In 1761, a French merchant ship holding 160 Malagasy slaves wrecked at Tromelin Island, 300 miles east of Madgascar. After 2 months, the crew was rescued but left the surviving slaves, promising to return and rescue them, only for a French navy officer to return to them after 15 years [2560×3422]

> Wreck of the ship Utile
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> On 31 July 1761[16] the French ship Utile (“Useful”), a frigate of the French East India Company, chartered by Jean-Joseph de Laborde and commanded by Captain Jean de La Fargue, transporting slaves from Madagascar to Mauritius in contravention of Mauritian law, ran onto the reefs of the island.[10] The ship had departed Bayonne in France with 142 men. After a stopover on Mauritius (then called the Isle de France), the ship embarked 160 Malagasy men, women, and children at Foulpointe, on the east coast of Madagascar, to bring them into slavery on Mauritius, despite the prohibition of trafficking decreed by the governor. A navigation error, due to the use of two conflicting charts, caused the vessel to wreck on the reefs of Tromelin Island (then called the Isle of Sand). The ship was a frigate, not a slave ship, and thus was not equipped with the shackles and chains usually found on slave ships.[17]

> After the wreck, the crew and about 60 Malagasy people managed to reach the island, but the rest of the slaves, locked in the hold, drowned. The crew retrieved various equipment, food and wood from the wreckage. They dug a well, providing drinking water, and fed on salvaged food, turtles, and seabirds.

> Captain Jean de Lafargue lost his mind as a result of the wreck, and was replaced by his first lieutenant, second-in-command, Barthelemy Castellan du Vernet who lost his brother Leon in the shipwreck. Castellan built two camps, one for the crew and one for the slaves, a forge and an oven, and with the materials recovered from the wreckage, began construction of a boat.[17] On 27 September 1761, a contingent of 122 French sailors (crew and officers) left Tromelin aboard the Providence. They left the surviving slaves – 60 Malagasy men and women – on the desert island, promising to return and rescue them.[10]

> The sailors reached Madagascar in just over four days and, after a stopover in Foulpointe, where men died of tropical diseases, were transferred to Réunion Island (then named Bourbon Island), and then to Mauritius (then called the Isle de France). When the crew of the ship reached Mauritius, they requested that colonial authorities send a ship to rescue the Malagasy slaves on the island. However, they met with a categorical refusal from the governor, with the justification that France was fighting the Seven Years’ War and thus no ship could be spared, the island of Mauritius being itself under threat of attack from British India.[18]

> Castellan left Mauritius (Isle de France) to return to France in 1762 and never gave up hope to one day return to the Isle of Sand to save the Malagasy people. The news of the castaway slaves got published and stirred the Parisian intellectual milieu; later, the episode was all but forgotten with the end of the Seven Years’ War and the bankruptcy of the East India Company.

> In 1773, a ship passing close to Tromelin Island located the slaves and reported them to the authorities of Isle de France. A boat was sent, but this first rescue failed, as the ship could not approach the island. A year later, a second ship, Sauterelle, also failed to reach the island. During this second failed rescue, a sailor managed to swim to the island, but he had to be abandoned by the ship due to bad weather. This sailor remained on Tromelin Island and, some time later, probably around 1775, built a raft on which he embarked with three men and three women, but which disappeared at sea.[17]

> It was not until 29 November 1776, 15 years after the sinking, that Ensign Tromelin-Lanuguy, captain of the corvette Dauphine,[2] reached Tromelin Island and rescued the survivors – seven women and an eight-month-old child.[5][18] Upon arriving there, Tromelin-Lanuguy discovered that the survivors were dressed in plaited feather clothes and that they had managed, during all these years, to keep a fire lit (the island did not have a single tree). The Malagasy people, who had been left on the bleak little island, built a shed with coral stones, for most of the wood had been used in the construction of the raft for the crew. They also built a lookout on the highest point of the island in order not to miss the ship that would, they hoped, come to their rescue. They were all from the Central Highlands of Madagascar, and had no knowledge of how to produce food in the coastal environment. Most had died within the first few months on the island.[15] The survivors remained with Jacques Maillart, governor of Mauritius (Isle de France), who declared them free and offered to bring them back to Madagascar, which they refused.[17] Maillart decided to baptize the child Jacques Moyse (Moses), on the day of his arrival in Port-Louis on 15 December 1776, and to rename his mother Eve (her Malagasy name was Semiavou) and to do the same with the child’s grandmother, whom he called Dauphine after the name of the corvette that rescued them.[17] The trio was welcomed in the house of the intendant of Mauritius (Isle de France). Tromelin was the first to precisely describe the island that now bears his name.[17]

> In 1781 the Marquis de Condorcet recounted the tragedy of the castaways of Tromelin, to illustrate the inhumanity of the slave trade, in his book Reflections on the Slavery of Negroes advocating the abolition of slavery.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tromelin_Island](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tromelin_Island)

[https://archaeology.org/issues/september-october-2014/features/tromelin-island-castaways/](https://archaeology.org/issues/september-october-2014/features/tromelin-island-castaways/)