounds, and a Hurricane Fund of two thousand. The soil was too thin to farm; the islands swarmed with mosquitoes, with dengue fever and yellow fever occasionally breaking out as epidemics; there were brackish swamps, acres of scrub and casuarina, and a few thin cattle. The Cayman Islands were a long way from being the brightest star in the Imperial firmament.

But a genius was waiting in the wings. Va.s.sel G.o.dfrey Johnson, a slender, bespectacled Jamaican whose family came from Madras, was a civil servant in the Finance Department in Jamaica. He came to Cayman during the debate over whether or not the island dependency should join the Federation; and, when it was decided that they should in fact become a new colony, separate and self-standing, he hit upon the solution that has since made the Caymans one of the wealthiest places on earth.

He explained that he had a sudden idea: since the islands were too poor to pay taxes, and since they were in the enviable position of being a British Crown colony, with all the stability and protection such status conferred-why not offer freedom from taxes to anyone who wanted to invest money on the islands? Why not encourage businesses to come and place their headquarters on Grand Cayman, and shelter themselves from the burdens of taxation they might face elsewhere? Why not offer secrecy and discretion, and make the islands into a Little Switzerland-on-Sea?

Mr Johnson worked for months, studying legislation and banking regulations, persuading the Jamaican Government, and then the Cayman Administration and the supervisors at the Foreign Office, that all would be well. By the time full colonial status was achieved the legislation was in force. The mosquitoes had been wiped out, too-Va.s.sel Johnson had decided that bankers would not come to Grand Cayman if they were going to be made the subject of a Torquemada's feast as soon as they stepped off the plane-and the colony was ready to receive its first millions.

It all took a little time. Bankers were reluctant to divert their monies from Zurich; American investors were content to keep their funds in Na.s.sau, 500 miles north, in the Bahamas. There was a natural reluctance among this most cautious of communities to set down with funds in a new and untried country-British colony or not.

But then came the independence of the Bahamas, in 1974. The bankers were content with the Prime Minister whom the British left in charge; but within a year there were audible stirrings of Socialist opposition in Na.s.sau, and the back streets were displaying posters calling for the nationalisation of the banks. Caution vanished; alarm took over; and banker after banker packed his suitcase and headed south, for Grand Cayman. Barclays Bank went first; and then a trickle, then a stream, and then a tidal wave. Banks from all over the world, from Winnipeg to Waziristan, set up shop in George Town.

The Yellow Pages in the Cayman telephone book lists six pages of banks, from the Arawak Trust (Cayman) Limited, to the Was.h.i.+ngton International Bank and Trust Company. Billions of dollars are invested in more than 440 banks registered in the Cayman Islands; and there are 300 insurance companies, dozens of world-cla.s.s accountants, and more than 17,000 registered companies-one for every inhabitant. Outside the offices of most lawyers in town are long noticeboards listing the names of each and every company registered with the firm: pretty secretaries can be seen every day adding new plates to the list as fresh companies send in their government registration fee (of eight hundred and fifty dollars, minimum) and commence operations under the benign and liberal style of Caymanian protection.

Now, from a sleepy mess of mangrove swamps and seagrape trees, the Cayman Islands have undergone an amazing and breathtakingly rapid evolution. There are now more telex machines per head of population than anywhere else on earth; there were, in 1980, more than 8,000 telephones on the islands-one for every two people, and almost as many per person as in Britain. Satellite dishes have sp.a.w.ned like mushrooms all over the islands-when I met Va.s.sel Johnson we did, indeed, sit under a seagrape tree beside the ocean, and there was driftwood on the beach and the sea s.h.i.+mmered in the late afternoon sun; but beside his house was a great white dish pointed up at Satcom Three, and he could receive fifty-three channels of television, twenty-four hours a day. He had a Mercedes and a motor cruiser, and there was a badminton court next to his bungalow. The standard of living he enjoyed was not, by island standards, particularly remarkable: but there was no poverty on Cayman either, and none of the shabbiness I had encountered on Grand Turk, or on Anguilla, or Montserrat.

But the liberality of the Cayman laws has led, it is thought, to some abuse. The islands are generally thought of as the prime resting-place for some of the world's hottest money-drug money, Mafia money, p.o.r.nography money. It is rarely provable-the island laws make it a crime even to inquire about a certain bank account. But the island authorities seem to think it is happening, and have looked, without success, at ways of helping the very worried American police agencies who come to trace notorious criminals here, only to find the trail suddenly running cold, as though the fox had dived into the river, and had swum away to safety.

I stayed with an elderly couple in a grand house outside George Town; they were British and had come to retire on Cayman because of the suns.h.i.+ne, and the absolute certainty they felt that, of all places in the world, this would not become tainted by Socialism. They showed me their bank statement one day-a Barclays' International statement, sent from the branch in George Town. It was of only minor interest until, quite by surprise, another statement fell from behind it. The Barclays' computer had folded the statement for the next customer-next in alphabetical order, that is-into the same envelope. The customer was a small firm that hired cranes in a town in Yorks.h.i.+re; it had more than four hundred and fifty thousand pounds on deposit, and I couldn't help but wonder why. I thought I might telephone when I got home, and pretend I was a detective, and ask why they felt it necessary to keep so much cash in a Caribbean tax haven. But charity, and prudence, prevailed, and I left them alone.

The nervousness of the banking community showed itself after the Falklands War, and the Cayman Islands were briefly worried. There was talk, easily audible in New York and Miami and Houston, that the British might well want to dispose of their remaining colonies, to make sure no such costly embarra.s.sment happened again. It was all rumour, of course-the reworking of a few editorials in the more radical quarters of the British press. But it set the bankers wondering-were the Cayman Islands secure? Should the money go to Switzerland once more, or to Liechtenstein, or Andorra?

The Governor of the islands, an astute Englishman named Peter Lloyd, a man with a long record of Imperial service-Fiji, Hong Kong, Bermuda, Kenya-recognised the danger signs. A royal visit should do the trick, it was agreed; and so the Queen, on her way to Mexico and the American West Coast, was briefly diverted to Grand Cayman in February 1983. It was expensive-two hundred dollars a minute, someone calculated. Her Majesty was given a Rolls-Royce that had once belonged to Mr Dubcek of Czechoslovakia; she unveiled a plaque for a new road, she saw an exhibition of local crafts (which, it must be said, are limited, and tend to involve turtle sh.e.l.ls, conches, and raffia work), she made one seven-minute speech, spoke to some elderly islanders, performed one walkabout and lunched and dined with the island grandees. Government House was not reckoned either grand or secure enough for the Monarch; instead she slept at the headquarters of a company called Transnational Risk Management Limited, which everyone agreed had more the ring of today's Cayman Islands about it, anyway.

Brief and costly though the tour had been, it underlined Britain's determination to keep the colony British, come what may. The bankers expressed their relief and their grat.i.tude, and growth resumed, as though the Falklands War had never happened. The islanders had already expressed their own thanks-a fund-raising campaign under the t.i.tle 'Mother needs your help' was organised by the Caymanians to help the bereaved and the injured from the South Atlantic, and the Caymanians contributed to the tune of twenty-eight pounds each, indicative both of their generosity, and their wealth.

However, the Caymans are not particularly endearing islands. There is no scenery (except underwater, where the diving is said to be among the best in the world); there is a relentless quality to the money-making on which the islands seem so firmly based-seminars on tax-avoidance in every hotel, beach lectures on insurance, advertis.e.m.e.nts for Swiss banks and tax-shelters and financial advice centres. There is little left which is obviously West Indian about the place: it seems like an outpost of Florida, rather than of the British Empire, with a tawdriness, a mixture of the seedy and the greedy that was less attractive than the shabbiness or the decay of the other islands.

But that is a churlish judgement. The lives of the Caymanians are undoubtedly much more comfortable than those of their brother-islanders up in Tortola, or across in Montserrat. Why should I deny them a life that gives them such riches? What was it that bothered me about the place?

Perhaps, I thought to myself in the airport taxi, it was because one a.s.sociates British Imperial relics, and a.s.sociates them rather fondly, with sadness and decay, with the sagging verandah and the peeling paint, the wandering donkeys and the lolling drunks, and with a generally amiable sense of indolence and carelessness. It was not very laudable, maybe-but it was rather, well, pleasant, and cosy. Perhaps because of all of that, the discovery of a colony with 200 telexes and a telephone for every couple and seminars on investment opportunity, and moreover to discover it in a place like the West Indies where efficiency and technology and wealth have never been at a premium-perhaps it was all too much of a shock to the system. I was not, I must admit, at all sorry to leave. The plane took me to Miami, and it was full of men in business suits, and they seemed to be carrying small computer terminals, and read the Wall Street Journal Wall Street Journal. This, surely, had not been an outpost of our Empire? Where was the charm? Where was the Britishness of it all? They hadn't even seemed terribly keen on cricket.

10.

The Falkland Islands

It was the first Friday in April-early spring in England, but a crisp clear autumn morning in Port Stanley, the capital of the Crown colony of the Falkland Islands. I was lying wedged under a bed, the Colonial Governor's chauffeur had one of his feet in my left ear, a terrified cat was cowering under a pile of pink candlewick, and the sound of gunfire was everywhere. Britain's very last Imperial war-although I didn't know it at the time-was beginning, and I seemed to be in the very middle of it.

I had arrived three days earlier. This was the first colony I had visited for years, and I had fallen hopelessly in love with the place. Everything, so far as I was concerned, was exactly right. It was a place of islands, and I loved islands. It was cold, and I loved cold places. A fresh, damp wind blew constantly from the west. There was the smell of peat in the air. The grey and purple moors and the white-capped sea-lochs looked as though they had been plucked from the remoter regions of Argylls.h.i.+re, or Ardnamurchan. The men, slow and deliberate of speech, pipe-smoking, church-going, all dressed in old tweed, oilskins and studded boots, made a modest living as seafarers and farmers; they knew about such things as Admiralty charts and weather and horses and birds and wild animals. They had the old and solid virtues of an earlier age-they were of the same stock as the ghillies and postmen and lobster fishers and shepherds of a seaside town in Northern Scotland, contented with their lonely living, wanting for little, happy to have been pa.s.sed by and forgotten by the world outside.

And yet on this crisp Friday morning the whole unwanted outside world, with all its awfulness and wasted energies, was preparing to descend upon the Falkland Islands and their people. An Imperial outpost that had languished for two centuries in the comfort of well-deserved obscurity was about to erupt on to every newspaper and every television screen in every country in the world. A week from this day it would be on the front cover, in full colour, of the major American news magazines, would be the subject of a thousand televised discussions, a matter for urgent diplomacy and for the meetings of presidents, prime ministers, generals, admirals and intelligence chiefs in capital cities on every continent. This morning, at the very moment I had decided it would be sensible to lie on this strange bedroom floor, almost no one in the world was even aware of the existence of these islands, or of this tiny windswept capital town.

And even as I mentioned this irony to the friend who sheltered beside me, a tragedy that was to alter the fortunes of the islands and the islanders for all time was under way, and we were hiding from it among the feet, the frightened cat and the rattle of bullets, among the dust b.a.l.l.s and yellowing newspapers under a standard British government-issue bed.

I had come to the Falkland Islands from Simla, the old Imperial summer capital of India. Just a few days before I had been strolling through the grand viceregal lodge, up among the roses and the deodars, with the fine white ridge of the Himalayas in the distance. Then I heard the BBC World Service tell about some curious goings-on in the South Atlantic, with sc.r.a.p metal merchants from Argentina trying to dismantle an old whaling station on the Falklands dependency of South Georgia, and the British Government being mightily exercised about it. I decided to go home. In the bus that took me from the hills to the plains I read what little there was in the Indian papers about the remote turmoil. It seemed that many of the old southern ocean whalers-and, indeed, the owners of the South Georgia whaling factory-were Scotsmen; and having just come from a building in India that had all the appearance of a magnificent Sutherland shooting lodge I was able to expatiate to the Bengali lawyer in the next seat on the theme the Scots as Empire-Builders, which at least matched his sermon on the Patriotism of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose for length and tedium, after which we both fell into exhausted silences.

The Britain I got home to was more amused than interested in what seemed to be happening on South Georgia. I knew a little about the place, because I had once contemplated applying for a job with the British Antarctic Survey, and had seen pictures of the old granite cross, the memorial to Shackleton, who had died there of a heart attack in 1922. The capital, if such it could be called, was Grytviken, and a small party of BAS men worked there, with their leader nominated as magistrate and representative of the Falkland Islands' Governor. What appeared to have happened on this occasion was that a small party of Argentinians had landed at Leith, twenty miles up the coast, and were busily dismantling the rusting hulk of the whaling station. The problem, so far as the Foreign Office was concerned, was that the sc.r.a.p dealers had ignored instructions to check their way through British immigration and customs; a Royal Navy patrol vessel had been dispatched to scare them off, the Argentine Navy had in consequence landed marines and sent in two frigates, ostensibly to support their civilian sc.r.a.pmen, and both governments were angrily sending Notes to one another demanding discipline, respect for sovereignty, and withdrawal of respective threats.

And so, six days after coming home from India, I was aboard another plane, heading south to write about this ridiculous little argument and, as it was to turn out, an unimagined and unimaginable war. It was a Sunday night, we were droning across the Atlantic between Madrid and Buenos Aires, and I was attempting a crash course on Falkland Islands' history.

Few seemed to have cared very much for the islands. To the first navigators they must have been terrifying: huge rock-bound monsters, looming out of the freezing fog and giant waves, bombarded by furious winds that screamed out of Drake Pa.s.sage and howled unceasingly from around Cape Horn. The seas are almost always rough, the air is filled with flying spray, visibility is invariably poor, and navigators and steersmen on pa.s.sing vessels always had too many tasks to perform at once to enjoy their leisure of island-spotting-the consequence being, uniquely in British Imperial history, that we have no real idea who first came across the Falkland Islands. The surviving records are confusing-was Hawkins' Maidenland, discovered by Richard Hawkins in 1594, the north sh.o.r.e of East Falkland? Did Magellan's expedition discover them, or are those insignificant patches on Antonio Ribero's maps of 1527 and 1529 records of the Spaniards' having found them at the start of the sixteenth century? The maps certainly give them a variety of names-the Seebalds, the Sansons, the Malouines, the Malvinas; and only when Captain John Strong was blown into the island waters by a mighty westerly gale in January 1690, and landed and killed geese and ducks, did they a.s.sume the name by which the British still call them today: Strong named them Falkland's Land, in honour of the Navy Treasurer, Viscount Falkland (a man whose career did not flourish, and who ended up committed to the Tower); seventy-six years later John McBride, who established the first British settlement, officially named the entire group the Falkland Islands.

The jumbo jet thundered quietly on. From the flight deck we heard a hushed voice mention that we were a few miles south of Tenerife, in the Canaries. Dinner was over and the stewards moved silently through the aircraft, dimming the lights for a Spanish-dubbed version of The French Lieutenant's Woman The French Lieutenant's Woman to be shown to those few pa.s.sengers still awake. My reading lamp illuminated the pile of papers I had gathered up before I left London, and I read on. to be shown to those few pa.s.sengers still awake. My reading lamp illuminated the pile of papers I had gathered up before I left London, and I read on.

There were innumerable references to the firm Argentine belief that she had sovereign rights to the Falklands (and persisted in calling them Las Islas Malvinas, after the French from St Malo who had established the first formal settlement, in 1764, and who had claimed them in the name of Louis XV). Of course I was in no position to judge the strength of the various claims: but I remember being impressed by the vigour and constancy with which Argentina a.s.serted her t.i.tle to the islands, and wondering if there was much more than obstinacy in the tone that successive British Governments had adopted towards the idea of any real negotiations over the islands' future. I was struck too by the suggestion that every Argentine schoolchild from the age of four knew in the minutest detail the history of the Malvinas, and had an unswerving belief in his country's ent.i.tlement to the islands; I cannot recall ever having heard anything about them at school at all, other than as a name in the stamp alb.u.m. (The penny black-and-carmine issue of 1938, with the black-necked swan, and the halfpenny black-and-green with the picture of two sets of whale jaws, were my particular favourites; I promised myself I would look them out when I got back home in a week or two.) Like most Britons I neither knew much about the islands, nor cared greatly about their fate, nor who owned t.i.tle to them.

Few of the early settlers seemed to have liked the islands. 'A countryside lifeless for want of inhabitants...everywhere a weird and melancholy uniformity' was the verdict of Antoine de Bougainville, the leader of the settler band from St Malo. Dr Johnson established the colony's reputation in 1771, noting that it had been 'thrown aside from human use, stormy in winter, barren in summer, an island which not even the southern savages had dignified with habitation'. 'I tarry in this miserable desert,' wrote the first priest of the Spanish community, Father Sebastian Villaneuva, 'suffering everything for the love of G.o.d.' And again, one of the first Britons to live on East Falkland Island, an army lieutenant, recalled some years later that the colony was 'the most detestable place I was ever at in all my life'. 'A remote settlement at the f.a.g end of the world,' said one Governor in 1886; 'the hills are rounded, bleak, bare and brownish,' wrote Prince Albert Victor, who had sailed in aboard HMS Bacchante Bacchante. The hills, he added, 'were like Newmarket Heath'.

Charles Darwin went to the Falklands aboard the Beagle Beagle in 1833, the same year that the Union flag was first raised by a visiting naval vessel. He knew that the existing Argentine garrison had been ordered to leave, and was scornfully dismissive of the Admiralty's action. He delivered a judgement as haunting as it was economical: 'Here we, dog in manger fas.h.i.+on, seize an island and leave to protect it a Union Jack.' Ten years later the islands were formally colonised-an Act of Parliament in London, twenty-eight-year-old Mr Richard Moody came south on the brig in 1833, the same year that the Union flag was first raised by a visiting naval vessel. He knew that the existing Argentine garrison had been ordered to leave, and was scornfully dismissive of the Admiralty's action. He delivered a judgement as haunting as it was economical: 'Here we, dog in manger fas.h.i.+on, seize an island and leave to protect it a Union Jack.' Ten years later the islands were formally colonised-an Act of Parliament in London, twenty-eight-year-old Mr Richard Moody came south on the brig Hebe Hebe to be the first Governor, a Colonial Secretary and Colonial Treasurer were appointed and the dismal new possession was inserted into the Colonial Office List, sandwiched between British Honduras and Gambia (although by the beginning of this century Cyprus and Fiji had become its closest alphabetical neighbours). Port Stanley was chosen as the capital, thirty pensioners were sent down from Chelsea Barracks, and thirty-five Royal Marines and their families followed shortly afterwards. Governor Moody's first Imperial decision was to curb the colonials' keen liking for strong drink. Spirits, he declared, 'produce the most maddening effects and disorderly excesses', and he slapped a pound a gallon on liquor brought in to the islands from home. to be the first Governor, a Colonial Secretary and Colonial Treasurer were appointed and the dismal new possession was inserted into the Colonial Office List, sandwiched between British Honduras and Gambia (although by the beginning of this century Cyprus and Fiji had become its closest alphabetical neighbours). Port Stanley was chosen as the capital, thirty pensioners were sent down from Chelsea Barracks, and thirty-five Royal Marines and their families followed shortly afterwards. Governor Moody's first Imperial decision was to curb the colonials' keen liking for strong drink. Spirits, he declared, 'produce the most maddening effects and disorderly excesses', and he slapped a pound a gallon on liquor brought in to the islands from home.

I must have slept fitfully for a while, for it was morning when I next looked out of the windows, and we were coming in to land at Rio. The Brazilian newspapers were full of news about the Malvinas, and there were pictures on the front pages of the wars.h.i.+ps Drummond Drummond and and Granville Granville, the two Argentine destroyers (despite their names) that were even now cruising around the fjords of South Georgia. Both s.h.i.+ps had been built in Barrow-in-Furness, and sold to the Argentine Navy-a measure, it was said, of the enduring amity between Britain and Argentina. Back in London politicians and diplomats set great store by this long-established friends.h.i.+p: here, to the extent I could translate the Portuguese headlines, it seemed to count for rather less. There was definitely the smell of trouble.

A day later and I was in deepest Patagonia. This was very different from the steamy warmth of the River Plate. Here it was very much a high lat.i.tude autumn. The wind howled down from the Andes, and whipped up the dust in cold, gritty flurries. I was in Comodoro Rivadavia, a town which I had long thought to be blessed with one of the prettiest names in the Americas. I had tried to get there two years before to write about a simmering dispute between Chile and Argentina over the owners.h.i.+p of a group of small islands off the coast of Tierra del Fuego; but the Pope stepped in to moderate, and the dispute collapsed, and there was no reason to go. Now I was here, and the place was a terrible disappointment. It was littered with the acc.u.mulated debris of the oil drilling business-rusty iron girders, enormous pulley blocks, barrels, abandoned lorries, stores dumps behind barbed-wire fences. The buildings were modern, and ugly, and the people walked bent over into the cold gales that blew along the alleys. (It was the second time that I had come to expect too much from a lovely city name: years before I had spun wondrous fantasies about a place called Tuc.u.mcari in New Mexico; but when I got there it was just an oily little truckstop on Route Sixty-six, best avoided. I felt much the same way about Comodoro Rivadavia.) Flying to the Falkland Islands has never been easy. In 1952 a seaplane made a remarkable journey all the way from Southampton to Port Stanley, by way of Madeira, the Cape Verde Islands, Recife and Montevideo. She took seven days, turned round a few days later and flew home. Then in 1971 a lighthouse keeper-the Cape Pembroke Light on East Falkland was one of the few remaining outposts of the Imperial Lighthouse Service-fell ill, an amphibious aircraft of the Argentine Navy flew in to evacuate him, and then agreed to fly to and from Port Stanley twice a month with pa.s.sengers and mail. A year later the state-run Argentine civil airline took over the task, and ran a weekly service to the islands. It was an excellent arrangement for both sides: the Falkland Islanders had an air service, and the Argentines could keep an eye on the colony. Moreover, with a small office in Port Stanley, manned by a serving naval officer (to which the colonial authorities seemed to express no objection), the Argentine military had a foothold-one that was to prove useful just a few days after I arrived.

It was Tuesday, 30th March when I presented my ticket at Comodoro airport, and the political atmosphere had become electric. Two days before-the Sunday-the intelligence community had told the British Prime Minister that Argentina was probably going to take action against the Falkland Islands; three atomic-powered submarines had been ordered to proceed with all deliberate speed to the South Atlantic; one, HMS Spartan Spartan, was being loaded with live torpedoes in Gibraltar dockyard at the very moment I was walking up to the ticket counter.