Untidy Little Island

"Here is no entrance except for friends," wrote one historian of the forbidding little (1.6 sq. mi.) island of Lundy. Rising like a granite fang out of the churning waters off the coast of Devon, the "isle of Puffins" has survived assault by the Spaniard, the Turk, the Frenchman and the Dutchman. But in all the 800 years since the King of England gave it over to one of his favorite barons, it has bowed to no nation for long--not even to its great neighbor, Britain.

The crumbling walls of its Angevin castle still keep guard over Lundy's only landing place, whence the medieval barons De Marisco once dispatched their men to raid the coast of England. It was from Lundy that the elegant 17th century pirate "Admiral" Nutt defied the Royal Navy; where the smuggler Mr. Thomas Benson, M.P., fired on all ships that did not dip their flags; and where a family called Heaven once ruled a kingdom of the same name. The islanders still point to the treacherous rocks that surround them and gleefully tell of the time a great galleon of the Spanish Armada went aground, or of where His Majesty's proud new battleship Montagu piled up in 1906. Aside from "bluebottles"--the island's name for tourists--the Lundyites do not like outsiders to get too close.

Martin I. v. George V. But last week the world moved closer all the same. Across the channel, the Devon County Council had sent off a letter to Her Majesty's Boundary Commission urging its claims on Lundy. For one thing, argued the council, if ever a crime were committed on the island, the jurisdiction of the Devon police might "be called into question. It would therefore be desirable to tidy up this point." This sort of tidying up is just what the Lundyites abhor; it was even worse than that dark episode back in 1931.

That was the year that the then Lord of Lundy, Martin Coles Harman, who had bought the island for $80,000, was ignominiously charged by Britain with violating the Coinage Act. In 1929 he had begun issuing his own stamps, his own puffin and half-puffin coins, and putting his own face on the front of the coins instead of that of George V. After the trial Harman was forced to withdraw his puffins and to have British stamps on Lundy mail along with his own. But the puffins remain profitable tourist items, and neither Martin Harman nor his son Albion, the present lord, ever officially conceded that the island is anything less than a "self-governing dominion."

Crisis on Safari. And so, each summer, when the cruel sea calms and the weather mellows, the population of Lundy swells from seven to 80 or so. Then the bluebottles flock to the island by the thousands to marvel at the ice-age cabbage that now grows nowhere else, or to catch a glimpse of a puffin, an auk, a rare peregrine falcon, or any other of the 145 kinds of birds found on Lundy. But as much as anything else, the bluebottles seem to come to spend a little time--and a few puffins--in a place with no taxes, no license laws, no schools (the only child on the island is ten months old), no policemen, no automobiles, no telephones, and apparently only one worry.

All week Lundy defenders, including the newly formed Lundy Island Association on the mainland, peppered the press and Boundary Commission with protests against the suggested annexation. But of all the friends of Lundy, the calmest was the island's Lord Albion himself, who first read about the crisis while on a safari in Africa. "Lundy," said he in London last week, "has lived without benefit of government for a long time. My inclination is to leave things as they are." Noting that Britain might well have to pay more in services to Lundy than Lundy would pay in taxes, Harman happily added: "It might be rather a poor investment for the adjacent island to annex our territory."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.