History of Mauritius: Dodos, Sugar, Empire and Belonging
The History of Mauritius Begins With an Empty Island
Mauritius is very good at looking uncomplicated. It lies.
In a lot of ways, this island nation is exactly what the photographs promise: turquoise water, volcanic mountains, sugarcane fields, and beaches lined with resorts where someone will happily bring you a drink containing fruit.
It's almost like Australia's answer to what the Caribbean is for vacationers from the United States.
When I arrive, I am overwhelmed by that sensation that one gets upon entering a new country. It's somewhere I feel that I don't quite belong and I'm attempting to squeeze into the routines of others. I'm conspicuously aware of myself as the outsider, unsure how easily I fit into the place around me and determined not to become the entitled white tourist intruding on someone else’s space.
I hadn't thought as much about Mauritius as I should have before coming. Most of my energy had gone into planning what to do before and after this island nation. But, by the end of this trip segment, I would realize that Mauritius is distinctive for a very human reason: people have spent centuries doing what people do best. Moving things around.
The first clue arrives the next morning.
I wake at the beach resort with the noble intention of treating the trip as something resembling a wellness retreat. I go to the gym, which feels sufficiently virtuous to justify immediately compromising the concept
For two days, a gift from the Hilton has been sitting in my room staring at me: a packet of coconut cookies called gato coco. The packaging explains that the coconut tree was introduced to Mauritius by the Dutch in the seventeenth century. If the Dutch did anything right, it was to spread around coconuts so that we'd eventually have these cookies.
But that means that even the cookies have an immigration story.
I make coffee, open the package, and sit overlooking the Indian Ocean, eating coconut macaroons and wondering what the future has in store for me.
It is a fairly spectacular way to start a morning.
I walk through the lush Hilton Mauritius gardens to the front of the hotel to meet my driver. His name is Salish.
Almost immediately, Mauritius starts complicating whatever vague picture of the island I brought with me. Salish is of Indian descent, as is a large share of the Mauritian population, something I somehow had not known before arriving.
It reminds me of Guyana, another place where a large Indian diaspora exists far from India. A place where I unexpectedly encountered curry factory workers and lotus flowers growing in drainage ditches. I begin to suspect that, like in Guyana, the British Empire may once again be involved. The British had a habit of moving enormous numbers of people around the planet while simultaneously spreading meat pies and insisting that nearly every dessert could be called “pudding.”
In this case, the connection turns out to be considerably less whimsical than pudding.
Salish asks what I would like to see. He lays out a few options that sound a lot like the tours I found while searching Viator: the north, the south, or the west.
I ask which one tourists usually prefer.
He suggests the north: Port Louis, lunch, a botanical garden, and then the blue water along the coast given that I'm going to the southern part of the island tomorrow and we can visit the center of the island on my way back to the airport the following day.
I finally have a plan.
The Great Experiment
The first stop is the historic waterfront in Port Louis. One of Mauritius’s two UNESCO World Heritage Sites, Aapravasi Ghat, sits here.
Before Port Louis, the French, the British, the sugar plantations, and the beach resorts, Mauritius was one of the few places on Earth uninhabited by humans. The dodo, however, lived here quite happily and nowhere else. It evolved without natural predators and therefore had no reason to be suspicious of Dutch people. It also never needed to fly anywhere given there was nothing to escape from. Poor unsuspecting bird.
The Dutch established the island’s first permanent colony in the seventeenth century. Making dodo bird smorgasbords, forest clearing, and introducing animals helped eliminate the dodo within decades. By the nineteenth century, the bird had become an early symbol of human-caused extinction, and by the twentieth it was appearing in museums, encyclopedias, and school textbooks beside the word “extinction,” which is where I first met it. It even made a cameo in Lewis Carroll's 1865 book Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
Until arriving in Mauritius, I somehow never learned where the victim had actually lived. Just what it represented.
Today the dodo is on the national coat of arms, which feels a little like putting the victim on the corporate logo, although I am pleased by its virtual comeback.
Port Louis itself became a city under the French, who turned its sheltered harbor into a naval base and colonial capital. This eventually dragged Mauritius into the Napoleonic Wars, Europe’s extremely elaborate method of determining whether Napoleon or the British could make life more difficult for everyone else on Earth.
The fighting began in Europe but, as empires tend to do, quickly spread anywhere either side owned a harbor, wanted a harbor, or suspected the other side was making suspiciously good use of one. Mauritius, then called Île de France, was particularly useful to the French because ships and privateers operating from the island could harass British trade in the Indian Ocean. Britain considered this both inconvenient and rude.
The French even managed a rare naval victory over the British at the Battle of Grand Port in 1810, fought just off Mauritius. Napoleon had the victory carved onto the Arc de Triomphe, presumably because opportunities to commemorate British naval defeats were not to be wasted.
The celebration was brief. A few months later, the British returned with considerably more ships and soldiers and took Mauritius anyway. They kept Port Louis as the capital, because empire may change management, but it cannot relocate a perfectly useful port.
Salish drops me near the waterfront. Cafés and brightly colored umbrellas give parts of it a surprisingly European feel, which makes what comes next feel like historical whiplash.
Aapravasi Ghat is a surviving fragment of the immigration depot through which indentured laborers entered Mauritius after slavery was abolished.
The British could congratulate themselves for ending the barbarism of slavery in 1835. The sugar industrial complex still needed workers. The solution was not ethics so much as contracts.
Beginning in the 1830s, Mauritius became an early testing ground for what the British called the “Great Experiment”: replacing enslaved labor with indentured labor. The phrase has the antiseptic confidence of bureaucracy, which is particularly unsettling when the experiment involves human beings.
At the depot built on the east side of the sheltered bay of Trou Fanfaron, newly arrived workers were registered, inspected, assigned contracts, and distributed to sugar estates. Between 1834 and 1920, nearly half a million indentured laborers passed through Mauritius, most of them from India. Many stayed. Others moved onward through the wider colonial world.
The number is difficult to grasp until you put it against the size of Mauritius itself. When the system began, the entire island had a population of only about 100,000. Think South Bend, Indiana but isolated in the middle of the Indian Ocean.
Over the decades that followed, roughly five times that number would arrive through the indenture system. They were not all here at once, of course, but on an island this small, a movement of people on that scale could not simply pass through without changing the place. It changed who lived here, what languages they spoke, what gods they worshipped, what they ate, where they built communities, and eventually what Mauritius itself was.
By 1861, the island's population had grown to more than 300,000. The immigration depot was therefore not merely processing workers for the sugar industry. It was sitting at the entrance to one of the great demographic transformations of the nineteenth century.
And Mauritius was only the beginning. The system developed here became a model for indentured migration elsewhere across the British Empire. In other words, Britain used a tiny island in the Indian Ocean to test a labor system and then, satisfied that it produced sugar efficiently enough, exported the idea.
Calling these workers “free” requires a generous definition of the word. They had contracts rather than owners, but their movement, employment, and daily lives were tightly regulated, and the economic logic had not changed very much: somebody still needed to cut the cane cheaply.
What survives of the depot is surprisingly modest.
Dark basalt walls. Narrow passages. Remains of kitchens, sheds, lavatories, and hospital buildings. Then there are the steps.
And then there is the gate. And steps.
Fourteen stone steps to be exact. They rise from what was once the arrival area. Every immigrant entering the depot had to climb them.
It is one thing to read that so much of modern Mauritius traces its ancestry to India. It is another to stand on the steps where many of those ancestors literally entered the country.
The walls nearby are marked with numbers, remnants of a bureaucracy determined to keep track of people with the same efficiency it kept track of sugar.
It feels odd reading about this in the middle of a modern capital.
It gets odder when I walk outside.
A few minutes from Aapravasi Ghat, the old harbor has become Le Caudan Waterfront, a development of shops, restaurants, offices, and public spaces built into the former docks. Above one pedestrian street, dozens of umbrellas float upside down in red, white, and blue.
They are part of the Allée des Artistes, created as a space for Mauritian artists and performers, and now one of the most photographed sights in Port Louis.
The transition is almost comically abrupt.
One minute I am standing on stone steps climbed by indentured laborers arriving from India. A few minutes later I am photographing cheerful umbrellas suspended above cafés.
Mauritius has an unusual ability to move from dark history to postcard within a few minutes.
At first the contrast feels almost inappropriate. The same waterfront that received ships carrying indentured workers became warehouses and docks, then offices and restaurants and places where families meet for lunch.
The city did what cities do. It kept going.
The umbrellas are not a memorial to what happened next door. They aren't supposed to be. They are simply evidence that life keeps going.
After slavery. After indenture. After the French. After the British. After the ships stopped arriving with people whose labor had already been spoken for.
People stayed.
They had children and made art. They built temples and churches. They created languages, food, music, and traditions that belonged neither entirely to the places their ancestors left nor to the Europeans who brought them here.
Eventually somebody hung an impressive number of umbrellas over a street and called it a place for Mauritian artists. I have a realization that the U.K. and France, and the U.S. for that matter, share flag colors. The umbrellas reflect the red, white, and blue.
That feels like part of the story too.
The indenture system tested here was repeated across the colonial world, helping create Indian diasporas in Fiji, Guyana, Trinidad, South Africa, Réunion, and elsewhere. Communities that now seem deeply rooted in those places are, in part, the consequences of the same nineteenth-century rearrangement of humanity.
That rearrangement hasn’t ended.
People still travel enormous distances in search of work. Millions of Indians live and work across the Gulf and wider West Asia today. The circumstances are obviously different: a construction worker taking a job in Dubai or Riyadh is not an indentured laborer stepping off a ship in Port Louis in 1840. Choice matters. Legal status matters. Two centuries of labor rights matter.
But some of the machinery remains recognizable. There is work somewhere. There are people somewhere else who need the money. Recruiters, contracts, governments, and employers connect the two, and people cross oceans because the opportunities available at home do not match those available abroad.
And then there's a magical blending. Their children grow up speaking different languages, eating slightly different food, and answering increasingly complicated questions about where they are from.
That may be the most enduring part of the story. Empires disappear and labor systems change, but people keep following opportunity across the map, and the places they move to are changed by their arrival.
Aapravasi Ghat is not a monument to immigration in the cheerful modern sense of the word. It is a monument to what happened when an empire abolished one labor system and immediately began searching for another.
I wander a little longer through Le Caudan Waterfront, past the cafés and umbrella-covered walkways, and find a shop devoted almost entirely to ships in bottles. I had read that Mauritius is known for model shipbuilding omewhere before the trip. I filed that information away with the many other things one reads online and assumes will never become relevant.
Apparently, this is its moment.
I buy a coffee even though it's hot and humid, and head back to the car. I need a jump start.
Between stops, Salish and I begin trading pieces of our lives. He tells me about his daughter, who is single and works at a bank. He asks about my family, my work, and whether I have someone at home.
When he learns that I am single, he becomes genuinely concerned.
I am, after all, almost 40, which in Salish’s telling means my body has already begun an irreversible process of collapse and I should probably have someone standing by to deal with the consequences.
His concern is sincere enough that I do not have the heart to point out that I have survived 39 reasonably intact years without a designated caretaker.
I text my mom to inform her that there's a man in Mauritius named Salish who shares the same opinions about my life as she does. "He's a smart man," she replies. "You should listen to him."
History for Lunch
He drops me off at lunch away from the polished waterfront and the version of the island most obviously arranged for visitors. Rose Hill.
Samosas served at a local restaurant in Rose Hill, Mauritius, alongside Coca-Cola and bottled water, Lunch in Rose Hill, Mauritius: white rice with shrimp, zucchini, peppers and pineapple in a sweet-an
The restaurant is unassuming: blue-and-white checked tablecloths, bamboo blinds, an orange napkin folded into a glass, Coca-Cola in an old-fashioned bottle. A liter of water arrives proudly announcing that it contains 18 percent less plastic. Nothing here seems particularly concerned with being photographed. It is just life, and I appreciate it that way.
Unsure what to order, I start with samosas, followed by white rice, raw cabbage and carrots, soft-cooked vegetables, and shrimp with zucchini, peppers, and pineapple in a glossy sweet-and-sour sauce.
This is not the Mauritius of turquoise lagoons and resort brochures, which is exactly why I am glad Salish brought me here. It may even be someone's house.
History is sitting on the table with me. The samosas connect to the Indian subcontinent. The sweet-savory shrimp and rice suggest Chinese influence. The vegetables, sauces, and seasonings belong to a Creole tradition shaped by generations of borrowing. Then, there's the American coke.
Almost everything on this island seems to have arrived from somewhere else. The great exception is the dodo, which belonged exclusively to Mauritius and, ironically, no longer exists.
Back in the car, I thank Salish for bringing me somewhere I would never have found on my own.
A Garden Collected From the World
Our next stop is the Sir Seewoosagur Ramgoolam Botanic Garden, begun in the eighteenth century and among the oldest botanical gardens in the Southern Hemisphere. Its history is tangled with the same colonial networks that shaped Mauritius itself. Plants arrived from across the tropics: palms, spices, fruit trees, ornamentals, and the enormous water lilies for which the garden is now famous.
It is less a preserved patch of original Mauritius than a living collection of things that found their way here.
Château Mon Plaisir, the two-story residence built during the British colonial period, sits within the garden. Walking past it, something occurs to me that I have somehow never really considered before: many of the world’s great botanical gardens began as projects of wealth, empire, aristocracy, or institutions built to serve them. Their landscapes were assembled because powerful people had the money, land, ships, and reach to collect the natural world and rearrange it behind gates.
The same impulse to collect has produced a strange second life.
Today, botanical gardens often serve as refuges for species disappearing in the wild. A plant once gathered as a curiosity or status symbol can become part of a living conservation collection, preserving genetic material increasingly rare in its original habitat. Seed banks, botanical gardens, and other ex situ collections now form part of the insurance policy against extinction.
The irony is hard to miss. Institutions born partly from privilege and acquisition have become places where fragments of the natural world are kept alive.
And I can’t help but wonder about the dodo again.
Had institutions with that kind of conservation purpose existed in Mauritius two centuries earlier, and had anyone understood extinction as something humans could cause and prevent, perhaps someone would have protected a breeding population rather than merely collecting specimens. Perhaps the dodo would have survived long enough for attitudes to change.
It is impossible to know. But standing in a garden now preserving species from around the world, the possibility feels uncomfortably tangible. What actually belongs here?
Is it possible that we just belong wherever we are?
Even the Birds Are Immigrants
A male Madagascar fody, Foudia madagascariensis, flashes through the greenery in brilliant red breeding plumage, looking as though evolution has turned the saturation setting up too high.
He is another arrival.
Humans brought the species from Madagascar during the French colonial period when slaves from Madagascar were also brought to build the foundations of Port Louis. It became established on Mauritius in the eighteenth century. Today it is one of the island’s most common birds. Mauritius already had a fody of its own, Foudia rubra, found nowhere else on Earth. That native species declined as forests disappeared and introduced predators raided its nests.
The newcomer didn’t replace it, and the two species can coexist. Still, there is something strange about watching an imported fody thrive while its endangered native cousin survives only through intensive conservation.
Even among birds, arrival has consequences.
Then I find the Aldabra giant tortoises, Aldabrachelys gigantea.
They sit beneath the trees like boulders that have developed faces. One stretches its long, wrinkled neck toward me, moving with the confidence of an animal that measures life in decades and centuries and has no reason whatsoever to accommodate my schedule.
The tortoises are not Mauritian either. Their surviving wild home is Aldabra Atoll in the Seychelles, where they escaped the fate that befell giant tortoises on so many other Indian Ocean islands. They can live for more than a century, and their presence here feels less like another garden attraction than a glimpse of an alternative ending.
By now, the dodo has been following me around Mauritius all day. It appears on souvenirs everywhere. A creature I had known only as an illustration in books has suddenly acquired a landscape, while a species humans helped eliminate has somehow become that landscape’s most recognizable ambassador.
So I stand in a botanical garden born from the old impulse to collect the world, surrounded by plants that may now be more valuable as conservation specimens than they ever were as trophies, watching a bird introduced from Madagascar and photographing a giant tortoise brought from the Seychelles, while Mauritius’s most famous native survives only as an image on plastic keychains.
It is a surprisingly good summary of the island: things arrive, take root, change the place, and become part of what Mauritius is. What was here first does not always survive.
A little farther north, the history becomes more obvious.
Salish points out a temple beside the road and asks if I want to stop.
I decline, mostly because I have no idea what I am looking at.
It turns out to be the Tamil Surya Oudaya Sangam Temple in Grand Baie, rising beside the road in an explosion of pink, turquoise, gold, and green. Tamil being Hindu religious and architectural traditions from South India and Sri Lanka.
The temple is dedicated to Shiva, associated with destruction, transformation, and regeneration. After everything I have seen that day, the symbolism feels almost suspiciously on the nose.
A few miles farther around the northern coast, the scenery changes again.
At Cap Malheureux, Notre-Dame Auxiliatrice sits almost absurdly prettily beside the Indian Ocean: white walls, black trim, red roof, turquoise water. Catholicism arrived by a different route, with the French colonial world, but it too took root.
The French name Cap Malheureux means Unfortunate Cape, which seems unnecessarily pessimistic for somewhere that looks like this. The name is generally associated with the dangerous reefs and shipwrecks along the coast. It also became the place where British troops came ashore in 1810 on their way to taking Mauritius from the French.
Today the invading fleet has been replaced by a beautiful view and fishing boats gently rocking in the lagoon.
I walk behind the church to the water. Across the turquoise is the unmistakable profile of Coin de Mire, while wooden boats sit in the shallows.
Before taking me back to the hotel, Salish makes one last stop.
He pulls into an enormous Western-style supermarket that seems to have materialized in the middle of nowhere but is oddly bustling. After a day of temples, colonial history, botanical gardens, and fishing villages, air conditioning, fluorescent aisles, and shopping carts feel like an abrupt return to ordinary life.
I have one mission: a bottle of Mauritian rhum for my father.
Then it occurs to me that I could hardly have chosen a more appropriate souvenir.
Rhum begins with sugarcane, the crop around which so much of Mauritius’s colonial history was organized. Sugar helped drive the demand for enslaved labor and, after abolition, indentured labor. It brought hundreds of thousands of people across the Indian Ocean and helped create the Mauritius I've spent the day getting to know.
After hours tracing the consequences of sugarcane across the island, I am standing beneath supermarket lights choosing a bottle made from it to carry home.
History occasionally has a sense of humor.
Salish helps me navigate the options, I make my choice, and he carries it to the car for me. Then it's back toward the hotel.
It is hardly the most historically significant stop of the day. After spending hours thinking about the enormous movements of people, plants, religions, animals, and empires across the Indian Ocean, my final act is something much smaller: carrying a piece of Mauritius home.
Plus, there is air conditioning.
I arrived with the vague ambition of treating Mauritius as a retreat of sorts: exercise, eat better, clear my head, perhaps return home as some marginally improved version of myself.
Travel encourages this fantasy. Go somewhere beautiful, remove yourself from ordinary life, and perhaps everything will rearrange itself into a more presentable form.
Mauritius suggests a less tidy version of improvement.
Nothing here became distinctive by smoothing away its contradictions. It became distinctive by absorbing them.
Perhaps people work that way too and we just don't realize it.
Improvement may not mean becoming a cleaner, more coherent version of ourselves. Some of it may be learning to live more comfortably with the pieces we accumulate: the people we have lost, the experiences that changed us, the mistakes, the good fortune, the parts we chose, and the parts we most certainly did not.
The seams do not necessarily mean something has gone wrong. Sometimes they are evidence that something has been assembled.
That is the part I did not understand while I was actually in Mauritius.
At What Point Does an Arrival Belong?
I had arrived with the familiar suspicion that I did not quite belong anywhere, then unconsciously looked to Mauritius for evidence that I was right. Seven years later, writing this, I realize Mauritius was never the source of that feeling. I had brought it with me.
And I had spent the day on an island where so much of what surrounded me had come from somewhere else: people, religions, languages, recipes, plants, birds, even the giant tortoises in the botanical garden. All had crossed oceans before becoming part of the landscape. Meanwhile, some of what had existed nowhere else, most famously the dodo, was gone.
Sitting at the beach bar, considerably busier today, eating a chicken burger while tonight's band performs a cover of Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game,” I find myself wondering: At what point does an arrival stop being an arrival?
Mauritius offers no tidy answer, but it does suggest that belonging is not the same as being native. Things can retain evidence of where they came from and still become inseparable from where they are.
People can too.
Over centuries, Mauritius made a home from what arrived by sea. Perhaps that is what I had failed to understand about belonging. Home does not have to be where you started, and becoming does not require erasing the evidence of everything that came before.
Seven years later, I am still carrying some of the same questions.
And I still have not opened the bottle of rhum.
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