Flag of Mauritius.
Mauritius is an island in the Mascarene Islands off the eastern coast of Madagascar, and is the primary island of the Republic of Mauritius. It was the only known habitat of the dodo.
Maruritius in 1632[]
The location of Mauritius.
In 1635, an expedition was sent to Maruritius to sent under the sponsorship of Princess Kristina of Sweden. Officially, the expedition was to begin work on turning the Mascarene Islands into Swedish colonies, Sweden having missed out on the rush to Africa and Asia in the OTL. Unofficially, the expedition was to try to save the dodo from extinction. The princess had become fond of dodos due to her love of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and charged the expedition's sole up-timer, conservationist and amateur ornithologist Pam Miller, with saving the dodo.
While the island had been used as a stopover port prior to the Ring of Fire[1], the earliest known permanent settlement had been established in 1638, so it was hoped that the expedition would arrive well before any permanent settlements had been established. Thanks to the butterfly effect, that did not quite happen. A small Dutch settlement had been established in 1634 when a group who had been headed for the Dutch East Indies (modern Indonesia) decided to stay after their ship had been damaged in a storm.
In late 1635, the island was renamed "Dodo", in honor of its best-known inhabitants, and a colony/research station was established on the island.
As in the OTL, the island became a stopover point for ships traveling between Europe and the Far East. In 1636, this included the expatriate Japanese who were traveling from Cambodia to Grantville.[2] Some of them stayed and introduced rice cultivation to the island.
References[]
- ↑ History of Mauritius on Wikipedia
- ↑ Their story is told in Ring of Fire III, "All God's Children in the Burning East".