Free Outposts by Simon Winchester Page A

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 network 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 foundsome 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