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Guiana.
    From one end of the world to the other railway stations and dockyards and libraries and botanical gardens and Jubilee Memorial Halls served to remind us of what the Empire had given to her subject peoples. (And there were historical tracts by the ton reminding us what the Empire had taken from these same peoples, and how barbaric and wicked an arrangement it had all been.)
    But these were all memories of the thing, reminders—premature,maybe, but reminders of a sort—that the Empire had quite passed away. Only, as Whitaker’s had so concisely shown, it hadn’t, quite. Perhaps, I fancied, the still-living, just-breathing Empire was to be found in these sixteen distant dots. Its life might be drawing peacefully to a close, but it might yet be possible to capture one last vision, hear one last remark, sense one final exhalation of pride, watch one small finale to the glories that once had been. I made up my mind to go, to make what in Victorian times would have been called ‘an Imperial Progress, an Inspection Tour’, to check up—half for the memory of old King George—exactly how was the blessed Empire, what was the state of the fragments that remained.
     
    Out came the timetables and the shipping calendars and the Cook’s Continentals and the Admiralty Pilots . I pored and checked my way around the Imperial world, working out how it might be possible to make a single journey that would take in every colony that remained. It became clear uncomfortably quickly that the journey would not be easy.
    Some colonies were not blessed with aerodromes—not St Helena for example, nor Tristan da Cunha. There was no simple way of getting to the Pitcairn Islands, in mid-Pacific (population forty-four), and it was strictly forbidden for anyone to go to the Chagos Islands, the sole members of the high-falutin’ arrangement known as British Indian Ocean Territory.
    Ascension Island was similarly difficult to reach—it belonged to the military, was administered by—of all people—the BBC, was on part loan to the American Navy and was loaded to the gunwales with secret electronics: strangers were discouraged, though not absolutely forbidden.
    But my first draft plan disregarded the Cassandras. I felt that, with some perseverance and a great deal of good fortune, I might girdle the world and take in every British possession inside six long months. I would fly from London to Bermuda—no problem here, since British Airways transports thousands of sunbathers there each year. Then I would fly on to the nearest neighbour-colony, the Turks and Caicos Islands; thence to the other Caribbean possessions—theVirgin Islands, Anguilla, Montserrat and the Caymans. Next—and here was a cunning move, easy to formulate at an Oxford desktop—I would travel from the Cayman Islands to the one-time colony (but now no longer) of Antigua, and catch the once-weekly American Navy plane that I knew took supplies across the ocean to the forces on Ascension.
    Now I was on the eastern side of the Atlantic, and fully able to wander down at will, aboard such ships as might tramp by, to St Helena, Tristan, the Falkland Islands, South Georgia and the Antarctic bases. I would, of course, be sure to set out from England in the winter: not only would the West Indies thus provide a welcome relief from the cold, but down in the southern latitudes it would be summer, and there would be no problems with bad weather, or with ice.
    From Antarctica it would be but a short step to Chile, to an airfield where I could catch a plane to Panama. A passing freighter would then whisk me smartly to Pitcairn Island, and would take me on to Fiji from where I could take yet more planes to Hong Kong. Down then to Singapore, on to another American warplane—how very generous these Americans were going to be!—to their Chagos Island base on the atoll of Diego Garcia—and then, via their good offices once more, on to Bahrein and Tangier. And at Tangier, as every traveller