Ever since Daniel Defoe wrote his novel ‘ Robinson Crusoe’ in 1719, the ambition of most adventurous young men has been to find an uninhabited jungle island where they can live in solitary peace with Nature and the elements.
When I worked in Africa as a foreign correspondent in the old days, I came across one such person who actually succeeded in achieving this dreamy aim for the rest of his life instead of merely imagining it, as most of us have done.
This modern-day Robinson Crusoe was a journalist on the staff of the East African Standard newspaper in Kenya who decided, literally in my hearing, to search the nearby vast tropical Indian Ocean for his version of paradise won.
My friend was Brendan Grimshaw, a 37-year-old wily Yorkshireman who, in 1962, decided to leave our material and busy world and search the great ocean, island-by-island, using native outrigger sailing boats, conventional flying means and even with the aid of a precarious dugout canoe.
After a fairly long survey, Brendan found himself in the sun-kissed Seychelles Archipelago where he came across a small lonely uninhabited island just a kilometre long and as physically removed as you can get from the hustle and bustle of life in Kenya, or anywhere else for that matter.
Brendan’s big find was the deserted palm-fringed Moyonne Island, a 24-acre remote rocky jungle in what are some of the world’s most balmy turquoise tropical waters. After establishing who the owners were, he managed to buy his new real estate for only A$16,000 and crown himself king of the unknown.
After I had heard that this happy recluse had initially established a home of sorts on his remote getaway, I decided to visit him some months later. The occasion arose when I was criss-crossing the Indian Ocean with Professor J.L.B. Smith, an international ichthyologist who first identified the world’s long-time missing link between sea and land life, known as the Coelacanth with fins for legs.
On arrival at Moyenne Island, I was greeted by possibly the happiest man in the world surrounded by his only island neighbours — a slowly wandering gang of aged giant tortoises and an orchestra of chattering exotic birds with a smell of silence on the silky tropical airs.
At that stage, Brendan had found a male native Seychelles friend, much as the original Robinson Crusoe had experienced with Man Friday. This newcomer was a middle-aged passing fisherman originally employed by Brendan to assist with clearing a small plot on the island for a house and a bush walk through the most dense of jungle imaginable.
Amazingly, my former journalistic colleague had also by this time managed to persuade the Seychelles Archipelago Government to declare his lonely private island home territory as the world’s smallest national park, boasting over 100 giant tortoises and exotic bird life.
After exchanging greetings with Brendan and his friend, I simply had to enquire whether there was any evidence of hidden treasure within the sea boundaries of Moyenne Island. The immediate answer I got was “the only treasure here is the peace we experience.”
During a minor safari of his heavily wooded kingdom, Brendan did, however, show me with glee two gravestones believed to be of dead pirates from Daniel Defoe’s day. According to certain Seychelles historians, Moyenne was originally believed by local fishermen to house evil spirits and was generally avoided by all ancient seafarers.
None of this, however, fazed the island’s first resident owner for even a second as he proudly proclaimed that Moyenne had assisted him to overcome a childhood medical problem by providing him with his first feelings of absolute freedom from the “have to’s” and “must do’s” of our Western way of life.
I must also admit that Brendan’s tropical wonderland island peace soon got to me as well as I soaked up some of the most laid-back equatorial vibes that a world traveller can ever experience.
My stay with my personal Robinson Crusoe was but short as I had to re-join my oceanic scientists in discovering a myriad of new and unknown fish and sea life among the local rainbow coloured coral reefs.
Over the years since the 1960’s, I learned that some time after my visit to Brendan’s island in the white and blue swirl of the magical Seychelles Island Group, his father had moved to Moyenne from Britain to later die there in peaceful surrounds. My friend also passed away more recently at a fair age and his beloved island has since become a restricted tourist destination — still a world of tranquillity unto itself.
Yamba resident and former foreign correspondent Oscar Tamsen whose work around the world from the early 1950s saw him in Colonial Africa for nearly two decades as a working journalist. Oscar’s years in the ‘Dark Continent,’ as it was then known, had him travelling from Cairo to Cape Town, meeting some of the world’s top newsmakers of the time as well as participating in a number of wars and rebellions.