TROMELIN.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXXI, Issue 67, 2 November 1911, Page 4

TROMELIN.

-Recently published accounts of a veritable “island of tragedy” bring under public notice one of the strangest anu least known of the earth’s strange places. It is the island of Troinclin, which probably not one person in ten thousand has ever noticed on a map, which lies 2-10 miles to the east ol Madagascar, and three hundred miles north of Mauritius. According to an olficer of the it ay a! Indian Marine, who writes about it in “Cham bers’s,” it consists of a mass of sand less than a mile in length, and only eight hundred yards wide. The highest pan is only fifteen feet high, and the lower parts arc submerged at high-water. The island is surrounded by a coral reef on which the sc; breaks heavily, and a mile from Hu shore there is a depth of two thousand fathoms. Landing is posribh at only one place, and in calm wra 1 her and at high water. The island is quite destitute of vegetable life.

This isolated and barren spat was the scone of terrible tragedies. One dark night in I7GI the French transnnrt Utile, canning troops to Mauritius, was wrecked there. Of the eight hundred and sixty people on hoard, only one hundred and ten were saved, and eighty of these were Macks. These hundred and ten were washed ashore. From the wreckage of the transport they constructed a vessel with which they hoped to road; Mauritius, hut it was too small to hold all the survivors. Moreover, the provisions saved from the wreck wore not sufficient to support so many people on such a voyage. The white members of the party therefore made off in their hogt with all the provisions they could seise, leaving the blacks to their fate. Nothing more was ever hoard of those white people. Within four weeks all the blacks, save seven women, were dead from privation and exposure. It is vouched for

as a fact, that those seven women maintained themselves on the island for fifteen years, living on shell-fish and brackish water. They were rescussd by a Captain Tromclin in 177t>, and there is now living in Mauritius a woman who is descended from one of the natives who spent fifteen years on the island. Nothing more was heard of the island until 1875, when a British man-of-war passed it, and noticed signs of wreckage, but none of life.