Beachcomber Magazine 03

them he’d come back for them. But the Governor of Île de France (which later became Mauritius), refused. The slaves didn’t “exist” because they hadn’t been “declared”. Fifteen years later, in an incredible feat, the Breton sailor Jacques Marie Boudin de Tromelin de La Nuguy, captain of La Dauphine , landed at the quay in Port Louis, offloading seven Malagasy women and an eight- month-old baby he had rescued from the Island of Sands. TWO HUNDRED YEARS LATER... On 12 June 1972, a young lieutenant from a French vessel attempted to unload barrels of fuel to supply the little power plant which supplied the meteorological station established in 1954. Max Guérout, second-in- command of the Provençal , decided to swim the containers to shore, as the tide was so strong, no boats could berth on the island. Equipped with flippers and a diving mask, he threw himself into the backwash, pushing a barrel in front of him as a bumper. The life of the young lieutenant would be changed by this experience. Thirty- four years later, he returned to the island with a team of archaeologists. With time on his hands after an exemplary career, he decided to find out more about the story of these slaves who had been forgotten on a sandbank which barely covered a coral reef, no bigger than the Jardin 