Desmond Morris, Falkland Islands Diary Entry
A shortened version of this article appeared in the Daily Mail on 12 November 2007
Before heading down to the southern tip of South America and rounding Cape Horn, the Aurora makes an eagerly anticipated diversion to the Falkland Islands. Most of the 1800 passengers on board are old enough to have relished the triumph of the British troops here, a quarter of a century ago, when, under firm orders from Margaret Thatcher, they swiftly defeated the invading Argentine forces, who were trying to annex the islands against the wishes of the inhabitants.
Before the Falklands War, few people knew anything about this remote place with its tiny population of less than 3000 intensely pro-British islanders, but after it was over they were all aware of its unique character and its charm. Hence the fascination at encountering it at first hand.
You know you are there when you see a street sign saying THATCHER DRIVE. And then there is a notice above a shop door saying 'Argentines will be served in this shop if they will give up their ridiculous claim to these islands.' Memories of the war are still vivid and everyone has a tale to tell of those extraordinary ten weeks in 1982, when thousands of Argie soldiers arrived and set up camp. They were mostly young conscripts who would have much rather been passing the time in the nightspots of Buenos Aires, but who had instead been dispatched here by a desperate military government, attempting to divert people's attention from the disastrous way in which the country was being run, back home. The Argentine troops soon gave in and found themselves prisoners of war, but not before they had laid countless land-mines all over the islands. These mines are still there today, making whole areas no-go zones and acting as a vivid reminder of the days of conflict.
An amusing footnote to the Falklands conflict is that, three days after the Argentine surrender, 10,000 of their troops were sent packing back to Argentina as prisoners-of-war aboard P & O's famous cruise ship the Canberra, that had been roped in to help with the war. This lenient treatment of the sad young men who had, until a few days before, been shooting at them, must surely have created one of the strangest voyages in all P & O's long maritime history.
Stanley, the capital city of the Falklands, which is about the size of a large English village, is a delight. The small houses are nearly all brightly coloured and many of them arrived here as pre-fabricated units, each packed into two marine containers and costing about £60,000.
The special house that the commander of the invading Argentine troops had built for himself is now the Falklands Museum, full of wonderfully evocative exhibits of bygone island days, including photographs of the now extinct Falklands Wolf. The last one was shot about 150 years ago.
The charm of Stanley is that it is more than pro-British, it is super-British, and whisks elderly visitors magically back to their childhood days, long before anyone had heard of parking meters, re-cycling, political correctness or multi-culturalism. There are old-fashioned red telephone kiosks, red letter-boxes and even a red double-decker London bus.
Life is so relaxed that there are no traffic lights and no prison - just two police cells for the occasional drunk. Priorities here are concerned with which of the many pubs serve the best beer, who will triumph in the darts competition and who win will this year's Governor's Cup at the local horse-racing track.
We pay a special visit to this racecourse, intrigued by the idea that a tiny city of only 2000 people can sustain a sporting venue of this type. But there it is, with its long, straight track of green turf and diminutive grandstands near the winning post - a defiantly British gesture in this distant corner of the world. We are even able to buy a DVD of the Governor's Cup 2006. Some of the jockeys seem to be marginally heavier than their horses, but everyone is clearly having a splendid time. And we learn that the Stanley racecourse is unique in the annals of horse-racing in at least one respect. Back in 1964, long before the Falklands War, and before there was a Falklands airfield, a Cessna light aircraft from Argentina used the race track as a landing strip. The pilot got out, planted an Argentine flag in the turf, claimed the Falklands for Argentina, got back in his plane and flew off home again.
Reluctantly leaving this historic racecourse, we go in search of a local delicacy with an irresistible name - Diddle Dee Jam - but fail miserably. The little shops are completely sold out because an even bigger cruise ship arrived yesterday, disgorging 3000 visitors - more than the entire local population - and stripped the shelves of the precious preserve. It is unique, being made from the tiny red berries of a dwarf shrub that is found all over the islands, but for us its taste must remain a mystery.
The cathedral in the centre of Stanley is unusual as cathedrals go, having a brightly painted corrugated metal roof and a huge whalebone arch outside it door. The arch, made from the jaws of two blue whales, was a gift from local whalers to celebrate the centenary of British rule here, but today it feels uncomfortably Moby Dickish in a world that has come to love whales rather than harpoon them. One local inhabitant certainly feels the same way because he has collected together a number of skeletal whale remains and placed them in his front garden next to huge signs saying STOP WHALING NOW. Somewhat incongruously, he also has a live reindeer from Lapland tethered on his small lawn, grazing there as best it can. When I asked him why it was there, so far from its natural home, he explained that it been brought south as part of a scheme to see if a herd could be established, but they had all fallen sick. The reindeer project had to be been abandoned, but he had managed to nurse this particular one back to health and it is now just a pet.
There is plenty of local wildlife to be seen here. We have time to visit to a penguin colony at nearby Gypsy Cove where hundreds of Magellan Penguins stand in dignified silence on the sandy beach, along with two huge King Penguins who appear to have taken a wrong turning but are stubbornly refusing to admit it. Not far away there is a colony of 1500 of these magnificent Kings, but this pair, for some mysterious penguin reason, have missed it.
While we are watching, one of the Magellan Penguins begins a long, solitary walk across the wide beach and laboriously starts to climb the shallow cliff below us. Up and up it struggles until it is only a few feet away. Ignoring us, it crosss the path on which we are standing and waddles off to its breeding burrow among the low Diddle Dee vegetation, pausing only to greet another nester and its chick on the way.
To a mariner, the Falklands is a ship's graveyard. There are over 100 known wrecks scattered around the coastline and probably 100 more that have yet to be discovered. The most spectacular one is the Lady Elizabeth in Whalebone Cove. A 1200 ton, iron-hulled barque, her first trip to the Falklands, back in 1889, was to bring the stones needed to build the walls of the new cathedral. On her last visit, in 1913, she ran aground, and today her great rusting hulk still stands proudly from the water, revealing the still elegant silhouette of her Victorian design.
Our guide, a delightful man by the name of Gerald Cheek, whose ancestors arrived on the islands five generations ago, turns out to be something of a celebrity. His proudest moment was when he represented the Falklands at the Olympic Games in Australia, just after the conclusion of the Falklands War. The Falklands contingent consisted only of himself, carrying the flag, and one other athlete - both of them entered for the shooting event. When they marched defiantly into the great stadium at the opening of the games, a huge roar went up, louder, he claims, than that for any other country. It is a moment he will never forget.
For the past nine days, Gerald explains, he has been ferrying Margaret Thatcher's daughter Carol around the islands, where she has been making a television documentary called 'Mummy's War'. Back in England Mrs Thatcher may have had her detractors, but out here she has none. If it weren't for her, this miniature England, endearingly frozen in time, would have lost its identity completely and become merely an Argentine outpost. And there would be no Diddly Dee Jam for tea and no draught beer in the Globe Tavern. Unthinkable.