Angel Hotel Cardiff

Mauritius: So much to see...if you can make it off the beach

Two hundred years ago, a squadron of French ships arrived off the coast of Mauritius.

It was a May morning and all seemed fine until the mist cleared and Commodore François Roquebert realised they'd come too late. No one had told Paris that the Union Jack now flew over Port Louis.

The French fled, with the Royal Navy in pursuit. After a naval battle off Madagascar, the British won the day and thus ended Napoleon's forgotten Mauritian Campaign of 1809-1811. In Britain, we really should make an effort to remember it. Never mind Waterloo, it was the capture of this volcanic island that handed the Royal Navy a free run of the Indian Ocean, making dreams of empire a reality.

Standing today on Fort Adelaide (named after the wife of William IV), I'm not surprised by the lack of bicentennial celebrations in Mauritius. The people of Port Louis prefer to mark 12 March 1968 when the quadricolore of independence was first raised down below me on the Champ de Mars.

Mauritius is a curious country, the product of a most unusual upbringing. It has been run by the French and the British but its culture is a unique hodge-podge of Hindu, Chinese, Creole and African. British tourists tend not to notice this as we are bussed straight from Sir Seewoosagur Ramgoolam Airport to our luxury beach resorts to be fed and pampered and washed by the Indian Ocean until it's time to go home again. Mauritius these days is synonymous with "honey- moon", its white sandy beaches a place where Europeans and Russians sizzle between mojitos.

But I had decided to get off the beach, to break out of this palm-fringed paradise where I'm not even allowed to carry my own fruit juice from the breakfast bar. I was going to see the island. Mauritius is bigger than Hong Kong and just a bit smaller than Luxembourg. That's a lot of non-beach out there.

Port Louis was the obvious place to start because it was here that the island's narrative really began in 1721 when the French and their African slaves arrived from Isle de Bourbon (now Reunion). Mauritius then was a lush, tree-covered island populated by some very odd-shaped birds, the dodo, prong-tailed and solitary. It had already been visited by Arab, Portuguese and Dutch traders, but no one had wanted to settle.

The Dutch occupied the island twice in the 17th century – it was they who named it after Prince Maurice of Nassau – but nobody stayed. My guess is they were unimpressed by what Mauritius had to offer. Certainly they had no time for the poor dodo which they named the walgvogel (disgusting bird) because of its flavour.

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