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such stranded men solace, a Bible, presented by the Scottish Commercial Travellers’ Christian Union, was tucked in with the food. As a final act the helicopter crew from Endurance raised yet another Union flag, though since the halyards had been destroyed it could only flutter at half mast, where it possibly remains to this day, whipped by the freezing winds, to declare to all the world that this minute speck of worthless land is British, and that, as stated in the best-known of all British Imperial axioms, ‘What we have, we hold.’
     
    The story intrigued me, for one reason above all. I had thought—to the extent that I had ever thought about the matter at all since schooldays—that we had no longer had an Empire. I had watched so many television newsreels, I thought, about this place being made independent, and that place, and this island, and that peninsula, with this member of the royal family going here, and that one there…surely, I had said to myself—surely it was all gone. And yet, if this story were true, we still had some sort of an Empire out there, and what was more, it was still big enough and complicated enough and still so far-flung and unruly and unmanageable that we occasionally misplaced, misfiled or plain forgot some of its more remotemembers, and didn’t worry too much if someone else took a fancy to them, invaded them, and took them away.
    What others did we have? How, as King George V is believed to have inquired from his deathbed—how is the Empire? And not just how—what was the Empire, and where, indeed, its members?
    Here came the fateful step. I had raised the question in a roomful of friends: which—it was rather like one of those baffling queries from ‘Trivial Pursuit’—which were the colonies still run, at heaven’s command, from London? No one was quite sure. Fiji, someone ventured—wasn’t Fiji ‘one of ours’? And what about Tonga, and the Isle of Man, and didn’t we still have Christmas Island? In fact weren’t there two Christmas Islands, and didn’t both belong to us?
    Then someone remembered she had an uncle who worked on a cable station that was still British—Assumption Island, she said, a name like that. No wait, Ascension, that was it! ‘Gibraltar!’ somebody else piped up. ‘Malta—and Cyprus!’ said a third.
    To the atlas, but the maps had been drawn in the early Seventies and were long out of date. Thin red lines were etched under some dozens of mid-ocean islands that I knew—even if my visitors did not—had long since become free of what their islanders had come to regard as the British yoke. The tides had ebbed from the high-water mark of Empire far too rapidly for the cartographers at Bartholomew or Oxford to capture, and so their maps, while no doubt topographically accurate, were monuments for the nostalgic, tempting us to assume that our Imperial manor was far grander than reality allowed.
    It was Whitaker’s Almanack that finally did the trick. There were just eight pages, sandwiched between the statistics of cattle ownership in Zimbabwe and the name of the Chancellor of the University of Adelaide—for how, indeed, had the Empire faded away!
    They were in alphabetical order, the forgotten names of Imperial might. There was Anguilla, set in the shallows of the Caribbean Sea. There was—the visitor had been quite right—Ascension Island, tucked into the fold of Africa in the equatorial Atlantic. Bermuda still belonged, and had like most of the others a colonial governor, noted by the Almanack as being a peer of the realm. British AntarcticTerritory was still ours, though only penguins lived there full-time, and there was no native population, and no government. We had a curious entity known as the British Indian Ocean Territory, and another, less curiously named, and more Imperially enticing in the British Virgin Islands.
    There was the Crown colony of the Cayman Islands—these three clumps of coral had, at the zenith of the Empire, been