Great Chagos Coast

The Great Chagos Bank is a vast atoll structure in the Indian Ocean, its reefs and scattered islands surrounding a broad lagoon. Portuguese sailors knew the Chagos Archipelago by the sixteenth century and called it Bassas de Chagas, after the wounds of Christ. French interest grew through Mauritius and Réunion; in the late eighteenth century plantations were established on several islands with the labour of enslaved people. The archipelago passed with Mauritius to Britain in 1814.