Ian Fleming's Adventure Journalism

[Revelator]

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.

[Revelator]

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.”

[Revelator]

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.

[Revelator]

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.

[Dustin]

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.

[Revelator]

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.

[Dustin]

I suppose this discrepancy - Fleming being already well off by any reasonable standards, yet feeling himself to be woefully underfunded - must be read and understood in the context of his family.

The wealth of the Flemings came only from Fleming’s grandfather; they were considered ‘nouveau riche’, and however hard Fleming’s mother networked to fit into high society, being chummy with Churchill’s wife and whatnot, that feeling of not coming from ‘old money’ she never managed to escape. Also, and especially perhaps, not with her younger son whom she considered at once deserving better and underachieving.

And since Fleming never really was able to escape his mother’s influence - she didn’t remarry, so she kept her hands on the bulk of the family estate while her children got allowances - he paradoxically always felt poor. Or rather, poorer than he thought he ought to be by rights.

And while this absurd display of ‘poorness in wealth’ made Fleming no doubt a deeply unhappy character for most of his life, it’s likely also the main reason that he wrote what he did. We owe our raison d’être to the dysfunctional family dynamics of the early 20th century upper crust.

[Revelator]

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?

[Revelator]

TREASURE HUNT IN EDEN—3

Gold or No Gold? (Sunday Times, August 31, 1958)

By Ian Fleming

Concluding his account of the search for pirate’s treasure, reputed to be worth $120 million, in the Seychelles, Ian Fleming describes his visit to the hunter and the site where strange clues have been found.

With a couple of days to waste before I finally met Wikins the treasure hunter, on the main island of Mahé, I sat down in one of the excellent but primitive beach bungalows of the “hotel” on Praslin Island and put down on paper what I had been able to piece together of the ten-year history of the treasure hunt. My sources are such documents as are available and the evidence of reliable witnesses. I subsequently checked these with Wilkins himself.

The treasure prospectus of 1955 was issued under the impeccable auspices of Messrs. Hamilton, Harrison and Mathews, Nairobi solicitors, and Messrs. Gill and Johnson, a leading firm of Kenya accountants. The result was an immediate subscription of £24,000 by some 400 shareholders. Since then, single shares have been bought for £4,000 when the market was good—that is when it leaked out that Wilkins had found Pegasus in the tenth hemisphere or whatever—but today I dare say the market is not so firm. But this, as they say on Wall Street “should not be construed as an attempt to induce the public to subscribe for shares” and I personally have no holding.

The Palace Sentry

Reginald/Herbert Cruise Wilkins was born forty-five years ago near Bideford, in Devon, of good yeoman stock. He decided to join the Army and went into the Coldstream Guards. His only military claim to fame is having been a sentry outside Buckingham Palace. In the middle of 1940 he was discharged from the Coldstream Guards as unfit and somehow found his way to East Africa where he became a white hunter. Later, in 1949, he went to the Seychelles and dabbled with the idea of starting a shark-fishery and meanwhile settled down in a bungalow adjacent to the present treasure site. The whole area was the property of a Miss Berthe Morel, subsequently to become the wife of a famous Seychellois, Mr. Arthur Savy.

Mrs. Arthur Savy died two years ago aged eighty-four, having, for the last ten years of her life, kept her coffin slung from the roof of her sitting-room. She is very important in the treasure story. She owned the famous cryptogram and documents which Wilkins is using today and she herself had hunted the treasure on and off for over forty years. Labour is cheap in the Seychelles and to keep a labour force digging and wall-making all that time would not have been too expensive a business. She also owned the land on which the treasure “is.” Wilkins quite naturally met this elderly lady and was several times asked up to her house for tea. On each occasion, he tells me, as he came into the room, Mrs. Savy appeared to shove some papers hastily under the tea-tray . This would have seemed to my suspicious mind as something like a “come-on,” but not to Wilkins, and in due course he “came-on” and asked what Mrs. Savy was hiding.

Then reluctantly the story of the Levasseur treasure came out and his papers were revealed. Wilkins believes they were originally stolen from Government archives in Mauritius where Levasseur was held prisoner before going to the gallows in France.

I asked if this story had been checked in Mauritius. The answer was no. Wilkins, fired with the story, cabled for his mother to come with the idea that he would invest a hundred or two in a hunt for the treasure. (In all he and his mother spent £6,700 between 1949 and 1955 when they went to the public for more funds.)

The Diviner

Wilkins then sat down and “deciphered” the cryptogram. Having done this to his satisfaction he was convinced that the treasure lay almost under his feet and he went back to Kenya, his head, as mine would have been, stuffed with dreams. As soon as he landed, and as if the Fates had paid for the insertion, he saw in a local paper an advertisement offering to divine copper, gold and diamond mines. Colonel Hennessy, a member of the British Society of Water Diviners, was a Eurasian, born in Bangalore, and had just ceased being Embarkation Intelligence Officer in Bombay. He listened to Wilkins, sent for his lawyer, Mervyn James Eversfield Morgan, barrister-at-law, of Nairobi and the three of them drew up a partnership deed dated July 18, 1949. Very soon they went off to the Seychelles. Sure enough, Colonel Hennessy’s pendulum swung like mad over the treasure site, whirled clockwise here and twirled anti-clockwise there, and the Big Dig was on.

I have seen a copy of Colonel Hennessy’s official report on his divinations and this is a typical extract: “Plot V.: Cavity plus, Gas plus, Fresh water, Salt water, Diamonds and Sapphires, Emerald, Ruby, Brass, Lead, Gold coins, Silk, Steel plus, Copper plus, semi-precious stones, Whale oil, Pearl, Parchment.” — Forgetting the “gas plus,” a pretty attractive inventory.

The partnership lasted for something over a year and what a year it was! They had found it. They hadn’t. Now they were on the threshold, and a nurse must be in constant attendance at the site in case Wilkins had heart failure when he saw the gold. The treasure hunters solemnly went to the Government and asked that a cruiser should stand by and be prepared to repel the gold-crazy populace and transport the treasure away to the vaults of the Bank of England.

Hunters Fall Out

But the emotional pressure on the partnership was too great, and at the end of this time the treasure hunters fell out and Wilkins brought a case for “Rescission and Nullity of Deed” against Hennessy and a certain J.P.G. Harris, a Kenya lawyer who seems somehow to have replaced Morgan as Hennessy’s attorney. It was a complicated case; injunctions and adjournments provided handsome fees for members of the Seychelles Bar until, in April, 1951, Chief Justice Lyon declared the case to have lapsed and it faded out. Hennessy, Morgan and Harris then left the stage and their connection with the treasure hunt seems to have ended.

From 1951 to 1955 Wilkins dug furiously in, under and around the giant rock to which he grandly refers as “the glacis.” The only event of note was his success in involving Government in the affair. The Government investment was a small one. In exchange for two full shares they provided some £750-worth of labour and other services by the Public Works Department, but the agreement, dated July 19, 1954, did allow Wilkins and subsequently less respectable people to say quite truthfully that the British Government had come in as a junior partner. However, the small subsidy of 1954 was only a temporary stop-gap. Pumps became necessary and Wilkins had exhausted every penny of his own and much of his mother’s money. There was nothing for it but to give up some shares in the giant treasure in exchange for a modest amount of ready cash. Wilkins went to Kenya, the prospectus was issued and in due course he was back on the site with the necessary equipment.

Now the hunt was again on in earnest and the impatient shareholders in Kenya, thirsting for news, despatched as their representative a certain Colonel J. Kent whose reports on progress caused the market in the treasure shares to veer wildly over the next two years. This was not Colonel Kent’s fault, but Wilkins became more and more unhappy and fell out with Colonel Kent at the end of 1957.

Deliberate Traps

I have read all the reports to shareholders and to me they make fascinating reading as this or that “clue” is discovered, is run excitedly to earth and in the end turns out to have been a false trail, or, as Wilkins insists, a deliberate trap set by Levasseur. Alas, there is no space for them here.

East of Longitude 10 and South of Latitude 35 (that is approximately East and South of Switzerland), is I reckon the septic zone, as opposed to the antiseptic, in which Britons are fortunate enough to live. Go farther East or farther South of these lifelines and a scratched midge bite may mean an amputation. Anyway, by the time I had explored the Seychelles and talked treasure with everyone that mattered, a small coral cut on the left shin, which I had foolishly not dabbed with Merthiolate, had become a deep festering wound and I was stuffed with medicaments, unsuspected glands were aching, and I had a mild fever. So I was already slightly airborne when I landed on Mahé and motored along the bumpy coast road towards the treasure site across the wide bay from Fairhaven, the admirable guest house in which I had the most luxurious bedroom in the Indian Ocean.

Most unusually for the Seychelles there was an occasional growl of thunder. Rain began to fall heavily and at four in the afternoon it grew dark. To my right it was low tide and, in the shallows out to the reef, the octopus fishermen were bent over the livid pools. An occasional flash of Satan’s Fire, which is more like a huge magnesium flare than our lightning, lit up the scene from time to time as if some celestial recorder wanted a photograph of my first meeting with Wilkins and, due to the gloom, was having to use flash.

I bumped and clattered round the bay, past the romantic Crusoe cottages of the Hôtel des Seychelles and the Beauvallon, where most of the keen fishermen seem to stay, and came to an unusually unkempt fishermen’s village in which all the inhabitants seemed to be suffering from pigmentation troubles. I asked the way of a piebald face and was directed onwards a hundred yards. As I pulled up at the side of the road, a skeletal white hound with elemental eyes dashed at the car with a snarl. I knew that the son of the proprietor of the land was in hospital with lockjaw. Rabies raised its dreadful head in my fevered mind. But the hound, after paying an unwelcome attention to my off front wheel, slunk away.

At the Site

The treasure site, as a treasure site, has much to recommend.it. It is well and solidly landmarked, being exactly at the western horn of the longest stretch of sand on Mahé—the mile long North West, or Beauvallon Bay. More or less directly above this point is the 2,000-foot high Mount Simpson. The site itself, at the point and below the mountain, is a giant 100-foot square elephant’s flank of granite that plunges, almost vertically down to the edge of the road and Into a small tidal bay. Levasseur would have said to himself that this cliff of granite would never be obscured by vegetation and it never has been. Somewhere beneath this 1,000-ton rock, according to Wilkins, lies the great treasure and, for all I know, he is right.

I got out of my car and walked towards a lean-to engine shed at the foot of the “glacis” (the Wilkins treasure lingo creeps up on one). Around me, for about two acres, the ground between the coconut palms looked as if it had been used for a film of the battle of the Somme. Everywhere there were craters full of greenish water, half shored-up walls, rough bits of masonry, little fortifications erected to try to keep back the sea, and the stumps of broken hoists. It was rather pathetic, as if some huge child had been playing with his spade and bucket. The engine shed, containing a well-kept Lister Diesel and a Holman Compressor, stood on the brink of a large and deep-looking crater full of water that extended round the base of the “glacis.”

Never-Smiled

A dozen coloured workers were tinkering, digging, wrestling with chunks of rock. On the edge of the crater sat a middle-aged man, dressed in a clean white shirt, blue trousers and sandals, gazing moodily at an oil slick on the surface of the pea-soup water. I introduced myself and, after dissipating sundry suspicions, we were off into Treasure Land.

Wilkins is a pleasant man. He engenders sympathy. He has steady, truthful but rather blank blue eyes in a totally unlined round face. His thin fair hair, neatly brushed back, and his modest, well-tended moustache are up to guardsman standards. He has a pleasant voice, and if he never smiled in my company, and certainly never laughed, it is perhaps because nothing he or I said amused him.

Stuff of Dreams

For the next hour it was all Andromedas and the Collarbones of Solomon (a hoary treasure puzzle I have not bothered to explore), The Golden Fleece, Pegasus and, of course, these infernal hemispheres (for which I had the good manners not to suggest there was a very much shorter word). Finally I interrupted. I pointed down into the scummy water. “Well, at least you’ve found oil,” I said encouragingly.

Wilkins’s calm eyes looked down at the rainbow slick. “It’s ambergris ," he said reverently.

Thinking “oh Lord, this is where I came in,” I said sympathetically, “What makes you think that?”

“They buried whale oil with the treasure. Must have been a lump of ambergris mixed up with it.”

“Why did they bury whale oil with the treasure?”

”To make poison gas. We’ve had to be jolly careful. They were full of tricks those chaps — always trying to lead us up the garden path into some booby trap. Here, Joe, bring the crowbar.”

A large Negro brought the crowbar and prodded into the murky depths. More oil came to the surface. I said, “Have you had the stuff tested or tried tasting it?”

“No.”

It was always so when I asked Wilkins if he had made the obvious tests. They had never been made. They might have destroyed the dream. I knelt down and dipped my finger in the stuff and tasted it. It was oil, petrol probably. I said so. I also pointed out that the gusher was about six feet away from the engines. Could someone have thrown a half empty can of oil or petrol into the pool at the end of the last dig?

“No, old man,” said Wilkins pleasantly. “Now just come and have a look at the Andromeda in the fourth hemisphere.”

We scrambled up and over the road to the sand. The tide was coming in and we had to jump for it once or twice. We walked and skipped from granite lump to granite lump. “Now you see over there, old man,” there was a vague pockmark in the rock, “that circle with the dot in the middle, that represents the sun. And there,” there was an irregular scab on the granite, “Taurus, the bull. See the horns? Now just look down.” I was standing on a ton of rock, more or less, I admit, cruciform. “That’s just one of the Andromedas. The best one, with her left leg bent, is in Kenya. Now just come over here…”

Newspapers and Government departments occasionally get letters of many pages in which this sort of stuff is mixed up with the future of Palestine, or a demand for a higher pension. In my rather feverish state, under the dark livery sky, Wilkins’ richly studded, evenly spoken chronicle of his discoveries began to work upon me like one of these letters and I became desperate to escape. Fortunately rain stopped play. It came down in heavy straight rods out of the doom-fraught sky. With a babble of thanks and a promise to come again I made a dash for my car, whirled it round and was off back through the looking glass.

Looking back at our first of many meetings, I am sure I am doing Wilkins an injustice, or at the very least abusing his hospitable reception of me, in writing this highly charged stuff. My fever did not abate and the next day I was in hospital having a mega-shot of penicillin and giant snacks of aureomycin, and I have a scar on my shin as big as a doubloon to show for it. So it was not until a week later that, more soberly, I had my further talks with Wilkins and I will try to keep the purple out of my prose in recounting the gist of them.

The Clues

Wilkins is certainly no slouch. When I saw him again he had already pumped out the site (“2,000 gallons a minute, old man”) and a solid looking four foot high wall was marching out into the shallows. “I’m going to curve it round like this,” explained Wilkins drawing with his finger in the sand. “That’ll keep the sea back while I dig under the road.”

“Why under the road?”

“Just have a look over here. We’re in the tenth (I think it was) hemisphere and I’ve found the star and the circle. And dead on the bearing at that.”

I followed him reluctantly and waited with some impatience while a workman dug round the base of a large granite boulder and fetched sea water to clean the exhibit

There indeed were two clearly outlined circles or wheels in the rock and these could not possibly, I think, have been cut into granite by anything but human agency. Now suddenly I began to doubt my own scepticism. Certainly a great number of Wilkins’s “clues” were wishful, but now it seemed to me that at any rate some of the rock markings I had been shown, and perhaps many more I had not bothered to look at, could have been made by man.

“How are you going to get under the road?”

“Have to get Public Works to agree and then build them a bridge, sixty foot, steel and concrete.”

“That’s going to cost a lot of money.”

Wilkins shrugged. “I’ve cabled for Jabby Trent (the latest liaison man with the shareholders) and he’s coming by the next boat. Perhaps we can make do with a trestle bridge.”

Wilkins’s Labour

When he is working on the site, Wilkins lives in a neat little two-roomed bungalow some fifty yards from the engine shed. We sat down and Wilkins spread out the documents from a bulging briefcase. These all looked very much like what such documents might look like. The basic cryptogram written in ink is on a piece of cloth (not vellum, as Wilkins thinks) without any margins.

I asked Wilkins if he had submitted the cryptogram to any expert cryptographer. No — because after four months’ hard work he had been able to decipher the puzzle himself. He showed me his translation. It was full of compass bearings and Greek mythology. The last line read: “Make diagonal at 82 degrees — here is the gold.”

The translation had been in French. Wilkins had known no French . He had had to teach himself the language. I picked up the photostat of a kind of chessboard with the German words “Gut,” “Böse” and “Mittel” (good, evil, middling) neatly scattered among the squares opposite the signs of the Zodiac written down the right-hand margin. Wilkins said indulgently, “They suddenly broke into Prussian.” Had he unravelled this one? “No. That one got me stumped.” There were various cryptic letters in spidery French and some aged correspondence with the Bibliothéque Nationale in Paris.

There was no particular coherence about the papers and no history of their origin or details of previous work on the treasure. I asked Wilkins if he had been able to find out anything about Levasseur himself. Had he been a man of education? Was there any reason to suppose he had been acquainted with Greek mythology? According to Wilkins, he had taken four years to bury the treasure. Why had he taken so long and made such an incredible rigmarole out of it when a few true bearings mixed up with some false ones would have served as well?

Wilkins had no satisfactory answers to these questions and there is no reason he should have. He was quite certain the treasure was there. He had believed it for nearly ten years and he still believed it. He intends to go on looking for it until the money (£9,000 remains) runs out or until his lease of the property expires in 1961. His untroubled blue eyes gazed calmly into mine. We called it a day.

His Armour

I called on Wilkins twice more to try to sort out the jumble of facts and phantasy that jostled each other round and round in my head. I heard the story of the numerous betrayals and attempts at sabotage he had suffered, his persecution by gris-gris (he had suffered mysterious poisoning; showers of stones had descended on his bungalow), the accusations of jobbery in his shares and, at no time throughout this catalogue of slings and arrows, did his even, good-humoured tone of voice become disturbed. It was as if his faith in the treasure had armoured him against all misfortune, or as if he disregarded every adversary except the great pirate who had set his puzzle and laid his traps 200 years before expressly for a man called Reginald Herbert Cruise Wilkins, ex-sentry at Buckingham Palace.

On each occasion I managed to see more clues. There was the copy of the original treasure “map” which, alas, I was not permitted to transcribe. This was a simple affair—a few curved lines, a few straight ones, and some groups of numerals. It looked very haphazard to me but Wilkins explained it with a few airy phrases involving the compass and the heavens. I dare say that if anything among the papers is in fact a guide to a treasure, this map might be the most significant. It looked to me more like the sort of thing a pirate of 1720 might have drawn—no frills and certainly no Andromeda. I was also shown some interesting fragments of glazed earthenware jars or phials. One of them bore on its base the following inscription in what seemed to me appropriately antique black lettering:

Pommade de Sain Bois
de Ls DUBOUAIS
Me LECHAUX Phen
Succr BORDEAUX

Bearing in mind that the Seychelles were French until 1814, these fragments could have been left by a previous inhabitant or even by a previous treasure hunter, but Wilkins found them ten feet under the earth and he is sure they were left by Levasseur or his men. I suggested that submission of the fragments to the Museum de Paris would resolve the problem, but here again — and I repeat, it was always so when a common-sense piece of research seemed desirable — Wilkins was satisfied with his own conclusions and with certain inquiries that had been made for him in London.

And so in due course our conversations came to an end and I thanked Wilkins and wished him luck and drove away down the dusty treasure road under the palm trees and left the dreamer dreaming in his dreamland. The next day I said goodbye to this beautiful, romantic, rather haunted paradise and started the long trudge back across the Indian Ocean and to Bombay and thence, in a flick of time, over the roof of the world to London.

Out of paradise and back in reality, what is one to make of The Great Wilkins Treasure? First of all, I am of the opinion that Wilkins is an honest, though possibly a deluded, man. The best evidence of his honesty is. that, in accordance with the terms of the prospectus, at any time during the past four years, Wilkins could have downed tools and pocketed the remaining cash. He could do so today and be the richer by £9,000. No, Wilkins honestly believes in the treasure and he is spending his shareholders’ money in honest and unremitting efforts to find it.

A Fever

And what to make of these “clues” he has found? Some, as I have suggested, may be genuine, but a vast number such as the skeleton of a horse (Pegasus), “island marbles” made of clay, fragments of bottles, a sea boot, a doll’s head (the best of the “Andromedas”) and suchlike are surely the remains of former human habitation on and around the site. As for the “door” which Wilkins found, fragments of wall and cement and other signs of human activity in and around the site, I feel sure that these are the remains of the forty-year search by the landowner, Madame Savy.

But when one has cleared away all the mumbo-jumbo, one is left, I think, with the following conclusion: If Levasseur buried a treasure, and if some of his shipmates didn’t come and dig it up after he had been hanged, this would have been an excellent site on which to bury it.

And, of course, there is that circle and that star on the rock and, even as you read this, the pumps will be chugging and the twelve men will be digging and blasting while Wilkins sits in the shade with his back against a rock. And, who knows, perhaps at this very moment, a great shout has gone up and Wilkins has struggled to his feet and is running forward — “Gold, Master! Gold! Gold!”

One hundred and twenty million pounds isn’t a figure — it’s a fever!

---

Note: The hunt for Levasseur’s treasure continues to this day. Reginald Herbert Cruise-Wilkins kept up the hunt until his death in 1977. Then his son John picked up the baton and has carried it since, though treasure fever has consumed others too. Perhaps the descendants of John Cruise-Wilkins will be still be hunting long after everyone reading this post has died.

But though the treasure hunt continues, this thread must end. I have now exhausted my stash of Fleming’s articles, so unless some kind multi-millionaire buys me a copy of Talk of the Devil, I have no more Fleming journalism to post, aside from his Atticus columns (which will require careful presentation). So my next project will probably be a re-posting of Fleming’s lesser-known interviews. Unfortunately there aren’t many of them, because despite his willingness to promote James Bond, Fleming liked his privacy. If you know of any potential leads, please let me know…

My thanks to everyone who has commented on (or simply just read and enjoyed) this thread and its predecessor.

[Orion]

@Revelator

More oil came to the surface. I said, “Have you had the stuff tested or tried tasting it?”

“No.”

It was always so when I asked Wilkins if he had made the obvious tests. They had never been made. They might have destroyed the dream. I knelt down and dipped my finger in the stuff and tasted it. It was oil, petrol probably.

Only Fleming would think sticking your hand in oil, then tasting it, is an “obvious test”

Edit: I should’ve said even though it doesn’t need stated, but I think I speak for everyone when I say;
Thank You @Revelator for posting all of Flemings articles you had. They have been fantastic to read and your cause of sharing to make sure they never disappear in the corridors of history, is a noble one.

[Single-O-Seven]

Thanks as always @Revelator. You’ve done us a tremendous service with your efforts in posting all of these articles. I look forward to the interviews, and should you decide to post the Atticus columns I know I’ll lap up each of those as well. And should I ever win the lottery, I’ll buy two copies of Talk of the Devil and ensure one gets to you.**

[Revelator]

Ian Fleming on his Jamaican villa
By Ian Fleming (House & Garden, April 1959)

Poets and solitaries and crooks love islands. They are for the adventurer rather than the homebody. They are for people who want to put a moat between themselves and the rest of the world. They are for the escapee rather than the rut-dweller. They are not for the solid core of citizens. They are for the froth.

There are too many ‘theys’ in all that, and other signs of hasty and indolent thinking, but it is eighty in the shade and out of my left eye I can see waves crashing quietly on the reef, and out of my right a pair of doctor humming birds going the rounds of a small jungle of hibiscus. This is too much distraction for proper writing and I shall be too lazy to rewrite what I have written, so it must just go as the sort of planchette-writing this place is apt to engender in one.

My eyes glimpse different things even while they are more or less focusing on my typewriter, despite the fact that I write in a corner of the room with the sole object of avoiding these distractions. But just within my wide-angled vision on both sides are the slats of jalousies and beyond are the brilliant primary colours and the summery sounds and movements that insist on being seen, or at least half seen, all through the day. These things–the blue sea and the hibiscus–mean as little to a Jamaican as green fields and Old Man’s Beard mean to an English countryman. They are the permanent background to his ‘winter’ and even when the trees begin to flame with orchids in April he wouldn’t think of bothering himself to reach up and cut one down with his cutlass for a girl friend, any more than the Englishman would give his girl a dandelion.

But to me, and of course to you, the tropical scene is an endless delight and to escape here, as I do, for two months (and the worst ones) of every English year is a fabulous refreshment for all the senses.

I was lucky. I came to Jamaica for three days during the war. It was July, and brown rain fell in thick rods between periods when everything sweated and steamed. I adored it all. I came back in 1946, found thirty acres of field above a pirates’ cove, built a house of large airy rooms and began to plant flowers and trees. Today the garden is a jungle round an acre of lawn and I and all the birds of Jamaica applaud my brilliant gardening. Nothing has changed. My housekeeper, the irreplaceable Violet, can cook about three more dishes than she could twelve years ago. There are not so many fish and lobsters inside the reef because, foolishly, I gave one of the local fishermen a spare mask and spear, and American prices and the hideosity of American shorts have made it almost impossible to visit the hotels.

But here the waves still crash quietly on the reef and the humming birds go their rounds of their hibiscus. I have only one worry at the moment. It is the time of the full moon and the smell of the night-scented jasmine is quite overpowering. Oh yes, I knew there was something else. The grapefruit and oranges and limes are simply weighing down the trees. I must remember to send a cartload to the school to get rid of them. Ah me!

[hardingdb]

Madame Arthur Savy was my great Aunt. We still have a share certificate for the treasure!

We tried to sell it when the original article was published with no luck.

We await the find in anticipation.

David Harding

[Revelator]

It’s wonderful to read that you have a link to the treasure! I hope you won’t have to wait too long.

[Revelator]

Note: What you are about to read is a chapter from the only unpublished book by Ian Fleming. In late 1960 Fleming was invited by the Kuwait Oil Company to write a book about the Gulf emirate, which had recently become independent. Fleming eventually agreed: the money was good and after the problems with Thunderball, he was looking forward to writing a non-fiction book.

Kuwait did not live up to Fleming’s romantic expectations (“This is a most ghastly place… sand drives in your eyes and there is a smell of oil everywhere”). Though he wrote positively about the oil company and the Kuwaiti royal family, his disappointment and an occasional note of disparagement shone through. During the editing process he was “fed up and overstuffed with the subject."

Fleming submitted his manuscript, titled State of Excitement, to the Kuwait Oil Company, but it chose not to proceed any further. The only manuscript outside Kuwait is at the University of Indiana. The Kuwait Oil Company is now owned by the Kuwait government and still refuses to publish the book.

Nevertheless, part of it was made public. Before leaving Kuwait Fleming discussed doing a radio program about it with the BBC, which he recorded on December 13, 1960. The script was really just two lengthy excerpts from chapters 13 and 15. I have combined these with additional material to reproduce all of chapter 13. I wish to thank the kind fellow researcher who shared the BBC transcript and photos with me. Enjoy!

---

Tuesday Talk

State of Excitement: Kuwait by Ian Fleming

Recording/Transmission: Tuesday, 13th December, 9:45-10:00pm, BBC Home Service.

Ian Fleming has just come back from Kuwait on what was essentially a fact-finding visit. Tonight he recalls two of the more unusual incidents of his stay there.

The hawks on their perches ruffled their feathers and preened themselves, some of the bearers and drivers knelt and said their prayers while others selected a clump of camel thorn on the perimeter of our camp for partial privacy and attended to their morning duties while a giant orange sun climbed out of the East and began to warm the desert of Kuwait, cold from the November night wind. The four of us on the hawking expedition, Ian the lepidopterist, John the public relations officer and Khalid the Kuwaiti, and myself grouchily emerged from our camp beds and, in desert tradition, banged our shoes on the ground to see if any scorpions had sought out their fragrant darkness during the night. None had.

George, the Pakistani cook—we had six nationalities in our twelve-man team—brought fried eggs on cold plates, and placed them among the bottles and dirty glasses of the night before. The forks were grimy with the servants’ curry. We picked the eggs off the plates and put them between slices of bread. After two or three munches I gave the rest of my breakfast to Penelope, the baby hedgehog we had caught the night before in the lights of the car and, after some suspicious grunting and bristling, she sat down on the sandwich and nibbled away quite enthusiastically. Then I wandered off into the desert towards the single waist-high clump of camel thorn I had genteelly noted the night before. This small clump was in fact the only landmark over an area of around twenty square miles. There was certainly no terrestrial feature and all the other clumps, so far as I could see, were of the standard knee-high model.

Of course, the Kuwaiti desert isn’t really flat. There are gentle modulations in the flatness, soft rises and falls that are as obvious to the bedu as mountains and valleys are to us, and are named just as precisely. There is even one small hillock in Kuwait. It sticks up out of the desert near the Burgan oilfield and the appearance of this little hundred-foot-high mound is quite startling on the horizon. But the rest of Kuwait, until the long range of sand hills that form most of the western frontier with Iraq, is what I would describe as flat as a pancake. It is also what I would describe as empty.

After two full days in the desert I saw many ants, one rabbit, one eagle, a few desert larks, one large black beetle and a pale cockroach and two ticks off a dead fox collected by Ian, the insect man. As for vegetation, there was nothing but camel thorn that dotted the desert in small clumps about ten feet apart and one small gnarled cedar tree with a bad local reputation for djins. To be fair, after a day, I got to distinguish between the grey spiny true camel thorn and two very similar bushes, one pinkish that is the favorite fare of the hubarra, of which more later, and one yellowish, at which camels have a munch, regularly once a week, as a dog will eat grass. Without this medicine the camel loses his appetite for the grey variety.

There are, of course, many other species of wildlife in the desert, as you will see in Colonel Meinertzhagen’s compendious Birds of Arabia, and of vegetation, of which Mrs. Dickson enumerates more than two hundred varieties in her Wild Flowers of Kuwait, but these authorities spent many years compiling their lists and, to return to my original train of thought, I shall stick to my proposition that the desert of Kuwait is both flat and empty.

On returning to camp I found all a bustle of activity. What was afoot? This well-used phrase would have been out of place where our particular camp was concerned. Lethargic disorder, leading in die course to rather indecisive action, was the keynote, and what was afoot when I got back from my clump of camel thorn was Ian shooting at a beer can with a .22 pistol, Khalid helping a driver who didn’t know about chokes to get his humber pickup to start, John haranguing the cook, and our fine body of well-trained hunters squatting around the fire having a second breakfast. However, in due course we were off, behawked and armed to the teeth with snake-bite and scorpion-sting cure, and led by the finest hawk-handler and tracker in the whole of Kuwait off into the virgin desert. Well, more of less virgin. In fact , as I soon noticed, not only was the desert crisscrossed with well-used sand roads, but every inch of it appeared to have been ploughed by the jeeps and Land Rovers of other intrepid hunters. However, we been told that the hubarra—crane-like birds—were plentiful and I looked forward to an exciting day’s sport of a kind I had never witnessed before, followed by a romantic evening under the brilliant stars (plus Discoverer II!) listening to the stirring tales of old Kuwait while the hubarras, turning on their spits over the camel dung fire, were taken off one by one and devoured with bare hands, myself as the stranger being given the best bits.

The odds were certainly on our side against the hubarra. Seif (meaning sword), a splendidly handsome man with crossed cartridge-bolts and an ancient Mauser automatic, had been loaned to us by Shaikh Jabir, the Minister of Finance, together with two of his best hawks and, for good measure, a third hawk, a trainee, who would be given his chance when the other two had exhausted themselves after, say, ten hubarra apiece. He travelled with me and Khalid in one pickup with the senor hawk, aged eight, and the three-year-old apprentice. The senior hawk was called “Select” in Arabic and was said to be almost as deadly a killer as “Petrol,” the favourite hawk of the late ruler Shaikh Ahmad, and renowned throughout Arabia. Our armament included a Remington six-shot repeating 12 bore, a .22 with telescopic sights and Khalid’s fine Holland and Holland 12 bore with his initials in gold on it. Our pickup was a Humber Snipe with sand tyres and specially strengthened springs and an upholstered bench perched high up in the rear to help pick out the hubarras at a greater distance. Ian and John, cruising parallel with us a quarter of mile away, were similarly equipped and I thought of the stories I had heard of dastardly sheikhs hunting from open Cadillacs and felt rather ashamed.

About a mile from the camp we stopped and I observed the famous ritual with keen interest. Saif, a majestic figure, rose to his feet in the back of the pickup, caressed Select and removed his leather mask, then, holding the hawk aloft, called “Oho-Oho-Oho” or words to that effect in a loud, commanding voice. Slowly the hawk swivelled its head round while large black and seemingly incurious eyes searched the ground near and far. It stopped its search once or twice to focus its dull gaze on something that looked promising, and once it bowed up and down several times, so I was sure it had picked up a hubarra, but for all Saif’s Ohos and mine enthusiastically added, nothing stirred in the whole clumpy expanse and after five minutes we drove on another mile and repeated the performance, again without success.

What should have happened is thus. The hubarra is a large brownish bustard (McQueen’s Bustard) with white on its wings. It is shy and canny and is so perfectly camouflaged in the desert that Saif said he had once seen a hawk actually perch on the back of a hubarra without knowing it was there—possibly a tall story. The only way to make it betray its presence is to shout the Ohos that are the cry of the camel driver collecting his flock. Apparently, the hubarra likes camel ticks and this cry makes him raise his head to see where the camels are. At once the hawk catches the tiny movement and planes off low over the ground to fall upon the bustard und kill it with pecks at the back of the neck. The handler comes up, takes the bustard from the hawk, rewards the hawk with a bit of raw meat carried in the pocket, hood it and goes after the next one. The famous “Petrol” had been known to kill eleven hubarras in a day and this is thought to be a record. I must say the Oho routine sounds most unlikely but most of the hawks are trapped in Persia, and Persians and Arabs have been catching hubarras like that for centuries so there must be something in it.

The most interesting—in fact the only interesting thing about the hubarra is its method of defence against the hawk. When the hawk makes its first lunge, the hubarra bows down, up-ends its rear discharges a powerful jet of liquid at its attacker—maximum recorded range one yard. This liquid is not what you might think, but a special mixture secreted somewhere near the anal canal for this single purpose. The mixture is viscous, caustic, and—should the hubarra’s aim be true—the hawk is temporarily blinded and its feathers gummed together so that it is put out of action for the rest of the day.

This fascinating defensive mechanism, similar to the ink ejections of octopus and squid and the poisonous spit of some snakes and lizards, is surely a remarkable instance of natural selection and I was agog to witness this truly miraculous example of the Almighty’s handiwork.

After the first hour or so, when my Ohos were getting rather hoarser, and the hawk’s eyes even duller than before, I suggested to Khalid that if the hubarras were so clever as to recognize the camel drivers’ call, with so much hunting being done by car, did they not also by now perhaps recognize the sound of a car and say to themselves “Here comes one of those damn fools trying to pretend he’s a camel driver. Better sit tight!” But Khalid pooh-poohed my theory and we went on careering over the desert of northwestern Kuwait almost to the frontier with Iraq. Suffice to say that after five hours driving over perhaps a hundred square miles neither we nor the other car had even seen the droppings of a hubarra, though Ian and John had, between them and shame on them, shot a fox.

At this stage of the proceedings I must admit that my spirits were low. Ranging over the hideous desert from seven until twelve without seeing a living thing except the aforementioned eagle and black beetle is no way to spend a morning, particularly beneath a sky almost as leaden as the desert. I reflected, and still reflect, that of all the empty hours of my life—in hospital, on watch at sea, listening to bad opera, fishing Scottish lochs in the rain—those five hours were the most barren of all. And, after lunch, there were to be four more of them, without even an eagle or beetle to break the searing monotony. Only the total farce of the proceedings and a search for the nearest thing to a circular pebble at each of our fruitless stops saved me from total despair.

It surprised me how much shingle there was in the desert of Kuwait, and rather handsome shingle at that. The fact that bedus come with their lorries and pick it up pebble by pebble for the meagre wage of 15/- per hundred cubic feet from builders suggests that there is, at any rate, one form of livelihood in the country that is poorly paid.

The truth of the matter is, of course, that there are no hubarra left in the whole of Kuwait. They, and practically every other living thing in the state, have been slaughtered. The locally connected Mrs. Dickson told me that even the seabirds on the islands have been mown down for target practice and, as for the migratory birds which I had expected to see in their thousands, they now seem to have heard of the region’s bad name, for I never saw a single one. With the flow of wealth, every man has his own car and gun, and hawking, once the province of the shaikhs, is now within reach of all. This is one of the unhappiest features of the boom state, and one must hope that the Ruler will take note of what is happening to the wildlife of his country and make sanctuary and protection laws before it is too late.

The day was partially redeemed by a rather tipsy evening round the campfire—a vast blaze of camel thorn—in which we roasted potatoes. My companions regaled me with tales of high life in Beirut, which laughably describes itself as “the Paris of the Middle East”. It is in fact a ramshackle township with hideous suburbs of vastly expensive steel and concrete apartment houses, few of them inhabited and most of them only half built, the largest and most garish casino east of Monte Carlo, a brothel quarter of monumental squalor and a fine harbor which is the greatest smuggling entrepot of the world. However, its geographically well situated to provide the Arab states with what the oil-rush needed—a wide-open town providing every refinement in physical delight, down to cinema bleu in colour and with sound, a combination which, I am told, spoils the masculine palate forever for the real thing.

There have been two recent scandals that had shaken even Beirut and my companions gave me the details.

The first upset the Lebanese not because of its criminal aspects but because it showed the depth to which jerry-building had sunk. In the capital, underground warfare broke out between the two richest gangs of white slavers. Going to bed one night in the luxurious top apartment of one of the largest blocks of flats, the head of one of the gangs touched off, by contact with the springs, a bomb that had been put under his bed by the rival gang. The bomb was so powerful that it blew the white slaver straight through the ceiling, leaving a neat silhouette of his outflung arms and legs in the flimsy concrete as in a Walt Disney cartoon. No one minded about the white slaver or the bomb and police investigations were cursory. The whole weight of the subsequent enquiry was directed against the builder and contractor for building a ceiling so thin that a body could be blown through it.

Almost concurrently the most famous Madame in Beirut had a bit of bad luck. This monster, whose name was “Chastity” in Arabic, was wont to freshen up her stable by recruits obtained by waiting outside the gates of the local girls’ school on graduation day. She would choose the least well dressed and not necessarily the prettiest, invite them to tea and dazzle them into a softer way of life than working in a shop.

Unfortunately a senior official, visiting her establishment, was offered his sixteen year old niece. Horrified, and courageously facing the scandal, the official at once informed his brother. The girl was rescued and Chastity went to jail for five years.

Having shamelessly desecrated the romantic desert night with these and less printable tales we retired to the austere comforts of our tents.

---

I was received by His Highness the Ruler of Kuwait, Shaikh Sir Abdullah al Salim al Sabah, K.C.M.G., who is 65 years of age. He has always been a man of simple tastes and today lives in modest quarters in his seaside palace at Sharf, and governs the country from an austere office in the oldest palace in Kuwait, Dasman, built in an uninteresting turn-of-the-century style, on the waterfront in the town. Since he became ruler in 1950, in succession to Shaikh Ahmad, and even since the coming of oil, he has changed his modest way of living in no way at all, except for the acquisition of a sober Cadillac.

This is not entirely true. Recently the Sultan of Morocco paid him a visit and brought with him a retinue so large that they could not be accommodated or even feasted at the same time in the Ruler’s home. This was considered by the Sabah family as severe loss of face and breach of manners, and the Public Works Department are now adding an extension to the public rooms of the seaside palace which will prevent future embarrassments of this nature.

The Ruler is a calm and even phlegmatic man, with soft and extremely intelligent eyes and a presence of considerable authority. Before I left Kuwait he gave me an audience, which remains in my mind chiefly on account of an exchange which thoroughly deflated my ego.

Before the audience I was carefully reminded that I must enquire after His Highness’ health. He suffers from gout, which takes now his right foot, and now his left, despite the latest treatment. The affliction is surely unfair, since he drinks nothing, does not smoke and is modest and abstemious in all things. I duly made polite enquiry and we talked briefly about gout. I suggested that the cause might be overwork and that he should have plenty of rest from his labours.

I then told him briefly of my abortive desert hunting trip and of my grief that the wildlife of Kuwait was so rapidly being despoiled. Would it not be possible to establish sanctuaries, or at least some form of protection by instituting a closed season, and could there not be hunting licences that would be checked at the police posts in the hinterland? Shaikh Abdullah said it was indeed a sad business. The trouble, of course, was hunting from motor cars, but this was impossible to control. As for hunting permits, that would be an interference with the freedom of his people, who did not like permits of any sort or description and regarded them as an interference with their freedom, in which he concurred with them. At least he was planting many trees, which would provide a haven for the smaller birds. In this I warmly agreed and sincerely congratulated him, for it is true that—although as one Shaikh put it to me, bringing up trees is as expensive as bringing up children—thousands upon thousands have been planted on both sides and down the centre of all the main roads of Kuwait, and a vast nursery in the model state farm is planning a program for increasing the greenery of the desert.

Commenting on the miracle of Kuwait, I said that in trying to gather facts for my book, I had found that the people had already forgotten what it had been like even ten years ago, and only a few remembered details from the early days of affluence. Was His Highness writing his memoirs? Or keeping notes on how it all had happened? The Ruler said he had no intention whatsoever of writing his memoirs. They would be written in the sands of time, and it was not for him to say what of this or that he had done was right or wrong. Posterity would judge. So I switched to the naïve question of whether, if His Highness had to go back ten years and start all over again, he would do anything differently. No, said the Ruler, he would not. On the whole he was satisfied with what had been achieved, and anyway if did not make the same mistakes he would probably make a lot of different ones. At this moment a cheque book was brought in and the Ruler excused himself while he carefully filled in two or three counterfoils and then the cheques, writing figures which from the motion of his pen seemed to contain quite an astonishing number of noughts.

I was greatly impressed by the Ruler. He is a firm, wise man and the country is fortunate that, when the golden avalanche came—today the revenue of this tiny sheikhdom, no bigger than Wales and with a population smaller than Cardiff, is at least £150,000,000 a year, thanks to it being the fourth largest oil production country in the world—this wise Ruler was there to act as the father of a family that might otherwise have been seized by chaos and intoxication.

To end our talk I produced what I considered an extremely neat slice of Arabism that I had chiselled away at the night before, on the basis of a motto I had heard in a bazaar. “I believe, Your Highness,” I said, “that there is an Arabic motto which says, ‘You cannot carry two watermelons in one hand.’ It seems to me that Your Highness has been trying to carry a hundred watermelons in one hand for the past ten years.” Satisfied with having got my little speech right, I sat back while the interpreter interpreted it. After a pause, and without the pleasant smile I had expected, the Shaikh, or rather Shaiookh, for he is a plurality of Shaikhs, uttered a curt sentence, and the interpreter turned towards me. “His Highness says it isn’t watermelons. It’s pomegranates.”

[Dustin]

Many thanks for digging this up and sharing it here with us, @Revelator!