Excerpts from ‘Passport to Anywhere’ by Lars-Eric Lindblad
I came to learn about the Seychelles in a roundabout way. In 1968, I had been invited by the government of the now independent island of Mauritius, at that time still a British colony, to assess its potential as a tourist attraction. It lies in the Indian Ocean, due east of the island of Madagascar.
Mauritius is easy to reach by air. This made it a food starting point in my search for the best possible area to cruise when the ‘Lindblad Explorer’ headed north from the Antarctic. At Mauritius, I learned more about the Seychelles and how their rare loveliness was mostly unvisited since there was no airport.
I also learned of a curious island southwest of the Seychelles, known as Aldabra. It is the largest raised atoll in the world, a massive coral reef that contains the only other breeding ground beyond the Galapagos for the giant land tortoise and teems with other rare wildlife. There were other scattered islands in the area, too, present or former territories of Britain and France. They all were in an area of clear blue seas and inviting climate. This part of the western Indian Ocean was obviously ideal for the ‘Lindblad Explorer’ in between her icy polar voyages.
We got together an exploratory team. Roger Tory Peterson would appraise the birdlife. George Holton, who had now joined ‘Lindblad Travel’, would bring his photographic talent, Jimmy James, of British Airways, then known as BOAC, would come along to assess the future possibility of air travel to an area that had no airports. Tony Irwin of our Nairobi office would join me in laying out a practical cruise schedule through the islands.
We flew to Mombasa on the Kenya coast. Here, we boarded the British India line’s ‘M.S. Kampala’ on her Africa-to-Bombay run. The ship was to make an almost grudging stop at the Seychelles. She was a venerable vessel with no less than four classes of cabins, plus a steerage that was not built for comfort. We left on the journey not sure whether our expectations exceeded reality.
When the island of Mahe hove in sight, however, there was no doubt in my mind that we had found some of the most beautiful islands in the world. As we passed the isle of Silhouette, Mahe rose out of the turquoise waters with high granite cliffs. It was even more beautiful than Morea in Tahiti. I wondered why these islands had been bypassed over the centuries.
Once ashore, we were taken to the Hotel des Seychelles, the only hotel on the island at that time. Modest and charming, it seemed to reflect the nature of the Seychellois people. They represented a melting pot, a grand mixture of many races that had only arrived there some 200 years before.
When we arrived at Port Victoria, the capital of the Seychelles, in 1968, the islands were still under the British flag, but Britain had decided to turn the islands over to self-rule. Jimmy Mancham, a young, vigorous lawyer educated in London and Paris, was gunning for the status of an independent British protectorate on the model of Gibraltar. He led the Seychelles Democratic Party. He was opposed by France Albert Rene, another sophisticated lawyer, who had had a brief career as a European banker.
Rene headed the Seychelles People’s United Party, which leaned to the Left under the influence of the Organization of African Unity. He wanted outright independence from Britain and was willing to fight if necessary. Both were members of influential Seychelles families. Albert Rene was quiet and introspective. Mancham was charming and flamboyant, a playboy by both Eastern and Western standards – but with a sharply contrasting seriousness of political purpose.
Mancham was Chief Minister of the newly-elected Legislative Council when I met him at the hotel on our 1968 arrival. His mother was a Seychellois of French descent; his father of Chinese descent. Jimmy Mancham had an engaging personality and a passion for both beautiful women and his country. He immediately made it evident that the Seychelles needed tourism to vitalize the precarious economy of the country – if it could be done without destroying the wildlife or scenic beauty. Of course, this was my objective, so we hit it off from the start.
Waiting for us on Mahe was Tony Beamish, brother of Lord Tufton Beamish of the British House of Lords. Both had been trying to generate enthusiasm and support in England for the islands, but without much success. Thanks to Tony Beamish, our team was able to set-up an exploratory cruise, first to the immediate islands near Mahe, and later to the atolls to the south – the Amirantes and Aldabra.
We headed out in a comfortable cabin cruiser for the islands known as the ‘granite group’, as contrasted to the coral and volcanic islands we would be visiting later. Most of them were privately owned; all of them have sparkling, uninhabited white beaches and wildlife that include some species found nowhere else in the world.
One colourful Seychellois named Harry Savy owned several islands: Fregate, Des Noeufs and Aldabra. The first is a granite island, surrounded by a coral reef, with magnificent beaches. More important to Roger Tory Peterson was that it harbored one of the world’s rarest birds, the magpie robin. There were only supposed to be a handful in the world, yet when we arrived there, we were able to count fifty-six of them – more than twice the reported world population. The bird’s survival may have been due to the pigs that Harry Savy had brought there. In uprooting the soil, they exposed lavish quantities of earthworms that made life easy for the magpie robin. This may be one case where a domestic animal has helped the wildlife.
Nearby Desnoeufs Island in the Amirantes has an extraordinary population of 2 million pairs of sooty terns and noddies. Savy was not exactly a conservationist. Each year he would harvest these nutritious eggs and carry them on his schooner to the Mahe market. They had thin shells and were difficult to transport, but he brought them through the surf to his waiting ship with great commercial success.
The Indian Ocean is of strategic value to the United States and Britain, as well as to Russia. At the time we were making our survey in 1968, the Soviets had established a base in Somalia. The Western alliance was still without a naval or airbase in this part of the Indian Ocean. Furthermore, with the Suez Canal then closed, the western Indian Ocean sea lanes became a primary artery for the flow of oil from the gulf, around the Cape of Good Hope to the United States and Europe.
The United States together with Britain was casting around for a suitable island for a strategic air and naval base in the region. Meantime, Jimmy Mancham was pushing hard for a commercial airport, which he considered a must to put the Seychelles on the map. He was well aware of both the U.S. and British aspirations for an airbase, and used this knowledge in eventually getting the commercial airport established.
A survey team had already visited Aldabra and found that the island would be ideal for a military base, with ample room for long runways and a large lagoon that could be blasted out for the naval base. This caused considerable concern among people interested in the natural sciences and the whole ecology of the area. Aldabra, twenty-one miles long and nine miles wide, is the only other place in the world besides the Galapagos where the giant tortoises exist. It also features other rich wildlife, especially birds, some of which are entirely endemic to this island. The tortoises were important symbolically, too. The coat of arms of the Seychelles features it prominently as part of the island’s heritage. Through Mancham’s conservation efforts, it had become a protected species, a step applauded by wildlife experts throughout the world.
My next visit to the Seychelles would not be until the ‘Lindblad Explorer’ arrived several months later, but I was anxious to get back to work closely with Jimmy Mancham and Tony Beamish in their efforts to save Aldabra.
At this stage, I felt that the Seychelles from Bird Island in the north to Aldabra in the south would offer the visitor much value. The establishment of the commercial airport at Mahe would be important, of course. Mancham was convinced that the air service would bring genuine prosperity to his area. But he was also firm in wanting to protect the wildlife of the islands and the seas surrounding them. He worked with the remnants of the British colonial rule to set up a code for stringent control of future tourism which would forbid the building of high-rise hotels, spear gun fishing, shell collecting, the killing of tortoises and other obvious threats to the ecology. But it remained clear that tourism was essential to the economic future of the islands.
In anticipation of the certain interest in the underwater reefs, I purchased a fifty-six-foot converted Norwegian coast guard cutter named the ‘Christian Bugge’ (irreverently referred to as the Holy Queer by the Seychelles’ fine British Governor, Sir Bruce Greatbach), which could take small groups of travelers who arrived by air around the islands. She had been built in 1905 with teak decks and was full of character. Later, I also bought a beautiful, sleek 125-foot schooner, replete with a lounge with a crystal chandelier and a piano. She was called the ‘Dwyn Wenn’, Welsh for the Goddess of Love.
She had five double cabins and would provide two-week cruises for those who flew in after the airport was completed. Both ships served us for years in taking people with a special love for the sea, snorkeling and diving.
Meanwhile, the fight was shaping up to keep Aldabra from becoming a military base. Roger Tory Peterson and I contacted every opinion maker we knew to emphasize that Aldabra was one of the most important wildlife areas in the world. Tufton Beamish continued to lobby in the British Parliament. Jimmy Mancham cajoled all the British and American officials he could collar. Sir Peter Scott did the same. Christopher Cadbury, staunch Quaker and chocolate manufacturer, provided major funds and effort. But the British and American military commanders continued to be confident they would win.
As prosecutors of the Seychelles, the British had the major influence, of course, although they planned to lease the islands to the U.S. Air Force if legislative approval was given. But they failed to realize the power of the voice of the tortoise. In England, millions of determined with gray hair and knitting needles carry tremendous clout. When aroused, they can spoil the chances of any well-meaning MP, especially if the issue involves dogs, cats, other animals, or rose gardens. We not only aimed for their support but for that of every wildlife and conservation society over the world.
We were now scheduling the ‘Lindblad Explorer’ to arrive in the Seychelles on her first cruise there in April 1970. The big commercial jetport on Mahe would not be completed until eighteen months later. By now, both British and Seychellois officials were looking forward to the economic boost that tourism would bring and pressed me for the date the first ‘Lindblad’ tours would arrive. Other travel organizations had made promises to them, but none had been kept. I told Governor Greatbatch and Jimmy Mancham that I would bring two full tours there, both by land and by sea, precisely on April 19, 1970. They were more than surprised at this, because the new jet airport would not be ready.
But as part owner of ‘Wilken Air’ in Kenya, I was sure in the back of my mind we could find a good location on the site of the big airport under construction to clear an airstrip that could handle a small plane. Tony Irwin became greatly involved in the flight venture and proceeded to arrange for building another landing strip on the Veevers Carters’ Astove Island where small planes could stop and refuel. I arranged to put into use two bulldozers: one to make the primitive landing strip at Mahe that could handle one of our ‘Wilken Air’ Twin-Engine Navajos, and the other to create a strip on Astove for the refueling stop. In this way, I was able to bring the Seychelles the first air service they ever had.
I am sure my promise was heard with a great deal of skepticism, so when both the ‘Lindblad Explorer’ and our ‘Wilken Air Navajo’ arrived at Mahe exactly on schedule on April 19, the surprise and elation were marked. The isolation of the archipelago was broken, but I continued to work on protecting its values. For two years, the ‘Explorer’ carried out twenty-four cruises between Mombasa and the Seychelles, with the naturalists on board emphasizing the need for protection of the locations we visited. The struggle between civilian and military control of Aldabra still was going on. I continued to invite as many conservation leaders as possible from England, West Germany, the United States, and other countries to visit Aldabra on the ‘Lindblad Explorer’, and I found that once people saw the island and learned about it, they became passionate advocated of saving it.
The ‘Explorer’ also played a part in one of the more dramatic sea rescues of the Indian Ocean. On July 1, 1971, the ‘Explorer’ was cruising toward Aldabra in the vicinity of a small island named Bijoutier, some 400 miles northeast of Madagascar. We discovered that a Taiwan fishing vessel named the ‘Chin Fu’ was hard aground on a coral reef, and that none of her crew of twenty-two could swim. Enormous waves were breaking over the stranded vessel. Although it was impossible to pull alongside, four of our Zodiacs under the command of Chief Officer Karl Torseth pulled in close enough for nine staff and crew members of the ‘Explorer’ to swim through the waves, board the ship, and tow the nonswimming Taiwanese crew to the shallow waters of the lagoon.
The hull had been sawed open by the reef, and hundreds of bloody fish were spilling out, drawing a large number of sharks to the sinking ship. Some of the ‘Chin Fu’ crew were being swept out to deeper waters and larger sharks, as the ‘Lindblad’ rescuers hauled them into the Zodiacs. Aboard distressed ship, Keith Shackleton and Rod Salm pulled a badly injured Taiwanese crewman out of the hold and lowered him to a Zodiac manned by Kim Morton, who managed to maneuver the rubber craft up to the hull and out again through eight-foot waves.
So rough was the water and weather that the overall operation, including ferrying the shipwrecked sailors to the ‘Lindblad Explorer’, took a total of eighteen hours. Later, the British naval survey ship ‘H.M.S. Beagle’ arrived at the scene to take the shopwrecked crew to port. Sir Peter Scott, who watched the rescue from the ‘Explorer’ deck through binoculars, later said that the work of the ‘Lindblad’ crew was one of the most spectacular displays of individual courage he had ever seen.
The new commercial jetport opened on July 4, 1971 – the final link between the Seychelles and the rest of the world. A BOAC VC-10 landed on the runway surrounded by most of the population of Mahe. With great ceremony, Jimmy Mancham stepped out of the plane on returning from one of his international trips to bring his region to the attention of the world. Speaking to the crowds he said, “The landing of this giant bird on this strip of tarmac marks the momentous beginning of a new era for our islands. We are suddenly and irrevocably thrust forward into the twentieth century.”
Playboy or not, Mancham was an astute politician with charisma. With independence from Britain looming as inevitable, his rivalry with Albert Rene intensified. With the arrival of the jets, ‘Lindblad Travel’ was swamped with requests for our tours to the Seychelles, and we were hard put to keep up with them. It was obvious that our operation would have to become much bigger than we had anticipated. Europeans and South Africans were booking our tours heavily. To meet all this demand, I decided to open an office, setting up Mark Gross and his wife as managers. They had worked successfully for us on Easter Island. I also brought Miguel Castro over from the Galapagos to be in charge of the ‘Christian Bugge’. But with the increased demand, this still wasn’t enough. We began handling tours for other agents not established in the Seychelles, and finally Sonja decided to go to Mahe to coordinate the new operation. She planned to stay only a short time. But as the traffic increased, she eventually remained there for over eight years. I was lucky to add Dr. Lyall Watson as both a naturalist and a survey specialist for future itineraries. Not only did he have a vast knowledge of biology, but he had lived for some time in the Seychelles and Indonesia, and knew the islands and islanders well.
The Seychelles were so attractive that they drew tourists like a net. We were to take as many as 42,000 there in one year. I tried to match every increase in business with some kind of effort to preserve what might be destroyed. I served on a committee for the preservation of the islands and spent a great of time on its work. The Aldabra fight remained the center of attention, but it did not come to a head until the mid-1970s, when the joint U.S-British military finally conceded defeat and agreed to place the U.S. base on the more distant island of Diego Garcia. I took a lot of pleasure in discovering that giant tortoises and a few million birds could chase away B52s that threatened their existence.
In 1971, when Jimmy Mancham was running the reelection in the second election in the Seychelles, I sailed on the ‘Christian Bugge’ to Desroches Island, southwest of Mahe. Mancham asked if he could hitch a ride with me on our schooner to campaign among the small islands while I continued my survey.
Regardless of how remote the islands he was going to visit, he dressed as if he had just stepped out of the shop of a prestigious London tailor. We put into several small atolls, landing in our zodiac, with Mancham stepping off on the beaches to give his election messages. On some of them we were forced to wade up to our knees to reach shore. By the time we got to shore, there was no longer a press in Mancham’s elegant, soaking-wet trousers, but he mounted a palm stump and gave his speech to the handful of people on the beach as if he were talking to a packed stadium.
But the problem with Mancham was that he was first a lover of his country and beautiful women, and second a politician. He had become very attracted to one of the stewardness on the ‘Lindblad Explorer’, and his impatience in getting to our rendezvous with the ship was getting the best of him. When the ‘Lindblad Explorer’ finally hove in sight, I was fishing off the stern of the schooner. Then Mancham spied the big ship. I had just hooked a huge tuna and was fighting the line for a long time. But Mancham unceremoniously cut the line and ordered full speed for the ‘Explorer.’
What eventually happened to Mancham is part of a history that was still continuing in 1982, when a mysterious contingent of mercenaries arrived at the Mahe jetport in the guise of a rugby team, purportedly bringing toys for children and posing as members of a beer-drinking club known as the Ancient Order of Foam Blowers. The roots of this abortive coup go back to the granting of independence in 1977.
Mancham, being head of the new country’s largest party, was appointed President. His rival Albert Rene, as leader of the opposition party, was Prime Minister in accordance with the new constitution to form a coalition Government. Mancham welcomed this solution and political peace seemed assured. When Jimmy Mancham left for London to attend the Jubilee in 1977, Rene embraced him and wished him godspeed.
Once Mancham was out of the country, Rene staged a coup and took over the reins while Mancham remained in exile. This coup had already been planned when Rene kissed Mancham goodbye. I had grown to like Jimmy enormously and knew how bitter he was about being deposed. At the same time, he told me that he would never go back to the Seychelles and live as a prisoner in his own country. He was still a lover of life number one, and politician number two.
Rene’s government remained paranoid about Mancham’s trying to come back and organize a countercoup. When the headlines broke in late 1981, it was obvious that the countercoup was taking place. The disguised mercenaries had come out of South Africa under the leadership of the notorious sixty-two-year-old South African mercenary, Mike Hoare. A tape recording of a speech by Mancham was found in the possession of the mercenaries, who were defeated with one killed and two wounded.
The coup failed because some of the mercenaries got drunk on the plane that carried them to Mahe. One of them started to make his exit through the customs gate marked ‘SOMETHING TO DECLARE’, as opposed to the other gate marked ‘NOTHING TO DECLARE’. The customs official opened his suitcase to find an automatic weapon right at the top of the suitcase, and the cat was out of the bag.
When Rene accused Mancham of staging the coup, Mancham replied: “Who are you to cry wolf?”
I have often reflected on this tragic struggle between two very capable and dedicated men. They both come from the same background and have a deep for the Seychelles. There is no question that each wants the country to prosper. At the begin-ning of independence, Mancham was granted the opening moves, just like a chess player who chooses the white pieces gets the artificial option of moving first. His opponent has no other choice to play the black pieces, whether he wants them or not. In other words, he has to take the opposite stance from his opponent. In this small country of 66,000 people, Mancham stood for continued cooperation and communication with Great Britain because he was convinced that tourism was the only viable industry the economy of the country could be based on. Rene, with basically the same goals as Mancham, was forced by the situation to choose a different direction. The result was that the “loyal opposition” had to become the “disloyal opposition.” The regrettable part is that they are both patriotic and accomplished men who have been forced into an artificial enmity.
The roots of this struggle were evident at the time of my first visit to the Seychelles in 1968. My own battle then was to preserve the natural resources there, as well as build a profitable business. I had to switch my attention at that time to several projects on many different fronts that demanded great care. Many of them involved keeping the ‘Lindblad Explorer’ on productive cruises that would take it to the Amazon, Indonesia, New Guinea, the Pacific Islands and the Arctic – all of which would require the most careful scouting and research.
The probing of the Arctic, never before undertaken by a passenger cruising ship, especially would not meticulous planning and imagina-tion. It would be a challenging as the Antarctic, and I was hoping to keep our misadventures down to a minimum. I cannot say that we were successful.