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.”