HISTORY OF MAURITIUS. 
m 
The administration of justice, of the police, and of commerce, as well as the 
military and marine departments, were a source of still more painful occupations. 
He found justice administered by two Councils, one of which depended on the 
other; the Superior Council was in the Isle of Bourbon. Since the arrival of M. 
de la Bourdonnais, his Majesty issued letters patent, which conferred an equal power 
on the Council in the Isle of France, in whatever concerned the criminal law. With 
respect to the general administration, the Council where the Governor resided, was 
to be the superior. As may be supposed, these alterations were attended with very 
beneficial effects: M. de la Bourdonnais may boast that, during the eleven years of 
his government, there was but one law-suit in the Isle of France, as he accommo¬ 
dated all disputes by his own amiable interposition. It might also be added, that 
after his arrival those disputes, which had so often interrupted the harmony of the two 
councils, no longer prevailed. 
The police was also a very interesting object; more particularly as the Maroon 
Negroes carried disorder and desolation into the very heart of the Isle of France. 
M. de la Bourdonnais discovered the secret of destroying them, by arming blacks 
against blacks, and in forming a marechaussee of the Negroes of Madagascar, who 
at length purged the island of the greater part of these marauders. As for commerce, 
there was no idea pf it when M. de la Bourdonnais arrived in the islands. He first 
planted the sugar-cane there, and established manufactures pf cotton and indigo. * 
The ope finds a vent at Surat, Moka, and in Persia, and the others in Europe. 
Agriculture was equally neglected in these islands; and such was the indolence 
of the inhabitants, that they did not avail themselves of the advantages with which 
the surrounding soil was ready to reward their labour. M. de la Bourdonnais, how¬ 
ever, gave a new turn to their character, awakened a spirit of activity, and brought 
them to cultivate all the grain necessary for the subsistence of the two islands, in 
order that they might be np longer subject to that state of dearth which had been 
so frequent in tfiejn, and which had annually compelled the inhabitants to apply 
to hunting and fishing, to the native fruits and roots of the country, for their 
subsistence. With this view also M. de la Bourdonnais introduced, though not 
without considerable difficulty, the cultivation of the manioc, which he at length 
obtained from the island of £>t. Jago and the Brazils. He was, indeed, obliged to 
• The sugar-works which M. de la Bourdonnais had established in the Isle of France produced, 
at this time (1750) a clear annual revenue of sixty thousand livres to the India Company. 
