THE MASCARENES 
198 
in the interior, Mount Limon, placed at the centre of 
the island, is only 1300 ft. high. 
The island, which was occasionally visited by Portu¬ 
guese and Dutch, was originally called Diego Rais; in 
the year 1726 it was declared a French possession by 
Diore, who was then governor of Bourbon, and it was 
called Marianne Island; this designation, however, was 
not permanently retained, but was converted into Rodri¬ 
guez. The first settler who lived for any long time on 
the deserted island was the French emigrant Frangois 
Leguat, who left his fatherland after the Revocation of 
the Edict of Nantes and came to the Mascarenes in a 
Dutch ship. He lived on Rodriguez from 1691 to 1693 
and very valuable information concerning the Natural 
History of the island was given in his travels which 
appeared in 1708. The island was then rich in tortoises; 
the solitaire, too, was still found in great numbers. 
Leoriiat’s statements were shown to be founded on fact 
by Newton, who in 1866 went to Rodriguez with a band 
of coolies from Mauritius and dug up some 2000 bones 
of this bird. 
In the last century, tortoises still formed an important 
article of export and provided the Colony of He de 
France with fresh meat. In 1760 four ships appointed 
to the provision trade brought away the enormous num¬ 
ber of 30,000 tortoises in the course of 18 months. 
The island was settled by several Creoles, but princi¬ 
pally by black labourers living partly in the valleys of 
Port Mathurin, partly in the inland town of Gabrielle; it 
attained continually increasing importance as a provision 
market for Mauritius, by the cultivation of vegetables 
and maize, because, owing to the engrossing sugar cul¬ 
ture in the latter island, a sufficiency of provisions could 
not be grown. A notable trade in dried fish is also 
carried on in Rodriguez. In 1845 the number of inhabit¬ 
ants was not more than 250. By the year 1886 it had risen 
