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  She arrived later in the afternoon—a strong, handsome Australian girl, blue eyes, a deep tan, and a glowing smile a yard wide. She was twenty-seven years old, with all the wisdom of a seafarer. Her story was a true contemporary romance: she had run away to sea nine years before: she had found herself in Port Moresby one summer, met an English sailor who suggested she might like to go cruising, and embarked on an eighty-eight-day voyage across the Indian Ocean which finished in Cape Town. By then, she laughed, her teeth were loose in their sockets and she had all the symptoms of incipient scurvy—but she had discovered that she loved sailing more than anything else in the world, and vowed to herself she would do anything to buy herself her own boat. So she went home to Australia, worked as a cook for a seismic crew in the Northern Territories outback, did six months as a jillaroo on a Western Australian sheep station, washed dishes, waited at table, skimped and saved and in five long years found for herself, and bought, this home-made, steel-hulled, gaff-rigged little beauty of a boat with its monumentally but unforgettably ugly name. A Queensland railwayman had built her in his back garden, and had inscribed the bill of sale in the fine copperplate of a Victorian: she was, he promised Ruth, a proud little craft, she would go anywhere, take on any weather, anywhere in the world.

  And so Ruth had begun to sail little Sketty around the world—she had left from a small gypsum-mining town by the Gulf of Carpentaria, had sailed up to Christmas Island, then on to Cocos-Keeling, the old cable station and private fiefdom of the Scots Clunies-Ross family, up and across to Galle, at the southern tip of Sri Lanka, then north once more to Cochin and finally down to Male, the capital of the Maldives. Her plan from there was to go down to the Chagos Islands, across to Mombasa, past Aden to the Red Sea, via Suez to the Mediterranean and to sidle through the French canals, over the Channel, and up to London. From there a quick run down to the Caribbean and Panama, a long trek over to Tahiti, and then finally via Tonga and New Caledonia back home to Sydney, then to North Queensland, and the Gulf of Carpentaria once again. Five years should do it, she thought; and then she would get a job.

  I liked her from the start. She was generous, sweet-tempered, enthusiastic, but cautious—an excellent sailor, an adventurer, an amiable soul. (She had been particularly, and characteristically, kind to the man I had seen on the boat: he was a Turk, a Gastarbeiter from Hamburg whom Ruth had met on the plane. He had nowhere to stay, and so Ruth gave him room on the boat, until it was time to leave for the south.)

  There was some opposition to our plan from among Ruth’s fellow yachtsmen. They knew I was planning to write about Diego Garcia, and feared that by going there I would cause them needless trouble. A Frenchman named Ivan, who had been sailing a big catamaran around the world for the past three years, remarked that the Chagos Islands were among the most beautiful and unspoiled places on earth, and there seemed an unwritten and unspoken assumption that the yachting community could visit the northernmost atolls, and bask in the peace and loveliness of it all. My trip, he was afraid, might well bring down some ukase from the British Government, forbidding any more visits, and enforcing the prohibition with naval patrols, and visits from the troops. He said he understood that it was right for the plight of the islanders to be written about, and that he knew he was expressing a selfish desire, to keep the islands pristine for the visiting cruising yachts. ‘All you say may be true, but you have to remember one thing, Simon,’ he kept saying to me one evening, as we sipped Ricards and watched the sun slip down behind the reef. ‘These islands of the Chagos—they are our diamonds, Simon. These are our diamonds. Don’t make them take our diamonds away.’

  But Ruth and I left one evening a week later, and the yachtsmen’s grumbles faded into the booming of the surf. Sketty settled down to a steady four knots, stretching her legs in the north-east trades, and loping down to the equator. We passed Addu Atoll, where Gan airfield had been, six days after leaving; we ran into the typical equatorial calms, and were blown about wildly by storms for three days and nights. But ten days out of the Maldivian capital, after we had skirted well to the south of a ragged and ugly-looking reef whose white razor-edge showed the black remnants of hulls that had come to grief, we spotted palm trees and coral and sand: Salomon Atoll, the most northerly inhabited island of British Indian Ocean Territory—a place where, just a dozen years before our visit, there had been a thriving little community of (the census reported) 289 men, women and children.

  This was the legendary land of Limuria—the relict peaks of that huge southern supercontinent of Gondwanaland, left floating in mid-ocean long after India and South America, Australia, Africa and Arabia had split away, and so tiny and so remote that for many years they were supposed only to exist in the imagination of the cartographers. A British sea-captain, James Dewar, is said to have first spotted the Salomon Islands from the bridge of his cutter, The Speake; then Captain Bourde of the French merchantman Salomon, who was on the trade run between Port Louis and Pondicherry, stopped by for fresh fruit and gave the islands a name and inscribed them on the chart. A second Frenchman named Dufresne marked them down for settlement; but he was eaten by cannibals in New Zealand, and the plan was abandoned.

  We eased our way through the reefs and into the lagoon. Ten of the eleven islands of the atoll had never been inhabited, according to the chart and the Pilot; Boddam Island, the most distant from the reef entrance, had a pier and a clutch of buildings. When Salomon sported its tiny industry, and its village-sized population, Boddam was the capital, and so it was there that we anchored, fifty feet from the shore. The old pier, warped and sagging, jutted from a wild mass of sea-grape trees, and a batten of timber clacked rhythmically against one of the old pilings. The moon rose, the sea darkened, the palms turned silver-grey, and there was a glint from a window-pane in a building I had not seen in daylight. This was an island ghost, with the feel of ghosts still very much about it.

  Next morning I rowed ashore. I beached the dinghy in a tiny bay, and stepped through an archway of palm leaves, and into an old back garden. Here was a greenhouse, with a few dozen panes still in place; there a brick outhouse, an old bicycle, some rusting tins, a garden fork. The lines of flower beds could still be made out, and the pattern of a lawn. At the top was a cottage, its roof broken, its floors rotting. I poked around inside: there was an old copy of a novel by Pushkin, in German, and a great number of shards of broken glass. Hermit crabs scuttled around on the floor, leaving trails in the dust as they heaved their shells to safety in the dark corners of the room.

  I found a narrow railway track, and then, hidden under the fronds of a dead palm, a small and rusting wagon. Then a long warehouse, and a collection of knives that the workers must have used to cut the coconuts. They were thick with rust, and insects seemed to have burrowed into their handles. Nearby, half-buried in soft tropical humus, were the great iron vessels and wheels of the industry—the very reason why these were once called ‘the Oil Islands’, and the machines from which came the oil that lit the fancy Regency lamp standards in the streets of Port Louis.

  I had read an old account of how the islanders had made the oil. They would spend their days gathering the nuts—climbing the great trees, hurling the nuts down to the collectors below—cracking off the husks, splitting the nuts and laying them, flesh-side upwards, in the drying sun. They would arrange them in blocks, eight yards square—3,000 nuts in each square. After a weekend in the heat the flesh would peel away from the shells, and the women would strip it away, rather in the same way women in the Arctic strip the flesh of a seal, and leave the meat for the men to prepare.

  Here in Boddam the men, working under shelters built of palm fibre, would pile the coconut flesh into flame-hardened wooden vessels, each one shaped like an hour-glass and sunk deep into the ground. A teak pestle, case-hardened by baking over endless campfires, would then be thrust into the soft pile of flesh and, using island mules, would be turned, hour after hour, squeezing the rich oil down into the hour-glass neck, and via a networ
k of pipes and runnels, into a collecting vat. Six hours of mule-work would crush four hundred pounds of copra, and an average of seventeen veltes of oil would drip into the tanks to be taken off by lighter to the waiting freighter. The islanders put much of their oil aboard the ‘floating charabanc’, as they liked to call it, the SS Zambezia, which could reach Port Louis in four days.

  But the relics that I found, under a huge airy roof of palm, were more modern: they hadn’t used mules and hardwood pestle-and-mortar sets on this estate for many years. These ruins were of a vast steam engine, with boilers and cast-iron crushers and a cog wheel ten feet tall. I was told later that the machinery had been imported from Ceylon. They must have been making hundreds of veltes of oil on Boddam when the Foreign Office decided to close the island down: it seemed to have been quite a prosperous little place.

  There was the ruin of an old shop along one overgrown street: scraps of paper showed they had once sold trousers, mirrors, bottles of claret and tins of sardines. There was nothing left now except for the cracked marble gravestone of the woman named Mary Thompson, who had died on Boddam in 1932. The walls were covered with the graffiti of ten years of visiting yachtsmen, and someone had drawn a map showing where the orange trees were, and the breadfruit, and the fresh water wells. Someone had found some chickens a few months before, and there was an earnest plea, in French, for visitors to feed them; we left plenty of bread and peelings for them, but never saw them. It is said they had gone native, and lived in the palms, pecking at the hermit crabs as they scuttled by below.

  I found the melancholy of this deserted paradise beguiling, and we stayed for many days, exploring the long sweeping coastline, wandering through the dozens of empty buildings, watching the sun drift down through the magnificent surfstorms on the oceanside of the island. I loved the grand old French colonial house that had been built for the Administrator—balconies and fretwork, carved stairways and a broad verandah for the evening Gitane and the glass of marc. Although this has for the last two centuries been—and of course is still—a British possession, Boddam and its few hundred islanders thought and behaved as French men and women. The French had discovered and named the islands, the French had started the copra industry, the French had colonised Mauritius. It was only the provision of the Treaty of Paris that spoiled matters. ‘His Britannic Majesty engages to restore to his Most Christian Majesty the Colonies, Fisheries and Factories possessed by France on 1st January 1792 in the seas and on the continents of America, Africa and Asia with the exceptions of Tobago, St Lucia and the Isle of France and its Dependencies, especially Rodriguez and the Seychelles, which are ceded to Great Britain…’ But for that, Boddam and Diego Garcia might today be under the command of Paris, with all the benefits and evils that might confer.

  And I loved the little church. There was no roof—probably never had been. The altar was gone, but the heavy old door still swung slowly open, and inside there were a dozen pews, and a window of blue stained-glass, and a candleholder, and the notice-board that gave the hymn numbers and the psalms. The acoustics were perfect, and one evening I stood at the spot the old priest must have liked, and listened to the boom of the surf and the whisper of the wind through the palms above, and wondered how on earth the bureaucrats 8,000 miles away in London could ever have used such phrases as ‘rotating contract personnel’ to describe the people who had lived and loved and worshipped here. This was a community, without doubt. The church had been built in 1932—a slab of stone by the west door said so. There was a little schoolhouse, and the shop, and the warehouse and the manager’s mansion. There was said to be an inn, where the workers bought their rum and their coconut toddy; and a small hospital, where the doctor prescribed medicines with names like ‘Eau de Saturne’, ‘Onguent de la Mer’ and ‘Pierre Infernale’. This was an island of labourers and millmen, rat-catchers, toddy-makers and fowl-keepers, where wives worked on the copra dryers and the children went to school, and the whole island went to church on Sunday. And now, thanks to a sale and a deal and a handshake and the exchanges of Notes between politicians in Whitehall and Foggy Bottom, this community was smashed and wrecked for ever, and the island was forcibly stripped of its people, to lie empty and half-silent, echoing only to the memories, and with the shuffling and scraping of the hermit crabs, and the endless sounds of wind and ocean.

  And then the plane flew over.

  It came suddenly out of a silent sky—a low hum, then an ominous growl, and a fierce roar as it swept overhead, no more than 200 feet above. It had four propellers, a bulbous nose and a trailing tail—I had seen just the same type of plane a few weeks before, on Bermuda. It was a Lockheed Orion anti-submarine reconnaissance aircraft, belonging to the United States Navy. On board would be twelve men: three in the cockpit, six hunched over screens and dials and gauges in the mid-section, one preparing to drop ‘ordnance’—detection buoys, flares, transponders—one manning a camera deep in the aircraft belly, and one man waiting in reserve in the galley, cooking hamburgers for his companions.

  The cameraman spotted the yacht, and the plane began a low and lazy circle, dipping down to examine us on each pass, waggling its wings when we waved up at him. After half a dozen times it straightened up and flew around the other ten islands of the group, checking each one for intruders. But there were none: Dog Island, Ile de la Passe, every tiny circle of palm and sand was utterly empty, and the plane soon tired of looking. It flew back over Boddam, roared so low the tops of the Afzelia trees rocked in its slipstream, and then soared high over the ocean and headed due west, for the next atoll of the colony.

  The oceanic quiet resumed; but the sense of utter isolation did not. We had been spotted. Our plan had been rumbled. The Americans knew we were in the vicinity, that the area they demanded be ‘swept clean’ was now contaminated by—I could read their report in my mind’s eye—unauthorised civilian personnel. When, we wondered, would the little gunboat appear over the horizon, and order us off?

  We stayed four more days on Boddam, pinned down by storm waves crashing deafeningly against the reef wall, and by the sight of thick, molasses-black clouds welling up from the south. A small cutter sailed into the lagoon one afternoon; it, too, had come from the north, and had been battered in a terrible storm; his batteries were soaked and his engine would not seem to work. He was French, and imperturbable, and he and his girlfriend swam, brown and naked, in the clear waters, caught fish and baked them, with freshly made bread, on a palm-log fire they built on the beach. They said it didn’t matter how long it took for the battery to dry. ‘I ’ave no work in Paris,’ said the girl, who was called Emanuelle. ‘So I am in no ’urry. This is ver’ lovely, no?’

  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 hundre
d 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.