Discovery and first settlement, to 1770

No one is indigenous to Seychelles. When the first Europeans arrived the granite islands rising out of the western Indian Ocean were empty of people, covered in forest, coco de mer palms and giant tortoises, and had been passed by rather than settled for centuries. Arab and Maldivian navigators almost certainly knew of them, but left no colony. The first landing anyone recorded came in 1609, when a crew from the English East India Company ship Ascension, sailing to India, stepped ashore and described the tortoises, the birds and the fresh water.

For more than a century after that the islands stayed unclaimed. What changed the picture was France's need to protect its sea route to India. France had held Isle de France, today's Mauritius, since 1715, and in 1742 its governor Mahé de La Bourdonnais sent an expedition under Lazare Picault to chart the islands to the north. Picault was struck by the fertile main island and called it Île d'Abondance. His charts were poor, so he was sent back in 1744 and this time named the island Mahé, after his patron, and the group the Îles de La Bourdonnais.

The formal claim came in wartime. With the Seven Years' War looming, France moved to secure the islands before Britain could. On 1 November 1756 Corneille Nicholas Morphey took possession in the name of King Louis XV, laid a Stone of Possession in the bay below what is now Victoria, and named the group after Jean Moreau de Séchelles, the king's finance minister. The name, later anglicised, stuck.

Settlement still took another fourteen years. On 27 August 1770 the ship Thélémaque landed the first colonists on the island of Sainte Anne, just off Mahé. There were fifteen white Frenchmen, eight enslaved Africans and five Indians. That small and unequal group is the true beginning of the Seychellois nation, because from the start these islands were peopled entirely by arrival, and by the labour of people brought there against their will. Everything that Seychelles became, and the diaspora it now sends back out into the world, grows from that first landing.