Presently, we were all congregated at the foot of my pigeon tree to discuss strategy. We decided that, as all the birds we had pinpointed – five in all – were widely scattered throughout the cryptomeria forest, we would start with the one in the smallest and most easily climbed tree nearest to the path and gradually work outwards to the others. Having decided this, we converged on the first tree and surrounded it with our torch beams and the blinding light of the portable searchlight, directed up into the branches where a fat, sleepy, bewildered pigeon sat some thirty-five feet above us.
At first sight, it looked extremely simple to shin up and grab or net the bird, but closer inspection revealed that the tree was so constructed that in order to climb it one would have to cause the maximum amount of noise and commotion. This could well startle the bird into launching itself into the frightening, black night. We had a rapid council of war in whispers, while the pigeon, now fully awake, watched us with benign interest. It was decided that the Sergeant, possibly the most gigantic of our force but the best tree climber, would scale one of the adjacent trees while John Hartley, who had long arms, would scale another. They would then endeavour to manoeuvre themselves into a position from which the capture of the pigeon would be possible. We decided not to plan any further at this stage since things tend to look different when you are dangling thirty-five feet up in the air.
The Sergeant started up his tree, massive but extraordinarily agile, and John Hartley, long-legged as a crane fly, started up his. The pigeon watched them coming aloft with deep interest untinged by alarm, its head slightly on one side. When the Sergeant and John had simultaneously reached a height equal to that of the pigeon’s roost, they paused for breath, then in hoarse whispers confided to us that the Sergeant could edge along the branch to within netting distance of the bird. We eagerly told him to go ahead. We watched as he edged his twenty-odd stone of bone and muscle out along a branch that seemed too fragile to support a squirrel, let alone our ebony Goliath, but to our amazement he reached the end without it snapping.
Here, he manoeuvred the net into position. This net, as I have explained, was like a pair of sugar tongs with a net on each end. Clapped together, they caught the bird in the middle. At the sight of the net, the pigeon showed its first signs of wariness; that is to say, it put its head on one side and gave a slight flirt of its wings. The Sergeant now found that he needed to get another three feet closer to his prey and that this meant climbing to a higher branch. As the pigeon was now showing definite signs of unease, we decided to turn off our battery of lights and let the Sergeant get to his new vantage point in the dark as best he could. Some time, and a considerable amount of blasphemy later, he called down to us that he had successfully reached his new position.
We switched on our lights and discovered to our astonishment that the pigeon had seized this opportunity to tuck its head under its wing and snatch forty winks. When the lights came on again it pulled its head out from under its wing, with a gesture of irritability, and looked distinctly put out. The Sergeant, with an air of desperation, was now clinging to yet another fragile branch and working the net into position. Breathlessly, we watched him as he swept the net towards the pigeon; then we saw the bird, with surprising agility, hop farther down the branch but not fly away into the night. The Sergeant, clinging desperately to his bending, creaking branch, edged closer and took another swipe. This time, the two halves of the net snapped together and engulfed the bird, but the effort had been too much; Sergeant and branch bent downwards and in an effort not to let go and fall, he relinquished his hold on the handle of the net.
In silent horror, we watched it fall. The two sides of the ‘sugar tongs’ fell open so that our precious Pink pigeon was now only contained in one half of the net and could easily escape. Then the falling net hit a tree limb and hung there. The pigeon gave a couple of half-hearted flaps and we waited to see if it would extricate itself from the net and fly away into the impenetrable gloom of the cryptomerias. However, after a token effort to escape, it lay stoically still, which was just as well as the net was only just hanging on to the branch.
Now we noticed something else. The branch in which the net was caught grew out at an angle and came quite close to the tree in which John Hartley was ensconced. Seeing this, John made his way rapidly down his tree and then out along the branches until he was separated from the net by a mere four-foot gap. With great care, since the branch he was on was both fragile and elastic, he reached across the gap. For a moment, I thought his arms were not long enough but then, to my relief, his hands closed round the mouth of the net. The Pink pigeon was ours.
Carefully, John eased his way back into the green depths of the cryptomeria where he transferred our capture from the net into one of the soft cloth bags with which he and the Sergeant had been provided. This safely done, he lowered the booty slowly down to the ground on a string. As the bag swung down out of the dark cryptomeria leaves, I received it reverently into my cupped hands. With great care, I opened it and extracted the pigeon for Dave to look at it. It lay quietly in my hands, without struggling, merely blinking its eyes in what appeared to be mild curiosity at this new experience. The colours seen so closely, even in an artificial light, were vivid and beautiful: the pale chocolates of the wings and the back, the rusty, almost fox-red of the tail and rump, and then the broad breast, neck and head, pale grey flushed with cyclamen-pink overtones. It was a remarkably handsome bird.
Gazing at it, feeling its silken feathering against my fingers and sensing the steady tremor of its heart-beat and its breathing, I was filled with a great sadness. This was one of the 33 individuals that survived; the shipwrecked remnants of their species, eking out a precarious existence on their cryptomeria raft. So, at one time, must a tiny group of Dodos, the last of their harmless, waddling kind, have faced the final onslaught of pigs, dogs, cats, monkeys and man, and disappeared for ever since there was no one to care and no one to offer them a breeding sanctuary, safe from their enemies. At least with our help, the Pink pigeons stood a better chance of survival, even though their numbers were down to such a dangerously low level.
We had taken so long over the capture of this pigeon that the moon had come out in strength and, to our annoyance, there was not a cloud in the sky. Any operation to capture more pigeons was doomed to failure, since there was more than enough light for them to see to fly by. Our first attempt to climb up to their roosts sent them flapping out of the cryptomeria branches and off down the valley. To try to track them down would have been a hopeless waste of time. As we tumbled and slipped and sweated our way out of the valley into a landscape brilliantly frosted by moonlight, we carried our precious burden, the Pink pigeon. We felt we could not complain. To have caught one bird out of the 33 in that sort of terrain and at the first attempt, struck me, in fact, as being little short of a miracle.
When we had got back to the hotel, showered, changed and anointed our mosquito bites, we assembled in the dining-room.
‘Why don’t we celebrate our capture,’ I suggested. ‘How about a dozen oysters and then some grilled lobster with green salad, followed by bananas flambéed in rum, washed down with a nice white wine?’
Both Ann and John said that, as a light snack, this met with their approval, and I gave the order accordingly. Presently, our waiter, who rejoiced in the name of Horace, came back.
‘Please, Sir,’ he said, ‘I’m sorry for the lobsters.’
Although English is the official language of Mauritius, I had run into trouble from time to time. The Mauritian habit of saying ‘mention’ as an abbreviation for ‘Don’t mention it’ when you thanked them, took a little getting used to. Now, I was faced with a new problem. Horace was sorry for the lobsters. Did this mean that, as a fully paid-up member of the RSPCA, the thought of the demise of these delectable crustaceans filled him with such remorse that he could not bring himself to serve them? Nothing in Horace’s demeanour led me to believe this was so, but, at the same time, I did not want t
o risk hurting his feelings.
‘Why are you sorry for the lobsters, Horace?’ I asked, prepared to be gentle and sympathetic.
‘Because there are no lobsters, Sir,’ said Horace.
We had fish instead.
3. Round Island
Unlike most sea expeditions undertaken in the tropics, our expedition to Round Island was an unqualified success; if, that is, you overlook the fact that Wahab was seasick, Dave suffered from heat-stroke, and I attempted to gain an Olympic Gold Medal for the longest most painful elbow-slide attempted to date on the island.
Getting up at four in the morning in a strange hotel is always sobering, especially when you suspect, from bitter experiences in other parts of the world, that you are the only member of the expedition who is being stupid enough to be on time, or, maybe, to appear at all. I always have a guilt complex when I get up too early in an hotel, and feel it incumbent upon me to creep about so as to avoid disturbing my less eccentric fellow guests. However, blundering about in unfamiliar territory is fraught with difficulties. On this occasion these started with trying to find the light switch, and knocking over the bedside table with its decoration of large water-jug, glass, clock, and three pamphlets on the fauna of Round Island. Next came the crashing descent of the lavatory seat (like a cannonade being fired across the bows of every sleeper in the place) to be followed by a rattle as of musketry as the waterpipes cleared their throats, merging into a roar of the shower which, at that hour, sounded like the cataclysmic eruption of Krakatoa in 1883. The only pleasure I derived from this whole dreary performance was the thought that I was waking my companions, who should have been up already.
Eventually, we piled sleepily into the car, complete with all the curious gear demanded of animal collectors (snake bags, nets, bottles, string, as well as cameras and binoculars), and drove off down the road, shiny wet with night rain between the whispering walls of sugar cane, towards the Yacht Club, at whose pier we were supposed to meet the rest of the party. Halfway there, luckily, we crossed paths with a car which contained Dave, who was driving in the wrong direction with great skill and confidence. Fortunately, he saw us, turned round and joined the cavalcade. Shortly afterwards, we came upon Wahab in his car, waiting under a tree to guide us; his wide, glittering, schoolboy grin was so mischievous and eager that we immediately felt not only confidence in the success of our mission, but even that getting up at four in the morning to accomplish it was a positive treat.
Arriving at the Yacht Club grounds, we parked our cars under the trees. Hopefully unseen by the Yacht Club’s Garden Committee, John and I cut ourselves lengths of the bougainvillaea hedge to make lizard-catching sticks. Then, with our bags full of food and equipment, we trooped down the pier and surveyed our craft.
She was like a baby tug, with a tiny fore-deck, closed-in bridge-deck area, and a well-deck (with polished wooden benches around the perimeter) that was roofed, but otherwise open to whatever elements we were likely to encounter. She was snub-nosed and rather bossy-looking, with a practical ungainliness which somehow gave me confidence in her sea-going abilities. According to the brass plate fastened to her, she was nearly twenty years old, and had been built, of all unlikely places, in Colchester. She had started life with the somewhat butch name of Corsair but now had been re-christened the Dorade.
She already had a cargo of humanity aboard her for, apart from a very smart-looking captain in a peaked cap, there was his first officer, who looked like a young version of Haile Selassie; a tiny walnut of a man who was a diver (in case we sank, one supposed); a benign Moslem barrister, who was a friend of Wahab’s; Tony Gardner and three forestry guards (who also ‘belonged’, so to speak, to Wahab); and a strange, portly gentleman, his sleepy-eyed, plump wife, and two female companions, all of them dressed in immaculate clothing which seemed more suitable for Henley regatta than the rigours of Round Island. As Wahab, Tony, and the rest of us joined them, I couldn’t help reflecting that we looked not unlike the strangely ill-assorted collection of individuals that the Bellman had taken with him to hunt the Snark.
With a certain amount of shouting, argument, and rearrangement of people and belongings, as always happens on these occasions, we were safely settled in the well-deck area and our luggage bestowed. The ropes were cast off, and the good ship Dorade started on her way across a black, velvety sea, besprinkled with the waning star reflections, for the eastern sky was already pale with hosts of tiny, dark cumulus clouds like a flock of curly black sheep grazing on a silver meadow. The sea was incredibly calm and the wind warm and pleasant. Those of our number who had felt qualms about the sea-going ability of their internal organs relaxed perceptibly.
The first island we passed, looming large and dark on our left, was Gunner’s Quoin, so-called because of its resemblance to the triangular-shaped piece of wood (like a flat-sided piece of cheese) that used to be wedged beneath a cannon to give it the right elevation and trajectory. Actually, as we chugged past it, I thought it looked more like the wreck of the Titanic, bottom-up and sinking by the stern. The dawn sky had now turned from silver to yellow. Those flocks of cumulus grazing on the horizon, became jet-black, with each curl rimmed in golden light, while the flocks that meandered higher in the pasture of the sky turned slate blue with flecks and stripes of delicate purple. In the distance now, we could see the silhouette of Flat Island which, except for a protuberance at one end, lived up to its name. Then there was Ile aux Serpents, or Snake Island, like an inverted pudding basin, and lastly, our destination, Round Island, which, at that angle, did not look round at all but, with the aid of a certain amount of imagination, vaguely like a turtle with its head protruding from its shell, lying on the surface of the sea.
‘Tell me,’ I asked Tony, since geographical nomenclature, like the zoological, sometimes needs explanation, ‘can you explain the anomaly of the names of those two islands?’
‘Which ones?’ asked Tony, puffing clouds of aromatic smoke from his pipe.
‘Round Island and Ile aux Serpents,’ I said.
‘I don’t quite see what you mean,’ said Tony, puzzled.
‘Well, Ile aux Serpents is round, and has no snakes inhabiting it, while Round Island is not round and is inhabited by two species of snake.’
‘Ah, yes, that is curious,’ admitted Tony. ‘My own view is that they got the islands muddled up when they were drawing the maps. It can happen, you know.’
‘I believe you,’ I said. ‘I once had an official map of the Cameroons which not only deflated a major town into a village, but shifted it two hundred miles north as well.’
Gradually, the whole sky lightened to powder-blue and shell-pink, and the clouds became smooth and white, piled up on the horizon like a snow-bedecked group of trees. Then, suddenly, through this forest of cumulus, the sun shouldered its way like a tiger, and burnt a glittering path of light across the sea, that seemed to catch the Dorade in claws of heat, even at that early hour.
The closer we got to Round Island, the more forbidding did the terrain appear. The sun was rising almost directly behind it, so that we saw it mainly in silhouette, rising, apparently sheer from the sea, with a tattered fringe of palms along part of its summit. The good ship Dorade shouldered its way across a blue swell that was, though not fierce, languidly muscular, and gave the impression of great power, like a half-asleep blue cat.
‘I’m glad it’s so calm,’ said Tony. ‘In fact, it’s the calmest I’ve ever seen it. Sometimes, it takes over an hour to land, and they frequently have to cut the anchor adrift if it catches under one of the submarine ledges.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘I read with reverence, not unmixed with awe, Nicolas Pike’s description of his sojourn on Round Island. His account of his first landing gives one pause for thought.’
‘Yes. Remarkable man,’ said Tony.
Pike was one of those indefatigable Victorian explorers, to whom present-day naturalists and zoologists owe such a great debt as, in their extraordinary unsuitable clothing
but with bright, alert, all-embracing minds, they circumnavigated the world, cataloguing everything they saw, recording everything they heard, insatiable in their thirst for knowledge, and most of them, blessed with a strange, archaic style of writing and a sense of humour of the variety generally only found in the more ancient volumes of Punch. Their accounts of what they saw and collected have a freshness, enthusiasm and appeal which is generally lacking in the flaccid travel books foisted on us nowadays by the naturalist traveller of the jet set. Here, for example, was Nicolas Pike setting foot on Round Island for the first time:
I at once saw that what had been told me of the difficulty of landing was no exaggeration. Luckily, our fishermen crew made their arrangements skilfully. The boat was allowed to drift within a few feet of the table rock, our landing place, against which the waves were breaking.
At this stage we had to wait, and watch for an opportunity for one of our crew to jump ashore with a rope, so that the boat might be kept bow on and steady. When this was effected, the rope was securely fastened to iron rings placed there for that purpose years ago; and then our provisions, water, etc., were passed on shore.
When everything was safely landed, each one watched for the moment when the boat rose, and sprung on to the rock with a bound that made every nerve quiver; and it needed a sure foot and steady eye to alight firmly on the slippery stone.
If our little craft, which rose and fell some ten or twelve feet, had struck her bows on the precipitous ledge, she would have been hurled to Davy Jones’s Locker, and all in her, in a few seconds. The depth of the water is about four fathoms here.