Outposts Read Online Free PDF Page B

not:
     
    First, then, what is a Colony, according to the common usage of the word? The term, by the common consent of modern nations, includes every kind of distant possession, agreeing herein with the Interpretation Act of 1889, under which the term colony includes every British possession except the Channel Islands, the Isle of Man, and India.
     
    That settled it—almost. One small but important question remained before I wrote to my first friend and booked my first passage. What to do about Ireland? There had been no doubt—Act of Union or no Act of Union—that the Ireland that existed before 1921 had the feel of Empire to it. The Irish were a subject people, their status reinforced by the lowering presence of British soldiery in barracks around their country. They were subject, and then they threw off the British chains, and freed themselves, and turned their collective backs on both the Empire and the Commonwealth that took its place. Yet six counties remained, by the choice of most of their inhabitants, held by the British still: Northern Ireland has much the same legal and constitutional standing today as all Ireland did six decades ago. It is a part of the United Kingdom. It sends Members to Westminster. It is not a colony.
    But I had lived three years in Belfast, and knew reasonably well that many Ulstermen and women felt, rightly or wrongly, that theBritish hold on those six counties had something of an Imperial feel to it, and that to understand the dying days of the remnant Empire it would be right and proper to make a brief visit to the last Imperial remnant in Ireland. And so, after argument and hesitation, I decided to go there too—to try to weave a course from Anguilla to Ulster, in other words, and try to discern a common pattern to them all. It was, as I have said, a long and complicated venture.
    What follows would have a pleasant neatness were it arranged logically, ocean by ocean, marching down the lines of longitude and along the lines of latitude according to some obvious plan. But my journeys were not like that, and so nor is this account like that. And it begins, not with the colony that is closest to the mother-country—that would be Gibraltar, which a jet can reach in little more than ninety minutes from Gatwick (though in fact I walked there)—but with the colony that is, if not the most distant, then certainly the most remote.
    There are islands in the Empire that are themselves more removed from civilisation. Some of those I mentioned at the start of this chapter—Elephant Island, or Zavodovski Island—are merely notations in a colonial clerk’s ledger, and a matter of brief excitement only for oceanographers or the authors of Pilots . There is no argument that the four Southern Pacific islands of the Pitcairn group—Pitcairn herself, and the coralline knolls of Ducie, Oeno and Henderson nearby—are the uttermost parts of the populated Empire. But they have no governor, nor an administrator, nor any visiting outsider who serves to remind the forty-odd inhabitants of their colonial status.
    No, the island group that seemed to me, from my maps and charts arranged on tables and walls and on door-backs in every room of the family house, to be most precisely an outpost —a remote colonial settlement, detached, lonely, and tragic—was sited in the very centre of the Indian Ocean, three thousand miles from Africa, eight thousand miles from home. Moreover, this one colony was, because of the dark secrets buried there, a place you weren’t allowed to visit. I had asked, and had been turned down—and the refusal rankled. So one blazing May afternoon I packed my bags andsea-sick pills and set off for what the Government, in their current Imperial despatches, refer to as the Crown Colony of British Indian Ocean Territory. The rest of the world knows it by the name of the largest of its myriad islands—a fourteen mile long strip of sand and coral and palm trees named after the Portuguese who