Journey to Mauritius

March 1768. A young captain-engineer of the King, with no fortune and no illusions, leaves Lorient aboard the Marquis de Castries for the Isle de France, present-day Mauritius.

Four months at sea await him: sharks and bonitos beneath the Line, storms south of the Cape, scurvy ravaging the crew before land at last appears on 13 July. On the island, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre looks at everything. As a naturalist, he describes the basalt and the forests, the monkeys, the corals and shells, the seasons and the winds. On foot, he walks the circuit of the island, spends a night on the mountain of the Trois-Mamelles, and crosses the remote posts where runaway slaves hide.

But the observer is also a moralist. What he sees of the plantations, the masters and the slaves wrings from him pages of an anger that few travellers of his day dared to put in writing.

The return is no less harsh: the hurricane at Bourbon, the climb of Table Mountain at the Cape, turtle fishing on Ascension Island, a crossing on which provisions run short.

In these letters written to his friends, one can already see the gaze that, fifteen years later, would give us Paul and Virginia.