Rockall: the outpost where empire and exploration meet

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jun/05/rockall-nick-hancock-colonial-outpost

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The British love affair with Rockall is a strange and wondrous thing. For more than 50 years, a great deal of flag-waving fervour has been indulged in the name of exploration. And here we go again: on Thursday a civilian explorer began an occupation of this inhospitable piece of rock lying 300 miles west of mainland Scotland for 60 days – ostensibly in aid of Help for Heroes, though Nick Hancock's expedition surely won't hurt Britain's territorial claim.

Rockall has long brought out expressions of patriotism. When the naturalist James Fisher helped the Royal Navy annex the islet in 1955, he was so moved by the occasion that he wanted to get down on all fours and kiss the bare stone.

Worried that such intimacy might detract from the solemn rituals of sovereignty, he thought it best to ask permission from the Admiralty. It readily assented. The relationship between Fisher and the Colonial Office was rather cosy. One civil servant noted: "Fisher's reward will lie in the kudos which he will gain as an authoritative writer on Rockall: he may even be able to turn it to financial advantage."

Fisher was known as an adventurous naturalist who could give a veneer of scientific legitimacy to this brazenly geopolitical exercise. He was delighted with the annexation: "At last," he said, "it's all going to be done proper, like being married in church." And none among the happy party were going to spoil the event by being explicit about what exactly was going on: that Britain needed Rockall, not out of misty-eyed sentiment for the shipping forecast, but because it wanted nuclear weapons.

This was a shotgun wedding precipitated by concern that the Soviet Union might use Rockall to spy on the Hebridean testing of the Corporal – the world's first nuclear missile. Not all in the Colonial Office were impressed. "Does anyone seriously suppose that Russia will try to annex Rockall in peacetime," questioned a civil servant's memo, "or would be physically able to maintain any sort of a useful observation post there?"

The mandarin had a point. The first year of testing saw an upsurge of Russian trawlers in the vicinity of St Kilda, but Rockall was of little consequence – at least until the prospect of oil and gas fuelled competing nationalist claims.

Though the survival expert Tom Maclean was unequivocal in his bid to reaffirm British rights, Hancock's purported rationale for Rockall Solo is rather more coy, using the language of exploration and personal challenge. But there is also something about conquering Rockall that quietly activates the historical legacies of colonialism. This is hardly surprising. Rockall is interesting precisely because it represents the last ever territorial expansion of the British empire.

At a time when Britain's empire was going to hell in a handcart, the Conservative prime minister Sir Anthony Eden could be afforded this small countervailing footnote. Rockall might only be 25 metres wide but, as the Daily Telegraph reported at the time: "Henceforth it is an outpost of empire"; or "As a communist would say, it has been peacefully liberated".

In one sense, all exploration is geopolitics in a different guise. The Royal Geographical Society, of which Hancock is a member, has often cloaked Britain's territorial ambitions with adventure and derring-do. But living in a solar-powered water tank for two months isn't quite David Livingstone.

Rockall Solo is not about distance travelled, heights climbed, depths plumbed or new horizons mapped. Privation used to be endured for some larger purpose – science or the elan of discovery. But with Rockall Solo privation is the larger purpose.

In that sense, the voyages of Fisher and Hancock are not altogether different. Fisher had a pleasant day out even if he "found the birds … a minor element in the excitement of the Rockall landing". Not to worry. The civil servant was right. Fisher filed his reports to the Guardian and settled down to write a book.