Victoria - The early years |24 August 2018

As it changed from a small colonial outpost into a residential township, Victoria had to endure some events of calamity. Tony Mathiot, on behalf of the Victoria committee travels back through the mists of time…. 

Unsurprisingly enough, most inhabitants of Seychelles, except for the few government workers, were not aware that Victoria had been named. There were no means to disseminate the news that could have reached the remote territories of Mahé, not even the inner lying islands. Inhabitants, when they had to, which was seldom if ever, travelled to Victoria by pirogue and for many years to come, they were coming to “L’Etablissement”.

When the township was named, three streets were also named. Albert Street (in honour of Queen Victoria’s husband, Albert Francis Charles Augustus Emmanual of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha (1819-1861). Victoria Street (now Francis Rachel Street) and Royal Street (now Revolution Avenue). The two former ones were then merely coastal footpaths that did not lead any further from the township, whereas the latter, Royal Street, led up to the wooded hills of St Louis.

With the arrival of the Anglican mission and the Catholic Mission in Seychelles, Victoria began to assume a quaintly dignified character, as the small town accommodated their respective ecclesiastic buildings. In 1854, four years after the arrival of the first catholic priest, Father Leon des Avanchers (1825-1879), a small catholic church was built (on the actual site of the present cathedral) and blessed in dedication of the Immaculate Conception. Two years before, on November 26, 1852, Seychelles had become an Apostolic Prefecture of the Catholic Church and conveniently it was in Victoria that the first seeds of the Roman Catholic faith were sown. The small Anglican church of St. Paul was consecrated by the first Anglican Bishop of Mauritius, William Vincent Ryan (1816-1888). It had been designed by an architect named Scott, who had designed the cathedral of St. John in Newfoundland. It was also around that time that the Michaud family donated a piece of land to the people of Seychelles for the express purpose of establishing a market in Victoria. The land was often referred to as “Terrain du Bazaar”. There were shops in Victoria then, as well as a Police Station, a prison and a courthouse.  Traders and retail merchants dealt in shillings, the Indian rupee and the Mauritian dollar, the latter of which five were equalled to one pound sterling.

On December 11, 1861, the first post office opened in Victoria. The town was still mourning the loss of Civil Commissioner George Thompson Wade who had passed away on September 25, 1861, after having administrated the islands for almost ten years. Through the hard labour and industry of the town dwellers, Victoria was slowly growing and expanding into a proper little colonial township when calamity struck. After many days of torrential rains, rivers burst their banks and raging torrents of water washed down the hill slopes above Victoria, dislodging boulders and uprooting trees which, as they went down the incline, destroyed everything in their path: huts, timber buildings and pig stys. An entire cliff face, dissolving as it went into a river of mud and debris covered a large portion of the town and partly created the Gordon Square (Freedom Square). The landslide also devastated a section of the cemetery where dozens of graves were washed down to Royal Street. Scores of inhabitants perished in that great lavalas (avalanche) of October 12, 1862, including two sisters of St. Joseph De Cluny who had arrived from Reunion on February 4, 1861. The old government house and the new St. Paul’s church were among the few buildings that survived the disaster. For many months, while the town was being cleared, the church gave sanctuary to those homeless and anguished inhabitants. It was Wade’s successor Swinburne Ward who had the burden of reconstruction. However, the Roman Catholic mission also played a pivotal role in the creation of optimistic development after such heart-wrenching devastation. In 1867, father Ignatius Galfione (1815-1881) established the St. Louis College for boys. Initially, managed by the Frères des Ecoles Chrétiennes, this noble educational establishment would be the predecessor of the twentieth century Seychelles College (1947). During the reconstruction of the town, the Anglican Church built the St. Paul’s school for boys. A new convent and school for the Sisters of St. Joseph de Cluny were also built.

With the arrival of the first ship of the Messageries Maritimes on September 24, 1864, the town soon appreciated the economic advantage of having a decent port of call to accommodate the maritime traffic of the Indian Ocean. Moreover, since 1861, ships of the Royal Navy were bringing in groups of liberated Africans who had been rescued from Arab dhows which were still persisting in the illicit lucrative slave trade. It was the Chief Civil Commissioner, William Hales Franklyn (1826-1874), a retired captain who joined the Colonial Service in Hong Kong before his appointment in Seychelles, who saw the need to build the Victoria lighthouse in 1872. In 1876, his successor, Charles Spencer Salmon (1832-1890) had received approval from the Colonial Secretary to build a coal depot at the end of the jetty. This coal wharf was a square measuring 91ft by 91ft. Hodoul Island, which had been built in 1829 by the French Corsair Jean François Hodoul (1765-1835) on a submerged reef on the shore side of the inner harbour for use as a careenage was leased to Dr. Henry Brooks (1831-1920). It had the capacity to hold some 2,000 tonnes of coal which was imported from Cardiff, Wales. Coal was certainly a very lucrative business, considering the large number of steam ships that came to drop anchor at Port Victoria. An islet measuring 73 feet by 86 feet at the end of the pier, called coal shed island was leased to Felix Desire Cheyron (1840-1896) who was the French Consular agent from Marseilles where the Messageries Maritimes was based. In 1898, after the death of Cheyron, the Imperial Government bought the coalshed islet for £1,030 with a view of turning Port Victoria into a Naval Coaling Station. The first commercial enterprise to establish in Victoria was no other than a coconut fibre factory. In early 1874, a French mariner named Léopold Auguste Charles Pallu decided to come to Seychelles to make use of all the tonnes of coconut husks that were accumulating on coconut estates on Mahé. He installed a coir fibre mill on the tract of land (which was later called Gordon Square and is now known as Freedom Square) that had been partly created by the avalanche of 1862. His modest enterprise which supplied the local market with ropes and cordage was unfortunately short-lived. “L’usine Pallu” closed in 1880. Apparently, the location was already being considered as the “industrial zone” because in 1883, another French man named Paul-Louis Guérard created the first soap factory on the same site. In 1891, Edouard De Saint-Jorre bought the business which prospered well into the early 20^th century. In 1875, the St. John of the Cross Hospital opened at Le Chantier (on the actual site of the National House). The hospital was in the charge of the Sisters of Saint Joseph De Cluny.

By 1879, the town of Victoria had quite a few licensed commercial and business establishments that catered to the multifarious needs of its inhabitants. There were retailers (K.A.Narainasamy, K.M.Pillay &Co, L.Felicie, Sinapapoulle & Co, V. Westergreen), a jeweller (E. Forget), a watchmaker (N. Loizeau), spirit seller (K.S Naiken & Co), four hotels owned respectively by (F. Maure, H. Longaille, C. Moustache, A. Jouanis), barbers (Poonoosamy, Irlapin), a cooper (J. L. Marion), a druggist (T. Pasnin), a tinsmith (L. Renaud) and  even an auctioneer (T. Doffay) -among others, like tobacco retailers, hawkers and sellers of cakes.

With the constant increase of lodging houses, taverns, residential buildings and even houses of ill-repute in the town, on November 11, 1881, Lieutenant- Governor of Mauritius Frederick Napier Broome (1842-1896) saw the imperative need to introduce an ordinance “To regulate the construction of buildings in the Town of Victoria, in the island of Mahé, one of the Seychelles (Act 31 of 1881). Article 3 specified that “No kitchen shall be erected in wood in any part of the Town; and no kitchen already built of wood shall be repaired except with uninflammable materials”. Article 8 stipulated that “No building shall newly built in the town of Victoria unless the ground floor thereof be raised at least thirty centimeters above the level of the footway in the streets, and if there is no footway, above the level of the street itself”.  Elsewhere in the ordinance, it was emphasised that the room of every dwelling house should be in every part at least two metres and seventy-five centimetres in height from the floor to the ceiling, or to the point from which the roof sprang. A person intending to erect, rebuilt or make alterations to any buildings within the Town of Victoria was under obligation to give notice of his intention in writing to the Board of Civil Commissioners. To minimise the risk of fire, it was illegal to erect any house or building, covered, or lined with straw, leaves or any thatch whatsoever. Therefore, Act 31 of 1881 informs us that as of 1881, all buildings or houses in the town of Victoria would be constructed of masonry and coral limestone. Such a building is the old former Supreme Court Building which now houses the National Museum of History. It is indisputably the oldest building in the Seychelles. It was constructed in 1885 during the time of Civil Commissioner Arthur Cecil Stuart Barclay (1843-1890), to provide accommodations for the New Oriental Bank Company.

Pursuant to an agreement with the Government, it was the company itself which undertook the erection of the building - and in order to gain space, a large portion of sea land had to be reclaimed. The extent of land on which the building was situated was 447 feet long, 292 feet broad at the wide end, and 113 feet broad at the narrow end. Although the land was raised considerably, at high tide part of it was underwater some 5 feet and was hardly dry at low tide. The building was constructed with limestone coral and timber. Ironwork was largely used in the construction. The roof was covered with red tiles and the pillars of the gallery were of iron. Its estimated cost was R120,000. A stipulation in the lease agreement was that the bank paid the Government a nominal rent of R50 per annum.

The New Oriental Bank moved in the building which a shareholder of the company considered “too large for present or probably any future requirements of a banking institution...” in mid-1887. However, a few years later, on June 17, 1892, the bank closed. The land reverted to the Government, and the building which the Bank was entitled to remove was sold to the Government for R30,000.

In 1893, during the administration of Thomas Risely Griffith, the Eastern Telegraph Company rented a section of the building to use as offices until August of 1894. The company was laying submarine cables to connect Seychelles with Mauritius and Zanzibar.

Late in 1894, the Treasury and Customs Department offices were transferred to the ground floor of the right wing of the building. The Judicial department was transferred to the entire upper portion of the building. This consisted of the Judge’s Court, the Judge’s Chambers and the Magistrate’s Court. The Police Department was located beneath, on the ground floor of the left wing. In order to accommodate the premises to the new requirements, certain alterations and modifications were effected. Wooden partitions which divided the upper portion were removed and glass doors were installed to all the upper external openings of the Courts and offices. A major additional feature was a stone staircase at the back of the building to form the entrance to the Judicial Department.

For these alterations and modifications, the Legislative Council approved a special vote of R2,500. It was here on the first floor of this building that Sir Ernest Bickham Sweet-Escott (1857-1941) took his oath of office as the Governor of Seychelles on November 9, 1903. For many years during the 20^th century, the building was known as the Treasury and Courthouse Building.

It was also in 1881 that Legislation was passed to establish a Savings Bank in Victoria. However, it was an ambitiously premature decision because the economy of the islands was such that virtually no inhabitant of the Seychelles had anything much to save. It would be over a decade later that a Savings Bank opened in the post office building.

In the early 1880s, two illustrious visitors arrived in Seychelles. The British general Charles George Gordon (1833-1885), who fought in the Crimean War 1853-1856, arrived at Mahé on September 11, 1818 and stayed in Victoria for almost a month in order to assess the defensive measures of the islands in the event of an enemy attack. In 1885, the year he was killed in Khartoum, Sudan, the broad level expanse of land which was partly created by the great and terrible landslide (lavalas) of October 12, 1862 was surrounded by the sea on three sides. During the colonial era, Gordon Square was the most popular venue for fancy fairs, football matches, sports activities, auctions and political rallies – and of course, as many of our septuagenarians would still remember, the annual Empire Day celebrations on May 24 (Queen Victoria’s Birthday). Gordon Square (since 1978, renamed Freedom Square) is among the most popular landmark feature of Victoria.

A peripatetic lady painter Marianne North (1830-1890) arrived in Seychelles on October 13, 1882 and spent three months in Victoria where she stayed as a guest of the Chief Civil Commissioner, Arthur Cecil Stuart Barkly (1843-1890) at Government House. She has left us with a magnificent and thrilling view of the Victoria Coast in 1883.

That dreadful year of 1883, when Victoria was once again struck with tragedy. An epidemic of smallpox, Variola Vera. On June 5, 1883, HMS Undine arrived in Port Victoria from Zanzibar. Aboard the ship was a passenger who had contracted the virulent disease. Wrongfully diagnosed as chickenpox, the disease soon spread across town and suburban neighbourhoods killing dozens of people and creating panic among the population. The Board of health imposed strict regulations pertaining to the burial of persons who died of the smallpox disease. The body had to be put into a coffin, the bottom of which was lined with a thick layer of quick lime or coarsely powdered charcoal. The shroud in which the body was wrapped had to be soaked with solution of hypochlorite of soda or carbolic acid, and the coffin then filled up with coarsely powdered charcoal and the lid duly fastened down.

In 1882, it was expedient to declare the government pier a legal quay for the loading and unloading of goods. At that time, the pier started from the corner of Albert Street where the Queen’s warehouse was located. No goods were allowed to be unladen from or shipped on board any vessel, mail steamers excepted, before 6am and after 4pm except by special permission of the collector of Dues and Taxes, goods imported had to be removed from the Quay within 48 hours.

In 1882, the town of Victoria was already discarding more than a few of its old buildings that had been erected during the last years of “L’Etablissement”. For example, near State House Avenue was an old stone building, covered with shingles, floored, having thirteen rooms pierced with twenty-five openings, measuring fourteen metres, five centimetres long by nine metres eight centimetres long by nine metres  eight centimetres large, four metres fifty-five centimetres high. That, together with six other buildings in Victoria was in a “sale by Levy” on Thursday December 21, 1882 at the valuation of R8,500.