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density of population was 36.8 to the square mile, compared with 373.3 at home in Britain, and there was room for every sort of wildness: the aboriginal mothers of Australia habitually ate their new-born children, the Gonds of Nagpur worshipped serpents and the smallpox. In every continent men of British stock and nationality were still extending the limits of the Pax Britannica, into territories that grew wilder and less hospitable as they grew scarcer. In Africa they were pressing up the Nile, across the Zambesi, inland from the Gold Coast and the mouth of the Niger. In Asia they had recently moved into Upper Burma, North Borneo, and many islands of the South Pacific. In the south they were penetrating the miserable heartland of Australia, and ih the west the Klondike gold rush was luring thousands of prospectors into the Yukon. This was the moving frontier of the British, the uncompleted adventure.
    Then there were the islands, fortresses and coaling stations, strung out along the shipping lanes. Gibraltar, Malta, Aden, Singapore and Hong Kong stood along the orient route. St Lucia guarded the West Indies, Bermuda lay in mid-Atlantic, Halifax in Nova Scotia was the home of one British squadron, Esquimalt in British Columbia the base of another. Everywhere British ships could berth in British harbours, stock up with British coal, replenish their supplies of British beer or biscuits, paint their hulls with British paint, pick up their instructions from British cable stations beneath the protection of British guns. In every sea a ragbag of islands announced the imperial presence: islands close at home, like the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man, which were technically not parcel of the realm, but overseas possessions; petty islands of the south Atlantic, like St Helena where Napoleon died, or Ascension where the Lord Mayor of London’s turtles came from; desert islands like Perim or Socotra; high-sounding islands like the Solomons, the Spice Islands or the Leewards; islands everyone hankered after, like the Bahamas or the Seychelles, and islands that nobody had ever heard of, like the Chagos Islands, or Dudosa; islands as big as Newfoundland or as infinitesimal as Diamond Rock, a granite lump in the Caribbean which had been garrisoned by the Navy in the Napoleonic Wars, and given the prefix ‘H.M.S.’. There were valuable islands, useless islands, heavenly islands, ghastly islands. Barbados was claimed to be the mostdensely populated island on the globe. Bermuda lived chiefly by supplying early vegetables to the city of New York. For the possession of the island of Cyprus the British paid £ 92,800 a year in tribute to the Sublime Porte, together with 4,166,220 okes of salt—fortunately more than covered anyway by repayments on a British loan to Turkey made forty years before.
    Many of these strongpoints and outposts stood on the road to India, the grandest of the imperial possessions. India was different in kind from the rest of the Empire—British for so long that it had become part of the national consciousness, so immense that it really formed, with Britain itself, the second focus of a dual power. If much of the Empire was a blank in British minds, India meant something to everybody, from the Queen herself with her Hindu menservants to the humblest family whose ne’er-do-well brother, long before, had sailed away to lose himself in the barracks of Cawnpore. India was the brightest gem, the Raj, part of the order of things: to a people of the drizzly north, the possession of such a country was like some marvel in the house, a caged phoenix perhaps, or the portrait of some fabulously endowed if distant relative. India appealed to the British love of pageantry and fairy-tale, and to most people the destinies of the two countries seemed not merely intertwined, but indissoluble.
    And finally there were the white colonial settlements, for many Britons the core and real point of their Empire. Into almost every temperate