If we look at the map showing the depths of the Indian Ocean, (28) we notice that Mauritius, with the sister French island of Réunion, rests on a relatively shallow bank, raised above the ocean floor. Following this bank northwards for nearly a thousand miles, we come to a whole group of little islands which are connected by a similar bank with Madagascar. The most northerly of this group are the Seychelles. Another great bank runs southward from India with scores of islets on it. In the north are the Laccadives, close to the coast of India; in the middle are the Maldives; and in the far south, beyond the Equator, right out in the ocean, is the little Chagos Archipelago, including the coral island of Diego Garcia, where at one time there was a small coaling station used by vessels bound to Australia. All these islands are but the fragments of a sunken land-mass which at a very early period of the worlds history joined South Africa to India. They are widely separated if we look only at the surface of the sea, but really joined together if we look below.
Mahé, the largest of the Seychelles, has an area of rather over fifty square miles, a little more than that of the island of Jersey; we could walk from end to end of it in a few hours. A map, showing Zanzibar, Pemba, Mauritius and the Seychelles 49 on the same scale, may perhaps help us to realize their relative size and shape. There is one good harbour in Mahé, on which stands Victoria, the capital, where steamers sometimes call on the voyage from Aden to Mauritius or from India to Mombasa. 50 Here is a general view of the harbour and here is a street 51 in the little town. The whole group was dependent on Mauritius and was given up to us at the same time as that island. The language of the people is still modified French. The Seychelles are fertile and beautiful and not unhealthy, in spite of their nearness to the Equator. They naturally abound in tropical plants, among which the coconut palm is the most valuable to the natives. Here are some of these palms with 52 the mill where the oil is extracted from the nut. Here also 53 we see a species of fan palm, which has a strange history. Centuries ago, the Portuguese found washed up in the Maldives and on the southwest coasts of India a curious double nut, the _coco-de-mer_. The tree which produced the nut was unknown 54 and could not be discovered in the neighbouring islands, so the fable was invented that it grew in the depths of the sea. The nut was much valued in India as a medicine, but in spite of careful search not until the end of the eighteenth century was the parent tree found in the Seychelles, where alone it grows. The Southwest Monsoon, blowing for months at a time, carried the nut all the way to India, just as it brought the fleets of Arab dhows from the coast of Africa. So we have in this tale of the nut a useful reminder of the climate of the Indian Ocean. We will now leave the Seychelles after a glance at another strange product of a neighbouring island, Aldabra. This is the giant tortoise. It 55 was at one time very common in this part of the Indian Ocean, as we learn from the accounts of early voyagers, but it is now rare.