Westlake, Donald E - NF 01 by Under An English Heaven (v1.1)

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his as yet unpublished book Anguilla: Island in Revolt, British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."
    The
next evening, Colonel Bradshaw got on his radio station, ZIZ, and denied
everything. "We sent no one to Anguilla," he said, "and if the
island was in fact raided or invaded it must have been done by Anguillans
living in Anguilla who are fed up with the terrible state to which Adams and
Company have brought their island." He also said that some of the
Anguillan rebels were "known to be Communists," which was pretty well
news to everybody.
    Meanwhile,
the Fact Finding Mission, five men of a different ilk, had arrived on St.
Kitts. They talked with Colonel Bradshaw and other officials, and they talked
with the detainees. On the twenty-ninth of June, they went to Anguilla to talk to the Peacekeeping Committee. The
other five were still on the island then, occasionally showing up at remote
houses and stealing food at gunpoint, and these two groups of five show the
range of potential solutions being considered for the Anguilla problem.
    The
Peacekeeping Committee would have liked to talk to the five men in the bush,
but they couldn't find them. However, they were also pleased to talk to the
Fact Finding Mission and agreed to send a delegation to St. Kitts to chat with
the Government there if three conditions were met: first, they required safe-conduct;
second, the British must have somebody present at the meeting; and third, the
Governor, Sir Fred Phillips, should preside at the meeting instead of Colonel
Bradshaw.
    Everything
was arranged, and the next day the delegation of five went off to St. Kitts,
led by Peter Adams and including a man named Jeremiah Gumbs, a businessman who
hadn't actually lived on the island for thirty years but who was soon to become
more famous and more important in the ongoing Anguilla crisis than any of his
fellow delegates.
    In
the history of The New York Times , only two Anguillans have ever made
its "Man in the News" column; the second was