Free Outposts by Simon Winchester

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 markedthem 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 thegreat 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