An alternative history of the Cayman Islands: Part 1: The Espievie

The espievie* is a unique species of joint stock company first discovered in the lush forests of George Town, Grand Cayman by the Scottish naturalist A. J. N. Calder in 1926.

For many years the local genus, consortium restrictum culpam caymanium — the “Common” or “Cayman exempted” espievie — was thought to be unique, but naturalists found variant species in other islands.** 

It turned out not even to be indigenous to the Caribbean. In 1947, pioneering Jersey botanist Ichabod Mourant discovered a colony of “Oiks”*** nesting in the archive stacks of Guernsey’s Library for the Illiterate. No one has been able to explain how such a flightless, brainless, defenceless anonymous society got from the relative warmth of the Carribean archipelago to the inhospitable wilds of the Channel Islands, much less how it survived there, but it cannot be contested that the Jersey Oik has subsequently flourished. These days, they are like weeds.

Naturally secretive, and reluctant to procreate when people are watching, the espievie was first bred in captivity in a famous scientific collaboration between Calder and the brothers Godfrey and Maginot Maple, then working in George Ugland’s zoological menagerie in George Town.

Today, on the site of that experiment stands Ugland House, headquarters of a state-of-the-art 21st Century industrial breeding programme for espievies of all kinds, meaning that the continued survival of this freak of financial biology is, for the foreseeable future, assured.

References

*Known in accounting circles, for some reason, as an “espiecie” — rest assured it is the same beast.

**L. B. G. T. Appleby discovering the Giant Bermudan espievie in Bermuda in 1929, and Herbert Fonesca discovering the Panamanian Film espievie in 1953.

***The word derives from the Jèrriais “Oeic” meaning “imaginary legal entity”.

Important disclaimer: The author has never been to the Cayman Islands, and he’s hardly going to get an invitation now. There is, therefore, much fantastical speculation in this article and you should assume it is, at the very least, mostly false.