Beachcomber Magazine 05

MAHEBOURG MUSEUM THE ART OF MEMORY 72 and a whole section of the hull of La Magicienne from 1810, whose discovery in 1934 got the naval museum project started. WITHOUT BEGINNING OR END “ Ships are the history books of Mauritius. The islandwas uninhabited when white colonists, African slaves, and Indian and Chinese coolies arrived by sea. Shipwrecks are real treasures. Some cannot be moved for fear of destroying them altogether. Like the Sirius, which we have turned into an underwater museum, ” explains Dr Yann von Arnim, president of the Mauritius History Society and co-founded the Mauritius Museum Council. “ We talk about ‘the first maps and the first sailors’, but who says they were the first? Maybe tomorrow we will discover an object that takes us further back in history. At the moment, the oldest remains left by humans in Mauritius are the wreck of the Banda , which ran ashore in 1615. But in 1598, the Dutch referred to the existence of an earlier wreck. And the Chinese and their impres- sive fleet were here well before the Arabs. We may well discover ano- ther much older wreck completely buried under the coral and sand. We have identified eight hundred shipwrecks around the island. The difficulty is to be able to study them all. It is a story without beginning or end. ” COLLECTIVE MEMORY When the naval museum became the National History Museum of Mauritius in 2000, its name change encompassed a wider history. Alongside the sunken treasures, models of ships, paintings and furnishings, the museum’s collec- tion expanded with engravings, paintings and ordinary objects that trace the history of slavery, the migrations of the Chinese and the indentured Indian workers. “ Once it became a national museum, its The bell of the East India base headquarters in Trincomalee, in Sri Lanka, in the room dedicated to the English period. Salle consacrée à la période anglaise, dans laquelle trône la cloche du quartier général de la base du comptoir des Indes orientales à Trincomalee, au Sri Lanka. A ship caught in a cyclone off Port Louis, engraving by Edward Duncan, c. 1826. Navire pris dans un cyclone au large de Port Louis, gravure d’Edward Duncan vers 1826.  