Chagos High Sea

The waters north of Chagos lie along a chain of coral atolls and submerged banks extending south from the Maldives. The low islands of the Chagos archipelago include Diego Garcia, Peros Banhos and the Salomon Islands. Portuguese navigators charted them in the sixteenth century; from the 1780s settlers arrived from Mauritius to establish coconut plantations, worked by enslaved people brought chiefly from Madagascar and Mozambique.