Diego Garcia Coast

Diego Garcia is the largest and southernmost atoll of the Chagos Archipelago, its narrow rim curving around a sheltered lagoon. Portuguese navigators knew the island in the early sixteenth century, but permanent settlement came much later. France claimed it in 1769, and in the 1780s colonists from Mauritius established plantations worked by enslaved people brought from Madagascar and Mozambique. Britain took possession during the Napoleonic Wars, and the island passed formally to British rule with Mauritius in 1814.