A history of Lion Mountain and the bay of Grand Port

A forested shore before 1598

Mauritius had no permanent human population before the Dutch arrived. Vieux Grand Port, the village at the foot of Lion Mountain, is described as the island’s first human settlement, and the forest the first visitors found ran unbroken from the shore to the ridges. It was rich in ebony, which is the reason the island was worth occupying at all, and it was home to the dodo and to other birds that had never met a predator. The bay itself, sheltered by a coral reef with a single winding channel through it, gave ships a protected anchorage on the windward side of the island.

The Dutch century, 1598 to 1710

In September 1598 the ships of Wybrand van Warwijck, part of the second Dutch expedition to the East Indies under Jacob Cornelisz van Neck, entered the bay and named it Port de Warwick. Sources give the date as 17, 18 or 20 September, so this guide says on or around 20 September. The island was named after Maurits van Nassau, the stadtholder of the Dutch Republic, and the name outlasted every change of flag that followed.

For forty years the Dutch used the bay as a stopping place without settling. Then, in 1638, Cornelius Gooyer arrived with 25 men and built Fort Frederik Hendrik on the colluvial fan at the foot of Lion Mountain, naming it after Frederick Henry, Prince of Orange. The fort was a refreshment station for the Dutch East India Company. One Mauritian account dates the decision to build it to 1637 and describes a four-pointed star of wooden palisades and earthen ramparts. Under Adriaan van der Stel the colony turned to ebony. Large areas of forest were cut, and to cut them he brought 105 enslaved people from Madagascar, with more following in 1644 and 1645. Some escaped inland.

The colony never prospered. The first occupation ended in 1658. The Dutch came back in 1664, a cyclone wrecked the wooden fort in 1695, and in 1698 the commander Deodati built a stone lodge beside the ruins. Cyclones, droughts, pests and illness wore the settlers down, and when the Dutch finally left in 1710 they burned the settlement, leaving only the lodge standing. By then the dodo was gone, with the last confirmed sighting commonly given as 1662. The Dutch had also, probably around 1602, released the long-tailed macaques whose descendants still live on the mountain.

The French and the move to Port Louis, 1715 to 1806

France claimed the empty island in 1715 and settled it in 1722, and the first French government sat where the Dutch had been, on the shore below Lion Mountain. It did not stay. The administration moved to Port Louis, whose harbour on the north-west coast lies out of the trade wind, and Grand Port became a secondary post. From 1753 a French government complex with a lodge, a prison, a bakery and a smithy was built directly on the Dutch ruins, and the site served as a military post for the rest of the century.

The end of Grand Port as the centre of the south-east came in 1806, when the post moved across the bay to a new town named Mahébourg after the governor Mahé de La Bourdonnais. Mahébourg grew and the old settlement did not. It took the name Vieux Grand Port, Old Grand Port, and the fort site slipped under grass and cane. One French house of this period, the Château Gheude of about 1772 on the La Chaux river in Mahébourg, would find its place in history four years after the move.

The week of the battle, August 1810

Between 20 and 27 August 1810 the bay became a battlefield. A British squadron under Captain Samuel Pym had seized the battery on Île de la Passe at the reef pass and tried to trap a French squadron under Guy-Victor Duperré inside the lagoon. The French moved the channel buoys, two British frigates ran onto the coral and were burned by their own crews, a third surrendered after a close-range battering and the fourth gave up when Commodore Hamelin arrived with reinforcements from Port Louis. Four frigates were lost. It was the most significant defeat the Royal Navy suffered in the Napoleonic Wars, and it is the only naval battle whose name is carved on the Arc de Triomphe in Paris.

The battle page on this site tells the week in detail, with the ships, the reef, the wounds of both commanders and the tradition that Duperré and Nesbit Willoughby were nursed in the same house in Mahébourg. From the ridge of Lion Mountain you look straight down on the water where it happened.

British rule and the memorial of 1899

The victory changed little for long. A British invasion force landed at the end of November 1810 and Isle de France was captured on 3 December 1810, barely three months after Grand Port. The Treaty of Paris of 30 May 1814 confirmed British possession and the island became Mauritius again in name. Slavery was abolished on 1 February 1835, and in the decades that followed indentured labourers arrived from India through the Aapravasi Ghat in Port Louis and reshaped the island’s population.

Grand Port was remembered under the British as well. On 30 December 1899 a monument to the battle was erected at Grand Port, the obelisk that still stands at Pointe des Régates on the Mahébourg waterfront, looking across the water at the lion. On 15 September 1950 the Gheude house, where the wounded commanders are said to have been treated, opened as a museum, and it is now the National History Museum. Mauritius became independent on 12 March 1968.

Uncovering the fort, 1997 to 2005

The Dutch fort came back into view at the end of the twentieth century. Archaeologists from Rutgers University in the United States and the University of Amsterdam excavated the site and found the Dutch layers about 50 cm below the French buildings of the 1750s, with the wall of the stone lodge of 1698 as the key find. The dates of the digging are given differently by different sources. The Mauritius Museums Council says work has gone on since 1997, while a Mauritian newspaper account counts five seasons, in 1999 and 2000 and from 2003 to 2005.

In 1998, for the 400th anniversary of the landing, the site was rehabilitated and landscaped and inaugurated by Prince Maurits van Oranje-Nassau, a namesake of the prince the island was named after. The Frederik Hendrik Museum opened on 27 May 1999 with an exhibition donated by the Dutch government. One encyclopaedic article gives 2010 for the museum’s opening, but the Museums Council, which runs it, gives 1999, and this guide follows the Council. Entry is free and the ruins sit in the museum grounds a few hundred metres from where the Lion Mountain trail leaves the village.

The mountain in Mauritian life today

For most Mauritians Lion Mountain is a shape rather than a site. It is the view across the water from the Monday market in Mahébourg, the ridge that fills the windscreen on the coast road to Bois des Amourettes, and the mountain that passengers see from the left-hand windows of an aircraft landing from the sea. Mauritius Post put it on a stamp in its Mountains of Mauritius series in 2004. Vieux Grand Port at its foot had about 3,000 people at the 2011 census.

For hikers it is a serious half-day, and the Ferney Trail race that starts in the valley on the far side has in past editions sent its longest courses over the summit at sunrise. The Vallée de Ferney itself, where a planned highway was scrapped after rare plants were found, became a conservation zone in the mid 2000s, and the kestrels released there from 1987 onwards have been seen over the mountain. A hotel magazine once cast the squat lion as a powerless guardian who watched the ebony forest fall and the dodo vanish. That is a writer’s image rather than folklore, but it is hard to stand on the head and not feel some of it.

The dates at a glance, and what the records do not say

Two things visitors ask about cannot be answered from the sources. No document found for this guide gives a Dutch name for the mountain, even though the Dutch lived at its foot for the better part of a century, and no old map or record shows when the name Montagne du Lion first appears. The lion is simply there in the French and British sources, as if it had always been called that. Where this page gives a single date for an event that sources disagree on, the disagreement is noted in the text above.