The French colony and the capitulations, 1770 to 1814

The young colony was poor and precarious, and it was built on slavery. The French planters cleared forest for cotton, maize, rice and spices, and the work was done by enslaved Africans shipped in through Mauritius. Within a generation the enslaved were the great majority of the population. This is the origin of the Creole nation: an African majority, a French-speaking planter minority, and the language, faith and food that grew where they met. Pierre Poivre's famous smuggling of nutmeg and clove seedlings to break the Dutch spice monopoly touched Seychelles too, and a spice garden was planted at Anse Royale.

The colony's survival owed less to its crops than to one man's nerve. When the wars of the French Revolution reached the Indian Ocean, Seychelles was almost defenceless. Its commandant from 1794, Jean-Baptiste Quéau de Quincy, understood that he could not fight the Royal Navy, so he chose to bend instead. On 16 May 1794 the British frigate Orpheus, under Captain Henry Newcome, appeared off Mahé. The next day Quincy signed a capitulation, handing the islands to Britain while securing terms that let the colonists keep their property and carry on trading.

Then, when the British ships sailed away, life went on much as before. Quincy repeated this manoeuvre again and again over the following years, surrendering formally whenever a British warship demanded it and reverting to French administration once it left. It was survival by paperwork, and it worked. The original 1794 instrument of capitulation still exists, held in the Seychelles National Archives, one of the oldest documents of the nation's public record.

The improvisation could not last forever. When Britain captured Mauritius in 1810, Seychelles fell with it, and this time the change was permanent. Quincy, ever the pragmatist, stayed on to serve the new rulers. Four years later a treaty in Europe would make the transfer final.