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(from works by Judith Skerrett for Alphonse Island Fishing Company Ltd)

Discovery
During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the Portuguese made several expeditions across the Indian Ocean. In 1503 Joao da Nova gave his name to a group of islands (now the Farquhar group), which he discovered. Vasco da Gama, returning from his second voyage to India, sighted islands that were subsequently noted on early Portuguese charts as the “Islands seen the second time by admiral Dom Vasco”. From the Portuguese word almirante (admiral) comes the name of the Amirantes Group, of which Alphonse is often considered a part.

It was over two hundred years from this date before Alphonse was positively charted and named. On 27 June 1730, Le Lys, a French ship coming from Juan de Nova (Farquhar), sighted an island that was not on their charts. They named the island in honour of the ship’s captain Commandant Alphonse de Pontevez who was celebrating his birthday. According to the ship’s log, they made no landing, merely noting (and naming) the nearby island of St François the following day.

Expeditions were sent from France to assess the value of granitic Seychelles in 1742 and 1744, and Mahé was officially annexed in 1756.

Settlement
In 1770 the first settlement was created on St Anne, an island off the coast of Mahé. In fact Alphonse does not appear to have had any legal proprietor until 1820, and by this time the Seychelles had nominally become a British colony. In 1810, during the course of the Napoleonic Wars, Mauritius fell to the British, and under the terms of the French surrender all Mauritian dependencies (including Seychelles) became British. There was a period during which no one knew if Alphonse was part of the French or British Empire, but eventually the French lost interest in their claims to Seychelles and after the Peace of Paris, 1815, it became accepted that these remote islands should indeed appear in pink on British world maps.