Outposts (30 page)

And thus matters stand. The colony hangs on, the majority of its people—all of its whites, and most of its blacks—appearing to prefer to remain under Britain’s invigilation, if not under its control; the American Government is eager to see the island remain secure, in Allied hands, with American military needs guaranteed by treaty with a reliable friend. Only a few voices are raised in support of real independence—the matter of freedom from the colonial yoke is not one that appears significantly to interest the islanders, and would not be argued in such terms anyway.

The tourists are as unaware of this as they are of the missions of
some of the planes parked at the airport. For them, as they bounce down the gangplank from the cruise ships moored at Hamilton, or as they squeeze into taxis or wobble away on their newly acquired scooters, Bermuda’s image is just as Walt Disney might imagine a tropical England, a coral island set in an azure sea.

There are British policemen—they wear shorts. The traffic drives on the left. You can buy tea in the afternoons. Old ladies with rosy cheeks and in Liberty print dresses are much in evidence. There is a Kennel Club, a Croquet Club, a Saddle Club, a Cricket Club, a Rose Society, a Girl Guides Association, a Keep Bermuda Beautiful association and the Meals on Wheels. Two clubs (Bermuda Yacht, and Hamilton Amateur Dinghy) can call themselves ‘Royal’. There is a fine cathedral, with a British bishop, and columns carved from granite quarried in Peterhead. There are British goldfinches in the trees, and a shearwater known as a Pimlico. There is a town crier in St George’s, and it would seem that every man and woman on the islands has a set of seventeenth-century clothes kept in a chest at home, and which is put on whenever there is a fete to attend or a busload of tourists to entertain.

There was a pretty little English railway, brass bound and chuffing from one end of the island to the other; but it was closed down, and sold to British Guiana in 1947. There is a little Army, too, with scarlet uniforms and bearskins, and which will remind Americans of the redcoats whom they so roundly defeated in the colonial wars. There is the ducking stool (set in a park ornamented by a notice proclaiming ‘I am a Park with Feelings; Please do not litter me with Trash and Peelings’) and the well dug by soldiers of the Black Watch. The splendid majesty of English law can be seen on an Assize Sunday, when full bottomed wigs are put on, and the judges wear scarlet robes. There is a
Royal Gazette
, which has appeared each morning since 1823; the Queen’s head appears on the coins and the banknotes, even though pounds, shillings and pence have long been abandoned and replaced by cents and dollars which are kept at par with the United States currency, to avoid confusion.

The visitor is advised to keep to a simple routine. Step off your liner, pop into Trimingham’s (est. 1842) for a pair of Bermuda
shorts in a nice classic clan tartan, take pictures of the British bobby directing traffic on Front Street, dunk a Twinings tea bag into a Spode cup of warm water at the Princess Hotel—still painted pink, and proud to remind its customers that it served as the headquarters for Imperial Mail Censorship during the war—buy some Pringle jumpers and Royall Lime aftershave and then spend the evening dancing to Johnny McAteer’s Orchestra in the Inverurie Hotel, and looking at the view from the terrace, with all the lights and the fireflies twinkling, and waves beating gently on the coral sand, the faint streaks of phosphorescence in the cool waters…

Cynicism aside, Bermuda is, without doubt, a success. It is, generally speaking, a peaceful place—more so than many Caribbean islands nearby. There is no unemployment worth speaking of, and that in Britain’s second most populous colony (Hong Kong being the biggest, by far). It is very wealthy—the 55,000 inhabitants took home some nineteen thousand dollars each in 1983 (compared to Britain’s eight thousand dollars, and to the two hundred and sixty dollars earned by the natives of Haiti, only a few hundred miles south). And there are no pioneer industries to decay and decline—Bermuda is dedicated almost wholly to the service industries, and is as such a vision of the future to which many countries might aspire. ‘The prosperity of Bermuda,’ a friend wrote to me once, ‘was largely built on the willingness of the British and American aristocracies to pay almost any price for the opportunity to consume alcohol in a congenial warm climate.’

Other writers have claimed that apartheid, of a kind, is rampant in Bermuda; younger people dislike the social exclusivity of the place, and the strict and heavy-handed ways of the Colonial Government; you hear complaints about the Americanisation of the place, the suggestion that Bermudianism is merely an anomalous cultural hybrid, a mule of a culture, attractive in its own way but of no lasting value or use.

And yet it does seem to work; it is rich, it is as content as any place I know, and it is stable. A young black woman I met shortly before Princess Margaret arrived to preside over the anniversary celebrations put it most eloquently: ‘I hate to do it, frankly,’ she
said, in the middle of a dinner party at which all the guests had been arguing for independence, and had been saying fierce things about kicking out the American bases and declaring Bermuda a nuclear-free zone. ‘I hate to do it—but when she comes I’ll be down there waving a Union Jack as the car drives by and the Princess waves at us all. It is something instinctive. I can’t explain it. I want it to go away. But while it’s there I’ll take part. It just feels good, I guess. But I’ll feel bad the next morning.’ And everyone at the table laughed, and nodded, and said things like, ‘Right on!’

And they were indeed all out on the streets waving their flags when the Princess drove by, and the most militant of them all at that dinner was seen in a white dinner-jacket, happily applauding the Queen’s sister as she made her thank-you speech for having been made Colonel-in-Chief of the Bermuda Regiment.

‘A place where we have practised cricket diplomacy,’ a smooth young man at the Washington Embassy once said of Bermuda. ‘A place where we don’t intend to pull stumps.’ A place that has the feel of a very elegant, British-built film set; a place that is a twenty-square-mile offshore aircraft carrier, crammed with the men and materials for the prosecution of an American war. A place where, though the British may provide the pomp, the Americans, for good or ill—and most Bermudians conclude it is for good—provide the circumstance.

A free ticket for seat 14 C on the Ryan Air International Charter from Kennedy Airport to the island of Providenciales had been thrust into my hand at the last minute, and so I wasn’t about to complain; but my neighbours in seats 14 A and B? After listening to their chatter for an hour or so, they were, I thought, just a little peculiar.

He had something to do with dentistry, came from Bayonne, New Jersey, must have been about sixty and had grey hair that seemed to have been sculpted, rather than merely combed, and was brittle, and of suspiciously perfect trim. The lady who sat between us—she may have been his wife—was about ten years younger, had bleached hair and wore a frilly blouse from Laura Ashley. Both drank from a bottle of Canadian Club whisky and concentrated intently on sex magazines, and carried on a breathless and deeply distracting conversation, ripples from which spread as far as row nine in front and, I suspected, at least to the beginning of the smoking section behind.

It thus proved very difficult indeed to concentrate on Hosay Smith’s
A History of the Turks and Caicos Islands
, particularly since it appeared to be written in pidgin. All I seemed able to retain was the fact that in 1893 the Turks Islands Government had raised thirty-three pounds thirteen shillings from the sale of dog licences, but I suspect that may have lodged in my mind because at the time the woman next to me was extolling the virtues of performing what sounded singularly unpleasant and possibly illegal things to her German Shepherd, which I gathered was most definitely not the blond Bavarian who looked after the flock of Merinos she and her dental friend kept in the garden in the back of Bayonne.

So it was altogether a relief when the tone of the engines changed and we began to sweep down through the sky, and glimpsed an island and a coral reef three miles below us on the port side. It was the island of Providenciales (or Provo) in the Caicos groups, on the western end of the oldest remaining British possession in the West Indies. Everyone aboard the plane was about to have a week’s holiday in the island’s newly opened Club Mediterranée, and they gasped with delight when the captain announced the outside temperature was eighty-five degrees. It had been snowing heavily in Manhattan, and Bayonne, not a pretty place in the best of weathers, must have been one step removed from hell.

The airport at which we landed, brand new, and with the heat wafting in visible waves from its unscuffed runway, was already well-known to most reasonably informed British taxpayers. In 1981 it had been at the focus of a small scandal: the developers of Club Med had promised to build an hotel on the island providing the British Government built an airport, and paved the dirt road leading along the island to their front gate. The British agreed and coughed up five million pounds—only to suffer a torrent of abuse from Members of Parliament who, perhaps rightly, wondered why on earth taxpayers at home were having to finance a scheme on a nearly uninhabited coral island that would make huge profits for Frenchmen and give pleasant holidays to rich Americans and give no benefit whatsoever to Britain. The Government of the Turks and Caicos Islands tried to reply that their airport would bring in tourists for many other hotels, and would help bring revenue to the island coffers thereby helping the colony to become economically independent—but London was in no mood to listen, and has dealt with the colony fiercely, and at arms’ length ever since. The day I arrived there had been a message from Whitehall insisting that the islanders all pay their electricity bills immediately, or Her Majesty’s Government would want to know why. The Chief Minister was arrested in Florida for drug smuggling. And in 1986 the entire administration was dismissed by the Governor. Such are the trials of contemporary colonialism.

But the particular trial, so far as the island Governors are concerned, is that—the airport scandal aside—not one Britain in 10,000 appears ever to have heard of the colony of the Turks and Caicos Islands. It is the third largest inhabited colonial possession after the Falklands and the curious scattering of reefs south of Ceylon known as British Indian Ocean Territory (the British Antarctic is of course far larger than all the others put together, and with the British Isles thrown in for good measure, but neither has nor has had a permanent native population); it is one of the earliest discoveries in the New World, and indeed lays claim to having been found by Columbus himself, it is claimed, on his first voyage. Depending on which local account is the less incredible, he landed first on the island of East Caicos, or on the beach beside the present British Governor’s mansion on Grand Turk.

Most modern scholarship suggests in fact that Columbus made his landfall either on Cat Island or, most probably, on Watling Island, both of which are in the Bahamas chain, a hundred miles to the north-west of Grand Turk. But one of his ships, the
Pinta
, is supposed to have foundered on a Caiconian reef, and, along with hundreds of other Spanish galleons that also stranded nearby, is regularly explored by treasure-hunters. Conventional belief holds that it was Juan Ponce de Leon, searching for the fountain of youth—which turned up on Bimini—who formally discovered the islands in 1512, nearly a year before he found Florida.

The Turks—named after a local fez-like red cactus, the Turk’s head—and the Caicos, or ‘Cays’, form, with their forty-two islands and skerries, two distinct archipelagos, separated from each other, and from their neighbours (the Bahamas to the west, Hispaniola to the south) by immensely deep channels. To see the drop-off into these much-used shipping lanes is impressive enough from the air, with the water’s colour changing abruptly from the palest of greens to a vivid dark blue. But to swim out over the reef edge is a decidedly more dramatic, and a terrifying venture: I tried it one calm afternoon, lying flat on the surface with my face, suitably masked and snorkelled, below water.

The bottom was perhaps ten feet below, with pink and yellow
corals and the waving fronds of tropical water plants. Small fishes glittered and glinted in the dappled sunlight. I paddled slowly onwards, out to the open sea, keeping my eyes fixed on the magical display below. The reef was still there, close enough to touch, glistening, gleaming—until suddenly, horrifyingly, it ended. It fell away, downward and vertical, into a bottomless black chasm. In an instant there was no coral, no fish, no light—just the edge, the beginning of the deep ocean. The charts said it was two miles deep here, and I shuddered with vertigo, and swam hurriedly back to the reef edge and to the lagoon beyond.

There had been Arawak Indians on the Caicos during the ninth and tenth centuries, and archaeologists from Pennsylvania regularly find potsherds and fishhooks buried in the limestone gravel. But the Arawaks vanished, inexplicably, and it was not until 1678, when sailors from Bermuda arrived in their fast cedarwood sloops, that the basal stock of today’s 7,000 islanders was laid. The Bermudians discovered that the islands, perpetually warm, almost wholly flat, and pierced by small lakes and lagoons that had a tendency to dry in the heat, could produce one commodity of which they had little and which, moreover, they could sell: salt. An annual routine was established: Bermudians from St George’s would arrive in March, when the daytime temperatures on Grand Turk, Salt Cay and South Caicos—the only islands where they constructed salinas—were creeping up into the high eighties, and through the summer they would collect the white crystal masses and pack them in boxes. By November, at the end of the hurricane season, they would be on their way back, calling in at Charleston, or New York, or Boston, or Halifax, to sell the boxes of a salt that was said to be particularly suitable for packing beef and pork, its principal use at the time.

The salt industry was to dominate the Turks economy for three centuries. The islanders called it ‘white gold’, and many fortunes were made—negro slaves from West Africa raking in the crystals, their white Bermudian owners raking in the money. Island timekeeping was ordered by the whistle on the old Frith and Murphy steam-powered salt grinder, which blew at ten each morning and
five each night, and could be heard, on a windless day, across the sound that separated Turks from Caicos, twenty miles away.

There were salt piles on the old colonial flag, though one can be forgiven for thinking that one of the piles looks like an igloo. The London flagmaker, as ignorant of the islands then as most Londoners are today, thought the sketches—two white dome-shaped objects in front of a three-masted merchantman—referred to some far-off British possession in the Arctic—Frobisher Bay, perhaps, or Point Barrow. So, without asking anyone, he obligingly touched up the sketch by adding a door to one of the salt piles so that any Eskimo could go in and out at will; the device was duly stitched together and remained the colonial symbol for a century, until someone noticed, rubbed out the door and put two black salt rakers beside the ship to leave no room for doubt.

Salt raking was a risky business in the eighteenth century. The Bermudians were chased away by angry Spaniards from time to time, and in 1764 kidnapped by the French Navy, who then established a small settlement of their own. They told the rival powers that they had done so to stamp out piracy, and clamp down on the growing local habit of building false lighthouses, which caused shipwrecks which could then be plundered. The British would have none of it. The Bermudians were, after all, their own kith and kin, and under the principle of
civis Romanus sum
, whereby any Briton in trouble abroad, particularly at the hands of the dastardly French, was fully entitled to Crown protection. In any case by this time the British Empire itself was already firmly established in the West Indies (of which the Turks are not, technically, a part: they, like Bermuda and the Bahamas, think of themselves as Western Atlantic islands). London was moved to make a tough response, and for what was to be classically Imperial reasoning.

Although the nine square miles of Grand Turk was made merely of mud, limestone and salt and thus of no great economic consequence to Britain, the island and its sister Cays did in theory have one vital function: they commanded the sealanes from the ocean to Cuba, and to Hispaniola, and Jamaica—and control of sealanes was
central to the growing Imperial philosophy. George Grenville, the Foreign Minister, complained to the French in terms of unalloyed arrogance: ‘The islands must and shall be restored. I shall wait for nine days for your answer. If I do not receive it, the fleet now lying at Spithead shall sail directly to assert the rightful claims of Britain.’ The Falklands War thus had its antecedents; in this case, though, after a ludicrous suggestion from the French that the island be governed in a three-way condominium, with Spain, France and England each taking three square miles and building proper lighthouses, Paris capitulated, and Britain took over. A British official was sent out from the Bahamas ‘to reside there and by his residence on the spot to insure the right of the islands to His Majesty’.

One might have expected the Bermudians to be well pleased. In fact they were furious. The appointment of Andrew Symmer as representative of the King’s Governor at Nassau meant that the islands were now, in effect, dependencies of the Bahamas, and no longer belonged to Bermuda. A century later they became official dependencies of Jamaica, and then when Jamaica became independent switched back to association with the Bahamas once more. It was not until 1973, once Nassau took independence, that the islands became a fully-fledged Crown colony on their own; Bermuda hasn’t had any official connection with the islands since 1764.

Up to this point the Caicos Islands had remained uninhabited, but for turtles and, down on South Caicos, the salt rakers who built a settlement called Cockburn Harbour. But the American War of Independence changed that, very suddenly. Flotillas of small boats brought hundreds of Loyalists out from the coast of Georgia: most settled in the Bahamas, but a number, with their slaves, made it out to Providenciales, and to North and Middle Caicos, and farmed cotton; but weevils, drought and, in 1811, a devastating hurricane that destroyed all the plantations, forced them to abandon the islands: only the negroes were left to get on with it, sinking rapidly into what one writer noted was ‘a state little short of savagery’. The Caicos Islands remained the poor relation of the group, although the brief prosperity the salt rakers of the Turks enjoyed (at one stage during the American Wars salt was making forty-eight dollars a ton)
fell back during the nineteenth century, and the colony subsided gently, an impoverished backwater, overlooked by London, ignored and forgotten.

The islanders, nearly all descendants of the slaves, have tried gamely ever since to make a living. They gathered sponges from the Caicos reefs, helped by divers from Kalymnos, one of the Greek Dodecanesian Islands, who were experts in sponge diving off the coast of Libya. The conch—various varieties, such as the Florida horse conch, the queen conch and the clam eating lightning conch—was harvested, and still is, by divers who can stay under water for two minutes on one breath. Lobsters and crabs, too, provided an income; and today there is considerable optimism that the spider crab, fed on plates of algae, will flourish, and provide crabmeat for the gigantic American market.

The Smithsonian Institution from Washington, using a drug-smuggling boat that was captured by the local police, have been carrying out experiments with different kinds of crabs; the boat is crewed by a posse of girls from the Peace Corps, who seem to prefer the idea of diving off Grand Turk to some of the tougher tasks the Corps hands out.

But generally the islands have suffered—either from neglect, or from that invariable error of the Imperial design, the one-crop economy. Whatever efforts have been made to rear conch and lobster, crabs or cotton, they have been minimal compared to the colony’s reliance on salt. And when, in 1964, the Bahamians established a massive, fully mechanised salt plant, mechanically raked, with a deep-water port for the ships that would collect it, the Turks economy collapsed—just as the St Helenian economy collapsed when demand for flax evaporated, just as the Gibraltarian economy did when the Admiralty closed the local dockyard. The islands present a sorry sight today.