2*j6 Voyage of the Novara. 



March, with a mulatto and a negro on board of a fishing craft, 

 named the Alliance^ of 45 tons, in which he had sailed from 

 St. Denis, on the Island of Bourbon, anew to take charge of 

 the little fishing station here, which is at present the property 

 of M. Ottovan, a French gentleman domiciliated in St. Denis. 

 While at Cape Town we were informed, in reply to our 

 enquiries, by the first authority in the country, that the Island 

 of St. Paul belonged to England, and was a dependency of the 

 Mauritius ; here, to our astonishment, we on the other hand 

 learned from the inhabitants that St. Paul at present was under 

 the protection of the French Government, and, in fact, was 

 an appendage of the Island of Bourbon, the governor of which 

 long previously had ordered the French flag to be hoisted, with 

 all the naval formalities, by a detachment of French soldiers 

 who had been landed from a French ship of war. According 

 to Viot — who is to all appearance a thoroughly trustworthy 

 man, but on whom, however, we throw the responsibility of the 

 correctness of the following information, — the island seems, 

 in fact, to have been, some twenty years since, the property of a 

 French merchant of St. Denis, named Camin, who somewhat 

 later entered into partnership with a person named Adam, a 

 Pole by birth, to whom he ultimately resigned the entire 

 island.* Adam, who was described to us as a man of exceed- 

 ingly fierce and determined charactei', did wonders for the cul- 



* According to Captain Denham, who visited tliis island in 1853, the present pro- 

 prietor called this fishing station, Marie Heui'tevent, and said he had bought it about 

 five years previously for COOO dollai-s from a Polish merchant of St. Denis, where 

 he himself also resided. {Nautical Magazine, pp. 68, 75). 



