Augustus James Ulysses Jaspert, Gus for short, arrived in Tortola, the largest of the British Virgin Islands, on 21 August 2017, just two weeks away from catastrophe. Jaspert, who was in his late 30s, had recently been appointed governor by Queen Elizabeth II, on the recommendation of the Foreign Office in London. The BVI is an overseas territory of Britain, with only partial independence, and the governor effectively acts as a backstop to the locally elected legislature. For Jaspert, a career civil servant, it would be his first hands-on experience of governing – and his first time in the British Virgin Islands. Any trepidation was outweighed by the prospect of moving to the Caribbean. “If you’re sitting in an office in London and someone says, ‘Go to Tortola,’ you look it up on a screen and think, ‘OK, I can do that,’” Jaspert told me.
While Jaspert, his wife and two sons were settling into their new life, a tropical storm gathered over the Atlantic. At first, forecasters weren’t unduly alarmed, but in the first days of September, the storm transformed into something much worse. In the afternoon of 6 September, Hurricane Irma made landfall in Tortola, which is home to the majority of the BVI’s 30,000-strong population. Irma was one of the strongest hurricanes ever recorded in the Atlantic basin. It scalped buildings, blew out windows and removed entire floors from homes. Shipping containers smashed into the islanders’ fishing boats and the out-of-towners’ yachts.
