Where Mauritius began, was abandoned twice, and beat an empire

A short drive from Mahébourg, a quiet stretch of coast holds the island's first chapter — and one of the strangest entries in French military history.

Everyone knows Mauritius is an island paradise. Far fewer know where its written history actually started: not in Port Louis, but here, on the south-east coast near a village called Vieux Grand Port — "Old Grand Port." Most tours never stop. They should.

The Dutch who named the island — then gave up

In 1598, a Dutch fleet sheltered in this bay and claimed the uninhabited island, naming it Mauritius after Prince Maurice of Nassau. The Dutch tried to settle here twice. They introduced sugarcane (the crop that would define the island's future), brought Java deer, and logged the precious ebony forests.

They also, infamously, helped wipe out the dodo. The flightless bird had no fear of humans and no defence against the pigs, monkeys and rats the ships brought ashore. Within decades it was gone — the most famous extinction in human history, and it happened right here. After two failed attempts, the Dutch abandoned Mauritius entirely in 1710, leaving little behind but ruins.

The naval battle carved in Paris

A century later, this same bay produced one of the most surprising facts on the island. In 1810, during the Napoleonic Wars, French and British fleets clashed offshore in the Battle of Grand Port. Against the odds, the French won — decisively.

It remains the only French naval victory significant enough to be inscribed on the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. And it happened in Mauritian waters, in sight of this coast.

The irony writes itself: just months later, the British landed in the north and took the entire island anyway. But the name "Grand Port" is still up there on the Arc de Triomphe, a permanent Parisian monument to a battle most Mauritians' own visitors have never heard of.

What's left to see

Today the story lives in the ruins of the old Dutch and French fortifications and in the small but fascinating Frederik Hendrik Museum, set among the foundations of the earliest European settlement. It's modest, uncrowded, and utterly overlooked — which is exactly why it's worth your time. Stand on the shore, look out at the bay, and you're looking at the spot where the whole improbable story of Mauritius began.