Somewhere East of Eden

by Michael McKeown

  For aeons, the island remained isolated and uninhabited. It was first mentioned in AD 978 by Arab seamen who briefly landed there. But five hundred more years were to elapse before the Dutch Admiral van Warwyck dropped anchor on the south-east coast in 1598 en route to the spice markets of the East and claimed the island for the Netherlands, naming it Mautits after his ruler, the Prince of Orange.

  The arrival of Man signalled a wave of extinction. The magnificent tropical hardwoods were felled for construction. Then, as always with homo sapiens, came his customary, unwelcome entourage of dogs, goats, rabbits, pigs, rats and monkeys. The introduction of these alien species was devastating. The goats devoured the undergrowth that had provided cover for the dodo, the dogs and cats hunted and harried the bird mercilessly and ate their chicks and the ground-rooting pigs, who found utopia in the primeval forest with its roots and tubers, ate their eggs. The sheer weight of numbers and belligerence of the Dodo’s new enemies proved too much for this ponderous and harmless bird and by 1781 the last one had disappeared.

  “So, failure to adapt had nothing to do with it dying out?”.

  “No,” de Freitas shook his head emphatically. “The dodo had lived for four, perhaps five million years. It took a combination of humans and non-native species seventy-five years to exterminate it. It was the rats, cats, monkeys and other nest raiding predators who did for it in the end.”

  I recalled something I had read quite recently in Time about scientists in Japan who were trying to produce a living species of a dodo from fossils and bones kept in museums.

  He dismissed the notion with a despairing shake of his head. “Scientists are forever telling us that nothing today is irreplaceable. But however much we pride ourselves on our technology we can no more restore the Dodo, or an uprooted hedgerow to its original ecological state than we can recreate the Mona Lisa or the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

  Centuries of widespread logging, and land clearance, as well as the introduction of exotic plants and animal species had ultimately combined to destroy the island’s ecosystem and I asked de Freitas if he thought things could ever recover.

  “As things stand, we are ranked as having the third most endangered flora in the world. Around two hundred of our three hundred and fifteen endemic species are critically threatened.” He gave a fatalistic shrug. “But there are success stories and for that we must thank the efforts of one man in particular – Gerald Durrell. No one, I think, would dispute that he more than anyone else did more to rescue the island’s flora and fauna.”

  Gerald Durrell, one of the best, and certainly the funniest of nature writers, a man whom David Attenborough described as “magic,” had taken the Dodo as a symbol of his Wildlife Trust because it was the personification of what Mankind was doing to species all over the world. He had first visited Mauritius in 1976, a time when this once verdant island was as fast becoming an ecological wreck with a handful of rare and unique birds like the pink pigeon and the Mauritius kestrel on the brink of extinction. Since then the trust’s partnership with the Mauritian Wildlife Foundation has introduced a long-term programme of habitat restoration, preserved species on the brink of extinction through captive breeding, as well as creating public awareness of the island’s hazardous ecological state.

  I asked him if he had met Durrell

  He shook his head regretfully. “Sadly no. When he came here I was studying oceanography at Newcastle University. And when he next came I was working in Australia. A great pity. Not least because by all accounts he was a wonderful story teller. I have a friend, Eloise Duval who met him several times when he was here. She’s a botanist by the way, and a very good one. You might like to give her a ring sometime.”

  Before leaving he gave me her ‘phone number.

  Two days later, I paid a visit to the gurglingly unpronounceable Sir Seewoosagur Ramgoolan Botanical Gardens, near the small village of Pamplemousse in the north of the island to see the giant Aldabra tortoises that had once inhabited the island, before being exterminated during the late 1770’s. Today the small but thriving population to be found here are the result of the of the world’s first wildlife translocation projects pioneered by no less a luminary than Charles Darwin.

  In 1874 Darwin, together with other eminent scientists, signed a letter to the Governor of Mauritius highlighting the plight of these tortoises who had been rendered extinct by the plundering of Dutch, French and British sailors in all but the remote, uninhabited Indian Ocean atoll of Aldabra. The Aldabra Atoll is the second largest coral atoll in the world comprising four large coral islands major islands which include a large tidal lagoon. In their letter, the scientists requested that some of the tortoises there should be re-located to Mauritius and a captive breeding project be set up on the island to ensure their future. The governor duly obliged and the giant tortoises were reprieved.

  I studied the tortoises as they lumbered ponderously along the sandy tracks in their enclosure with their customary bleary-eyed expression. Over a metre long and weighing around 250kg they were very similar to the Galapagos turtles that Darwin first saw on his journey there on HMS Beagle in 1835 – an occasion that was to forever change our understanding of the natural world and our place in it.

  It was during his time in the Galapagos that Darwin became aware that many of species of birds and animals on the islands possessed unique physical variations to those on the mainland. On his return to England he began to consider the possibility that certain species from south America had reached the Galapagos and, over time, altered their appearance as they adapted to a new environment. The idea that species could change over time was to lead to Darwin to his theory of evolution by natural selection. It was possibly the greatest single idea in the history of human thought.

  The unshakeable belief of Man’s superiority still prevailed when Darwin set sail aboard HMS Beagle in 1831 on a geological expedition to chart the coastline of South America. The conviction that God had created all species and put them in one particular place had existed for over two thousand years. According to Genesis, God had exhorted Man to ‘go forth and multiply, to subdue and have dominion over fish and fowl.’ In other words, the Bible encouraged man to exploit the natural world for his own gain.

  Darwin’s Theory of Evolution made us rethink our place in the world. It asserted that all life – birds, mammals, fishes, plants and flowers – is related and has descended from a common ancestor, all of which were interrelated. He demonstrated that life had originated in small, simple forms which gradually became more complex. In a passage that I have always enjoyed, he wrote: “From so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”

  Hard though it may be for us to grasp today, evolution in those times was a dangerous, even subversive word. It implied that things could change and neither the State, or the Church was prepared to countenance any alteration to the established order of the revealed truth. The idea that the world was created by natural forces and not God, and that we did not have dominion over this planet was complete heresy to the Church who vehemently denounced Darwin and The Origin of the Species in 1859.

  “If one person can be said to have single handedly saved Mauritian wildlife from going the way of the Dodo, it was Gerry Durrell,” Eloise Duvall told me. We were sitting on the shaded veranda of her timber framed Creole house outside Moka, a twenty-five-minute drive from the capital Port Louis. Purple jacaranda trees lined both sides of her garden whose lawn was rimmed by colourful beds of huge, trumpet-shaped hibiscus, zinnias and scarlet and yellow canna lilies.

  Eloise was in her early seventies, a tall, slender woman with an air of quiet radiance that certain serene people seem to acquire in old age. She had clearly once been truly gorgeous, as a silver framed photograph on top of a rosewood writing desk testified. She had warned me over the ‘phone that she was prone to moments of forgetfulness but not once in our two hours or so of conversation did she hesitate over a name or a place or a da
te.

  Eloise was easy and entertaining company. She came from an affluent French-Mauritian family who had arrived on the island in the mid-seventeenth century. Her father had inherited a sugar plantation started by his grandfather in the south east of the island but according to Eloise his heart was never in it. His real love was wildlife, formed by a six-week holiday he spent on a friend’s family ranch near Lake Naivasha in Kenya. He never got over the experience. “And here in Mauritius…” She raised an eloquent eyebrow.

  Her interest in botany had been fired when as a child of eight her father had told her about the jackfruit tree that grew in their garden. The tree which was cultivated in India over three thousand years ago, is the largest tree fruit in the world weighing up to as much as 35 kilogrammes.

  “But what really fascinated me was learning that it is composed of hundreds and thousands of flowers and this compression of fleshy petals is what we actually eat.”

  I asked her what it tasted like.

  “Something like a mixture of mango and banana. It’s really quite unique.” She shook her head regretfully. “Unfortunately, now is not the season so I am unable to send you back to your hotel with an armful of them.”

  Gerald Durrell was clearly a great favourite. She had met him when he came on a working holiday to the island in 1975.

  ” It wasn’t a good time for him, “she told me. “I’m not saying anything that is not now widely known. Things were going badly in his marriage and he had just about reached rock bottom. Mauritius in those days was a remote and little-known island and he arrived when the situation for what remained of its endemic animals and plants was bleak. Conservation organisations abroad had begun to refer to us as ‘Paradise Lost.’

  “And did he know just how bad things were?”

  “I think he had some idea. But nothing approaching the reality he discovered. When he arrived indigenous bird species had been reduced to eleven including the world’s rarest pigeon, falcon and parrot, all of which were teetering on the brink of extinction. And it was nearly as bad with the native reptiles and plants.”

  “So, what began as a holiday became a full-blown conservation mission.”

  “Oh, absolutely. It was the start of the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust in Mauritius. And you could see just how passionate he was about making a success of it. He opened people’s eyes and showed them what a terrible mess things were and that it was up to us to do something to remedy it.” She paused reflectively. “He had this amazing ability to make people listen to his ideas and follow them. And at the same time, he had this gift of making people laugh. It was part of his charm. He was naturally funny as well as being a wonderful story teller.”

  That evening back at the hotel I came across a passage in Durrell’s Golden Bats and Pink Pigeons that I had bought in a bookshop the previous day. After repeated failures one of the rare pink pigeons was caught and Durrell gently extricated it from the umbrella-shaped net.

  “I received it reverently into my cupped hands,” he wrote later. “It lay quietly, without struggling, merely blinking its eyes in what appeared to be mild curiosity at this strange experience. It was a remarkably handsome bird. Gazing at it, feeling its silken feathering against my fingers and sensing the steady tremor of its heart-beat and its breathing, I was filled with a great sadness. This was one of the thirty-three individuals that survived the shipwrecked remnants of their species, eking out a precarious existence in their cryptomeria raft. So, at one time, must a tiny group of Dodos, the last of their harmless, waddling kind, have faced the final onslaught of pigs, dogs, cats, monkeys and man, and disappeared forever, since there was no one to care and no one to offer them a breeding sanctuary, safe from their enemies. At least with our help the pink pigeon stood a better chance of survival.

  I was still pondering the hapless Dodo’s fate when two days later, I drove out to a small seaside restaurant on the north west of the island. I had been directed to it by a colleague who described it as the kind of family restaurant that had once existed all over the island, before prime sections of beaches were grabbed by the big hotels with the advent of tourism. “The patron is called Maurice”, my friend said. “Be sure to tell him I sent you.”

  Plastic covered tables and scuffed wicker chairs were arranged haphazardly under the dappled shade of casuarina trees. The clatter of saucepans, music and voices coming from the kitchen put me in mind of a Greek island taverna. Below me sugar white sands ran down to a small crescent shaped bay with turquoise blue water.

  The patron arrived bearing a tray with a small carafe of local white rum, orange juice and a basket of freshly baked bread. There was, he informed me, a set menu consisting of hors d’ouevre and a choice of line fish caught that morning.

  I sat there musing on the plight of the dodo who had once peered out from the teak and ebony forests that had formerly lined this very same beach. And sitting there, I pictured how it must have been when the first Dutch sailors arrived. Lacking any fear, the plump, good-natured dodos with their hooked beaks would have waddled trustingly down the beach to investigate the new arrivals. To the sailors, half-starved and riddled with scurvy after months at sea, they must have appeared like manna from heaven and they lost no time in clubbing them to death and roasting them over hastily improvised fires.

  My train of thought was interrupted by a waiter who, with an extravagant flourish, presented me with a blue, oval platter containing a beautifully grilled swordfish resting on a bed of a rich rougaille – an aromatic, spicy tomato and onion based sauce with sautéed garlic and traces of ginger, thyme and chilli. It was as near to perfection as any chef could contrive and as I savoured it, I tried not to be too judgemental on my fellow species who had glutted themselves on the unsuspecting dodos. Yes, it was true I deplored what they did but then how, given the same circumstances, would I have reacted?

  The melancholy tale of extinction however did not end there. In 1691, a small group of French Huguenots fleeing religious persecution in Europe, arrived on the uninhabited island of Rodriguez some 400 km north west of Mauritius. Their leader Francois Leugat, from Burgundy, later wrote a book Voyages et Aventure en Deux Iles Désertés, in which he described at length the charms of his tropical idyll. He and his comrades, he notes regretfully, would have stayed longer had not it been for the complete lack of female company, something which naturally no true-bloodied Frenchman could endure indefinitely. Amongst the island’s exotic flora and fauna were thousands of giant tortoises and turtles. “There are on this island such a multitude of tortoises in groups of two or three thousand,” Leugat wrote, “that you can make more than one hundred strides on their shells without your feet treading the ground.”

  Had it been possible for Leugat to re-visit Rodriguez, no more than a hundred years later, he would have been sorely puzzled. Of the huge colonies of turtles and tortoises which he wrote of hardly any remained and these were to be found existed only in the remotest and most inaccessible parts of the island.

  So, what, you may well ask, had happened. Where did they go? Had there been some virulent epidemic or unrecorded tidal wave which had wiped them out? It was none of these things. Instead it was mankind, in the shape of the Dutch East India Company. In two years, between 1771 and 1773, well over a quarter of a million tortoises were captured and stowed in the ships holds. Despite their privations, the tortoises could survive for several months, providing a regular source of nourishment for the ship’s crew. Additionally, tortoises represented a valuable source of oil and were boiled, often alive, for the oil in their skins. Records of those times show that a staggering five hundred of these magnificent creatures were required to make a single barrel of oil. With numbers like that extermination could only be just around the corner.

  I was jolted out of my reverie by the arrival of the patron. He drew up a chair and leaned back contentedly, accepting a small glass of rum.

  “Santé. Your health.”

  “Regardez. Les jeunes garçons.” He raised h
is bushy eyebrows and pointed towards two young boys wearing green Dodo T-shirts who were playing football on the sand, and added lugubriously,” Sometimes I think I am in the wrong business”

  “I looked at him surprised. His establishment looked prosperous and a shiny new Cherokee jeep was parked in the shade near the entrance.

  “The Dodo. He has become like gold. T-shirts, beach balls, lilos, plastic rings, towels and soft toys…I know people who are making fortunes from them.” He made the universal money gesture, rubbing his fingers and thumb together and added enigmatically. “Dead man’s gold.”

  I looked at him and he smiled conspiratorially.

  “The best. Dead men cannot make claims and the Dodo, he has gone.”

  “Gone, but not forgotten,” I said and, raising our glasses, we drank to absent friends

  A BEAR IN BUCHAREST

  You can judge a man’s true character by the way he treats his fellow animals.

  - Paul McCartney

  In the early 1980’s, for reasons too long to expound on I found myself in Romania en route to Budapest. The Berlin Wall was still standing and Romania was groaning under the repressive regime of President Nicolai Ceausescu. In what was probably the most rigidly Stalinist of all the Soviet bloc states, freedom of speech was ruthlessly suppressed and, as his paranoia deepened, Ceausescu’s secret police, the Securitate, came to be regarded as among the most brutally oppressive in the world. Hardship, anxiety, hunger and fear were etched on peoples’ faces and you could see it in the way that waiters, shop assistants and receptionists would hastily look away, avoiding eye contact. Hope had gone and with it any kind of belief. It was my first and only experience of a totalitarian state and absolute tyranny.