Chagos High Sea

South of the Chagos islands, deep water surrounds a scattered group of coral atolls and submerged banks. Diego Garcia, the southernmost inhabited atoll of the chain, has low islands enclosing a lagoon. Portuguese navigators charted these islands in the sixteenth century. Plantation settlement began from Mauritius in the late eighteenth century, bringing enslaved workers to cultivate coconuts on land that rises only slightly above the sea.