“There are such plenty of land-turtles in this isle, that sometimes you see two or three thousand of them in a flock…” Believe it or not, this amazing depiction, worthy of some lost paradise, does not come from the pen of a utopist, but from the logbook of a French navigator, namely François Leguat. His observations date from 1691 and the island in question is in fact Rodrigues…

A Sheltered Life by micropalaeontologist and popular TV producer Paul Chambers, invites readers to discover the fate of the oldest representative of its race : the giant tortoise.It tells us that Marion’s tortoise, the last indigenous specimen from Rodrigues (photograph on p 206), left wandering at Port-Louis Line Barracks until 1929, came directly from a world where everything on earth was gigantic, 2 million years back. An era much prior to the so-called “times of giants” and of cyclops, as related in the comparatively inoffensive mythology of the peoples of antiquity…

<B>Ecologists fight human destruction</B>

As World Environment Day has just been celebrated on Sunday, it is interesting to rediscover one of the animals which made our island unique in the world’s fauna. Apart from the Mascarenes, Aldabra and the Seychelles, the only archipelago which hosted giant tortoises was the Galapagos.

And though the Mauritian variety, being totally decimated by 1778, joined the dodo in our ecological hall of shame, the link to our history and to human wretchedness did not stop there. For Aldabra island, which enabled a few specimens to be reintroduced in Mauritius, became at the centre of the first-ever fight led by ecologists to preserve a site from human destruction. Which proved successful to some extent but which afterwards sadly influenced Britain’s choice of Diego Garcia as a US military airbase…

Yet the story which Chambers has written is compelling from the first to the last word. Not just in terms of scientific interest, or of its simple yet highly cultured literary style. There is something in this book of a childish fascination or avidity for everything that literally captivates the reader. And which saves the author from giving the impression of being too anecdotal at times.

Revealingly, the opening of the book is highly dramatic with a quote from the notes of Charles Darwin, driven on the hostile Galapagos during his world trip on the Beagle in 1835, just a few months before discovering our shores. Much of the book is centered on Darwin’s link with the tortoises.

For the book illustrates that it was they who provided the starting point to his concept of evolution and natural selection! The reader is thus allowed to follow him in his trials and errors, his hesitations-at the tortoise pace which gave birth of the theory of the evolution of species…

Survival still under threat

And if through Darwin’s destiny, one has great encounters with extraordinary figures including geologists, naturalists, governors (Arthur Gordon and Pope-Henessy), economists (Thomas Malthus) and even an eccentric fantasque member of the Rothschild family, there is perhaps a more essential element to be reaped here.

Considering that his theory of evolution was considered as heresy in his times, it simply appears that Darwin’s story is about will and courage in the face of blindness. Something reminiscent of the fate of the giant tortoise, which managed to survive a few million years, but which is still under threat....

● <B>A sheltered life -The unexpected history of the giant tortoise by Paul Chambers, John Murray (Editor). 306 pp. Available at all good bookshops.</B>