TREASURE HUNT IN EDEN—2
Butterflies and Beachcombers (Sunday Times, August 24, 1958)
By Ian Fleming
Continuing his account of a recent visit to the Seychelles where a search is going on for pirates’ buried treasure, reputed to be worth £120 million, Ian Fleming describes some remarkable finds—of treasure and personalities.
The island of Desroches, where treasure was found in 1936, is a dot in the Indian Ocean just east of the Amirante group and about 120 miles from Mahé, the chief Island of the Seychelles. It was a great rendezvous of the Blackbirders, and, long after the abolition of slavery, the remnants of the “Ebony Trade” continued to flourish with the outlying islands, using Desroches as an entrépôt . Even today you can see the ruins of a great underground cellar into which a nineteenth-century owner of the island used to herd his slaves whenever a sail was sighted. On a day at the end of April I stood on the bridge of the fairly good ship De Quincy and watched Desroches grow from a smudge on the horizon to a Robinson Crusoe paradise of brilliant green palm trees and dazzling sand while the captain told me the story.
Captain Houareau had been a young sailor in one of the inter-island schooners at the time, and the overseer of Desroches, which was owned by one of the “grands blancs” of Mahé, had been a man remembered simply as “Jules.” One day in 1936 the schooner had visited Desroches to take off Jules who had suddenly and inexplicably thrown up his job. The reason he had done so, as was subsequently discovered, was a good one. He had found a rich treasure of gold coins (small gold coins, his Desroches mistress was later to say) and he was escaping with them to France. The discovery had come about like this.
Search at Dawn
One day a labourer working on the pier at which I was soon to land had come upon the first links of a rusty chain. He had followed the chain a little way through the sand in which it lay deeply buried, but gave up when he had got out of his depth towards the reef. He had then reported his find to Jules, the overseer. Jules waited until dawn when all his small labour force was busy inland husking the day’s quota (today 400 nuts—wage three shillings) of coconuts and he had then followed the chain out towards the reef in a pirogue. At the end of the chain he found an ancient metal cauldron which he had somehow managed to heave into his boat. When he got this home and forced off the sealed lid he found a small fortune in gold coin.
Jules was a good carpenter and he spent the next few weeks building three stout wooden trunks with false bottoms. Then he packed his clothes, and, having sent his resignation in to Mahé by a passing fishing boat, he set sail in the schooner of which Houareau was one of the crew. “I helped carry those trunks into the customs shed,” said Captain Houareau dolefully, “and each one weighed a ton. The customs men were suspicious but short of smashing the trunks they could do nothing. Although I remember they even searched his accordion. The very next day this Jules sailed for France in a Norwegian ship.”
“What happened to him?”
“Ah, he was a sly one, that Jules. When the true story leaked out through the ménagère he had forsaken on Desroches a certain Seychellois called Michel got together all his money and his family’s money and sailed for France to beard this Jules and find out where the treasure was. He thought there might be some gold left. Jules sold him a plan, a true plan of the treasure place, and Michel came back to Desroches. He found the chain where the plan said he would, and he followed it out to the reef and pulled up the end. But of course there was no treasure. Jules had taken it all.”
The Captain laughed hugely at Michel’s stupidity.
When we landed, I asked the present owner of Desroches, Monsieur André Delhomme, who had sailed with us, if the story was true. He said it was and he added these details.
Jules had lived well off his treasure and had married a well-connected French woman. Through her he came to know Louis Renault, head of the Renault companies. Renault was impressed with Jules and allowed him to purchase some of the privately-owned Renault stock with his gold pieces. Jules lived happily ever after until two years ago, when he is believed to have died in Brittany.
Hunting for Cowries
While the coconut experts strode round the tiny island I got down under the milk-warm sea and hunted for cowries, of which every turned rock yielded two or three.
Collecting shells is one of the minor treasure industries of the Seychelles; for the islands are astonishingly rich, particularly in cowries, of whose 164 species no fewer than sixty-four are found in these waters. Everybody, from the Chief of Police downwards, has his hoard, and everyone has his secret beach.
Later I was to hear scraps of conversation like the following: “Found an odd-looking Valkyrie the other day. Must find time to give her a tooth-count. Might be a sub-species.” “There he was sitting by his pirogue with a pile, an absolute pile of Talparia Argus in front of him—you know, the pheasant cowrie. Ten dollars at least in the catalogues. And you won’t believe it, but he’d smashed the whole blooming lot to pieces for bait!”
But it’s a peaceful occupation and that afternoon I made a modest start with two of the beautiful Tiger cowries that are twice as big as golf balls and that shine out from the rock crevices like great jewels. Then at dusk we were rowed on board again to a beautiful, lilting rowing-song with the refrain “Oh Marie, qui a des jolies tetons” [“Oh Mary, who has such pretty breasts”] and sailed through the night and the next day home to Mahé.
Tales of Adventure
We had previously visited Alphonse, south of the Amirantes, and Poivre, a member of that group, and at each one there had been tales of adventure and treasure. On Alphonse, for example, there still lay in the palm-thatched boat-house a tiny coracle of boards in which a Canadian had sailed 1,500 miles with nothing but seagulls and flying fish to eat. He had been sailing alone round the world and had been wrecked on the Chagos group. From the remains of his boat he had built this little six foot tub and had sailed vaguely in the direction of Africa to land, by God’s grace, when he was hardly a day away from death, on Alphonse. If he is alive today he may care to know that his little coracle is still preserved and his courage venerated by the fifty inhabitants of Alphonse.
At Poivre, Mr. Baillie, one of the leading English planters on Mahé, told me of the lost treasure of the German raider Koenigsberg of the 1914-18 war. The Koenigsberg used the vast landlocked lagoon of Aldabra as her hiding-place. She was sunk there by the Royal Navy, but when her wreck was searched for the gold coin she had been forced to use as currency for supplies, there was no trace of the treasure. Three years ago, the Seychelles Government put the leases of Aldabra and the not-far-distant island of Cosmoledo out to tender and they were surprised to get many offers from Germany. It transpired that the Koenigsberg treasure is a favourite myth with the Germans and there are many secret maps giving its location. None of the German offers was accepted, but two years ago a party of Germans in an Italian schooner landed on Cosmoledo, carried out a quick dig and hurried away. Perhaps they were as lucky as Jules.
I was later to find that treasure is as much the topic of everyday conversation in the Seychelles as are the football pools in England, and that secret digs are the order of the day. Just before I arrived, a citizen had written feverishly to the Governor asking that, on the next visit of one of H.M. ships, she should be instructed to fire a salvo from her main armament at a particular rock-face the writer would designate. If she would do this, and lay bare the riches beneath, he would go halves with the Government.
Gruesome Discovery
On our long voyage home to Mahé through the doldrums, Captain Houareau told me of his own private treasure hunt—a grisly tale. Five years or so ago he had been sailing north of the Amirantes when, off the African Banks, which rise just above the surface of the sea, he was hailed by some excited fishermen. The night before, a big cargo ship, wearing so far as they could see no flag, had hove to off the banks and a boat had come ashore carrying two officers and four Chinamen. The Chinamen had carried a heavy chest ashore and this they had buried under the supervision of the officers. Then the boat had been hoist inboard again and the ship had departed. Hardly had he heard the end of the story than Captain Houareau was ashore with a spade and a machete. Sure enough, the edge of a box soon appeared and when he cut through the wood, his machete rang on metal. It was lead. He cut a hole in it and a dreadful odour emerged. It was a coffin.
When Houareau despondently told the story to his owner in Mahé the man said, “Houareau. You are a bigger fool than I thought. Of course it is a treasure and they have thrown some meat on top of it to put people off the scent (so to speak). Go back, dig up the treasure and we will go halves.”
More excited than ever, Houareau ploughed back across the ocean to the African banks and this time he took the whole lid off the coffin. Captain Houareau looked at me delightedly. “And there was gold, gold, gold.” He held up three fingers. “Three gold teeth in the mouth of a poor old Chinaman endormi.”
Back in Mahé I ascertained that it was still the closed season for my own, the Wilkins treasure hunt, and that Wilkins had himself retired to the neighbouring island of Praslin but would be back in a few days to begin operations. To pass the time I visited Silhouette, three hours’ sail away, and the remarkable man, Monsieur Henri Dauban, who is its “king.” Over a dish of jugged bat (yes, Pteropus Celaeno, the flying fox. Not recommended) Henri Dauban told me a series of vertiginously tall tales.
He had been a card-carrying Communist, he had mounted and ridden on a forty foot Chagrin shark and helped it to scratch the parasites off its “shagreen,” he had the only real treasure in the Seychelles, a butterfly that lived on the summit of his thousand foot peak and was worth £2,000 per specimen, he had represented England in the Olympic Games. This seemed a verifiable tale. I stopped the flow and asked for details. This is the story Henri Dauban told me.
In 1924 he had left the Seychelles and gone to England to learn about world commodities and he had worked on essential oils for a famous Mincing Lane firm. He lived in a boarding house in the suburbs adjacent to a sports ground owned by one of the big five banks. One day, looking out of his window, he observed to his great surprise a group of young men “throwing the harpoon” in a distant corner of the ground. They were doing it very badly, getting no distance, and “the harpoon” was flying crooked. Dauban had fished with the harpoon since he was a child and he couldn’t understand why these men were practising so badly and yet so seriously, so he went down and asked what they were trying to do.
The Javelin Thrower
“We are practising throwing the javelin for the Olympic Games in Paris,” explained one of the young men. “Then England will not win,” said Dauban. “I also can throw the harpoon. May I try?” They allowed him to and he threw the harpoon straight and true and twice as far as any of them had achieved. He did this as if standing in a pirogue and without taking any run.
The young men were very excited and told Dauban that he must come with them to Twickenham on the following Saturday for the semi-finals of the eliminating trials. Dauban laughed and said he would if he got a proper invitation. The young men arranged this. Dauban won easily at Twickenham and again, on the following Saturday, at Wembley. On these occasions instead of throwing his harpoon as if he was standing in a boat he copied the standard run. Everyone was delighted and in due course he received the official invitation to represent England at Paris. No he hadn’t won. The Finns and the Norwegians were far too good for him, but he hadn’t disgraced England. He had come in fairly near the top.
I took this delightful story, as I had taken the others, with a cubic metre of salt. When I got back to England I consulted the Olympic records. It was quite true, Henri Dauban had represented England in the javelin in Paris in 1924. And now what about the Communism and the shark and the butterfly?
The Communism I cannot check, but the Chagrin shark [Whale Shark?] is in fact a docile creature and not carnivorous. It occasionally capsizes boats by rubbing against them to remove its parasites. As for the butterfly, was this perhaps the unique Cirrocrista Mulleralis Legrand captured by the eminent French entomologist Legrand? His visit to the Seychelles in 1956 on behalf of the Museum de Paris was the most recent of a long list of scientific expeditions, starting with Charles Darwin, who said that the islands should be made a natural history preserve. Each scientist has noted some new species in the rich variety of flora and fauna that are endemic to the Seychelles.
Having said a reluctant goodbye to Silhouette and its local Baron Munchausen I returned to Mahé and spent a few days meeting local notabilities and eccentrics while waiting for a boat to take me over to Praslin to beard Wilkins, the treasure hunter, in his den. There are not as many true eccentrics in the Seychelles as some writers would have us believe. There are innumerable wafer-thin “Colonels” living on five hundred a year with their ménagères and they are the subject of much gossip, but in fact they are uninteresting people, the flotsam and jetsam of our receding Empire. But there is a crusty and excellent Knight of the British Empire who acts as a public scribe to the local malcontents and unsplits their infinitives when they wish to have a bash at Government—the national sport among the tiny plantocracy and small middle class. There is the ninety-year-old “father” of the Seychelles who claims, and can name, 167 illegitimate children. And then there is, of course, Sharkey.
Sharkey’s Club
Sharkey Clark is a most valuable citizen of Port Victoria and is held, except by the Roman Catholic Bishop, in general esteem. He came to the Seychelles, with a 100 per cent. disability pension from the Canadian Navy, as engineer of the Cumulus, Ommaney’s C.D.C. fishery research vessel. Today, with the help of an iron-muscled bouncer named Bob, he runs “Sharkey’s Club,” where the visiting seaman pays a shilling entrance fee and can then carouse till dawn and be certain that Sharkey’s machine will get him back on board his ship in time. Successive Governors have been grateful for this well-oiled safety valve in the town.
Only once did Sharkey Clark nearly come to grief. There had been a reception at Government House under the last regime, and Sharkey, who had been invited, consumed, under the strain of polite conversation, fourteen glasses of champagne (the exact details of this imbroglio have been lovingly preserved). In due course he and several other guests proceeded to the Seychelles Club, the social Mecca of Port Victoria and an agreeable place.
Sharkey, needing to “freshen up,” retired into the shower room opposite the long bar. There was no towel and all Sharkey could find to dry himself with was a red, white and blue cloth lying on the floor. Draped in this, Sharkey, a short man with steely blue eyes, a limp and a huge paunch, found he made a fetching picture. Certain that others would agree, he threw open the door and proceeded to do the dance of the seven veils before the applauding company.
But one man, prominent in the French community, did not applaud but ran tight-lipped to the telephone and rang up the French Consul. The flag of La Belle France was being insulted! The French Consul hurried to the scene—high words, uproar, scandal! Passions, always rather near the surface in local Anglo-French differences, boiled through the days. Sharkey must resign. The committee must resign. All of French blood would certainly resign.
Sir Michael Nethersole, leader of the British community, who is usually appealed to for a settlement to every contretemps, mildly inquired why, if the French set so much store by their flag, they left it lying around the floor of the washroom. Anyway, where was this flag? Let it be produced. The flag was produced. Consternation, relief, apologies given and accepted! It was not the French flag. It was square and not oblong. It was the signal letter T belonging to the yacht club. Sharkey was saved, so was La Belle France, and the Colony sat back, exhilarated and refreshed.
But all this is beachcomber history, the backstairs stuff of any tropical colony, and I chronicle it only as an appendix to the local lore handed down by Ommaney, Mockford, Waugh and others. And yet I could convey no picture of these treasure islands without explaining that the bizarre is the norm of a visitor’s life and the vivid highlights of the Seychelles are in extraordinary contrast to the creeping drabness, the lowest common-denominator atmosphere that is rapidly engulfing us in Britain.
For example: Here the cathedral clock strikes twice, the second time two minutes after the first, for those who didn’t hear it the first time. It is a criminal offence to carry more than one coconut. With two, you will be stopped on suspicion of praedial larceny.
In the Leper Colony
Trouble brews in the leper colony on Curieuse Island. One of the staff hates the Superintendent and also hates Leper Annie, an inmate who rejects his advances. He has written a gris-gris (black magic) letter to the head gris-gris man on the neighbouring Praslin, detailing exactly how he wants these two to die. Foolishly he has signed the letter. The gris-gris man will have none of it and takes the letter to the local schoolmaster. Who is to handle the case? The Chief of Police, or the Director of Medical Services who administers the leper colony?
That’s what I mean, it’s an odd sort of place.
Now, armed with the background to the tale and the basic facts, it was time to beard the great treasure hunter himself, and I took passage in the schooner Janetta for Praslin where Wilkins was said to be girding his loins for the coming open season on Mahé. It was a false trail. Wilkins had left the day before for Mahé. We had almost passed each other at sea.
Faced with an exasperating three days on Praslin, there was only one thing to do—visit the famous “Vallais de Mai,” home of the notorious Coco de Mer palm and the unique black parrot and the authentic, or almost, site of the Garden of Eden. After that I would sit down in one of the excellent but primitive beach bungalows of the “hotel” and get the history of the treasure hunt as far as I knew it, down on paper.
Praslin is a mountainous island about half as big as the Isle of Wight. At the southern end there is a saddle between peaks and this is the Vallais de Mai. It is a slow, very hot two hours’ walk to traverse the-Garden of Eden, or half an hour if you run through it as the natives often do two or three times a day. The walk has often been described in poetic flights of varying emotional temperature and I will commend to you once again Ommaney’s Shoals of Capricorn and myself be brief. It is a strange and beautiful walk into pre-history through a dark silent forest of giant palms. The only sounds are the trees’ softly chattered comment on your passage and the occasional distant whistle of the parrots. I was later to see several of these in the distance. They are sooty grey, very wild and have never been domesticated.
Nothing lives under the trees except one of the world’s largest snails—Helix Studeriana—but the golden-barred gloom is full of the imagined shapes and shadows of those monsters one knows from museums. The great trunks of the trees rise straight as gun-barrels to the green shell-bursts a hundred feet above your head and above them again the broken patches of blue sky seem to belong to quite a different, a more modern world of familiar people and familiar shapes. Here, down below, you have seen none of it before and you gaze with curiosity at these elephantine vegetables, many of them over 600 years old, and think how odd it must have been then.
Sense of Sin
Everyone who has visited the Vallais de Mai has been struck by the strange sense of original sin that hangs in this secret place. It comes partly from the grotesque impudicity of the huge fruit of the female tree—the largest fruit in the world—and from the phallic shape of the inflorescence of the male, but also from the strong aroma of animal sweat the trees exude. The natives will not go there at night-time. When it is dark, they say that the trees march down to the sea and bathe and then march back up the valley and make massive love under the moon. I can well believe it.
I consulted the Director of Medical Services about the fruit’s alleged stimulant properties. He averred that not only had it none but equally it had no nutritive value. For myself I may say that, well iced and cut into cubes, the firm jellied fruit of the double nut has a milky transparency, is glutinous to the palate like the cubes of turtle fat in turtle soup, and tastes of nothing at all.
In due course I found my way out on to the well-beaten mud path. Where I came out there was a piece of paper on the ground. It was a page from a child’s exercise book—clearly a message to me from Eve. Repeated ten times down the page in a clear, young hand, were the words “Le chagrin la menait et elle versait des torrents de larmes amères.” [“Led by sorrow, she poured torrents of bitter tears.”] Puzzling over the significance of these melancholy words I walked thoughtfully down the mountain and back into the world.
NEXT SUNDAY: Gold or No Gold?