My very own TREASURE ISLAND
John Craven sails the Caribbean searching for the precious cargo he left behind... But it’s not gold – it’s iguanas
AS I stepped ashore, the setting was perfect – a small, uninhabited Caribbean island bathed in sunshine, with an emerald sea caressing its golden beaches, wooded hills, caves to explore, and even the prospect of finding treasure. For this was Norman Island, where Robert Louis Stevenson probably set the greatest of all pirate tales, Treasure Island. Back in 1750, the same year as the one on Jim Hawkins’s treasure map in the famous story, a Welsh pirate called Owen Lloyd buried more than 50 chests of silver bars and pieces-of-eight on the island after raiding a Spanish galleon.
His brother John had a peg leg – could he have morphed into Long John Silver? The island, at the southernmost tip of the British Virgin Islands (BVIs) archipelago, fits the bill perfectly. But the real-life story didn’t end well for Owen as he was arrested and never claimed his booty, worth £20million today.
Much of the hoard was later recovered – the last big find was by a fisherman who stumbled across a chest a century ago in a cave – but to this day, treasurehunters live in hope.
Yet I was there in search of a very different kind of treasure – a natural one I had left there (quite legally!) 12 years before. It happened while I was filming a project to save one of the world’s rarest creatures – a large lizard known as the Anegada rock iguana.
Once common in the BVIs, its last refuge had become the lovely coral island of Anegada, where numbers were down to a few hundred and dropping. Then in stepped two unlikely saviours – billionaires who own nearby islands. Sir Richard Branson on Necker, and American Dr Henry Jarecki on Guana, reckoned the iguanas would stand a better chance of survival if their islands had some as well, and they were right.
Thanks to this iguana diaspora, the species is thriving on both islands, and as Dr Jarecki happens to own Norman as well, the next step was to put some there.
So I found myself helping a team of American conservationists round up two adults (Adam and Eve, of course) and ten hatchlings and sail them to
their new home. It was quite an event, the first time rock iguanas had lived on the island since the days of Christopher Columbus (sailors used to eat them), and we wished them well as they scampered into the undergrowth.
I often wondered what happened to Adam and Eve, but I never expected to return. Then recently, I noticed that Norman Island was one of the calling points on a cruise around the BVIs in the tall ship Star Clipper. So I put my name on the passenger list and found myself once again on this rather special island.
Glancing at the fine lines of our four-masted ship anchored in the bay, it crossed my mind that some of the last people to arrive by such means were searching for ingots, not iguanas. Either way, it was needle-in-a-haystack time.
I had only one afternoon to check out an island two miles long, and sadly could find no trace of Adam or Eve or any of the others.
But at the island’s only beach bar, people told me iguanas had been spotted recently so our mission must have been successful. And I did bring one home – well, a small replica from a gift shop.
For me, returning to Norman Island was the highlight of a seven-night voyage on what felt more like a large private yacht than a cruise ship.
Star Clipper is a sleek and beautiful barquentine, built in the 1990s but modelled on the tea clippers of the 1800s. Life on board is casual and everyone – about 100 Americans and 20 Brits – gathered on deck for the spinetingling spectacle of the great sails being unfurled to Vangelis’s stirring music 1492: Conquest Of Paradise.
The majesty of her sails was matched by the elegance below – all rosewood and burnished brass – with six grades of cabin ranging from the owner’s suite to an inside triple berth. Step outside the cabin door, though, and everyone gets equal treatment and friendships soon develop.
Breakfast and lunch in the smart dining room is buffetstyle, and the main event of the evening is the five-course dinner. Don’t expect lots of cabaret-type entertainment – it’s not that type of cruise. Instead there’s a quiz or a crew show and a nightcap beneath the stars. Our voyage began and ended on the splitpersonality island of St Martin/St Maarten, which is half-French (the larger half) and half-Dutch. At just 16 square miles, it is the smallest island in the world to be shared by two nations.
Both sides live in tropical harmony and by far the noisiest place is Maho Bay, where, if you lie on the beach,
you can see the rivets on planes a few feet above as they come in to land. In contrast, stroll through clouds of white butterflies on your way to one of the 40 beachfront restaurants and bars in the French village of Grand Case, which styles itself as the gourmet capital of the Caribbean.
Once on board Star Clipper, our first stop was the nearby island of Anguilla for a day on the beach. Then it was on to Virgin Gorda for a swim in The Baths – a series of small sea pools under a collection of giant boulders – followed by a beach barbecue served up by the ship’s catering team.
We also dropped anchor at St Kitts, where we took a tour of a former sugar plantation and a massive 300-year-old fortress known as the Gibraltar of the West Indies.
Our final island was ultrachic St Barts, where I spotted a Porsche taxi and a yellow submarine. In fact it was a yellow boat with an ingenious underwater compartment shaped like a huge cigar.
It could take about 20 people in rows of two, and its large windows made you feel you were scuba-diving without any effort as turtles, nurse sharks and vast numbers of multicoloured fish passed by while we glided over reefs and a spectacular shipwreck. It was a great experience. After a week of luxury aboard Star Clipper, gracefully calling in on a string of treasure islands, I decided I really love sailing when other people do all the hard work.
The ship has a high percentage of guests who go back time and again to revel in its gentler pace of travel. Maybe I’ll join them – and who knows, next time I might find Adam or Eve… or even a chest of silver.