In the Indian Ocean, just below latitude zero, a group of islands are associated with the stories of equatorial adventure.
Merchant ships fading into the misty waters, pirates obsessed with the gold they left behind and madmen haunted by the ghosts of slaves beaten to death and elephants slaughtered for their ivory.
Centuries ago, along these waters, seasonal winds brought with them trade from India and the East. When these winds blew from south to north, trade from southern Africa made its way up the coast.
Pirates hijacked these ships, looted them and often kidnapped the captain and left the crew for dead. It all sounds quite Hollywood, but in the Seychelles these stories are based on facts and there is pirate treasure to be found - lots of it.
One such treasure was buried on the island of Praslin.
Rocky, the entertainment manager at Paradise Sun Hotel and so named because he is a two-times Indian Ocean Boxing Champion, recounts the story: "In the early 1970s, when I was about five years old, there was a group of Englishmen who would come to the island to steal treasure buried by pirates. In those days the Seychelles was still under British rule, so when the people of Praslin saw two yachts, one named Bulldog, the other Biggles, they simply assumed that they were British and didn't think anything of it."
"Then people started talking. Some complained about their back yards being completely dug up. In some places, the thieves had dug all the way under people's homes.
"They got away with more gold than we will ever possibly know about. Where they found treasure they'd leave a wooden spoon on the steps by the front door. They had a sense of humour," says Rocky as he sits at the bar of the Paradise Sun and looks around him at the tourists and at the ocean, limpid in the wake of a spring tide.
"After a few weeks of these strange occurrences, a group of the strongest men decided to get together to find out what the hell was going on. They rolled up their sleeves and walked down to the water's edge looking out at sea at the two yachts. Before their eyes, the yachts pulled anchor, caught wind in their sails and sailed off into the night.
"You can ask anyone here about Bulldog and Biggles and they'll tell you," he says, eyeing out a young bronzed French girl. His caramel skin, clean looks and sportsman's physique must get him a lot of girls.
Back on the island of Mahé in the suburb of Bel Ombre, Reginald Cruise Wilkins's widow sits in her lounge waiting for a TV soap opera to start. Outside I chat to her son, John, about the heady topic of treasure hunting.
It's hard to believe that while many of us sit at a desk wide-eyed in front of a computer screen there are people in the world whose purpose is to decipher codes and find treasure on behalf of eccentric billionaire investors.
Just across the road from the Wilkins house is a rough beach strewn with rocks. Boulders stick out above the level of the tarred road. John makes me take a closer look at one of the boulders. There are markings on it, a half egg and a small circle chipped into the rock.
"This is one of the markings that indicates the direction of the treasure," he says with a glint in his blue eyes.
His father, Reginald Cruise Wilkins, was a British soldier who had originally been transferred to Kenya. There he befriended a group of Masai, hunting with them, drinking the blood of their kill, getting a taste for adventure. He then moved to another British colony, the Seychelles, where he met his wife as well as a woman called Madame Rose Savy who, he later discovered, had the treasure maps left behind by Olivier le Vasseur.
Le Vasseur was a Frenchman, a privateer who turned to pirating.
The pirates who terrorised these waters in the 1800 and 1900s were clever men. They spoke different languages, they had the seafaring dexterity to sail ships that were built for speed, they practiced psychological warfare and a group of them communicated through Masonic codes and the Code of Solomon.
Madame Savy was a Mauritian who decided to settle in Bel Ombre. It is here that she found the markings on the rocks. She became enthralled by fantasies of pirate's treasures and she hungered for discovery and wealth. With money left to her by her father, she travelled to Mauritius, Reunion and then further to Paris, where she scoured the archives for maps and clues.
She found parts of the original parchments thrown out to the crowds by Le Vasseur moments before his public death. He was hanged for crimes of piracy in 1730 on what is now Reunion island.
In his pirate days, Le Vasseur was most infamous for hijacking La Vierge Du Cap, a Portuguese ship carrying the Archbishop of Goa and an Indian viceroy. The ship was carrying a 2,4m solid gold cross encrusted with rubies, diamonds and other precious stones. There were also Christian icons, goblets, coins, uncut diamonds and a jewel-encrusted sword. Le Vasseur and his men boarded the ship.
The pirate wasn't expecting a fight but the viceroy held up his sword in defence. He then picked it up and offered it back to the viceroy, who refused it and continued to fight with his bare hands. According to legend, the viceroy lived.
Le Vasseur, who by now had gained the nickname of La Buse or La Bouche (the buzzard), was successful in stealing the prized gold cross. Then he disappeared.
"No one heard from him for many years and I believe that it was during that time that he laid out his intricate plan for the treasure," says John, playing with the edge of a sharp stone with his thumb.
"In those days it was a bad omen to melt down religious icons, so they had to be kept whole. La Buse employed a few men to help him lay out the treasure.
"He spread it over a wide area, probably the whole island of Mahé, setting booby traps and making it extremely difficult for anyone to find. That is until my father bought the maps from Madame Savy. She saw in him the potential and the gift for deciphering codes and clues and shared her secrets with him.
"On the day that he told her that he had the money to buy the parchments, she led him to her attic. There she climbed a ladder to her coffin, opened it and pulled out the parchments.
"After laying out each clue, La Buse would kill the men who'd helped him, in this way perpetuating the mystery and perhaps also out of habit - he enjoyed the thrill of the kill," says John.
He and his father discovered that the parchments held clues in codes. Some riddles were written in Greek, others in Hebrew. Some described Greek mythology and referred to the celestial map of the skies. Others were written in Masonic script and the Code of Solomon.
The Wilkins men followed the clues on the parchment as well as the engravings on the boulders and found that the educated pirate had also based his clues on the 12 labours of Hercules.
From 1949 to 1977, Wilkins senior, with the help of 200 men, moved massive boulders and thousands of tons of earth as they followed the demarcated path that led from one clue to the next.
They unearthed quartz-walled chambers, balls of marble, flintlock rifles, carvings and statues. Wilkins senior became convinced that the pirate had concealed the treasure at Bel Ombre in a subterranean cavern that he probably covered with a boulder.
John is continuing on his father's journey because it has also become his dream. However, there is a lot at stake and the situation is not so bureaucratically cut and dried. He cannot continue to excavate until he is given a government permit to do so. "Politics," he says, looking up at the cloudy sky.
A few metres away a metal-detecting device called a proton magnetometer points to 16kg of metal stubbornly buried beneath the rock at a depth of 5,4m.
Is this the gold cross from Goa, or was that already dug up by the pirates of Bulldog and Biggles?
- Veruska De Vita was hosted by travel specialists Seyunique. Tel: 011-453-2933, email [email protected]