Outposts Read Online Free Page B

Shelter.
    There is an Isle Parasole that is British. There are two islands of the Empire, rather inconveniently close to each other, both named I’lle Anglaise. Westminster presides in ultimate authority over Three Brothers, a Necker and a Virgin, one Lively, one Barren, one a Danger. British civil servants in Whitehall have technical authority over the fates of places with the unfamiliar names of Po Toi and Shek Kwu Chau, Jost van Dyke and Visokoi, Takamaka, Beauchene and Providenciales.
    And, in a serried line stretching through the freezing seas from fifty-six degrees south to the formal boundary of the Antarctic, at latitude sixty, the rocky outcrops of South Sandwich—Leskov, Candlemas, Saunders, Montagu, Bristol, Cook and, most vulnerable of all, the dependent colonial Island of Southern Thule.
    We still had, it seemed, dominion over palm and pine.
     
    No, not a bad collection, someone said. And was it not true—yes, it was! we discovered as we studied the maps—that thanks to happy coincidences of history and geography the islands and peninsulas that Britain had not given up were still draped around the oceans and the time zones in such a way that it was still technically correct to say that the sun never sets on the Crown dominions. While it was sinking into the sea over one island in the West Atlantic so, at that same moment, it was rising to a bugle call and a flag-hoisting ceremony half a world away, in the Indian Ocean, or the China Sea.
    It was a small and ragged sort of Empire now, no match for that great assemblage of peoples and races—a quarter of mankind, a quarter of the land surface of the globe—over which Victoria had reigned with such supposed benevolence and wisdom. Four hundred million people were, at the moment of Victoria’s Jubilee in 1897, subject to her whim and fancy (tempered by English law, proud tradition and good, old-fashioned common sense). Great nation-states, or nations-in-the-making—India, Canada, Australia, South Africa—were governed from Whitehall by her servants, in her name. Oscar Wilde had noted that England was a land ‘Before whose feet the world divides’ and few could be found who would quarrel with the notion.
    But today none give the Empire, even though it exists in shrunken form, so much as a thought. No world divides before Britannia’s feet. The United Kingdom, mighty though she sounds, commands little might, wields little power, can number only a few subjects in her sovereign territories. I thumbed through the Almanack and did a little mental arithmetic—at the time of the last colonial census, in 1981, there were 5,248,728 people who could justly be called citizens of the Crown colonies—an eightieth of the number noted just fifty years before. And 5,120,000 of those lived in Hong Kong. The remaining fifteen possessions held just 128,000 colonials.
    Might it be possible, I mused, to visit all these places and catch, possibly for the very last time before progress and political reality snuffed it out for ever, something of the spirit of the old Imperial ambition—to see what remained, and find out what it had all been like, and why it had been so grand, why it had lasted so long, why it had died so quickly, but yet had seemingly refused to die completely?
    Were there really still governors out there somewhere, with their blanco’d topees and plumes of goose feather in white and scarlet? Did British civil servants still look after our far-flung dominions with a sense of romantic fascination, privilege and pride? Was there a little of the colour and pomp and swagger and—dare I say it—the style of the old Empire to be found in these forgotten specks left scattered through the seas? I had been in India, and had sensed the Empire in the cool marble of Curzon and the bold sandstone of Lutyens. I had felt it in the echoing halls of Ottawa’s parliament, in great cathedrals in Africa, in fretworked bungalows in jungle hill stations from Malaya to