The island of Mauritius is the largest island in the Republic of Mauritius. Nevertheless, it is quite small 65 km (40 mi) long and 45 km (30 mi) wide, with a population of just over one million. Geographically, the island is considered to be part of Africa but it has a relatively advanced economy and a democratic government so, it ranks first in Africa in several socio-economic indicators, including education and literacy.
For example, the GDP per capita is over double that of South Africa (IMF 2025). Mauritius was formally British territory and is a member of the Commonwealth. There is even a statue of Queen Victoria down near the harbour. Like Australia and New Zealand, Sri Lanka, India, and many more, they drive on the left (the right side) making the streets familiar to us.
The island was formed relatively recently by volcanic activity some 8 million years ago. Its volcanoes are no longer active because the hotspot moved west, during the next three million years, and now rests under nearby Réunion Island, our next port of call.
As these recently formed islands have never been connected to any other landmass, much of the flora and fauna has evolved in isolation, creating many new species from bids that originally flew in and seeds carried by birds, wind and the ocean, many from Madagascar or Sri Lanka.
In Mauritius, the most famous among these is the, now extinct, Dodo, a large flightless pigeon. It's extinction captured the Victorian imagination as a skeleton was displayed in the London Natural History Museum and it is one of the animals featured in "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland". Its demise it is thought to have been due to hungry sailors and the even hungrier rats, that they carried with them. A similar fate was met by the local tortoise population. Too slow, too tasty. Perhaps not - see later.
"But who is to give the prizes?" quite a chorus of voices asked.
"Why, she, of course," said the Dodo, pointing to Alice with one finger....
"But she must have a prize herself, you know," said the Mouse.
"Of course," the Dodo replied very gravely. "What else have you got in your pocket?" it went on, turning to Alice.
"Only a thimble," said Alice sadly.
Like Réunion, Mauritius was colonised by the French, who followed a failed Dutch attempt at colonisation in the 16th century. Prior to the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 the islands provided useful re-provisioning for ships travelling to and from India, providing fresh fruit and vegetables, useful in the prevention of scurvy. So, during the Napoleonic Wars, at the Battle of Grand Port, 20–27 August 1810, the British seized the island. Under the subsequent Treaty of Paris, France was obliged to cede Mauritius and its dependencies to the United Kingdom.
The new British colony of Mauritius now included Rodrigues, Agaléga, St. Brandon, the Chagos Archipelago, and, until 1906, the Seychelles. Mauritius soon became the British Empire's main sugar-producing colony and remained a primarily sugar-dominated plantation-based colony until independence, in 1968.
We both have friends who came from Mauritius and imagined this would be an uncontroversial first stop, where we would join our cruise of the Indian Ocean. But when I turned on BBC News on the 20th of January 2026, I discovered that Mauritius was front page news.
In his latest diplomatic dance around Britain's support for Greenland's present sovereignty, President Trump had accused Britain of military weakness, in allowing sovereignty of the island of Diego Garcia to pass to Mauritius.
What?
In 1968 Mauritius became an independent republic. Yet, just three years earlier, Mauritius had formed part of a new entity: 'the British Indian Ocean Territory' which merged Mauritius with Chagas Islands a remote Indian Ocean archipelago located about 2,000 kilometres to the north-east of Mauritius. It's difficult to see them on a map. Yet among the larger Chagas Islands is the island of Diego Garcia.
In the 1960s and 70s, the UK forcibly relocated the population of Diego Garcia, around 2,000 inhabitants, to establish a joint military base with the US.
Mauritius asserted, on historical grounds, that the Chagas Islands had previously been part of their territory and this became the basis of a sovereignty dispute before the International Court of Justice.
Last year, the Court ruled in Mauritius' favour and both Britain and the United States appeared to accept the ruling with the UK agreeing to pay Mauritius an annual rental, for 99 years, for the use of the island.
Suddenly, President Trump was calling Britain weak, saying it's a bad deal.
This was huge news in the UK - soon eclipsed by Trump's even more outrageous remarks about allied troops not pulling their weight in Afghanistan. That one went over 'like a lead balloon' in the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, France, Germany, and Italy (the US allies that lost, in some cases, hundreds of combatants). Trump rapidly back-pedalled - TACO?
To see more of the island, we engaged a driver to take us to the most popular tourist places, including the waterfall shown below and several others you can see by clicking on that image.
At lake Ganga Talao, our driver engaged me in a religious discussion. He doesn't need statues or pictures to feel closer to God: All this (flim-flam) is just a way for simple minds to approach the mystical (ineffable) that is God, he opined. I agreed that this was a philosophical position held by many and that I had once held, when I was a teenager attempting to explain away the Trinity. Obvious nonsense, given the age and scope of the universe and mankind's relative insignificance.
I told him that the Anglican Bishop of Newcastle (NSW) once said something similar to me at Christmas. I didn't pursue it beyond that, as he might have gone on even longer, and Wendy was hopping from foot-to-foot, wanting to get back in the car and get going.
For you, my readers, my issue with this position is that it is just an intellectual way of justifying and preserving the icons of religion and ideas that have no support in reality. It's a position I soon abandoned as irrational when studying philosophy, reading Hume and Bertrand Russell, among others (click on those links, if interested).
Across the road from a similar statue of Lord Shiva known as Mangal Mahadev and
adjacent to Ganga Talao, a sacred lake and the most important Hindu pilgrimage site on the island,
symbolically connected to the Ganges River in India,
It's a major attraction for devotees and tourists. The lion is undergoing maintenance.
I wondered how religious are Mauritians? I looked it up. Very, according to the last census: Hinduism (48%); Christianity (32%); Islam (18%); Other (1.00%). No religion less than 1%.
Notwithstanding the island's relatively high economic standing, some parts of the capital, Port Louis, are quite shabby. Yet, we were able to find a very pleasant restaurant, down by the harbour, where there are a number of attractive colonial buildings.
For several centuries Mauritius' principal economic activity and income was sugar growing. This has now been surpassed by tourism and the service industry, including IT and call-centres, supported by the country's excellent universal education and health systems.
As elsewhere in the world, the growing and harvesting of sugar, almost universally, employed slave labour. When slavery was abolished in the British Empire, in 1834, the slaves were replaced by indentured labour. Many of these people came from the Indian subcontinent, together with others from China and Africa, and they now make the majority of the Mauritian population.
Indentured labour was also used in the cane fields in Queensland in Australia. This was widely condemned by the other States and was a barrier to the proposed federation. So, immediately following Federation in Australia, this pseudo-slavery was ended when most of the indentured labourers (called 'Kanakas') were forcibly deported (under the Pacific Island Labourers Act 1901) This was among the first Acts of the new Australian Parliament and became a basis for the White Australia Policy (click on the Act link to find out more).
In Mauritius, the sugar labourers remained and prospered.
