The Secrets of the Abandoned Castaways on Tromelin Island Finally Reveal Their Story.

They had been illegally enslaved and then marooned and abandoned on the remote Tromelin Island for fifteen years, with only archaeology able to tell their amazing story.

It was on the night of 31 July 1761, that Jean de Lafargue, captain of the French East India Company ship L’Utile (“The Useful”), was likely thinking of wealth and personal gain. Held in the ship’s hold were around 160 slaves that had been sold in Madagascar a few days before and bound for ?le de France, known today as Mauritius. The thriving French colony had a plantation economy in need of labour on that small island in the Indian Ocean. However, slavery was legal at the time, de Lafargue was not authorized by colonial authorities to trade in slaves.  

According to the detailed account of the ship’s écrivain, or purser, as L’Utile approached the vicinity of an islet then called ?le des Sables, or Sandy Island, winds kicked up to 15 or 20 knots. The ship’s two maps did not agree on the small island’s precise location, and a more prudent captain probably would have slowed and waited for daylight. But de Lafargue was in a hurry to reap his bounty. That night L’Utile struck the reef off the islet’s north end, shattering the hull. Most of the slaves, trapped in the cargo holds, drowned, though some escaped as the ship broke apart. The next morning, 123 of the 140 members of the French crew and somewhere between 60 and 80 Malagasy slaves found themselves stranded on ?le des Sables, shaken, wet through and injured, but alive.

De Lafargue had some kind of nervous breakdown, according to the écrivain. First officer Barthélémy Castellan du Vernet took over leadership and command, rallying the crew to salvage food, tools, and timber from the shipwreck and build separate camps for the crew and the slaves. Under the first officer’s guidance, a well was dug, an oven and furnace built, and work building a new boat begun. Within two months, the makeshift vessel La Providence emerged from the remains of L’Utile.  Before he sailed away with the crew, Du Vernet promised the Malagasy people that a ship would return for them. And so they waited. The few that survived waited a very long time.

The island today called is called Tromelin Island, laying around 300 miles east of Madagascar and 350 miles north of Mauritius. Shaped like a sunflower seed, it is just one-third of a square mile of sand and scrub. Today it hosts an unpaved runway, a staffed weather station, and a wildlife preserve. Hermit crabs swarm across the island in packs at night, and each year hundreds of sea turtles and countless birds arrive to lay their eggs.

Diaries, letters, and the écrivains account document the wreckage and the two months that the French crew stayed on the island, but the Malagasy castaways left no written records. Their story would have remained almost completely untold but for an underwater research vessel in the late 1970s, and the Naval Archaeology Research Group (known as GRAN), which has since studied dozens of post medieval shipwrecks.

Four days later the La Providence arrived safely in Madagascar, and the crew were transferred back to Réunion Island and Mauritius. De Lafargue died in transit, leaving du Vernet to face Antoine Marie Desforges-Boucher, the governor of Mauritius, who was furious with the violation of his prohibition on bringing slaves to his island. Du Vernet repeatedly requested to have a ship sent back to the island, only to be denied again and again. News of the abandonment even reached Paris and caused a brief stir, but was forgotten in the chaos of the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763) and the looming bankruptcy of the French East India Company. According to these documents Du Vernet never gave up trying to rescue the slaves from Tromelin Island.

He was probably the only man who tried to save the people who remained on the island. Finally, in 1772, in response to another request from the first officer, the minister of marine affairs agreed to send a ship. La Sauterelle arrived at ?le des Sables in 1775 and sent a small boat carrying two men to the island, but it was dashed on the reef. One man swam back to the ship, the other to the island. Two more ships followed La Sauterelle, but neither was able to make landfall at the reef- and whitecap-shrouded island. At last, on November 29, 1776, more than 15 years after L’Utile had been shipwrecked, La Dauphine, captained by Jacques Marie Boudin de la Nuguy de Tromelin (from whom the island gets its current name), made contact. Only seven women and an eight-month-old boy remained. 

It is highly possible that most of the 60 to 80 slaves died within the first couple of years. A group of 18 had apparently departed the island not long after they were abandoned, but it is unknown whether they ever reached Madagascar. Some 15 survivors endured for the following 10 years or so. Just months before the rescue, three men and three women, as well as the French sailor stranded from La Sauterelle (who had witnessed two failed rescue attempts himself), had left the islet on a raft with a sail of woven feathers. They were never heard from again. The testimony of the seven remaining women and the records of La Dauphine have been lost. Only the archaeology that has been conducted on the island can reveal their story of abandonment, survival, and, ultimately, community-building.

In 2006 the remains of the shipwreck, that only consisted of the heaviest items usually found on naval ships from that time period such as cannons, anchors, ammunition, rigging, that had not been washed away by centuries of waves and storms. A few hundred feet offshore, the divers found marks in the rocky reef where the ship struck and came to rest, confirming the account of the écrivain.

The ship’s pilot had produced a small map that indicated where the stranded crew and slaves resided, as well as the sites of the furnace and oven. With this map as a reference, an archaeological team were able to locate bricks used to make the oven, along with dozens of nails, which indicate that boards from the ship had been burned. For the rest of that season, and across three more, the archaeologists followed the progress of the castaways from the wreck to the beach to the site where they eventually settled, at the island’s highest point, about 25 feet above sea level.

The team also found six copper plates or bowls. These items had clearly been salvaged from the wreck, and then possibly hammered into new shapes. More remarkable was how they had been repaired, some up to eight times over the course of 15 years. To repair a copper plate is not so easy, the castaways had to cut pieces of copper from other objects for patches, drill holes through both patches and plates, and then use small rolled pieces of copper as rivets, which they then hammered into place. The repairs are reflections of patience and industry, and hints at the passage of time. 

Three intact buildings were also found by the archaeology team, with the initial discovery of what was probably the kitchen, with all things well kept in each part of the buildings. In this oval shaped building with walls around 5ft in thickness, there was a stack of six more copper vessels, topped with a conch shell, and a deposit of 15 cleverly made spoons. These were cut from copper with small wings at the base that could be folded over a twig to make a handle. In total, 45 domestic objects were found there, and in another building were tools, iron tripods to hold cooking vessels, and big lead bowls, probably made from lead sheets kept on L’Utile to patch holes at sea. The large lead bowls were likely used to hold water, meaning that lead poisoning may have been a problem for the survivors. Pieces of flint and the metal against which they were struck, were also found which indicates how the castaways started and maintained fires. A few small pieces of copper jewellery, a ring, a couple of bracelets, and an eighteenth-century Portuguese coin that may have been worn as a pendant were also found, along with a pointe démêloir (tip-comb), for untangling hair. Slaves usually had their hair cut short, but the castaways would have been able to grow their hair out again. Traditionally, a man would have made a pointe démêloir for the woman he loved. These small, personal finds suggest that at some point in their stay, the castaways came to the realization that there would be no rescue and they would have to build lives, a community, on the island. They have passed the time of strictly surviving and they begin to live a ‘normal’ life. Yet those objects make the only part of this history currently discovered.

The construction and arrangement of the castaways’ structures say a great deal about life on the island, and in some ways even reflect the psychological experience of it. people across Madagascar generally lived in small huts of wood, mud, and thatch, with each family group on its own plot some distance from neighbours. Such materials were not available on Tromelin, so the people there had to make do with what was on hand. The buildings are composed of two layers: flat plates of beach sandstone planted in the ground vertically, topped by coral blocks. This construction style is unlike any Malagasy home, but it does have a direct correlate on Madagascar: burial cists. Traditionally, all stone buildings would have been reserved for the dead. Psychologically, this is very intriguing. The people chose to live in what were, in their minds, tombs, representing another cultural shock. After surviving the horrific ordeals of enslavement, the shipwreck, and the abandonment, they even had to overcome their own cultural prohibitions.

In addition, the buildings, rather than being separate, shared walls and were clustered in about half an acre, unlike more diffuse villages back home the castaways had, at some point, dismantled buildings to erect a wall approximately 20 feet long, probably after a hurricane or cyclone had damaged the hamlet. In these ways, the structures represent systematic adaptation to the lack of space and the need for protection from cyclones, and they reflect a psychological state: grave-bound, but together, leaning upon one another.