Westlake, Donald E - NF 01 (9 page)

The
second theory, that Anguillans came down to St. Kitts to do some plinking, also
has some problems with it, principally the fact that there wasn't any reason
for them to do so. However, Trinidadian author V. S. Naipaul has reported this
theory as fact in the
London
Sunday Times
saying, . . the Anguillans raided St. Kitts
and shot up the police station and Defence Force headquarters. The raid, by 12
men, was openly planned; people went down to the wharf in the afternoon to wave
as the 50-foot cutter left for St. Kitts. Five and a half hours later the
cutter tied up, quite simply, at the main pier in St. Kitts. Then the
Anguillans discovered they hadn't thought about motorcars. They had intended to
kidnap Bradshaw; they had to be content with scaring him."

The
third theory, that the attack was staged, certainly
sounds
like
something the St. Kitts Government might do. And there are those cells so
conveniently emptied three days ahead of time. And when I was on St. Kitts and
went to the police station in
Basseterre
, I noticed that none of the bullet pocks in
the wall were less than nine feet up from the floor; either the attackers
thought they were shooting at giants or they didn't really want to hit anybody.

However,
the fact is, theory number two should stand up, because it's the truth. The
Naipaul account is pretty accurate, except that it wasn't motorcars the
Anguillans couldn't find; it was Bradshaw.

A
dozen of them, including three raffish young Americans, decided to kidnap
Bradshaw and hold him for ransom. The ransom was to be
Great Britain
's acknowledgment of
Anguilla
's secession from St. Kitts. (They were
still, of course, trying to attract the donkey's attention, and this was one
time the burning-sticks-on-sheets-of-powder contingent got their way.)

They
sailed to St. Kitts, landed at
Basseterre
, and went roaming around town, a dozen men
with rifles. They claim to have stopped a policeman at one point and asked him
where Bradshaw was, but he insisted he didn't know.

They
never did find Bradshaw. In the old days, on hot nights when they had nothing
to do but think about their aggravations, the boys on Anguilla used to go over
and shoot up the police station, full of its uniformed foreigners from St.
Kitts. Now in
Basseterre
, with time on their hands, they reverted to
form, and before leaving gave Sergeant Edgings a nostalgic salute.

(That
wasn't all the shooting done that night. In addition to the police station and
the Defence Force building and the electricity plant—one can empathize with electricityless
Anguillans pumping a couple of bullets into the Kittitian electricity
plant—there were shots fired at two dances. Did the Anguillans open fire on
dances? Or did somebody else do some shooting that night, too, for reasons of
his own?)

And
what of the jeep found blazing away in a cane field north of town near the dead
body that had been buried there apparently for some months? And what about the
boat stolen at
Heldens
Bay
?

The
jeep and body have never been successfully explained, but the
Heldens
Bay
boat was stolen by part of the group from
Anguilla
that had become separated from the rest.
While the main party returned in the cutter they'd traveled down in, this
second group, including the three Americans, stole the boat and lit out for the
Dutch
island
of
St. Eustatius
, with the St.

Kitts
Revenue Cutter in hot pursuit. It failed to catch up. The Dutch authorities
wouldn't permit Kittitian police to make arrests on Dutch soil, so Group Two
took a plane to
St.
Thomas
,
where they did enough blabbermouthing for the
St. Thomas
Daily News
to be able to print the
names of the three Americans in its issue of June 16.

But
what about those fortuitously empty cells? The answer, I think, is that
Bradshaw knew his opponents and anticipated that sooner or later the Anguillans
would do something that would give him the opportunity to clap PAM in the
clink. I doubt he anticipated that PAM would do anything; the Anguillans would
act, and PAM would pay the consequences. And so it was.

An
additional result of the spree of June 10 was that Bradshaw once again asked
all his neighbors, plus
Britain
, for armed help to put down the Anguillan
rebellion. Once again he got a series of polite refusals, and from the British
the first indication that the donkey might be listening; Bradshaw was told by
the British Government that "unless some firm understanding could be
reached with the Anguillans about their problems it is difficult to see how far
a military operation could solve the situation."

Closer
to home, the Prime Minister of Jamaica offered to set up a "Caribbean Fact
Finding Mission" to try to find out what was wrong between St. Kitts and
Anguilla, or, as the Mission put it, "initiate discussions between Mr.
Bradshaw and leaders of opposition factions in an endeavour to find a basis for
an amicable settlement to the dispute."

But
Bradshaw said no thank you to fact-finding missions; what he wanted was men and
guns and ships.
He was having
trouble about the ships, but the other two he was getting, one way and another.
He already had an army, called the Defence Force and consisting of seventy men;
Bradshaw now declared himself a colonel in charge of this army, put on a khaki
uniform complete with Sam Browne belt and holstered pistol, got a rather stout
lady with a rifle to be his bodyguard, and went out in his Rolls-Royce to watch
his army pass in review. (In the American Army, by way of contrast, seventy men
is slightly larger than one platoon, usually led by a lieutenant.)

Then
there were the police.
Great Britain
, before the
Anguilla
rebellion, had agreed to replace the old
arms of the St. Kitts police with new weapons, and now these started coming in.
The police force numbers 110 men, and the British sent along guns enough for
the entire crew, plus the Defence Force. Colonel Bradshaw promptly invented a
new militia called the Special Volunteer Constabulary, found 162 volunteers,
and gave them the old Lee-Enfield .303 rifles that the police and army had been
using until the new guns had arrived from England. This* Special Volunteer
Constabulary was a very scruffy group of men, built around the nucleus of a
street gang called The Breadfruit Tree Boys, who had been credited with much
rape and burglary in the Basseterre area before blossoming into constables.
(One Kittitian police inspector stated in court, under oath, that some of the
volunteers would have been facing criminal charges if they weren't in the
Constabulary.)

Meanwhile,
back on
Anguilla
, an uneasy week followed the invasion of
St. Kitts. Boys and men patrolled the beaches at night, armed with conch shells
and toy walkie-talkies. By day the Peacekeeping Committee, led by Walter Hodge,
a local builder who was later to emerge as the island's financial wizard,
gradually altered itself from an emergency organization into a government.
Rebellion or no rebellion, life had to go on. The schools had to run, the
airport had to be maintained, customs duties had to be collected (whenever
possible), and the general public operations of society had to continue without
interruption. Almost all the members of the Civil Service had chosen to stay at
their jobs, so what the Peacekeeping Committee did was move naturally into the
vacuum left by the removal of St. Kitts s authority.
But
Anguilla
couldn't go it alone. The Anguillans really
did want to get back somehow with Mother Britain; they were rebelling, after
all, under the British flag. But the English apparently wanted nothing to do
with them. And so, reluctantly, the Peacekeeping Committee turned elsewhere.

On
June 16, just a week after the foray into
Basseterre
, Peter Adams flew again to
San Juan
,
Puerto Rico
,
to send some more telegrams. One went to U Thant at the United Nations, asking
for "guidance" in the current troubling situation. Another went to
President Lyndon Johnson, asking the
United States
to accept
Anguilla
as an American territory in a status
similar to that of the American Virgin Islands. While on
Puerto Rico
,
Adams
also made an attempt to round up some medical supplies, which by now were
nearly half a year overdue on
Anguilla
.

U
Thant didn't answer this telegram either, but
Adams
did get an answer from the United States
Government. That is, he got it if he read
The New York Times
for
June
17, 1967
, which
reported, "Officials said today that the
United States
would never negotiate directly with
Anguilla
on the question of association.
Britain
still handles
Anguilla
's foreign policy 'as far as we are
concerned,' Government sources said, adding: If Anguilla is serious, the
request must be handled through the
United Kingdom
.'"

It's
no surprise, really, that the
United States
was the nation to produce
Catch-22.
Great Britain
wouldn't talk to
Anguilla
unless the words came through St. Kitts,
and now the
United States
wouldn't talk to
Anguilla
unless the words came through
Great Britain
.

However,
with the Anguillans sending out all those telegrams and giving so many
statements to reporters, it isn't unlikely that various governments began
talking among themselves, suggesting to one another that something be done to
quiet things down. Whatever was or wasn't said, Colonel Bradshaw suddenly
reconsidered the question of the Fact Finding Mission and decided he'd
appreciate their efforts after all. The Fact Finding Mission was forthwith
assembled and turned out to be composed of four government officials and one
university professor, all from various West Indian islands. It was the sort of
group whose equivalent members in the
United States
would be on a committee to raise funds for
a community cultural center.

The
Mission
arrived in St. Kitts in late June, at
around the same time that something very mysterious was happening on
Anguilla
. On the night of June 23, two young men
patrolling the beach at
Limestone
Bay
saw a ship without lights stopped beyond
the reef. Three rowboats were moving toward shore.
Limestone
Bay
is perhaps the most remote corner of the
entire island, with neither a road nor a footpath leading to it. The two boys
hid in the brush and watched the rowboats land and counted the men who came
ashore; they were thirty.

While
one of the boys kept watch, the other took off through the brush until he was
close enough to the police station for his walkie-talkie message to be picked
up. Truckloads of Anguillans immediately set out, but the trucks had to be left
behind on the nearest road while the men ran across the rough ground toward the
bay. The noise of their approach alerted the invaders, who immediately got back
into their row-boats and headed away from shore again. That is, most of them
did; five stayed behind on the island, drifting away into the darkness. When
the Anguillans finally thundered down onto the beach, the boats were gone and
so were the men; all that was left was one policeman's boot.

In
his as yet unpublished book
Anguilla: Island in Revolt,
British
journalist Colin Rickards mentions this incident and adds, "At
noon
the following day I happened to see the St.
Kitts Revenue Cutter entering
Basseterre
roadstead towing three rowing boats, but
thought nothing of it." When he heard about the previous night's invasion,
however, Rickards began to look into things at the St. Kitts end. "My own
careful investigation in St. Kitts," he says, "pinpointed five men,
all known to be Government loyalists, and all of them crack shots, who were
missing from their homes and various places of work."