by Alec Waugh
In July 1801, as an outcome of the bomb assault in Paris on the First Consul’s life, seventy political prisoners, including Jean Rossignol, who had played so prominent a part in the storming of the Bastille, were landed at Seychelles. They were completely innocent: it was a Royalist plot and they were revolutionaries, but Fouché thought them dangerous. He wanted to be rid of his old colleagues. De Quinssi thought them dangerous, too, but not for Fouché’s reasons. He did not want to have the peace of the plantations disturbed by equalitarian doctrines; ‘Les amis des noirs,’ indeed, and Robespierre asserting that it was better to lose a colony than a principle. They’d be having the same trouble here that they had had in San Domingo. He arranged to tranship the more violent ones to the Sultanate of Anjouan. He bore his victims no ill-will. He commiserated with them in their misfortunes, advising them in their own interest to conceal the reason for their exile. But he probably learnt without surprise the nature of their subsequent demise.
The Seychellois came first. That was the principle on which he based his trust. In all he capitulated to the British seven times. His capitulations were prompt and practical, and by the readiness of his compliance he contrived to preserve the property of the inhabitants, their laws and customs, and their right to worship. The British formed so high an opinion of his honesty and capabilities that after the final surrender in 1810 they confirmed him in his governorship, which he held until his death seventeen years later.
Most of the drama in Seychelles’ history took place under his benign régime. During the early part of the eighteenth century Mahé provided a harbourage for buccaneers, who harassed the British East India trade to the Cape. But the island was not officially colonised until 1756 when it was named after Louis XV’s Controller of Finance, Vicomte Moreau des Seychelles. Mahé was always a sideshow to the French; its mountainous interior was unfavourable to large-scale cultivation; spices were planted that would, it was hoped, rival the products of the Dutch East Indies; but the plantations were destroyed on the scorched-earth policy, in the mistaken belief that a British ship was about to land. Only the cinnamon remained. That was about all that happened. No one in Paris bothered about Seychelles, nor after the turmoil of the Napoleonic wars did anyone in London bother about them much through the long slow course of the nineteenth century. Until 1903, indeed, they were administered from Mauritius, which is over nine hundred miles away.
Slavery was ended in the 1830s, but Seychelles had never enjoyed the rich plantation prosperity of the West Indies, so that emancipation made little difference. A Protestant church was established, but its services were unattended. An occasional priest from Mauritius would pay a visit to solemnise marriages and christenings, but for the most part there was no religious life. The Africans returned to the faith of their ancestors, and witch-doctors in the hills performed gris-gris ceremonies. It was not till 1851 that a Capuchin Mission restored religious life. Mahé is ninety per cent. Catholic, and to-day the Bishop is, next to the Governor, the most influential person in the group.
The days passed placidly in this remote dependency. The coconut industry flourished; whaling ships put in; men-of-war called and spent money. The population increased steadily. It was a mixed population. Slaving continued though slavery had been abolished. British men-of-war would intercept Arab dhows laden with black ivory, and, faced with the impossibility of restoring the contraband cargo to its point of exit, discharged it at the nearest British port—which was often Victoria.
The cargo was a mixed collection—African, Indian, Moorish, Malagash. No British families came out to settle. It was too far away; there was no inducement; no land to buy, no scope for private enterprise: ‘escapism’ was not yet a creed. No families came out from France, though a few moved over from Mauritius. Transient visitors to the island were mainly masculine, sailors for the most part who were given a sailor’s welcome by the female populace. Life was monotonous for the sons of the French planters. Gallantry was the most effective antidote to boredom. The whites grew darker and the blacks grew whiter. The result is a very attractive blend of feature and of colouring.
The visitors of any consequence during this period were so few that their passage is on record. In the 1870s General Gordon, then a colonel, was sent to report on the possibility of utilising the island as a link in the general chain of Imperial defence; strategically he was unimpressed, but he felt convinced that Mahé and Praslin were the site of the original Garden of Eden. The reasons for this belief will be given later.
In the early ‘80s, Marianne North, the sister of Mrs. John Addington Symonds, paid a two months’ visit. She enjoyed herself, to judge from the account she gave two years later in a two-volume record of her travels, Memoirs of a Happy Life; though she commented unfavourably on “the poisonous stretch of black mud” that has now been reclaimed as Fiennes Esplanade, and remarks that “the sole sober man at Christmas was the U.S. Consul, who received a yearly salary of three hundred pounds, in return for which no services of any nature were required’.1 The last pages of her book contain a revealing letter that she received from Queen Victoria acknowledging her gift to Kew of a collection of botanical drawings. “The Queen regrets to learn from her ministers that Her Majesty’s Government have no power of recommending to the Queen any mode of public recognition of your liberality.” As good an example as you could find both of official English and the limits that are imposed upon a constitutional monarch. It lay, however, within the private rights of the Queen-Empress to send a large signed photograph.
Other unusual visitors came, too. There was, at the close of the eighteenth century, a certain Pierre Louis Poiret, a quiet, unassuming man who arrived, nobody quite knew how, in the company of a tutor, to be presented on his arrival with a house and slaves. A timid, uneducated man, he begat nine children with the co-operation of two ladies, neither of whom he married. The first of his daughters he christened Marie Lisette Dauphin, the second Marie Elise Dauphin; their descendants have the Bourbon nose and mouth. There are many who still insist that Poiret was Louis XVII.
Other and more authentic royal personages were to come to Mahé in the course of that slow-moving century. The Sultan of Perak; Mevanga, the King of Buganda; Kabarega, the King of Bunyara, and Khalid Bin Bargash, pretender to the Sultanate of Zanzibar. For Britain followed Fouché’s example, and used Mahé as an asylum for political offenders, to such an extent in fact that a special law was passed for their treatment.
They were all in their way distinguished gentlemen, but the most picturesque was King Prempeh of Ashanti, who arrived in 1900 with his mother, fifty-five followers and three wives. As far as can be gathered at this late day, his incarceration was the outcome of a technicality; he did not make the kind of submission that the British required. He himself was chiefly worried because, his reign having been preceded by a civil war, he had not been installed with the proper ritual on the gold throne of Ashanti. In face of so serious an omission, and one which required, he was convinced, immediate remedy, he could not give full attention to the, in his opinion, trivial complaint that the British tendered. He sent a deputation to Whitehall. But it was not received. Finally British troops moved in. It was all a misunderstanding. Prempeh was a man of little education but marked personality, with a vivid sense of his prerogatives. He brought with him his native headsman, and was distressed when he was told on ordering the execution of one of his servants that the sentence could not be carried out. But he quickly adapted himself to Western customs. Representatives both of the Anglican and Roman Catholic Churches tried to persuade him to join their branch of the Christian Faith. Prempeh asked to which branch belonged the King of England. On learning that Edward VII was an Anglican he said, “We consider that all Kings should have the same religion. We will become one too.”
So sincere was his conversion that in the course of time he put away two of his wives, and later one of his sons became a Church of England clergyman. He not only accepted a Western faith but Western customs and cost
ume. He arrived clad in a leopard skin, but after twenty-five years’ exile he returned to his throne in spongebag trousers, a cutaway morning coat, and a silk hat. Half the colony came to the wharf to see him off. He had made himself popular and respected. He was greatly missed.
The last refugees to be landed in Seychelles were five members of the Arab Higher Commission, during the first stage of the Palestine disputes in 1937. I met one of them in Beyrouth, Fuad Effendi Saba, the son of a Church of England clergyman. Considerable restrictions were put upon their liberty; they could not receive visitors; on their walks in the town they were not allowed to enter into conversation with any resident. But Fuad Saba is able to talk now without resentment of his year’s detention. Worse things have happened to him since. He is one of the 900,000 Palestinians—many of them Christians—who were forced to cross the frontier when Israel became a State. He quoted to me an Arab proverb: “The murder of a man is a great crime but the destruction of a people is something to be considered.”
He described with detachment the attempts he and his fellow prisoners had made to lessen their restrictions, of the unfailing courtesy with which the Governor, Sir Arthur Grimble, had received them, of the air of personal disappointment with which Sir Arthur had explained the constitutional predicament that made it impossible for him to take any action without the permission of the Secretary of State. “Oh, those official letters,” Fuad said. “Always ending up ‘I have the honour to be, Sir, your obedient servant’, and that invariable final paragraph beginning ‘I have the honour, however, to point out …’ All so very suave. You have to read each letter through three times before you realise that your request has not been granted. And of course the moment the order for our release came through, Sir Arthur became a normal human being and gave a cocktail party for us.”
The arrival and departure of these refugees are the sole landmarks that the history of the colony has to show through a century and a half. Time passed pleasantly and unobtrusively. No one bothered anybody. In the eighteenth century there was an idea in Europe that colonies existed for the exclusive benefit of the parent country. There was something to be said for this contention, since the colonies had been acquired and were being defended at the cost of blood and bullion—something but not everything, as the Thirteen Colonies explained. Now in the 1950s there is an idea that the parent country exists for the benefit of its colonies; there is something to be said for this, since the needy and disaffected populace of undeveloped areas is vulnerable to communist ideas; something but not everything, as Burma has found, as India is finding, and as the West Indies may discover. New problems rise when the parent country grows impatient with criticism and drains on its exchequer, takes the colonists at their word and hands back its responsibilities to a politically untrained oligarchy.
During the nineteenth century Liberal principles held good. There was no impulse to ‘improve’ people who did not clamour to be ‘improved’. If anything appeared to work, it was allowed to go on working, and as far as Whitehall was concerned no news of trouble reached it from Seychelles. The years went by, and no one in England appears to have been aware that in these two remote outposts of the Empire in Seychelles and Mauritius, there had emerged a unique emigré society of French families, cut off from France, drawing no cultural sustenance from France, receiving their education from the teaching brotherhood of a Swiss order, neither absorbing the English way of life nor being absorbed by it; proud of their French ancestry, maintaining French customs, yet unaware of the changes that were taking place in France; a part of Britain, yet in no way British, regarding the British as foreigners.
I was there for the fourteenth of July. The fall of the Bastille was celebrated both with a dance in the club which the Governor attended and a champagne d’honneur in the Empire Hotel. The champagne party took place at half-past eleven. It was organised by the club on a system of quasi-invitation, a subscription of fifteen shillings securing admission for yourself and for a lady. At the end of the room a long table was decorated with a corsage of bougainvillaea. There were fifteen seats at it. The Chief Justice presided. The Bishop was there; two other priests; representatives of the chief French families—les grands blonds, and the senior British resident. The gathering sat on chairs arranged at right angles against the wall. First sherry was served in tumblers; then sandwiches were brought, in bulk; then came champagne, again in tumblers; when everybody had a glass the speeches started.
The Chief Justice proposed the toast of France. It was a witty and a tactful speech. The British Labour Party was at the moment trying to govern with a single-figure majority, and he considered that England had infringed the French monopoly of Government without a Government. Military operations had just started in Korea, and he referred to France as the bulwark against the tide of atheistic communism that was sweeping across Europe. The French ate it up. The Bishop was delighted. There were in all six speeches, differently phrased tributes to the cultural heritage of France, with the exception of the final speech by an eighty-year-old British resident, who unfortunately exploited the occasion as an opportunity to attack the Governor. At which point, everyone having consumed at least half a pint of champagne in addition to two preparatory lagoon-sized sherries, it was considered prudent to break up the gathering and move over to the club. The whole feel of the occasion was completely French. You could not believe yourself to be anywhere but in an outpost of Colonial France.
The grands blonds of Mahé are a unique society.
2. Seychellois Routine
(i) Northolme
After A Five days’ stay in Victoria with the Edmondses, I went out of town. There were at this time two places in the country where a visitor could stay; they were both in the north part of the island, some four miles out—the Beauvallon Hotel and the Northolme Guest House.1 I chose Northolme, both because Compton MacKenzie had recommended it and because, when I met him on the Kampala, I had felt an immediate liking for its proprietor—Maurice Michaud, a Seychellois, one of the grands blonds, large and red-haired and ruddy, with a benign, broad grin. I felt that I should enjoy myself more and learn more of the island in his house than in a modernised beach hotel.
I never regretted my choice, and Northolme during my two months’ stay remained my base. For those who prefer privacy I can recommend Beauvallon. It is on the sea and has the appearance of such a de luxe hotel as you would find in St. Thomas or Juan les Pins. There is a long, low, bungalow-type of building, containing twelve self-contained one-room flats, each with its own verandah. The beds, as elsewhere in Mahé, are adamantine—the mattresses are stuffed with coconut fibre and laid on a frame either of straight cut boards or unresisting metal, there being a local belief that you are cooler that way; but there is in compensation fitted furniture, a shower, and bedside lamps. Far enough away so as not to disturb the guests are the main public buildings, a bar, a dining-room, a lounge. The kitchens are unobtrusive. It is all very neat and clean, and the cooking is good.
Its drawback for my personal preference is its emptiness. It was built in the belief that after the war Mahé would enjoy a tourist boom. Before the war an increasing number of visitors from Kenya came over for their holidays. There was a regular boat service and a four weeks’ visit could be arranged. But services since the war have been uncertain. It does not pay the B.I. boats to stop there. The Kampala, on my trip down, carried four saloon passengers and one ton of cargo. She took away no cargo and one saloon passenger. B.I. boats, indeed, stop at Mahé only out of a sense of public duty, for tradition’s sake. There is a vicious-circle impasse; if there were more passengers, boats would call more often, but there cannot be more tourists till there are more frequent sailings.
My birthday fell due during my visit, and I celebrated it with a small dinner party. I gave it at the Beauvallon, because it had a refrigerator. The meal was well cooked and served. We were all, I think, reasonably gay. But as a permanent residence I should have found the hotel melancholy. Nothing is more desolat
e than an empty bar.
Northolme is everything that Beauvallon is not. It stands on an exposed promontory, fifty yards below the road. You approach it through the farmyard and the kitchen premises. Ducks, geese, pigeons, and guinea-fowl scatter at your approach. A number of native girls will be giggling, or quarrelling with the cook. Water will be splashing into a pail that is already overfull. There will be a smell of cooking, succulent and oleaginous. Maurice himself, barefooted and unshaven, will be issuing orders to his workmen— he has an estate of four hundred acres and the hotel is for him a sideshow; his main reason for converting the main building into a guest-house and himself going down into restricted quarters being the need of an occupation for his wife.
The house had originally been built before World War I by an eccentric colonel who considerably increased the local population during his retirement. He was interested in astronomy and constructed a large attic room, walled with sliding panels, each of which contained a round port-hole so that every aspect of the heavens was visible. It was this room that Compton Mackenzie occupied; and a framed, signed notice at the foot of the stairway proclaims his tenancy and the composition there of Hunting the Fairies. He recommended it to me, but the dark painting of the woodwork and the rattling of the panels soon drove me downstairs to a lighter room with a private verandah capable of accommodating a twelve-guest ‘sundowner’. For this accommodation with full board I paid fifteen pounds a month.