ONCE IN, NEVER OUT
Prologue
Saturday, February 28th Rockall, North Atlantic
Just standing on the bridge of HMS
Courageous at dawn was usually enough to put Commodore Sir
John Wellingsly in a good mood and fill his breast with pride. The
Courageous was a magnificent light cruiser--sleek, fast, and
modern, the peer of any ship in any navy in the world.
But today was different. As Sir John
surveyed the nautical traffic around the miserable pinpoint of rock rising
from the depths of the North Atlantic, he knew that he was about to lose
an embarrassing naval engagement to Iceland, a country that didn't even
have a navy. The Icelanders would win because they had done what the
British cabinet and its experts from the Admiralty had not thought
possible--they had sailed their small, fast, coastal fishing boats to
Rockall, crossing at least 230 miles of the most treacherous expanse of
the North Atlantic.
A thousand years before, Icelandic Vikings
had crossed the North Atlantic in forty-foot open boats and had ravaged
the British coast for fun and profit. For the people who had colonized
Greenland in the tenth century and North America four hundred years before
the birth of Columbus, the trip to Rockall in a modern forty-foot fishing
boat was child's play, nothing more than a delightful sea excursion.
Now the small boats of the Icelandic coastal
fishing fleet were there in front of Sir John, clearly visible from the
bridge as they prepared for action against the strung nets of the large
British fishing trawlers he had been assigned to protect. It was the
maneuverability of the small boats, not the speed and the firepower of the
Courageous , that would decide the day. Sir John knew how it
would go because, as a young lieutenant, he had served on the frigate HMS
Manchester
during the last Cod War in 1975.
Then, as now, fishing was Iceland's primary
industry. The waters around Iceland, where the warm Gulf Stream meets the
cold Arctic Current, were the richest fishing grounds in the world, with
catches of cod, haddock, salmon, redfish, shrimp, scallops, Norway
lobster, and herring constituting three-quarters of the country's export
income. However, in the early seventies there had been a worldwide
technological revolution in commercial fishing, with the fleets of the
maritime nations employing bottom scanners and sonar to locate the schools
and then haul them in using improved lightweight nylon nets.
In Iceland, the catches had plummeted and
the country had been thrown into crisis. The Icelanders had claimed that
the stocks of marine life off their shores were being depleted due to
zealous overfishing by foreign fishing fleets, mostly British. The
Icelandic government had reacted by unilaterally claiming authority over
their coastal waters for a distance two hundred miles from their shores,
the first country to do so. The robust crews of Iceland's small,
economically threatened fishing boats had responded with vigor, cutting
the very expensive nets of every British trawler found operating within
the new limit.
The British fishermen had protested to the
British government and the British government had protested to the
Icelandic government, but the Norsemen hadn't been prepared to listen.
Armed with complaints of net-cutting and righteous indignation, the
British ambassador to Iceland had camped out at Government House in
Reykjavík. He had been politely ignored until he threatened action
by the Royal Navy. The Icelanders had considered the threat to be an
undiplomatic breach of protocol and reacted by expelling the ambassador
and breaking off diplomatic relations with the United Kingdom, thereby
setting the stage for the fourth Cod War in twenty years between the two
nations.
Backed into a corner, the British government
had sent in the Royal Navy, as promised. It had been a laughable show,
with members of the world press covering the incident outnumbering the
"combatants" on both sides. The imposing presence of the
British fleet off their shores hadn't slowed the Icelandic fishermen in
the slightest. The fishermen simply placed their wives and children on
the decks of their boats as they went about their merry net-cutting
mission under the guns of the British fleet.
The Royal Navy had reacted by sending a
warning shot across the bow of any Icelandic fishing boat approaching the
strung nets of a British trawler, an action which sent the Icelanders into
convulsions of laughter on the decks of their boats as they threw their
life jackets overboard for the benefit of the reporters above. Then they
had driven in behind the British trawlers and cut the nets anyway, usually
giving the honors to the youngest person on board capable of handling the
clippers.
The British admirals had been able to do
little more than watch and smile benignly for the cameras overhead.
Their smiles had become even more forced when the feisty captains of the
Icelandic fishing boats, their day's work done, had given the Royal Navy a
treat just to show that there were no hard feelings. The admirals were
forced to look down over their guns at the Icelanders, standing with their
families on the decks of their fishing boats as they regaled the British
sailors with a chorus of gospel hymns in the ancient Icelandic language,
giving thanks to God for transforming the British navy into, in effect,
the much-improved Icelandic Coast Guard.
Beaten and chastened, the British government
had seen no way out but to declare their own two hundred mile fishing
limit around the British Isles, prompting a similar reciprocal action by
every maritime nation in the world. Owing to Iceland's stand, the two
hundred mile fishing limit quickly became a respected canon of
international law.
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By four o'clock, Commodore Sir John
Wellingsly was experiencing an unwanted bout of déjà vu as
he stared down at the singing families of Icelanders in their fishing
boats off his starboard bow. It had been a long day and a complete
disaster. Six miles behind the Courageous was Rockall, so tiny that it
wasn't even visible from the bridge. Visible instead were many Icelandic
boats, five British trawlers steaming in circles as they tried to retrieve
their nets from the bottom, and four news helicopters overhead nearly
colliding with each other in their efforts to capture the scene.
Sir John allowed himself a moment of
reflection as he pondered the imminent end of his long and otherwise
distinguished military career. In the good old Cold War days he had
steamed by Rockall many times before while searching for Soviet submarines
operating in the North Atlantic, but he had never bothered asking himself
who owned the half-acre island. If anything, he had considered Rockall as
nothing more than a hindrance to navigation because it had always been
surrounded by large fishing trawlers from nations around the world,
including Iceland.
"I wonder which idiot in Whitehall
decided Rockall was part of the British Isles?" Sir John asked no
one in particular, so softly that he didn't realize that he had given
voice to his thoughts until he saw the helmsman staring at him.
"Sir?" the helmsman responded.
"Nothing. As you were," Sir John
ordered, embarrassed at his out-of-character slip and hoping that the
helmsman hadn't heard.
But the helmsman had heard. The entire crew
had been embarrassed by the events of the day and he couldn't hold his
tongue. "Begging your pardon, sir, but I hear that the idiot who put
us in this mess was the foreign secretary. I hear it was Sir Ian
Smythe-Douglass himself."
