l8 DAHLAK 



helm, turns in the engine-room and seasickness. The morning 

 was glorious, and as the gallant little ship entered harbour 

 the seagulls of Massawa flew up with a great fanning of their 

 wings to salute her. Still a little shaky, my companions 

 greeted me warmly. 



The Eritrean authorities were at first not too happy about 

 the arrival of the Formica. (Eritrea, incidentally, is a state 

 federated with Ethiopia.) We had met our first difiiculty when 

 we had applied at the Ethiopian Embassy in Rome for visas. 

 The answer had been a categorical 'No* and no amount of 

 urging from influential quarters could change the decision. 

 It seemed that we were suspected of having motives of 

 espionage, but in view of the fact that most of the charts of 

 the Dahlak zone were Italian anyhow and that in the entire 

 region there were no civil or military installations of any 

 kind, the spy theory was abandoned. But only to be replaced 

 by another. Could not an expedition which called itself the 

 Italian Expedition be disguising aims that might be national- 

 istic, patriotic, nostalgic, or what you will, aims in short that 

 might be calculated to stir up the local Italian colony and 

 make them restless? This suspicion was perhaps legitimate 

 enough; too few years had passed since Italy had become 

 separated from Eritrea forever, 2ind there were still too many 

 Italian colonists who were not resigned to it. Why, reasoned 

 the Ethiopian authorities, should an Italian scientific 

 expedition choose as its base Dahlak, which belonged to 

 Eritrea, out of all the thousands of other tropical archipelagos 

 in the world ? 



But for all the honesty and sincerity of all the counter- 

 arguments we were able to advance, the Ethiopian govern- 

 ment remained unconvinced. Direct contact was the only 



