Dutch Pirates in Paradise

Bonete beach, with a traditional canoa in the foreground.

There is a Dutch saying that goes: "Nederlanders zie je ook overál!" ("You run into the Dutch everywhere".) Well, in the case of Bonete, an isolated fishing (and surfing) community on the island of Ilhabela, that is definitely the case.

Believe it or not, but less than three hours from the third largest city in the world, São Paulo, there is a village of just 250 souls living in what Edna O' Brien would call 'splendid isolation'. Bonete, on the island of Ilhabela (off the São Paulo coast) can only be reached by following a dangerous but fun path (I walked 12km in the sweltering heat (with my 18kg backpack on), crossed two reasonably deep waterfalls, saw one small snake) or by motor boat.

Bonete has no mobile phones, no electricity, no pollution, no stress, no nightlife. It only has traditional fishermen and (less traditional) surfers. There is a beach, there are hills covered in subtropical rainforest (the Mata Atlântica), there is a really nice waterfall to swim in, the pousada (a Brazilian concept somewhere between a hostel and a hotel) where I stayed was good. Basically, it's heaven on earth. But I found out that, after a day or two, heaven gets extremely boring: paradise is the same all day long.

So after two nights, I decided to hit the road, or rather, the waves. I took the easy way back, a motor boat. This is where I found out about Bonete's past. I asked Fernando, the fisherman who gave me a lift back to civilization, if he had ever met a Dutchman before.
"Of course," he said. "I've got plenty of Dutch blood myself!"
It turns out that the traditional fishermen of Bonete (not the surfers) are the descendents of Dutch pirates who married with the local Tupi-Guarani native tribe. In the 15th and 16th Centuries, the pirates used Ilhabela as a hiding place from which to launch their attacks on the Portuguese settlement of São Sebastião, on the mainland. The Dutch pirates must have liked paradise better than I did, because they stayed.