In 1962, Brendon Grimshaw was a forty -year -old English journalist who had worked for some publishers in Eastern Africa when he decided to completely upset his life. After a pleasure trip in the summer of that year, he was fascinated by the Seychelles and purchased the small abandoned islet of Moyenne for the modest sum of 8,000 pounds, one of the 115 islands of the archipelago located just 4 and a half kilometers from the northern coast of Mahé.
An abandoned island looking for rebirth
Moyenne is a small jewel of just ten hectares that gets up from the hair of the water up to sixty meters in height. The sand is white, the granite boulders typical of the Seychelles peek along its line of coast, and the island looks like a pyramid of Selva that appears from the ocean. However, when Grimshaw arrived, the island did not show exactly like a paradise: it had been completely abandoned since 1915, except for a family of fishermen who had lived there for a few decades.
The paradisiacal beaches and the nature of Moyenne appeared to Grimshaw’s eyes as the perfect place to start again and live a new phase of his life. The journalist immediately fell in love with the silence of the island and his impenetrable vegetation, finding in that place the right balance between proximity and remoteness from civilization. Soon, however, he realized that buying Moyenne would prove to be an easier task than taking care of it.
The challenge of the restoration
The state of abandonment and the ancient human interventions had left Moyenne in poor condition. The weeds suffocated the undergrowth and the vegetation was so dense that the coconut walnuts falling from the palm trees did not even reach the ground. The birds were no longer there anymore, while the mice banqueted undisturbed in the undergrowth. The interventions to be made to redevelop the islet seemed to have no end, and the fate of Moyenne appeared already marked and threatened by the tourist boom that was affecting the adjacent islands of the archipelago.
It was then that Grimshaw shakes a deep friendship with Rene Antoine Laforune, son of a local fisherman, who became his inseparable companion and his “Friday”. The two decided to give new life to the island, cleaning it, planting trees and tracing paths in the jungle. Grimshaw’s goal was to protect Moyenne and bring her back to its original beauty, recreating an adamitic paradise destined to survive him. He wanted to report at least one of the Seychelles to the appearance that he had to have before the arrival of mass tourism.
Mysteries and legends
The restoration work did not fail to reveal surprises. Among the vegetation of the north-western side of the island, Grimshaw found two tombs whose tombstones laconically recited: “Unhappily Unknown”. The journalist, on the basis of a local legend, was convinced that they were two pirates – not surprisingly, one of the beaches on the northern side of Moyenne is known as Pirate’s Cove.
According to legend, the tombs belonged to a pair of hoaxes, perhaps killed so that their spirits, infesting the island, protected the treasure that this hatched. It is not known if Grimshaw believed to the bottom of this rumor, however every morning he got up telling himself that he really wants to find a treasure. Two sites are marked on Moyenne’s maps with the symbols of the skull and crossed bones, where Grimshaw and Laforune sought the trunks full of wealth, but they never jumped out.
The transformation into paradise
Over the years, Grimshaw and Laforune planted over 16,000 mango, papaya, mahogany and palm trees. This imposing reforestation work has attracted many tropical bird species over time – today the island hosts a quantity higher than that of any other place of the archipelago – as well as the giant turtles of Aldabra, a species at risk of extinction of which today are fifty only on the island of Grimshaw.
While the former journalist proceeded in his work, the Seychelles were becoming one of the most requested tropical destinations in the world, and Moyenne’s beauty also began to attract prying looks. Over the years, Grimshaw received offers from foreign magnates – including a sheikh that seems to have gone to offer up to 50 million pounds to grab the island – but always rejected them to protect the tropical paradise that he had built from scratch with his hands.
The inheritance of a lifetime
With the advance of the years, Grimshaw made himself more and more realized that he did not have much time available to protect the future of his creature: having no children, he had no one to entrust to Moyenne in custody. The situation complicated further when his friend Laforune died in 2007. At that point, Grimshaw decided to look for an agreement with the Seychelles Ministry of the Environment.
In 2009, two years after the disappearance of kidney, Brandon Grimshaw signed an agreement with the government of the Seychelles who included Moyenne in the protected national park of the Ste. Anne Marine Park. Thus was born the Moyenne Island National Park, the smallest national park in the world, which acquired a special status. Although tiny, according to some estimates, the island of Moyenne contains the largest amount of biodiversity per square meter in the world compared to other protected areas, with multiple plant species per square meter of any other national national park in the world.
A testament for eternity
Grimshaw died in 2012, after having lived on the island for fifty years without ever abandoning it from the moment he set foot for the first time. His tomb is next to that of the two pirates and that of his father, who reached him in the last years of life. In his testament he wrote that “the island of Moyenne must be maintained as a place of prayer, peace, tranquility, relaxation and knowledge, for the inhabitants of the Seychelles and overseas visitors of all nationalities, ethnic groups and religions”.
Moyenne today
Today on the island there is a restaurant, the Jolly Roger, which serves grilled fish and seafood in Creola sauce, a small museum dedicated to the life of Grimshaw and two nurseries for the puppies of the giant turtles that scroll happily in Moyenne’s undergrowth. Arriving here is not simple: the island does not have a pier and is reached maximum by a few dozen visitors per day.
Those who have been there tell that no other place in Seychelles can equal their sense of discovery – it really seems to enter another world. The story of Brendon Grimshaw remains an extraordinary example of how the passion and dedication of a single person can transform an abandoned place into a natural paradise, preserving it for future generations.
Posted by Oatley Flora and Fauna Conservation Society on Saturday, Janogy 15, 2022
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