PREPARING for a trip next month put me in mind of William Le Lacheur, a Guernsey sea captain who helped found a nation with no military force.

I will be leading a wildlife tour to Costa Rica, a country the size of Wales with more species of bird than the whole of Europe.

It is the most advanced and wealthy country in Central America yet has no military, an economy based on tourism and coffee – and holds a Le Lacheur as its most cherished hero.

William made a success of Costa Rica’s coffee trade, introduced Protestantism, educated the fledgling country’s sons and is even credited with introducing football.

Born on 15 October 1802, he was baptised 16 days later at the Forest Church. Little is known of his younger years except that he attended the parish school.

A plumbeous hawk looks for prey from a rainforest tree.

He is believed to have followed his maternal grandfather, who was a sea captain. He became captain of his first vessel, the St George, in 1827.

Three years later he entered the Azores fruit trade at the helm of the 55-ton cutter Minerva (a small coincidence, as the ship on which I sail as a naturalist bears the same name).

By 1836 he had established Le Lacheur & Co. in partnership with a Captain Grace.

They were active in the Mediterranean and West Indies fruit trade but the ships proved too small for William’s ambitions.

He bought Monarch from the Sebire yard, St Peter Port, in 1841 and sailed her to Brazil on her maiden voyage.

From there, he took a cargo to Texas.

Despite a global recession, he was able to pick up a return cargo from Honduras and arrived in London in September 1842.

All coffee from Costa Rica was traded via Valparaiso in Chile at that time, with the South Americans giving it a large mark-up and selling little.

Captain Le Lacheur’s voyage to the Pacific coast of the Americas was returning to London empty when he called into Puntarenas in Central America for ballast.

The swinging nests of Montezuma’s oropendola.

He was offered 4,393 bags (weighing just over 1m. pounds) of coffee beans that he was to sell in London.

He promised to return with the proceeds.

It took five months to sail from Puntarenas to London, arriving on 19 October 1843. But the cargo was sold easily to the London Coffee Company and William returned with 36,700 pesos in silver sixpences. (It is said that Costa Rica had a shortage of coins at the time and their government over-stamped the sixpenny pieces and used them as currency.)

Having established the source, route and market for coffee William exploited it to his utmost, returning with agricultural tools and equipment to assist the growers.

He took delivery of the barque Costa Rica, a much bigger ship, from Sebire’s yard in 1850 and business expanded accordingly. Costa Rica’s coffee trade was established.

Bigger ships, also built in Guernsey, were to follow.

William loved the country and made good friends there. However, he was not enamoured of the treatment of its people – it was a ‘poverty stricken and superstitious’ society that he believed was exploited by Spanish Catholics.

Captain Le Lacheur was a devout Christian, a member of the Rev. Wild’s congregation at Eldad Chapel in Town, and as such took out thousands of Spanish copies of the Bible and established a Protestant community in a house bought in San José.

The year after William’s death in 1865, it was resolved to build the first Protestant church in Costa Rica.

Made of pre-fabricated iron, the structure was shipped to Costa Rica by Le Lacheur’s son John and assembled in San José as the Church of the Good Shepherd. It became unofficially known as the Iron Church.

When rebuilt in 1937 with more traditional materials, a memorial plaque was erected to Le Lacheur with an inscription that includes the phrase ‘by whose exertions public Protestant worship was established in this Republic’.

William also encouraged the sons of wealthy folk to be educated in England. He was instrumental in helping them set up football teams on their return to Costa Rica and is credited with introducing the game there.

William was living near Regent’s Park in London when he died on 27 June 1863 after a lingering illness. He was buried at Highgate Cemetery, north London. In its obituary The Star, a forerunner of this newspaper, said: ‘Guernsey never gave birth to a man of whom the island had more cause to be proud or who has deserved to be more lamented than him whose decease we record. By his industry and intelligence and his Christian virtues, he entitled himself to the highest esteem which society can confer.’

My trip to Costa Rica will, sadly, not include time to explore San José. But we may drive past the Church of the Good Shepherd, in which case I will spare my countryman a thought or two.

Most of my time will be spent exploring the national parks, which are famous for their abundant birdlife.

A hummingbird sips sugar-water from a feeder.

A spine of mountains separates the Pacific coastal area from those next to the Caribbean. There are species that inhabit one or other side and each is different, with a third band of avifauna along the mountainous highlands. We shall be looking for such exotics as Montezuma’s oropendola (oro is Spanish for gold, pendola means swinger, hence my name of ‘gold-swinger’) and the stunning resplendent quetzal, one of the most beautiful birds in the world.

Birds of prey and warblers that nest in the USA and Canada will be migrating through – in the past, my groups have stretched out flat on the ground to watch hundreds of hawks migrating overhead.