Ian Fleming's Adventure Journalism

“A World Crammed with Treasure”: Past and Present Under the Sea

(Sunday Times , April 26, 1953)

By Ian Fleming

(Last Sunday, in an exclusive despatch to The Sunday Times, Ian Fleming told of a visit to the little island of Grand Congloué, near Marseilles, where Commandant Jacques Cousteau and his team of divers are raising the wreck of a Greek galley that foundered in about 250 B.C. Ian Fleming is now back in London and here comments on some of the questions that have been put to him.)

“I am interested in the history of trade marks…” “We are manufacturers of corks…” “Did all this happen between the First and Second Punic wars?” “What did the wine taste like?”

“What are these lizards you talk about?” “Where can I buy an aqualung?” “I am spending my holiday near Marseilles. Can you…?”

If one is a specialist it must be tantalising to read a report in the newspapers which touches one’s subject , however lightly. “Why didn’t he bring back one of those lizards?” “At least he might know how much saffron goes into bouillabaisse.” “Surely he noticed the name of the people who make those German compressors.”

I warmly sympathise and I have answered all questions as well as my capacities have allowed. I would have to be too many different people at the same time to answer them any better. I now feel very sorry for Cousteau. When I said goodbye to him aboard the Calypso, he and Madame Cousteau were working on their correspondence. They have just reached September, 1952!

As further background to this exciting story (there must be thousands of little Everests being climbed every day that one never hears of) I can only add that this Greek galley must have sailed for Massilia (Marseilles) in about 250 B.C. to sell wine and household pottery for the private profit of a rich Greek merchant adventurer. Perhaps the ship was about as big as a Thames barge, but much higher in the water, and perhaps it had one large sail.

It hugged the Côte d’Azur and sailed only by day, at between two and three knots. At night the crew probably slept on board, and they certainly drank a lot of the wine that was carried in huge jars, or amphorae, on deck. They must have drunk it with straws or pipettes inserted into holes drilled in the shoulder of the jars below the neck. I examined such a hole and it could only have been made by man.

Protective Mud

Then they hit this tiny island and the galley sank in the position you see above [graphic omitted]. There is no current here, so the mud and sand began to silt over the wreck and continued to do so through 2,200 years, protecting the upper cargo, and even more so the lower, which the divers have hardly reached, from erosion and the fingers of the sea. Except where it has been cleared by the suction pump, the mud is still about ten feet deep.

“How was the galley ever found again?” Fishermen from Marseilles kept on bringing up amphorae that had broken loose from the deck cargo, and one day Christianini, a Marseilles salvage diver, went down and found a long grey tumulus in the mud. Commander Cousteau came to hear about it and he and his divers cleared enough mud away to realise that a whole galley lay buried at the maximum depth at which skin divers could work.

Disinterested people, such as the Chamber of Commerce at Marseilles, put up funds, and Cousteau added all his private means, including his profits from his book, The Silent World, and his films and under-water photographs. Le Figaro and the National Geographic Magazine of America also came to his help, and operations started last August.

No one is making any profit out of this venture. Everything salvaged goes straight to the Musée Borely at Marseilles. And if fame were the spur the story would not have been kept almost secret for nine months.

Work will go on all through the summer and anyone who happens to be near Marseilles will find no difficulty in hiring a motor-boat to go to the island, though for safety’s sake they will not be allowed to approach very near. Since sightseers are inevitable I suggested to Cousteau that he should put a collecting box on a buoy near the island with the notice visitors to France know so well: “Pour l’entretien du chateau.”

Lonely, Queer

As for the diving itself, there is little to add to my short account except to say that going over the side into deep water, and deep water only, without rocks or sand to give you bearings and keep you company, is a lonely and queer business. The visibility has that annoying degree of opaqueness you meet motoring at dusk. You can’t quite see and yet you would see still less with your lights on.

I was not quite sure how my body would react to the depth, and, if it did react, whether I would do the right thing or make a fool of myself. Naturally I was exasperated at not being able to walk on the wreck. At a depth or about 50 feet I could just see the diver at work on the bottom.

But this was the most advanced type of under-water experience, and every other grade is available to all of us, men, women and children. On holiday this summer, round the shores of England, it will be worth going to the local carpenter and getting him to putty a pane of glass into the bottom of a two-foot square box, about one foot deep, make the whole thing watertight and cut a couple of hand holes near the top of two sides. Then all that is necessary is to walk into the sea, within, your depth, and put the box on the surface of the sea and look through it.

There, waiting for you, is a new world, crammed with treasure and beauty and excitement. From that first moment to goggles and aqualungs and sunken galleys is just turning the pages of the most exciting book that has been given to us since we learnt to fly—the book of the sea. The first instalment will cost about half-a-crown.


Notes: Fleming had met Jacques Cousteau at a party given by the publisher Hamish Hamilton, and when Cousteau invited him to visit his underwater project, Fleming eagerly agreed, though this meant being out of the UK on Casino Royale’s publication date of April 13, 1953.

John Pearson writes that “Jacques Cousteau, that lean, vital, ex-gunnery officer of the French Navy, with his cool efficiency and panda-ringed eyes, had a very special appeal for Ian Fleming. Cousteau was his sort of hero…And like all Fleming’s real-life heroes Cousteau possessed several of those vital qualities which Fleming lacked but desired. He was a man of action devoted to a cause with a wholeheartedness which Fleming had never really succeeded in bringing to anything. He was an expert and something of a scholar. He was self-sufficient.”

Before Fleming left France, Cousteau presented him with a copy of The Silent World . Referring to their first meeting, Cousteau signed it, “En souvenir d’une soirée à Londres, où il y a beaucoup été question de poissons … et d’illusions menacées.” [“In memory of an evening in London, where there was much talk of fish … and threatening illusions.”]

Fleming wrote he was “aiming to become the journalist of the underwater world,” but this never quite happened, though he certainly wrote extensively about the underwater world in his fiction. Pearson speculates that “a fortnight on the Calypso probably gave him enough experience of the rough end of underwater exploration to last him a lifetime.”

He adds: “Fleming’s experience with the expedition, and particularly the underwater swimming, gave him a chance to add to the description of Bond’s underwater swim to Mr. Big’s ship, the Secatur, in the manuscript of Live and Let Die , which was awaiting his final corrections when he got back to Victoria Square. When he left the Calypso and Marseilles he and Anne drove along the coast road to the big aquarium at Monte Carlo, where he noted some of the final details for his description of the aquarium in the same novel, along with the names of the rare fish which Mr. Big’s organization used as a front for their gold smuggling.”

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Treasure Hunt at Creake Abbey (Sunday Times, July 26, 1953)

By Ian Fleming

The needle on the micro-ammeter was steady on zero. There were some rain-clouds in the sky, and through the fringes of them the July sun blazed down with extra heat. From somewhere came the drowsy swish of a scythe. Under the eaves of the neighbouring house the martins twittered softly round a broken nest. Twenty feet away, at the end of the black snake of cable, Corporal Hogg, R.E. slowly swung his locator in a wide arc over the disused herb-garden beneath which, four feet down, lay the tiled floor, untrodden for 400 years, of the Chapter House of the ancient Abbey of Creake.

Suddenly there was a flicker on the control-instrument which I was operating. Then a sharp dip, which went on through forty to sixty, then to hundred, the end of the scale. The Corporal would be seeing the same figures on the dial in front of him, on the frame of his locator. I turned the sensitivity-switch down to nine, then to eight, then to seven. Still the needle clung to the end of the scale.

“Six. Corporal.” I called. “Sixty on six.” The Corporal inched the long nose of his locator through a clump of rosemary. The needle swung back towards zero. He moved the locator back and at once the needle returned to sixty. He stopped. “ Here,” he said.


“There comes a time in every rightly constructed boy’s life when he has a raging desire to go somewhere and dig for hidden treasure,” wrote Mark Twain in the “Adventures of Tom Sawyer.” In me that particular boy has never died.

Ever since, on May 3 last, The Sunday Times offered to investigate likely tales of buried treasure, I had been examining the letters that came in to the Editor. I had had helpful talks with the Royal School of Mines on methods of detecting different metals under the ground; Messrs. Siebe Gorman had advised on problems of underwater search and hazards of foul air (in wells, for instance); and the Special Branch of Scotland Yard had told me where people usually hide things.

But it was the Sappers whose perennially adventurous spirit was immediately stirred. Certainly they would help. They would be glad to test out some of their latest mine-detecting equipment on unknown metals in enclosed areas. So long as no cost fell on the public funds, and in exchange for a detailed report on the technical results, they would produce two expert men, with equipment, for a maximum of three days. “UBIQUE” is more than a motto for the Sappers.

The sites that had been suggested were narrowed down to three. Because of its spectral name we finally chose Creake Abbey, the ruins of a twelfth-century Augustine foundation a few fields away from Nelson’s birthplace at Burnham Thorpe, and adjoining the great Norfolk estate of Holkham. Rumours of buried treasure have hung round these ruins ever since the sixteenth century, but no attempt has been made to find the treasure since a rascally unfrocked priest named William Stapleton tried to raise the spirits of the monks and make them divulge their secret in 1528, about twenty years after the Abbey had been dissolved. It is recorded that after six weeks he “returned to London disconsolate.”


The present owners, Rear-Admiral H. G. Thursfield and Mrs. Thursfield, who live in the beautiful house that merges into the ruins, were extremely sceptical but extremely kind, and in due course we assembled on the lawn that now covers the Cloister Garth of the Abbey—myself , my assistant, Mr. Peter Kirk, who provided all the documentation on the site, Captain Hough, R.E., who had come to see that his men were in good hands, Corporal Hogg of the bomb-disposal force of the Royal Engineers, and Emil Schneider, one of the German ex-P .O.W.s who are volunteers in the same dangerous trade. (He at once became “Emil the Detector.”)

During the whole of that day we worked with the locator (ERA No. 1, Mark 2), and with the more familiar Polish mine-detector Mark IV A, the machine that looks rather like a vacuum-cleaner and screams in your ear when it detects any metal down to a depth of about two-feet-six. The ERA locates only ferrous metals, but is effective to a depth of about six feet. Thus the detector is good for walls and floors and the locator for tumuli and for deep earth over original foundations.

Our hopes were high but inchoate. We didn’t know if there was a treasure. We didn’t know what metal we were looking for and we didn’t know whereabouts in the Abbey ruins and their surroundings to look for it. We covered the supposed site of the Chapter House, of the Abbot’s Lodgings, of the Cloisters and the Cloister Garth, and we quartered the grass-grown floor of the Abbey itself. Every time we got a good fix we marked the spot with a bit of paper. And then we started to dig.


In two days we dug up about thirty nails of different sizes, one frying-pan, one mole trap, one oil-drum and about a hundredweight of miscellaneous scrap-iron—all judged to be artifacts of the early twentieth or, at best, late nineteenth century. The sweat poured from our brows and our muscles ached. Our jokes about twelfth-century sardine-tins ceased at an early stage and when we even failed to find the Admiral’s lost signet-ring in the chicken run (I mean Abbot’s Lodgings) we decided to call it a day.

But somehow we weren’t as cast down as might be imagined. We comforted ourselves with the knowledge that this had been in the nature of a “dummy run.” The machines had exceeded our expectations; we had documented ourselves most carefully on the site and the history of the period, we had conscientiously investigated every possible clue. We really had hunted the treasure.

And as for the. treasure itself, we felt inclined to agree with Mark Twain that “It’s hid in mighty particular places, Huck—sometimes on islands, sometimes in rotten chests under the end of a limb of an old dead tree, just where the shadow falls at midnight; but mostly under the floor in ha’nted houses.” But certainly not, we decided, or probably not, or at any rate possibly not, at the Abbey of Creake in Norfolk.

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Wonderful! Thanks for continuing with this thread.

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You’re very welcome! The best is yet to come.

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5 Explorers Near Goal 1,900 ft. Under Pyrenees ( Sunday Times , August 16, 1953)

From Ian Fleming

Pierre St. Martin, Saturday.

The Pyrenees are riddled with caves. So are all those counties of France, Correze, Vienne, Dordogne and the rest, that lie between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. Caves that first animals lived in, then men. Caves, like those of Lascaux, that were the private cathedrals or art galleries of man 20,000 years ago. In them, deep underground by the light of bonfires, they painted like Picasso, and then repainted and engraved in the rocks, still through the centuries like Picasso.

And other caves, like some that Norbert Casteret has found, where the animals went to die. Prehistoric cemeteries for bisons and stags and bears. And still other caves, in which today the shepherds of the Pyrenees preserve their meat through the summer. Caves used by bandits and by British soldiers and airmen escaping during the war. Caves like the great Cave of Pierre Saint Martin, which was first explored last year and which contains nothing of interest but millions of gallons of water, running at a speed of a metre a second, that may soon give electricity to an area of France as big as Kent.

Desolate Site

I am writing this at the opening of this gigantic cave, 6,000 feet up among the lower peaks of the Pyrenees. The shaft goes down into the side of a mile-wide stony amphitheatre that might have been blasted by an atom bomb. It is a desolate place, grey and harsh, with only a few stunted pines to give shade. At the side of the shaft there is the winch covered by a tent and the telephone line to men who are down there now. Two members of the expedition are on watch.

For hours and even days nothing happens, and then the winch starts to whine and more than one hour later a man in a miner’s white steel helmet is helped out of the top of the shaft, taken out of his harness and’ stripped of his dripping overalls.

The people who explore caves are called speleologists, but, in fact, they are adventurers pure and simple. They like going deep into the earth in the same way that Hillary likes climbing a mountain, or Thor Heyerdahl likes drifting across the Pacific on a raft.

This cave at Pierre Saint Martin was discovered in 1950 by a speleologist named Lepineux who saw a jackdaw fly out of a lagged hole in the rock. He knew that Jackdaws nest only where there is a long drop below. Lepineux climbed down the hole and enlarged it. He threw a stone down it and could not hear the fall.

Requiem for Loubens

In 1952 a team consisting of the greatest speleologists in France made the first exploration . One of them. Marcel Loubens, was killed when his harness broke on the great vertical shaft 1,000 feet deep, down which he was being lowered on a quarter-inch steel cable. This morning I attended a Requiem Mass held at the opening of the cave on the anniversary of his death.

Before Loubens was killed the team had mapped the series of caverns that are illustrated above. This year most of the same team is present. If there is a leader it is Norbert Casteret, who, I suppose, is the greatest speleologist in the world. He was born and still lives about 20 miles from here, and has spent his whole life exploring the caves of the Pyrenees.

He has discovered the oldest statuary in the world. He has been down the deepest abyss in France and has also altered the map of south-west Europe by discovering the true source of the River Garonne. His wonderful book Ten Years Under the Earth was “crowned” by the French Academy.

This year the French Government has taken a hand. The French Army carried out a parachute drop last week of all the provisions for the expedition. They dropped ten tons of heavy equipment against the side of the mountain. Nothing was damaged and everything is working perfectly.

Reservoir of Power

So far the team has penetrated nearly two miles along the slowly descending tunnel towards the Kakouetta Gorge. There are about 1 1/2 miles still to go before the hydro-electric engineers attached to the expedition learn where they can sink a shaft to bring the huge reservoir of hydro-electric power down into the valley with a sufficient drop behind it. Twelve hundred feet below me as I write, in a temperature of three degrees centigrade, there is the base camp, with tents, heating devices and special food.

Down there at this moment are five men, including Lepineux, who first discovered the cave and has now been down for three days. They have just broken contact with the telephone and will not be heard again for 24 hours, during which time they may have learned the final course of the underground river, and, incidentally, may have broken the world record for the lowest descent into a natural cave. The record now stands at 2,000 feet. They are estimated to be 100 feet above this at the moment.

And I sit here, watching the black mouth of the cave—and vaguely mistrusting it and the validity of the whole enterprise—and the thin life-line that winds on the winch; and one hopes that the living men will come out safely and leave their dead comrade, Marcel Loubens, where he is and would wish to be with the epitaph of Charles Cotton, the friend of Izaak Walton, who wrote:

O my beloved caves!
From dogstar’s heat
And all anxieties my safe retreat!
What safety, privacy, what true delight
In the artificial night
Your gloomy entrails make,
Have I taken, do I take.

As I came down the mountain this evening a speleologist of a rival group was carried past me on a stretcher. His skull was broken. I hope I shall be able to summon more enthusiasm for this sport before the expedition closes down next Thursday.

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Caves of Adventure: Explorers Find a New Wonder of the World

(Sunday Times, August 23, 1953)

Greatest Cavern with Waterfall and Underground River

From Ian Fleming

PIERRE SAINT MARTIN (Pyrenees).

The 1953 expedition into the great caves of Pierre Saint Martin is over, without accident and with results which, in the realm of speleology, are sensational.

Now that everyone is back in the valley and the mule trains are coming down the mountain with the heavy gear, there is not an individual connected with the expedition who is not profoundly relieved. Since I reported last week there has been a series of alarms.

A majestic thunderstorm hit the central Pyrenees, washed away a small village and killed six of the inhabitants. Lightning is attracted by caves, particularly a cave into which two thousand feet of cable descends. But it never struck.

Communications broke down several times. A member of one of the relief teams (not a Frenchman) had a mild attack of claustrophobia, and had to be brought to the surface. Finally, there was difficulty in bringing out the last man. The unweighted cable would not go down the shaft. Three men had to be lashed at intervals down the face of the shaft to help the end of the cable round the corners.

Deepest Descent

But now all is well, and here are the results given to me in an exclusive interview by the leaders of the expedition: Robert Levi, the organiser, Norbert Casteret, the chief explorer, and Lepineux, the great speleologist who discovered the cave.

The record for the deepest descent into a natural cave has been handsomely beaten at 728 metres. It was previously held by the Italian Capabranca with a 632 metres’ descent into the Preta cave—the 658 metres’ descent of Chevalier into the Chartreuse massif is held not to qualify, since several intermediate lateral exits were available (of course there is the old Everest trouble about which member of the expedition actually broke the record. “It was the team,” is the official and acceptable verdict).

Four more huge chambers were discovered, the last of them far greater even than the Marcel Loubens Cave. This colossal cave is judged by Casteret to be the greatest enclosed cavern so far discovered in the world. It is certainly the deepest. It has been christened the Verna Cave, after the Verna group of speleologists from Lyons (wrongly described as scouts) who have played a great part in the whole saga.

The Great Cave

In Casteret’s opinion, which will be widely respected, the Verna Cave is undoubtedly one of the wonders of the world. It is domed. The walls and floor are straight and smooth, but the floor is encumbered here and there by uneasily balanced towers of stone blocks, each as big as a cottage, which soar up into the darkness. Through the floor runs the great black river, swift and deep and silent. The air is pure and damp, with a temperature of four degrees centigrade. The water temperature is three degrees centigrade and it runs at half a cubic metre per second.

One or two tiny coleoptera, described to me as “aphenops” were found, and a centipede, dead white and almost transparent. These were the only living organisms found in the course of the expedition.

Details, distances and dimensions are not yet available. Last year, apparently, many errors were made in the estimates, and these will have to be corrected before the official figures of the exploration to date can be made known, but it seems that about a mile and a half of fresh ground was covered, as the result of which much of the underground picture as portrayed in last Sunday’s map is changed. This map was adapted from the sketch—now out of date—in Tazieff’s Caves of Adventure (published by Hamish Hamilton).

In particular what was thought to be a long tunnel, extending in an easy slope from the Loubens Cave, turns out to be the new series of four chambers mentioned above, so that the whole underground picture looks like a string of seven different sized sausages joined together by varying lengths of tunnel which is about four times the circumference of the London Tube.

All the chambers and tunnels are encumbered by fallen rock that rendered progress most difficult and exhausting: “The whole affair was very dangerous,” Casteret told me. Before the last great cave there was a beautiful waterfall with a drop of 20 metres which had to be descended, and then the river ran on over pebbles and stones until, at the end of the last cave, it disappeared through broken rock in. the floor.

A Failure?

Thus hydro-electrically the expedition seems to have been a failure, and although this is denied by the explorers, I believe it to be the opinion of the experts. But a local group of speleologists from Pau are dynamiting a blow-hole further down the mountain, known as the “Trou du Vent,” which, it is thought, may lead towards a resurgence of the underground river. The wind comes howling up from the earth out of this hole, and there is a distant roar of great waters.

For the rest, the equipment worked perfectly and the health of the explorers was excellent, thanks to the heating of the tents at night by a new system described to me as “petrol-catalysis” which allows the men to breathe dry air. Sleep, appetite and digestion were normal. No stimulant drugs were used, and the food consumed was unusual only in its high sugar and fat content. The winch worked perfectly.

A full length 35 millimetre film with some sound was made by Hertot, the photographer of Commandant Cousteau, using acetylene torches and magnesium flares for lighting. The painful arguments about the disposal of the body of Marcel Loubens ended with the agreement of the family to allow his body to remain inside the mountain. It may not be buried or cremated. It must remain under its pile of boulders, perfectly preserved in this frigid air, surmounted by the disintegrating cross of phosphorescent paper that had long since ceased to shine and the epitaph cut into the rock face. “Ici Marcel Loubens a vecu les derniers jours de sa vie courageuse”—a perpetual warning to the explorers who go down the jagged shaft that rock is stronger than man.

Horror of the Depths

It was the oppression of this knowledge, the awareness of the puny bodies enclosed in the mammoth viscera of this mountain that awoke in most of us, as we sat comfortably above on the surface of the world in the bright light among the Alpine flowers, a deep loathing for this great cave. And it is only now, when all have been spared and when so much has been achieved, that we can grudgingly admit that this most hazardous expedition was justified. But while these men were down in the cruel bellv of the mountain—some of them not more than holiday pot-holers—there were desperate misgivings which spread throughout France, and I for one can testify that I had not witnessed such a nightmarish piece of human endeavour since the string-and-stickfast days at the beginning of the war.

But now it is over and these valiant and foolhardy men have been preserved. Casteret tells me he will certainly coma back next year, and so, I expect, will many of the others. Meanwhile the rocks will grind and shift in the mountains, and the winter snows will swell the great river underground. And in the awesome Verna Cavern there will be no one to care, least of all the questing sightless centipedes, that this gloomy antechamber of Hell has just been included among the natural wonders of the world.

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What a fabulous adventure - thanks for sharing this particular gem!

I didn’t know that Fleming has been so interested in spelunking. In fact I often wondered how Fleming might have used the theme after Peter O’Donnell used it in The Silver Mistress and Trevanian in Shibumi. A shame he didn’t get around to send Bond down that route.

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The Sixth Continent Under the Sea (Sunday Times, June 26, 1955)

From Ian Fleming

CANNES.

The first Underwater Archaeology Conference has now completed its work and the sponsors, the Club Alpin Sousmarin, are to be congratulated on its success. If Cannes—or better still Monaco, in view of the royal family’s traditional interest in submarine matters—is far-sighted, it will provide the funds and organisation to make the conference a regular international event, and to include on its agenda underwater exploring in all its branches.

Although this first conference has barely touched upon the immediate concerns of underwater archaeologists, when each speaker drew aside the curtain from his particular porthole, one looked through upon the problems of a new world.

Even International Law—the rights of the discoverer, of the salver and of the country within whose riparian limit the discovery is made. In France the whole matter is covered by a Royal Decree of 1680 and by the antiquated Laws of Colbert. These allot to the finder 10 per cent. of the value if the discovery, generally a wreck, is ashore, 33 1/3 per cent. if it is found at a depth of 15 ft., and 50 per cent. if it is found at a depth of 45 ft. There they end. There is nothing to cover the many recent discoveries at depths of over 100 ft., nor the salvage, at great cost and risk to life, of archaeological treasures which are, by another set of French laws, automatically the property of the Ministry of Fine Arts.

And who is to pay for the work —far more costly in man-hours (good visibility and calm weather are not essential to a dig at Stonehenge) and in equipment than terrestrial archaeology? Commander Cousteau’s archaeological work has been financed only to the tune of 1/30th by the French Government and he has been luckier than most.

New means of salvage were discussed—the Cousteau one-man bathyscape now being tested to destruction at depths up to 3,000 feet; fast methods of search, by holding on to a torpedo or being towed over the bottom of the sea on a skid; underwater television for the direction of excavations by archaeologists on the surface; the use of compressed air and suction pumps for clearing wrecks and sites, and stereoscopic underwater photography for measurement and reconnaissance.

Rebikoff, the pioneer of underwater colour photography, showed some fine films, including an enchanting record of a battle between a baby octopus and an adult sea anemone (and here I might mention, though it has nothing to do with the conference, that Cousteau arrives back this week from the Indian Ocean with twenty miles of underwater film for the moving picture of The Silent World for the Rank Organisation).

The uninitiated would imagine that normal salvage methods should be good enough for the archaeologists, but the experiences of many speakers made it clear that the traditional diver in a diving suit is far too clumsy and slow for this kind of light-fingered work, and I heard dire stories of the operations of the famous Italian salvage ship Artiglio on the sunken trading vessel at Al Benga. It did indeed raise 100 amphorae in a day by methods appropriate to the salvage of a sunken coal barge, but, through no fault of its owner or crew, the damage done was appalling.

The representative of the Ligurian Study Group who reported on this wreck had a sad tale to tell. The Italian Government, already active on many dry land projects, has no money to spare for its territorial waters, and the young Italian divers are interested only in shooting fish and finding treasure. Their parents and school-teachers brought them up on the contents of their local museums and they have no enthusiasm for risking their lives for mere “pottery and statues.”

The English representative of the British Sub-Aqua Club, Mr. Richard Garnett, pricked up his ears at this and gave an enthusiastic account of last year’s Sunday Times expedition to Chios and described the plans for two English expeditions to the Mediterranean this year, one to Crete and another to Cyprus. It seems likely that members of British underwater clubs with proper training and a smattering of languages will find no difficulty in loaning their services to Mediterranean clubs once things get better organised.

Mr. Garnett also mentioned a fascinating discovery at Syracuse, where the British Vice-Consul thinks he has found the remains of an Athenian battle fleet, reported sunk there by Thucycides. This site is now being examined by the Italians and the first reports are that the ships are in fact trading vessels. But the discovery is an exciting one, with much talk of amphorae being used as firebombs and the like.

Mr. Garnett also gave details of the Pudding Pan wreck-site in the Thames Estuary off Whitstable, whence, despite thick water and currents, Roman pottery has been recovered by the British Underwater Reconnaissance Group and shown, I believe, on television.

The 2,000-year-old sunken trading vessel off Marseilles and the salvage methods used on it were fully discussed and Professor Benoit of Marseilles threw out the notion that in fact two ships were sunk, one on top of the other. This he deduces from the types of pottery being recovered, of which he said his museum already contains 6,000 different examples of 65 types. He mentioned his suspicion that Sestius, the Greek merchant who shipped this and other cargoes of wine to Marseilles (by A.D. 200 the Gauls had grown their own vine-yards and killed the Greek trade) threw in free drinking goblets with each 30-litre amphora, for many of the goblets are marked with the same Greek advertising slogan (cribbed no doubt from Guinness!): “Drink Wine. It’s Good for You.”

From the trademark of Cassius, a metal-merchant of around A.D. 100, on lead anchors and on the lead counter-weights attached near the handles of oars to lighten the blades on fast galleys (mentioned by Pliny and Plutarch), whose products are also found in the Rhineland, and from the copper and tin used in the construction of sunken ships, a clear picture of the great Roman, Greek and Phoenician metal routes is being built up.

The representative from Tunisia described progress on the Mahdia wreck, on which Greek sponge-divers worked from 1907-1912 and recovered amongst other treasures, the Mahdia “Hermes.” This wreck, which lies in perpetual swell five kilometres from the coast, has, in the last twelve months, been cleared of sixty tons of marble columns, and the programme for 1955 includes deep excavation into the after-part of the 30-foot vessel, in which there has already been identified part of the arm of a gigantic marble statue. Here also might be, said the delegate, the famous “Golden Virgin” which tradition has firmly planted among the cargo.

This, with the sunken trading ship off the Ile de Levant, in the Hyères Group, which is being excavated by Commander Tailliez, and which may prove even more important than Cousteau’s wreck, completes the list of some of the underwater archaeological projects now going forward in the Mediterranean. They are perhaps enough to suggest how useful and fascinating this first conference was.

And yet they are only a corner of the problems which future generations will have to solve as they push forward their exploration of the Sixth Continent. There are greater treasures under the sea and in the sea than wrecks and sunken gold and buried cities, and they include more food and power and mineral wealth than can ever be yielded by our scratchings on the narrow land surfaces of the world. These resources will in due course be explored and harnessed, but perhaps this is the moment to salute the pioneers—all Frenchmen —Cousteau, Dumas, Diolé, Tailliez, Huot and Bombard, who, in just twenty years, have encouraged the Common Underwater Man to lose his shyness for the new element he is about to conquer.

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Adventure in the Sun

I. The Remora’s Kiss (Sunday Times, April 1, 1956)

Ten years ago Ian Fleming built a small house in Jamaica and every year he spends his holiday there. This is the first of a series of articles describing some of the extraordinary things that befell him during his latest visit.

Before the morning breeze came to ruffle the mirror of the bay, I walked through the palm trees and down the slope of pale gold sand and slipped into the sea. The water was even warmer than the nine o’clock air and I swam slowly out towards the dark shadow that marked the deep shoal where there might be something more to see than the sting-rays or flounders that inhabit the open plains of sand.

I was naked except for a Pirelli mask and I was equipped with a simple underwater spear-gun. After ten years of underwater fishing round Jamaica I have long since given up shooting fish except for the pot, but this was an expedition to a remote beach and we would be glad of a langouste or a jack or snapper for dinner. And this was unknown terrain, with the protecting reef at least five miles out, and while I pretend not to mind barracuda or shark, even the underwater equivalent of a catapult allows one to forget about them.

Secret Sands

The bay in which I was swimming is the most beautiful I have seen in the world. It is the classic back-drop of Stevenson and Stacpoole—a five-mile crescent of unbroken, soft, white-gold sand, fringed for all its dazzling length with leaning palm trees in whose shade an occasional canoe is drawn up between a thatched hut and a pile of discarded conch shells as tall as the hut itself. The great sweep of water is milky blue during the day and in the evening, when the sun—with its famous green flash—sets in your face, it runs through all the blues and greens in the spectrum.

The huge anchorage, sheltered even from the trades, was used by the pirates, and Nelson and Rodney used to anchor here and send parties ashore to hunt wild hogs. Walt Disney filmed part of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea here, paying the “cannibals” 25s. a day.

It is still the occasional haunt of the manatee or sea cow, those large and friendly mammals which are becoming rapidly extinct. They are supposed to be the origin of the mermaid. The female has two rudimentary breasts and occasionally rises out of the waves holding her young in her flippers, perhaps to teach it to breathe. (There are at present two in the London Zoo and the contemporary print entitled “Real and Ideal” reproduced here [omitted] was inspired by the first manatee shown in England in 1888.) One was caught in a fisherman’s nets in the bay in February and the inhabitants feasted on him for days, for as one of them said to me: “Them have all-meat—beef an’ mutton an’ pork.”

Only the most adventurous tourists know of this great secret beach and perhaps no more than five per cent. of Jamaicans have ever paid it a visit. For the time being it is one of the most beautiful hidden places in the world. One dreadful day this remote corner of Jamaica will be as famous a sunshine holiday resort as any in the world.

For the last ten years I have held a key to this paradise and the only white man I have ever met there is a bearded character straight out of Somerset Maugham called Dr. Drew.

Dr. Drew threw up his practice in Oxford forty years ago and somehow came half across the world to this secret place. He built himself a modest stone-and-plaster dwelling and beside it (believe me!) a fives court, which now has wild orchids growing out of the cracks in the cement. He is ninety-three and healthy and happy and if someone wants the bare bones of a mystery, there it is.

The Remora

On this particular morning, not many days ago, the great crescent bay was empty except for one sailing dinghy belonging to an employee of a sugar company. The dinghy, moored in about three fathoms, cast its wavering shadow on the edge of the long shoal to which I was swimming.

The fishing canoes had left at first light and were now specks on the horizon round the distant reef and behind me along the five miles of sand there were only a few children playing and an occasional lonely figure taking the morning walk to the little rum-shop and store that, with Dr. Drew’s bungalow, is the centre of the bay’s life. Below me the endless plain of marcelled sand was quite empty and it was a relief to the eyes to come to the first half-buried rocks and grassy seaweed of the acre or so of shoal.

I swam slowly over the shoal looking down for signs of life or even for those symmetrical patterns in the sand that betray the camouflage of Atlantic flounders or buried conch and helmet shells. There was nothing.

I “felt” a barracuda (one really does “feel” them) and looked behind me to see a big one, perhaps ten pounds, lying motionless near the surface, watching me out of one golden tiger’s eye. Its stripes were not showing (there is a theory that when the stripes are vivid the barracuda is hungry or angry) and I swam towards it. As barracudas do, it kept ahead of me exactly to its ten yards, but, as I finally put my gun off safe and took aim, it opened its mouth with what might have been a yawn and swanned off into the grey mist.

The barracuda had led me towards the moored dinghy, and I was suddenly surprised to see, swimming fast towards me in the great, empty hall of the sea, a small grey and black fish with a diamond-shaped head. The fish swam very busily, with a motion rather like an eel or a snake, and almost before I could take it in it had come up and bumped softly into me. This was as extraordinary as if, walking across a field, a flying pigeon had bumped into one.

Even more surprising, the fish then proceeded to flutter round me, prodding me with its blunt nose and easily dodging my free arm as I tried to shoo it away. Under my arms, between my legs, down my back, I felt the slithery exploration while I trod water and tried to parry these familiarities. And then suddenly the fish clamped itself firmly to my stomach and I knew with a touch of queasy dismay that this was a remora, the parasite fish of the sharks.

Off my own reef in Jamaica I once saw a shark quite close with two remoras attached to it, and I had watched the host and its parasite guests for some time. The remora has a suction area on the back of its flattish head and it attaches itself to the shark’s stomach rather like a small fighter plane beneath a bomber. It travels with the shark and feeds on the scraps that fall from the shark’s jaws, as do the little yellow and black pilot fish that are the companions of many big fish.

Parasite Guest

The remoras I had seen off my reef did not stay in the same position on the shark, but again and again detached themselves and executed a graceful game of tag with each other round the huge fish, flattening themselves against him at different points, then flitting to another spot as he cruised majestically through my reef. It had been a beautiful and fascinating sight, but there was something rather different in the idea of this eighteen-inch-long, hard, snaky fish clamping itself to my own pale, defenceless, and, it seemed to me at that moment, diaphanous skin. I banged hard on the remora’s head and it let go, and after a few more attempts to get a hold, snaked away.

I felt relieved but rather churlish, and I had the esprit de l’escalier reflection that it would have been extremely smart to carry for ever the marks of a remora’s sucker on one’s stomach—so much more chic than the claw scars of a tiger or even the fang-marks of a fer-de-lance (which I was to see a few days later on the leg of a distinguished American naturalist). So, hoping that my remora had not gone home to a shark, I swam hurriedly after him and soon there was a long shadow on the sand and the chains of the two anchors and I came up with the sailing dinghy and all was clear to me.

Mistaken for a Shark

There, under the hull of the boat, were two remoras, flitting from spot to spot as I had once seen them do on the shark, waiting in vain for scraps to fall out of the wooden jaws of the boat. I have no idea how long they had been attached to this dummy host, but there is no doubt that, when one of them caught a distant glimpse or sound of me, he hurried off to inspect the alternative “shark.”

I am sorry now that I shot one and took it ashore to examine. They are harmless and extraordinary fish and afterwards it was easy to sentimentalise the encounter so that the remora became some charming bird that had flown into one’s pocket to live with one and eat the crumbs from one’s meals. But later the fishermen told me that I was lucky he had not taken a firm hold. The sucker is extremely powerful (as mysterious a mechanism as the charge in an electric eel that is strong enough to kill a horse, and as the phosphorus lures carried by some fish), draws blood immediately, and can be detached only by pressing the remora hard behind the eyes.

Even so, now that I am back in London and the sunburn is fading, how dashing to be able to display, in suitable company, that dreadful stigma of the tropic seas—the bloody kiss of the remora on one’s stomach!

Next week Ian Fleming will tell of his quest for the elusive Solitaire bird on the Blue Mountain in Jamaica.

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Vivid and exciting prose! I love reading about Fleming’s Caribbean adventures. Thanks for posting!

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Adventure in the Sun

II—Blue Mountain Solitaire ( Sunday Times , April 8, 1956)

Ten years ago Ian Fleming built a small house in Jamaica and every year he spends his holiday there. This is the second of a series of articles describing some of the out-of-the-way things that befell him during his latest visit. His first article last Sunday described an encounter with the Remora fish, which mistook him for its usual host, the shark.

“I received,” wrote Philip Gosse, the great naturalist, in 1847, “the following note from Mr. Hill in reference to an intention I then had of ascending that magnificent ridge called the Blue Mountains, whose summits are 8,000 feet high.

There are two living attractions in these mountains, a crested snake [since killed off by the mongoose—I.F.] and a sweetly mysterious singing bird called the Solitaire. This bird is a thrush and it is worth a journey to hear his wonderful song…As soon as the first indications of daylight are perceived, even while the mists hang over the forests, these minstrels are heard pouring forth their wild notes in a concert of many voices, sweet and lengthened like those of the harmonica or musical glasses. It is the sweetest, the most solemn, and most unearthly of all the woodland singing I have ever heard.”

Philip Gosse, who taught our great-grandparents all about birds and fish, was immortalised by his son Sir Edmund Gosse in that most bitter of all family memoirs Father and Son. Although his Birds of Jamaica is one of my handbooks, I abhor this bearded, mealy-mouthed old Victorian pedagogue. The sight of a beautiful bird sends him at once to the Scriptures and thence to reflections on “God’s handiwork” which positively drip with hypocrisy. Having thus squared himself with the Almighty and with the Victorian reader, he forthwith despatches his Negro killer, Sam, after the bird with a gun. God’s handiwork is promptly slaughtered and Gosse then treats us to a list of what he found in its entrails.

So it is in his chapter on the Solitaire from which I have quoted. Inevitably, “I sent in Sam with a gun, with orders to follow the sound. He crept silently to a spot whence he heard it proceed and saw two birds of this species which neither he nor I had seen before, chasing each other among the boughs. He shot one of them.” Later the other bird, no doubt the mate, flew out after Sam. “He fired at this also and it fell; but emitted the remarkable note at the moment of falling.”

The intestine, notes Gosse, was seven inches long.

Secret Bird

I am neither an ornithologist, nor any other kind of naturalist but ever since I came to Jamaica I have been intrigued by the Solitaire, this rare and secretive bird with the unearthly song and beautiful name (which I stole for the heroine of one of my books), and I have always wanted to climb the Blue Mountain, the highest peak in the whole Caribbean and inhabited by the aristocracy of Jamaican “duppies,” or ghosts. But it seems a wearisome business to leave the soft enchantments of the tropic reef and the sun-baked sand of my pirates’ cove on the north shore, motor over to Kingston and then make the long, hard climb trip into the wintry forests of the great mountain.

But, in the first week of last month, four friends dragged me out of the luxe, calme et volupté of my beachcombing existence and, at three o’clock on a blazing afternoon, we had abandoned our car at the little hamlet of Mavis Bank in the foothills of the Blue Mountains and had taken to the mules.

Coffee Lands

It is a long trek to the little guest-house of Torregarda, 6,000 feet up at the base of the final peak, but the beauty of the ride is fabulous. This part of Jamaica is completely remote and as un-spoilt as the whole island must have been in the days of Tom Cringle’s Log and Lady Nugent’s Diary. It is enchanting to be greeted with “Good evening, young master” by the occasional Negress carrying her sack of coffee berries down the mountain to market (it is from this wild area that comes Blue Mountain coffee, considered by many to be the finest in the world, and every “wattle-an’- daub” hut has its acre of the pretty bush) and to be met everywhere along the path with those warm, wide smiles that “progress” is so rapidly wiping off the face of modern Jamaica.

To the right, the Yallers Valley stretches away in great soft undulating sweeps towards the distant haze of the sea, and this March the mangoes everywhere were flaming in purple and gold, their early flowering meaning in Jamaica a rainy year. All the way there was the chirrup of the Vervaine humming-bird, the second smallest in the world, and the only one, I believe, with a true song, and as the tropical vegetation gave way to almost Swiss meadows strewn with small mountain flowers there was a steady, continuous drone of bees.

We reached Torregarda at five, to be greeted by the unusual sight of hydrangeas and azaleas. Torregarda is a sensationally situated chalet in a setting of incomparable beauty and peace. The bedrooms are extremely comfortable, but the food is of the boiled mutton and lemon curd variety and water shortage reduces the viability of the bathroom and lavatory. Poets or lovers would give it five stars.

Grisly Hours

We went to bed early and were awakened at the grisly hour of 2 a.m., drank some coffee, climbed on to our mules in pitch darkness and started off again in single file behind a man with a lantern. To begin with this was all very romantic and beautiful—the wavering light of the lantern on ahead, the occasional clink of hooves on rock, and the vast concourse of stars above our heads—but soon the path grew narrower and more precipitous, it became colder, and a chill mist came down and hid everything but the rump of the mule in front and the occasional branch that whipped at one out of the darkness. And, like all mountain climbs, mile stretched upon mile and the summit walked slowly away from us as we advanced.

It began to rain, and then to pour, and all the gloomy prognostications of our sea-level friends were suddenly true. We were fools, they had said—the precipices, the discomfort, the rain, the cold, the aching behinds, “and even when you get to the top you’ll see nothing because it’s always in the clouds.” We had pooh-poohed these counsels. This was the lily-livered talk of thin-blooded plantocrats without an ounce of romance or adventure in their souls, who only knew the stinking Turkish bath of Kingston. But now, thinking of them lying comfortably sleeping under their single sheets down on the coast, or perhaps sitting sipping their last drink in the delicious (as it then seemed) tropic lug of a night-club, we had second thoughts.

At last, after a three-hour climb, there was a small stone hut in the fog and driving rain, and we got down bow-legged off our mules and staggered inside and started a fire whose smoke soon drove us out again into the bitter cold.

Coffee with whisky and a mess of bacon and fried bread did nothing to revive our spirits and when, at six o’clock, the mist paled and we knew it was dawn, we set off down the valley rather than catch pneumonia waiting for the fabulous view that we had promised ourselves—that view that, on May 3, 1494, had included the flagship of Columbus and his straggling fleet of caravels.

Solitude

My companions disappeared into the mist with a barrage of oaths and bitter jokes. At least, I thought, as I started down after them on foot, I will save something from the wreck by seeing, or at least hearing, the Solitaire.

With the exercise, my spirits revived, and soon the rain stopped and the light improved sufficiently for me to take an interest in my ghostly surroundings. It was deadly quiet except for the water dripping from the Spanish moss which everywhere festooned the skeleton soapwoods, and the thick damp mist deadened the footfall.

At first it was like walking through the landscape of a Gothic fairy tale, and then there were banks of beautiful and exotic tree-ferns which transferred one into the pages of W. H. Hudson, somewhere deep in an Amazonian jungle. The mountainside along which the narrow path ran, with a smoking precipice on the left, was solid with orchids and parasite plants, alas not yet blooming, and with the tortured leaves of wild pineapples. And there were occasional bramble roses and wild strawberries and blackberries which were bitter to the taste. It seemed extraordinary to find this dank and exotic profusion only a few hours away from the mangrove swamps and the great, dry, sugar-cane, banana and coconut lands in the plains and on the coast. I regretted that my ignorance of botany would not allow me an orgy of Latin name-dropping when I got back to sea level, which at that moment seemed a thousand miles away.

The silence was complete and only occasionally broken by the chirrup of a tree-frog that didn’t know it was day, and I passed the time trying to invent a limerick beginning with the line “A sapient bird is the Solitaire,” but had got no further when I suddenly came through the clouds and out into the sunshine and saw the great panorama of a quarter of Jamaica below me and, across the mountains, the distant arm of Port Royal reaching into the sea beyond Kingston Harbour.

After a rest I moved on and came into a place of great beauty—a long glade over which the moss-hung trees joined to form a glistering tunnel through which the sun penetrated in solid bars of misty gold. The path ran between moss borders of brilliant dew-sparkling green, and on either side there was a dense mysterious tangle of tall tree-ferns and ghostly grey tree skeletons weighed down with orchids and Spanish moss, and other parasites. It was like some fabulous setting for “Les Sylphides”—the most intoxicating landscape I have ever seen.

Bonjour Tristesse

And it was while standing in the middle of this hundred yards of silent dripping grove that I suddenly heard the sound of a breathtakingly melodious, long-drawn, melancholy and slowly dying policeman’s whistle. I can think of no other way of describing the song of the Solitaire, and since I learn that in Dominica the bird is known as the Siffle Montagne perhaps the simile will pass. It was calling to its mate, which answered from somewhere far away in the dripping woods, and I stood, and listened to the pair-for a quarter of an hour as they exchanged their poignant “Bonjour Tristesse.”

Then I went on my way down to Torregarda.

For those who are interested in a more expert description of the song, here is a further extract from Gosse’s chapter on the Solitaire in his “Birds of Jamaica”:

I never caught sight of the Solitaire and even the muleteers said they had rarely seen one. They described it, as does Gosse, as being more or less the size of a mocking-bird, but with upper parts of blue-grey, wings black with grey edges, tail black, with a touch of copper beneath, breast grey and hazel eyes.

But at least I heard the song of the Solitaire, and it is a song I dare say I will never forget.

Next Sunday Ian Fleming will describe a visit to the great flamingo colony on the remote Island of Inagua—the first scientific visit since 1916.

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And the expedition that gave inspiration to Dr. No.

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Adventure in the Sun

III—To Flamingo Land (Sunday Times, April 15, 1956)

By Ian Fleming

After the age of forty, time begins to be important, and one is inclined to say “Yes” to every experience. One should, of course, be taught to say “Yes” from childhood, but Wet Feet, Catching Cold, Getting a Temperature and Breaking Something add up to a traumatic “No” that is apt to become a permanent ball-and-chain.

ESSENTIAL YOU ACCOMPANY FIRST SCIENTIFIC VISIT SINCE 1916 TO FLAMINGO COLONY INAGUA MARCH FIFTEEN STOP PARTY CONSISTS ARTHUR VERNAY PRESIDENT BAHAMAS FLAMINGO PROTECTION SOCIETY COMMA ROBERT MURPHY OF AMERICAN NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM AND SELF STOP FAIL NOT BRYCE.

I had only one week of my Jamaica holiday left to me and I am not particularly interested in flamingoes. I looked up Inagua on a map. It looked remote and exciting.

I cabled back “Yes” and flew up to Nassau on March 13 and spent two nights in a remarkable tropic folly and bird sanctuary called Xanadu which my friend Ivar Bryce has built in a remote corner of the island. There, in between the feverish life of Nassau and exploring the off-shore waters of Xanadu, I learnt about the Society for the Protection of the Flamingo in the Bahamas.

The flamingo, like so many other rare and beautiful species of birds, is disappearing from the Bahamas, its traditional habitat, as from other parts of the world. For example, in 1940 there were 10,000 on the island of Andros in the Bahamas. Today there are ten. People are beginning to worry about animal and bird species being wiped off the face of the globe, and Mr. Arthur Vernay, who lives in Nassau and is an explorer and naturalist of distinction, decided three years ago to do something about it. He formed the society, enlisted world-wide support, and set to work to save the flamingo.

At dawn on March 15, crushed together in a tiny CESNA plane, we flew the 400 miles down the beautiful necklace of the Bahama Group to Inagua, where there is the largest flamingo colony in the world. The object of the expedition was to make an approximate count of the colony and to see that the society’s protective measures were working well on the eve of the mating season.

Ghastly Isle

Inagua is the most southerly of the Bahama Islands and it lies about 100 miles north of the famous Windward Passage between Cuba and Haiti. It is a hideous island and nobody in his senses ever goes near the place. It is known only for its flamingoes and its salt industry and, apart from its bird-life, its only redeeming feature is the charming Ericson family, originally from Boston, who work the salt and are the royalty of the island. Inagua is a British possession, but if the Ericsons don’t want you there the island’ will give you no welcome. They employ the entire population of 1,000 souls and the last thing they want is the coming of tourists or of any other “civilizing” influence. I don’t think they need worry.

We stayed the night with this admirable and splendidly feudal family in Mathew Town, a scatter of more-or-less solid shacks with a fine lighthouse. a hard hot wind that makes any form of garden impossible (the few plants are protected by great ugly sheets of tin), one communal store and a mound of salt awaiting shipment. We learned a great deal about salt. We were also told that it was lucky we hadn’t arrived a few weeks later in the mosquito season.

The mosquitoes on the salt pans are so thick that they literally choke you. The wild donkeys that infest the island are killed by them Their bites are nothing. They smother by their numbers. As our hosts talked. I could sense the millions of larvae stirring hungrily in the mangrove, swamps and on the salt pans. Even in the comfortable house, there was the whiff of tropical marsh gas brought by the hot maddening wind. Islands in the Sun? There are many kinds of them.

The Lake

We left before dawn on a lorry with the two Bahamian bird wardens. Bryce and I sat with Dr. Robert Murphy in garden chairs placed on the platform of-the truck—a fine way to ride and see the country. We drove through the acres of salt pans, great ghastly expanses of brine, white and crusty at the edges, drying in the hot wind that is vital to the industry, to the edge of Lake Windsor, the hundred square miles of brackish water that covers the centre of the island.

Only the light and the sky redeem this dreadful lake. Dreadful? Well, its base is marl mud, very fine in texture and the colour of a corpse. The lake is only two to three feet deep for the whole of its area, and the bottom is pockmarked every few feet with sharp limestone coral excrescences. The shores and cays are thick with mangroves, straggly and leggy, from which came the rotten-egg smell of the marsh gas in which we lived for two days. And yet it was also wonderful. The great mirrored expanse of water through which we were pushed for ten miles in flat-bottomed boats, the mirages, the silence, the sense of being on Mars. And then the birds.

Flamingoes? Every horizon was shocking pink with them, hundreds of them, thousands of them, reflected double in the blue-green glass of the lake, talking away and going about their business in huge congregations that literally owned this world across which we were moving like waterboatmen across a pond.

As we got closer to a group, the necks would start craning, and the chuckling, honking talk would redouble as if gangsters were spied approaching a great fashionable garden party. At first there would be a slow and stately walking away, an aloof withdrawal, and then one nerve would break and with great hurrying strides a single bird would scamper a dozen leggy steps to gain momentum and the great red wings would open and suddenly he was up with the long red legs tucked under his tail. And then, one by one, the others would follow, until at last all were in the air and making, with stately wing-beat, for the lea of a mangrove cay farther up the lake.

Fabulous birds, seven feet across the wings, perhaps six from orange beak to claw tip, and, under the wings, a great dash of black primary feathers. Not handsome, except in their flame-red colour and the grace of their flight, and their heads remind one of bottle-openers, but bizarre in their strange beauty, like great red and black bombers, purposeful and awe-inspiring.

Innocent Abroad

New horizons opened up, all quivering with pink. The excitement of my expert companions was great. It was clear that the protective measures carried out by the society—the appointment of the wardens, the strict policing of the lake against pilferers of eggs and young (flamingo tongues are considered a great delicacy) and the regulations against low-flying aircraft had, within little more than two years, been dramatically successful, and in this time one of the major spectacles in the world of birds had been created. Dr. Robert Murphy, who had been alternately gazing through binoculars and writing busily in his notebook ever since we had sighted our first banana quit in Mathew Town, organised an industrious “count” which rapidly climbed into the thousands, and there was much informed talk about mating dances and the colour-cycle, which is from pure white through grey to pink and then red flame.

I felt left out and racked my brains for an ornithological gambit, however modest. I could only think to ask if this flamingo, which is the American flamingo, or Phoenicopterus Ruber, was the largest red bird in the world. I spent some time clothing this juvenile question, in the appropriate mumbojumbology. Finally: “Would you say, Doctor, that the overall dimensions of’ the Phoenicopterus are the largest of any rubrous bird?” “Yes,” said Dr. Murphy briefly, and I felt like the triangle player in an orchestra who has managed to hit his triangle at the right place in the score.

In fact Dr. Murphy, who has just-retired as chairman of the Department of Birds in the American Museum of Natural History, although he is one of the greatest ornithologists who has ever lived, is entirely human, a splendid and most entertaining companion and the only man I have met who could make scrambled eggs with a basis of Nestlés condensed milk (sweetened). He also has the supreme distinction (which I mentioned in an earlier article) of bearing the fang-marks of a fer-de-lance on his ankle.

It took us three hours to reach Long Cay, where our tent was pitched and where we had breakfast. Then we went on again, now under a blazing sun, towards the ever-retreating horizon, behind which we hoped to find the first nesting-colony of the flamingoes. But we were a week or so early. The birds had not yet started to build those extraordinary townships of foot-high mud volcanoes in whose crater they lay one large amateurish white egg. So the boats were pushed on again, deep into the mangrove swamps, where a myriad other sea birds were already nesting and where the tumult and the stench were at times almost overwhelming.

Wild Aviary

Here were great colonies of the Louisiana Heron, the Black-necked Stilt, flocks of which skimmed round us with astonishing beauty and precision, American and Reddish Egrets and other exotic birds, and here, on wading through a marsh that bubbled with gas, we came upon a combination of bird colours that outdid even the spectacular flamingoes.

First there was an unexpected swarm of our familiar Double-crested Cormorants, perching in ranks of black witness among the low trees; then, above and around them, the noise of our arrival had exploded hundreds of Roseate Spoon-bills and white Egrets into the sky. The combination of black and white and pale pink against the vivid green of the mangroves and the deep blue sky gave an impression of some extraordinary daylight firework display in which the rockets always went on bursting.

As I stood up to my knees in the mud and gazed with awe on the great wheeling galaxies of black and white and pink, my companions were more scientifically engaged photographing the nests full of eggs and young with which each mangrove bush was laden, and I am glad to say that not only this extraordinary place but also the whole expedition has been recorded by Dr. Murphy upon countless rolls of colour film.

Towards evening, and after many other bird species had been identified, we trekked back to our tent on the Cay and at once stripped off our clothes and lay down in the lake to relieve our sunburn and get rid of some of the mud. It was then clear why Lake Windsor on Inagua will always be one of the great bird preserves of the world, for the shallow waters are almost solid with food. No sooner had we lain down than countless tiny fish no longer than a thumb-nail came to nibble us and we found that the silt beneath our bodies was largely composed of minute shells and fingernail clams—ideal fare for the curiously shaped beak of the flamingo with its reversed scooping motion.

The rest of our expedition was more or less an extension of what I have already described. The final estimate of the flamingo colony of Inagua was 15,000, and, if this year’s hurricanes miss the island, the nesting season, which will now be under way, will perhaps add another 5,000. A film of the colony will shortly be made by. Mr. Robert P. Allen (the Audubon Society associate who, more or less single-handed, saved the Whooping Crane from extinction) and the public will then be able to see for themselves that the labours of Mr. Arthur Vernay and his society have added considerably to the beauty of the world.

The Secret

As a postscript to these notes on Inagua I should mention that an exceptionally interesting man died on the island last year. He was a very aged fisherman and, two or three times each year, for many years past , he would slip quietly into the Commissioner’s office, which also serves as a rudimentary bank for the Inaguans. Without saying anything, he would place upon the Commissioner’s table a neat pile of Spanish doubloons of the sixteenth century. After receiving pound notes in exchange for his gold, he would leave as discreetly as he had come.

Now the old fisherman has died, and his secret has died with him. but it seems clear that, in or around Inagua, there is something else beside salt and flamingoes.


This is the last of Ian Fleming’s three articles about the out-of-the-way things which befell film on his latest visit to Jamaica. The previous articles appeared on April 1 and 8.

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A most intriguing man indeed. In Live and Let Die we see what might happen if such a man didn’t bring his doubloons to the Commissioner’s office but to a figure like Mr Big…

Many thanks for sharing these gems, @Revelator, always a welcome treat.

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More Adventures in the Sun

My Friend the Octopus (Sunday Times , March 24, 1957)

By Ian Fleming

Every year Ian Fleming returns to the small house by the sea in Jamaica which he built ten years ago and on each succeeding holiday he finds some new adventure to describe. Last year it was the deadly remora, the blue mountain solitaire and the flamingos which captivated him. Here, just back from his latest visit, he begins a new series of Adventures in the Sun.

Probably no living creature inspires such universal loathing and terror as the octopus. The reputation of this sea shell (for the octopus belongs to the same family of molluscs as the clam) stems from the fact that the octopus remains one of the few unexploded myths.

It is still a credible villain in children’s stories and its relative, the giant squid, is probably the most fearsome creature in the world.

But the octopus and the squid should not be confused. The giant squid lives thousands of fathoms deep and engages in titanic battles with sounding whales who are often found marked with its suckers. (Not long ago the eye of a squid was found in the stomach of a whale. It was two feet in diameter!) So, even in fiction, it is difficult to invent circumstances in which giant squids could be a threat to man.

An authentic case was the squid engaged by the French battleship Alecton in mid-Atlantic in 1860. The squid was 60 feet long, exclusive of the arms. The Alecton engaged the monster in battle but her cannon-balls traversed the glutinous mass without causing any vital injury. The Frenchmen at last got a harpoon to bite and passed a bowling hitch round the rear end of the squid and attempted to haul it on board. But the line cut through the flesh of the beast and the Alecton only salvaged a chunk weighing about 40 lb. From this morsel the total weight of the squid was estimated at two tons.

But this is a very different creature from octopus vulgaris , which this striking portrait [omitted] shows at about a quarter of its natural size.

When I first started spending my holidays in. Jamaica and skin-diving I was infected by the octopus myth and waged war upon the tribe. This year an octopus came to live at the bottom of my garden and I have quite changed my mind.

There are certain disagreeable features about octopuses. Their appearance is, to say the least, unusual and they have talents which seem to us supernatural. They can change colour from off-white to dark brown. They can turn luminous in the dark. They travel very fast by jet propulsion and the suckers on their eight arms exert terrific and unrelenting pressure. They are also slimy and creepy-crawly and are very difficult to kill unless, as is the custom with Jamaican fishermen, you bite off their heads.

In Jamaican waters they are not feared. They are not called “devil fish,” as they are in many parts of the world, nor yet “pus-fellers,” in the tough lingo of deep-sea divers, but “sea cats”— a much more friendly name. In fact, octopus vulgaris is an extremely shy creature which, although it has few enemies apart from man, has little confidence in its natural weapons and spends a disproportionate amount of its time trying to hide. It hides very effectively, squeezing itself like thick paste into rock crannies or choosing the nearest piece of coral and flattening itself against this after changing its colour to an almost exact camouflage.

As I say, I first regarded these creatures as enemies and had many, in retrospect, cruel and untidy battles with them. Then one day, standing on a rock at the side of my beach, I saw through the clear water a few inches down an octopus, asleep just below me.

It had turned itself into a kind of clumsy saucer with its tentacles wrapped round its body. Now and then the tip of a tentacle moved delicately, like the tail of a sleeping kitten. It did not seem to have attached itself to the shelf of coral and rocked slightly in the small currents. There were one or two leaves on the water. When the shadow of a leaf floated over the octopus it blushed a dark brown. Occasionally it opened a sleepy eye and then closed it again.

I defy anyone to watch a sleeping octopus for some time and not be captivated by its defencelessness and astounded by the bizarre mechanisms of its camouflage.

Finally I moved so that my shadow fell across it. At once the creature was fully awake. It turned exactly the colour of its coral bed and, with incredible stealth, its tentacles unfurled on the rock and took hold. The eyes watched me. I moved again and the octopus took a deep breath to prime the tanks of its jet mechanism and started slowly crawling sideways. I lifted a hand and it gathered itself up like the sheet in M. R. James’s ghost story, “Whistle and I’ll Come to You” and launched itself sideways with streamlined compactness and shot into the deeps.

It was from that day that I decided to befriend the octopus and when, this year, one took up residence a few yards out from the beach it was given a warm welcome and christened “Pussy.”

If you happen to collect shells an octopus can be a very valuable pet. Each morning when we visited “Pussy” in her comfortable burrow in the coral, we would find a new tribute of shells on her doorstep. They were not very rare shells—clams, tulip shells and small helmets—but they were in pristine condition. Octopuses have an easy way with shells. They simply attach their suckers to each side, or to the operculum, or door, to a shell, and pull and go on pulling, until the muscles of the animal in the shell are exhausted. Then they eat the animal.

“Pussy” became a valued feature of the property and privileged visitors were taken to inspect her. She would playfully tug at the blunt end of a spear and occasionally display a shy tentacle or a watchful, stealthily retreating eye. I had hopes of developing the relationship by giving her crushed sea urchins to eat. Then I had to be away from the house for a couple of days.

On my return I was greeted with disquieting news. My small son, never quite clear who “Pussy” was, but merely accepting her daily tribute of shells, informed me that fishermen had caught a fine sea cat and presented it to Beryl, the housemaid.

I hastily swam out and placed a fat meal of sea urchin at, the door of “Pussy’s” burrow. Nothing happened. Perhaps she was out hunting. I let a day go by and still she did not reappear.

I asked the housekeeper. Yes, indeed, Beryl had been given a fine sea cat by the fishermen.

Where was it? What had happened to it?

“Beryl mash her and cut her up and cook her in hollive hoil and eat her out of a coconut.”

That is the worst of pets. Something always happens to them.

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More Adventures in the Sun—2

Treasures of the Sea (Sunday Times, April 7, 1957)

By Ian Fleming

Every year Ian Fleming returns to his house by the sea in Jamaica and on each succeeding holiday he finds some new adventure to describe.
In his previous article, the first of a new series, he wrote of the ‘octopus at the bottom of the garden.’ Here, he describes a visit to the Cayman Islands in search of rare sea-shells.

The Cayman Islands have always sounded to me extremely romantic. Columbus discovered them and named them “Las Tortugas,” after the turtles which swarmed on them. Lying to the north-west of Jamaica and to the south of Cuba, well away from the shipping lanes, they were the principal hide-out of the buccaneers and have been the haunt of treasure-seekers for 200 years.

The Caymanians also sounded a most attractive people. Descendants of the pirates or of Cromwellian soldiers, they have somehow managed to keep their bloodstream free of negroid strains, and they have built up a tradition as some of the finest sailors in the world. Until last year it was very difficult to get to the Caymans, but now there are almost daily flights from Jamaica and Miami, and last month, with two girl Fridays, I went to Grand Cayman to collect sea-shells in the imagined paradise.

Grand Cayman is some 20 miles long, and, at its broadest, eight miles wide. The Island is more or less in the shape of a giant bottle-opener and, as you can see, the North Sound, where the pirates used to careen their ships, almost cuts the island in two. It is very flat and marshy, and only occasional palm trees stand up above the covering of mangroves, sea grape and sea almond. A hot, dry, ugly wind blows almost continuously, but not hard enough to disperse the mosquitoes which render the place almost uninhabitable in the summer.

The population is about 7,000 and the capital, Georgetown, is a pretty clap-boarded little village with a vaguely Cornish air. Beside the natural harbour crouches an exquisite Presbyterian chapel. The Caymans are a Scottish Presbyterian stronghold, and no doubt this accounts for their staunch, sober character and for the fact that the four-cell gaol is rarely occupied. On the principal beach a new and luxurious hotel was opened last year, but its rates, £8 15s. for a single room and bath, were not for us, and we put up at the excellent Pageant Beach Hotel, a single-storey motel-like affair, entirely on the American style. There are three other simple, small hotels, and the total number of hotel rooms on the Island is about 300.

The Roneod information bulletin on the Caymans was written by the last Commissioner, Mr. Gerrard, and is a model of what such things should be: modest, humorous and realistic. (It can be obtained from the Tourist Board in Kingston, Jamaica, or from the Commissioner’s Office, Grand Cayman.) One paragraph which had attracted me was “The coasts and beaches of the Cayman Islands abound in shells of an astonishing variety.” I happen to collect tropical shells in an amateurish fashion and was looking forward to much treasure. I am ashamed to say that I am uninterested in rare, dull shells and only collect those which are huge or beautiful or strange. I do not even ticket or catalogue my collection, but leave it piled on shelves for other amateurs to admire and the sun to spoil. But the collection amuses me, and, now that I will not shoot fish, adds purpose to the exploration of tropical beaches, underwater landscapes and reefs.

I could not begin to give details of my collection but these two illustrations from Hyatt Verrill’s excellent Shell Collectors’ Handbook, published by Putnams, New York, show Caribbean treasures I do not possess and which I hoped against hope might turn up in the Caymans. [Images omitted due to poor reproduction quality: they depict “Murex Argo, West Indies, rarest of large shells” and “Violet Scorpion, Pterocera violacea.”]

Our taxi driver from the airport, Conrad Hilton, was helpful. “I often takes folks huntin’ for shells. Only las’ week I takes Mr. German huntin’ shells. Him comes from New, York. Mebbe you knows him.” (Residents of small remote places assume that all visitors know each other, just as they know every single one of the local inhabitants.) “Him was mos’ satisfied. Ah takes him to Bodden.”

Who was this rival shell collector who had forestalled us and doubtless skimmed the cream from Conrad Hilton’s private treasure beach? However, perhaps since we have underwater masks we shall do better than this serious-minded, though no doubt expert, conchologist with his topee, sneakers, sun glasses, khaki shorts down to the knee and blistering nose (as we imagined him).

“There’s a man at Bodden collects shells. Mr. Willywaw. Sells them. Mebbe you like to buy some?”

We had a vision of the cunning Mr. Willywaw sitting in his treasure house waiting for boobies from overseas and lovingly caressing a Precious Wentletrap as he talked of the requests he had had from American museums.

“We’d like to see his collection but we don’t want to buy shells. We like to find them.”

“You find plenty shells at Bodden.” Conrad Hilton was definite.

There was a great stretch of sandy beach between our hotel and the jagged dead coral against which the waves crashed. (It crossed my mind, and still crosses it, to wonder where the sand came from since the rocks were between it and the sea.) As soon as we arrived we put on our masks and took spears and went into the sea to explore. No doubt, even opposite the hotel, there would be pickings from this paradise of sea-shells.

It was the most ghastly sea bottom I have ever explored. An endless vista of dead grey coral, interspersed with sharp and angry niggerheads and positively infested with huge black sea eggs—a type of sea urchin with four-inch needle-sharp spines which break off and fester in your flesh. There were few fish about and no crabs or lobsters—just an endless, dead landscape bristling with black spines. Worse, the American way of life, which has Grand Cayman in its grip, had penetrated the surrounding sea. Everywhere there was refuse—the permanent unbreakable refuse of a people that has given up eating fish and fruit and now lives out of American bottles and cans.

The bottom of the sea was littered with rusty (and rustless) cans, disintegrating cartons and the particularly vivid green of broken Pepsi-Cola bottles. (The company must have a monopoly on the island. Other soft drinks were poorly represented.) And the place was a sort of bottletopia. Everywhere were bottle tops; the sad rusty coinage of our civilisation.

We swam for an hour along the rocks and round into the yacht harbour where grey silt and slime covered everything. We came ashore disgusted. Thank heavens tomorrow would be different!

At 9 o’clock Conrad Hilton came to fetch us and we rattled off along the appalling roads on our way to Bodden. The roads on Grand Cayman had once been metalled—perhaps during the war when there were a few defences on the Island against its use as a possible refuge for U-boats—but the surface has melted and eroded into ridges and waves and potholes. Fine sand, which makes even bicycling very difficult, has covered them. A few motor-cars ply for hire during the “season” and then, over the next nine months, get wired and soldered together again.

Bodden turned out to be no “secret” place, but Grand Cayman’s other “town”—a handful of houses and bungalows at one end of a six-mile sandy beach. Conrad Hilton drove us to the Presbyterian minister’s bungalow and this charming padre allowed us to leave our picnic lunch and bits and pieces on his wooden verandah. Strung with empty knapsacks for our shell burdens, we hurried down to the beach and started tramping into the wind, and sun to where, six miles away, the beach ended at Betty Bay Point.

There were, practically speaking, no shells at all. Surely there would be more when we got away from the houses! There were none, or at any rate none worth picking up. For mile after mile we trudged towards the distant shimmering rocks that never came nearer. From time to time we stopped and put on our masks and went into the sea. At once the sand ended and it was another dead landscape scattered, but more sparsely than off Georgetown, with tins and bottle tops. A bright flash of colours caught my eye in deep water and I dived. It was a disintegrating Quaker Oats carton.

Deep depression filled us. Where was this paradise of seashells? Surely Mr. Willywaw could not have scoured the place clean that morning in the four hours since dawn. He and his minions could not possibly have covered the whole six, miles of beach. There were a few fishermen about and occasional heaps of conchs that had been broken to remove their animals, but there were miles of shelving sand without a single footstep below the high tide mark. My companions gave up and stopped. Obstinately I covered another two miles, my face gradually stiffening and smarting in the sun and wind. I came to the Point and turned. Now there was six miles of baking sand without the spur of treasure hunting. I set off on the return journey.

Next Week: Ian Fleming continues his search for “Treasures of the Sea.”

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More Adventures in the Sun—3

He Sells Sea-Shells… (Sunday Times, April 14, 1957)

By Ian Fleming

Last Sunday Ian Fleming described his arrival in Grand Cayman in search of rare sea-shells. The search along Bodden Beach was fruitless, but Conrad Hilton, the taxi driver, still had the mysterious Mr. Willywaw, a famed collector of sea-shells, up his sleeve.

Philosophically we had our lunch and curled up to sleep in the shade to wait for 3 o’clock. When Conrad Hilton arrived I was sharp with him. What did he mean by saying that this was just the place for us? There weren’t any shells. Wasn’t there somewhere else he knew of? Anyway, let’s go and see Mr. Willywaw.

Mr. and Mrs. Willy Wood (for that was their name) lived in a neat concrete bungalow. They were quite charming. Willy Wood was a handsome, middle-aged Caymanian with the sort of face you would find on the quay at Brixham. His living-room contained much inappropriate and overstuffed furniture. There was a battered wireless set, and faded photographs round the walls. Chickens and dogs scratched about in the bushes between the house and beach. There was no sign of sea-shells.

I summoned my scant expertise and questioned him. “Tiger cowries?” No, he did not know them. “Cone shells? Did he find many like this?” I produced a broken Marbled Cone I had found that morning. No, he could not say he did. They found small ones which they used as spinning tops for the children. “Well, do you find any giant Queen Helmets?”

“No, just small ones.”

“Olives ?”

“Sometimes, not often.” (These pretty, highly polished shells are common on my Jamaican beach.)

Well, what were his most valuable shells? Willy Wood smiled secretively. He reached under the sofa and pulled out a large grocery box untidily heaped with brown paper bags. He peered into several of these and threw them carelessly back. I thought that he was even more careless of his collection than I was. Finally he found the right one.

“These are my best ones,” he said. “Ever seen these?” He tipped the bag on to the floor. A pile of small slivers of brown cuticle fell out. They looked rather like morsels of tortoise-shell. The small bag must have contained thousands of them. They were ugly, dirty little scraps and extremely dull. We gazed in astonishment.

Willy Wood said “You know the Bleeding Tooth shell?” (Despite its interesting name, this nerite is one of the commonest shells in the whole of the Caribbean. Members of the same family, but without the bloody looking teeth, can be found in their billions round the coasts of England.) “Those are the ‘doors’ of the shell.”

Willy Wood was referring to the opercula—the tough membrane with which the animal shuts itself inside its shell.

Astonished, I said, “But why are they so valuable?”

“Don’t know”" said Willy Wood. “But I get 18 dollars for these.”

“Eighteen dollars! Each?”

Willy Wood smiled pityingly “No, 18 dollars a gallon.” A gallon of these scraps of stuff would number, I suppose, about 10,000.

“Who do you sell them to? What do they use thein for?”

“Dealers in the States—St. Petersburg, Miami, New York. They use them in artificial jewellery. Make necklaces and so forth.”

Willy Wood picked up another brown bag and poured a pile of tiny white volutes on to the floor.

“We call these Rice Shells. They fetch 12 dollars. When I need some of these I just bring up a sack of sand and pour it out on the porch and put on my spectacles and spend an afternoon picking out the shells.”

More bags were opened. More piles of incredibly dull little shells were poured out. “Ten dollars, nine dollars a gallon. They say they use these for sewing on materials.” Willy Wood laughed indulgently at the notion. He said that he was not doing so well now. There were too many people round the world in the business. He used to ship gallons and gallons of shells every week. Now the prices were going down and he only made a shipment once every two or three months.

Now it was all clear to us. The “paradise of sea-shells” myth had grown out of this strange, but rewarding, activity of Willy Wood paying pennies to the children of Bodden to pick up thousands upon thousands of the commonest sea-shells in the world to go off to the sham jewellery factories in the States. Of course, to a Caymanian, the place was a “paradise,” where you could just pick up the ground you were standing on and sell it at 18 dollars a gallon. But as for rare or beautiful sea-shells, maybe there would be some specimens in the Cayman seas but no one was in the least interested. They were not what Mr. Bloomfeld in Miami wanted.

It is true that I also was not very clear what I wanted, except that it should be something handsome and something new to me. I do not collect shells seriously. I was not looking, for instance, for a Left-Handed Cone shell, or a Double-Spined Fighting Conch, or for some of the Treasures of the Sea that can be found in the Caribbean and that might be worth £20 or £30 each.

My illustration [omitted] shows three shell treasures. It is taken from Hyatt Verrill’s excellent Shell Collector’s Handbook, published by Putnams, New York. As Mr. Verrill points out, no shell is really rare. There are species that live in remote places or very deep or those that are fragile. One such is the Slot Shell or Pleurotomeria, found off Japan—dull shells with rusty brown markings, but still selling for £20- £40 a specimen because they usually live at 100 fathoms or more and are fragile. An example of this is the Glory-of-the-Seas Cone, which, for 200 years, was considered the rarest of shells. By 1944, 25 specimens were known and the value of a fine specimen was around £500. Since then many more examples have been found and, in 1945, the price had dived to about £20.

Today Mr. Verrill says that two of the rarest shells are the Prince of Wales Cowrie, of which only four specimens are known, and the White-Toothed Cowrie, the only specimen of which is in the British Museum.

Before the war one of the prizes was the Precious Wentle Trap found off China and Japan. The ingenious Chinese counterfeited them in rice paste and sold them for hundreds of pounds to collectors. Then came the war and the G.I.s started looking for shells and buying them in the Pacific islands, and the bottom fell out of the market in Wentle Traps and in such rarities as the Great Golden Cowrie. This shell was a symbol of aboriginal royalty and all specimens found had to be delivered to the island chieftains. “Civilisation” came with the war and now Great Golden Cowries are a drug on the market.

But there are still prizes to be found in Caribbean waters—such as the Murex Argo of which one of the few specimens is in the Liverpool Museum of Natural History—and our minds had been inflamed with the hope of legendary treasures such as these when we came to the Caymans. Faced with Willy Wood’s famous “shell collection,” we realised that our quest had been fruitless. We edged the conversation away from shells to pirate gold.

Willy Wood said Yes, indeed. People were always hunting for it. After the war he had bought a mine-detector in Florida and spent months searching round the beaches and caves. “And I dug, I dug for days and weeks and I kept on finding it again and again. And do you know what it always was?” Willy Wood roared with laughter, “Bottle tops and suchlike. And do you know some folks from here even went over the cemetery with a mine-detector? They heard that the Spaniards were buried with their swords. They dug up plenty of graves before the Minister and the police got after them.”

Conrad Hilton, who had been observing the whole scene from the doorway, felt that this was a slur on the island. He broke in “But, Willywaw, don’ you ’member that man who came an’ when he gone ’way, his suitcase was heavy as lead? He wouldn’t allow no one carry it out to the plane. Took him quarter of an hour to get out to the plane movin’ his suitcase a few feet at a time. And he got into the plane and no one never saw him again.”

Willy Wood shrugged indifferently. “If that had been gold,” he said practically, “it would have bust through the floor of the plane. Maybe the man was sick or something.”

We parted, the two shell-collectors, despite their common bond, disunited, and crashed and banged our way back to Georgetown, the day saved by the charm of Willy Wood and the strangeness of his trade.

On the way I questioned Conrad Hilton about the turtles for which Grand Cayman has always been famous. Apparently these were also a myth. There are no turtles in the Cayman Islands. The Caymanians catch them off the coasts of Nicaragua, 500 miles away. We have a treaty with Nicaragua which allows them to do so but even in this tiny remote trade we have just been slapped in the face. A month, ago the Nicaraguans arrested two Caymanian ships and threw their crews into gaol. Nicaragua had done a “Suez” and torn up the turtle treaty without warning.

But what about this business of the turtle soup for the Lord Mayor of London? Was that a fable too?

Conrad Hilton said no, that was about all that was left of the turtle trade. The Caymanians caught enough turtles to feed them and their families. They kept them in a lagoon with each fisherman’s initials carved in the tortoiseshell. Two or three times a year they shipped a few to Kingston to be flown to London.

There is no Industry in the Cayman Islands, except banking the money, which the Caymanian seamen send back to the island from all round the world. It is time the encyclopaedias and guide books got these things right.

We left Grand Cayman with only mild regret and were glad to get back to the lush green beauty of Jamaica. Grand Cayman, like the other small Caribbean and Bahamian Islands I have visited, is, when you have taken away the sun and the colours of the sea, an ugly, lonely little island once brushed excitingly by history but now a refuge for the two-week American tourist who cannot afford, or who is disgusted by, Florida. Tourism will certainly be developed for these people, the roads will be metalled again and there will be attempts to spray the mosquitoes and sand flies. The staunch, cheerful Caymanians, the nicest feature of the island, will not be more than superficially spoilt by this traffic until the modern pirates discover the place.

Then the island will be given over to the pirates again—to the modern pirates who discover that the only direct tax in the Cayman Islands is a head tax on adult males, between 16 and 60, amounting to eight shillings a year.

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Treasure Hunt in Eden (Sunday Times, August 17, 1958)

By Ian Fleming

A cache of treasure worth £120 million is believed to have been buried by the eighteenth-century French pirate, Levasseur, on the island of Mahé in the Seychelles. Ian Fleming recently visited the island to discover how an Englishman, armed with old documents, has been seeking the treasure for nearly ten years. Behind this search, financed by shareholders, lies a fascinating blend of fact and legend.

I—Pirate Gold

I have always been interested in buried treasure. I think most men are. Women are less interested either because they have a more realistic turn of mind or because they were brought up on different children’s books. Early reading of Coral Island, The Blue Lagoon, Treasure Island and other Stephensonia, Jules Verne and Rider Haggard gives a boy that golden treasure bug which he rarely gets out of his bloodstream even in much later years.

I found my first treasure at the age of nine. We were staying in the summer holidays at the Tregenna Castle Hotel at St. Ives and I spent much of my time looking for amethyst-quartz in the cares along the beaches. One day, far from the town, I penetrated deep into a little cave and found at the back a lamp of ambergris as big as a child’s football. I knew all about ambergris from Stacpoole. It should have the consistency of thick paste, be greyish in colour and have no smell. There simply wasn’t any doubt about it. I was thrilled. Now I would be rich and I would be able to live on Cadbury milk chocolate flakes and I would not have to go back to my private school or indeed do any more work at all. I had found the short cut out of all my childish woes. But how to get it back to the hotel? Carefully I extracted the heavy lump, picked out some of the pebbles that had stuck to it, and hoisted it onto the lap of the grey jersey, which, with grey shorts, I was wearing. The long walk back was exhausting and the hot sun and my hot body melted a fraction of my treasure (at £1,000 an ounce I could easily afford the small wastage) so that soon my jersey and shorts were a dreadful sight. What did I care? There would be no scolding or punishments ever again. People looked curiously at me as I climbed the narrow street and went through the big gates and up the drive. I stared haughtily back.

Soft Squelch

My mother was having tea in the palm court (as I remember it) of the hotel with a handsome admirer; I stumped through the crowded tables and stopped in front of her. She looked startled at my expression and my filthy appearance. Quite casually I released the lap of my jersey and let the lump of ambergris fall with a soft squelch (it was rather more melted than I had thought) at her feet. I said “There” and stood waiting for her, or for someone else to say “Ambergris, by Jove !”

My mother looked astonished. “What is it darling?” she asked. “What a mess you’ve got your clothes into.” “It’s ambergris” I said. “It’s worth £1,000 an ounce and there must be two pounds of it. How much does that make? I’m not going back to school.”

A horrified waiter bustled up and looked down at the dreadful grey mess on his parquet floor. “Don’t touch it,” I said imperiously. “It’s ambergris.” Kindly or unkindly, I cannot remember which, he asked where I had found it. I told him and then, I hope kindly, he explained. It was butter I had found. A lump of butter from a supply ship that had been torpedoed several months before. She had been carrying a cargo of New Zealand butter and lumps of the stuff had been washing up on the coast from time to time. No doubt I burst into tears.

Wilkins’s Prospectus

Memories of this bitter experience came to me when I first got a sight of the Wilkins Treasure Prospectus, and, without wasting space on my own picayune treasure tales, here is the gist of it—cut, but with the wording unaltered:

A short précis of the story of the treasure and details in brief of the work done by Mr. R. H. Wilkins up to the 31st December, 1955.

Oliver Levasseur commenced his piracy in 1716 in the Caribbean where he stayed for some time, at the end of which he refused to return to France but turned pirate and came into the Indian Ocean in 1721 in his vessel “Le Victorieux.” He was joined by an English pirate named Taylor in his ship “Defence,” and together they took over control of the shipping lanes from John Avery, the English pirate, who had become ruler of Madagascar in former years and whose greatest prize had been the capture of the daughter of the Grand Mogul with her marriage dowry while she was on her way to Persia to marry its ruler, the Shah. Avery was driven from Madagascar and returned to England to die penniless in Bideford, Devon.

Levasseur and Taylor took two French treasure ships belonging to the Compagnie de France, namely “La Duchesse de Neuilly” and “La Ville d’Ostende.” Up to this time Levasseur had been offered a free pardon if he would bring his treasure in but he sealed his fate by taking the Royal Portuguese Papal vessel “Le Cap de Ver” which was returning to Europe with the Bishop of Goa and his treasure—church plate, diamond cross and staff, etc.—on board. The treasure in the first two ships is believed to be ninety million gold francs and estimated to be some one hundred and twenty million pounds worth at present-day values. The value of the treasure in the ship “Le Cap de Ver” is not known, nor is there anywhere any record of the amount of treasure taken from Avery or brought by Levasseur from the Caribbean.

As a consequence of taking the Bishop of Goa’s treasure ship, Levasseur realised he could expect a pardon no longer. It Is believed that he then set about burying the treasure and the French archives indicate that this took Levasseur some four to five years to bury.

The taking of the Bishop of Goa’s ship caused the wrath of the Pope and representations were, it is believed, made to the French Government through papal channels which resulted in renewed efforts on the part of the French. Levasseur was eventually captured by a naval vessel, “La Meduse,” under Captain d’Hermitte, in 1730, and was taken to the Isle of Bourbon (now Reunion). After various attempts to make him disclose the whereabouts of his treasure were made without avail he was hanged on July 17, 1730. On the scaffold he threw to the crowd a number of papers crying “Find it who can.” These papers were held by various families and some came into the hands of the Paris archives.

When I was in the Seychelles in January, 1949, I came across some documents in the form of a cryptogram, a cryptic map and other papers which interested me. My work in the Seychelles was finished and I had to wait three months for a boat to bring me back to Kenya. I started to try to interpret the documents and papers. I did not get very far at this stage but I did discover that the documents had some relation of Greek mythological figures pertaining to their astronomical values. I also found certain carvings on rocks at a particular place on the coast of Mahé, the Island of the Seychelles on which I was at the time. I particularly observed the mythological figure of “Musca” or “Asp” carved on a rock.

I took the documents and papers I then had back to Kenya with me and spent several months working on them. I managed to translate them and the translation I got indicated to me that I should look for an area where there would be indications of the northern and southern hemispheres containing the mythological figures of Greek mythology relating to the heavenly bodies or stars and probably indications which had something to do with the story of Jason and the search for the Golden Fleece.

I returned to the Seychelles and started exploring the area where I had earlier uncovered the carving of the “Asp,” having first concluded an agreement with the owner of the land in which I thought the treasure to be buried…

I found other carvings in the area, some above ground and some underground. They all related to the mythological figures I have mentioned above. I soon discovered a complete hemisphere with these figures set out correctly in the right position from the other. I then found indications of other hemispheres in the same area and I found carvings and other indications which clearly referred to the Jason and Golden Fleece story. I found buried the bones of an ox many feet below ground. I also found a complete skeleton of a horse buried without doubt to indicate Pegasus the Horse. I found Andromeda both carved and in statuette form. Indeed in my five-to six-year search I have found many things to prove that my interpretation of the documents and papers is correct and to prove, which is even more important, that no one has been on this site before me.

In all I have found eight hemispheres. All have been complete in themselves and each has led me in turn to the next. In each except the last hemisphere the Golden Fleece—the treasure — has been stolen by the fox and there are indications to this effect left there by the pirates. In the last hemisphere these indications are absent and the fox itself is shown within the hemisphere, which has not been the case in the other hemispheres. I therefore believe the treasure to be intact from this evidence…

Extreme caution is now needed and suitable pumping equipment has to be available to keep the water under control to enable digging operations to proceed, but I have complete confidence in getting into the cavern—given the equipment if not this year then next.

The prospector for whom I act has the full co-operation of the Seychelles Government in this search for treasure and there is an agreement in writing properly stamped and registered under which this Government gets a certain share of the prospector’s share of the treasure in consideration of the Government providing many useful and free facilities to me as the prospector’s attorney to help me in the search.

The prospector now desires to dispose of not more than a further twelve shares at the price of £2,000 for each share. These can of course be split so that for example if any person desires to invest £100 he or she will obtain 1/20th of a share.

Those persons advancing money for the purchase of any one share or proportion of a share are asked to sign a formal application for that share or portion of a share that they desire to purchase and they will receive either from Messrs. Gill and Johnson, chartered accountants, or Messrs. Hamilton, Harrison and Mathews, advocates, of Nairobi, a formal receipt therefor and in due course a document in a form satisfactory under Seychelles law to transfer the share or part of a share which document after being signed and stamped will be registered with the Seychelles Government in the manner required by Seychelles law.

It is pointed out, for avoidance of doubt, that should the treasure not be found then any balance of money paid by persons for the purchase of shares or portions of shares will belong to the prospector absolutely.

Nine Years’ Dig

Well, that’s the prospectus, and some £24,000 was quickly forthcoming. I later made the acquaintance of a shareholder and I have a complete set of the subsequent progress reports, that reached shareholders from Nairobi. (My particular shareholder is an interesting man, by the way. In 1938 an elephant knelt on his left leg while a tigress chewed off his right. But that is how it is in this story. Even the smallest walk-on parts have a touch of the bizarre.)

A treasure hunt for £120 million, with shareholders scattered all over the world, is an interesting business and I was surprised to find that only snippets of news about its progress had leaked out during the nine years’ dig. The whole thing made up the sort of adventure story that intrigues me and. having made sure through the Colonial Office that the hunt was still on, I shook the Easter snows of England off my boots and twenty-four hours later the sweat was pouring off me in Bombay. The next day I sailed in the excellent s.s. Karanja of the British India Line and just over four days later I came on deck at five o’clock in the morning and watched the Seychelles materialise out of the darkness.

The Crown Colony of the Seychelles consists of ninety-two islands in the Indian Ocean. The capital, Port Victoria, on Mahé, which is about as big as the Isle of Wight, is some 1,000 miles from Africa and 1,500 from India. Population, 40,000, exports: copra, cinnamon, patchouli, vanilla and various exotic desiderata, including two fabled aphrodisiacs—sea-slug, or bèche de mer, to China, and the grotesque Coco de Mer fruit, to India. The best of very few books on the Seychelles is F. D. Ommaney’s admirable “Shoals of Capricorn.”

Garden of Eden

As we crept in towards the islands, I was somehow unsurprised when instead of the usual seagulls a single large bat flew out to inspect the ship and, no doubt, report back. The night before I had filled in my customs declaration form and had sniffed the wind of a treasure island in its old-fashioned print. Instead of the usual warning about importing alcohol, tobacco, agricultural machinery and parrots, I was cautioned that “Passengers must specifically state if they have in their possession OPIATES, ARMS AND AMMUNITION, BASE OR COUNTERFEIT COINS.” After this I was only surprised at not being required to sign the form in my blood.

With an almost audible blare of trumpets and crash of cymbals the sun hurled its javelins into the heavens over the Garden of Eden a few miles away on the port side. The dull geographers call it Praslin Island, the second largest of the Seychelles, but General Gordon wrote a book proving conclusively that these islands were originally joined to the northern bulge of East Africa and he pin-pointed the famous “Vallais de Mai,” home of the bizarre Coco de Mer, as the original Garden of Eden. I am sure he is right.

We slowly engraved our wake across the mirror of the doldrums and at breakfast time the roar of our anchor chain echoed back to us from the emerald flanks of Mahé, biggest island of the group.

The captain bade me farewell with a final warning: “First thing you do, you get your return passage fixed up. Left a chap here last year and the next thing I heard he’d hanged himself with his braces in the Pirates Arms. Couldn’t get a passage out. Claustrophobia.”

I thanked the captain, told him I didn’t wear braces, and went down the ladder to the launch and the twenty-minute trip in through the reef.

Ramshackle Paradise

Of Mahé, Ommaney wrote: “As we passed slowly along the coast, I thought I had never seen a lovelier place in my life. Many people, seeing it thus for the first time, have said to themselves: ‘This is where I will spend the rest of my life and here, with God’s help, I will die’.” But when Ommaney landed he changed his mind and found much to criticise in the island and its inhabitants. So did Alec Waugh in his gossipy Where the Clocks Chime Twice. For my part, having known tropical island life in the Caribbean and having seen something of it in the Pacific, I found nothing either surprising or unpleasant in this authentic though in parts ramshackle tropical paradise. It is true that the Seychelles are fifty years behind the times in almost everything unconnected with the Government—a Government incidentally which under the light but firm reign of Mr. John Thorp, lately Governor of the Leeward Islands, is quite astonishingly efficient and forward-looking in all departments—but most of us would count that a blessing.

Apart from the humidity, which is exasperating to the new arrival, poor communications and the standard of living, the Seychelles are blessed.

The temperature varies between 75 and 85 degrees throughout the year and the sea temperature is much the same. Scenically the islands are some of the most beautiful in the world, the waters that surround them are almost paved with game and other fish, the bird life includes ten species unique to the Seychelles (including the famous black parrot, coracopsis barklyi, of Fraslin) and botanically there is almost every tropical species of tree and shrub including the majestic Coco de Mer which grows naturally nowhere else in the world. On a drabber note, the tax rates are not attractive but servants are around ten shillings a week.

Incomparable beach sites can be bought for about two to five hundred pounds an acre, and a substantial bungalow would cost around £3,000 to build and furnish. On the reverse of the medal is lack of refrigeration, shortage of electricity, telephones, meat, vegetables, except tropical varieties, poor roads and, from March to May and in October and November, the aforesaid humidity. To make up for lack of snakes and malarial mosquitoes there are centipedes and scorpions, though in a month I never saw either, and occasional Stone Fish, one of the Scorpionidae. If you have the misfortune to step on any of these there is excellent medical service. Some knowledge of French is important since the man-in-the-street speaks Creole, an incomprehensible language consisting almost entirely of bastard French nouns stitched together with grunts and facial expressions.

Anyone who is attracted by the sound of this patchwork paradise would do well to write to the Tourist Officer, Port Victoria, Seychelles, Indian Ocean, and enclose a postal order for three shillings. By return, i.e., in about a month, he will receive a workmanlike tourist handbook. The only reason why these beautiful British possessions are not overrun with tourists and settlers from Africa and England and why there are still only about 150 rather tatterdemalion hotel and guest rooms on Mahé is poor communications. In theory you can fly from London in a day to Bombay or in a little longer to Mombasa via Nairobi and have a pleasant three to four days’ voyage to Port Victoria. But in fact there are only about two sailings per month by British India and the Eastern Shipping Company. At one time or another the Union Castle, Royal Interocean, Bank and Messageries Maritimes lines have called at the Seychelles, but copra is the only large outward cargo and the rest of the traffic and mails are not economic. It is the chicken and the egg. If the British India line will take a view and increase calls on the Seychelles to twice a month, then the tourist marionettes will start to revolve. The hotels will get built, the roads will improve, the electricity company will operate for twenty-four hours instead of twelve, the cargoes will materialise for the returning ships and the British India Company will benefit.

Two Spectres

However much a Government is willing to help with guarantees and tax reliefs, private industry must make the first move. In this part of the world there are two spectres that commemorate the failure of two majestic treasure hunts carried out by the last Socialist Government—the ground-nut scheme in Tanganyika that cost you and me 36 million pounds and the quarter of a million-pound Seychelles fisheries scheme which became so weighed down with overheads that it never got off the ground.

However, tourism is the mundane side of the Seychelles treasure story and this is not a travel series. All I can say is that, having spent a month in the islands, the true treasure of the Seychelles, as the Roman Catholic Bishop was tartly to remind me at a Government House reception, lies in the natural resources of the islands and their simple, kindly, and often beautiful people. If I were a British millionaire, I would invest in them before the American millionaires get there first as they have in the Caribbean.

But I was in pursuit of more earthy objectives and, after ascertaining that Wilkins, the treasure-hunter, had abandoned operations during the high tides of the south-east monsoon, and had retired to the neighbouring island of Praslin, I jumped a schooner trip to the outer islands with the object of looking into the treasure myth that pervades the whole group. We set sail in the m.v. De Quincy, an elderly ex-minesweeper of 100 tons with a single 100 h.p. Parsons diesel, eight berths, a splendid captain named Houareau, and a solid crew of Seychellois wearing the black-ribboned flat straw hats of Nelson’s time.

The Ghost Ship

As we chugged round North Point on our thirty-hour voyage to the Amirantes we were passed by the most beautiful ship in the Indian Ocean coming home from the Islands. She is a 50-ton schooner called Le Revenant, with a pale blue hull and grey sails and woodwork silvered by the sun. This is how she came by her name. As the Juanetta she was caught by the cyclone of 1951 when lying at anchor off Farquahar Island in the Aldabras. By the time the cyclone had blown itself out the remains of her were lying 300 yards inland, among the palm trees. Lloyd’s surveyor from Mauritius agreed that she was 100 per cent. loss and her owner was paid £10,000. He at once began digging a channel to the sea, refloated and rebuilt her, and after years of work she set sail again among the islands as Le Revenant. That day, as The Ghost Ship hissed quietly by with all sails set, coming into harbour with the dawn, I felt a pang of the heart such as the sight of no other ship has given me.

We carried three sucking pigs and twelve chickens to eat on the way, a super-cargo of a beautiful negress with baby, one temperamental dog and several tribes of ants, cockroaches and spiders. The other seven passengers were Mr. Frank Cook, Editor of “World Crops” (immediately dubbed “koko”) who had been sent out by the Colonial Office to advise on coconuts on which he said, and we all ultimately agreed, he is the world’s leading expert, Mr. Jefferiss, Director of Agriculture, a sardonic, wafer-thin, pipe-smoking character whose photography embellishes this series, his assistant, Mr. Guy Lyonnet, who remained silently immersed in “La Loi,” the Prix Goncourt winner, throughout the voyage, and three representatives of the Seychelles plantocracy—Mr. Douglas Baillie who, besides planting coconuts, is an administrator of note and a formidable, though tight-lipped, conchologist and stamp collector, Mr. Jimmy Oliaji , a leading Hindu merchant, heir to the Temoolgees, the “Sassoons” of the Seychelles, and a compulsive talker, and Mr. Andre Delhomme, a witty and very Parisian member of the “Grand blancs” who are alleged, with the help of the Roman Catholic Church, to rule the Seychelles from behind the scenes.

Romantic Voyage

In this good company I wallowed, at six knots, 150 miles across the ocean to Alphonse, just south of the Amirante group, and thence to Poivre and Desroches and so back to Mahé and the blessings of iced drinks and water closets. It was a wonderful, romantic voyage through the squalls and doldrums to lost coral islands—the endless chunkachunkachunk of the diesel, the skimming following sooty terns, boobies and shearwaters, the death-flap of the bonitoes, king fish and tuna on deck and the subsequent stench of the salted flesh drying in the sun, the varying but always sad cloudscapes that strung along our horizons and had always so strung, through the ages of pterodactyls, pirates and U-boats. And then, from time to time, the smudge on the horizon that grew into a coral atoll, the pirogue out through the reef and the ride back through the surf, the clear sea bottom aflash with life and colour, the jump to land on the wet sand and the huddle of palm-thatched houses with the central boat-house with the tall white cross which also acts as a guide through the reef on its roof. There would be brief public relations with the local manager and his family, the rude discomfort of the earth closet and the brief ease of the blood-heat water in the bath house, and then, while the other’s went seriously about their work, I would talk to the fishermen about their local treasure myth and then put on my mask and get my face under the sea and away from the roasting sun and escape to the sergeant majors and the bat fish, the globe fish and the morays and compare, greatly to its disadvantage, the underbelly of the Indian Ocean with the underbelly of the Caribbean. (The Governor, something of a cartoonist, subsequently lampooned this favourite hobby of mine.)

It was a wonderful, simple voyage which scraped off the civilised scales and parasites and hurled you back fifty, a hundred years. Wallowing through the doldrums with a queasy stomach and sucking pig and 60 degree beer for dinner and with only the blazing southern Cross and the symmetrical jewels of Orion’s Belt to think about is a good therapy for Strontium 90, and the future of England and the world—let alone one’s own private puzzles.

Captain Houareau

I spent much time with the captain, a huge man with a feminine voice and feet that hurt him so much that. he bathed them for half an hour every morning in the deck pump. Captain Houareau is a brilliant navigator and he and the De Quincy are just what you need if you are after doubloons. He knows all the stories, has his own ideas and has not lost faith in Treasure as a real thing.

How real is treasure in the Seychelles? To my great surprise it is more real than you might think. First of all you have to differentiate between what the locals call “Le Grand Trésor” and “Le Petit Trésor.” It is a logical definition. The captain of the ship, Le Grand Corsair, had of course the Big Treasure in chests in his cabin. He slept on them. Traditionally his leather-bound chests contained pieces of eight, Maria Theresa thalers, doubloons and Louis D’or. There were also ropes of pearls and, as inevitably as the “hundred grand” in American thrillers, a richly jewelled cross. (This features prominently in the Wilkins Treasure in search of which we are bound.) In due course, when the going got hard or he got old, the captain would work out his hiding-place on a remote island, pick out an identifiable hiding-place, mark it by physical features and the stars and then get his treasure ashore, bury it and murder the witnesses. This must have been difficult. My ship is lying off a coral atoll surmounted by two humps probably called “Les Tetons.” I take bearings and make my plan, perhaps obscured by clues and traps—childish ones, for I am not very well educated—and then I get fifty of my sixty crew dead drunk. (But how do I keep my boat’s crew sober? How do I lull their suspicions? These things are difficult among criminals, each with his own secrets and suspicions, in a 500-ton ship.) And then my heavy chests are borne over the side into the whaler and we pull for the shore, our oars muffled with sacking, and I leave my ship without a watch. (Who is my second in command? How do I explain my actions to him?) We come to the spot. We carry these heavy chests up above the tide-line to the cave, of the big rocks, or the single palm tree (so soon to be blown down) and under my directions we dig. How do I keep them at it while I anxiously examine my turnip-watch, the-stars, the lifeless ship lying offshore, on which one among the rum-soaked crew may soon revive and watch the swaying lanterns ashore? Then the hole is dug and the chests lowered in.

Security Problem

I have single-shot pistols, perhaps four of them, though that in itself would have aroused suspicions. There were no revolvers in those days and the labour force, for the rowing and the digging, could not have been less than six. And when the work is done and the hole covered in, I shoot the men and we set sail. But the next morning? Where is La Barbe, the second mate? What has happened to Le Cossu, Simon le Grand, L’Espagnol, L’Homme-singe, Petit Phillippe? Did not someone hear the sound of oars last night, see lights ashore? Can I silence these murmurings with a torrent of oaths, with a threatening plank run out over the heaving stern?

I don’t know the answers to any of these questions. The security problem of burying heavy treasure is to me the greatest argument against the “Grand Trésor.”

But I can more easily comprehend the hiding of the Petit Trésor which every man on the ship had round his waist or hidden in the wooden walls of his ship. These little treasures were bags full of gold coins which were every man’s portion. To get them ashore and bury them in a water jar would not have been too difficult. There was always fear of one’s shipmates and of defeat in battle to spur one on. But even then one can see the shifty, ever-watchful eyes of one’s “best friends” and one can feel the treasure-guilt and guile that must have sailed in these small, desperate ships.

Clues to Treasure

Houareau, captain of the De Quincy, told me the story of one such Petit Trésor. He told me how it had been hidden and found and of the way the finder had got it away from the treasure island and through the customs at Port Victoria. Houareau had carried it for this man, not long ago, in 1936. And the man had got the treasure away to France and had lived on it.

I was to hear of other such treasures before I came back to the Wilkins Grand Trésor. I am told by a solid enough witness, for instance, that there is one on the island of Praslin at this moment and that the finder has baked the gold, which is in bars, into loaves of bread which sit innocently on the shelves of his larder. And, if you want Captain Houareau’s own best bet, it is the island of Astove, in the Aldabra group, and a headland called Pointe aux Canons where you can see the sunken cannon of a Portuguese, ship below the sea. However, these are unproven. The treasure trove of 1936 is fact.

NEXT SUNDAY: Ian Fleming meets some of the remarkable inhabitants of the islands and hears of strange treasure hunts—and finds—in recent years.

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What a fabulous, fantastic and bizarre tale.

And actually it’s interesting also on another level, reflecting on Fleming and his lifelong fascination with treasure and wealth. The opening anecdote tells of this priceless find - that turned out to be butter - and how the nine year old dreamed briefly of a life of fabulous wealth. Not realising then, and not even now as he recounts it, that he’s already rich beyond the means and imaginations of most of his contemporaries.

Here’s a boy in the summer of 1917 spending his holidays at a seaside resort and dreaming of quitting his boarding school with the riches he found. A boy who’s already used to ordering staff and whose wet dreams consist of Cadbury flakes for now.

Of course, at nine years none of us can claim to be a rounded character. But here is a theme that would follow Fleming all his life, the fascination, the fixation on wealth, on its magnetic power and the dreams it allows one to dream. Even the already rich shareholders of this treasure hunt. Even the already rich Ian Fleming, who can afford to chase around the world at the drop of a hat to observe the even richer in their pursuit of more riches.

I think it’s this part of Fleming’s personality that lead him in the end to write down all the daydreams he must have lived in since early boyhood.

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Spot on! Ernest Cuneo wrote that money was Fleming’s “basic drive” and that “he desperately wanted to make money, big money, in the style of the banking house of Fleming founded by his grandfather.” But Cuneo also wrote that Fleming was “a knight errant searching for the lost Round Table and possibly the Holy Grail, and unable to reconcile himself that Camelot was gone and still less that it had probably never existed.”

So I think the mercenary and romantic sides of Fleming’s character were equally entranced by the idea of buried pirate treasure. His romantic imagination endowed the idea of extreme wealth with unlimited possibilities. And yet in his books he also shows ambivalence: the Bond villains are examples of wealth and power gone haywire, and Bond himself furiously turns down Draco’s million pounds.

Incidentally, I think a treasure hunt in the Seychelles would be a terrific basis for a future Bond film.

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