Silhouetted in the Andaman Sea, an elephant takes a morning dip in the warm waters. Photo: Cesare Naldi

Rajan, a 60-year-old elephant born in captivity on the mainland of India, learned to swim nearly 40 years ago, when he arrived in the Andaman Islands—a remote archipelago in the Bay of Bengal—to work for logging companies. For three decades, he and about 200 other elephants hauled felled trees through the jungle. To get from island to island, they were taught to swim—that’s how Rajan developed his love of the sea. During this time he developed another love: Rani, a female elephant and co-worker, was his “wife” until about 15 years ago, when she died of snakebite.

As a means of protecting the islands’ biodiversity, logging was banned there in 2002. The other elephants were sold and sent back to the mainland, where they were put to work at Hindu temples. But Rajan, whose wealthy owner was in no rush to sell, stayed on Havelock Island in the care of a driver, or mahout, named Nasru (his silhouette appears at the top of the frame).

For the next six years, the six-ton Rajan enjoyed a life of leisure, eating bananas, napping in the sun, and swimming in the bath-warm waters of the Andaman Sea. But in 2008 his owner received an offer he couldn’t refuse: $60,000 from a temple in Kerala, India. Rajan, now in his mid-50s, was about to lose his hard-won freedom.

That’s when the owners of a local jungle lodge, Barefoot at Havelock (whose website, www.barefootindia.com, includes Rajan’s history), stepped in. Their “Save Rajan Campaign” raised enough money to purchase Rajan outright and let him continue his retirement. Today he’s the last privately owned elephant in the Andaman Islands.

This photo, which ran in the May issue of National Geographic, was snapped on December 11, 2008, by the U.S.- and Italy-based photographer Cesare Naldi. “I took this picture around 8 a.m. near the shore of Radha Nagar Beach while I was scuba diving,” Naldi says. “I was about 300 feet from shore, in ten feet of tropical water, 82 degrees Fahrenheit. I had my camera in an underwater housing with two strobes.

“When I was in the water with Rajan, I was really surprised by how fast he could move his legs to swim. Most of the time he had his head under the water and used his long nose to breathe, like a submarine uses its periscope.”

Elephants can live nearly as long as humans, so with good luck and good health, Rajan may enjoy another decade or two of morning dips. —Jeremy Berlin

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