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Chasing the British Empire
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13415 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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9 / 1987 |
2,596 Words |
| Author
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John H. Fund
John H. Fund is an editorial writer for the Wall Street
Journal. |
THE SUN NEVER SETS
Travels to the Remaining Outposts of the British Empire
Simon Winchester
New York: Prentice Hall, 1986
317 pp., $17.95
When Queen Victoria celebrated fifty years on the throne with her Diamond Jubilee of 1897, she claimed over 400 million people as subjects - one quarter of the world's population. That great empire has now shrunk to "sixteen groups of rocks and atolls and ice-islands." The population of the colonies is only 5.5 million, of which over 5 million live in Hong Kong alone. What is the glue that still unites these far-flung remnants of Empire with the mother country? In 1981, Simon Winchester, a reporter for the London Sunday Times, set out determined to write a contemporary account of the vanishing British Empire:
Might it be possible, I mused, to visit all these places and catch, possibly for the very last time before progress and political reality snuffed it out forever, something of the spirit of the old Imperial ambition - to see what remained, and find out what it had all been like, and why it had been so grand, why it had lasted so long, why it had died so quickly, but yet had seemingly refused to die completely?
It was a tall order and Winchester's journey took three years and one hundred thousand miles. It took him from the bitter cold of the Antarctic to the crystal clear waters of the Caribbean. He traversed both the Indian Ocean and the South Atlantic in order to visit lonely specks of land in the middle of gale-swept oceans. His means of conveyance ranged from private yacht to cargo boat, from an Argentine commuter airliner to a royal Air Force bomber. And during his travels, he discovered a great deal about the British character, its honesty and integrity as well as its pig-headed insensitivity to the needs of others.
Enough scraps and rocks and tiny fingers of land survive under British dominion that the sun still "never sets on the British Empire," and Winchester visited almost every speck of land where the Union Jack still flies.
Stalwart traveler
Some places proved too inaccessible even for the most stalwart of travelers. He did not make it to lonely Pitcairn Island, inhabited by forty-four descendants
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