Outposts Read Online Free Page A

mere dependencies of Jamaica, but Jamaica had gone her own way now, and the Caymans stood colonially alone, their islanders proud to be British in the Caribbean Sea.
    The Falkland Islands we knew a little about: the son of the Port Stanley harbourmaster had been in my class at school, and he used to tell me stories of the storms and the moorland and the sheep, and how he longed to go back to the peace of it all during the summer holidays, even though it was winter ‘down there’. He had not spent an Easter or a Christmas in the Falklands since he had been sent off to England for his schooling, and that bothered him, as I remember.
    There were the Falkland Islands dependencies, too—memories of stamp collecting, and the Stanley Gibbons Catalogue, the thickest book a schoolboy ever owned, came flooding back. The dependencies had always issued colourful stamps, with maps outlined in orange, and sketches of seals and enormous polar birds.
    But there were still more. We ran Gibraltar and Hong Kong. We administered Montserrat and the Pitcairn Islands, as well as the exile-island of St Helena, where Napoleon Bonaparte spent the last six miserable years of his life. We had charge of the volcanic morsel of Tristan da Cunha, which had been evacuated in the 1960s when one of the cones suddenly erupted. The islanders, who knew little of ‘civilised’ life, were all brought to Britain, but loathed the place, and eventually decided that, volcano or not, they would all go back home.
    And finally, in this alphabetic list, one colony of which no one in the room seemed to have heard: the Turks and Caicos Islands, utterly overlooked and puzzlingly named, and set in the pleasant waters of the western Atlantic, not far from the Bahamas, 200 miles from Florida.
    So, from Anguilla to Grand Turk, just sixteen groups of rocks and atolls and ice-islands were still officially classified as ours, as dependent territories of the British Crown. Not a massive Empire, maybe, but an Empire nonetheless, and more than any other Imperial power of the past had managed to cling on to, were that anything of which to be particularly proud.
     
    But there are lesser islands, too—chunks of rock and ice and coral not large enough to be listed in the gazetteers of the relict Empire, morsels and specks found only on the maps, in the charts, in the sailing directions and in the catalogues furnished by the Directorate of the Overseas Survey, and the Defence Mapping Agency of America, who keep tabs on all the world’s dry land, and who, from day to day, claims to own it. So there are many such—many more than even the keenest student of political geography might suppose.
    At the time of writing it seems that Her Majesty’s writ runs in some 200 named islands of any size, and a thousand smaller rocks and skerries besides. But it is in the fine print of the gazetteers that the true extent of Her Majesty’s realms becomes clear. ‘Citizen of United Kingdom and Colonies’ say the blue-and-gold passports. How many bearers are aware that they are, by virtue of holding such a document, subjects of the British Crown and, technically, proud citizens also of an Empire that includes the island of Zavodovski, the rock of Stoltenhoff, of Elephant Island, Junk Island, of Spectacle Reef and Prickly Pear Cay?
    Tireless administrators can still, if their tasks allow, outline in Imperial pink the perimeters of two Dogs, a Swan, a Hen, a Parrot, an Eagle, a Bosun Bird, a Sealion, a Rabbit, a Nightingale, a Shag, a Carcass and a Rat. There are islands called Alpha, Gamma and Lamda; there are skerries named after Robert, George, Peter, Norman and Nelly. London salutes in islet form the memories of Nelson, Henderson, Livingston, Hawkins, Golding, Willis and Pickersgill. Union flags can still, in theory and in good weather, fly proudly over Coronation, King George, English and St George’s. The Royal Navy may by right lie less than three miles off Inaccessible, Astrolabe, and