The Dutch in Mauritius, a century of landfalls

The island’s name is Dutch, and it dates from a single day. In 1598 a squadron under Admiral Wybrand Van Warwyck dropped anchor at Grand Port, on the south-east coast, and named the land Mauritius, in honour of Prince Maurice of Nassau, stadtholder of Holland. The island was not entirely unknown. Arab sailors had probably reached it in the Middle Ages, and maps from around 1500 already give it an Arabic name. The Portuguese, who called it Cirne, had put in there several times in the sixteenth century without settling. With the Dutch, however, something else began: the history of a human settlement.

The landing of 1598 was nothing like a settlement. For forty years, nobody made a home on the island. The first attempt came only in 1638, when the Dutch built Fort Frederik Hendrik on the shore of the bay of Grand Port, named after another stadtholder of the United Provinces. The fort served as a supply post for Dutch ships sailing to Asia or returning from it.

The sea around the island still bears the marks of this traffic. The National History Museum in Mahébourg displays a Portuguese astrolabe dated 1568, raised from the wreck of the Banda, lost in 1615: it is the third-oldest Portuguese astrolabe known. Close by are blue-and-white Chinese porcelain of the Ming period, from the reign of Wanli, along with gold and silver coins, buttons, a buckle and trade beads recovered from the Speaker, a pirate ship that sank on 7 January 1702 at the mouth of the Grande Rivière Sud-Est.

The most famous episode of the century lasted only a few weeks. On 14 August 1642 the Zeehaen and the Heemskerck put to sea under the command of Abel Tasman, bound in search of the southern land the Dutch called the Zuidland. Their first port of call was Mauritius. There the two ships took on water and fresh provisions, as well as useful charts, and were repaired before sailing on. It was from Mauritius that the expedition set out that would carry Tasman towards the southern lands.

A merchant aboard the Zeehaen, Isaac Gilsemans, used the stopover to draw the bay, the fort, the neighbouring buildings and the mountains of the interior. His drawing, made in September or October 1642, is now held by the National Archives of the Netherlands. It shows Fort Frederik Hendrik as it stood four years after it was built.

The first settlement lasted some twenty years. Other attempts followed, but none grew enough to turn a profit, and the Dutch left the island for good in 1710. They introduced sugar cane, domestic animals and deer. Deer bones, indeed, are among the food remains unearthed at Vieux Grand Port.

They also left behind less welcome guests. The island served as a place of banishment for convicts, and with them came pigs and monkeys, while rats escaped from the ships. These animals ate the eggs that the island’s birds laid on the bare ground, and the dodo, hunted by sailors for its meat as well, could not survive.

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Vieux Grand Port, four centuries underfoot

It is at Vieux Grand Port that this century can be visited. The site is regarded as the cradle of Mauritian history: that of the island’s first human settlement. Yet what stands above ground is French, built after 1753 on the very ruins of the Dutch fort: a lodge, a prison, a bakery, a bancassal and a forge. The remains of Fort Frederik Hendrik, uncovered in 2000, lie some fifty centimetres below the surface. From 2000 to 2004 a Dutch team led by Pieter Floore and Jayasena Ranjith carried out an archaeological programme there, and every year a two-month excavation season continues on the site with researchers from the Netherlands.

In 1998 the site was redeveloped for the four hundredth anniversary of the first landing, then inaugurated by Prince Maurits van Oranje-Nassau, a descendant of the stadtholder whose name the island bears. The Frederik Hendrik Museum opened on 27 May 1999 and serves as an interpretation centre. A model of the site orients visitors at the entrance, then the main room unfolds four centuries of occupation: stones, bricks and nails; musket balls, cannonballs and gunflints; sickles, hoes, beads, coins, clay pipes and ceramics; and food remains in which fish, beef, deer, pork, dugong and turtle can be identified. Panels show seventeenth-century maps and the portraits of the two stadtholders, and a model represents a ship of the Dutch East India Company. On the walls of the lodge, graffiti depict ships of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Admission is free.

Near Ferney, on the coast road, a monument marks the site of the first Dutch landing, with Lion Mountain as a backdrop. It was restored in 2013, and the Dutch Tower at Vieux Grand Port was restored in turn in 2019 and 2020.

One hundred and twelve years separate the first anchorage from the final departure. What remains is a name, borne ever since by the whole island; sugar cane, which would make its fortune under other flags; the deer; and a fort that can no longer be seen but is still being excavated. For anyone arriving in Mahébourg, a visit to Vieux Grand Port puts things back in order: before the Isle de France, before Port Louis, the human history of Mauritius began here, on the shore of this bay.