with seven to eight hundred tortoises, who refuse to land them here for the sick of other ships, preferring to sell them at Bourbon or exchange them there for chickens!’ Labourdonnais did not keep an exact account of the number of tortoises removed from Rodrigues during his governorship. It could hardly have been less than 10,000 annually. One of his successors, Desforges-Bourcher, the same who was formerly governor of Bourbon and had attempted to establish a colony at Rodrigues in 1725, was more precise. Four little ships were engaged during his governorship in transporting the tortoises to Isle de France. They were La Mignonne, L'Oiseau, Le Volant and Le Penelope. Thousands of tortoises were brought back each time, as the following extract from one of his reports to the Company shows:
14 December 1759
L'Oiseau arrives from Rodrigues with 1035 tortoises and 47 turtles. She had loaded 5000, but took eight days to reach Isle de France and lost most of the cargo.
15 May 1760
— L'Oiseau brings 6000 tortoises 29 September 1760
— L'Oiseau arrives with 1600 tortoises and 171 turtles 12 May 1761
— Le Volant docks with a cargo of 4000 tortoises 6 December 1761
— L'Oiseau brings 3800 tortoises alive out of a shipment of 5000.
The Royal Navy helped itself too, when in Rodrigues waters. Thus on 26 July 1761 two ships loaded 3000 tortoises.
Presently, after two-and-a-half hours’ flying, we saw ahead of us the meandering, ever-moving scarf of ivory-white foam that marked the reef around Rodrigues. This great bastion of coral ringed the island and, indeed, formed a great shelf in the deep ocean on which the island stood. The reef in some places was twenty miles from the island’s shore and the great piece of placid, emerald green water it guarded was dotted with smaller islands, some mere sand dunes, others substantial enough to have given refuge to giant tortoises and a giant species of lizard, also now extinct. We banked and came in low to land on the tiny, red earth airfield. From the air, the island looked biscuit- brown and pretty barren, though there were patches of green in the valleys and a scattering of dusty green vegetation elsewhere. From the moment we left the plane, we were enveloped in the magic charms one only feels on small, remote, sun-illuminated islands. We made our way over the red laterite airstrip and into the minute airport building, on the facade of which was the heartwarming sign saying Welcome to Rodrigues’. Inside, I saw, to my astonishment, a desk set in an open window on which there was a sign saying ‘Immigration’.
‘Immigration?’ I said to John. ‘What can they mean? They’ve only one plane a week from Reunion and three from Mauritius.’
‘Don’t ask me,’ he said, ‘perhaps it’s not for us.’
‘Please to have passports ready for Immigration,’ said a jovial policeman in smart green uniform, thus dispelling any doubt.
It was fortunate we had by chance brought our passports with us, since it had not occurred to us that we would need them, Rodrigues being a dependency of Mauritius. At that moment, the Immigration Officer himself arrived; a large, chocolate- coloured Rodriguan in a handsome, khaki uniform. He was sweating profusely and carried a big bundle of unruly files. He had an earnest, nervous, wrinkled face like a bloodhound recovering from a nervous breakdown. He seated himself at the desk, knocked over the sign saying ‘Immigration Officer’ with his files, and smiled at us nervously as he righted it. We lined up in front of him, dutifully brandishing our passports. He gave us a little bow, cleared his throat and then, with a flourish, opened a file which contained immigration forms of the sort that ask you every imaginably fatuous question, from your date of birth to whether your grandmother had ingrowing toenails. His stern demeanour as an upholder of the law was slightly undermined when a gust of warm air from the window blew his forms all over what, for want of a better term, one must call the airport lounge. We all scrabbled around collecting them for him and he was pathetically grateful.
He was now sweating even more profusely than before. He leant his rotund elbows on the forms to prevent another unfortunate episode, and took Ann’s passport. Laboriously he copied out her place and date of birth, her age and her profession. This was all plain sailing and he handed her back her passport with a wide glittering, triumphant smile; the smile of a man who has the situation under control. His confidence was premature, however, for, flushed with enthusiasm, he leant forward to take my passport and another sly gust of wind scattered his forms like confetti across the airport lounge. It took several minutes to retrieve them all and by that time Ann’s form had a handsome boot mark on it where a helpful member of the airport police had stamped on it as it slid past him along the floor.
We re-established the Immigration Officer at his desk and he accepted, with gratitude, Ann’s offer that she stood behind him and held down his migratory paper forms while he devoted his time to filling them in. Rid of the burden of this paperwork, as it were, he was now free to show his mettle as Immigration Officer. He took my passport and riffled it with his chocolate- coloured fingers like an expert card sharper. He gave me what I think was supposed to be a shrewd and penetrating glance, but it was far too beguiling to be this.
'Where have you come from?’ he asked.
As Rodrigues had been waterlogged for two weeks and we were the first plane in from Mauritius in that time and as there was only that plane on the airport, I found the question baffling. If it had been made to me at London Airport, say, with hundreds of planes an hour coming in, it would have had some relevance, but here in Rodrigues with, at best, only four planes a week the question took on a slightly ‘Looking-Glass’ quality. I resisted the impulse to say that I had just swum ashore, and told him instead that I had come from Mauritius. He puzzled over the ‘author/zoologist’ designation under ‘Occupation’ in my passport, obviously thinking it might be something as dangerous as CIA or MI5; then, with some difficulty over the ‘zoologist’, he copied it out slowly and carefully on to his form. Then he stamped my passport and handed it back to me, with his ingratiating smile, and I made way for John. Meanwhile, Ann was having a struggle with the forms, as quite a stiff breeze had sprung up. She was now helped in her task by the policeman who had contributed his boot mark to her form. He seemed determined that the police force should not be lagging behind the immigration authorities in devotion to duty.
The immigration man now took John’s passport and asked him where he had come from.
‘Yorkshire, in England,’ said John innocently, before I could stop him.
‘No, no,’ said the immigration man, confused by this largesse of information, ‘I mean where you come from now?’
‘Oh,’ said John, ‘Mauritius.’
The immigration man wrote it down carefully. He opened John’s passport and laboriously copied out the relevant information regarding John’s nascence. Then he looked at John’s occupation and saw the dreaded and incomprehensible word ‘herpetologist’. His eyes shut and his face wrinkled in alarm. He looked like a man who every night for years has awoken, screaming, from a dream in which his superiors have not only asked him to define what a ‘herpetologist’ was but to spell it as well. Now his dream had come true. He licked his lips, opened his eyes, and glanced nervously at the dreaded word, hoping it had gone away. It stared back at him implacably, ununderstandable and unspellable. He made a valiant attempt.