CHAPTER
1
INTRODUCTION
Geography
is destiny. Napoleon
A small mirror
can reflect a large distant object. One example is
that of telescope mirrors, which help us observe
huge distant suns. Similarly, a historian can
illustrate great events by showing how they are
reflected in distant places. Few places are
as remote as the Chagos Archipelago, a cluster of
islands in the middle of the Indian Ocean.
Their main island, known today as Diego Garcia, is
more than 900 miles from the nearest significant
land, the island of Sri Lanka. For more than
five hundred years various powers have fought for
control over the Indian Ocean, yet for much of
this time these islands have played little if any
part. In general, however, there has been a trend
toward their being increasingly important. For
while the physical geography of the island has
remained relatively constant, the political and
economic geography of the Indian Ocean has
undergone tectonic shifts. History has
demonstrated other cases of small, obscure islands
jumping into the headlines. The Falkland
Islands are a more modern example. You may not
have heard of Diego Garcia, but you have probably
not heard the last of it.
Physically,
Diego Garcia and the Chagos Archipelago of which
it is part are located near the center of the
Indian Ocean. Yet, for much of the ocean’s modern
history the island has played a very peripheral
role. Even the physical centrality of the island
yields ambiguity. Some geographers consider the
Chagos Archipelago to be East African Islands.
Others think they are an extension from South
Asia, a continuation of the Maldives south of
India. Such arguments over the labeling of the
island are not merely academic, as controversy
over a “Nuclear Free Africa”
demonstrates. Thus, as the title of
this thesis indicates, Diego Garcia may be at the
center of the Indian Ocean in terms of physical
geography, but it has largely been at the edge of
everywhere else in terms of its history.
Table 1 lists
most of the islands that comprise the Chagos
Archipelago. Only the main island of Diego Garcia
and the island of Peros Banhos have had
significant permanent settlements. Others have
been occupied by smaller numbers, for limited
times, or are not large enough to support
settlement. The Locations and names are given as
known in 1857, when their locations were fairly
well known.
Table 1.
Locations
of the Main Chagos Islands
________________________________________________________________________
Island
Name
South
Latitude East Longitude
Diego
Garcia
7
deg 15 min
72 deg 32 min
The Six
Islands
6
deg 35 min
71 deg 25 min
Three
Brothers
6
deg 10 min
71 deg 28 min
Salomons
Islands
5
deg 23 min
72 deg 35 min
Peros
Banhos (22 smaller islands) 5 deg 23
min 72 deg
03 min
Legour
Island
5
deg 39 min
72 deg 32 min
_______________________________________________________________________
Source:
British Public Records Office CO 167/38
CHAPTER 2
PRELUDE AND
DISCOVERY
In 1509 the
bay of Diu, in what is modern day India, was the
site of one of the most important naval battles in
history. On one side was Viceroy Francisco
de Almeida, commanding a force of 19 ships and
about 1,200 men comprising virtually the entire
strength of Portugal in the Indian Ocean. On the
other side was a combined Muslim fleet of Egyptian
and Indian ships under the command of Amir
Hussain. With typical Portuguese audacity,
Almeida sailed directly into the narrow and
shallow harbor to attack the numerically superior
enemy. What followed was a “bloody
hand-to-hand melee of broadsides, grappling, and
boarding.” When it was over, however, the
Portuguese had destroyed the enemy fleet and
become masters of the Indian Ocean. To emphasize
this point, Viceroy Almeida had his fleet sail
along the coast firing the arms and legs of
prisoners out of cannon and onto the roofs and
streets of native towns.
Shortly
thereafter a visiting Marshall of Portugal,
Fernando Coutinho, arrived and appointed his
cousin, Afonso De Alboquerque, in place of
Almeida. Coutinho had arrived with 15 ships
and 3,000 troops and soon led an attack on the
important port city of Calicut. During the
fighting, however, Coutinho was so intent on
prying the ornate gilded doors off a palace that
he allowed himself to get cut off from his troops.
He was killed and Alboquerqe, himself wounded by
an arrow, had to lead a retreat. The
manner of Coutinho’s death reflected one school of
thought amongst the Portuguese. Coutinho has been
described as “Falstaffian - Strong of arm, great
of belly, but weak of brain.” His
emphasis had been on raiding and plunder, sacking
cities and taking ships in order to acquire wealth
that could be spent back in Portugal. Upon his
death, however, Alboquerqe would be elevated to
the de facto Portuguese ruler in the Indian Ocean,
and he was of an entirely different mind.
The government
of Portugal, in effect King Manuel, wanted to
control the Indian Ocean in order to milk its
commerce. Simple piracy might make a few rich
individuals, but only an organized effort at
control and trade would generate the revenues that
would sate an entire kingdom. The Indian Ocean and
its nations, however, would pose challenges to the
Portuguese. Unlike in the “new world” of the
Americas, the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean
region often faced technologically advanced and
politically sophisticated foes. The Portuguese had
proven their naval superiority, but had few ships
to patrol vast areas. Unlike the Americas, with
its plague wracked and poorly armed natives, many
Indian Ocean nations had large armies complete
with modern cannons. Unlike in the Americas,
in the Indian Ocean the Portuguese could not carry
out a straightforward policy of conquest.
More sophisticated strategies would have to be
employed.
Afonso De
Alboquerque was a proponent of what could be
called a “forward strategy.” Some Portuguese
believed that they should establish remote bases
at key points located a distance from their main
opponents, and use their naval superiority to
project force. De Alboquerque, however, was among
those who favored a much closer proximity to
potential enemies. Only by establishing a
permanent presence in target lands and playing a
direct role in regional politics could the
Portuguese hope to master the huge region. Naval
power would be the lynchpin of Portuguese power,
but it would enable Portuguese strategy rather
become it.
The Indian
subcontinent was the main prize, and with the
victory at Diu the Portuguese had won an agreement
with a local ruler to establish a base at Cochin.
Cochin was not the most important port in India,
however, and its rulers were not among the most
powerful. In addition, the port facilities
themselves were extremely vulnerable to attack by
land armies. The Portuguese could only stay there
at the sufferance of a second class ruler. This
clearly would not do. In a brilliant move
whose details do not concern us, De Alboquerque
seized the great port of Goa from the Sultan of
Bijapur on November 10, 1510. Goa,
nicknamed “Golden Goa,” was the largest port on
the western side of the Indian subcontinent and
the Sultan of Bijapur was arguably the
subcontinents most powerful ruler. In addition,
the port featured a fortified “island” of land cut
off from the mainland by rivers and marshes. It
would give the Portuguese security against
attempts to eject them from landward. For several
years both the Portuguese and the Sultan would
battle for control of this key city. These battles
would lead directly to the discovery of a small
island in the middle of the Indian Ocean, and
ultimately to this thesis.
On March 25,
1511, the first vessels of a 6-ship armada sailed
from Portugal under the command of Dom Garcia de
Noronha . Their destination was India,
to reinforce De Alboquerque in his efforts to
establish Portuguese control over the Indian
Ocean. For a European vessel of that day, the trip
“round the horn” of Africa was far from
routine. It would take over a year for the
ships of Dom Garcia’s armada to reach their
destination. The normal route for Portuguese ships
on the trip would take them along the African east
coast once they passed the continents southern
tip. They would sail northwards, never too far
from land, until they reached the Arabian Sea
north of the equator. Only then would they turn
and sail eastwards toward the Indian
subcontinent. The Portuguese were the
greatest seafarers of their day, but the open
ocean still held unknown dangers that wise sailors
avoided when possible.
One reason to
stay close to the coast was the crude navigation
of the day. In particular, in the days before
there were accurate chronometers aboard ships,
determining the correct longitude of a vessel was
a hit or miss proposition. And, as several
centuries of shipwrecks and disasters attest, a
miss could be deadly. So while the distance of a
ship to the north or south of the equator could be
determined fairly well by a skilled navigator, the
distance of a ship east or west was often little
more than guesswork. Thus, Portuguese vessels
sailing to India tried to follow the African coast
so that landmarks could give them periodic fixes
on their location. In addition, located to the
west of the Indian subcontinent was a chain atolls
that are today known as the Maldive Islands.
Without modern navigation or sensors, or even
charts, such island chains were a grave danger to
be avoided if at all possible.
The Portuguese
had learned, however, that there was a wide
passage through the Maldive and Laccadive islands
at nine degrees north latitude. Thus, they
could sail northwards along the African coast and,
when they reached the correct latitude they would
turn eastward and could sail safely through the
Maldives until they reached the coast of India.
From there they could once again navigate with the
assistance of landmarks. It would seem
logical that a faster route to India would travel
straight from the southern tip of Africa
northeastward to the subcontinent. Caution,
however, usually prevailed over trying such a
risky new route. In 1505 vessels under the command
of Pedro Mascarenhas had ventured into the waters
east of Madagascar. They had discovered several
islands, dubbing them the “Mascarene” in honor of
their captain. One of the islands, which the
Portuguese called Cirne, was home to a strange
breed of large, flightless, birds. In 1512
Mascarenhas would be tasked with expanding
knowledge of this region in an attempt to reach
India faster.
In early
February of 1512 the six ship armada of Dom Garcia
de Noronha reached the Portuguese supply station
at Mocambique, on the east coast of Africa . It
was here that he heard of De Alboquerque’s
struggle to maintain control of Goa. Since it took
months for news to reach even this far, Dom Garcia
could not be certain how desperately De
Alboquerque needed assistance, and clearly a
faster route to Indian might prove useful. So Dom
Garcia split up his small armada and sent one
portion, under the command of the
experienced Mascarenhas, to try and reach
India via a new route. Instead of sailing north
along the coast of Africa (the “inner passage”),
Mascarenhas would sail to the east, south of
Madagascar, and then northeastwards toward India.
It was during
this voyage that Mascarenhas apparently discovered
a remote island and named it Dom Garcia after his
commander, and then a whole string of small
islands, reefs, and shoals, that he dubbed the
Chagos archipelago. There are no
accounts of the Portuguese actually landing on any
of the islands of the Chagos Archipelago on this
trip, but clearly their discovery did not rate as
a major discovery. The islands were all
rather small and unpopulated, and did not have any
valuable natural resources (such as gold) to be
exploited. They were marked on charts as
accurately as the navigators could determine their
location and, for the next 200 years, avoided when
possible.
The Portuguese
were not great colonizers, and had little use for
the remote, unpopulated, islands. Since their
ships could refit and get provisions at Africa on
the long trip to India, the Chagos were not very
important even as limited supply posts, though
some ships may have stopped to gather food there.
Indeed, the region was to be avoided. As stated
earlier, island chains posed dangers to sailors of
the era. The many small islands of the Chagos,
combined with reefs and large shallows and poor
navigation, were a ready-made burial ground for
ships. Even a hundred years later, ships
making the great voyage to India would tend to
sail northwards into the Indian Ocean either to
the west of the Chagos when headed to the west
coast of India, or to the east when headed to the
east coast of India. Like a net cast across
the route to India the Chagos lay ready to snare
the unwary ship. In less than three decades at
least four Portuguese ships would wreck themselves
on the reefs of Peros Banhos. In 1551 it was the
Algarvia, in 1577 the Sao Joao, and already again
in 1578 the Sao Pedro.
Another vessel
was the Portuguese Conceicao. The ship sailed from
Lisbon on April 1, 1555, and piled up on the rocks
of Peros Banhos in the Chagos when the pilot
refused to listen to a cartographer who was aboard
as well as more experienced seamen. Almost 200
survivors were huddled together on the shore of
this remote, relatively barren, atoll. The captain
and a few chosen officers told the other survivors
that they were going offshore to the wreck to
salvage more supplies. They took the best boat and
never looked back, sailing off toward Cochin,
India on their own. One of the shipwrecked
passengers, Dom Alvaro de Castanheda, took charge
and gathered the remaining boats, as well as the
arms, jewels, and provisions, and sailed off for
India with another 40 men .
This left
behind 164 desperate souls to survive on the
atoll. At the beginning there were more than
10,000 seabirds on the island. Within a month,
however, fewer than one fifth
remained. The birds quickly adapted to
having predators around, and 164 people can eat a
lot of birds. Discipline broke down as there were
attempts to ration the birds. Many were eaten “on
the sly” and everyone was “fierce and
quarrelsome.” The fifth month on the island, 30
people died of starvation and a last desperate
attempt was made to go for help. From the ship’s
wreckage a boat was constructed and 26 men put to
sea. For over a month, the last days without food
or water, they drifted until reaching “some”
inhabited islands. Their numbers slowly dwindling,
the survivors then spent a year sailing from one
small island to another before a friendly prince
sent the last 12 survivors to Cannanore, India, on
his boat. .
The Portuguese
solidified their control over the Indian Ocean.
They soon controlled Goa, the main port on the
Indian subcontinent, Ormuz, the key to the Persian
Gulf, and Malacca, astride the eastern route to
the Orient. Fortified settlements and trading
posts known as feitorias ringed the Indian Ocean
from Sofala in southeast Africa to Ternate in the
Moluccas. King Manuel of Portugal could rightly
claim his title as “Lord of the conquest,
navigation, and commerce of Ethiopia, India,
Arabia, and Persia.” The Portuguese would
stretch their reach to Japan, but a series of
naval defeats at the hands of the Chinese thwarted
their plans in the far east. .
Yet, despite
establishing a maritime empire in the Indian
Ocean, the Portuguese remained uninterested in the
Chagos islands. Despite their central location,
their remoteness was compounded by the necessity
of sailing ships to utilize prevailing winds,
which meant that sailing vessels could not sail
directly to and from them at will. In
addition, the islands were unpopulated and did not
have valuable natural resources. While a ship that
happened to pass could gather some food or spare
wood, there was little else to stop for. The
islands also lacked good harbors and anchorages
for vessels of the day, a point which will be
addressed later on and might surprise modern
readers who think of Diego Garcia as a fine
port. Indeed, due to navigational
uncertainties the large, uncharted, archipelago
was a danger to be avoided. This state of affairs
would continue until well into the 18th century,
when a new conflict over control of the Indian
Ocean would make the islands of increasing
interest to maritime powers.
CHAPTER 3
BRITISH,
PIRATES, AND FRENCHMEN
By the year
1600 the English were a rising sea power and were
eager to challenge the virtual Portuguese monopoly
on trade with and through the Indian Ocean.. It
was in 1602, while on a pioneering voyage to the
East Indies, that captain James Lancaster would
forge an English association with the Chagos
islands that continues to this day.
Lancaster had survived an earlier, disastrous
attempt by the English to reach the East Indies in
1591. He had reached Sumatra before losing his
last ship, however, and then the Dutch had made
their first successful voyage to Java and Bantam
in 1595. Lured by the incredible profits offered
by the spice trade, the English were intent on
trying again. .
On March 30,
1602, while sailing across the Indian Ocean from
west to east in the ship Red Dragon, Lancaster was
six degrees below the equator when his ship came
upon a large ledge of rocks and water only five
fathoms deep. This was a surprise to Lancaster,
who expected nothing but deep water in the middle
of the Indian Ocean. Casting about the ship, he
found water eight fathoms deep and carefully
continued toward the East. A lookout aloft
reported seeing low laying land five or six
leagues to the southeast. The charts
Lancaster carried noted an island called “Cardu,”
but it was not near his calculated position. After
sailing another 14 leagues the ship came upon
another flat of rocks, so it turned south, and
after traveling 12 leagues in that direction found
yet more rocks.
As Lancaster
related, in “divers wayes, wee found flats of
rockes round us.” In some places the water
was 20 or even 50 fathoms deep between the rocks,
but threading a course between them taxed the
ship’s crew dearly. For more than two and half
days the ship was in extreme danger, creeping
along behind its pinnasse which was sounding out a
safe passage. Finally, at 6 degrees 43 minutes
south, the ship found a channel six fathoms deep
and slipped back into deep waters on its way to
Nicobar island, which it reached on May
9. James Lancaster had survived an
encounter with the Chagos Archipelago. While
the Portuguese had lost several ships to the
archipelago in the preceding century, the island’s
locations were still not well charted. In
addition, the maritime powers often jealously
guarded geographic knowledge. This, combined with
the accuracy problems of the navigation technology
of the day, helped ensure that knowledge about the
Chagos was fragmentary and often wrong.
Interestingly,
on this trip Lancaster demonstrated a bit of
knowledge that was for some reason lost, and would
not become known again to the English for 170
years. Sailors spending long times at sea
had a very restricted diet, and various maladies
associated with malnutrition plagued them. Among
the worst was scurvy, caused by a vitamin
deficiency that came from a lack of fruit and
vegetables in the diet. In 1591, on
Lancaster’s first voyage to the Indian
Ocean, several sailors suffering from scurvy had
made quick recoveries when the ship stopped at the
island of St. Helena and the crew got fresh
oranges and lemons. So on this trip Lancaster
bought along a store of lemon juice, and every
sailor got three spoonfuls for breakfast,
otherwise fasting until noon. Using this method he
greatly reduced the incidence of scurvy amongst
his crew. It was not until over
a century and a half later during the expeditions
of the famed Captain Cook that the practice of
giving fruit juice to crewmen became commonly
known and adopted, and the British sailor acquired
the nickname “Limey.”
As an
illustration over the uncertainty of geographers
and map makers of the time, the main island of the
Chagos seems to have gotten its name of “Diego
Garcia” by accident. Originally Mascarenhas had
dubbed the island “Dom Garcia” and early
Portuguese maps call it such. Beginning
circa 1600, however, English maps called the
island “Diego Garcia.” While speculative, it
is possible that British map makers assumed the
island was named after the well-known Portuguese
geographer and navigator Diego Garcia de Palacios,
who in reality had nothing to do with the
islands. It also possible that the English
had miscopied an abbreviation of “I de D
Garcia.” Some early English maps also call
the island “Diego Graciosa.” or “Diego
Gracia,” and other variations can be found. At any
rate, as Portuguese maritime prowess withered away
and the English grew in influence, the name Diego
Garcia stuck.
In December 5,
1604, another Englishman, Sir Edward Michelbourne,
would sail across the Indian Ocean in quest of
trade and plunder, leaving what is perhaps the
earliest useful description of some of the main
islands of the Chagos Archipelago. Michelbourne
commanded the diminutive Tigre, a ship of 240
tons, and the accompanying pinnasse Tigres
Whelp. He also had in his service the
famed English navigator John Davis, who had been
Lancaster’s navigator on his earlier trip across
the Indian Ocean. On the 15th of June they sighted
the Ile Dos Banhos (Peros Banhos). Its location,
according to Davis, was “sixe degrees and
thirtie-seven minutes to the South-ward and one
hundred and nine degrees longitude.” Davis
wrote in his log that the islands were “falsely
laid” in most charts too far to the west. In
reality, Davis’ navigation was off by miles.
Thousands of them, in fact. The true
longitude of Peros Banhos is about 72 degrees.
According to Davis they were more than 2,000 miles
further east. If that was the case, they wouldn’t
be in the Indian Ocean at all but rather somewhere
in Indonesia. This error, though rather large even
for its day, highlighted how even experienced
navigators were vexed by the longitude problem.
There were
five islands in close proximity, and boats were
sent ashore. The islands abounded with “Fowle,
Fish, and Coco Nuts” but while there was good food
there was no good anchorage. The sea bed dropped
off rapidly from the island, and thus it was too
deep to anchor very far from shore. If a ship came
close in to anchor, however, it risked being
pushed onto sharp rocks and shoals by wind and
currents. The Tigre sailed on, and on June 19 it
sighted the Ile of Diego Graciosa (Diego Garcia).
According to Davis, “This seemeth to be a very
pleasant Iland, and of good refreshing if there be
any place to come to an anchor.” Alas, a bad
wind was forcing the ship toward the shore and it
did not stay in the area very long. While passing
the island, however, it was noted that it was ten
or twelve leagues long and abounded with birds and
fish, as well as having “a mightie wood” of
nothing but Coco Trees. .
It is perhaps
not coincidental that in Shakespeare’s “Macbeth,”
written during this time, the witches at the
beginning of Act I, scene three, discuss a ship
called the Tiger and her fate. In particular, the
line “a pilot’s thumb / wrack’d, as homeward he
did come” might be a reference to the death of the
famed pilot/navigator John Davis, who died during
an epic battle with Japanese pirates during this
trip. .
The British
were forging their way into the Indian Ocean,
lured by profits. By 1608, for example, a trip to
India yielded a 234% profit for its investors. By
1612, English captain Thomas Best engaged a
Portuguese fleet while sailing off Surat,
India. The struggle amongst the European
nations for control over the Indian Ocean had
begun in earnest. Over the course of the 1600s the
British generally gained in strength in the Indian
Ocean, while the Portuguese and the Dutch were
relegated to secondary powers. The French,
however, would rise to challenge British hegemony
in the region. This British-French rivalry would
lead to a greater interest in the Diego Garcia and
the Chagos Archipelago by the mid 1700s.
While
historical documentation is lacking, it is
interesting to speculate about any ties between
the Chagos Islands and one of the more fascinating
developments in the Indian Ocean in the late 17th
century, the rise not only of piracy but of a
pirate nation. Located at the port of Diego-Suarez
on the island of Madagascar, from approximately
1685 to 1730 there existed the nation of
“Libertalia.” It existed as a haven for pirates
plundering shipping from one end of the Indian
Ocean to the other. The roll call of Indian Ocean
pirates over the years was long and multinational.
There were Englishmen such as Read, Teat,
Williams, Avery, and Kidd. Irishmen like
Cornelius and Jamaican Plantain plundered
alongside Frenchmen like La Vasseur and La Buse
(a.k.a. the buzzard). Later on Americans
like Tew, Burgess, and Halsey would ply the
age-old trade in the region. Pirates did not
always sail along normal streams of commerce,
indeed their irregular navigation and desire for
private places to rest and replenish may have made
the Chagos a popular destination.
The 17th
century passed almost as quietly as the 16th in
the Chagos Archipelago. Even well into the 1700s
the islands would be largely ignored and avoided.
Indeed, as one French geographer would later
relate:
The French, in
their passage from the Isles of France and Bourbon
to India, had conceived an insuperable dread of
the archipelago which extends from the North to
the North-East of Madagascar; nor had any of them
attempted to pass through it, though it would have
shortened the voyage upwards of three hundred
leagues.
During the
18th century, however, there would be a growing
interest in the island chain. Portugal was no
longer the dominant naval power in the Indian
Ocean, and the Dutch were also no longer in
contention for the place of preeminence.
Instead, the English and the French were both
expanding their interests, and their rivalry, into
the Indian Ocean. This rivalry led to a renewed
interest in once neglected locations like the
Chagos Archipelago. The “zero sum” reasoning of
great power competition meant that even if a
nation was not interested in owning and exploiting
some island, its rival might. Thus, both the
French and English would begin to look upon the
Chagos, and Diego Garcia in particular, in a new
light. In order to carry out strategy, these
nations needed information gathered and analyzed.
The French
were among the first to actively investigate Diego
Garcia and the other islands of the Chagos
archipelago. In 1742 the French ships Elisabeth
and Charles explored the Chagos region and more
accurately fixed their location. April 15, 1744,
would find the Elisabeth surveying Peros Banhos in
the Chagos with a chart maker/geographer
aboard. In 1768 the French ships L’Heure du
Berger and Vert Galant visited Diego Garcia. Among
the passengers was the Abbe’ de Rochon, astronomer
to the Navy. A year later the Vert Galant
returned, and her commander Lt. La Fontaine
reported “a great number of vessels might anchor
there in safety; but the principal object is
wanting: for though it is covered with woods, it
is not provided with fresh water.” La
Fontaine’s analysis was flawed. The island
is among the wetter places on earth, with an
average annual rainfall of more than 87 inches.
The island is very flat, however, and because of
its shape no point is very far from the ocean.
Therefore the rain quickly runs off. There
are no rivers nor even streams or creeks on the
island. How, then, could a person get fresh water
in between periods of rain?
The obvious
answer would be to dig a deep well. When
this was initially tried on Diego Garcia, however,
the results were marginal. There was plenty of
water, but it was very “brackish,” with salt and
minerals. The problem was twofold. Firstly, the
island was made up of coral and water that
percolated downward through it picked up minerals.
Secondly, once the well reached below sea level
(only a few meters at most on the island) then
there was also the possibility of seawater seeping
in from the ocean or lagoon. The answer, which was
apparently not obvious to La Fontaine, was to not
dig deep wells but rather shallow ones. On the
island, large volumes of good fresh water are
contained in “lenses” in the ground that are
shallow but cover wide areas. Currently, with a
major military base on the island, all water is
provided by means of a “fresh water catch” system
that utilizes these lenses.
The Vert
Galant may have visited Diego Garcia once again in
1771 while carrying famed French explorer
Kerguelen. The ship would eventually be destroyed
by a cyclone while at Mauritius in 1773.
The British in
the Indian Ocean were represented largely by two
entities: the Royal Navy and the East India
Company. The East India Company was far more
than simply a business. Indeed it operated a navy
of its own. From its foundation circa 1600 (it had
sponsored Lancaster’s voyage in the Red Dragon) to
its eventual demise in 1874 the company played a
key role in the British presence in the Indian
Ocean. At times the Company served as the de
facto government of India and held incredible
influence over British government policy in the
region. Service to the Company promised great
opportunity to ambitious young Brits, and for
generations the East lured the up and coming as
well as those with nowhere else to go. Even before
the British settled in the Americas, and long
after its colonies there had rebelled, the East
India Company was a cornerstone of British
strength.
CHAPTER 4
ENTER THE
HYDROGRAPHERS
One of the
first British to methodically gather and
promulgate information on the Chagos islands was
Alexander Dalrymple. A Scott, born in 1737,
Dalrymple went to work in India as a young man.
While there, he became fascinated in the lesser
known lands to the East and in the prospects of
doing business with them. In order to try
and convince the conservative bosses of the
British East India Company to back expansion he
marshaled all the reports, maps, and data he
could. His enthusiasm and skill led to him
becoming Hydrographer to the East India Company in
1779, and eventually the Royal Navy’s first
hydrographer in 1795. At the beginning of
the Napoleonic Wars the British were losing more
ships to running aground than to French action,
and advances in sciences related to cartography
were making specialists like Dalrymple extremely
valuable.
In one
publication Dalrymple took up the question of the
Chagos Archipelago. During a lull in
the century’s periodic British-French fighting,
Dalrymple had been corresponding with French map
maker M. D’Apres de Mannevillette about
reconciling the contradictory information that was
available about this island chain. Dalrymple had
detailed charts from 11 British vessels that had
visited the region between 1744 and 1776. To this
he added D’Apres tracks of six French ships from
1757 to 1777. Finally, Dalrymple looked into
journals and accounts of a further 26 British
visits between 1699 and 1780. Dalrymple
insisted on calling the main island Chagos, though
the French used the name Diego Garcia. By
painstaking analysis of the varying accounts and
charts, Dalrymple laid out the best locations for
many islands in the chain and determined that the
island known as Candy (or Candu) was nonexistent.
In May of
1786, Lieutenant Archibald Blair was tasked with
conducting a survey of the island of Diego Garcia
in conjunction with a tenuous attempt to settle
the island. The East India Company had several
specific questions it wanted answered. Among them;
What dangers and difficulties did a ship face upon
entering the harbor? What were the precise
locations of the three small islands in the mouth
of the harbor, and how safe were their respective
channels? Within the harbor, where best to
anchor? Finally, Blair was to leave
“distinguishing marks” of his survey for future
reference.
In addition to
making charts, Blair made several useful
observations for future sailors. He sailed around
Diego Garcia and confirmed that ships could not
anchor on the seaward side because of the
steepness with which the island dropped off into
the ocean. He noted that within the
harbor there were patches of rocks and coral and
that a ship should use a chain on its anchor, as a
cable might be quickly ruined. He also took a
careful look at the entrance into the harbor,
which was divided into channels by three small
islands. His determination was that the Main
Channel, between the ‘middle’ and ‘west’ islands
was a good passage with little danger as clear
water exposed potential problems to incoming
ships. Between ‘east island’ and ‘middle island’
the water was very shallow and treacherous,
allowing only small craft to pass. And, finally,
between “east island” and “east point” the channel
was also dangerous for larger vessels, probably
not even allowing a “sloop of war” to
pass. Finally, Blair noted that
between May and November there appeared to be a
constant NW current, which helped explain the
wreck of many ships such as the Atlas, which
thought it was 5 degrees further eastward when it
ran aground on Diego Garcia.
The wreck of
the East Indiaman Atlas was to produce another
hydrographer, one who would eventually replace
Dalrymple as Hydrographer to the East India
Company upon his death. The First Mate of the
Atlas was a young Scotsman named James
Horsburgh. A conscientious navigator, he was
surprised when his ship ran aground on Diego
Garcia. He determined that inadequate and
incorrect information had lead to the wreck and
dedicated himself to the task of improving
navigation and hydrography. For years, even as he
sailed the world on a variety of ships, he kept
meticulous notes, studied journals, and
corresponded with others. His most substantial
accomplishments were the discovery of the diurnal
fluctuation of air pressure over ocean areas and
the publishing of an encyclopedic book on
navigating in waters common to East India Company
ships. As noted, he was later in life named
Hydrographer to the East India Company as well as
a member of the Royal Society.
CHAPTER 5
A TEMPORARY
SETTLEMENT
As noted,
Blair’s surveys were in conjunction with an
attempt at settlement. In January of 1786 the East
India Company officers received orders from London
to establish a settlement on Diego Garcia, as well
as another at Nancouvery Harbor in the Nicobar
islands .
To
the President and Council of Bombay
We direct
that with all possible dispatch, you send two
small vessels from Bombay to take possession of
and settle the Island Chagos or Diego Gracia,
situated in 7 [degrees] 16 [minutes] South,
which was visited in the year 1774 by the Drake
Ketch. We rely upon your discretion to chose
proper persons to be sent in these Vessels to
take an exact Survey of the Harbour and Island,
and to give an Account of its produce and the
best means of settling it, to make it a place
for Refreshment of Ships, and also what might be
necessary to make it tenable against Attack,
which by the Plan, it appears might be done at a
very small expence, some of the small vessels
from the Bombay Marine should be employed with
Diligent and Intelligent Officers to examine and
ascertain the situation of numerous Banks and
Islands in that part of the Sea, as an accurate
knowledge of those hitherto much neglected Seas,
is essential to the security and navigation of
the Company’s ships;
By
March the expedition was underway, with stores and
supplies aboard the Admiral Hughes, which sailed
along with the Napier and some other vessels. Two
senior servants were in charge, one named Price
and the other John Richmond Smyth. Serving under
them was Captain Sartorius of the Bombay
Engineers. He was to be the chief engineer,
surveyor, and commanding officer of the military
detachment. The expedition carried with it a set
of “secret orders” to deal with contingencies,
most notably the possibility of other European
nations settling or claiming the island .
The summer of
1786 was a time of unprecedented activity on Diego
Garcia. In conjunction with the settlement were
the Blair survey and visits by various ships
including the Drake, Viper, and Experiment as well
as a supply visit by the Swift Grab. While details
are unclear, field pieces of “European Artillery”
were also put on the island, once again probably
in the case of disagreement over the island’s
status . Indeed, the French government would take
offense at this British move. The French had
settled the strategic island of Isle de
France (Mauritius) to the southwest of Diego
Garcia and the Chagos. Indeed, there were
apparently a few French on the island of Diego
Garcia, though not part of an official or
organized settlement attempt. A British naval
station on Diego Garcia could interfere with
French attempts to employ their sea power from
their Southwest Indian Ocean islands toward India.
Precisely who legally possessed the island was
open to question, but the British were apparently
operating on the assumption that the unsettled
island was legally Res Nullius (land not yet
‘owned’ by any nation).
A letter from
Messrs. Price and Smyth to the “Secret Committee”
would outline what the settlers quickly discovered
about the island. Potatoes, yams, and many
“culinary plants” could be raised on the island,
but importantly grains such as maize and rice did
not seem to grow well. Sheep and goats throve, as
did hogs and fowl. Cattle, on the other hand, did
not do well. Captain Sartorius noted that every
building material was found wanting. He also
pointed out that the island was everywhere flat
and level and that the island could be fortified
only at “immense expense.” When a French
brig visited the island its Captain said he had
known nothing of the English settlement plans, but
predicted they would fail. The French
apparently felt that the island could not support
a useful population and that this, combined with
its remote location and lack of supplies (such as
timber), made settlement purposeless .
In late
November of 1786 the Indian Government sent the
Drake and the Morning Star to evacuate the English
settlement. The diplomatic waves, though small,
continued. In the Spring of 1787 the French
Governor General in India, Vice Comte de
Souillare, sent the British government a letter
concerning the English on Diego Garcia. It
apparently made claims of mistreatment of the
French who had been on the island, for British
civil servant Boddam answered that Smyth and
Price, the leaders of the expedition, had “showed
signal humanity to the deserted wretches whom they
had found on the island.” Note that
Boddam carefully claimed the French on the island
had been “deserted,” asserting the British
position that the French had never truly
settled the island and could not claim
sovereignty. The French, however, apparently
disagreed. The French ship Minerve was sent to
investigate the English settlement but found that
it had already been withdrawn, so it left behind a
“stone of ownership.” The island’s ultimate
ownership would not be decided for another
27 years.
Even as the
settlement on Diego Garcia was being withdrawn,
others within the British establishment were
criticizing the attempt. One example was a
dispatch sent to the Right Honorable Charles Earl
Cornwallis, Governor General and Commander in
Chief in Bengal, in December of 1786. Only
five years earlier Cornwallis had been forced to
surrender a British army to the American rebels at
Yorktown. Now he was on the other side of the
world attempting to strengthen the British
position in India and the Indian Ocean. Situated
at Fort William, the British garrison in Calcutta,
Cornwallis was receiving reports from across the
region. This particular report was from
Captain James Scott, who wrote that he had heard
of the settlement of Diego Garcia and “It is
difficult to form an idea of the motive which has
led to this measure.” Captain Scott was a
friend and business partner of Francis Light, who
in August of 1786 had taken possession of Penang
from the Sultan Abdullah Kedah on behalf of the
East India Company. They were intent on
developing Penang into a major port, and
apparently did not want to see rival efforts
taking the attention, or the money, of the
Company.
Captain
Scott laid out the case against investing
resources into settling Diego Garcia. To begin
with, the island could never be “an object of
commerce.” Its produce was “confined to coconuts
and a precocious supply of turtle and fish.” He
then explained why, from a sailor’s viewpoint, the
island was not as handy as its central geographic
position might seem to indicate. To begin with,
the lagoon had “dangerous and narrow openings, of
difficult access at all times.” Even worse were
the prevailing winds, which hampered sailing to
and from the island and India. Captain Scott laid
out several scenarios, noting that strong South
East trade winds prevailed from April to October,
and from October to April there were the North
West monsoons. If used as a “port of retreat” for
the British fleet in India, for example, it might
take more than three months for the round trip
from India. Added to this were dangers of running
aground and the “foul ground” in the lagoon which
made the use of anchor chains (vice cable)
necessary.
The Captain
then pointed out that as a “port of rendezvous”
for the European fleet the island also had severe
disadvantages. Its location closer to the French
islands (Bourbon and Mauritius) necessitated
fortification, which would be extremely expensive
given the lack of local supplies and
resources. Captain Scott felt that British
resources would be better spent building bases and
settlements elsewhere. After his withering
criticism of Diego Garcia he wrote “From a
prospect so dreary and from difficulties which
good luck only could cope with - Let us turn our
eyes to Pooloo Penang.” Penang, which
had recently been re christened Prince of Wales
Island, was a strategic port located near the
Straits of Malacca. Unlike the waters near Diego
Garcia, the Straits were a shipping route and
served as a natural choke point for blockade.
CHAPTER 6
PERMANENT
SETTLEMENT AND THE NAPOLEONIC WARS
The period of
escalating British-French rivalry in the Indian
Ocean would reach its crescendo with the French
Revolution and the subsequent Napoleonic
wars. It was during this time that the
island of Diego Garcia got its first permanent
settlement. While the French and English
governments had decided that the Chagos were not
fit to serve as significant military bases,
several enterprising French businessmen on the
island of Mauritius saw an opportunity to make
some money off the island of Diego Garcia. By the
late 1780s the French administration on Mauritius
had given concession ( French joissances ) to two
men: M Le Normand to harvest coconuts and M.
Dauget to fish. There is no evidence that either
actually set up any operations on Diego Garcia,
and they may have simply obtained the concessions
for resale.
By 1794,
however, M. Lapotaire was producing coconut oil on
the island for export to Mauritius. By 1808 he was
joined by M. Dauget and M. Cayeux. At the
dawn of the 19th century oil was a valuable
substance, it not only lit lamps but was being
used as lubrication for an increasingly mechanized
world. This of course was the golden era of
whaling, as whale oil was one main source. But
coconuts were another source of oil. Harvested,
shelled, dried, and then pressed, they could
provide a valuable, high quality oil. The
key to the economic processing of coconuts (which
will be described later) was cheap labor,
and the French in Mauritius had this in the form
of slaves. Lapotaire had more than 100 slaves on
Diego Garcia providing for 12 mills while Cayeux
had an operation half as large.
There were
soon complications from both business competition
and France’s enemy, England. On the business end,
two other men (one a former Cayeux employee)
imported 20 slaves and set up a couple of mills of
their own. There were disagreements over precisely
who had the legal right to do what. Secondly, with
open warfare raging in the Indian Ocean, there was
concern by the French owners that the English
might be tempted to plunder the island. These
problems were all submitted to Governor Decaen on
I’ll de France and he subsequently issued a set of
orders. All the established businesses would get a
share of the island, but no one could make
finished coconut oil on the island. Instead, the
island would only produce copra (dried coconut)
for exportation to Mauritius and refining there.
The idea was that the English would not bother
stealing bulk copra but would take the more
valuable and handy finished oil. If there were no
oil on the island, the English wouldn’t bother the
plantations. In addition, Diego Garcia would
have to do the island of I’ll de France a civic
favor by accepting for settlement all lepers.
The primary
base of operations for the French navy during this
period would be I’ll de France, the island that
was previously known as Mauritius and,
confusingly, would be renamed that again in the
future . During the French Revolution the island
of I’ll de France and its occupants were often a
mere afterthought to French authorities on the
European continent, and as a result the island
escaped much of the tumult and the terror. With
the rise of Napoleon and war with the British,
however, I’ll de France’s strategic location in
the Southwest Indian ocean made it important once
again. An island of considerable size and
population, it served as an excellent place from
which to terrorize British sea routes around
Africa to India and the Far East. The French Navy
was never strong enough to directly challenge the
British in the Indian Ocean so the primary
strategy became one of rue de guerre. French
warships, as well as privateers and outright
pirates, would sail from Mauritius to attack
British shipping, usually with an eye to taking
captured ships and booty back to Mauritius for
sale. The island, awash with cut rate goods taken
from the unlucky and incautious (as well as sugar
grown locally), quickly attracted profit minded
merchants from around the world. Among these were
merchants from the new United States of America.
Between 1786 and 1810 some 600 U.S. ships would
visit Mauritius, and the U.S. would establish a
consulate on the island in 1794.
The Viper,
Drake, and Experiment, which had all spent a
portion of 1786 in and around Diego Garcia, would
all have various adventures during the Napoleonic
Wars. On 26 July, 1800, the 14 gun cutter
Viper was blockading I’ll de France under the
command of a 25-year-old Acting Lieutenant,
Jeremiah Coghlan. He took a dozen men and a
ten-oar boat and rowed in close to shore to try
and storm the anchored French gun-brig Cerbere,
which was manned with 87 sailors and 16
soldiers. Twice the dozen or so Englishmen
tried to storm the Cerbere, only to be beaten back
into their boat. Finally, on the third attempt, an
already twice wounded Coghlan would lead his men
to take the vessel, which surrendered when its
last officer fell. For this exploit naval
regulations were waived and Acting Lieutenant
Coghlan was promoted to Lieutenant .
In April 1805,
off the coast of southern Africa the east Indiaman
Experiment with her 20 guns would be captured by
the French 30 gun Napoleon commanded by Captain
Malo le Nouvel. She was carrying a cargo of tea
from India, and was taken to I’ll de France to be
sold . During the invasion of I’ll de France in
1810 the British ship Pitt carried 430 troops of
the 59th regiment, 2nd Brigade, under Lt. Colonel
Gibbs . The Drake fought a particularly
tough battle with the French Piemontaise commanded
by Captain Louis Jacques Epron, while escorting a
batch of East Indiamen . Ultimately, the British
prevailed in the Indian Ocean, invading I’ll de
France in 1810 and eventually taking permanent
legal sovereignty over the island with the signing
of the Treaty of Paris of 1814. By taking
possession of I’ll de France (which they quickly
renamed Mauritius) the British sought to ensure
that the French would never again be in a position
to challenge British hegemony in the Indian
Ocean. Along with the title to Mauritius,
the British took possession of sundry
miscellaneous small islands, rocks, banks, and
chains. Among them were the Chagos Islands
and Diego Garcia, which were now officially
declared British territory.
Though the
British now had sovereignty over Mauritius, the
island remained very much culturally attached to
France. Its citizens continued to speak French and
carry on French traditions, one of which
conflicted with the policies of its new masters in
England: slavery. Mauritius, in addition to
its role as a French maritime center, was
dependant on a plantation economy consisting
primarily of growing sugar. During the
French Revolution the island’s leadership had
taken a dim view toward extending “fraternity and
equality” to the slave class, and it continued to
resist British efforts to end the practice.
Following a bitter and complicated process, all
slavery was officially ended in Mauritius in 1835,
with slaves having their status changed to that of
indentured servants. At this time, most of the
residents of Diego Garcia were indeed former
slaves. Many had come from Africa via slave
trading centers on Madagascar and at Mozambique.
At least officially some had been converted to the
Roman Catholic faith, though with a strain of
tribal syncretism that would continue through the
20th century. They generally spoke Mauritian
French Creole, though over time the language of
the Ilois (i.e., “Islanders”) would become more
distinctly different.
The ‘Ilois’
(who would eventually call themselves
“Chagossians”) have very little in the way of a
written history, particularly from this era. Most
of them were illiterate, and they lived a
relatively simple life as laborers and craftsman
on Diego Garcia. One can only speculate when the
‘Ilois’ emerged as a distinct ethnic group, as
opposed to just being Mauritian slaves (or slave
descendants) on another island. To the
extent that records exist, most deal with the
concerns of plantation managers and owners as well
as governments. The scientific expeditions that
visited Diego Garcia, for example, did not
consider the Ilois as meriting scientific study.
Business and government records note births and
deaths and administrative details, but there is
virtually nothing about the “culture” of the
Ilois, their traditions, their beliefs, etc. The
history of the Ilois is largely a lost one.
To the extent
that there is historical data from the early days
of the Chagos, much of it seems due to
serendipity. In 1819 the Dutch ship Admiraal
Evertzen wrecked on the reefs of Diego Garcia. The
ship was named after the famous Dutch admiral who
captured New York during the 3rd Anglo-Dutch war
in 1673, putting ashore 600 men near the spot
where the World Trade Center would later stand,
and fall. His namesake ship was homeward bound
after traveling to Batavia when it met its fate.
The first officer of the ship, Quirijn Maurits
Rudolph Ver Huell, made drawings of scenes from
the crews time on the island. The stranded sailors
were eventually picked up by the US merchant
vessel Pickering, which was on its way to
Mauritius. The drawings highlighted the
natural features of the island: coconut trees,
jungle, the ocean, birds, and an apparently
primitive lifestyle. The natives shown appear to
be fairly light skinned Creoles wearing little
more than loincloths. At the time of the drawings
(1820) they may very well have been slaves, as
slavery was not finally abolished in all of
Mauritius and the lesser dependencies until
1835. One drawing appears to show the
ship’s crewmen operating a coconut mill, which
leads one to wonder if they had to work to earn
their keep.
CHAPTER 7
EXPLORATION,
EXPANSION, WHALES, AND SOULS
In the 1820s
and 1830s the British were setting the stage for
yet another extension of their worldwide maritime
dominance. Ever since the Portuguese had first
entered the Indian Ocean, the Red Sea had been a
bastion of Muslim piracy and treacherous waters.
Europeans had dreamed of being able to safely sail
up the Red Sea to transfer goods from the East the
short distance across the Isthmus of Suez. But the
navigable waters were often relatively narrow, the
ocean was poorly charted, and the prevailing winds
made sailing difficult. Added to this was the
proximity of the land enclosing the Sea, which
meant many potential pirates who did not need
sophisticated sailing skills in order to snare
unwary ships. Finally, the Ottoman Empire had
traditionally protected this ocean and much of its
surrounding area. The British, like the Portuguese
centuries earlier, would first try to establish a
base on the island of Socotra near the mouth of
the Red Sea, but would by 1839 decide to take the
port of Aden on the Southeast tip of the Saudi
Peninsula instead.
In 1829 the
British Thetis, with 10 guns and under the command
of Commander Robert Moresby, escorted the first
coal ship up the Red Sea. The age of steam was
approaching, and the eventual shift to coal fueled
ships would impact even remote Diego Garcia. The
British needed information about this new region,
and soon Moresby was overseeing two vessels, the
Palinurus and the Benares, surveying the Red Sea.
Not only did the ships and their crews gather
nautical data, but some crew members also traveled
ashore and wrote descriptions of the Saudi
Peninsula. As an indication of how difficult this
task was, the Benares ran aground no less than 42
times during the endeavor. A person no less
esteemed than the famed explorer Richard F. Burton
would explain, “Robert Moresby, the genius of the
Red Sea, conducted also the survey of the Maldive
Islands and groups known as the Chagos
Archipelago.” This survey, published in
1837, would update the work of Lt. Blair’s survey
from almost 60 years earlier. Conditions
were difficult working in the tropics in that era,
“ . . . death was busy amongst them for months and
so paralyzed by disease were the living, that the
anchors could scarcely be raised for a retreat to
the coast of India.” In the end, however, the maps
produced were of such high quality that they
warranted a special viewing by the Queen of
England.
As an
interesting side note, one of the things Moresby
found on Diego Garcia was litter. On September 18,
1837, he found a bottle with a note in it on the
shore. It was signed by F.C. Montgomery, 4th
Regiment and also mentioned Captain Twopenny of
the 73rd Highlanders. They had been aboard a ship
traveling from Plymouth, England to Ceylon when
they threw their message in a bottle overboard, at
a point more than 1,300 miles from Diego Garcia
and two years earlier.
In 1849 an
article on the Chagos Islands appeared in The
United Service Journal and Naval and Military
Magazine. It took a very dim view toward the
progress of the islands, whose proprietors “do not
themselves reside in these Islands, but live in
opulence where they like, deputing the management
of the affairs of the Chagos to a number of
registrars, or overseers.” The article
does not paint a very nice picture of life on the
islands, but allowances have to be made for the
British sensibilities of the authors. There is
dismay that the laborers “resemble the tribes of
Africa, from whom they took their origin” and that
“No idea of a Supreme Being appears to exist in
the Chagos Archipelago.” After all, the
article points out, the proprietors are of “French
descent.” One senses that the authors expect
little more from this combination of African and
French influences. Interestingly, this account
seems somewhat contrary to accounts of Roman
Catholicism (if of a syncretic nature) being well
established on the island.
Most of the
islanders lived on huts set on posts 3 feet above
the ground, the space below “being invariably
occupied by pigs,” which abound and produced a
“stench.” Sheep and cows were also to be found on
the island, and poultry was “exceedingly
plentiful.” There were turtles, both green and
hawksbill, and the laborers were rewarded with “a
piece of blue cloth worth seven or eight
shillings” if they found a particularly fine
example. It was noted that by this time
seals and walrus were almost entirely gone from
the island. This was probably largely due to human
hunting, but may also have come from the
introduction of dogs.
Dogs were
raised on the island and their sale resulted in
“considerable revenue.” The article notes a
“valuable breed of pointers” being raised.
The article is not too clear about when it was
referring to Diego Garcia in particular or another
of the Chagos Chain. It described an island
called “Home of Dogs,” however, that could
be one of the small islets in the mouth of Diego
Garcia’s lagoon. A large number of dogs were
raised there, tended only by “one Negro -
generally a leper.” The dogs were reportedly
fond of human attention, and at low tides some
would swim across to “neighboring islands.”
The islands
were also hosts to two introduced insect species.
Wasps had been imported from Mauritius to kill
insects that infested the coconut trees. They
thrived, much to the discomfort of the laborers.
In addition, honeybees had been introduced and
beeswax and honey were being exported. They made
hives in hollow trunks of cocoa trees. The entire
island ecology was reportedly fueled by the Bois
Mapan, also known as the roose-tree. A native of
the Maldives, it grew very fast and died just as
quickly, its remains eventually forming the basis
of the soil that could be found.
The Chagos
Archipelago produced more than just coconut oil.
It also produced an even more valuable kind of
oil: whale oil. Whaling ships routinely whaled in
the warm waters of the Chagos, perhaps as an
antidote to their time in the richer grounds in
the Antarctic south. For example, the whaler
Harrison out of New Bedford, Connecticut, stopped
in Diego Garcia during a three-year whaling voyage
beginning in 1854. Over time, however, the
whale population in the central Indian Ocean would
become depleted just as one of the worlds largest
oil consumers, the United States, discovered oil
on its own territory in Pennsylvania. Like sea
lions and seals, whales would become a rarity near
the island.
The year 1859
found the United States on the verge of civil war.
Though the island of Diego Garcia had ended
slavery decades before, a less violent kind of war
was being waged: A war for souls. As stated
earlier, the island of Mauritius (and therefore
Diego Garcia) was largely of the Roman Catholic
faith in accordance with its French heritage. When
the British had taken sovereignty over Mauritius
from the French, however, they had bought with
them the Anglican Church. Vincent W. Ryan, D.D.,
the Bishop of Mauritius, visited Diego Garcia and
other remote islands in 1859 in an effort to
counter the baleful influence of the
“romans.” He left Mauritius aboard Her
Majesty’s despatch gunboat Lynx and on June 15 he
went ashore at the Minni-Minni plantation on Diego
Garcia, where the manager (appropriately named Mr.
Mainguy) greeted him with the gift of “a fine pig”
and a basket of oranges and lemons. The Managers
of Point Maria Ann (Mr. Barry) and South East
Point (Mr. Regnaud) were also there.
Bishop Ryan
uttered a lament that would be repeated by future
missionaries when he said “Several causes tend to
produce a bad state of morals among the labourers,
though as far as physical comfort and supply went,
they seemed to be remarkably well off.” The next
day, while on a 3-mile walk to the South East
Point Estate, he met an “old Bombay Malabar” who
had spent 13 years in Mauritius as palefrenier
(stable boy) and knew of the Bishop. He asked that
the Bishop send someone who could show them “the
right way,” this repeated phrase apparently being
the means by which the Anglicans distinguished
their religion from the Catholics. The Bishop then
spent some time at the “spacious house” of
Monsieur and Madame Regnaud and their four
children, which was located near the plantation’s
busy coconut mills. He noted that the island had
many “Malabars” (descendants from the Indian
Subcontinent) and wrote “I spoke to several in
Creole, chiefly Madrassess,” expounding on the
folly of idolatry. After baptizing a child he gave
some literature to a local woman named Eugenic.
On his last
day on the island, the Bishop visited Point Maria
Anna. He asked an “old Negro” on the beach if
anyone there know “the right way” to heaven. The
man pointed the Bishop to 12-year-old Pelagie
Figaro. She had until recently been living on
Mauritius under Anglican tutelage and was
apparently a very good reader and student.
Finally, the day was ended with a ceremony that
involved much singing, blowing on shells, and
recitation from the gospel about Lake Tiberias.
CHAPTER 8
DIEGO GARCIA
IN THE SECOND HALF OF THE 1800s
Diego Garcia
continued to exist in relative obscurity.
The island’s plantations main export was coconut
oil, though whole coconuts were shipped out as
well. The island also produced small amounts
of various products for export: dried and salted
fish, turtles and turtle shells, coconut fiber and
cordage coir, etc. All products were
exported to Mauritius via routine visits from
supply vessels. Table 2 lists government
statistics on some exports from Diego Garcia in
the middle 1850s.
Table 2.
Selected
exports from Diego Garcia, 1850s
________________________________________________________________________
Item
1854
1855
1856
(partial)
coconuts
10,000
45,000
8,000
oil of
coconut
1,619 casks 1,579
casks 634 casks
________________________________________________________________________
Source:
British Public Records Office FO 167/288, 1859
A decade
later, in 1864, the output of coconut oil from the
three plantations on Diego Garcia was 34,000
veltes for East Point, twenty thousand for
Marianne, and twelve thousand for Mini-Mini.
The work of
harvesting and processing coconuts did not change
much until the end of the plantations almost 100
years later. First, coconuts would be collected
and stacked, with a worker expected to collect
1,500 per day. Then each pair of huskers would
husk 4,500 coconuts per day. Finally, those who
sorted the nuts from the husks would be expected
to collect 1, 500 nuts per person per day. The
nuts, having been husked and separated, would be
broken and laid flesh-up in blocks 24 feet square,
each one holding about 3,000 nuts. After about
three days in the sun the flesh would curl from
the shell, and women used knives to extract the
flesh. It would then be fed into the mills, which
were essentially large pestle-and-mortar
arrangements driven by harnessed mules circling
the mill (though in slavery days slaves may have
done it). On a typical day, with about 6-8 hours
of milling, 404 pounds of copra could be turned
into 17 veltes of coconut oil, or about 28
gallons.
The advent of
the steam ship was to have a significant impact on
Diego Garcia. On December 10, 1825, the steamer
Enterprise left Falmouth in England for a 115-day
passage to India. In 1830 Captain John Wilson led
the first Bombay-Suez steamer trip aboard the Hugh
Lindsay. As noted, surveyors such as Moresby
were laying the groundwork for new shipping routes
into the Red Sea and up to the Suez Isthmus.
Unlike sailing vessels, steamships were not at the
mercy of the various prevailing winds and monsoons
of the region. Ships would no longer travel in
sweeping arcs as they attempted to harness the
wind on their long voyages. Instead, shipping
would become more directly point-to-point.
In addition, steam power normally meant more
maneuverable vessels, and the constant advances in
the arts of navigation and hydrography were making
travel in and near the Chagos less
dangerous. The opening of the Suez Canal in
1869 led to even more marked changes in Indian
Ocean navigation.
Finally, some
350 years after having been discovered, the
geographic centrality of Diego Garcia would be a
factor. Ships sailing back and forth between
Europe and rapidly growing Australia, for
example, no longer had to sail far to the
South of Diego Garcia and around the Horn of
Africa. Instead, they could travel through the
Suez canal, and Diego Garcia was near the direct
route between the entrance of the Red Sea and Cape
Leeuwin, Australia. In addition, these ships
would need coal to fire their steam engines. This
would lead to a brief period that could be called
Diego Garcia’s “coal boom.”
The Royal Navy
assisted in surveying Diego Garcia for steam
navigation with a visit from the HMS Eclipse in
1881 under the command of Captain Garforth.
The same year the Orient Steam Navigation Company
closed its coaling station in Aden.
Following an inspection by one Captain Slader it
opened up a coaling station on Diego Garcia in
1882. At the time the Orient Company had 12
ships running the England-Australia route via the
Suez Canal, including the transports Austral and
Lusitania. In addition, the London-based
firm of Lund and Company set up its own coaling
business on Diego Garcia. Lund only operated two
ships on runs that would utilize Diego Garcia, but
they contracted with another 50 ships to provide
coal on a contingency basis.
With this
business boom came attendant problems. At first
the Orient Company imported 40 Somali workers for
their coaling station, as coaling in that day
required a great deal of manual labor. The Somalis
proved to be very troublesome, however, and they
were replaced with Mauritian workers. They
suffered from very poor morale, however, and
consideration was being given to importing Chinese
laborers before events overtook the stations. The
Lund company, which was coaling fewer ships, hired
local labor on an “as needed” basis for its
coaling operations. Normally the imported workers
lived separately from the natives on the
plantations. They had worse conditions, and
generally were not allowed to bring their families
to Diego Garcia. This, combined with poor pay and
alternating periods of idleness and backbreaking
labor, made for much trouble.
The lives of
the coaling stations were to be short lived, but
their existence helped highlight a problem for the
British authorities on Mauritius. The problems
with coal laborers, as well as a general rise in
the island’s population, led the British
authorities to establish a police post on the
island. The cost of maintaining empire was a
constant concern, however, and in 1888 a report
from the Auditor General recommended a paring of
the island’s police force, which consisted of one
officer, six constables, and a laborer. The report
stated that law and order needed to be maintained,
even if the Orient Steam Navigation Company was
closing its operation. It also noted that in
accordance with Ordinance 13 of 1884 the police on
Diego Garcia were “temporary” and could be called
back by the governor of Mauritius. It suggested
these specific manpower changes, along with their
attendant costs in Indian Rupees, the common
currency of the island.
Table 3.
Costs of
policing Diego Garcia circa 1888
_______________________________________________________________________
Present
Proposed
1 Police
Officer 3,400 1
Sergeant
720
1
Constable
480 1
Constable
480
2 @
420
840 2 @
420
840
3 @
320
960 Accommodations 318
1
Laborer
240 Supplies/Stores 1,000
Accommodations
449
Supplies/Stores
2,400
-----
-----
Totals
Rs.
8,469
Rs.
3,358
note: Rs =
Indian Rupees
________________________________________________________________________
Source:
British Public Records Office CO 167/638, 1888
Even with the
proposed savings, the authorities on Mauritius
were not happy to be spending money on policing
Diego Garcia. The island, in their opinions,
should be able to pay for its own policing. One
suggestion was taxing coal sold on Diego Garcia 1
rupee per ton, which given the contemporary sales
levels would have raised about 6,000 rupees. The
auditor warned, however, that such a tax would
“practically stop the industry,” but that a tax of
1/4 rupee per ton might be feasible. Another
suggestion was a tax of one rupee per hectoliter
of coconut oil. Diego Garcia, having exported
3,630 hectoliters to Mauritius in 1886, could
thereby pay for its own police.
The report
which requested the new plan from the auditor
general made clear the pressures Mauritian
authorities were under to economize. Its author
wrote that “enemies” of the colony wanted it to
balance receipts and expenditures. It then
forwarded the argument that Diego Garcia should be
an “imperial” instead of a “colonial” burden. This
was a key distinction. Colonies were expected to
more or less pay for themselves as if they were
businesses. But imperial assets (such as strategic
military bases) were paid for by the British
Empire as a whole. Diego Garcia was economically
insignificant, even to the small colony of
Mauritius. “The only advantage which the
dependency offers is a coaling-station in time of
necessity for Her Majesty’s ships-of-war.” The
island, the Mauritian authorities claimed, was a
military asset that they should not be expected to
pay for.
A tax on oil
would be strongly opposed by the council on
Mauritius, as the owners of the Diego Garcia
plantations had friends there. There was no point
in taxing miscellaneous items unless a customs
launch was purchased, and at 4,000 rupees that did
not seem likely. And, as the auditor would note, a
tax on coal would be moot as it appeared that the
coaling operations would be shutting down even
before an added tax made them even more
uneconomical. This assessment raises
an interesting question: Why was the Diego Garcia
“coal boom” so short lived?
There would
appear to be several reasons. In the first
place, increases in the size of ships, combined
with improved technology, were allowing steam
vessels to sail very long distances without
re-coaling. Stops in mid-ocean would not be
necessary. Since ships did not have to stop in
mid-ocean to coal, the question then became “why
should they?” It was expensive to haul coal
to remote Diego Garcia, unload and store it, and
then transfer it back onto ships. This made coal
sold on the island more expensive. In addition,
coal transfer relied on manual labor and there was
more (and cheaper) manpower at major ports where
ships could save time by re-coaling and loading
cargo at the same time. Finally, while more
shipping was traveling near Diego Garcia, it was
still far from a “major” route. Seen in retrospect
coal was to be supplanted by fuel oil anyway.
CHAPTER 9
EXPLOSION,
INVESTIGATION, AND WWI
Since Diego
Garcia was the only inhabited land for almost a
thousand miles, it sometimes served as destination
of desperation. In October, 1881, the Dutch
steamer Koning der Nederlanden was headed from
Batavia to Amsterdam when it broke a shaft and
foundered while several hundred miles from Diego
Garcia. One hundred seventy five crew and
passengers, in six boats, attempted to make it to
the island. As the boats straggled along passing
steamships picked up a few of them. One boat made
it all the way to Ceylon with twenty nine
survivors aboard. But none ever reached Diego
Garcia and 90 passengers and crew were never to be
heard from again. The island was a small speck
indeed in a very large ocean.
On August 27,
1883, Diego Garcia had its breakfast interrupted
by the sound of explosions, low but powerful.
Thinking that the sounds were from a vessel in
distress, islanders were dispatched to various
points on the island to scan the horizon, but
could find nothing. The steamer Eva Joshua
was moving from Point de l’Est to anchor near
Point Marianne when its crew heard the ominous
noises. Men were sent aloft, but like the
islanders could not see any cause for the sounds.
Only later would the islanders find that the
alarming noises had come from the explosion of the
volcano at Krakatoa, Indonesia, more than 2,200
miles distant.
In 1888 the
Orient Steam Navigation Company ceased its
operations on Diego Garcia after offering the
British government an opportunity to take over.
The land the company leased reverted to the
government. In short order, Lund and Company was
shut down as well. During this time,
in 1885, the British government had sent yet
another survey team to the island. This may have
been an indication that the Admiralty at least
considered taking a more active role in the
island’s future. The H.M.S. Rambler, under
the command of the Honorable F.C.P. Vereker, made
the most accurate charts of the island to
date. The island would once again retreat to
its raison de etre, coconuts, but by the end of
the century there was an omen of events to come.
An 1898 German expedition to do deep sea research
left Hamburg for a 9-month voyage aboard the
Valdivia and operated near the Chagos. The
residents of the island were surprised in 1899 by
the visit of a warship from this strange nation.
The Furst Bismarck, a German armored cruiser, and
the Marie, were showing the German flag in a
hitherto British ocean. It would be
almost 15 years before the islanders would see
another German ship.
The Chagos
would gain a small measure of world attention a
few years later during the Russo-Japanese
War. The Russians, in an effort to counter
Japan’s naval supremacy in the far East, sent
parts of the their Baltic fleet on an epic voyage
to the Pacific. The hastily assembled Russian 2nd
Pacific Squadron split up and headed towards the
Indian Ocean on two routes, one across the
Mediterranean and the Suez Canal, the other around
the Horn of Africa. There was speculation
that the two Russian groups would merge in or near
the Chagos. The British had declared neutrality,
so the use of Diego Garcia itself seemed ruled
out. The Russians, however, might attempt to use
some of the smaller, unpopulated, islands for
re-coaling and repairs. In addition, there was the
possibility that the Japanese would send ships
into the region to meet the Russians. In the end,
however, the Russians fused their fleets near
Madagascar, and although they then sailed
Northeast and near the Chagos, there were no
Japanese ships waiting for them as they sailed on
to their fate at the battle of the Tsushima
Straits. The Russian cruiser Aurora
would survive the trip, going on to a famous role
during the later Russian Revolution and is today a
museum ship in St. Petersburg.
That same
year, 1905, Diego Garcia and the other Chagos
islands were again visited by a scientific
expedition. This one, sponsored by the Percy
Sladen Trust, was undertaken aboard the HMS
Sealark, a survey vessel on loan from the Royal
Navy. The ship visited various islands in the
Chagos, anchoring at Diego Garcia July 7 to the
13. The expedition gathered much interesting
scientific information about the region and its
findings were widely reported.
In the early
morning hours of October 9, 1914, two ships sailed
into the lagoon at Diego Garcia. Upon anchoring an
assistant manager from one of the island’s
plantations climbed aboard and was surprised to
see a portrait of the Kaiser hanging. He had
simply assumed the ships were British. The Captain
of the ship quickly explained that it was the
German Emden, sailing with the British collier
Buresk. When the plantation manager, Mr.
Spender, came aboard, the Captain explained that
the ships had been participating in joint
maneuvers and damaged in a storm. He asked if the
islanders would help with some needed maintenance.
A bout of heavy drinking may have eased any doubts
Mr. Spender had about the new guests. It turned
out that the island was only visited by a supply
schooner every three months and hadn’t heard from
the outside world since July. The German Captain,
Muller, told the manager that Pope Pius X had
died, but failed to mention one other very
significant piece of world news.
The next day
Mr. Spender provided the Emden with the gift of a
live pig as well as boatload of fruit and fish.
Captain Muller gave cigars and whiskey in return,
and cordial relations were cemented. The Germans
fixed the motor on a launch for the islanders. In
return, islanders helped the Germans with the task
of scraping their hull. The hull of the
Emden was encrusted with barnacles. In order
to clean them off the ship was careened afloat by
alternatively flooding either port or starboard
storage tanks, heeling the ship and giving
cleaners access. In addition the ship was
repainted in grey. After a busy day and night of
work and trading the Emden and the Buresk sailed
out of the lagoon at 11 A.M.. The islanders
watched the ships head Northwest into the Indian
Ocean.
Five days
later Diego Garcia was visited by two more ships.
This time one stayed at sea just outside the
lagoon while another entered. The ship pulling
into the harbor was the HMS Hampshire and its mate
was the Empress of Russia. These were indeed
British ships, and Captain Grant of the Hampshire
informed the surprised islanders that the world
was at war and that he was looking for a German
raider that was loose in the Indian Ocean
terrorizing British shipping. The islanders,
unaware that a war had started, had unwittingly
given aid and comfort to the enemy. The British
Buresk, which had been accompanying the Emden, had
been captured by the Germans while hauling coal to
the British fleet in Hong Kong. It may have
been just as well that the islanders did not
know about the war, for they had no defenses at
all and the Emden could have easily shelled the
island and taken what it wanted with shore
parties. The success of the German raiders was
embarrassing to the Royal Navy, and this
particular episode would make British headlines as
“High Comedy on the High Seas.”
During her
three months of operations the Emden steamed
33,000 miles and sank or captured 23 merchant
ships, one cruiser, and one destroyer. More than
80 allied ships were involved in running her to
ground, which was accomplished at Keeling Island
in the Cocos group when she was intentionally run
aground after being crippled by the HMAS
Sydney. The HMS Hampshire, which had
come to Diego Garcia seeking the Emden, sank in
1916 after hitting a mine while on a mission to
Russia. More than 640 sailors lost their lives in
that disaster, as well as the Commander-in-Chief
of the British Army, Lord Kitchener, who was
headed to Russia for negotiations. The HMS Empress
of Russia would survive the war and be returned to
civil use, only to be recalled and used as a
troopship during World War II. Her navigator
during her trip to Diego Garcia, Geoffrey Miles,
would eventually lead the British military mission
to Moscow during World War II..
Diego Garcia’s
involvement in World War I, as fleeting and
humorous as it might have been, was a sign of the
potential importance of the island. Wars between
major powers were now being fought in even the
most obscure and faraway places, as the naval
engagement of the Falkland Islands would further
demonstrate. Diego Garcia’s central location may
not have yielded an economic bonanza (as related,
the coaling business had not thrived), but from
its central location one could strike out against
shipping lanes in many directions. It was a great
spot for raiders, much the same way it may have
been for pirates in earlier centuries, and would
therefore have to be watched by the British if
only to ensure its enemies did not utilize
it. Within 25 years the island would be
heavily utilized in an even more intensive battle
against not only the Germans but also the Japanese
and Italians.
CHAPTER 10
THE INTER-WAR
PERIOD
The period
between the world wars would pass relatively
uneventfully for Diego Garcia. The coconut
plantations continued to be the pillars of the
island’s economy. Table 4, with data recovered
from a variety of visiting magistrates
reports, will give some idea of the typical
volume of exports from the island.
Table 4.
Sample
exports from Diego Garcia in the inter war
period.
_______________________________________________________________________
Item
Sep
‘26 - June
‘27
1929 May ‘31 - May
‘32
coconut oil
veltes
10,739
4,094
7,361
copra
tons
250
150
711
coconuts
272,778
169,500
225,087
tortoise
shells
kilos
60
124
158
_______________________________________________________________________
Source:
British Public Records Office CO 167/879/4, CO
167/861/10, CO 167/869/13
One note of
excitement would be the assignment of a new
manager in the mid 1920s. Soon there were
complaints that “labourers are being roughly
handled and ill treated by the new manager Mr.
Edouard D’Argent” and that the islanders were
living in a state of fear. In May 1926, Mr.
Henry Bigara died shortly after a person named
Fidelia had committed suicide. Police sergeant
LeMeme quickly figured out that an islander
variously called Besage or Catawon had murdered
Bigara at the instigation of the manager D’Argent.
They were both sent to Mauritius to stand trial
for the death of Bigara (Fidelia’s death could not
be pinned on them). Catawon was quickly convicted
but the jury hung on D’Argent’s guilt. He had many
friends in Mauritius and the local press supported
him. In addition there were rumors of jury
tampering. A second trial convicted D’Argent,
however, and he was sentenced to spend the rest of
his life in “penal servitude” on Mauritius. He
died shortly thereafter.
British
authorities on Mauritius noted the difficulties of
policing the remote Chagos islands, as well as the
fact that sometimes the people sent to manage the
plantations were less than ideal for the
task. D’Argent, for example, was called a
“brute and a bully” who was unfit to manage.
Conditions on the islands would not “give rise to
a public scandal if they were fully investigated,”
but nonetheless a close watch would be
kept. One continuing problem was that
the owners of the plantation resided on Mauritius
and they saw Diego Garcia and the other Chagos
Islands as little more than some easy income.
There was a perennial shortage of capital for
investment and many ambitious plans for
development were wrecked on the shoals of fiscal
austerity. Mauritian colonial authorities felt
that the owners should pay for needed services and
upkeep while the owners in turn felt that such
costs were the obligation of the colonial
authorities. Compounding the geographic isolation
of Diego Garcia was the complex social hierarchy
of Mauritius. Not only were the native Diego
Garcian’s largely uneducated laborers, but they
were also of “dark” mixed-race descent.
One example of
the lack of investment was the failure to provide
the island with even a radio. In 1930, for
example, a visiting magistrate argued that a
wireless transmitter/receiver should be
installed. In 1936 a different visiting
magistrate would make the same suggestion,
pointing out that a wireless would allow the
islanders to hear “emergency broadcasts” from
Nairobi, Bombay, and Colombo. As he correctly
predicted, however, the owners would not pay for
the wireless set and neither would the colonial
authorities. The island would not get
a radio until 1941, when the RAF began using the
island as a base. Suggestions for more significant
reforms were shelved as well. For example,
in one message to the Colonial Office it was
suggested that the Chagos should be administered
not from Mauritius but from the Seychelles
islands, and that goods for the islands should be
shipped to Colombo instead of Mauritius. The
author noted, however, that Diego Garcia and the
Chagos were a Mauritian “family business” and that
any attempt to change the status quo would be
opposed.
Table 5 gives
an idea of the population of Diego Garcia through
this time.
Table 5.
Diego
Garcia population in the inter war period
_______________________________________________________________________
year
Men
Women
Children
1927
151
124
136
1930
150
135
150
1935
103
169
198
1937
166
164
185
______________________________________________________________________
Source:
British Public Records Office CO 167/861/10,
167/867/13, 167/893/4, 167/896/16
The figures
should be taken with a grain of salt. The visiting
magistrates sometimes broke down the population by
plantation and sometimes didn’t and occasionally a
wild variation in population was reported with no
explanatory comment. For example, a 1928 report
listed only 18 “lads and lasses” as the apparent
child population, and there was no reason given
for the fluctuation of about 50 men listed in
1935. During this time some of the
other Chagos Islands were also inhabited. Peros
Banhos, for example, typically had about 100 men,
80 women, and 100 children living on it. A few
other islands had even smaller and more transient
populations.
In 1933 yet
another scientific expedition would find its way
to the Chagos. The John Murray Expedition was
undertaken on the smallish vessel Mahabiss. The
primary goal of the expedition was to investigate
the possibility that a continent once connected
Africa to India. One of the members was
Lieut.-Commander Farquharson, R.N. He not
only made magnetic observations but also kept the
echo-sounder running continuously for more than
22,000 miles of sailing.
During these
decades the Chagos Islands were only
intermittently visited. Perhaps three or four
times a year a large steamer from Mauritius would
make a visit to Diego Garcia, dropping off
supplies for the island and picking up its
exports, mainly coconut related. In 1929, for
example, a visiting magistrate would visit the
island aboard the SS Surcouf. In the
mid 1930s these supply runs were made by the SS
Zambezia. The islands would also be visited on a
regular if infrequent basis by smaller vessels,
often delivering limited supplies as well as mail
and people. One ship used in the early 1930s was
the S.V. Diego, a barque of approximately 150 feet
length, 380 tons, and built about a half-century
earlier in England. The loss of the Diego, wrecked
on the shoals of Eagle Island in the Chagos while
on a supply run, was nearly a disaster for it
passengers, one of whom was a missionary priest.
Roger
Dussercle was a French priest with a missionary
bent. He had served earlier as a chaplain to the
French army in Morocco and then eventually been
assigned to by the Catholic Church to work on
Mauritius. Mauritius was already predominately
Catholic, and well served with churches and
priest. The outlying islands however, the “lesser
dependencies” including Diego Garcia and the
Chagos, had no assigned priests and often went
years without religious guidance. Dussercle not
only made it a point to visit the islands, but he
also wrote books about his adventures. On June 20,
1935, he would have an adventure indeed.
Eagle Island
was being abandoned, and the Diego was shuttling
workers and stores to other islands in the Chagos
(such as Diego Garcia). The 19th of June finds it
near Eagle Island when a surprise storm begins and
the winds shift, indicating a very early monsoon
season and startling the crew. The ship was in
danger of being run aground and dropped two
anchors, but they simply dragged. The third anchor
was dropped and briefly held before the line
parted. The crew and passenger donned life vests
as the situation worsened. The crew raised the
anchors and tried to maneuver out of danger, but
the rudder didn’t respond to commands. The captain
walked off the bridge and calmly informed his
second mate of the situation.
There were
confusion and terror as the ship went up on the
rocks amidst the storm. The ship was lying on its
port side at a 60-degree list on the rocks. Three
of the four lifeboats were swept away empty. The
crew could not launch the last. Father Dussercle
found his services as a priest in high demand as
the entire crew and passengers crowded on the
bridge for what appeared to be certain death. The
ship’s distress had been noted ashore, however,
and an island resident named Arthur Tallant came
to the rescue. He was a ploughman by trade, but
apparently could handle a small boat as well. He
made at least thirty trips to the ship, saving
everyone at only a few people per trip.
Everyone was saved, but the Island didn’t have
enough supplies to feed everyone and it might take
months for anyone on Mauritius to notice the loss
of the Diego. There was only one seaworthy boat on
the Island, and it was eventually taken by Second
Mate Berenger to Peros Banhos to alert authorities
of the shipwreck, despite continued bad
weather. In 1939 the island of Diego
Garcia received what appears to be its first visit
by an aircraft. The British had been considering a
trans-Indian Ocean air route to improve
communications with the far East, particularly in
view of the tense world situation. A PBY-2 flying
boat, nicknamed the “Guba 2", was piloted from
Australia to Mombasa by Capt. P.G. Taylor. The
aircraft surveyed one possible route and took
aerial photographs of stops including Diego
Garcia. It is possible the flight was coordinated
with a visit to the island by the HMS
Liverpool. The flight was an example of the
ever greater reach of aircraft, and the PBY-2
would be the basic design of the “Catalina” flying
boat that would be heavily used by the allies
during World War II. Diego Garcia would see
many more such aircraft in the near future.
CHAPTER 11
THE THIRD
OCEAN IN THE SECOND WORLD WAR
World War II
was indeed a “world” war, and the Indian Ocean
would play a secondary but nonetheless an
important role even though the region is largely
overlooked. The Indian Ocean was an
important area for the British. With the Germans
and Italians in North Africa and ravaging shipping
across the Mediterranean the British position in
Egypt and the Middle East depended largely on
supplies coming from the East. In addition, the
British homelands needed supplies from India and
Australia, and especially fuel from the Middle
East and Southeast Asia (prior to the Japanese
entry into the war). The huge British refinery at
Abadan, Iran, for example, became a key source of
vital 100 octane aviation fuel for the allies.
During the war
385 British, Allied, and Neutral ships would be
sunk in the Indian Ocean, 250 of those by
submarines. This amounted to 1,789,870 tons of
shipping, with the worst months being March and
April of 1942. Beginning in 1939 German
surface raiders were the primary threat. Then it
was Italian ships and submarines that had been
caught in Ethiopia. With the Japanese entry into
the war there was the danger of major enemy fleets
raiding into the ocean, which the Japanese did.
Even as the raider threat subsided and the
Japanese were forced to turn from the Indian Ocean
toward the encroaching U.S., submarine forces
began taking an ever heavier toll. Both German
submarines, notably the “Monsoon” group operating
out of Penang, and Japanese submarines were a
danger in the Indian Ocean.
Diego Garcia
would find itself involved in the war from early
on. Even prior to the war, as tensions in
Europe mounted, the HMS Liverpool called on Diego
Garcia to show the flag in May of 1939. The
British, recalling their experience with the Emden
in World War I, kept a much closer watch on the
islands once the war began. No German raiders
would attempt to pull into Diego Garcia. Indeed,
mindful of the possibility that the British would
use the island as a forward anchorage or seaplane
base, the German raiders studiously avoided coming
too close. During an operation to prevent
Vichy French shipping from crossing the Indian
Ocean, for example, the British made aerial
reconnaissances of the Chagos islands. The HMS
Hermes, Enterprise, and Mauritius searched around
the island, and two Catalina flying boats used the
island to fly 12 hour missions in support.
In
late 1940 the German raiders Atlantis and Pinguin
were both operating in the Indian Ocean. The
Atlantis and the accompanying Speybank met up with
the Vichy ship Lot and the Japanese African Maru
in the general vicinity of the Chagos . Indeed,
the Axis had a rendezvous point Viechen (Violet)
at 14 degrees South by 73 degrees East, several
hundred miles south of Diego Garcia, which was the
nearest inhabited land. The potential utility of
Diego Garcia as a central base of operation was
highlighted on May 17, 1941, when the British got
a good radio direction-finding fix on the German
raider Kormoran only 200 miles from the island.
The nearest ships were the HMS Cornwall and
Glasgow in distant Mauritius, which were sent in
pursuit. By the time they arrived, however, the
raider had slipped away.
In January of
1941 an MNBDO (Marine Naval Base Defense
Organization) force was sent from Port ‘T’ (Addu,
Maldives) to Diego Garcia, escorted by the HMS
Glasgow. At the same time, the steamer Zambezia
was sent to Diego Garcia from Mauritius with
supplies. The British were stretched thin, and
plans were made for an Indian infantry company to
garrison the island while artillerymen from Hong
Kong and Singapore Royal Artillery regiments
manned the coastal defense batteries.
One of
those traveling to Diego Garcia was a British
Marine named James Alan Thompson aboard the Clan
Forbes. Thompson would later write several
books in which he would discuss his time spent on
the island, most notably “Only the Sun
Remembers.” Thompson had originally been in
charge of an anti-aircraft detachment during the
ill-fated British defense of Norway. He escaped
Norway as a straggler aboard one of the last
British ships out and was sent to the Middle East
and ultimately to help with the construction of a
secret naval base (base ‘T’) at Addu Atoll in the
Maldive Islands north of the Chagos island
chain. When initial construction was
finished at Addu his unit was sent south to Diego
Garcia.
Thompson’s
experience in Diego Garcia was far from enjoyable.
The islands had always been hot, isolated, and
relatively primitive. Now, under the pressures of
wartime, ill-fed troops and workers would struggle
to build the military facilities to fight off a
potential Japanese attack. Particularly
damaging to morale was the lack of contact with
the outside world. Thompson writes about getting a
pre-Christmas letter from his wife in late March.
He put it:
I was never so
near the sun, so near the elemental, so fearful or
so overwhelmed; East or West along the Equator
Line, degrees North or South, the sun burned
nearer to the earth in Chagos..... Trapped,
imprisoned by thousands of miles of ocean to every
point on the polished brass compass, by-passed by
ship trail and sky path; feebly fastened to life
by the haphazard supply ship coming from
Mauritius, once, twice, three time each long year.
Until the temporary installation of a RAF wireless
station at East Point, completely devoid of
contact with the distant world; at one time
unaware of the world’s new war.
The troops and
laborers were at the distant end of a long and
tenuous supply chain. The island did not produce
enough vegetables and fruit for the new population
and many of the troops began to suffer maladies of
malnutrition like scurvy and even beriberi.
Even without combat the work could be dangerous. A
young sergeant died a “lingering death” after
falling overboard and striking his head on an
adjacent landing craft. While moving one of
the old 6 inch guns out of the Clan Forbes the
teeth in a winch slipped and the barrel fell 8
feet. The winch handle spun off and hit a man
square in the forehead. He survived, albeit with a
“terrible dented scar on his brow.” Thompson
explained:
But
the anchorage had to be given the surface defence
of two old six-inch guns, ultimately manned
by a wretched, ill-disciplined, spiritless battery
raised in Mauritius, transported to Diego Garcia,
and literally flung ashore without semblance of
tentage, equipment, proper rations and devoid of
the knowledge or will to provide in any way for
their own future existence.
The island did
have one redeeming feature, however: Diego
Garcia is the fisherman’s paradise; the incredible
Valhalla where all lies come true, where two
exaggerating arms cannot span the fish caught;
where there is neither doubt nor hope but only the
certainty of catching fish until his arm is tired
or the line snaps. Until there is no longer room
to move in the boat, until there are sufficient
fish to feed a ship full of hungry men. Fishing in
paradise, in the kind waters of greedy and
ignorant fish; dream fish, fish weighing ten,
twenty, fifty, one hundred pounds. The one sport
of Chagos; in which to indulge our small
excitement until the sun burned our bodies and the
revolting stench of the dead sharks became
unbearable.
In July of
1941 the British were facing the prospect of
fighting the Japanese in the East in addition to
the Germans. There was disagreement over the
precise course the British should take, but
clearly defenses in the Indian Ocean needed to be
shored up. A British planning estimate forecast
that the Japanese would attack the Soviet Union
and take its Maritime Provinces in the far East
before turning Southwards to attack British
interests. This would give the British a
“breathing space” in which to prepare. The
role envisioned for Diego Garcia was as a cruiser
fueling base with some gun and boom (anti-torpedo)
defenses.
The same
month, the Navy’s Director of Plans had made a
slightly more pessimistic assessment. This report
considered the possibility that Singapore might
not be useable as a fleet base due to Japanese air
attack, and emphasized that in this case the
British could not ensure that Japanese surface
forces would not enter the Indian Ocean. With
Singapore out of the picture, it envisioned
the British falling back on a “line” running from
Durban to Mauritius to Diego Garcia to the Nicobar
Islands. This would protect the most vital
Northwest Indian Ocean sea lanes. It further noted
that Port ‘T’ was centrally located behind this
line and was a logical choice as the main fleet
base. Port ‘T’ was the secret British port in the
Maldive Islands, being hurriedly built. In
addition, while Diego Garcia was centrally located
and forward, Port ‘T’ was already surveyed, had a
better harbor, and was closer to vital specialist
building resources. As is often the
case in war, a “strategic” choice (Diego Garcia)
was beat out by real limitations in vital
resources such as survey, construction, and
engineering unit locations.
By August the
British navy realized that it did not have enough
information about Diego Garcia. In particular, the
surveys on file were not up to modern standards.
If necessary, could Diego Garcia be used by deep
draft capital ships like battleships? After
a flurry of messages highlighting the shortage of
specialist vessels, the HMIS Clive, of the Indian
Navy, was tasked with conducting a survey.
Ultimately, it was decided that Diego Garcia was
indeed suitable for aircraft carriers and
cruisers, but ships with deeper drafts
(battleships and very large merchant vessels)
could not use the anchorage.
In October of
1941, following a reconnaissance by the Indian
Army, the Commander in Chief of the East Indies
commented on the development of the Diego Garcia
base. Only two guns were allotted for the shore
battery, a symptom of just how far stretched
British resources in the Indian Ocean were. They
would both be sited near Eclipse Point, where they
could cover the main channel into the lagoon. In
addition, there would be a battery observation
post and a port war signal station located on
Eclipse Point. The base would also get W/T
(wireless telegraphy, British for radio) and a
Mauritian garrison expected to be ready by
February of 1942.
In October of
1942, following the Japanese attack on Pearl
Harbor and US entry into the War, the British War
Cabinet issued top level plans for Diego Garcia.
The first plan, ‘A’, was to be started immediately
and foresaw three major tasks for Diego Garcia: As
a fueling and minor operational base, an advanced
flying boat base, and an aerodrome (i.e., an
airfield). The backup plan, ‘B’, was in case there
was a need for Diego Garcia to become a major
operation base and called for a much larger
logistical and support presence as well as added
defenses. When it was later decided that Diego
Garcia was not suitable for large draft vessels
plan ‘B’ was dropped.
The plans
foresaw the island suffering possible day and
night torpedo and bomb attacks from up to 100
carrier-based aircraft. In addition, bombardment
from 12" cruiser guns was a possibility, as well
as attacks by motor torpedo boats and submarines
(outside the lagoon). As a worst case scenario,
there was the possibility of the Japanese landing
up to one brigade of troops. On the bright side,
none of the attacks was likely to be sustained.
The Japanese were expected to hit and leave, not
try and take the island permanently.
An aerodrome
was to be built on the land Southwest of Eclipse
Point. If the Japanese severed communications from
Australia to the US West coast it might be
necessary to ferry aircraft “the long way around,”
via Africa and Diego Garcia. The island was
also to get a fighter squadron and a combined
ground reconnaissance and torpedo bomber squadron.
For air defense the island would get 16 heavy and
16 light anti-aircraft guns. In addition,
controlled minefields and indicator nets would
protect the channel into the lagoon. A small
garrison of troops would serve as a last ditch
defense. According to British projections, at
least 54 officers and 404 ratings would be needed
by the navy alone to man the base and the
underwater defenses, including many “afloat” in
local defense and harbor craft. If
plan ‘B’ had been fully implemented, there could
have been as many as 4,000 troops and auxiliaries
on the island. As a further indicator of British
shortages, the island was to get one radio
transmitter and power supply from the UK, but a
second medium-power set would have to be taken
from a pool being gathered in the region. The
radio station was initially to be manned by a
leading signalman, three signalmen, and three
coders. Looking to the future, however, possible
sites for HF/DF (high frequency direction finding)
and radar antennas were considered near East Point
and near Eclipse Point.
The military
bureaucracy shifted into high gear, but the plans
for the island were never fulfilled. In the
earlier parts of the war there was a serious lack
of resources, and by the later periods the
perceived need for the base diminished. In
particular, the US victory at Midway Island in mid
1942 helped ensure that the Japanese could never
again muster a major threat to the Indian Ocean.
Ultimately, the aerodrome and most of the other
planned facilities were never built. The main
military activity that did take place was the
establishment of Advanced Flying Boat Base No. 29,
which flew Catalina flying-boats on reconnaissance
and antisubmarine warfare patrol. Additionally,
the two 6" guns were placed and the island housed
a small garrison and some weather and
communications personnel.
The two guns
were placed at Kerry Point, which is today known
as Cannon Point, and they remain as reminders of
the war along with the concrete bunkers and ammo
boxes of the “fort.” The two guns were already
more than 40 years old when they were put on Diego
Garcia, yet another indication of how strapped the
British were for equipment at the time. They were
installed by the MNBDO in December of 1941 and
manned by Royal Marines until relieved by X
Mauritian Battery in January of 1942. They,
in turn, were relieved by the 12th Indian Coast
Battery of the Indian Army in September of 1942.
It was not until October of 1942 that construction
of the shelters and magazines began.
The guns
themselves were 6" Mark VII guns, one (piece 1264)
manufactured by Vickers and the other (piece 1417)
by the Royal Gun Factory. The former was installed
on cradle 798 and pedestal 1067, while the later
was installed on cradle 1067 and pedestal 798, the
cradle/pedestal sets apparently getting switched
during installation. The guns had a range of
approximately 14,000 yards with a nominal muzzle
velocity of 2,500 feet per second. There
were 99 feet and a 276.5 degree bearing from gun
number one to number two. A 2-meter Barr &
Stroud F.T.29 rangefinder (number 22119) was used
on a Type M.T. 1454 modified mount (number 2219).
A Vickers clock and naval Dumaresq were used for
fire control.
While the
aerodrome was never built, the island did, as
noted, serve as a flying boat base. The facility
was rather small and quite Spartan, with normally
at most three flying boats present at any time.
Though small in numbers, these aircraft played an
important role in the surveillance of the central
Indian Ocean. While they did not sink any enemy
submarines, their presence complicated enemy
operations and they also carried out the less
glamorous task of reporting on general shipping.
The air operations were centered in the lagoon
adjacent to the East Point plantation, and they
left a landmark that exists to this day: the
remains of the Catalina flying boat named “Katie.”
On September
16, 1944, RAF Officer Pilot James Park took off
from Madras, India, in a Catalina named “Katie”
after the squadron letter ‘K’. The aircraft flew
more than eight hours to Kelai in the Maldive
Islands where it was supposed to refuel, but a
storm prevented this. So it continued to Diego
Garcia which was over another 10 hours away. The
Catalina was a very slow aircraft, but it could
fly very long distances. Even so, the aircraft was
running almost literally on fumes when it landed
in the lagoon at Diego Garcia. Refueling was a
grueling task. Four gallon Gerry cans would be
filled with fuel ashore and wheeled to the pier,
where they would be loaded onto rowboats. The
rowboats would then be rowed out to the aircraft
and the fuel cans would be hoisted up and poured
into the aircraft.
Since another
aircraft already at Diego Garcia took precedence
for refueling, the pilot Park went to bed with
‘Katie’ bobbing lightly on the water with a
crewman on board. An unusually strong storm soon
blew up and tore the “Katie” from its mooring.
Normally the crewman aboard would have started the
engines and taxied to keep the aircraft from
blowing ashore but it was out of fuel. The
aircraft ended up on the beach, wrecked.
Useful parts were salvaged, leaving a hulk that
remains an island landmark to this day.
The
British had no plans to utilize the native
plantation workers. One report stated that the 450
or so natives were used to “easy living” and “will
be of no use whatsoever.” Another said
that “people less likely to be able to do work of
any kind can scarcely be imagined.” The
British government arranged to compensate the
Diego Garcia company for any loss of plantation
revenues caused by the military buildup. Though
most of the natives did not need to be relocated,
the presence of the military was distorting the
economy. The managers felt the workers would be
“spoilt” by the occupation. Workers would find it
easier to catch and sell fish or do odd labor for
the troops rather than harvest coconuts. An
additional symptom was rapid inflation as the
natives sold food to hungry troops that were
suffering from a substandard diet out of tin cans.
While Diego
Garcia was never the sight of any major battles
like Midway or Guadalcanal, the area was still
dangerous for sailors right up until the end of
the war. Two cases in particular stand out. On
September 19, 1943, the Fort Longueuil was
torpedoed and sank Southwest of Diego
Garcia. Victims of the German submarine
U-532, two Indian crewmen survived the ordeal.
First they survived four and ½ months at sea on a
life raft. And then, upon finally reaching shore
(in Indonesia) they were captured by the Japanese
and imprisoned for 18 months. On July
2, 1944, the Liberty ship Jean Nicolet was
torpedoed by the Japanese submarine I-8. The
blazing ship was abandoned, and the Japanese
submarine picked up approximately 100 survivors. A
few were taken below, then for the next three
hours the rest were subject to shootings,
beatings, and stabbing. Many were forced to run a
gauntlet of Japanese crewmen with pipes and
knives. The ordeal only stopped when the I-8
detected an aircraft, submerging while leaving
more than 30 bound men on deck. Amazingly, some of
them managed to swim back to the still burning
Jean Nicolet and launch rafts . It is quite
possible that the aircraft in question was a
Catalina flying boat from Diego Garcia.
The island
holds the graves of 9 World War II service
members, aside from those who were buried at
sea. They were either members of the
Mauritius Regiment or the Royal Indian Artillery,
and are all buried at the Pt. Marianne Cemetery as
per Table 6.
Table 6.
Allied WWII
casualties buried on Diego Garcia
__________________________________________________________________________
Name
Rank
Service #
Unit
Date
of Death Age
Appado,
G.D.
Private MR/1298
Mauritius Reg.
20/07/1942 ??
Atchia,
AHM
Corporal MR/368
Mauritius Reg.
28/02/1942 ??
Buta
Kahn
Gunner
44606 Royal Indian
Arty. 26/02/1943
20
Hardy,
LP
Private MR/284
Mauritius Reg.
17/07/1942 ??
Mehdi
Kan
Gunner AAA/25239 Royal Indian
Arty. 08/04/1943
28
Montocchio,F
Gunner
MR/1038 Mauritius
Reg.
12/07/1942 ??
Muhammad
Latif Sha Gunner
25214 Royal Indian
Arty. 08/04/1943
??
Pierre-Louise,
I Private R/MTF/61
Mauritius Reg.
05/07/1942 ??
Samundar
Kham
Cook
CA/1541 Royal Indian Arty.
16/06/1943 32
__________________________________________________________________________
Source:
British Commonwealth War Graves Commission
CHAPTER 12
THE END OF
WWII AND THE ENTRANCE OF THE AMERICANS
The end of the
war saw Diego Garcia once again left to its own
devices. Although there were some changes, such as
the installation of a permanent radio set and the
opening of a school for the children, life
returned to the normalcy of coconut harvesting and
fishing. The military simply packed up and
left, taking whatever could be carried. The
military might have been gone, but the island was
not forgotten. In 1953, as the British
considered the increasingly tenuous position of
their empire, they decided to investigate the
possibility of maintaining control of the Indian
Ocean from bases on remote and isolated islands,
instead of from large nations like India.
The Far East Air Forces conducted Operation
Concubine, which included a survey of various
Indian Ocean islands for potential use as air
bases. One of those surveyed was Diego
Garcia. A few years later a new Mauritian
governor, Sir Robert Scott, would take an interest
in the isolated atoll and pay it a visit. He
traveled aboard the H.M.S. Loch Killisport instead
the usual inter-island steamer, the old, slow,
steamship M.V. Jules. His report of that
trip paints a portrait of the island before it
suffered from yet another intrusion of history.
Scott reported
that the island’s population was “markedly African
with few signs of mixed ancestry.” In addition he
“was surprised to find that a relatively high
proportion of the residents regard the islands as
their permanent home and they have their
characteristic way of life.” He estimated that 80%
of the population were “natives” with most of the
rest being Seychellois who were indeed only
temporarily living on the island. It
is telling that the Governor of Mauritius (and by
extension the “lesser dependencies” including
Diego Garcia) was surprised by the existence of a
native population with its own culture. Since
basically the only employment on the island was
the plantations, and they hired workers on a
contract basis, the island’s residents were often
referred to as “contract laborers.” This gave
readers of government reports the idea that the
island’s residents were a transient and temporary
population whose true home was elsewhere. This
oversight would lead to controversy and
complications that endure to the present day.
As far as
culture, Scott noted that Diego Garcia had “a
society which is notably partial to alcoholic
refreshment and broad minded with regards to
marriage.” Attempts to replace the notorious
Sega dances failed, and on other islands attempts
at changing local mores had proven less than
successful. On Agalega island, for example,
records were played on a grammaphone instead but
“Satan found much mischief still.” Likewise, on
Salomon the introduction of volleyball failed
because the fishermen found the nets “too great a
temptation.”
There were
other changes for the better, however. One of the
islands longstanding health menaces,
ankylostomiasis , had been almost eliminated but
even improved sanitation could not stop flies from
being a nuisance. The islander’s workload was
considered “fair,” and spare time was often spent
fishing. The school at East Point had 33 students
though there were attendance problems. Many
parents apparently considered school a “newfangled
superfluity.” There were 258 men, 198 women, 107
boys, and 93 girls, largely split between the two
main settlements of Pointe de l’Est (East Point)
and Pointe Marianne.
Governor Scott
had hopes for continued development of the island.
One of the companies operating a plantation on the
island, Diego Ltd., had ambitious plans. One
of the economic problems was that the traditional
product, coconut oil, was facing keen competition
from new methods of processing vegetable oils. A
Mauritian company, Inova Ltd., was considering the
construction of new plants to produce a much
higher quality of coconut oil that could compete
on world markets. The age-old method of pressing
with donkey-driven mills would come to an
end. In addition, another 1,500 acres of
Diego Garcia would be added to coconut
cultivation, with another 80 Seychellois workers
imported to increase the workforce. The cost of
clearing land for plantations led to consideration
of mechanization to assist traditional manual and
animal labor. Diego Ltd. estimated selling
1,300 tons of guano per year as fertilizer.
Diego Ltd.
also planned on hiring better managers and
supervisors by offering better pay and benefits.
More fruit tress, particularly citrus and
breadfruit, would be planted to enhance the local
diet. And while commercial pork production was not
feasible more “free range” pigs would be raised to
likewise improve the sustenance of workers. These
plans were not without difficulties, however. It
was noted that the slow and infrequent steamship
communications between Diego Garcia and Mauritius
hampered economic development. In addition, Diego
Ltd. foresaw the need for acquiring an estimated
750,000 rupees in capital for the improvements.
Governor Scott predicted that the company would
seek government assistance and had doubts they
could raise it.
As the British
slowly withdrew from their empire, other nations
were expanding into it. In particular the United
States was taking an increasing interest in the
Indian Ocean. The growing importance of Persian
Gulf oil being shipped through the Indian Ocean
was recognized by US strategists. In addition, the
U.S. was increasingly taking the lead in regional
political issues under the mantle of anti
communism. In 1954 the US Chief of Naval
Operations, Admiral Robert B. Carney, established
what would become the Long Range Objectives Group
in the office of the CNO. The group was designed
to provide the Navy with strategic guidance, a
sort of “grand strategy” by which operational
leaders could steer. One of the staffers, Stuart
Barber, originated what would become the
“strategic islands” strategy.
The basic idea
of a naval power operating from isolated bases was
hardly new. As related in this thesis the
idea had been a recurring one in the history of
Diego Garcia. Now, however, the idea was
dusted off and modern exigencies were taken into
account. Barber foresaw a need for a ring of
strategic island bases (mainly in the Southern
hemisphere) circling the globe. Such islands would
be relatively cheap and easy to acquire in both
monetary and political terms, and would be immune
from the trend toward greater third world
independence that threatened established
bases. Barber scoured maps and atlases
looking for candidate islands. Diego Garcia headed
his list as having the potential to be such a
base. In 1957 Admiral Jerauld Wright,
Commander in Chief of the US Atlantic Fleet,
“inspected” Diego Garcia from a U.S. ship.
In May of 1960
Admiral Horacio Rivero, the director of the Long
Range Objectives Group, proposed that the British
be asked to “detach” Diego Garcia from Mauritius
when that colony was given independence. The
new Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Arleigh
Burke, agreed and informal contacts with the
British were stepped up. In early 1959
Fred Hadsel, who was liaison for African Affairs
at the US embassy in London, had contacted the
British with a proposal. The US Navy, he
indicated, was studying the possibility of a U.S.
naval task force operating in the Western Indian
Ocean. In order to further planning, he proposed
that a team visit and survey British ports
that might function as logistics bases. The team
would be small and travel in civilian clothes, and
he suggested Mombasa and Mauritius as two possible
places to investigate.
The British
Foreign Office welcomed the US interest. They
noted the importance of protecting the oil routes
as well as the potential benefits of having the US
dependant on the British. The political situation
in Kenya was “complicated,” however, and therefore
Mombasa was not an ideal choice. Similarly,
Mauritius was likely to get self-government in the
near future and the British could not make a
long-term commitment there. It was suggested that
the US team visit the Seychelles on their
tour. Governor Scott of Mauritius
added his apprehension at the possibility of the
US Navy establishing itself on Mauritius. “While
paying due tribute to our debt to the Americans,
the prospect of opening up Mauritius to the
‘American Way of Life’ fills me with
misgiving.” He cited the bad experiences of
Pacific Islands and said there were “too many
opportunities for tactlessness in the political
and social fields.” Governor Scott did not
absolutely rule out any US presence, however,
noting that money was an effective salve and that
something of a “limited scope” might be arranged.
The British
may have been concerned that the US would turn to
France for support in such a venture. The French
maintained a strong presence in the Red Sea port
of Djibouti, and the British noted growing US
interest in that port as well. A large dry dock
was being constructed as a joint French-Ethiopian
venture, the Ethiopian portion of funding being US
foreign aid to Ethiopia. In addition, a large
tanker dock was planned and NATO funding (via
France) was also being used to upgrade the port.
According to the Egyptians the US wanted a base in
Djibouti in part to help support Israel.
Following a
flurry of telegraphs and reports, London sent
a message emphasizing that the U.S.
was looking merely for a depot for use in case of
an emergency that called for the deployment of a
task force. There was no truth, according to
London, to rumors that the U.S. was going to
station an aircraft carrier permanently in the
Indian Ocean. London was also trying to
ensure that it kept the colonies and remote
officers from overstepping their authority in the
quest for possibly lucrative US development
money. In particular it was noted that Sir.
E. Baring was “most anxious to involve the
Americans in East Africa,” but that all officials
should be noncommittal to US proposals.
Talks were in the exploratory stages, and London
reserved the final say on any agreement.
June 12, 1959,
the Admiralty sent out a message announcing that
Her Majesty’s Government had given permission for
the US CINCNELM to send a small, low profile,
survey team in civilian clothes. The team members
would be Captain H.K. Rock, Cdr. E. Hook, Jr.,and
Cdr. LR Larson, C.E.C. Their itinerary would
have them leaving Nairobi for a couple of days
visiting in Mombasa and Mauritius before returning
to London on Air France flight 288 on July 3. The
Admiralty emphasized that it was uncommitted and
that local officials should likewise remain
noncommittal.
Meanwhile, the
Air Ministry was expressing its concern over
numerous U.S. requests to use facilities in
British territories around the world. The British
were uncertain as to U.S. intentions. Were these
requests all part of a coordinated effort?
While the British naturally wanted to be helpful,
the Air Ministry pointed out, great care was
needed to ensure that the Americans did not take
advantage of British kindness. In particular, the
“awkward” arrangements concerning Ascension Island
in the Atlantic were cited as demonstrations for
the need for “careful coordination” within the
British government and caution about the terms of
any arrangements.
Almost on cue,
the U.S. CinCPacFlt (Commander in Chief, Pacific
Fleet) invited the Chief of Staff of the British
Far East Fleet and four other officers to visit
Pearl Harbor. Among the subjects to be
discussed was a general concept of operations for
the Indian Ocean and the problems the Pacific
Fleet faced in staging forces into the ocean. In
light of the need for US bases information was
requested on the possible use of the R.A.F. base
on Gan (in the Maldives) to support U.S. Indian
Ocean forces.
The survey
team led by Captain Rock made its inspections. In
discussions with British officials, they noted the
various difficulties with the sites being
surveyed. They also surprised their British
hosts by bringing up several more possible
locations for support facilities. One of these was
the remote island of Diego Garcia. The British
were not able to arrange for the team to visit
Diego Garcia given the time constraints and the
limited communications to the island. They were,
however, pleased that the U.S. was considering new
options. The British felt that it was best if the
US did not get involved in Mombasa, and spent some
time carefully explaining the potential problems
of the U.S. use of facilities on Mauritius.
In late July
of 1959 the Admiralty released a comprehensive
report on “U.S. Navy Interests in the Indian
Ocean.” Marked “for UK eyes only,” it
outlined the Admiralty’s appreciation of the
situation. The report noted that the US embassy in
London had initiated discussions about the
possibility of the U.S. operating a fleet in the
Western Indian Ocean. The U.S. “might wish to say”
that such a deployment would only be made in an
emergency, and that it did not want “bases” but
only a “depot.” Indeed, the stated U.S. preference
was for a civilian manned supply depot somewhere
on British territory. The Seychelles,
Diego Garcia, and Gan in the Maldives were all
possibilities being investigated. In addition, the
US wanted oil storage in Singapore and the use of
a W/T (i.e., radio) station in Mauritius, if
necessary building an American extension onto the
British building. U.S. requirements
for fuel storage in the Western Indian Ocean were
along the lines of fifty-eight thousand tons of
fuel oil, forty-five hundred tons of diesel oil,
and over two thousand tons of aviation gas.
The British
emphasized that the US did not want a permanent
Indian Ocean presence but was only preparing for
emergency deployments of 15 to 35 ships. The US
also wanted to minimize capital investment in
procurement or refurbishment needed for the
facilities. In addition, the US had made clear
that it wanted to minimize any political
opposition to the U.S. facilities. The
“political opposition” the US Navy had in mind may
well have been domestic as well as foreign, and
minimizing costs would help to avoid involving the
US Congress in any decision.
The British
were particularly eager to assist the U.S. since
they were considering shutting down their own
operations at Aden. They remained leery of
involving the U.S. in Kenya, but Mombasa looked
like it was the best candidate to fulfil U.S.
needs. The British felt that Mauritius and Gan
would lead to too many political problems. Diego
Garcia was remote and undeveloped, and would
“entail heavy capital investment” which the U.S.
was trying to avoid. On the other hand, the
British felt that there would be “no appreciable
political repercussions” to allowing the U.S. to
use Diego Garcia. The report, apparently operating
under the same assumptions as Governor Scott
before his visit, said the island was “undeveloped
and populated very thinly by imported estate
labor.” At this very early point officials
did not seem to know (or to care) that the island
had a “native” population with a distinct culture.
The British
sent word that they were confused by the numerous
U.S. enquiries, and later in the year the U.S.
Chief of Naval Operations, Arleigh Burke, sent a
message to the British First Sea Lord. He stated
that he understood British concerns and that the
U.S. was grappling with its potential role in the
Indian Ocean. He said that a “small but flexible
force” for emergency operations in the Indian
Ocean was being considered, but pointed out the
difficult logistics problems such operations would
pose. In order to simplify planning and
negotiation he established CINCNELM as the single
point of contact on potential Indian Ocean
facilities. The British Ministry of
Defense then circulated a clarifying message that
U.S. explanations “enable us to dismiss, once and
for all, the idea that the Americans might be
intending to deploy a task force permanently in
the Indian Ocean.” The U.S. only
wanted “facilities” and not “bases,” and would
only operate in the region during emergencies.
It appears
that the British took these intentions at face
value, but at certain points one can sense some
British feeling that these “facilities” would only
be the proverbial camel’s nose under the tent.
Governor Scott in Mauritius, for example, asked
openly if the U.S. would be replacing the British
in the Indian Ocean. In the short term, however,
progress on U.S. plans was predicted to be stymied
by the fact that the developed facilities (such as
at Addu and Singapore) came with political
complications. Developing new facilities (at Diego
Garcia, for example) would take “substantial
expenditure.”
In the spring
of 1961 the British First Sea Lord prepared to
table a paper for the Chiefs of Staff on the
subject of U.S. facilities in the Indian Ocean.
The Admiralty noted that the U.S. continued to be
interested in using British facilities at Gan and
Aden as well as possibly adding on U.S. sections
to existing British facilities. In addition, the
U.S. was also continuing to consider undeveloped
places like Diego Garcia, Socotra, Ile de Roches,
and St. Annes Island. It was stressed that the
talks with the U.S. navy were “informal and
confidential in nature” and warned of “the
importance of not mentioning it to American
officials.” The talks were sensitive
to both parties for domestic as well as
international political reasons. The British were
grappling with the end of the empire and the
question of pulling out “East of the Suez.” The
U.S. was beginning to get drawn into Vietnam, and
military expansion into the Indian Ocean would
raise the specter of increased costs as well as
overstretch. The executive branches of both
governments were intent on coming to terms with
one another with minimal interference from
legislators and the general public.
By the fall of
1961 the U.S. was ready to make another overture.
The U.S. Naval Attache in London, Rear-Admiral
Gayler, asked that an official from the Colonial
Office meet with Professor Reitzel, who was on the
staff of the U.S. Chief of Naval Operations.
During World War II Reitzel had been a liaison
officer to British Admiral Cunningham in the
Mediterranean theater. Professor Reitzel was
an early practitioner of what would become known
as “area studies,” using a multi-disciplinary
approach to provide regional commanders with
advice.
Reitzel
informed his host that he had been personally
appointed by the CNO, Admiral Arleigh Burke, to
carry out “special evaluation studies.” He
was using his experience in Mediterranean studies
to analyze the political, military, and logistical
considerations for stationing U.S. forces in the
Indian Ocean. He then pointedly asked what the
British were going to do as they lost their main
Indian Ocean bases, and suggested that it was a
situation the British and Americans should study
together. He was advised that the CNO should
contact Admiral Crawford before writing the First
Sea Lord.
Meanwhile, the
US Navy was formulating a formal proposal that was
set before the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1962. The
JCS agreed in principle with the tentative navy
plan, and soon planning picked up steam.
Following communications problems during the Cuban
Missile Crisis the U.S. military had implemented a
large scale study of its global communications
system. It noted that there were huge “blackout”
areas in the Indian Ocean where U.S. Navy ships
were out of contact with higher command. The
Missile Crisis had reinforced the need to maintain
close contact with (and control over) tactical
units in distant regions. Therefore, a need was
felt for a new communications station to keep
contact with ships in the Indian Ocean. Project
KATHY considered Diego Garcia as a candidate.
In late 1963
President John F. Kennedy was asking about the
possibility of the U.S. 7th Fleet operating in the
Indian Ocean as a countermeasure to perceived
communist Chinese expansionism. In January
of 1964 Secretary of the Navy Paul Nitze declared
that there was a “power vacuum” in the Indian
Ocean. In April of 1964 a U.S. aircraft
carrier task group ventured into the Indian
Ocean. In July of that year, as
talks with the British intensified, yet another
survey team was sent to Diego Garcia. The
team, led by Commander Harry Hart of the office of
the Chief of Naval Operations, flew from the U.S.
to England where it picked up more members,
including British representatives. Ultimately, it
flew to Gan in the Maldive islands and transferred
to the HMS Dampier for the final leg to Diego
Garcia.
It might be
significant that one of the members of the survey
team was Mr. Vance Vaughn, who was from the U.S.
Navy Communications Annex at Nebraska Avenue in
Washington, D.C. Nebraska Avenue was the
headquarters of Naval Security Group, the arm of
the navy tasked with signals intelligence.
More overtly, the team included two enlisted men
who were tasked with setting up a radio unit for
tests. Master Chief Electronics Technician Richard
M. Young and Radioman Chief M.J. Meriji used a
25-watt skid-mounted generator to power their
radio, and a 20-foot dipole antenna to
transmit. Using the call sign WOLF WOMAN they
tested the islands “hearability” by contacting
various other radio stations, particularly ships
at sea.
During a
subsequent meeting CNO Admiral Rivero would state
“I want this island.” He was not alone. The USAF,
alerted to Navy plans, expressed an interest in
using Diego Garcia as a base for B-52 bombers. The
Navy was leery, however. In the first place,
the Navy had only envisioned a short and crude
airstrip. The planned runway would have to be
significantly lengthened and thickened to handle
the big bombers, and this would cost money.
Secondly, the Navy and State Department had been
insisting that the “facility” on Diego Garcia
would be very small and limited. Adding a
base for nuclear bombers (the mission envisioned
at the time) could stiffen political opposition to
the base. Plans for bombers were shelved, at
least publicly, for several years.
The Central
Intelligence Agency was also interested in Diego
Garcia. In particular, it was thought that
the People’s Republic of China would test its
ICBMs by firing them into the Indian Ocean.
There was also a growing awareness in the
intelligence community that a number of
established intelligence posts were being
endangered by the evolving world situation.
The U.S. Army had a significant facility at
Kagnew, Ethiopia, which was threatened by
political instability. Likewise, overt U.S.
facilities in Pakistan might not be welcome for
long. The 1964 Military Construction Bill
originally contained funding for a “classified
communications project” in the Indian Ocean.
This was to be on Diego Garcia, but the funding
was cut. Before funding was in place, the U.S.
wanted to ensure that it could indeed have the
island, free of interference, for a long time.
CHAPTER 13
CREATION OF
THE B.I.O.T. AND THE U.S. BASE
By this time
the British government was deeply involved in
negotiations over Mauritian independence.
Arguments over the terms of independence were
highly charged amongst the various Mauritian
political factions. The British used this to
their advantage. As a later Mauritian government
report stated, the British handling of the Chagos
issue were “part of a definite and long term
strategy on the part of the UK
government.” Few Mauritians knew much
about Diego Garcia or the rest of the Chagos
Archipelago and the Mauritians negotiating their
independence apparently did not think them of
great importance. This may have been a political
miscalculation on their part, as the “excision” of
the island (as the Mauritians termed it) became a
controversial subject. There is still some
uncertainty over certain details of the
negotiations, and subsequent political wrangling
has not cleared up this cloudy subject. Sir
Seewoosagur Ramgoolam, the chief Mauritian
negotiator, has said that negotiators had to
choose between Mauritian independence or giving up
the Chagos. Yet, he refused to term the
British demands for excision of the islands as
“blackmail.”
On November 8,
1965, the British issued the first BIOT order.
This order established for the first time a
political entity known as the British Indian Ocean
Territory (BIOT), comprising of Diego Garcia and
the rest of the Chagos as well as a few other
Indian Ocean Islands. The BIOT order was
issued by the Queen of England as an “Order in
Council” under the authority of the Colonial
Boundaries Act of 1895. Parliament was not
consulted. Such use of what British law terms
“Royal Prerogative” is a demonstration that the
Monarchy continues to be more than just a
ceremonial post. Two days later, on November 10,
1965, the British publicly announced the creation
of the BIOT. The announcement was
intentionally low key, as the British were trying
to avoid political and legal complications,
particularly from the United Nations.
Close on the
heels of the creation of the BIOT came an exchange
of notes with the United States regarding joint
use of “Indian Ocean Islands” for defense
purposes. An “exchange of notes” is
technically not a treaty. Therefore, the
U.S. president does not have to have it ratified
by the U.S. Senate. Indeed, congress (like the
parliament) was kept very much in the dark about
plans for Diego Garcia. In addition, a secret
attachment to the agreement would be even more
controversial. The United States agreed to pay the
British for detaching Diego Garcia, with the sum
not to exceed 14 million dollars. United States
law requires that spending be approved by the
Congress, but in this case no congressional
scrutiny was wanted so a new method of payment was
created.
The British
were buying the Polaris missile to arm their
strategic missile submarines, and were paying
various fees in accordance with prior agreements.
Secretary of Defense McNamara agreed to
waive a 5 percent research and development
surcharge on the project in order to pay the
British. This was carried out with a series of
accounting measures that, arguably, were legal
since the executive branch didn’t “spend” money
but rather simply didn’t collect money owed. This
methodology generated much criticism when it was
later discovered. The General Accounting
Office found that without an actual judicial
ruling (i.e. a lawsuit) it could not say with
certainty that the transfer was illegal, but it
“was clearly a circumvention of the congressional
oversight role.”
The question
of funding was central to controversy over the
arrangements to use Diego Garcia as a base. To
begin with, the executive branches in both Britain
and the U.S. were trying to establish the base
with a minimum of legislative involvement (or even
notification). This meant that costs had to be
kept low to keep the project under the radar of
budgeting authorities. In addition, even within
the governments different agencies and bureaus
were engaged in the age old practice of maximizing
their own gain while shifting costs onto others.
In the public announcement made by the British
with the establishment of the BIOT, they had
stated that they would pay three million British
pounds to Mauritius, one million pounds to the
plantation company, and would assist with
“resettlement.” In general, the
British were planning on paying out about as much
money as they were secretly getting from the
United States, when related compensation to the
Seychelles was taken into account. This plan ran
into problems immediately. In the first place, the
Mauritians considered the three million pounds to
be compensation for “loss of sovereignty” or in
effect payment for real estate. Resettlement
assistance had not been specified, but the
Mauritians were clearly thinking that additional
considerable funds would be coming. The British,
on the other hand, interpreted “assistance” to
mean things like providing advice.
To make
matters worse, part of the British agreement with
the Seychelles involved upgrading the airport at
Mahe and the project was going way over budget. In
a classic bureaucratic sleight of hand the British
Ministry of Defense had gotten the Treasury to
agree to pay excess costs for the establishment of
the BIOT. The Treasury thought that it was simply
going to apply the US money to the Indian Ocean
projects and that everything would balance.
When it became apparent that the budget would not
be met the Ministry of Defense refused to transfer
money to Treasury. Treasury was now faced
with an escalating bill for a project that was for
another department. Clearly, additional money for
resettlement would not be forthcoming. It appears
that the British may have hinted that further U.S.
funds would be appreciated. In a joint
State-Defense message to the U.S. embassy in
London in late 1970, for example, it was stated
that the U.S. position was that “we recognize the
British problem” but that the costs were “clearly
envisioned to be the United Kingdoms
responsibility.”
During all of
this there was a notable lack of consultation, by
any party, with the people living on the island of
Diego Garcia or the other Chagos islands.
The people on the island had coexisted with
military facilities before, and no one told them
that they were all to be evicted from the Chagos
in its entirety. The British government was
intent on satisfying U.S. demands for an
unpopulated island, however, and it was not going
to be deterred. The British began a quiet
policy to reduce the population on the islands. As
the Chagos were remote and primitive, many people
who lived there would travel to Mauritius and the
Seychelles for healthcare, schooling, visiting
relatives, marriage, and other sundry reasons. The
British began to simply deny people who left the
island passage back, often leaving them stranded
away from what they considered their home. The
British kept this practice as secret as possible,
and would later carry out the final mass expulsion
by surprise.
The British
had caught themselves in a legal and political
trap, and hoped that secrecy could keep it from
being sprung on them. The British had
detached the BIOT from Mauritius and then given
Mauritius its independence. This meant that
the British were not simply “resettling” the
Ilois. They were exiling them. As
citizens of a British Colony there was no legal
means to force them to move to what was now
another nation. In theory, if they could not
remain on the islands then they should have been
allowed to settle elsewhere in Britain. The
British government clearly did not want that, for
political as well as fiscal reasons.
Fortunately for the officials of the day, it would
take years for the legal issues to come to court.
In 1966 the
plans for project KATHY, an “austere
communications facility,” were replaced with REST
STOP, plans for a more significant support
facility. In 1967 yet another survey
team visited Diego Garcia, this time on the HMS
Vidal. The late 1960s also saw a
series of British withdrawals from “East of the
Suez.” As the British were closing bases and
ports like Aden, Yemen, the Soviet Union was now
beginning to take an active interest in the Indian
Ocean. Now that significant sums were required to
start construction the Congress could no longer be
left out. The 1970 Appropriations Act however, did
not ultimately contain any funding for Diego
Garcia. As expected there was intense
congressional scrutiny over plans to expand the
U.S. role in the Indian Ocean. In the midst of
trying to extricate the U.S. from Vietnam many
congressmen were leery of this expansion.
Ultimately, it was suggested that the military
drop plans for a support facility and go back to
original plans for an “austere communications
facility” to replace Kagnew Station as the
Ethiopian situation was rapidly deteriorating.
On 15 Dec,
1970, the Nixon administration announced its
intent to go ahead and construct a joint military
facility on Diego Garcia. The planned
communications station was now called Project
REINDEER, and an intelligence collection role was
added. An additional 50 people would be stationed
on the island to meet these “Project Charlie”
requirements. Meanwhile, plans for an
expanded base and mission were underway. The
military considered using Diego Garcia if the use
of facilities in Bahrain, in the Persian Gulf,
were denied. In addition, the U.S. was preparing
contingency plans for the possible operation of
Polaris strategic missile submarines in the Indian
Ocean. All of this was undertaken against a
backdrop of general international opposition. For
example, a U.N. resolution called for the Indian
Ocean to be a “zone of peace.” Despite
the desires of the regional nations, however, both
the U.S. and the Soviet Union were escalating the
Cold War in the Indian Ocean.
In 1971 the
first major contingent of U.S. Navy “sea bees”
arrived to begin construction of the facility. It
had been decided that the U.S. military (with
contractor support) would carry out the task. The
BIOT was legally run by a commissioner, who was
appointed by the Queen in accordance with the
original BIOT Order. He issued the Immigration
Ordinance of 1971, which in effect allowed the
expulsion of any person from the island and only
allowed entry with the commissioner’s permission.
Forced expulsions could now be carried out under
the force of law.
In September
of 1971 the island’s normal supply ship, the MV
Nordvaer, arrived at Diego Garcia from Mauritius.
The remaining Ilois and other plantation workers
were told that the ship was not going to resupply
the island, but rather would be carrying them off
the island. On September 28 the last 35 people
carried their own baggage aboard the overcrowded
vessel, forced to leave behind their most valuable
possessions: their animals, or at least
those animals that had not been killed. For
example, by order of the British more than 1,000
pets (mainly dogs) had been slaughtered in an ad
hoc gas chamber with exhaust fumes.
The evicted islanders were dumped in Mauritius,
most of them headed for life in urban slums.
Construction
now began in earnest. By Christmas time of 1972 a
runway long enough to accommodate the C-141
aircraft was built. This allowed for a visit to
the military workers by entertainer Bob
Hope. A small flotilla of U.S. amphibious
and supply ships carried personnel and supplies to
the island during this time. Some of the vessels
included the tank landing ship Vernon County
(LST-1161), the attack cargo ship Charleston
(LKA-113), the dock landing ships Monticello
(LSD-35) and Anchorage (LSD-36), as well as the
chartered American Champion. Trees were
felled and the initial airstrip was made of
compacted coral which was blasted from the
island’s reef at low tide.
Meanwhile,
pressure was building to expand the “facilities”
beyond a mere communications and intelligence
station into a more sizeable support facility. For
example, ships moving into the Indian Ocean from
the Atlantic fleet had traditionally used ports in
South Africa for logistics as well as rest and
relaxation. South Africa demanded strict adherence
to its apartheid laws, however, and the US Navy
was grappling with racial problems within the
ranks. The Navy could not abide by apartheid while
working to better integrate itself, so South
African ports became off limits. This greatly
lengthened the supply chain from the Atlantic. In
addition, the U.S. Navy saw signs of an impending
Soviet takeover everywhere. The CIA believed that
the Navy was overstating the maritime threat from
the USSR in the Indian Ocean, but as during much
of the Cold War the more alarming predictions were
the most believed. Regional conflicts
such as those between India and Pakistan simply
underscored the volatility of the region.
During the
early 1970s Diego Garcia would serve as a starting
point for disagreements over the US role in the
Indian Ocean, which were closely tied to growing
Soviet naval and political activity in the region.
In the aftermath of Vietnam many in congress were
leery of expanding the U.S. military presence into
the Indian Ocean. At the same time, however,
others were more convinced than ever that the
Soviets posed a major threat and that the U.S.
needed to demonstrate resolve. There was pressure
from congress to examine the possibility of
reaching some sort of agreement with the Soviets
regarding the Indian Ocean region, but once again
there was a countervailing view that negotiations
would be futile and be perceived as a sign of
weakness. In addition, the U.S. military was
making extraordinary claims about Soviet strength
in the Indian Ocean. While the CIA projections
were much more modest, they were also muted by
secrecy.
On August 28,
1974, President Ford said during a press
conference that “The Soviet Union already has
three major naval operating bases in the Indian
Ocean.” This statement surprised many analysts,
and when pressed the Department of Defense said
that the President had been referring to Berbera,
Somalia, Umm Qasr, Iraq, and Aden, Yemen. During
subsequent testimony before congress the CIA
Director, Colby, contradicted the president by
emphasizing how small and limited these facilities
were. When pressed by a senator during hearings
over Diego Garcia one administration spokesman
issued a classic defense: “I think the discrepancy
is apparent rather than real. It is a question of
how one defines a base.” Defenders of
an expanded Indian Ocean presence also indicated
that the U.S. had its own growing interests in the
region even without a Soviet stimulus. The Arab
Oil Embargo and subsequent U.S. contingency plans
for seizing control of Saudi Arabia were also
fueling the desire for a more sizeable presence in
the region. During congressional testimony
administration officials scoffed at the very
notion that the U.S. might intervene militarily in
the Middle East, yet it is now known that the U.S.
approached the British about just such a plan.
Work continued
on Diego Garcia. In October of 1972 the U.S. and
Britain signed a formal agreement to establish a
joint “limited communication facility” on the
island. By March of 1973 the Naval Communications
Station opened for business with about 200
assigned personnel. The Navy established that
assigned service members would serve a 12-month
tour on the island unaccompanied by dependents.
While the base was officially a “joint” endeavor
with the British, there were only a few British
assigned to the island. It was almost entirely
American. The 1973 Arab-Israeli war
and subsequent oil embargo had a major impact on
U.S. policy and strategy. In addition, the Navy
feared that the reopening of the Suez Canal would
allow for more Soviet ships to stage from the
Black Sea and Mediterranean fleets. Plans for an
expanded facility, which had always been around
but on the back burner, were moved front and
center.
Meanwhile, the
resettled Ilois were languishing on Mauritius. The
government of Mauritius had a resettlement plan,
but as of 1972 it had not yet been put into
effect. Much of the problem was local politics.
The Ilois were an unpopular minority and the
government feared that giving them assistance
would upset other Mauritians for whom aid was not
funded. Cyclone Gervaise had left more than 90,000
Mauritians homeless and unemployment during the
period was running at about 20%, leading to
political instability. Meanwhile, those few
remaining Ilois on islands other than Diego Garcia
(which had been depopulated in 1971) were shipped
to Mauritius by the end of 1973. Now no islands of
the Chagos Archipelago would be peopled with a
native population. In 1973 the British
government agreed to give Mauritius an additional
650,000 British Pounds for a “full and final”
settlement of resettlement costs. Many of
the Ilois were induced to sign waivers of further
legal action under questionable circumstances.
Some, however, refused, and soon the Ilois were
investigating legal action.
In 1974 the
Ilois signed a petition decrying their expulsion
and impoverished standard of living, delivering
copies to Mauritian Prime Minister Ramgoolam and
the British and U.S. embassies in Mauritius. They
wrote “Our ancestors were slaves on those islands
[ Chagos ], but we know that we are the heirs of
those islands. Although we were poor there, we
were not dying of hunger. We were living
free.” Naturally, the British told the
petitioners that they should take their problems
to the Mauritian government. The U.S. position
would later be enunciated by a State Department
official: “these people originally were a British
responsibility and are now a Mauritian
responsibility.” The petition and
subsequent public revelations about the horrible
conditions of the Ilois created a stir in the U.S.
congress. Up until this time, administration
officials had told congress that the islands were
unpopulated. The administration defended its
earlier testimony in part by explaining that it
had relied on British reports, implying that it
was unaware of the problems. In response,
senator John Culver led an effort to delay funding
for the expansion of the island’s facilities and a
number of congressionally stimulated
investigations were begun.
CHAPTER 14
NO LONGER
“AUSTERE”
By 1974 the
plans for the expansion of Diego Garcia beyond an
austere communications facility were set. The
lagoon was to be dredged to provide an anchorage
capable of handling a 6-ship carrier task force.
Petroleum storage was increased tenfold and
facilities for loading a 180,000 ton tanker within
24 hours were planned. The runway would be
lengthened from 8,000 to 12,000 feet and
additional apron space and facilities would be
built for aircraft including P-3 Orion
antisubmarine warfare aircraft. Finally, personnel
facilities would be added for more than 600
people. These plans were controversial,
however, and held up by opposition to the base and
revelations of the eviction of the Ilois. By 1976
the opposition had been overcome and the Navy was
ready to begin construction of the expanded
facilities. On February 25 the British Indian
Ocean Territory Agreement of 1976 was signed,
formally permitting the U.S. to upgrade its
communications facility to a support facility.
A less
publicized part of the upgrade was to be the
establishment of a ground station for a new
generation of intelligence gathering satellites.
The United States navy had built and operated such
spacecraft since 1961 under conditions of extreme
secrecy. Many of the navy’s early “SolRad”
satellites, which had the publicized mission of
studying solar radiation, carried a secondary
payload called GRAB (Galactic RAdiation Background
experiment). Its mission was to covertly monitor
electronic emissions (such as radar).
By the early 1970s these systems had evolved into
Project SISS ZULU, which had ground stations
around the world operated by all three military
services and the CIA. In 1976 the Navy was to
begin operation of a new generation system under
the codename CLASSIC WIZARD. The station on Diego
Garcia would effectively replace a SISS ZULU
facility that had been located near Peshawar,
Pakistan, before that nation had refused to renew
a base agreement.
Events in 1979
and 1980 would cement the role of Diego Garcia in
U.S. military strategy and lead to yet further
expansion. A series of shocks in the Middle East
and Southwest Asia including the fall of the Shah
of Iran, the Hostage Crisis, and the Soviet
invasion of Afghanistan, would lead President
Carter to enunciate the “Carter Doctrine.”
Basically, it publicly announced that the United
States would fight to maintain security over
Middle East oil supplies. The policy was primarily
a warning to the Soviet Union, but it set the
stage for large scale U.S. intervention following
the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait a decade later. Diego
Garcia would become the home for a small fleet of
ships carrying pre positioned equipment for the
newly formed Rapid Deployment Joint Task
Force. The Diego Garcia lagoon would
be home to about a dozen large merchant ships
packed with the equipment and supplies to support
an expeditionary force whose personnel would be
flown to meet their gear.
In
effect, Diego Garcia’s mission expanded as
presidential doctrines evolved. The Nixon Doctrine
emphasized limited direct U.S. involvement in
foreign conflicts, and the base was originally
created by emphasizing its limited role as a
communications facility and that it was not the
signal of a permanent, major, U.S. presence.
The Ford administration began publicly exploring
the idea of expanding the U.S. naval mission in
the Indian Ocean. With the Carter
Doctrine, Diego Garcia would not only be a
significant support facility for a nearly
continuous major U.S. naval presence, it would
also be a “jumping off point” for direct
intervention into regional wars.
It is
interesting to note, however, that plans for these
various Diego Garcia expansions were made prior to
presidential doctrines or foreign policy
announcements. This could lead one to speculate
about cause and effect in terms of U.S. foreign
policy. Public acknowledgment, and debate, about
mission expansion seemed to take place only after
the executive bureaucracy had already formulated
the plans which would inevitably (if messily) be
carried out. Both the U.S. and British executive
branches took action to ensure that legislative
oversight became instead legislative hindsight,
looking into actions already carried out instead
of debating and helping to formulate future
actions.
The Reagan
administration continued the policy of developing
Diego Garcia. One of the most notable changes was
the upgrading of the runway and airfield
facilities to permit B-52 bombers to operate from
the island. The United States kept this capability
low key for international political reasons, but
during the Gulf War of 1991 a provisional bomb
wing would operate from the island, bombing
targets in Iraq. An antisubmarine warfare
operations center (ASWOC) was established on the
island. A USAF optical space tracking
facility was built as well as a space
operations facility. Logistics facilities were
upgraded. At the end of the Gulf War of 1991,
Diego Garcia was firmly established as a major
U.S. base of operations. Its importance has grown
in inverse proportion to the permanent U.S.
presence in several regional nations. In
particular, the U.S. military withdrawal from the
Philippines has greatly increased reliance on
Diego Garcia. In this sense Diego Garcia is a
vindication for the “Strategic Islands” strategy
adopted so long ago. The U.S. might leave or be
evicted from some nations (Iran, the Philippines).
Some facilities might be vulnerable to attack
(Yemen to boat bombs and Bahrain to SCUD
missiles). But Diego Garcia is safe and isolated,
both physically and politically.
Today Diego
Garcia is a major U.S. base supporting military
activity in Iraq and Afghanistan. At the time of
the establishment of the base few could have
predicted the tumultuous path of history. The
Soviet Union, the bases’ raison de etre, no longer
exists. The advent of communications satellites
has ended the Indian Ocean communications “dead
zone” that worried Kennedy era strategists. Iran
has gone from ally to enemy and the U.S. has ended
up invading not Saudi Arabia but Iraq. Twice. The
island has become even more important as its
original, limited, missions recede into the past.
Diego Garcia is still geographically remote, but
the expanding reach of technology has allowed it
to serve not only as a “support” facility but as a
combat base. B-52 bombers, many older than the
base itself, fly round-trip bombing missions over
Iraq. During the last invasion of Iraq B-2 bombers
taking off from Missouri landed on the island in
order to swap crews for the return flight home. It
took the aircraft more than 40 hours to reach
Diego Garcia via their bombing points after take
off, and the return flight from Diego Garcia was
30 hours.
The U.S.
military is more firmly entrenched on the island
than ever, and it vigorously opposes resettlement
of any of the Chagos islands. Years of legal
wrangling have ended in further disappointment for
the Chagossians, as they now call themselves since
‘Ilois’ has taken on pejorative overtones in
Mauritius. In November of 2000 two British judges
handed down a stunning decision which declared
that the British government had “no sources of
lawful authority” to justify the removal of the
natives, and instructed that they be allowed to
move back to at least some of the islands. The
British government stalled, calling for the
inevitable studies of the situation. The British
government argued, among other things, that the
islands may eventually be submerged by global
warming and that therefore they should not be
resettled. It then resorted to yet another “Orders
in Council” to effectively overrule the court’s
orders with the Queen’s prerogative. Regardless,
no one would be allowed to return to the islands.
The
Chagossians’ hopes for monetary compensation were
dashed in October of 2003 when a judge at the High
Court in London threw out their case. He ruled
that their claims were “stale and time-barred,” a
vindication of the stalling tactics of the British
government. The judge ruled that even though some
of the Chagossians had been subject to “shameful”
treatment, they had no prospect of success since
exile as a legal wrong was “not arguable.” He also
accused some of the Plaintiffs of lying and
failing to address past litigation (such as a 1982
agreement signed by many Chagossians). Likewise, a
longshot suit filed in the United States against a
plethora of defendants was summarily dismissed.
CHAPTER 15
SUMMARY
Diego Garcia
has long been at the center of maps of the Indian
Ocean but on the periphery of the regions history.
As time goes on, however, its role in the region
is beginning to match the centrality of its
location. Ignored by the first “western”
superpower in the Indian Ocean, the island is now
the key base of operations for the latest
superpower in the region. The islands of the
Chagos were first chronicled by Portuguese sailors
who stumbled across them while sailing for other
destination. For centuries they were little known
and served as little more than a navigation
hazard. As sailing technology and knowledge
improved the islands became more accessible. While
the islands of the Chagos were not suitable as
military bases during the Napoleonic era, colonial
entrepreneurs would permanently settle the islands
and begin the industry that would be at the center
of the islands economy for over a century: coconut
harvesting and processing. The introduction of
steam power in ships would further erode Diego
Garcia’s isolation and at the beginning of the
20th century formerly alien powers, like Germany,
would show an interest in the area. The two world
wars would make even the remote Chagos into a
battle zone, and the introduction of aircraft
would allow the island to dominate the central
Indian Ocean as it never had before.
If the French
and British conflict around 1800 helped lead to
the island’s settlement, the U.S. and Soviet
conflict in the 1960s helped lead to the island’s
depopulation. Unfortunately, many of the island’s
residents, whose ancestors were slaves, had become
attached to what they thought was their island.
Unprepared for the termination of their primitive
island lifestyle, they found themselves an
impoverished and unwanted minority in Mauritius.
As in so many cases, the necessity of the powerful
becomes the destiny of the weak. Despite the
evaporation of its original justifications, the
island base has expanded and is considered more
important than ever by the United States. The
seemingly inevitable expansion of U.S. power in
the Indian Ocean in the face of claims to not want
such power brings to mind many historical
parallels. Hegemonic patterns,
however, are beyond the scope of this thesis.
If the
importance of Diego Garcia to its “owners” was
marked on a graph, it would grow rapidly as the
modern day is approached. Inversely, if one were
to graph the nominal isolation of the island
(physical, cultural, etc.) a rapidly decreasing
line would be seen. As distance means less and
less the islands physical centrality becomes ever
more important. The ocean buffers Diego Garcia
from enemies both physical and political, but the
United States has the means to strike out over
this “defensive” barrier into adjoining regions.
The island may be entering an era of unprecedented
utility as air power, fast sea lift, and modern
communications allow facilities and units on the
island to directly intervene over the entire
Indian Ocean littoral. As other nations gain
capabilities for striking effectively over
distance, however, the need for increased
defensive measures could sap the island’s
offensive utility. As an example, India is on the
verge of being able to field tactical ballistic
missiles that could threaten Diego Garcia from
Southern India, and is upgrading its
aircraft to longer range models.
As
the importance of the base on Diego Garcia
increases it is likely that the U.S. presence will
become increasingly controversial in the political
arena. It is conceivable that some day Diego
Garcia may become not just an adjunct to wars but
the central issue of one, like the Falklands.
Diego Garcia itself may soon be making history
instead of just enduring it.

Only the Sun Remembers: James Alan
Thompson and Diego Garcia
by Steven J
Forsberg
As
most island residents know, they are not the first
to get their arses sent to Diego Garcia. As
early as 1786 military people were being sent to the
island, despite their protestations that the place
was 1) Remote 2) Hot 3) Useless. And yet, as we
approach the 219th anniversary of the first official
settlement of the island by the British (a
settlement which was quickly abandoned) , it may be
time to reflect on the blessings of our modern age.
As recently as World War II the island was a very
different place for the people stationed on
it. While some themes remain constant, there
is little doubt that Diego Garcia has come a long
way from the place described by British marine James
Alan Thompson. He did time on DG during World
War II and even lived to write about it. His
most apropos book was “Only the Sun Remembers”,
which I will quote extensively in a bit. While
it was more a work of literary exposition than a
historical text, it still provides some food for
thought for those who think that modern day Dodge is
a “hardship” post. James Alan Thompson didn’t
think too highly of Diego Garcia, but he had his
reasons.
Thompson was newly married when he joined the Royal
Marines during the first days of World War II.
His first adventure was being assigned as an officer
overseeing a detachment of an anti-aircraft
regiment. The guns were obsolescent antiques saved
from a scrap heap, “Mark God-has-forgotten 1916
single barrel 2 inch naval pom poms”. They
were not mobile, it took hours to move them. They
only had contact fuse shells. The crews were poorly
trained. So naturally, when the Germans
invaded Norway these guys were on their way.
They landed at a small port and set up their guns.
Things went fine. Until the German planes showed up.
After several days of getting the snot bombed out of
them they finally managed to shoot down an airplane.
It just happened to be a British aircraft. As
the front lines collapsed back onto the port the
unit “lost cohesion.” That’s staff speak for
“Every man for himself.” After a couple days
lingering near town (to avoid bombing and shelling)
Thompson found himself amidst a crowd of cold,
tired, hungry, desperate soldiers elbowing their
ways onto the last ships out. So much for the glory
of war!
After a little bit of rest and relaxation the
military saw fit to forward Thompson to the middle
east. He spent some time in Palestine, where the
British were fighting a guerilla war against the
Zionists. While there, he was thick in the British
attempt to organize a defense of the island of
Crete. For those who don’t recall, the Germans
invaded Crete and made the British look as bad as
they had at Norway. Apparently deciding that
Thompson’s morale was still too high, the military
then forwarded him to the Indian Ocean where
certainly the Brits would do better against the
Japs. He was assigned to a ship named the “Clan
Forbes” (more on her in a minute), which served for
a while as a sort of mobile base construction
ship. He spent time on the Maldives Islands,
helping to build a secret naval base where the
British hoped they could hide their fleet.
Just as they were getting the base up and running,
they got a morale boosting visit from two visiting
ships, the Prince of Wales and the Repulse.
After much partying with the crew they sent the
ships off to punish the Japs. For those who
don’t recall, the two ships were quickly sunk by
Japanese aircraft, and the Japanese imitated the
Germans by unceremoniously kicking the British out
of several places in Asia and the Indian
Ocean. After the “great naval fortress” of
Singapore fell the British would indeed use the
secret base in the Maldives to hide from a raiding
Japanese carrier force. It just wasn’t the
Brit’s decade. Finishing up in the Maldives,
the Clan Forbes was sent to build up the British
presence at Diego Garcia, and Thompson sailed along.
The
Clan Forbes was a sizeable ship, but she was built
for cargo and not passengers. Relatively new (1938)
she was 7,500 tons and over 463 feet long. She had
been bombed by the Germans while in port in England,
but was quickly patched and sent on an emergency
supply mission to Malta, which was being pounded by
the Germans and Italians (surprise, surprise).
She eventually found herself in the Indian
Ocean. Incidentally, this was the 3rd Clan
Forbes. Her namesake, the second Clan Forbes, had
been sunk by a torpedo during World War I.
"I was never so near the sun, so near the soul of
the elemental, so fearful or so overwhelmed; East or
West along the Equator Line, degrees North or South,
the sun burned nearer to the earth in Chagos.
Trapped, imprisoned by thousands of miles of ocean
to every point on the polished brass compass,
by-passed by ship trail and sky path; feebly
fastened to life by the haphazard mail and supply
ship coming from Mauritius, once, twice or three
times each long year. Until the temporary
installation of a RAF wireless station at East
Point, completely devoid of contact with the distant
world; at one time unaware of the world’s new war.
[editor's note: Recall that during World War I the
islanders had welcomed the German raider Emden, not
knowing that a war had broken out ]
Diego Garcia, Chagos; a name unheard, disregarded,
useless, unremarked from my schoolboy’s bleak
geography or avid, quick-eyed reading of traveler’s
tales.
Only those who have really known can appreciate the
emotions of loneliness; the lonely and the lost, who
have once stared into unknown skies at the earth’s
ends. And have marvalled at their own ignorance,
wondered at the labours of their little fates; and
seen again with frightened eyes the deathless,
ever-present spectre of the no-return, the ghost of
the no-go-home. Never again to see, to hold or to
touch; to approach the loveliness in the warm, sweet
splendour of the touch of flesh....."
Yeah, he was missing his wife alright. Something about
being on the opposite side of the planet can do things
to people. And recall this was well before the
internet, or even Cable and Wireless, or for that
matter scheduled mail service.
"Cables and bent cards for
Christmas, birthday, and wedding anniversary; formal
memories in the rough, sore heart. I cursed
and yearned for the real, the warm, white flesh
behind the ink scrawl, wept for the lips behind the
comforting, senseless lipstick imprints. Paper and
ink; life from a Stephen’s bottle and a Parker pen;
paper emotion, posted joy. Under an invisible
avalanche of heat; as I read in sun sick March in
the Chagos, of my wife and home in a bitter
December, as she anticipated a Christmas which I had
nearly forgotten, on the other side of the earth."
This guy seriously needed to get drunk, or
something. Imagine yourself living on DG, but
without a few comforts. Like air conditioning or
ice. Ouch! Amidst the confusion and
disorganization of early 1942, many of the military
actually began to come down with scurvy and even
beri-beri because of the poor diet. Working in the
heat and humidity they suffered from various
blisters and skin maladies that I will do the reader
a favor and not describe in detail. Even far
from enemy fire death took its toll with a variety
of mishaps that any modern sailor could understand.
A “young sergeant” died a lingering death after
falling over the side and hitting his head on an
adjacent landing craft. Thompson got to censor his
last letter home. Another marine was much luckier,
however. While winching one of the decrepit old 6
inch guns out of the Clan Forbes (still mounted at
‘Cannon Point’) the teeth in a winch gear slipped
and the barrel fell 8 feet. The winch handle spun
off and hit a man square on the forehead. He would
ultimately live, albeit with a “terrible dented scar
on his brow.”
"But the anchorage had to be given the surface
defence of two old six-inch guns, ultimately manned
by a wretched, ill-disciplined, spiritless battery
raised in Mauritius, transported to Diego Garcia,
and literally flung ashore without semblance of
tentage, equipment, proper rations and devoid of the
knowledge or will to provide in any way for their
own future existence."
Gee whiz, was there *anything* good about DG back
then? Well, actually...
"Diego Garcia is the fisherman’s paradise; the
incredible Valhalla where all lies come true, where
two exaggerating arms cannot span the fish he
caught; where there is neither doubt nor hope but
only the certainty of catching fish until his arm is
tired or the line snaps. Until there is no longer
room to move in the boat, until there are sufficient
fish to feed a ship full of hungry men. Fishing in
paradise, in the kind waters of greedy and ignorant
fish; dream fish, fish weighing ten, twenty, fifty,
one hundred pounds. The one sport of Chagos; in
which to indulge our small excitement until the sun
burned our bodies and the revolting stench of the
dead sharks became unbearable."
What about the natives?
Thompson wasn’t too impressed. He even got a firsthand
look at the infamous “Sega” dance, which sounds an
awful lot like a modern day rave. Chemicals (in this
case rum), drums, orgy-like sex. But of course
Thompson is too gentlemanly to describe it in great
detail, damn him! Bertillon, a manager, is
described like a character out of a Dickens
novel. While saying his goodbyes, Thompson
bluntly said “I hope I never see this place again.”
"Forever gone; never to return. In the coming years
never the words, one day I will go back; only a
curse for the buried months. With fading pity for
the lost humans; Bertillon and his hatred, the
unseen Malbois in the house near the great trees,
the Creoles in laughter and passion. For I was
apart; I had no love, I could not care. I longed to
escape from Chagos, away from the lifeless islands.
I turned from the rail,
and the new breeze from the open sea freshened in my
face."
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