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Abandoned on a desert island for 15 years; French archaeologists uncover evidence of an extraordinary story of slavery, shipwreck and survival, writes John Lichfield.(Dispatches)

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From: The Sunday Independent (South Africa)
Date: 20070211
Author:

In 1776, 57 years after Daniel Defoe wrote Robinson Crusoe, eight people were rescued from a tiny, treeless island in the Indian Ocean.

Seven of them, all women, had survived on the island for 15 years. The eighth, a baby boy, was born there.

The women were the remnants of a group of 60 people who were shipwrecked and then marooned on the scrap of coral and sand in 1761. They were abandoned, and then forgotten, 480km from the nearest land, for a simple, brutal reason. They were slaves.

Now, 230 years later, a team of French archaeologists has spent a month searching ...

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