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.