My World of Islands

by Leslie Thomas

  He seems to have been invented for the sole purpose of becoming extinct and that was all he was good for.

  WILL CUPPY, How to become Extinct

  Despite the obituaries, and no one has had more, I like to think that the Dodo is still with us. Alive, not too well (he never was), he plods myopically among his private hills on the island of Mauritius. I picture him, egged on by his wife, a sad survivor from the ancient days.

  Mauritius was named after someone called Prince Maurice by the earliest Dutch sailors who made a landfall in the sixteenth century. They then set about butchering the Dodo, a trusting, cumbersome, harmless and inedible bird. The meek rarely inherit the earth.

  The Dutchmen departed leaving piles of bones and feathers. Years later the skeleton of the Dodo was uncovered in a bog at Mare aux Songes, the place where the airport now stands. The bird that could not fly has a runway as a memorial.

  Mauritius lies due east of Madagascar in the midriff of the Indian Ocean, the smaller offspring island of Rodriguez floating further out. Outside the two towns of Port Louis and Curepipe the countryside is green and echoing. There is much pastoral emptiness; in villages by brown rivers people sit and stare, roadmenders squat in the shade of perpetual tea-breaks, women carry loads on their heads, and men accompany them, hands in pockets and deep in thought. Fields of ruffled sugar-cane are broken by the explosion of the flame tree. Mountains are modest in height but eccentric in shape; sharp, ragged, like one of the opened pages of a childhood stand-up picture book.

  The sugar plantations are punctuated everywhere by piles of rusty volcanic rocks, some as big as a house. Placed at intervals about the flat countryside they were built by slaves, the forebears of many Mauritians, to clear the land for growing. From the air they look, with their attendant shadows, like widespread trees, but at ground level they can be seen for what they are – the results of an amazing labour. Some remain bare, some are covered with runaway flowers, harsh grass or small trees. They are poignant and largely unnoticed memorials to a captive people.

  The island is warm, and frequently wet. The rain is fierce and truncated, but often welcome and always useful. My Indian driver stopped his coughing car up in the hills during a ten-minute torrent. I thought he had stopped because he could not see to negotiate the hairpin bends. Not a bit of it. Cheerfully he took a handful of soap powder and ti rew it over the car then jumped back in. ‘Always I keep vehicle clean, sir,’ he assured. ‘Most clean machine.’

  One of the joys of travelling to Mauritius was leaving London. A foot of snow caked my car on a Siberian morning followed by a delay at Heathrow Airport because the planes could not be deiced quickly enough and only one runway was fit for use.

  As arctic men holding hoses sprayed the Boeing’s wings with de-icing jets, the British Airways captain confided that he had never seen ice conditions like it – not even in Anchorage, Alaska. Eventually we squelched to the runway, roared off, soared through the blizzard, and into a sky full of sun. It had been up there all the time.

  Seventeen hours later, far from the cold creaking of the English winter, we lost height over a glossy sea, crossed the white seam of coral reef, and dropped over the bright island. It appeared flat and verdant, with a deeply bitten coastline, a chocolate river cutting through its centre, and strange, imitation-looking mountains trapping a lake that stared up like a blind eye.

  Elephant clouds drifted clumsily across the land, but the hills herded them and the sky was shining and clear over one of the world’s more poetically named airports – Plaisance.

  It is no exaggeration to say that the real landscape of Mauritius is in its people’s faces. Outside the airport, around the many-legged banyans and haughty palms the people congregated, vividly clothed, busy, chattering: Indians, Chinese, Africans, some Europeans, all Mauritians. A woman in an aching pink sari stood with great dignity, eating an ice-cream cone. An old man in pure white, his beard like a bib, stared at her with what appeared to be envy but may only have been admiration. Families fell on top of each other to greet someone arriving from the plane. Children danced, holding hands in circular excitement. Some people with no one to greet perhaps, stood, chattered and observed. A man dispensed evil yellow syrups from a container on his bicycle; another offered striped umbrellas, another sold fish. The airport has become the contemporary marketplace.

  Mauritius, a British colony for 158 years, and still within the Commonwealth acknowledging Queen Elizabeth II, is entirely French. The languages spoken are French and Creole; children dutifully learn English at school, but many forget it as soon as they leave the playground.

  Driving from Plaisance Airport through Beau Vallon, Plaine Magnien and Camp Diable, across the Riviera des Anguilles and past the Grand Bassin lake, it was hard to believe Britain counted this as hers. My destination was the hotel at a place on the west coast called Flic-en-Flac, a name supposedly derived from the noise made by drums and marching troops.

  The journey, inevitably I was to discover, was down roads channelled through the green sugar-cane country. Mongooses, imported to kill the rats that ate the crop, scuttled across as though on some urgent business. Mountains popped up like stage scenery, small flags of cloud on their pinnacles. On the southeastern coastal corner is Morne Mountain, 1,800 feet high. The top can be reached if you are inclined – and inclined is the word – by climbing up staples hammered into the rock. The mountain, they say, is haunted by the sad ghosts of slaves who escaped, clambered the sheer slopes, and made a fortress of the summit. Soldiers tried to climb after them but, pounded with rocks, were always repulsed. When slavery was abolished the soldiers went up again, to give the fugitives the good news. They were avalanched as usual but some sportingly managed to gain the top. The slaves, thinking they were about to be retaken, leaped from the bald height onto the rocks below, a classic case of jumping to conclusions.

  It was raining in Port Louis, thick and warm, drumming on roofs and trees. Queen Victoria, prim on her plinth at the front of Government House, was soaking wet in no time. The inscription beneath speaks somewhat ambiguously of ‘Our late and much regretted Queen’. She has enjoyed an appropriate and regal vista over the years, looking out along a lengthy colonial avenue of giant palms, upright, and ranged in two ranks like plumed guardsmen.

  Empire administrators of the Victorian days would have, I fancy, only slight difficulty in recognizing Port Louis today. The mildly jaded elegance remains; wooden verandahs before the shops, small flowered open spaces; the aromatic harbour and the poise of Government House, pillared, palmed and passaged. Taciturn fans revolve in shaded rooms and restaurants along the streets. The curried scent of lunch drifts into the midday. The old British Queen shares a garden with Mahé de la Bourdonnais, the great French fighter and tradesman, whose influence as Governor General of Mauritius is still felt everywhere.

  It was the French who built the Champs des Mars, the traditional wide avenue of their cities, constructed to allow the quick entry of an army into the centre of a city. Here the British improved matters by turning it into a racecourse, which it still is, usefully situated within the town. It was, unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, off-season.

  The rain had stopped for lunch and the population emerged to stroll about in the steam. The pavements were busy with interchanging faces: the Indian, the Oriental, the African, the European. Between themselves they spoke vividly in the language that bridges all the gaps, that, as Miss Chan Din Hin, a young Chinese put it, is easy to learn. ‘Everyone makes it up as they go along,’ she said.

  Miss Chan works in a Government office. Her parents fled from China twenty-five years ago and her father now keeps a shop. She speaks English, French, Hakki Chinese and, of course, Creole. She was planning her first trip to China. ‘It will be a foreign place,’ she agreed. ‘I want to see it, but I do not think I will stay. The people must work too hard.’

  At school in Mauritius she learned her French and English. At home her family speaks Chinese. In her everyday life
the patois comes naturally. Everybody understands it. Written, it takes on an additional curiosity. There was a notice of a political rally (an election was coming up). ‘Gran Miting,’ announced the poster. ‘On 20th Desam, 1981. Orators include Mr. E. Joomumbaccus.’ At the Victorian Port Louis Opera House there was a season of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. In Creole.

  Although the Dutch first colonized and named Mauritius, it was the British and the French who squabbled longest over it. The island, up to the time of its independence in 1968, had been ruled by eighteen Dutch Governors, twenty-one French and thirty-one British. The French changed the name from Mauritius to the Ile de France and then the British, who might have easily called it something else, reverted to the Dutch name.

  Pirates were here in great musters. They formed their own kingdom called Libertalia across the channel in Madagascar and there, flush with booty, made a touching attempt to settle down to everyday life. Understandably perhaps few would trade with them and they found themselves surfeited with stolen gold but with not enough food to eat. Most of them returned to piracy. At least they could steal food. The British and the French cottoned on to the importance of Mauritius as a base to protect their possessions in India. It was called the Star and Key of the Indian Ocean.

  In the southestern corner of the island today, in the village of Mahebourg, is a shaded plantation house, reached by a drive through trees. After a battle between the British and French in 1810, both commanders were carried here, severely wounded.

  Suress, my Indian driver, President of the Mauritius taxi-men’s union, met his verbal match here. It was Friday and the museum was shut because the curator was at the Mosque and there was no knowing when he might be done with his prayers. His wife, a staunch lady, stood firm and had a shouting match with Suress, from the door of her house behind the museum. The place was milling with chickens and ducks, and the louder the lady shouted, and the more Suress argued, the more frenetic the squawking of the livestock became. In the end, sweating and disgruntled, the taxi-drivers’ champion returned. ‘Tomorrow,’ he announced, ‘we come back. Maybe he get out of the Mosque by then.’

  Dutifully we returned next day and it was worth it. In the airy house it was not difficult to imagine that day in August 1810, when the rival commanders in the battle of Grand Port were brought bleeding up the steps. Sir Nesbitt Josiah Willoughby, a stern-looking sailor with a long jaw and a Nelsonian eye-patch was found on his ship, incompetently left for dead, under a Union Jack. He was taken to Mahébourg and treated in the same room as the French Commander, Duperre. There is no record of whether they were able to converse. They both recovered and lived not just to fight another day, but another thirty years and more.

  In the museum is a remnant of another romantic story, far more famous than the fight at Grand Port. The battle is merely described in history books and recorded on the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, the second occurrence still lives as a great love story. A ship’s bell, green and cracked, is all that remains of the Saint Geran which on a clear, moonful night in August 1744, was allowed to drift onto the rocks at l’lle d’Ambre, off the Mauritius coast. She had suffered a stormy five months’ passage from France and now, becalmed, and within sight of her harbour, she was allowed to fall among the rocks and reefs which tore into her hull. Among the awakened passengers were Mesdemoiselles de Mallet and Caillou, who were engaged to two officers, Messieurs de Payramon and de Longchamp. As the masts tumbled and the ship collapsed the two ladies were urged to take off their voluminous clothes, jump into the sea and swim for the shore. They stoutly refused on the grounds of delicacy and died for prudery, clasped in the arms of their gallant lovers. In another version of the tale we have Captain Delamare, who had permitted the disaster, refusing to take off his uniform because it was below his dignity as a sailor. It was probably the most competent decision he took all the long night.

  The novelist, Bernardin de Saint Pierre, a friend of Rousseau, heard the story when he spent two years in the lie de France, and from it he fashioned the romance of Paul et Virginie, one of the classic love stories of France, still read and enjoyed today. In this fictionalized version the heroine Virginie is returning to the island. Her faithful and patient lover, Paul, waits on the shore, only to see the Saint Geran wrecked within sight of the beach. His drowned beloved is washed up almost at his feet. He dies of a broken heart. A simple tale that has so far been published in five hundred editions.

  The bell of the Saint Geran was found wedged in the wreckage by a diver in 1968. It stands in the museum, cracked but crudely reassembled. Soon after its finding it was stolen and smashed for scrap. Recovered and patched it now stands with a somewhat sorry appearance. So much for romance.

  According to the tales the soil and rocks of Mauritius are congested with buried pirate treasure. ‘Only the Devil and I know where it is and the last survivor will get the lot . . .’ promised Captain Teach who rifled many a passing ship in the island’s waters. Tree-fellers uncovered an inscription, ‘This is where I buried my wealth . . . he who finds it will sing for many a day.’ They found only some old pipes, some knives and bits of pottery.

  ‘Walk up the cliff in an easterly direction as shown in my will,’ instructed Nageon de l’Estang who, in the eighteenth century, managed to combine the professions of naval officer and pirate, a difficult task. ‘After twenty to thirty paces due east, in accordance with the documents, you will find the clues used by corsairs to mark a circle, the river running only a few feet from its centre. There lies the treasure . . .’

  None of the many subsequent searchers found any treasure. Only Nageon de l’Estang seems convinced that not one, but two, hoards were lying waiting to be disinterred. According to his documents, a fabulous treasure looted from India is to be gained for the asking in the south of Mauritius, near a river’s entrance to the sea. ‘Three iron barrels and jars full of doubloons, coins and ingots worth thirty million, as well as a copper casket full of diamonds from the mines of Visapour and of Golconda.’

  The words were enough to make yet another treasure hunter try his luck. It was me. I went to seek it, accompanied by Suress, an amiable companion rendered diabolically piratical by the absence of all his front teeth, leaving two at the side projecting like fangs. A cutlass would have slotted in perfectly.

  We went off on a Saturday morning to the Baie du Jacotet on the southern coast, where a river does run into the sea and where stories persisted of half-buried pirate cannons, frequently used as pointers to hidden gold. It was like the day in Madeira when I found the names of the English soldiers on the old fountain. It was one of those adventures which only happen if you try.

  Some labourers cutting through undergrowth with machetes directed us to a tight bay where four villagers were fishing and boys were swimming across the mouth of the Rivière des Galets, playing on rafts made of banana and bamboo. Suress, not embarrassed, asked the men if they would mind indicating the cannons pointing to the location of the pirate treasure. They obligingly did so and went on fishing.

  We had to cross the river and the swiftest way seemed to be by the banana and bamboo rafts. The doughty Suress negotiated with the boys and we found ourselves kneeling as if in waterborne prayer on these strung-together contraptions while the shouting boys towed us through the breaking water. My white trousers, last worn at a cricket match (The Duke of Edinburgh’s XI versus Prince Charles’s XI, none the less) the previous summer, were soaked and muddy before we reached the other side. ‘Most people not come here,’ mentioned Suress as we trudged through red mud and undergrowth like barbed wire. ‘Next time I not come.’ For some reason or other, when we were up to our knees in squelch and our necks in jungle, he mentioned casually that he had a cousin in England. In Tottenham.

  Torn, wet and muddy, under the pointed sun we reached a further beach and there another fisherman pointed to the hinterland. The cannons were there, he indicated. We climbed a slope and looked down, searching the thick entangled undergrowth. My goo
dness! There it was! A cannon, twelve foot long, amost choked by greenery. ‘One more here,’ called Suress. Sure enough, even more deeply buried in creepers was another cannon, the same size, pointing at right angles to the first. ‘Somewhere there is a third,’ I announced like Blind Pugh. ‘Buried upright with its muzzle showing.’ Suress returned to the fisherman. A few rupees fluttered. The man left his lines and led us along the empty beach. In a small enclave he scraped away the sand and revealed the round mouth of an upright cannon. My heart jumped.

  I purloined a few rusty pieces from the cannon and they are here before me on my desk as I write this. Suress was disappointed because we did not find any treasure. But I think we did.

  In the region of Mauritius called the Rivière Noire lives a young Welshman named Carl Jones. His companions are giant fruit bats, delicate pink pigeons, a peregrine falcon from Wales called Sweetheart, and one of the rarest birds in the world – the Mauritius kestrel. He is trying to prevent what happened to the Dodo happening to this handsome hunter and is so engrossed in his work that he can be reached only with difficulty. Often he is halfway up a mountain, a cliff, or only a tree; when he is at home he is just as outlandish. To contact him you have to telephone the local police station.

  He is a tall, wry young man, living among the birds and animals like a fellow creature, which is the way, he says, it should be done. ‘You can’t study animals or birds unless you live with them.’ He had been up until three that morning feeding an infant fruit bat with cereal and milk.

  We walked around the enclosure, his private kingdom. Adult bats as large as squirrels, folded their black silken wings around themselves like Sir Gerald du Maurier folding his cloak. The pink pigeons, dainty as Delft, are oddly contrary. ‘You just can’t put them together and know that they will mate,’ Carl confides. ‘You have to try half a dozen different pairings before they click. You see, they have to fall in love. And once they do mate they make poor parents. I have to put the eggs under doves to hatch and then rear the baby until it is almost grown. Mother and father are just not interested.’ Not surprisingly the pink pigeon was once thought to be extinct.