We walked together, silent and content, along the old island paths. The plane came by twice a day, morning and evening, circling, taking more pictures, reporting the various arrivals and our various doings. I built a fire one evening, and banked it with leaves and old breadfruit and coconut husks, and a thick plume of smoke rose over the island. The plane scented it within moments and roared in from the west, radars locked on and engaged. I began to feel the plane was hovering over my right shoulder, watching my every move. If I undid my shaving kit and boiled up some water, there was the Orion, swooping in to have a look; if I read a book somewhere deep in the shade, a black insect-like shape would appear on the far horizon and buzz towards me and dive so low its crew could read the page number. ‘Unauthorised civilian reading Pushkin’, would go the message, back to the Pentagon. Obvious Commie ploy.
One evening I stumbled on a tiny steel plinth set into the ground. ‘512 Specialist Team, Royal Engineers’ was engraved on the top. ‘May 1984—Survey Mark’. The Army had been on Boddam Island only a few weeks before. They might well be back. The weather was better outside, and we realised we had taken to calling the island ‘Goddam Boddam’ because of the heat, and the mosquitoes, and the arrival of yet more long-distance yachts. We decided to weigh anchor, and set sail for Diego Garcia itself, little more than a hundred miles south. Emanuelle could not understand why we were going. ‘Stay for a little while more!’ she pleaded, swimming behind us. But we waved our farewells, and swung and weaved our way out of the lagoon between the shallows and the coral-heads. The dolphins joined us near the lagoon mouth, and leaped and twisted under the bows as we started to pitch gently in the swells. I hoisted the mainsail and Ruth hoisted the head and the foresails, and we butted through a sloppy sea and into the night and a rising full moon.
The principal feature of the Chagos Archipelago is under water. The islands, such as Boddam, and Peros Banhos, the Eagle Islands and Diego Garcia may all be, in a political sense, important; but to the geographer they are almost irrelevant. The Great Chagos Bank is all that really matters—an immense circle of ocean, sixty miles across, where the water can be as little as six feet deep, which is affected by bizarre currents, strange waves, peculiar fish and birds and animals. It is a frightening place, if only because it is so unexpected. There is no land in sight, and the great glassy swells of the deep sea have given way to the riffles and chops of the shallows; this water is not blue, but light green, and coral-heads of pink and orange suddenly thrust upwards from the sand, and scratch ominously against the hull. Most ships give the bank a wide berth; the currents are unpredictable, the air is filled with crowds of birds, the sea heavy with bonito and flying fish, and an occasional white breaker suggesting a reef that could tear your hull in two. We kept to the eastern edge of the bank, with the echo-sounder on, and every time the dancing lights of the display showed less than a hundred metres below the keel, we steered further eastwards, to keep ourselves in the comfort and security of the deep.
It was shortly before dawn on our second night out from Boddam that we spotted the loom of lights of Diego Garcia. Ruth, who had an infallible eye for such things, saw it first—a vague, pale discoloration of the night horizon, the yellowish blur from a thousand lights of a small city. Otherwise the sea and the sky were black—the moon had set—and the loneliness of the setting was profound. I unwrapped the direction-finding radio and tuned in to the Diego Garcia beacon—a faint bleeping pattern of morse sounded from a few points off the starboard bow. We sheeted in the sails, edged a few degrees closer to the breeze, and made directly for this most secret of British islands.
When dawn came up, and the lights went off, so the loom of the colony vanished. But the beacon kept sounding, and by breakfast-time I could pick up a radio signal which was unmistakably American. It was Sunday morning. ‘Hi everybody!’ said the voice, crackling and fading as we dipped into troughs between the swells, ‘Hi! This is Reverend Harry of the God Squad wishing you-all a very Happy Sunday!’
And Reverend Harry, with his Oklahoma accent, his fervour and his enthusiasm, went on to catalogue the miseries and pitfalls of modern service life, and how best to avoid them. Only snatches of his sermon filtered across to us. ‘Let’s all pray for Marion, of Waxahatchie. She’s sick—and I don’t mean no cold or headache, folks. I mean major-league misery.’ ‘And now folks, don’ any of you get into drugs, d’you hear? ’Cause you drug-users are gonna die—no doubt about it. And when you die, well, man—that’s for a long, long time…’
And just in case we had any doubts, the station broadcast its identification, over and over again. ‘Yessir, this is Radio Fourteen-Eighty-Five—the American Forces Radio and Television Service, Diego Garcia, in the big wide wastes of the good ol’ Indian Ocean.’
We had gone below for breakfast, leaving the boat to steer herself. The water rumbled and chuckled under the hull—we were making good progress, and we had been doing so for about an hour when I decided to go above, and check the horizon. I very nearly fell overboard. The sea, which had been quite empty when I went
below, was now seething with ships. Two long container ships were bearing down on us from the east; there was a strangely shaped vessel, painted a brilliant white, about five miles ahead; two destroyers sailed away northwards; and heading on a direct collision course for us, and no more than a mile away, were the black, weed-covered bows of a massive ocean-going tug. A dozen men clustered around the wheelhouse, all apparently staring in our direction.
She bucked and reared in the swell, passed on our starboard quarter, and made a wide turn behind us and came alongside. She was called the
Robert W
. and was registered in Seattle. I imagined she was on charter to the Navy as the base perimeter patrol ship, and that this was as far as we were likely to get. I cursed silently. Three weeks at sea, to be turned away within sight of the place. Bloody bad luck. Ruth looked glum, too; I suspected she thought the same.
‘Where you from?’ barked a voice from the wheelhouse. We yelled our reply, and saw the entire audience react with stunned, but friendly, disbelief. These were big-ship sailors, and our little schooner must have looked too tiny to accomplish a passage across the average lake, let alone an ocean as wide and difficult as this. ‘For Chrissake! All that way in that tub!’ exclaimed the skipper. ‘You wanna beer?’ And almost as he said this, two cans of Olympia Lite Beer whistled across the green and heaving gap, each from a different member of his crew. I stopped mine, and Ruth caught hers, the tug erupted in a burst of wild applause, and we began a fifty-decibel conversation as both boats struggled to keep on course, and avoid a collision.
No, they were not on patrol; they were simply taking a group of sailors on a Sunday morning fishing expedition. As far as they were concerned we could go and crawl over Diego Garcia about as much as we wanted. ‘It’s not us who give the trouble,’ the skipper explained, with a sympathetic grin. ‘It’s the bloody limeys here. They run the place, and they’re mean as hell. But you want to get in to Diego? Well, we got a plan.’ And he went on to tell us to fake a mild emergency—‘appendicitis, engine trouble, something like
that—in fact, why not throw out all your water? They’re sure to let you in if they think you’re out.’
We had taken on six jerrycans of fresh water at Boddam—most of it not so fresh, in fact, and alive with wriggling red worms—and had plenty of spare in the bilge tanks. So we opened all the deck containers and dribbled the water out into the sea, to the ironic cheers of the tugboat crew. When the last one was empty, the skipper disappeared, and could be heard chattering on the radio. Finally he appeared again and gave a thumbs-up. ‘They’ll let you in to fill up—so come on in. Follow us!’ And he turned south, and roared off at ten knots, the skipper obviously delighted with the success of his small deception. We fell in beside his wake, let our sails fill out, cranked up our tiny Lister diesel engine to give us the extra knot or two, and made passage for Diego Garcia.
It came into view after only a few minutes, though the first sight was not of a dusting of green palm trees, but of a single white tower, and a cluster of ships’ masts. The tower was marked on the chart—‘Wht. Twr. Conspic.’—and as we came closer, and began to see the lines of palms heeling over in the wind, and the upper-works of a veritable flotilla of vessels, we could see it was a water tank, and had words stencilled on the side: ‘Welcome,’ it said, as we expected, ‘to the Footprint of Freedom’.
The reef entrance was marked by lights and buoys, and we passed two islands where there had been a leper colony a century ago. Inside, the channel was deep and wide—no danger of running aground on a coral-head, as we had with such ignominy up in Boddam. The channel had first been widened a hundred years before, when the Orient Steam Navigation Company decided to abandon Aden as a coaling station, and make Diego Garcia the main refuelling stop between the Red Sea and Cap Leeuwin.
Messrs. Lund and Company worked the coal bunker, employing forty Somalis and seventeen Europeans to operate the depot and its 15,000 tonnes of Welsh steam coal. It took about forty-eight hours to coal a liner, and the passengers were asked not to disembark, because of the ‘lack of facilities’ on the atoll. A Lund and Company official once reported great excitement among the native islanders
when the liner
Lusitania
called; generally, however, coaling staff and copra-gatherers kept themselves apart, and there has never been any persuasive evidence of Somali blood in the Diego Garcian stock.
The
Robert W
. led us to a buoy in Eclipse Bay, just beneath the water tower and no more than a hundred yards from the shore. There was a satellite dish and cluster of domes and aerials and a café, with people sitting on a verandah out over the water. They waved and I thought I heard someone inviting us over for a beer.
The tug meanwhile had tied alongside, and the cook was busily passing over to Ruth a bewildering and wonderful assortment of food and drink. For the last two weeks it had been lentils and corned beef; now we had legs of frozen pork, fresh orange juice, beer, strawberries, tinned peaches, fresh pears…until suddenly the buzz of friendly American voices gave way to the stern and unmistakable accent of a British Government official. ‘Break away, please! Break away! Her Majesty’s Government orders. Break away!’
The two men, both in khaki shorts and shirts, with their epaulettes emblazoned with the letters ‘BIOT’, stepped off a power boat and on to the tug. The crew members took immediate fright: water pipes were disconnected, hawsers were undone, springs released, bowlines untied and the
Robert W
. and
Sketty Belle
began to drift apart. The two newcomers jumped nimbly aboard the yacht and signalled to the tug to move well away. Her skipper waved to us and grimaced at the back of the two, who were now arranging themselves, and opening their government-issue briefcases, in our main cabin.
Neither man smiled. One was named John Eddington, the other Jan Gover, and they had no interest in small talk. Passports were produced, forms were pulled from cases, and all the usual questions were asked—what firearms did we carry, did either of us suffer from malaria or measles, what duty-free alcohol was on board, were we carrying cocaine or marijuana. And then Mr Gover assumed an even more stern expression and asked my profession. ‘Representative,’ I said, since that was the word on my passport. ‘Of what?’ he asked. ‘Publishing,’ I replied, thinking that sufficiently anodyne. ‘Oh yes,’ Gover scowled. ‘Publishing newspapers, by any chance. You wouldn’t be a journalist, would you?’
The game was well and truly up. Yes, I said, I was. (‘He’s admitted it!’ Gover whispered into the microphone of his radio, as though, after grilling me for three days, with liberal use of the thumbscrews and the rubber truncheon, he had finally heard me tell him where the gold was hidden.) Then Mr Eddington, the senior man, intervened. He waved a piece of typing paper, and became more formal. ‘Last January, Mr Winchester, you wrote to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, requesting permission to visit this territory.’ I nodded mutely. I had indeed written to the Commissioner, Nigel Wenban-Smith (who combined his somewhat less-than-onerous job with that of being head of the East African Department), and had received a polite, but firm refusal. Under the terms of the 1966 agreement with the United States, he said, no civilians, except those working for the Government, could travel to any of the islands. He promised to put my name on the list of applicants, but held out rather little hope.
‘Why,’ Mr Eddington thundered, clearly quite angry, ‘did you disregard the instructions of Her Majesty’s Government?’ I stifled a chuckle. It all seemed so very comical—this utterly serious conversation taking place in so tiny a cabin, piled high with frozen pigs’ legs and cartons of strawberries. I stuttered a reply. I had wanted to see if the Government’s assurances that only ‘rotating contract personnel’ lived on Diego Garcia were in fact true. I wanted to see if the graveyard still existed at Minni Minni, or if the wild horses from the islanders’ old stables still ran on the beaches by East Point, and if there were any remanent members of the clutches of Muscovy ducks and Buff Orpington chickens that some islander set free on moving day ten years before, and I wanted to see if the hibiscus still grew by the manager’s house, and if the pier still stood, from where the manager’s wife once watched ‘a giant ray, moving through the water like an animated army blanket’. I wanted to know, in short, whether our Government had been telling the truth when it took over the islands for the American forces to use, or whether the politicians had lied to the world, and dismissed the demands of the islanders like so much chaff in the wind.
All this cut no ice with Mr Eddington, and Mr Gover looked
frankly contemptuous. ‘You’ll have to go,’ he said. ‘Right away.’
But Ruth had some shots left in her locker. No, she said, she was not prepared to go. As skipper of the vessel, she had a duty to see that neither it nor her crew were likely to be in any danger at sea. There were problems with the boat. The autopilot was not working. The stern gland on the propeller shaft was leaking, and needed to be repacked and tightened. The diesel tanks were almost empty. One of the sails was badly torn and needed patching. All this would take time, she said, and a brief sojourn in a British colony would be most convenient.