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on the north African coast knows well, a plane of Gibraltar Airways waits to carry travellers to the Rock. From there, finally, to London. I would have flown and tramped 40,000 miles; but in six months the Empire would be mine.
    In reality it all turned out a great deal more complicated. What I had hoped might occupy six months, in fact took three years. For 40,000 miles, read 100,000. And my fond belief that it might be possible to include all the remains of Empire in one eccentric circumnavigation turned out to be the most wishful of thinking. To make all the right connections, to find yachts, cargo boats, air force jets, scheduled air services, railway trains, open border gates, hydrofoils and ocean liners that went to these tiny blotches of pink that were by now outlined on a map I had pinned to the kitchen wall—to find these, and to organise them, to beg permissions andto seek new friends, to get time off and to delay deadlines (and to wait for three months while I was let out of prison—that story, which belongs elsewhere, inevitably intrudes into the narrative of one of my visits) meant that, aside from making what an American would call ‘a considerable logistical complexity’ of the whole affair, also forced me to return many times to London. So I would sally out to the West Indies and then, rather than try to travel from the Cayman Islands to Ascension Island, would return home, repack my bags, write more letters, cadge more favours, and set out south again.
    And in the end, I made it. The entire British Empire—or at least, the entire populated Empire that was still governed by resident British diplomats—was duly visited. The Imperial Progress was duly accomplished. All governors were visited (save one—an old boy from my school, who was away on furlough when I knocked on his door at Government House in Montserrat); all seals inspected, mottoes read, legislatures (where such existed) visited, lighthouses noted, hills climbed, birds photographed, islanders (for most of the colonials lived on islands) engaged in conversation.
    There were also some slight problems with definitions and remits—for in strict truth there are more islands that are dependent territories of the Crown, and which are not normally counted as colonies. The Isle of Man, as that other teatime visitor had suggested, is indeed a territory dependent upon the English Crown, and it is not a part of the United Kingdom. And it has a governor. The Channel Islands enjoy an almost exactly similar standing, too. Should I visit these, and include them in the Progress?
    I decided, after some debate with friends and diplomatists who know the details of such things, that to visit Man and Guernsey and Sark and the other islands and rocks nearby would be to introduce red herrings into the story—if only (for there is no logical argument for excluding them) because these were places that had been so closely interwoven with national British life for so many centuries that they were wholly free of any feel of Empire about them. True, there was a governor in a large mansion outside Douglas—but he and his predecessors never carried the swagger and the style of trueImperial governors about them, and his tiny territories never felt sufficiently foreign to be classed as colonies.
    My biblical authority on these questions was to be found in a delightful set of little books I discovered in the Codrington Library at All Souls College, in Oxford. (An appropriate library for colonial research, though rarely used as such: Codrington gave it to All Souls essentially as a means of salving his conscience, since he had made his fortunes slaving and sugar-dealing in the British West Indies.) The books, published in 1903, are the four volumes of C. P. Lucas’s Historical Geography of the British Colonies , preceded by Hugh Egerton’s monograph on Colonial Origins , in which I found the paragraph that settled my mind about which I could visit, and which I would