The Missing Deed to Folhlhavai (Chagos Archipelago)

Conventional accounts of French sovereignty over the Chagos islands frequently begin with a captain’s reported discovery in 1744. The archive tells a less tidy tale.

Adapted from the research paper “The Unexamined Legitimacy of French Acquisition of Folhlhavai and the Maldivian Claim” (12 October 2026), which readers are encouraged to consult for the full sources.

In a map collection of the Bibliothèque nationale de France sits a hand-drawn chart of a cluster of atolls in the central Indian Ocean. Its title announces that the islands of Chagas were discovered by the tartane l’Élizabeth under Captain Lazare Picault on 16 April 1744. For generations that sentence has opened a legal story. France found Folhlhavai (Chagos Archipelago), France administered it, and Britain took it in 1810 and received it by treaty in 1814. Everything since, from the British Indian Ocean Territory to today’s disputes, rests on that chain.

A close reading of the archive suggests the first link is weaker than it looks. The chart is labelled a copy. The nearest account of the captain’s journal places him near the Amirantes that day. Older European charts drew a feature called Chagas apart from other southern Maldivian islands. And nobody has produced the document showing how France turned a sighting into sovereignty.

A copy, not an original

The library holds two related sheets in the same division of the French navy’s former hydrographic service. One, a plan of the islands of Peros Banhos discovered by the l’Élizabeth, is attributed to Picault. The other is the Chagas plan.

The Chagas sheet is not what it appears. A note on its face says it was copied from the original plan, and the library dates it to after 1744. On its reverse is a signature attributed to the Chevalier de Fleurieu, the French naval hydrographer. Fleurieu was born in 1738. He was six when Picault sailed, so whatever his signature signifies, it was not written at the time.

None of this suggests forgery. Naval offices routinely copied and reconciled charts as new surveys arrived. But it means the name Chagas, tied to 16 April 1744, survives on a later copy, and whether it appeared on the original is unknown. No comparative examination of the two titles’ handwriting, their coastlines and soundings, or the paper and watermarks has been identified in the materials consulted.

The captain who was somewhere else

The closest surviving textual witness examined so far records a different itinerary. In 1909 A. A. Fauvel, compiling early documents on Seychelles history, described a 17-page extract from the journal of Picault’s voyage of 1743 and 1744. Its title describes a voyage from Île de France, today Mauritius, “allant aux 3 frères ou les Illes des Amirantes”. Under 16 April 1744 Fauvel records Picault about eight leagues west of the “3 frères ou Amirantes”, though that line may be Fauvel’s summary rather than the extract’s own words.

The extract itself shows what “3 frères” meant. On 28 May Picault anchored off Frégate. The next day he sailed for the island he called the ancient 3 frères, and on 30 May he anchored in a harbour Fauvel identifies as Port Royal, later Port Victoria on Mahé. On Fauvel’s reading, the Three Brothers of the journal were the Mahé group, not islands within Folhlhavai, where the same generic name appears only later.

Other records fit the Seychelles itinerary. Picault’s plans of Mahé and Praslin state they were surveyed ashore in May 1744, when he named the islands after the governor, La Bourdonnais. Within weeks of the supposed discovery of Chagos, he was charting the Seychelles.

The chain of witnesses is long. Picault’s journal is unlocated, the extract is undated and its compiler unknown, and Fauvel’s text is part transcription and part summary. None of it names Chagas or Peros Banhos.

Could he have strayed east unawares? Possibly. Navigators of the period fixed latitude well but often misjudged longitude, and the Amirantes and parts of Folhlhavai lie at broadly similar latitudes. Until Picault’s route is reconstructed from his courses, latitudes and later surveys, the claim that he discovered Chagos on 16 April 1744 goes beyond the documents.

Which Chagas?

The two plans may also depict less than their titles suggest. It has been proposed that the Peros Banhos sheet shows the northern part of an atoll that Portuguese sources record as Candú, Kandhoo in Dhivehi, and the Chagas sheet its southern part. If so, they show one atoll, not two island groups found separately. The proposal has not yet been tested against the reefs, channels and soundings of the sheets themselves.

The idea matters because older European sources used a separate family of names. In 1563 the Portuguese historian João de Barros described the last islands of the Maldives, “chamadas Candú & Adú”, as lying at seven degrees south, with a king at Maldiva styled lord of all. Addu Atoll lies less than one degree south of the equator. Seven degrees falls in the latitude band of the southern Chagos atolls, though latitude alone cannot fix which islands Barros meant.

A chart by Jan Barend Elwe, published at Amsterdam in 1792 and stated to be compiled from several manuscript charts, draws these names as separate features. It places the “Ilhas das Chagas” south-west of the Maldives, Camdu south of Addou, Adu farther east and Pollowois farther south-east. The chart postdates Picault and does not fix modern positions. It does show that a later chart labelled Chagas need not depict the feature an older tradition called Chagas.

Known before the French

There is a deeper problem. The islands may not have been undiscovered.

Portuguese geographical knowledge of the central Indian Ocean predates Picault. François Pyrard, a Frenchman shipwrecked in the Maldives in the early seventeenth century, described islands he called Pollouoys, some 140 years before Picault’s voyage. His later editors, Albert Gray and H. C. P. Bell, identified them with Fólávahi. Pyrard wrote of reports reaching the Maldivian sultan, two expeditions sent under royal authority, voyages by earlier kings, and a commander who meant to settle a fertile island. A sixteenth-century title associated with Sultan Hassan IX, known through later editors, refers to “the seven islands of Pullobay”.

These sources carry their own burden. The identifications rest partly on editors’ judgement, the original Portuguese document has not been examined, and similar names prove nothing alone. But if the identifications hold, a French captain in 1744 could not have been first to find islands already known, named and visited under a Maldivian king. Such evidence would not, by itself, conclusively establish Maldivian sovereignty. It would, however, raise the question whether the Maldivian monarchy had already exercised authority over territory that France subsequently treated as available for acquisition.

Sighting is not owning

Even a confirmed French discovery would not settle the matter. In the period’s vocabulary, reconnaissance, découverte and voir la terre meant surveying, finding and sighting. None meant a formal taking of possession, and no French record of such an act from 1744 has surfaced in the materials examined. That does not prove none was made. It does mean histories asserting French possession have not shown how it arose.

By 1770 the name Diego Garcia appears in French hydrographic material, an Iberian name showing inherited nomenclature rather than French discovery. The Maldivian name Foalhavahi (Diego Garcia) belongs to a separate tradition still awaiting study.

So how did France acquire title? If it treated the islands as belonging to no one, the question is whether they were in fact available. If discovery generated only an inchoate claim, the question becomes whether subsequent French acts were sufficient, under the law applicable at the relevant time, to establish sovereignty. If authority grew through concessions and settlement, their dates and reach become the issue. Or historians, seeing later French administration, may simply have assumed an acquisition the archive does not contain.

What the law says

Lawyers will cite the 1928 Island of Palmas arbitration. Its arbitrator, Max Huber, held that discovery gave at most an incomplete title, which had to be perfected by effective occupation and could not defeat another state’s continuous and peaceful display of authority. The island went to the later administrator. That principle gives subsequent French and British administration considerable legal significance, but it does not resolve the validity of the original acquisition.

Palmas demonstrates the insufficiency of discovery alone against a competing title supported by an effective display of sovereignty. It does not decide a case where an existing state already exercised political authority, and Huber himself gave weight to the Dutch East India Company’s agreements with local rulers. The International Court of Justice later held that territory inhabited by politically organised peoples was not regarded as belonging to no one. Uninhabited atolls raise a harder question, namely whether they lay within the domain of a kingdom whose authority worked through navigation, harvesting and expeditions. An Indian Ocean sultanate need not have kept European colonial paperwork. Nor can Maldivian authority be assumed from knowledge alone.

The British link is derivative. Britain captured Île de France in December 1810, and the 1814 Treaty of Paris ceded the Isle of France and its dependencies, “especially Rodrigues and Les Séchelles”. Folhlhavai is not named, so whether it passed as an unnamed dependency is a separate question. Either way, as Huber put it, a state cannot transfer more rights than it holds.

What this does not prove

The argument has limits. In 2019 the International Court of Justice advised that when Britain detached the Chagos Archipelago in 1965, it was clearly an integral part of colonial Mauritius. That finding on the territorial composition of colonial Mauritius in 1965 remains authoritative within the opinion. But the court was asking whether Mauritius’s decolonisation was lawfully completed. It did not determine how France originally acquired the archipelago, adjudicate an antecedent Maldivian title, or examine Picault’s charts. Its finding on 1965 does not decide how the archipelago first entered the French colonial domain.

Nor would a flaw in French title hand the islands to the Maldives. In the 2008 Pedra Branca case, the court found that the Sultanate of Johor had original title to a rock in the Singapore Strait, yet ruled that sovereignty had passed to Singapore through its conduct and Malaysia’s silence. Old titles can be lost. Whether any Maldivian title survived colonial rule, independence in July 1965, the creation of the British Indian Ocean Territory, the 2019 opinion and the 2021 and 2023 rulings of a special chamber of the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea is a question for another day.

The question that remains

The question is not whether France eventually administered Folhlhavai. The historical record establishes that it did. The question is how France first acquired the sovereignty it subsequently exercised, whether that acquisition was legally valid, and whether the territory was already subject to another sovereign’s authority.

Later administration, first French and then British, cannot substitute for an examination of the original title, although subsequent conduct may have independent legal consequences. Nor can a later colonial cartographic designation establish what an earlier navigator discovered or what rights his sovereign acquired. The earlier European record kept geographical distinctions that later French nomenclature may have obscured.

The missing evidence does not prove Maldivian sovereignty. It exposes a question that the conventional account has treated as settled without adequately demonstrating its answer.

Before the law can determine what France transferred, history must establish what France acquired.