The Seychelles
First a French, then a British colony, these remote and beautiful islands are being gradually drawn into the modern world, writes J. Coen.
It is possible that the Seychelles Islands were visited by Arab and Indonesian traders several centuries before the Portuguese, who are said to have given the islands the name of Sete Irmanas - Seven Sisters - but there is no evidence that they ever landed there. Vasco da Gama is thought to have sighted the islands but there is no evidence that he, either, landed on them.
The islands first appeared on a map made by the cartographer Alberto Cantoni, in 1501.
The first recorded landings were not made, however, till a century later when, on January 19th, 1601, an expedition of the East India Company visited them while seeking to establish trade in Aden and Suarat.
An account of the voyage was written by John Jourdain, but it remained forgotten for three hundred years until Jourdain’s Journal was published by the Hakluyt Society.
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