Outposts by Simon Winchester Read Free Book Online Page A

and perhaps every three years His Excellency the Governor would come in his launch, and the children would be lavish with their flags and sing the one English song they knew to him.
    But there was little evidence of that today. Tacked to the wall of one cottage I found a photograph of a debutante that had been cut from a copy of Country Life —a rather stern-looking girl from Wiltshire. And in another bungalow, four volumes of The Times History of the War , mildewed and yellow with age, but readable still, and with portraits of Kitchener, and stirring accounts of the Somme.
    Boddam was always a small cog in the Imperial machine—one of the least islands of a lesser dependency of a colony whose best-known inhabitant—the dodo—had become a symbol of the extinct. And yet the island, though apparently dead and inhabited by ghosts, still remains today in London’s charge, still vexes the occasional civil servant. One might suppose it does not vex him much, since it has no permanent inhabitants, and thus neither products nor needs; but it is, incontrovertibly, a piece of British territory for which the Crown is responsible and which ultimately, one might suppose further, a government in London would still wish to protect and defend with a degree of passion, verve and style.
    In fact, in the specific case of Boddam Island and her neighbours—and in particular one neighbour a few hours’ sailing time away to the south—London wishes rather more than that. The colony of British Indian Ocean Territory, which spreads in a wild profusion of atolls and lagoons and reefs over twenty-one thousand square miles of ocean, is at the same time one of the least-known, and inmany ways the most important of those that are left. It is a place of great beauty, and until recently it enjoyed the perfect peace of a tropic backwater, unremembered, but unencumbered. However today it is all very different. It is a place of considerable and unnecessary sadness—a territory wrapped in official mystery and internationally directed secrecy, its people and its history victims of a wretched and all-too-little-known scandal. Although its official title is the British Indian Ocean Territory its repute stems from the name of one very large island at the southern tip of the colony, a hundred miles from Boddam, and first discovered four centuries ago by a Portuguese sailor who gave it his name: Diego Garcia.
    It is the only colonial possession which it is not legally possible for ordinary civilians to visit—unless they have government permission, which is seldom given. To get there I had to sail for some three weeks in a tiny and comfortless schooner. When I arrived I was brusquely shown the door, and only managed to stay for a few hours. It is not a place whose charms and problems Britain wishes to have advertised around the world. And small wonder, for the history of Britain and her Indian Ocean Territory is an unattractive story at best, and to many critics is a saga of terrible cruelty, best forgotten and wisest ignored.
    The background is more complicated than it ought to be and involves, initially, the two large Indian Ocean islands of Mauritius (famous for the dodo) and the Seychelles (best known for a remarkable type of coconut which is formed in the shape of the female buttocks). Both islands were made British colonies in 1814 under the terms of the Treaty of Paris; at first the Seychelles was a dependency of Mauritius, and then, in 1903, it became a fully-fledged colony in its own right.
    The two colonies also looked after a number of distant barely populated tropical islands as dependencies. The Seychelles Governor had under his wing such obscure Imperial particles as Desroches Island, a sandy spit planted with 800 acres of coconut palms; Aldabra, known for its giant tortoises, frigate birds, and sacred ibises; and the Farquhar Group, just to the north of Madagascar. Mauritius cared for the minute rock of Rodriguez, 200 miles to theeast; and the