After dealing with such striking events, such potent personages and vast territories, it is rather an anti-climax to have to treat of the little island of Mauritius, which is not as large as the county of Surrey, and which, except under its first Governor, Sir Robert Farquhar (who tried from this vantage ground to annex Madagascar), has had no stirring connection with events of great importance. Mauritius was taken by the British from the French in 1810. The French had known it by the name of Île de France, but the British revived the older Dutch name of Mauritius. The French had introduced the sugar cane and other valuable plants; and these plantations were half-heartedly cultivated by means of slave labour until the slave trade was abolished. Then, in the fifties, Indian kuli labour was introduced with great success; and now the inhabitants of Indian descent in the colony number nearly 40,000, while Indian half-breeds are also numerous. The total population in 1912 was about 370,500. The negro, negroid and Malagasy element was important—over 50,000. Deducting the Asiatics (20,000, mainly Indian, a few Chinese and Arabs) there remain about 120,000 white and 160,000 half-castes and Eurasians. The European population is almost entirely of French descent; and the marked French sympathies of the white inhabitants have sometimes caused a dissonance between the Governor and the governed, though ample concessions have been made to the Mauritians by the equal recognition afforded to French laws and the French language. Nevertheless, in spite of these political questions, and the occasional hurricanes which visit the island with disaster, it is a prosperous colony in ordinary years (doing a trade with an annual value of about £5,000,000), and only has to appeal to the Treasury of Great Britain for assistance on such rare occasions as when unusually great damage has been done by cyclones.

Numerous small islands in the Indian Ocean are dependent on the Government of Mauritius. All had much the same history—discovered by Portugal, they were eventually utilized by France, and finally captured and annexed by England. The most important among these Mauritian dependencies are the Island of Rodriguez, and the Oil Islands Group (Diego Garcia). The Seychelles were formerly associated with Mauritius, but since 1897 have been an independent colony under a full Governor. They consist of 90 small islands in the Seychelles group, the Almirante, Aldabra, Cosmoledo, and other tiny archipelagoes; the total land area being only 160 square miles, with a population white and coloured of 26,000. The Seychelles were taken possession of by the French in 1743. Prior to that date they were uninhabited, though there are on them the traces of ancient habitation which may represent the halting places of Malagasy sea-wanderers on their way from Sumatra to Madagascar. Their name of Seychelles is a misspelling of “de Séchelles,” the surname of a French minister of finance in 1756. The British fleet captured the principal island (Mahé) in 1794, but allowed the French Governor to continue to rule the islands until 1810, when they were taken possession of definitely; partly for the reason that the French in Mauritius and Réunion had abused the tolerance shown to them, by directing constant privateering attacks on British shipping. It was in Mauritius that one of the noblest heroes of British colonial pioneering—Matthew Flinders, of the Royal Navy—was imprisoned for six years, eating his heart out, losing all the advantages he might have gained from his truly wonderful circumnavigating survey of the Australian coasts^[162]. To remove from the French all possible base of operations in the Indian Ocean, Bourbon (Réunion), an island slightly larger than Mauritius, and the most southern member of the Mascarene group, was also occupied by the British, who on this occupation and that of Mauritius, of Tamatave and other points on the coast of Madagascar, founded claims to a protectorate over the large island of Madagascar, as will be related in greater detail in a later chapter. Bourbon, however, was restored to the French in 1816 and renamed at a later date Réunion.