5th August

5th August 2012

The one good thing about being on the 4-8am watch is watching dawn break and seeing that we are back to sunshine. This morning as I gazed out to sea I could see something making very large splashes. It could only be a large whale but which sort I don't know. It played around for some time but didn't approach the ship. Zoltan, who was prowling about trying to fix the internet in the middle of the night, said he heard what sounded like a whale  spouting so perhaps it had been with us for some time.

Today's blog is written by SAMS undergraduate Paddy Lewtas. When he disembarks in Iceland, he flies on to Longyearbyen to do the third year of his degree at the University Centre in Svalbard.

“Now Mr Fogle, about your Rock……..”

This afternoon, we coasted gently past a rather well known, but oft-disputed piece of maritime heritage; a piece that has incongruously made its way into the news and media fairly regularly over the years, not to mention the odd cameo in fragments of popular culture. And it set me pondering.

In September 1955, Commander ‘Tubby’ Leonard hovered his nimble Westland Dragonfly helicopter over a rocky pyramid-shaped granite outcrop in the middle of the Atlantic. Here he deposited three Royal Marines and a naturalist. The drop required a precise hover close to the outcrop’s summit. There a brass plaque was cemented in, the Union flag raised and saluted, before the landing party were snatched up again and returned to the nearby HMS Vidal, in time for tea and medals.

Commander Leonard couldn’t have been aware of the associated events that would unfold during the following half century. Rocabarraigh, in Scots Gaelic, or as it’s more commonly known, Rockall, has been at the bottom (or surface!) of many disputed claims to the mining and fishing rights of the thousands of square miles of seabed surrounding it. Britain, Ireland, Iceland and Denmark (via the Faeroes) all have staked rival claims. But the 1955 landing is often referred to as the ‘last annexation of the British Empire’.

This appropriation of Rockall was seen as vital due to the risk of Soviet eyes potentially using the rock as a convenient spying place, to observe the flights of experimental cruise missiles from a test facility on South Uist.

Since then, there have been many other landings, or ‘occupations’. Many of which have involved plaques, flags, sentry boxes, declarations or a territorial mark of some form. In spite of all these various claimants, the legislative power and the decision of whose and what it is, now lies with the UN, and the vagaries of the United Nations Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf.

Surprisingly, the UK’s 1997 ratification of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) meant that Rockall also represents the only example in the world of a state voluntarily downgrading an insular feature to simply, ‘a rock’, therefore reducing the area of its claimed exclusive economic zone.

The territorial squabbling continues….

As a curious example then, it was slightly unexpected to see this afternoon not one, but four pelagic trawlers working the waters right next to Rockall; ironically bringing home the fact that the deep-sea fisheries still enjoy a relative free-for-all status. Two of the vessels were UK registered, Banff and Kirkwall, the origin of the other two was unclear.

Aside from questions about the health of the pelagic fisheries, whose water really is it? Whose are the fish? Whose are the minerals that may be on and in the seafloor? These are all questions that are relevant, contemporary and of our era, both my generation and the next.

Rockall to some, will always represent the last piece of the British Empire. But maybe the futility of all the political power struggles and territorial disputes is best epitomised by this:

Rockall, obviously belongs to Ben Fogle. He stuck a post-it note on it saying so, in May 2007.