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Hi, I'm George Page for Nature. In the middle of the Western Indian Ocean, just south of the
equator, lies a group of small islands made of granite, outcrops from a vast submarine plateau.
Their origin is something of a mystery. They're the only oceanic islands in the world composed
of granite. Geologists think they may be remnants left behind when the continents of India and Africa
drifted apart millions of years ago. Because of their long isolation, species of plants and
animals which can be found nowhere else on earth evolved on these mysterious islands. Since the
arrival of man in the 17th century, some species have disappeared forever, but enough remain that
we call our film about these remote islands, Fragments of Eden. The log of an East India
trading ship in 1609 furnishes the first glimpse of a cluster of islands in the Indian Ocean. To
the Boats and Thomas Jones, they were more than desolate rocks. They seemed an earthly paradise.
An English merchant on that ship, John Jordan, kept a diary. He records, a good refreshing place
without any fear or danger, except the alligators. For you cannot discern that ever any people had
been there before us. Alligators no longer lie in wait here, but much life does remain on these
islands of granite. Many of the smaller creatures may have come here originally on driftwood,
perhaps as eggs.
Birds of course could fly here, but these islands are home to many that are unique.
The
earliest human visitors here were less concerned with these granite islands as a source of beauty
than as a source of food and riches. They had little effect on the crab population,
but many visiting turtles never made the return trip back into the sea. But even before the
islands were discovered, produce from their shores was being marketed in distant lands.
From these islands came a treasure from the sea, for which an emperor once paid 4,000
gold florins. Far to the northeast, beachcombers on the shores of India once recognized a fortune
in this enigmatic nut of prodigious size and erotic form, but from which nothing could
ever be persuaded to grow. It came, they thought, from some strange palm that grew in the sea.
They named it Coco de Meire and invested it with magical properties. A legend was created,
a myth that lingered until this mysterious archipelago was discovered. The Seychelles,
already ancient when our own species was just emerging. One million years ago they probably
looked just like this, but the granite rocks in fact had cooled 500 million years before.
Only within the last three centuries have these islands been inhabited. A colorful colonial
history has left the islands with an intriguing assortment of people, a mix of French, Madagascan,
African, Oriental, British and Scandinavians. They now crew the schooners, populate the
plantations and speak with the distinctive patois of the French Creole.
The Seychelles economy, it was once said, stands on a nut, the coconut, though it's
spiced with cinnamon, vanilla and cloves. To move the produce of the plantations from
the outer islands to the main island of Mahé, the local craftsmen have shaped the island's
trees into schooner and brig, lugger and bark, and this elegant pirogue, essential to the
safe crossing of the treacherous coral reefs fringing each island.
The very earliest explorers paid great heed to the quality of the trees available for
building ships. John Jordan's diary notes, as good timber as ever I saw of length and
bigness and a very firm timber. You shall have many trees of 60 and 70 feet.
That was in January 1609. He went on to write, we anchored within a pistol shot of the shore
and watered and wooded at our pleasure with much ease, where we found many coconuts, both
ripe and green of all sorts, and much fish and fowl and tortelles.
The tortelles, giant tortoises, were good meat as good as fresh beef. But Jordan wrote,
after two or three meals our men would not eat them because they did look so ugly and
so great that eight of them did almost laid our skiff.
A century and a half later, soon after colonization by the French, nearly all the giant tortoises
were killed. The alligators were hunted to extinction, and much of the remarkable forest
was felled to grow more coconuts and spices for the new trade developing in the Seychelles.
There is still that earthly paradise to be found here, and General Gordon, hero of cartoon,
found what he believed to be a fragment of the true biblical Eden, hiding in a granite
valley on the island of Praline.
To Gordon's eager devout eye, here indeed was a garden eastward of Eden. Out of its
ground he wrote, might grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food.
He found what he thought might be a tree of life, also in the midst of the garden, and
the tree of knowledge of good and evil.
But around the beasts of this Eden and what's today known as the Valley de May, there weaves
a biological mystery that parallels Gordon's search to justify Genesis. How did these varied
animals and plants come to be isolated a thousand miles from anywhere on 29 tiny isles of rock?
A Seychelles blue pigeon feeds on a fruiting fig. Both the species of pigeon and the species
of fig are found nowhere else on earth.
There's a hothouse menagerie of island life here, but there are no native mammals apart
from two kinds of bats. People have been here for but a twinkling of the eye, compared with
the unimaginable span of time since these islands came into existence.
And how did the plants get here? From where did the ancestors of this Pandana seed come?
Did they float across the ocean or have they, as General Gordon believed, been here all
the time, left over plants from a vast sunken continent?
Had the plants or creatures like this tree frog been here since the islands were isolated,
they would probably now bear little relation to the tree frogs or plants of distant Africa,
Madagascar or India. But in fact, many are recognizably relatives of those on far off
shores.
Modern science, revising the myths, tells us that these islands are indeed the crowns
of mountains that once stood dry on the edge of Africa, an edge that once joined onto what's
now the coast of India. The islands are the fragments left when India drifted away from
Africa. Some of the trees here are also found in Asia. The then new Indian Ocean wore away
the surrounding land as it still is wearing down the present islands.
Mist and rain soaked or curious summit flora finds a tricky foothold in poor soil. Pitcher
plants must supplement their diet by digesting insects. These are fragments of the ancient
primeval plant community. There's hardly anywhere here that you aren't reminded that these
mountain slopes on the main island of Mahe have been heavily used.
A tropical forest extracts water from the mists and without it the reservoirs may run
dry. It would be to the islanders' peril if what little is left of the original forest
is cut or burned.
A typically drab island sunbird once fed on nectar and insects among mountain moss forest
trees with names like Bloirouge, Capucines and Letagne. But now it lives in this woodland
of introduced cinnamon trees that have gone wild, largely replacing many of the native
trees.
For
the first hundred years of settlement the planters and their slaves tried to break into
the spice trade then monopolized by the Dutch. It's ironic that the cinnamon forest from
which these women are cutting whole trees to obtain the bark and leaves are now a virtue.
Their roots hold on to the poor soils that in the wake of cutting and burning the original
forest might have washed away in the monsoon rains.
The leaves will be distilled for cinnamon oil. From the bark will be cut the familiar
cinnamon sticks.
Such human changes to vegetation in other parts of the world have taken place over many
thousands of years. But here on these islands the transformation has occurred in a little
more than a century and a half.
By and by in the remaining moss forests there are still echoes of that undiscovered country.
A begonia clings to a mossy rock face and not far away and unique to the Seychelles
Granite is the most common rock of all continents. It can look like this in India, Africa or
Madagascar. So the Seychelles are a little bit of continent in the middle of the Indian
Ocean. What gets onto them clings hard to survive be it plant, animal or man. Within
these splits in the rocks soil accumulates and there a seed will grasp hold. Stilt rooted
screw pines and palms can stand firm against the torrents of rain that cascade over these
boulders.
But these forbidding rocks are shelter to quite delicate blooms. The wild vanilla, an
orchid that found its own way here. It has stems that are green and fleshy and has no
leaves at all. It's found nowhere else.
That a kind of cave swiftlet lived among these rocks was long known but just where it nested
wasn't revealed until 1970 when two small boys proudly led a visiting biologist down
behind the stilt roots of a large pandanus into a secret cave. And there were the nest
of lazerondelle as they call them here hanging from the near horizontal roof. They're built
of lichen cemented together with saliva, tough and flexible but quite dry to the touch. In
totally dark caves these birds echo locate like bats to find their way about. Their color
is much darker than similar birds in Madagascar and they're considered to be a Seychelles
island race of that species. They lay only one egg per nest unlike the Madagascan types
too and that also is an island adaptation. There are fewer predators here and there's
more competition for food on these scraps of land. So island species tend to raise fewer
young than their continental cousins. Below the nests there have accumulated great piles
of guano, a delight to cockroaches and a sign that the caves have been used by generations
of swiftlets. The mystery of the cave swiftlets was solved but there's another little known
creature again peculiar to these islands. It's a creature of the night. Often its presence
is indicated only by its saw-like rasp of a cry that gave it the Creole name Sierre
meaning woodcutter. By playing a recording of the cry it's possible to provoke a meeting
with a bird declared to be extinct for over half a century but then miraculously rediscovered.
It's the Seychelles bare-legged Scops owl and it's never been filmed before. It's about
the size of America's burrowing owl. Its legs are indeed bare of feathers and that plus
the small size of its ear tufts plainly distinguishes it from its African counterpart. That kissing
between what is an established pair is a kind of dress rehearsal for the courtship feeding
that occurs before breeding. It's extraordinary how little is known about this owl. It probably
nests underground rather like the swiftlets but a nest has never been found. It probably
lives on lizards, frogs and insects. There never were any small mammals here originally
but not one of the 40,000 or so people who live on Mahay has ever discovered the answers.
The owls are perhaps as puzzled by the lights and sounds as we are about their secret life
of which this is for all but a very few people a very first glimpse.
It's thought that there may be no more than 80 of the owls on Mahay.
Were you in the
place?
Much of the fascination of the Seychelles lies in these mysteries that every island
hides.
Each is a time capsule that provides a glimpse of its history.
If you can reach the farthest of them, your journey is seldom unrewarded.
Away to the east of Mahé sits Frigate, the most remote of the Granite Islands and scarcely
a mile across.
Pirates once camped beneath those trees.
Of their treasure island stockade, little remains, but visitors can almost sense their
ghosts.
This is where John Jordan's shipmates sighted those first huge tortels, the giant tortoises
they found so ugly.
Perhaps they saw, too, the magpie robin.
It was found on many of the islands and relied much on the scraping and digging of the tortoises
to turn up a meal for it.
Frigate is now a microcosm of those 17th century days and the millennia before, for there are
only 90 or so tortoises left and a mere handful of magpie robins.
But the giant tortoise still has several hundred thousand of its kind south on the atoll of
Aldabra, while all the magpie robins in the world live here on tiny Frigate Island.
Since Gardner has done its work, the robin will move in to feed.
There are just 24 of these birds, but that actually represents a success story.
Not long ago, there were fewer than a dozen.
They were then the rarest bird in the world.
Throughout the islands, they fell victim to the domestic cat, a disastrous introduction,
as have been the rats that jumped ship on some islands and the barn owls brought in
to catch them.
But the owls found the seabirds easier prey.
On Frigate, they finally trapped all the cats and the ground-feeding robin can now safely
steal the eggs of skinks in the company of scorpions, with no danger from the alien cat
that it never learned to fear.
This is not an earthworm on the robin's menu, or even a snake.
It's a curiosity called a Sicilian, a burrowing amphibian, a legless ancestor of the modern
frog.
It's certainly been here longer than the giant tortoises, and the Sicilian is one indication
that the islands have never been covered by the sea.
When most of the old tortoises had been butchered by the first settlers, the magpie robins found
the activities of people clearing undergrowth as rewarding as the diggings of its reptile
ally.
But the complete removal of forest cover was not to the liking of this shade-seeking bird,
and that contributed to its decline, even though it's blessed with the sanctuary of
Frigate Island.
Known here as the P. shantez, the singing robin, it's a type of thrush, a family widespread
in Asia, another echo of that ancient land link.
ship of an early colonizing expedition in 1768.
It's the most populated of the outer islands, and famous for its coconut plantation and
its boat builders.
Step ashore and you step back in time to a leisurely age when life revolved at the pace
of the bullock.
There's never been a need to rush in this tropical heat.
They still export most of their copra or dried coconut.
They crush some of the coconut for oil to be used at home.
Coconut oil gives the characteristic flavor to the Creole cuisine, be it an adventurous
dish of curried fruit bat or just the fish from the sea.
Zadig, perhaps more than the other islands, brings people and the unique biology of the
Seychelles into direct conflict.
The people need wood for fires and for boat building, and they need space to grow coconuts.
There seems hardly room now for the scraps of original woodland still left on the small
marshy plateau of this tiny island.
And yet here, where the modesty blooms under the badamier and the Takamaka trees, there
lives one of the most attractive birds of the Seychelles.
It's the Black Paradise Flycatcher, a bird found almost nowhere else.
The males and females are quite different, partly in adaptation to how they feed on this
island.
She hunts in the upper stories of the forest to feed her single fledgling, and her livery,
white underneath, perhaps makes her less noticeable to insect prey when seen against the patches
of sky above.
He hunts lower down, more covert in his elegant dark plumage.
The nest is safer from egg-stealing skinks if out on the end of a branch, but it does
come into full view of people out there, something that for millions of years was not a concern.
The fearless fledgling is eager to fly, but still relies on being fed by its parents.
Its first flight takes it to the edge of its parents' territory.
Not far away, there's a female of a neighboring pair.
Father drops in with a dragonfly.
In this case, the next-door female is perhaps a distracting influence.
Father threatens the intruder, and now perhaps the meal can proceed as intended.
Among the trees of La Digue, there are some 25 pairs of paradise flycatchers, but that
will only last as long as there are trees for them to live in.
The Takamaka tree and the Badamiye tree, though, have those other uses, and these people have
a reputation to maintain as the finest of boatbuilders.
It's a tribute to them that so far they've been prepared to leave places for the flycatchers
to live, and unless modern machinery regrettably speeds up the rhythm of life on La Digue,
here at least the birds and the people are finding a brief harmony.
But on the adjacent island of Prelin can be seen the dramatic results of the Seychelles'
appetite for its own timber.
What's left of that Eden is almost confined now to the unique and protected valley that
so inspired General Gordon in 1880, the Ville de Mai.
He sought there the tree of life.
He found the breadfruit tree.
He sought the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and declared it was this, the Coco de
Maior, the palm that bears that fabulous nut that was once treasure on India's shores,
and that was discovered to grow only here on this island of palms.
Its ancestors were here well before the continents drifted, and its true biology is more intriguing
than all the myths.
To begin with, the male trees thrust out enormous catkins that bear tiny male flowers, distinctively
scented and certainly attractive to large green geckos which feed on the pollen.
There's still some mystery as to how the pollen reaches the female trees.
A local fairy tale has it that after dark on stormy nights, the male trees walk over
to the females.
Clugs find the male catkins attractive too, grazing on the pollen.
Under the giant leaves of the female trees hang the enormous ripening fruits, together
weighing some 400 pounds or more.
The famous nut is inside the green husk.
The female flower is disappointingly drab, considering it gives birth to the largest
seed in the world.
The fruits are killed by sea water, so they never escaped from the island in any shape
to grow elsewhere.
It's said this palm can live a thousand years.
When dead, their headless trunks provide nest holes for a parrot, the black parrot of Praline
Island, the national bird of the Seychelles.
It doesn't attempt to eat the coco de mer.
It prefers nuts or seeds inside the fruit of other palms of this magical valley.
It discards the soft parts.
The French, perhaps more accurately, called it the coffee-colored parrot, and one might
wonder why it isn't as gaudy as parrots usually are.
One reason could be that among island birds, the bright plumage associated with competing
for territory or for mates isn't quite so necessary.
On an island, the rules are changed.
Praline is small, the number of territories available restricted.
So tone down the colors, and there's less aggression, food sources can be shared, and
breeding territories can be used by more than one pair throughout the tropical year.
It may also be that with only one type of parrot on the island, bright plumage is simply
unnecessary.
The black parrots have this valley all to themselves and can afford to be drab and complacent.
There are some 50 or so parrots using this valley, and a favorite food is this introduced
bilimbi.
The fruit is a bit like a gherkin, but the parrots pick out the pips and the rest drops
down to the skinks.
They've adapted the techniques used on the native palms to this new delicacy.
Officially, they're still on the endangered list.
There are not enough fruiting palms, and there's a shortage of trees to nest in.
But the Seychelles National Park policy will perhaps guarantee pride of place to retaining
the black parrot, their national bird.
There are reserves or national parks planned for many of the islands.
Each has its special needs.
All of this island, called Arede, was purchased privately over 10 years ago.
It's now administered by the Royal Society for Nature Conservation.
In the past, it was an island noted for its seabird colonies, many of which were over-exploited
for food.
Inevitably, the numbers decreased.
But now the birds are building up again.
This north cliff is used by the huge and gaunt-winged frigate birds, but only as a roost.
They probably bred here once long ago, and the signs are they'll do it again under this
new management.
More than 2,000 frigate birds come here between October and November.
By day, they feed at sea, skimming the surface for squid and flying fish.
This island, too, has its own plants.
The botanists are still playing games with the official name of this bush.
Once it was listed as a gardenia and smells like one, but its fruits can be used like
lemons.
So, to the creoles, it's always been bois citron.
And you can walk through a forest of seabirds.
The Pisonia trees are laden with fairy terns, competing for branches to nest on.
The
tropic bird is graceful in flight, but ungainly at landing.
It leaves its family down on the ground.
The moving carpet of skinks is what catches the eye first.
And then, in a granite nook, there is the tropic bird chick with its parents.
It's clear at once how vulnerable such birds are to the rats that have ravaged other islands.
No ground predators existed naturally.
Natural deaths like this one did occur.
These reptiles play the role that small mammals perform on the mainland.
On these islands, there was a given take that found its own equilibrium until people tipped
the scales with careless introductions of alien species.
This naughty tern is beyond assistance, but it won't lie for long.
With the skinks cleaning up on land, there are these beachcombers to do it here.
The ghost crabs miss nothing with their elevated eyes.
But theirs is a waiting game.
Dusk brings in bridal terns.
Into come the shear waters, heading for their burrows among the boulders.
As a food called fuke, they were eaten by the hundreds.
The long wait is over.
The crabs moved in once it was dark.
By morning, they'll have eaten everything.
One
That January day in 1609,
Bosen Jones wrote in his log,
These desolate islands ought very diligently to be sought of them that shall prevail hereafter,
because of the good refreshing that is upon them.
These islands seem to us an earthly paradise.
Those first human footprints among the many tracks on that beach left no permanent mark,
but for a century they were the writing on the wall for the fish and fowl and those ugly tortelles.
They were a sign of the plunder to come.
The hawksbill turtle's fate was sealed by the beauty of its shell.
They called it tortoise shell, but it came from this turtle.
Unlike the giant land tortoises, enough turtles survived to keep their species age-old appointment with these granite islands.
It's perhaps 30 years since this turtle hatched here on this protected island called Curieuse.
Each will lay about 200 eggs and then return to the sea unmolested.
The hawksbills leave a buried treasure far richer than any pirate's hoard,
a living link with island life stretching back to the birth of this ocean to which they'll soon return.
They leave a promise of new lives to come.
Those that did travel hereafter stayed, though now the old colonial days are just memories, like this governor's name for the market.
Once green turtles and hawksbills were sold in this market, but they became officially a forbidden fruit of the sea.
Now that law is under review.
The Seychelles Republic has advanced to its independent future.
The outside world has found them.
In a way, the ancient continents have rejoined.
The islanders do still rely on what they can grow or catch here for themselves.
But the evolution of the Seychelles is quickening.
There is one import that they can afford, the rising tide of tourists.
But that could swamp them with a hundred thousand visitors a year.
The people of the Seychelles have the turtles in their care, as they have the fish and all the natural wonders of their islands,
scattered over almost half a million square miles of sea.
A fragment of Eden in the Indian Ocean.
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This is PBS.
Patty Arnett and Steve you had a great night.