Penloom History · The stories they left out

Tromelin — the fire they kept burning for fifteen years

Indian Ocean, 1761–1776

Abandoned on a treeless sandbar in 1761 with no way to make fire, they simply never let it go out.

On 31 July 1761 the French ship L'Utile struck a reef in the dark and broke up on a treeless sandbar 450 km east of Madagascar. She was carrying Malagasy people the captain had bought illegally — the Company had suspended the trade — and roughly half of those locked below deck drowned where they lay.

The boat they built

The survivors dug a well and spent two months building a boat from the wreckage. On 27 September the French crew sailed away in it, promising to send a ship back. They reached Madagascar. The governor of Île de France declined to pay for a rescue, and the later attempts failed.

Fifteen years and two months

On 29 November 1776 the corvette La Dauphine took the survivors off: seven women, and a baby boy eight months old.

The hearth

French archaeologists excavated the island between 2006 and 2013. They found dry-stone houses of coral block with walls a metre thick against the cyclones, vessels beaten from the ship's copper sheathing — and a hearth. They had no way to make fire. So they never let it go out.