Outposts (4 page)

The storm had died during the small hours, and when dawn broke the skies were clear enough for the sextant. We were rolling cumbrously in the long, slow swells. During the gales, which had blown for the three days since we crossed the equator, we had taken down the sails, and for this warm winter’s night we were hove-to, under bare poles.

It was 200 miles or so since we had last spotted the sun. I had only the vaguest idea of where we were. I knew it was still the Indian Ocean, of course, somewhere well south of Addu Atoll in the Maldives. But the storm might have blown us anywhere. We might even be back north of the line; it might be summer all over again.

I squinted into the sun, and took three sextant readings, sliding the sun’s lower limb as gracefully as possible against the grey plane of the horizon. Slowly I worked on the figures: Greenwich hour angle; local hour angle; declination; azimuth. I was tired, and the swell rocked me back and forth against the chart table. A pencil snapped. I cursed it then, and once again as I managed to get a piece of simple addition wrong, and had to rub out a whole column of figures. Then I remembered that the clock was eleven seconds fast and the sextant had an error of two minutes of arc, and worked anew to build these into the ever-more-entangled filigrees of arithmetic. Eventually, though, a pattern of angles emerged. Out came the plotting chart and the parallel ruler and the dividers, and I traced three parallel lines towards three dots, and drew more lines at right angles. They were, I noted with some pleased surprise, pretty close to each other: the sights had been good: now I knew where we
were, to within a mile or so. (To be pedantic, and given that the mysteries of navigation are what they are, I knew that we were at one of two points on the surface of the globe—either here, or at a place on precisely the opposite side of the globe, somewhere off the coast of Ecuador, not too far from the Panama Canal. But as the boat had been in India only a couple of weeks before, deductive logic suggested that we could hardly already be anywhere near Cotopaxi, the Galapagos Islands, or downtown Quito. We were still very much in the Indian Ocean, no doubt about it.)

I ran the rule along from the dots to the latitude scale: five degrees, twelve minutes south. Then again, down to the longitude, which read seventy-two degrees, thirty minutes east of Greenwich. I pulled what my faith suggested as the appropriate Admiralty chart—Indian Ocean, Southern Portion—from its drawer, and found the point where five degrees thirty minutes south coincides with seventy-two degrees, fifteen east.

Here in the heaving middle of the Indian Ocean, we were in British territorial waters. After ten days of sailing, after a thousand miles of doldrum, gale and trade in the highest of high seas, we had made it to one of the most remote and least remembered areas of British property anywhere on the face of the globe. A relic of the greatest Empire ever known. A tiny, blighted, forlorn morsel of dependent sea upon which swam a score and more islets still reckoned as Her Majesty’s domains.

Soon, if we sailed further west, and if the charts and my reading of them were adequately accurate, the seas should shallow, turn green and translucent, and there would be birds and the smell of land again. We were, I reckoned, but a few miles—a few hundred cables—from the possession that once was known as the Oil Islands, one of the lesser dependencies of the Crown colony of Mauritius. A generation ago this was a cheerful and prosperous little gem set in the diadem of Britain’s Imperial might. Today, under the name of British Indian Ocean Territories, and a new function (the need for the coconut oil having long since vanished, the street lamps of Mauritius now being powered by electricity), the colony lingers on, just an outpost, a faraway memorial to an extraordinary time.

Ahead of us, if my navigation had been halfway reasonable, stood the morsels scattered at the very northern tip of the Territory—Speaker’s Bank, Blenheim Reef, Salomon Atoll and Boddam Island. We set three sails, swung the tiny schooner westwards and, with freshening trade winds off the port quarter, made a course for this speck of Britain’s former glory.

Sailing is not, perhaps, as noisy a means of transport as some, but it is not quiet. The halyards creak, the sails slap, the bows hiss as they cut through the waves, and a hundred unsecured bits of would-be jetsam bump and jostle below with the endless movement of the sea. These are familiar sounds, and before long they fade into a kind of silence, noticeable only if they change in pitch or rhythm or volume.

After three hours of this muted concert, a new sound suddenly intruded. At first it was like a distant train, rumbling through a marshalling yard at night, its power magnified by the prevailing breeze. As the miles fell away it became ever louder and changed, until it was like a dull, deep-throated growl, as though some gargantuan beast were lurking in the waters ahead, full of menace. I peered into the distance, but saw nothing, just a whirling flock of petrels.

From twenty feet up the mainmast ratlines the picture was very different. The birds were flying above a long and almost unbroken line of white foam, stitched on to the horizon itself. As my eyes became accustomed I could see huge ocean curlers throw themselves on to the ragged line, breaking and hurling spray and spindrift high into the air, and booming with raw power as they did so. We edged closer and closer to the reef. Occasionally, behind the white, boiling waters, we could spy a flash of coal-black coral and, oddly vertical in this domain of the horizontal, the remnant skeletons of steel ships that had driven on to the razor-wall of rock, and had long ago been ripped apart and had died where they so unexpectedly stranded.

Below us the water was still two miles deep. A mile ahead, rising sheer from the abyss, was Blenheim Reef, ‘drying’, as the appropriate volume of the Admiralty
Pilot
puts it, ‘very rarely, but breaking always’. This, whatever the romantic attractions of discovering a monument to the Duke of Marlborough’s great victory so far from
home, was a place to avoid, and I swung the boat hard south. The reef became a slim white line on the starboard horizon, more and more broken as we sailed along its length, until just a pair of tiny rocks remained, and then it was gone, with only the growling boom evidence of its sinister existence.

But now, in its place ahead, a smudge of green. It uncoiled before us, became two smudges, then three distinct patches, then five. The green patches became trees—coconut palms, heeling over in the wind. A new line of boiling reefs appeared below the palms and, as we closed to within a mile of the shore, there were sand beaches, and, half-hidden by the barricades of palm trunks, huts of grey wood, with verandahs from which, we mused, old men sucking on their pipes were even now watching us dipping lazily through the waves towards them.

That was a fancy, we knew, having some idea of the strange history of this corner of the British Empire; but the mere presence of the old houses, brooding in the afternoon sun and yet, as I well knew, quite empty but for a few rats, crabs and rhinoceros beetles, cast a chill of sudden excitement. We rounded the reef entrance—the island at the atoll’s northern tip is called Ile de la Passe, as is the island at almost every reef entrance in every atoll in the Indian Ocean, thus making it one of the commonest of our Imperial names—and made our way, with infinite navigational caution, into the lagoon itself. Blenheim Reef may have always been a vacant plot in the Imperial landscape; Salomon Atoll, until very recently indeed, was a lively home to 300 thriving and happy subjects of the British Crown—perhaps the most isolated of all the outposts London had ever sought to control.

The lagoon was mirror-calm, and cool green. The charts showed innumerable hazards—a sandbank here, a coral head there, a channel barely a yard wide leading to this island, another ending in a cul-de-sac beside that. The dolphins cared not one whit, of course: a score of them swam out to meet us, and chirped gaily as they leaped and dived alongside, or played under the bowsprit. I had become accustomed to their habits in recent ocean nights: they would sidle up to the beam, leaving yellow trails of phosphorescent
fire, and listen—I could swear it—to our soft conversations in the cockpit. If we moved up to the bow flat, and talked there, the swimmers would edge alongside; if we stopped talking, or if only one of us stayed on deck, they would become bored with the lack of discourse, and slip away in a flash of irritated tedium, an illuminated harrumph! and try again later. If these dolphins were the clubbable beasts from the ocean then, I promised, I’d have a word with them, later.

They led us in—or so it appeared, as they were always a few inches from the bow, no matter which way we turned. As we nosed more deeply into the lagoon, and the boom of the surf quietened behind, so the scale of the atoll began to appear. Eleven distinct islands: the Ile de la Passe now a little behind on the port side; English Island on the starboard quarter; Shearwater, Jacobin, Salt, Hen, Cemetery, Devil’s, Mapor and Tatamaka Islands on the atoll’s gently curving flanks and then far ahead, at the southern tip, Boddam Island, the half square mile of territory recognised by those faraway administrators in Downing Street as being the atoll’s tiny capital.

From here Boddam looked no different from her neighbour islets—a high horizon of palm fronds, the irruption of the leafy mass of giant breadfruit trees, the occasional glint of an orange flower, or a banana fist, or a
ficus
. The beaches were short and steep, littered with branches and fallen coconuts, and with occasional outwashes of black sand where some root had become dislodged and spilled humus into the sea. Dead corals—all in a spectrum of reds ranging from the palest of pinks to the richest of carmines—lay half-buried in the shell sand, tugged at gently by the ever-lapping waters of the lagoon.

But then I began to see that Boddam was not quite the same. There was a small wooden pier jutting from a mass of bushes; a tall Calvary, overgrown with greenery, stood behind, as testament to the evident faith of the islanders; and, deep in the interior gloom, the outlines of a grand
petit château
, all fretwork and wrought iron, and seemingly brought here from the Loire a century back and left to decay among the steam and the ants of mid-ocean.

We anchored in two fathoms—a mooring accomplished only
after we had hit, and briefly stranded upon, a head of brain coral that rose unpredictably to within a yard of the surface, and of which even the dolphins were ignorant. We were not entirely alone: a small sloop from Marseille lay off the dock, and a catamaran registered in San Francisco bobbed at anchor half a mile off. The skipper rowed across to say hello: he was a postman from the suburb of San Mateo, and had left home—wife, children, dogs—to sail around the world.

‘Figured it’d take me five years to go right round,’ he grinned. ‘Only managed to get halfway, and I’m eight years behind schedule already. So damn pleasant, places like this.’ He asked how long I was staying, and when I told him a week, give or take, his grey beard shook with amused outrage. ‘Chrissake! A week! I’ve been here three months so far and I’ve only been to half the islands. This is undiscovered territory here, friend. You stay a good long time!’ And he rowed his dinghy away at a furious pace, stirring up the water and alarming small 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.