Outposts by Simon Winchester Read Free Book Online

schools of silvery fish.
    He stayed on his boat for the rest of the week, as did, for most of the time, the young couple from France. They had some mysterious problem with their engine, and laboured all day, covered in grease and sweat. The man rarely swam over to the island—though the girl, a lithe and dusky creature from Paris, sometimes came ashore for coconuts. I would find her in a clearing, machete in one hand, a fresh coconut to her lips, drinking the milk. She giggled when she saw me, and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. ‘You like some?’ she would ask, and offer the green globe, neatly cut at the top. It was very hot, and the liquid was cool and soothing, especially when it spilled from the sides of the cut and down on my chest. ‘Feel good, no?’ she would ask, and then run back to the tree, and climb the trunk with all the agility of Mowgli, and thwack! and thud! with her knife until a small pile of fresh nuts lay on the sea-grass below. ‘Take what you want,’ she would offer. ‘Now I go to get some limes. Have you found the chickens yet?’
    Once there had been chickens on Boddam Island. There had been a great many chickens, and pigs, and donkeys, and people.Some 289 islanders at the last count, made in 1966. Almost all of them had been British subjects, and loyal subjects at that: a visitor in 1955 noted that the islanders were ‘lavish with their Union Jacks’, and a choir had sung a ragged version of the National Anthem to him, heavily accented in French.
    A long time ago there had been a plan to turn Boddam Island into the greatest free port in the entire Indian Ocean—a port to rival Hong Kong, and where all transoceanic liners would be bound to call so their passengers could buy silks and perfumes and wines—and coconut milk and coir placemats. But nothing came of it, and the islanders continued with their unending attentions to the products of the coco palm—oil, copra, milk and wood—and dispatched them all to the north isle of Mauritius, 1,200 miles away to the south-west.
    At the end of the Sixties something very strange happened to the people of Boddam Island, and to their neighbours, too. Exactly what fate befell them belongs to a later chapter; its consequence, though, is what now remains—an utterly deserted desert island, yet reliquary to an old town that still clings on, wind-torn and ravaged, but recognisable—inhabitable, even—in the tiny palm jungle.
    There is a main street, lined with little cottages. A church, roofless, but made of coral rock and with its stained-glass still in place, stands in a clearing. The cemetery records the deaths of islanders through the two centuries of habitation: a Mrs Thompson died there in 1932, though in what circumstances her tomb does not record. There is a small railway, and a couple of little trucks I found I could just push through the shards of accumulated rust. A long warehouse, lined with jars and hooks and old tin boxes, stands at the end of the track.
    And, behind a low wall, ringed by flower beds that had long since resumed their feral patterns, a mansion. This was clearly where the man who ran the island—or woman, it being a woman who had the idea of turning Boddam into a free port—made his home. It was once a rather splendid place: three floors, verandahs, balconies, shuttered windows, a pergola by the lawn. Now the whole place sagged at an alarming angle; when I climbed up the main staircasethe house shook, and when I climbed down the stairs collapsed with a roar and in a cloud of grey wood-dust, and I had to jump the last six feet.
    Not long ago a family had lived here. It had been a simple life, undemanding, pleasant. There had been no grand balls or diplomatic receptions at this corner of the Empire; but no doubt they had raised a glass on the occasion of the Queen’s birthday. Once in a while there was a radio message from London; and a ship would come every couple of months to collect the oil and the copra;