If it has an airport…
… it ain’t worth going to.
Great Britain has a troubled relationship with islands. Aside from being one, and deporting people it didn’t like to one, and abusing some fairly innocent farmering communities on a nearby one, Great Britain also “owns” some right up to this day.
Which is not to say that Great Britain actually wants to be a colonial master anymore. Apart from the cutely-named British Indian Ocean Territory, apparently necessary for the defence of the World, and the Falklands, which presented Margaret Thatcher with an attractive opportunity to put the Iron in the Iron Lady in 1982, Great Britain has tried pretty hard to offload most of them.
Benign neglect is not so benign if you live on Pitcairn, for example. A small group of four islands with less than 50 permanent residents and no airport, the people of Pitcairn are hardy sorts descended from the mutineers on the Bounty. Not swayed by such toughness, Great Britain spent a good 20 years ignoring Pitcairn, in an ill-fated attempt to get the islanders to give up, pack up and move to “civilisation.”
Unfortunately for Great Britain, the people of Pitcairn didn’t think much of the argument that their island group half-way between New Zealand and the Panama Canal was not viable. So there they continue to sit, waiting for passing vessels, enjoying a life only marginally tainted by a sexual scandal that raises important questions about how easily the laws of Great Britain can be applied to a small island group thousands of miles away….
No such scandal on Tristan de Cunha, meanwhile. Officially the most remote inhabited island in the world, home to 250 people descended from just 7 families, it does however have a substantive problem with the size of its gene pool, which has given rise to an asthma epidemic. It is presumed that the previous answer to this problem, that of giving a bag of potatoes for every woman from Saint Helena who would come and marry an islander, is no longer likely to work.
Tristan de Cunhians were also “lucky” enough to get a chance to live in the motherland, after a volcanic explosion left the island, which is almost exactly the same size as Ulleungdo, uninhabitable. Evacuated to Britain, it was largely presumed in Whitehall that they would never return. Guess what; 90% of them did. There is a message in that for all of us.
Ah yes, to Saint Helena. 4,000 people, a veritable thriving metropolis. Home to Napolean, who was apparently not all that enamoured of the place, site of Jacob’s Ladder, still in use today, and soon to have an airport, or so it is said (although that is also said of Ulleungdo, which is a whole other story…). Served by RMS Saint Helena, the last remaining Royal Mail ship, an old-school cruising opportunity.
See? An interesting relationship with islands. Especially ones without airports…
