Rough island story
TABLE TALK DENIS BROGAN
Having commented last week on the irritation I felt at being unable to cash a sterling travel- ler's cheque and having to suffer for the sins of the decline of British authority, I have been particularly struck this week by the attacks on the British government by the Soviet govern- ment, which seem rather flattering, since I should not have thought that the Kremlin cared very much what the British government or the British people thought of its activities. Maybe they simply think this is the weakest unit in the western alliance and will buckle fastest under pressure. This judgment may not be totally false.
But I am at the moment much more in- terested in the controversies over the Falkland Islands. I have a very old connection with the Falklands, since one of my most revered school- masters was a native of the islands; he was of Orcadian origin, and about the age of eleven or twelve was sent back to Scotland where he ultimately graduated at the University of Aberdeen. But it was one of our efforts, some- times successful, to divert him from teaching us Latin or English by getting him to tell us something of what it was like to grow up in the Falklands. This was a specially easy diver- sion after the Battle of the Falkland Islands in 1914 had put that remote dependency on the map for a brief moment. If my memory is not betraying me, Mr Anderson told us that the winds were so powerful on the islands that sheep were often blown into the Atlantic, and it was only by tenacity that he prevented him- self from following the sheep. He may not, of course, have been telling the total truth. How- ever, we did learn a good deal about the Falk- land Islands, and none of it attracted me to the idea of permanent settlement there, and thus I was not very interested in the islands as such.
In the complicated negotiations, if that is what they are, between Lord Chalfont and the Argentinian government, there seems to have been an absence in the British press of any very plausible account of the history of the islands. However, Lord Chalfont seems to be accident prone. Like another Welsh statesman, Mr Powell, he says more or less than he means, and the alarm with which his movements as a negotiator are watched is not totally unjustified. But, again accidentally, I know more about the Falklands than most people since I had to read and review a life of Bougainville published a few years ago. It was the work of a very learned French naval officer who had actually been present at the Diamond Jubilee review of the fleet at Spithead in 1897; he had lived to pro- duce this life of the navigator long after the Second World War.
Bougainville himself had an extremely long and astonishingly varied life. After all, he had fought under Montcalm at Quebec in 1759 and lived as one of the great ornaments of Napo- leon's empire till 1811, when he was buried in the Pantheon. He was involved in a dispute over the Falkland Islands which were claimed by France, Britain, and Spain. ('Claimed' is, like almost everything in the controversy, a slight exaggeration.) For Bougainville, these were the Iles Malouines, since they had been, so he claimed, settled by sailors from Saint-Malo: which is why the Argentine Republic calls them Las Islas Malvinas.
The French attempt to settle on these bleak islands was a failure, apparently because Bou- gainville invented most of their attractions and the few settlers quickly discovered that he was mendacious, and also because the King of Spain, the enlightened and energetic Charles III, was not having any, and neither Britain nor France was willing to waste any time or money or blood on holding this miserable outpost of the great Spanish empire. But the controversy was bitter, and an example of the touchiness of the rulers of Spain, who rightly thought that their immense empire was a very fragile struc- ture indeed and could not stand any dangerous neighbours, French or English. The indignation with which the rulers of the Argentine Republic contemplate this outpost of British imperialism is, I suspect, highly facti- tious and fictitious. Here I should admit my j prejudices. There are few bodies politic with which I have less sympathy than the Argentine Republic, and none whose easy patriotic noises impress me less. In natural resources, Argentina is one of the richest countries in the world. It not only escaped both world wars; it has not had even a civil war since 1890. Its army and navy must be, along with those of Sweden and Switzerland, some of the least practised military organisations in the modern world. The last time the Argentine Republic took part in a real war was in the extraordinary war by Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina against Para- guay.
As I have pointed out before, it is very for- tunate that there were very few Paraguayans because they seem to be the most formidable military race the world has ever seen. Com- pared with them, Zulus, Japanese and Prussians are almost pacifists. It took the inhabitants of Paraguay, after their heroic resistance to three neighbours, rather more than a generation to breed enough males to fight another war, and I suspect that they are about ready for a new one now since they have not had one for an- other generation. I also strongly suspect and hope that they would chew up the conceited inhabitants of the Argentine Republic whose last serious military triumph occurred when the Viceroyalty of the River Plate was successfully defended against an extremely incompetent British expedition in 1806. I have always thought that one of the things that should have been taught in the educational institutions of the Royal Navy was the number of naval ex-
peditions accompanying troops which failed completely, sometimes disastrously, sometimes
ignominiously, and sometimes both. The ex- pedition to Buenos Aires was one of these preposterous and humiliating adventures.
The inhabitants of Argentina are in many ways remarkable. They are the 'whitest' in- habitants of Latin America. They are pro- bably more of Italian than of Castilian descent. but they have of course not only a large number of Welsh Argentinians, but a large number of Irish Argentinians. For example, I have just learned that the family name of Che
Guevara was Lynch; and I am glad that some of the liberators of Rio de la Plata from Span- ish rule were Irish, although none was so famous as Almirante O'Higgins who liberated Chile.
But I am not in favour of giving up the Falk- land Islands to the Argentine government under any kind of pressure, since it would only boost the already excessive vanity of the Argentinians and suspend their not undue power of self-criticism. It may well be the case that the future of the Falklands under any rule is rather drab. I hope they are not going to be abandoned. But if the young people are
emigrating to New Zealand, for example, it may be impossible to keep the islands going except
by a subsidy. The subsidy need not be very big, and I think it should be paid, although there are unkind critics who suggest that some of the payments could be made by existing economic institutions rather than through the sudden miraculous draft of seaweed which is supposed to save the islands from bankruptcY; I must confess I do not believe in it very much! After all, it is a long time since St Kilda was abandoned, and I really have more interest in St Kilda than I have in the Falkland Islands.
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