Chagos High Sea

South of the Maldives, the Chagos waters surround scattered coral atolls, reefs and submerged banks. The Great Chagos Bank spreads beneath the sea, while Diego Garcia and Peros Banhos have low islands around their lagoons. Portuguese navigators charted the archipelago in the sixteenth century. In the late eighteenth century settlers from Mauritius established coconut plantations on some islands, using the labour of enslaved people brought across the Indian Ocean.