Diego Garcia: The Ultimate Strategic Spot for Breadfruit Trees

Breadfruit trees towering in the lush, fertile landscape of Addu Atoll, a symbol of local identity and natural abundance. Photo credit: Equatorial Inn Addu.

In the middle 1830s a captain of the East India Company’s Indian Navy stitched the Maldives and Foalhavahi onto the same set of charts. Commander Robert Moresby did not come as a planter or a governor. He came to measure reefs that wrecked ships on the India-to-Cape track. The work began in Maldive Isalands and ended among the atolls Europe called Chagos. One island on the northern rim of Peros Banhos still carries his surname. In the Dhivehi geography recovered on the old Foalhavahi sheets, that atoll is Holhimadulu, and the island remembered as Naladhoo. The two names describe one place seen from two traditions: a British hydrographer’s honour, and a Maldivian island word.

From Male to the southern water

Moresby (1794–1854) had already surveyed the Red Sea. In 1834 he was sent south in the Benares, with the Royal Tiger under Lieutenant F. T. Powell and a tender named Maldiva.

(The Maldiva: Moresby’s Small Boat on a Named Sea) Lieutenants Christopher and Young worked with him. For two years they triangulated the Maldives. The three Admiralty sheets that followed were the first modern charts of the atolls. Maldivian pilots used them into the satellite age. A deep channel between Northern Maalhosmadulu and Fasdhuethere still bears two names at once: Hanikandu and Moresby Channel.

He did not survey in a vacuum. He carried letters to the Radhun from Bombay and Ceylon. He lived for a time at Male. He wrote that Maldivians were a seafaring people who built their own quadrants, copied British nautical tables into Dhivehi, and ran schools of navigation. That is the documented companionship of the Maldives years: not a tourist escort, but a meeting of two pilot cultures, one with instruments and chronometers, the other with the secret of the reefs. When the Maldives work was finished he sailed on. In February 1837 he went to the Chagos Archipelago. He finished in 1838 and returned to Bombay. Darwin later used his notes on the Maldives and the Great Chagos Bank for The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs

The sequence matters for any Foalhavahi argument. The same hand that mapped Addu, Huvadhu and Male then mapped Holhimadulu. The British state treated the two surveys as one Indian Ocean task. Maldivian memory treats the water as one ridge.

Holhimadulu, Naladhoo, Moresby Island

Peros Banhos is the northernmost large atoll of the group, the nearest emerged ring to Addu. Île Yeye, on its north-east corner, is the Chagos island closest to Gan,about 520 kilometres of open sea. On European charts a cay at the northern end of Peros Banhos is Moresby Island, named after the 1837 survey. After that survey the Indian Navy published the first detailed plan of the atoll. A channel in the same rim is Moresby Channel. The British habit was to write the surveyor onto the reef.

Holhimadulu where Peros Banhos sits, and lists Naladhoo among the islands of that southern geography. Identifying Moresby Island with Naladhoo is a living Dhivehi pairing, not a line printed on the 1837 Admiralty sheet. It is how Male' now reads the same sand the captain measured. The pairing is consistent with the rest of that map: Kandhoo with Île du Coin, Foalhavahi in the narrow sense with Diego Garcia, Fehenaavari with the great bank. Holhimadulu / Peros Banhos is the hinge-the atoll that looks, more than any other in Chagos, like a Maldive atoll in miniatur

Breadfruit: what is written, and what is inferred

The record that can be cited without stretching is this: while on Diego Garcia, Moresby planted thirty breadfruit trees. He also noted cats and chickens on that island. The Chagos Information Portal and the standard biographical summaries repeat the thirty trees. They do not, in the sources easily traced, name the nursery. They do not say Naladhoo. They do not print “Addu.”

Golden, crispy fried breadfruit slices, locally known as Theluli Bambukeyo, laid out on lush green leaves.

The inference is not wild. Breadfruit-bambukeyo-is a Maldivian staple. It is eaten boiled, curried, fried as theluli bambukeyo, cooked in coconut milk as bambukeyo bondibaiy. Southern atolls, Addu among them, grew it as island food long before the captain arrived. Moresby had just spent two years among those islands. He then sailed the same monsoon road to Foalhavahi. A surveyor who needed living stores, who had Maldivian seamen and pilots in reach, and who chose a tree that feeds a village, is more likely to have lifted shoots from Maldive Islands than from Bombay. “Likely Addu” is a reasonable southern guess: Addu Atoll is the last inhabited ring before Holhimadulu, and the same people who knew the channel to Foalhavahi knew how to move a bambukeyo. It remains a guess until a logbook says so.

White terns, the emblematic Dhondheeni of Addu Atoll, gracefully perch on a breadfruit tree under the clear blue Maldivian sky.

Whether the thirty trees stood only on Diego Garcia or whether cuttings also went into Holhimadulu soil is a second uncertainty. Plantation records and later visitors describe breadfruit on the Chagos estates; Moresby’s documented act is Diego Garcia. Tradition may attach the same gesture to Naladhoo because that is the island that bears his name. History should not merge the two without a citation.

What the voyage means

Moresby’s name on a Holhimadulu cay is colonial branding, like “Chagos” itself. The work underneath the name is different. He could not have finished the Maldives sheets without Maldivian knowledge. He then carried that knowledge-charts, local pilots’ habits, perhaps living trees-into the atoll Male' calls Holhimadulu. The British later used those charts to run coconut oil and, much later, to empty the islands. That is not Moresby’s crime. It is what empires do with accurate water

For the Foalhavahi claim the useful facts are narrower and stronger than a legend of Addu saplings. First: the first scientific map of Peros Banhos was drawn immediately after the first scientific map of the Maldives, by the same captain. Second: he named an island and a channel on the atoll nearest Addu. Third: Maldivian tradition already had a name for that atoll and for its islands, Naladhoo among them. Fourth: he planted breadfruit on Diego Garcia after years in Raajje, where breadfruit is food and not an experiment.

White terns, the emblematic Dhondheeni of Addu Atoll, gracefully perch on a breadfruit tree under the clear blue Maldivian sky.

A tree taken from Addu and set in Holhimadulu would be a small, human proof that the two shores were one sailing world. The documents prove the sailing world. They prove the thirty trees on Diego Garcia. They do not yet prove the Addu cutting or the Naladhoo garden. Until they do, what the Dhivehi map still calls the island, and what a southern odi would have found obvious: that Naladhoo and Addu sit on the same road, and that Moresby only measured a path Maldivians already knew.

Note: Diego Garcia The Most Strategic Breadfruit-Tree Territory

Diego Garcia is sold to the world as a runway.The British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT) was formally established on November 8, 1965, by a British Order in Council. It serves as a pivotal joint base, which led to its separation from the Maldives. The island's lagoon continues to influence treaties, leases, and decisions in New York.

British Era & Independence: Known as the Maldive Islands, it became a member of the United Nations under this name in 1965 following its independence from Britain.

The Official Drop: On January 21, 1969, the Ministry of External Affairs formally declared the removal of "the" and the change of name to Maldives, shortly after the nation became a republic in November 1968.