Man Quits Job to Buy an Abandoned Island And Spends His Whole Life Turning It Into a Nature Park

Derek, a 77-year-old giant Aldabra tortoise, also called the reptilian cat lady, roams free on the 9.9-hectare stretch of Moyenne island, which is in the Indian Ocean. Today, hundreds of these endangered tortoises are roaming unconstrained on this tiny island, thanks to a man named Brendon Grimshaw. When Grimshaw first visited Moyenne in 1962, the island was a graveyard of unkempt brush piles and dead pirates. Weeds and overgrown bushes were invaded by scampering rats, according to the BBC.

Even coconuts falling from trees didn’t hit the ground. When Grimshaw witnessed the gloomy island withering and wasting due to neglect, he abruptly resigned from his job and bought the island for a whopping sum of money, intending to transform it into a beautiful postcard scenery. His love story with Moyenne was featured in a documentary called A Grain of Sand.

At that time, Grimshaw, just 37 years old, worked in a well-paying job as a newspaper editor. He rubbed shoulders with some of the leading personalities of Tanzania, including the future president Julius Nyerere and Prince Aly Khan, to name a few. He had visited Moyenne for a holiday and, after noticing its condition, he had decided to redress it with beauty. "It was totally different. It was a special feeling," he told a documentary film crew in 2009. "This is the place I'd been looking for," per BBC.

At four minutes to midnight on the last day of his holiday, he signed an agreement and paid $10,867 to purchase the island. But he couldn’t do it alone. There was a bevy of storms and misadventures. So nature sent him a partner. Together with a local named Rene Antoine Lafortune, a 19-year-old boy and son of a local fisherman, he initiated the transformational journey of the island. "His vision was to leave an unspoiled island for future generations of Seychellois and the world," said Suketu Patel, who first met Grimshaw in 1976 and became a lifelong friend. "He wanted a mini-Seychelles. He wanted to try and replicate what Seychelles and its islands were like before tourists came." 

Today, the island is flanked by groves of palm, mango, paw-paw, and over 16,000 lush trees. The pirate graveyard is now “Pirate’s Cove,” which doubles up as a treasure-hunting site for tourists. Shorelines are bordered by granite boulders, white sands, and walls of trees. A tiny rainforest bursts and shoots from the ocean. The giant tortoises are protected with the sign that reads, “Please Respect the Tortoises. They are probably older than you.”

Today, Moyenne sits like a gem off the north coast of the Seychelles’ largest island, Mahe. As the YouTube description of the documentary reads, the island stands “against the ever-expanding reach of our insatiable desires.” Recalling the effort it took to transform the island to this, Grimshaw said in the documentary, “It was backbreaking, exhausting work. My hands were covered in blisters. Slowly, the trees grew and fruited, and eventually water, electricity, and a phone cable were piped across from Mahe.”

Currently, the island is managed by Moyenne Island Foundation, overseen by Patel. A restaurant named Jolly Roger nestles in the heart of the island, serving tourists platters of grilled fish dipped in red Creole sauce. A museum dedicated to Grimshaw’s life cradles giant tortoise babies. Inside the “Pirate’s Cove,” sleeping between two pirate graves is Grimshaw, whose tombstone reads, “Moyenne taught him to open his eyes to the beauty around him and say thank you to God.”

More on Green Matters

Brazilian Couple Spent Two Decades Restoring Their Hometown Forest — Now, the Wildlife Is Returning

Man Inspired by 'Avatar’ Creates a ‘Biosphere’ Connecting The Nearby Land to a National Park

Grandma, 91, Spends Years Planting Trees Alone and Turned Her Backyard Into a Big Five-Acre Forest