16 October 2003

Getting Out of Dodge

It was silent in Boston, where a million blue television screens reflected the eleventh inning Yankee home run that put them out of their misery. Twenty-nine times the Yankees have done that, sending the Red Socks packing, slinking back to the visitor's locker room to change in silence, eager to get out of Dodge and get home. It was harder in Wrigleyville two days ago when the last long ball popped into the mitt of the Marlins fielder and the Cubs became the ninth team in history to blow a three game lead in the pennant finale. It had the stuff of legend about it, the 1945 American League victory a long time ago, and the last World Series win in 1908. Both of the lovable losers are out of it. The Cubs must be going for the centennial, and the Socks carry the curse of the Bambino, the result of the trade sending Ruth to New York, back to Beantown. The Cubs were already home, though. They had no where to go.

Both teams really had something going this year, but the extra-innings for the Socks is just one of those things. I feel bad for the Chicagoans. It really did seem to be their year, and Steve Batman, the fan who interfered with Moises Alou's chance at the foul ball in the eighth inning will achieve mythic proportions over the years. I suspect the guy will have to leave town. There was an interview with a young man from New York, who as a young boy reached out of the stands and caught a ball before the infielder form the other team could catch it. His act made the hit a home run, and the margin of victory for the Yankees.

He says you would think that things would die down after a while but it is not true. Nine years later, he is still getting calls of thanks.

So I think Steve should just sell the house and move. There is not going to be any way out of this for him, and the Cubs couldn't do it on the field in their last chance the night after. They choked, but the city will remember Steve forever. Unfair as it seems, he ought to just get out of Dodge.

I mused on that. "Dodge" is what we called the island of Diego Garcia, and that was a place that everybody wanted to get out of. It is part of the Chagos Archipelago, a north-south necklace of 52 atolls smack in the middle of the southern Indian Ocean. Narrow beaches encompass a placid lagoon of the most delicate blue. It could be paradise, or it could be the desert island of despair and I contend it is both simultaneously. It is the end of the earth, and assignment there was once considered akin to a tropical Siberia. But the sailors on the ships longed to go ashore, to where there was no steel and the breeze was gentle and the coconut crabs scuttled up the palms. So Dodge was heaven and hell, depending on your perspective.

We would have done anything to get ashore, and those assigned there would have done anything to get out of there.

"Dodge" was the shorthand corruption of the aviation abbreviation for the airfield, which is why this otherwise pedestrian atoll means so much to the Brits and the Americans. The name was an evocation of the American West, or at least the time when Kansas was considered to be the West. The whole notion of what constitutes the "West" is a malleable one. To Thomas Jefferson, the great Northwest featured places like Ohio, and the village of Chicago far to the Northwest. My Michigan Wolverines call themselves without irony "The Champions of the West," though strictly speaking, the state now lies somewhere in the East.

Diego Garcia is named for one of the great, if lesser known, Portuguese navigators. He was born in Lisbon in 1471; died in Madrid in 1529, and entered Spanish service in his youth. In 1532 or thereabouts he made a voyage to the East Indies, which are east of India, to be sure, if you are coming from Spain and headed in that direction. In the course of the journey he discovered the lovely atoll that bears his name, situated about 400 miles north of Mauritius.

The question of who is who and who is entitled to what in the Indian Ocean loomed large in my life for a brief time. I still care, of course, about Port Blair, the strategic base in the Andaman Islands that guard the eastern approaches to the pastel vastness of he Indian Ocean. The British gave the Andaman and Nicobar islands the new Republic of India they created in 1948 to cover the enormous imperial retreat. I care about the Republic of the Maldives, whose islands drip south from the tip of the Subcontinent toward the equator, and of course I care about the Chagos Archipelago to the south and west, which continue south toward the green island of Mauritius. I care about them because they were solid land in the midst of the great deep, and of all of them, only Diego Garcia was a welcoming place in my time. Standing on the deck of our ship in 1978 we looked at the palms that swayed over the golden sand. Out Captain brought the aircraft carrier near enough for us to see. "Eyeball Liberty" we called it, since we were not going ashore.

But we could look at it, and God, did it look lovely!

It seemed a sort of paradise. The shore was heavily vegetated, with the highest point of land only 22 feet above the gentle waves. If you were to walk around it, (and they told us the British detachment did not appreciate that) you would amble about 40 miles. It seemed an attractive proposition for us who could only walk a thousand feet without falling into the ocean. My charts claimed the lagoon was well protected, 6.5 miles wide and 13 miles long.

Forgive me if I digress, but the history of the region intrudes. All these islands were uninhabited when the Dutch came through, seeking China, or something like it, in the early seventeenth century. I don't want to be ethnocentric here. There is speculation that other navigators visited as well, if not as intrusively. Phoenicians probably sailed these waters about 2,000 years ago, and Malays and Arabs stopped in the islands in subsequent centuries.

But it was Portuguese like Diego Garcia who charted the waters and shoals and in 1638 the Dutch established a presence on the big island east of Africa they named after Maurice of Nassau, the stadthouder of Holland. The first residents of the island were Dutch convicts and slaves from Indonesia and Madagascar. They sought to export ambergris, ebony, and other resources. After twenty years, the colony failed, as did a second settlement established in 1664. The Dutch pulled out of Mauritius in 1710, having presided over the extinction of the dodo bird. They left behind some runaway slaves, swarms of rats, and ravaged ebony forests, and a plant that was to rule the future: sugarcane.

The French colonial model that replaced the Dutch was more successful. They had been working the islands of the Indian Ocean since 1638, when they took the islands of Rodrigues and Reunion, and in 1715 an expedition of the French East India Company claimed Mauritius for France. The Company ruled until 1764, when, after a series of inept governors and the bankruptcy of the company, Mauritius became a crown colony administered directly by Paris. A similar transition from corporate rule to imperial dominion was progressing under the British in India, far to the north.

Mauritius became the seat of government for all French territories in the region with its capital in Port Louis. The first Indian residents were imported in the latter half of the 18th century. The French ruled until 1810, and the sugarcane planters grew rich. The United States opened a consulate in Port Louis in 1794 in recognition of its importance in the sugar trade

Napoleon's change of fortune back home brought the scent of opportunity to the British of India, and in 1810 they dispatched a force of 10,000 troops to consolidate the Indian Ocean under the Union Jack. The 1814 Treaty of Paris that re-drew the world awarded most of the French possessions to the British, and the blue waters became a British lake.

In the year of the British occupation, 600 American merchantmen called at Port Louis. We have been sailing these waters a long time.

Although the French capitulated to the British, and the official language changed, the British agreed to leave in place existing legal and administrative structures. Few British immigrants came to the colony. The little islands of the Chagos archipelago were administratively attached to the territory of Mauritius. There the matter lay for a couple centuries. With the end of empire the Brits began to make preparations to get out of Town. But not all the way. They recognized that the sparsely settled islands in the midst of the great sea posed no great administrative burden and potentially a strategic bonanza. In 1965, in preparation for the granting of independence to Mauritius, the Chagos Archipelago was transferred to an entity called "The British Indian Ocean Territory," administered through the Seychelles. In 1968, a defense White Paper declared there was no reason for a British presence East of Suez. The Persian Gulf Squadron was stood down, and the Americans were invited to help the Shah and take up the White Fleet burden. The islands in the middle of the Indian Ocean looked very strategic. Unlike Mauritius, there was no large and potentially troublesome population. And the people that were there….well…there were not so many of them, and they weren't really from there, anyway….

So I apologize for the digression. But that is how the few planters and their employees became the objects of the suit in the High Court in London this month. You might have heard about it on the radio, or passed over the article in the Post.

The people of the Chagos Archipelago contend they were cleared out of the islands thirty years ago to make way for the American air and naval base on Dodge. They were in court earlier this month to seek the right of return. They attorneys they have retained accuse Britain of having acted illegally and wanted the British High Court to issue a ruling entitling them to restitution and access. Their case was rejected. But Her Majesty's Government, acting through the Minister responsible for overseas territories, threw the islanders a sop. She said a study would be conducted to see whether people could return to the outer islands, though specifically not to Diego Garcia itself.

The Government made no attempt to defend the motives behind the original action, which was to permit the Diego Garcian to leave for visits to Mauritius to the south and then not be permitted to return.

You would have thought they would have figured it out after a while, but the islanders were mostly just laborers on the coconut plantation. They call themselves the Ilois. It reminds me of the people of the future that H.G. Welles wrote about in The Time Machine. Gentle, his Ilois were, and the prey of the dark Morlocks, brutal denizens of the tunnels below. You get the literary parallel. There are about 5,000 of the islanders. Most of them live around Port Louis in Mauritius. The BBC, famous for castigating the late imperial system, called the expulsion of the gentle Ilois "an act of late colonial arrogance breathtaking in its execution. "

Had the Court permitted the return, it would be a huge financial commitment for the Brits, which is to say there would be a huge pass-through to the Yanks. There is no infrastructure, no fresh water and no established commercial ports of call. The American tenants of the British Indian Ocean Territory are also said to be unhappy at the prospect of such a move. We may not own the place but we have some equities, you know?

IN these times of tension and terrorism we don't need a "population problem."

It is funny that the greatest Empire of modern times should come down to this, a few remote islands taken as afterthoughts or coaling stations for the Royal Navy. With no one on them, they now provide little stationary aircraft carriers in strategic plans, enabling bases for adventures elsewhere.

In 1973 the U.S. Navy SeaBees showed up. When they arrived the main atoll was empty. Only the donkeys and the coconut crabs remained. The crabs were as big as dinner plates. They set up an antenna and got the radios working. They wandered along the pristine beaches, spoiled only by the beaching fuselage of a Catalina Flying Boat named Kate that had arrived out of fuel during World War II and been blown ashore by a typhoon.

Mail came once a month and loneliness was a theme. The shore party was assigned to the base on one year tours. There was no radio or TV to listen to save for the Stars and stripes radio station based in Bangkok, Thailand. A lot of guys couldn't take the solitude and loneliness. The island had a real reputation for looney behavior that would not have been permitted elsewhere. It has calmed down enough now that even the Air Force is OK with the place. They have based B-52s here in support of operations in Iraq, both times, and Afghanistan. Diego Garcia is absolutely essential to our presence in the Indian Ocean.

Diego Garcia is shaped like a shower shoe. Or the outline of one, anyway. That is why they call it "The Footprint of Freedom."

I'm glad I got to see it. For the crew of our ship, Diego Garcia was beer and a beach. And when we sent the helicopter ashore, the pilots smuggled some whiskey back for those of us that could not go. And t-shirts with the Island's shower-shoe logo. But above all there was an airstrip there big enough to handle transports from the World. Which meant there was a way to get out of Dodge.

Or based on its location, it might be a place that a Chicago Cubs fan with something to forget might want to go.