My World of Islands

by Leslie Thomas

  Mornings and evenings had an enclosed quietness. There would be pigeons about the house at first light and, before breakfast of bacon, egg and Scottish potato cakes, I would go down with the happy spaniel Jessie through the tress to the cobbled beach, stand there and look out on a scene of unaltering serenity. The water had none of the blue blatancy of the Pacific. It was pale and oddly private – like looking into the window of a small shop.

  Evenings I remember for the woodsmoke from the jaunty chimney-pot of the house and those of the others about the bay and the daylight drifting west, slowly like a boat leaving the shore. Lone birds would fly on journeys known only to themselves and the sea would rifle through the shingle and pour into rock pools. Then the generators would start and the lights in the houses would shine and you knew it was time for dinner.

  One night the schooner came in, the Te Aroha, a stocky vessel built in 1914, bringing goods and a few passengers to the Barrier. In the post office at Mulberry Grove is displayed the timetable of her sailings and arrivals at all the small harbours and anchorages up the island coast.

  I went down to the jetty with Bill and the dog and watched the crew – including a young and hard-working lady called Maggie Pigeon (pigeons of all sorts seem to have an affinity with the Barrier) unloading the cargo.

  Maggie is from Brisbane. Clad in a black singlet and shorts she was operating the winch, regulating the boom that swung out the cargo of everything from boxes of apples to window frames. I sat on a rock and enjoyed the scene. There are few pleasures as enjoyable as watching a boat being unloaded.

  Just above the jetty I discovered another extraordinary family: Dick Wheeler, a cray-fisherman and harbour-master of Tryphena, his wife Lynne and their children. There was also a young man there who had come from Lord Howe Island, in the Tasman Sea. Islandmen are always attracted to other islands. On the Barrier until some time ago lived Johnny Laffoley, who came from Jersey in the English Channel Islands, in 1862. He had a little ‘bach’ (a cabin) above Tryphena and he played the violin at socials. Another of the old settler families, the McMillans, came from Prince Edward Island, Canada.

  Dick Wheeler, when he is not out fishing, has been building his own house. It is an amazing place, a sort of great wooden hull – like the interior of Noah’s Ark – into which, over the past ten years, he has been fitting comfortable rooms. The living-room looks out over the superb anchorage, and is one of those places that is at once welcoming to the stranger, crammed with books and wine bottles, and with the kettle chuffing on the hob. Not content with building his house, Dick was also constructing a boat. He took me down to his shed and there she was, a splendid 38-footer, each panel and piece lovingly placed and veneered with the touch of a true craftsman. ‘Two years it’ll take to finish her,’ he forecast. ‘I’ve still got a bit to do in the house.’ I can imagine him now, working away there on the winter nights, the lantern glowing across the tide below. Fortunate man.

  Most of the inhabitants of the Barrier have built their own homes. When I was walking by the shore at Mulberry Grove I met Ken Smith who built his house. He is blind, but his expertise in carpentry and joinery is legendary. His brother Bert lives in a distant part of the island. He is also blind and built his own house too. Jan Jackson, the travelling teacher, had met Bert and said that he knew every tree and rock for miles around. ‘I’ve fallen over most of them,’ he explained.

  For me the settlement at Mulberry Grove shows everything of life on this homely island. The school, with the sea at its door, the track leading to the petrol pump and the telephone box (the exchange closes after 5 p.m.), the collection of wooden houses, the post office, the store, the rusty taxi, and the people waiting either to use the telephone or for the arrival of the amphibian. There is no pub and no church, although social gatherings are held in the community hall, and church services in one of the houses. I think it is the only island of its size I have ever visited where there is no church. Perhaps they thought, like so many ventures, it would fail. The Mulberry Grove shop has a collection of paperbacked books so ancient they might be collectors’ items, including, for some reason, the Bi-Annual Report (1968) of the New Hebrides, miles away in the South Pacific. The shop was said to be changing hands. Businesses, from shopkeeping to logging to gold-mining to whaling, do not seem to flourish on the Great Barrier. Perhaps the island will have to stay content with being beautiful, and with being amiable – some places are not meant to make a profit.

  GREAT BARRIER ISLAND situated latitude 36°10’S and longitude 175°20’E; area 110 sq. m (285 sq. km); population approx. 570; New Zealand

  THE INDIAN OCEAN, THE ORIENT AND THE PACIFIC OCEAN

  The Seychelles

  Round and About Paradise

  I think any requirement is fulfilled for deciding that the site of the district of Eden is near Seychelles.

  GENERAL GORDON, 1881

  Islands throughout the world, because they are so often remote, unattainable, beautiful or mysterious, have been blessed with romantic names; except, that is, where their discoverer happened to be Captain Cook who called them after admirals, lords, or even learned bodies. His imagination lagged far behind his navigation.

  Cook did not explore the Seychelles. It was left to a poetic Frenchman, Lazare Picault, and as a result the islands bear some of the most lyrical names in the atlas. Silhouette, Félicité, Marianne, Cousin and Cousine, Aride, Curieuse and Anonyme are as lovely as they sound. Once the main island of Mahé was called Ile d’Abondance, but even as romantic an explorer as Picault knew who paid his bills. He called it Mahé after the Governor General of the Ile de France (Mauritius) whose name was Mahé de la Bourdonnais – who was his patron.

  There is plenty of room in the Indian Ocean and the Seychelles stretch themselves across many miles of coloured water – from Bird Island a thousand miles off Kenya to Aldabra and Farquhar only just clear of Madagascar. To fly due north from Mauritius over the ocean during the evening is to view a distant tranquillity; the islands appear far below, one by one, solitary. The sky changes shades; small prim clouds loiter like unemployed angels.

  It is only in recent years that aircraft have opened up these isles to the rest of the world. At one time the journey took five days from Mombasa in Africa. The British found the islands a convenient place for banishing difficult colonials, including an African king who kept slaughtering people, and the Sultan of Perak, Malaya. On Cousin island today there lives a giant tortoise of irreparable age who, it is said, once bit the exiled Archbishop Makarios of Cyprus.

  The pilot of the British Airways 747 had invited me to his flight deck to view the varied evening, to see the islands, apparently travelling south in the deepening shade. I took the fourth seat in the cabin, clamped on a pair of earphones and listened to the lady air traffic controller at Mahé airport providing instructions for our landing. Her voice came up to us, sounding precise and cool.

  One of the curious sensations of sitting there through that landing was the unawareness of the huge length and bulk of the airliner at our backs. It was just as if four men were sitting in a saloon car, and three of them were driving it.

  On the runway at Mahé was the Royal Swazi Airlines jet that had been used, shortly before, in an abortive attempt at a coup d’état in November 1981. It was wrapped in plastic sheeting to cover up the bullet marks. The attempt had been almost comic in its failure but the Seychellois were still anxious. At the Customs every sock in my bag was investigated with the intensity of someone looking for holes, and I was warned that there was a curfew in force and that I must be indoors by ten o’clock at night. Guns were poking out everywhere. So much for tranquillity.

  In the times before the airport, Victoria Town, Mahé, was one of the world’s unmolested places. Ships arrived, unloaded and departed, all in good, slow time. The smallest statue of Queen Victoria in the Empire (hardly two feet in height, it was difficult to see whether or not she was amused) stood under the languid Union Jack and the palms at the crossroads of th
e wooden town. The newspaper contained little. It could be comfortably folded into a man’s wallet. Rickshaws once rattled about the streets (there is one still on show at the Beau Vallon Bay Hotel) and perspiring Englishmen sought shade and drinks. The Seychellois, as their name suggests, nodded acknowledgment to their British lords and remained obstinately Indian Ocean French.

  For in the mid-eighteenth century French colonists from Mauritius, a thousand miles south, had arrived in the Seychelles and began to build and trade. The British sailed in during the Napoleonic troubles and the French Governor, displaying admirable sense, unhesitatingly surrendered, quickly pulling down the tricolour and running up the Union Jack. The British sailed away contented. The Frenchman then, just as deftly, exchanged the flags again. When the British returned he surrendered once more and repeated this performance on a further four occasions. His seventh surrender, in 1810, was the final word. The British came back for good and – both sides accepting the principle that whomsoever you cannot beat you should join – retained the French governor as their administrator. Thus the French never lost their sway over the Seychelles and today many of the 64,000 inhabitants, Indian, Chinese, Arab, African, speak French as their second language after Creole.

  There are a hundred isles and islets distributed across the local ocean, some inhabited by people, one – Aldabra – inhabited by a race of giant tortoises and others left to the birds and lizards. General ‘Chinese’ Gordon, who died his legendary death at Khartoum, was once sent to the Seychelles to advise on how the archipelago might best be defended – he failed – and travelled to the off-island of Praslin which he immediately, and in the face of much contrary evidence, pronounced as the original and authentic site of the Garden of Eden. This took the natives somewhat by surprise but they accepted it with a good grace, probably thinking of future commercial possibilities. The story has it that Gordon, tramping through the luxuriant Vallée de Mai, met a man who was the forebear of Boris Adam who still lives on Praslin. When asked his name, the man replied truthfully, ‘Adam.’ That finally convinced the General.

  Boris Adam lives by the sea, renting boats and serving fish curry to anybody who happens by. Ronald Reagan happened by a couple of years before he became President of the United States. He wrote in Boris’s visitors’ book:

  NAME: Ronald Reagan PROFESSION: Politician

  POINT OF EMBARKATION: Oblivion DESTINATION; unknown

  It is not difficult to understand the wonder that Boris’s ancestor noted in General Gordon’s face as he tramped through the Vallée de Mai. Despite the geographical disparity it might easily be Eden. The coco-de-mer grows here, the most wonderful palm in the world, a soaring pillar, waving its crest at the sky 100 feet up and living to 800 years and more. Its coconut is probably the largest fruit in the world, weighing up to forty pounds. To buy one the visitor must go to an authorized dealer, pay 500 rupees (about £50) and have the prize stamped ‘For Export’. In the thirteenth century Rudolf II, a Hapsburg king, paid 4,000 florins for one for the tree is said to be erotic; it is an aphrodisiac, the shape of the nut is anatomical and female and the catkins of the male tree are equally suggestive. The Seychellois say the trees get together at night and make love.

  Even on Praslin, which boasts an airfield (the terminal building has a thatched roof) and a small stone shed hung with a Barclays Bank eagle, it is easy to be away from people among the thickly scented valleys, their birds and waterfalls, or on beaches like golden scimitars. I stayed in a lodge made entirely from the coconut palm, its fruit and its fine fanned leaves. There were only three other guests there. In the morning the dawn chorus was amazing. I went out expecting a thousand chortling, whistling, hooting birds. All I found was half a dozen minahs, performing all the impersonations. On the beach I met a Seychellois girl who was sorting through shells and seaweeds with her feet. ‘I have found a pearl in a shell,’ she explained sweetly. ‘And I am looking for another for my second ear.’

  Unlike most warm islands, the Seychelles are neither volcanic nor coralline. They are granite – like the English Channel Islands and the Scillies – with, sometimes, coral attachments. The huge, smooth brown rocks pile on each other’s backs or lie in the water like bathing hippos.

  They formed a comfortingly familiar horizon for John Phillips who lived on Cousin with his young wife, Vivienne, for he came from Cornwall. They were the only people on the island. The Phillipses met at Oxford University and successfully answered an advertisement for an ornithologist couple to care for the island’s rare birds. They were island people too. They had been out to St Kilda, the loneliest outrider of Britain, and John’s ambition was, one day, to be the birdman of Fair Isle.

  On Cousin they lived in a bare house, eating mostly coconuts and fish, and getting to know the birds. Here are the dovelike fairy tern, which, uniquely for a seabird, lays its eggs in a tree – on the bare branch; the black sooty tern, and the noddy tern, and the rarest treasure, the brush warbler, which in all the world is known only on this island.

  I walked up the gradient paths with John, through the sun-filtering trees and onto the hippopotamus rocks. We could look across to the twin island of Cousine, a green bonnet with a lace of surf about its rim, and a veil of green-blue sea. It was untroubled by human habitation. Lizards slid from under our feet, wagging across the warm rocks. John and Vivienne seemed to know every bird on the island, personally. He lifted stones and branches to reveal fluffy infants sitting as phlegmatically as maiden aunts. ‘We have to guard them very closely,’ he said. ‘We get predators even here. The other night a barn owl, which had flown across from Praslin, crashed through the door and into the house. It gave us a hell of a shock.’

  The young couple – Vivienne was from Yorkshire – were occupied and content. It did not seem odd to them that, because of the emergency curfew, they had to go indoors at ten every night even though they were alone on their island. ‘We’re usually indoors by that time, anyway,’ shrugged John. ‘And if that’s the rule, it’s the rule.’

  On our trek we met up with Cousin’s oldest inhabitant, George, the giant tortoise, the one that made his mark on history and on Archbishop Makarios. The size, colour and texture of one of those ancient leather armchairs, George pondered his way from one side of the island to the other, sometimes taking weeks for the journey. He had been doing that for more than a century.

  If it were not for the palm trees and the sun, sailing into the miniature harbour of the island of La Digue would be much like arriving in some haven on the West of Ireland. The unofficial jetty, the limp water, the casual boats, and the suspicion that nothing much ever happens are the same. The island men were working on a lovely old schooner which was to become the La Digue boat, replacing an ancient and famous craft, the Lady Esme, which for generations was the island’s transport to the rest of the world. The hammers sounded across the flat harbour, the water as clear as a window.

  Three ox-carts were waiting to transport the arriving passengers from the jetty. There are only six motor vehicles on the island. There is a story that one day two of them collided head-on. I climbed into one of the carts, sat down and then stood up hurriedly – the left-hand horn of the ox next door was sticking through the slats of the cart and into my backside.

  The road was dried mud, which an old woman was sweeping with little optimism and a broom made of palm fronds. The three ox-carts set off in a bunch and we had a dusty, bone-rattling ‘Ben Hur’ type of race for half a mile. The woman sweeping the road stood back with a sigh to let our party pass by.

  Even at the uncomfortable pace and despite the dust clouds, it was easy to see how La Digue was. The shed-like shops, Oline’s Boutique, J. E. P. Appassamy’s Emporium and the Ocean Café, all sell Guinness and other commodities. On my second day I went into Oline’s to purchase some toothpaste. The proprietor noticed my tape recorder. Being suspicious he dispatched his small son through a hole in the wall and a few moments later I was being conducted to the local police station to explain my p
resence on the island to the sergeant. The police thought I might be an anti-government spy. I suggested that a spy would hardly mumble openly into a tape recorder, but nevertheless they made me replay the tape, and seemed to think some of it might be in code.

  ‘You should have seen the police in the British days,’ shrugged Kersley St Ange, who keeps a lodge by the lagoon. ‘They were pretty unpopular. One Christmas Eve the islanders kidnapped six of them and put them out on the coral reef. They were very wet when they were rescued. It was no way to spend Christmas.’

  When the attempted coup took place Kersley St Ange had twenty-five German tourists on his hands. ‘They had to stay here for three weeks,’ he smiled elegantly. ‘They got to like the local fish very much.’

  The hills of Mahé are lofty and green in the sun. Beau Vallon Bay in the west of the island curves exquisitely with the shadow of Silhouette Island like a misty pyramid on the skyline. The trees come down thickly to the beach and its long blue rollers. Nearby at Bel Ombre a man called Reginald Cruise Wilkins spent twenty-five years of his life digging for a vast pirate treasure. You can see all his excavations, his walls and dykes, on both sides of the road. His pumps now stand rusting. For all his devotion and his gritty work he died without finding the treasure. Sometimes you can go through life never getting what you think you want. Even in Eden.

  SEYCHELLES situated between latitudes 4–5°S and longitudes 55–56°E; area 171 sq. m (443 sq. km); population approx. 67,000; independent republic within the Commonwealth

  Mauritius

  Long Live the Dodo!