The First Owner of Cerf Island
By Julien Durup a student of Seychelles History
The first proprietor of Cerf Island was in fact Dr. Charles Telfair (1778-1833). Who was this friendly and diplomatic man who became a naturalist? He was born in Belfast son of a school master, studied under the famous chemist Joseph Black and later became a medical Doctor. In 1810, Dr. Telfair visited La Réunion and Mauritius as the ship’s surgeon with the British Royal Navy. Previously in 1797, he entered the Royal Navy as a Medical officer and served in the Mediterranean and later followed Admiral Albemarle Bertie to Cape of Good Hope and the Indian Ocean. Admiral Bertie was a controversial officer of the Royal Navy who had been accredited for the British conquest of Mauritius.
After the British invasion of Bourbon (La Réunion) in July 1810, Dr. Telfair was made Commissioner for Saint Paul and the Leeward districts. After the fall of Mauritius, Governor Robert Townsend Farquhar (who became his protégé) named him Head of Government at Saint Paul. Dr. Telfair went to Mauritius accompanied by Farquhar to set up a military hospital on Ile Platte. During that time, he started with Farquhar to collect manuscripts relating to Madagascar and its languages. He later was one of the four commissioners entrusted with the handing back of La Réunion to France. In 1817, he became Private Secretary to Farquhar and sailed to England with Farquhar. While there he married Annabella, the daughter of Admiral Charles Chamberlayne. Arriving back in Mauritius, he tried to create a model estate with a school to improve the living conditions of the servile population. Later, he persuaded two local naturalists, Louis Bouton and Julien François Desjardins, (a zoologist who had his own museum at Argy in Flacq), to donate their collections to form the nucleus of a proposed Colonial Museum.
In 1819, he visited Paris and was made Chevalier of the Legion of Honour, at that time an unusual merit for a British officer.
Ten year later, together with Desjardins, Bouton, Wenceslas Bojer, a naturalist and botanist from Resanice, (now part of the Czech Republic residing in Mauritius), and other local naturalists, formed the Société d’Histoire Naturelle de l’Ile Maurice.
Dr. Telfair is credited to have introduced banane gabou from China to Mauritius in 1826. In 1829, he sent the plants to England where it received the name Cavendish banana from Lord Cavendish. From 1825, he was Honourary Superintendent of Pamplemousses Gardens and sent many plants to Sir William Hooker, director of Key Gardens in England. Hooker later named after him an Afircan genus of the cucumber family, Telfairia occidentalis, of the cucurbitaceae family. It is commonly known as fluted gourd, fluted pumpkin and ugu. The lesser ‘Hedgehog Tenrec’, endemic to Madagascar Echinops telfairi was named after him and also the Round Island Skink (leiolopisma telfairi) of Mauritius. The Bignonia telfaira from Madagascar was named after his wife because she painted it.
Dr. Telfair also sent bones of the solitaire from Rodrigues to the Zoological Society and the Andersonian Museum, Glasgow. His collections were donated to the Zoological Society of London, but were scattered, and in fact lost, when sold in 1835.
The passage of Dr. Telfair in the Seychelles is not certain but he received Cerf Island as concession from Farquhar. Civil Agent Edward Madge, his proxy friend sold Cerf Island on his behalf on 15th of September 1815 to Dr. Emmanuel Poupinel. However, he left two small plots at Victoria which he later sold to Anne Augeard on 29 January 1823. He died at Port Louis on 14 July 1833.
Source:
- Marc Serge Rivière: From Belfast to Mauritius (Charles Telfair (1778-1883) Naturalist and Product of the Irish Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Ireland.
- Dictionary of Mauritius Biography: pp. 532-533
- Julien Durup: The First Landowners of the Seychelles 1786-1833 (unpublished)
- Pier M. Larson: Ocean of Letters, ISBN 978 0 521 73957 3