Brendon Grimshaw was a newspaper editor with no background in conservation when he bought a neglected island in Seychelles in 1962. He spent the next fifty years proving that background wasn't required.
After years of searching the Indian Ocean for an island of his own, Grimshaw settled on Moyenne, a small, overgrown islet within Seychelles' Sainte Anne Marine National Park, and purchased it for £8,000, roughly £150,000 in today's terms. What that sum bought him was four species of tree grown so dense you couldn't reach the beach on foot, undergrowth thick enough that coconuts couldn't fall through it to the ground, and very little else.
Sixteen Thousand Trees, Planted by Hand
Grimshaw relocated to the island permanently in 1972, working alongside a Seychellois partner, René Antoine Lafortune. Together the two men cut paths through the forest, cleared scrub, and began planting, a task that grew close to an obsession over the following decades. By the time they finished, they had put more than 16,000 trees into the ground themselves, one at a time.
The island held no birds when Grimshaw first arrived. He introduced ten from a neighbouring island as an early experiment; every one of them flew straight back. He tried again expecting the same result, and this time a handful stayed. As the newly planted trees matured and began fruiting, more birds arrived on their own, drawn by the food rather than any further intervention. The island now supports an estimated 2,000 of them.
Turning Down a Fortune
Grimshaw personally introduced Aldabra giant tortoises to Moyenne, offering a species that had been hunted to near extinction elsewhere in Seychelles a place to live without threat. Roughly 120 now call the island home. As word of what he'd built spread, offers to purchase Moyenne began arriving, reportedly reaching into the tens of millions of dollars at their peak. Grimshaw turned down every single one.
He spent the next twenty years lobbying for Moyenne to receive formal legal protection, and in 2009, three years before his death, it was declared a national park in its own right, separate from the marine park surrounding it, making it one of the smallest national parks anywhere in the world. His will requested that the island remain, in his own words, "a venue for prayer, peace, tranquillity, relaxation and knowledge" for anyone who visited, regardless of where they came from.
Grimshaw died in 2012, in his eighties, having spent half a century converting a patch of overgrown scrub into a functioning sanctuary for the animals the surrounding islands had already lost. Moyenne remains protected today, still populated by tortoises descended from the ones he first brought over, and still open, exactly as he intended, to anyone curious about what one determined person can do with an island nobody else particularly wanted.