The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica, стр. 77

was made an officer in the Volunteers, as supposedly befitted my status as a Frazer orphan, as Longfaeroe’s Davidic candidate, as Abigail’s lover, and especially as what they called “the hero of the Presbyterian church.” I was assigned responsibility for a part of the southwestern shore, an important area because if any plague ships were coming, they would likely ride the westerlies from South America. Again, I do not want this to sound like grand militarism. The Volunteers and Falkland Irregulars in exile never numbered more than several hundred men and boys, committed to defend an island of two thousand mostly uninhabitable square miles from all sides, from nature.

It should be without excuse that I report that the leadership determined to stop any group wanting to land on South Georgia henceforth. There are excuses, however, worthy of my attention. The most profound might be that survivors, as we all were on South Georgia, are forever condemned by the fate that has permitted them to survive. This seems abstract, needs detail.

I learned gradually, once I was out of my hut and down to mix with the South Georgians, what had happened out there in the Atlantic since I had fallen sick. The so-called fleet of the damned had grown apace for a few years; the beasties had come to South Georgia as they had to the Falklands, not in great numbers, because the Atlantic was vast and violent and the African ports were downwind. What beasties that had made it were either dead soon after or were taken into Gaunttown, some at Shagrock, a few at Cape Disappointment. Then, without explanation, the fleet had disappeared in our part of the ocean. The news we could get on the radio (a most unreliable machine that far at sea) mentioned a “refugee crisis,” said that potent councils of nations were struggling to solve the dilemma. A British warship called at Gaunttown my second summer on the island. The captain explained little, said he was on a “fact-finding mission” for special commissions established in Europe to resolve the “refugee crisis.” I am using his slang purposely, to demonstrate that whatever was going oh out there was treated like a secret by the very people, in Europe and the Americas, who should have known most. We on South Georgia, without resources, seemed to know more than they did. The British captain had not challenged Elephant Frazer when he had introduced himself as governor-general of South Georgia (before the war there had been only one governor-general for the whole of the Dependencies, based in Port Stanley), and had introduced Simon Brackenbury, a fierce Pattie-hater, as the governor-general of the Falklands government-in-exile. The commander of the Volunteers, a hard, devious, and enigmatic man named Gordon Hospidar whom everyone called “the Hospidar,” made demands on the captain’s stores and armory, and was obliged without comment. The captain acted as if he despised his compassionless task, hated what his government had made him, an emissary to charnel houses. The captain said he could do nothing to help the Falklander evacuees, could promise neither foodstuffs nor a British squadron for South Georgia. The message was clear: South Georgia was on its own. The captain did make one angry remark that became the focus of bitter jesting on the island. The captain said, promising to return, which he did not, “There’s been no war. There’s been one bloody shuffle.”

That is descriptive of what the leadership on South Georgia inaugurated after the rumor of plague, during my fifth winter there. From the defeat to the visit of the British captain, they had nursed thoughts of revenge on the Patties, plotted possible attacks on Port Stanley; from the captain’s visit to the rumor of plague, they had transformed the island into a fortress against anarchy; after Germanicus’s return, they again transformed the island, this time from fortress to bloody shuffle. They thought like losers, acted accordingly. Reason gave way to meanspiritedness and worse. There were vicious arguments, food-hoardings, suicides, a sharp increase in the death of the old and the very young. The corresponding increase in funerals moved Longfaeroe back to the fore of the community as psalm singer. There were several other pastors in Gaunttown, mostly Falklander evacuees; Longfaeroe was their master. They combined to preach sermons that supported a hardening of everyone’s heart.

The chief controversy, what began the collapse of the nascent goodwill that had seen South Georgia through its deprivations, came not from the outside, not from plague or Patties or British suzerainty, but from inside. It concerned the thousand-odd beasties who had been given shelter before and after the defeat at Port Stanley, mostly as subsistence workers, as outright wards of the South Georgians. They were three quarters from South America, the remainder from Africa, the Falklands, a few families off a freighter that had originated in Italy. With the reorganization in fear of plague ships, the Volunteer command recommended to the governor-general, Elephant Frazer, that the beasties be corralled into a single camp, in a ravine just outside Gaunttown. The camp was built that fall; the beasties were moved into it over the winter, made to live communally in longhouses, were given a curfew, sharp rationing. The men and boys were conscripted into work gangs to help build watchposts along the western shore and to seal the passes that ran through the center of the island, west to east. The women and girls were forced to work in the whaling factory that supplied the island’s lighting and heating needs. A few were allowed to sail with the small whaling fleet left to us. In all, it was slavery. Longfaeroe dared to call it “Christian communism.” I should mention that no one on South Georgia was living much better than the beasties in the camp that winter; many of the Volunteer outriders and those at Shagrock suffered worse.

Still, it was abject cruelty toward those sad, helpless, lost people. I should explain that over the years since the defeat, there