Chagos High Sea

West of Chagos, deep ocean surrounds the low coral islands and banks of the central Indian Ocean. The Great Chagos Bank is a vast atoll whose reefs enclose a wide area of water, while Peros Banhos and the Salomon Islands lie farther north. Portuguese navigators charted the group in the sixteenth century. Towards the end of the eighteenth, settlers from Mauritius established plantations on some of its islands.