two camps, one for the crew and one for the slaves, a forge and an oven, and with the materials recovered from the wreckage, began construction of a boat. On 27 September 1761, a contingent of 122 French sailors (crew and officers) left Tromelin aboard the Providence. They left the surviving slaves – 60 Malagasy men and women – on the desert island, promising to return and rescue them. The sailors reached Madagascar in just over four days and, after a stopover in Foulpointe, where men died of tropical diseases, were transferred to Réunion Island (then Bourbon Island), and then to Mauritius (then called the Isle de France). When the crew of the ship reached Mauritius, they requested that colonial authorities send a ship to rescue the Malagasy slaves on the island. However, they met with a categorical refusal from the governor, with the justification that France was fighting the Seven Years' War and thus no ship could be spared, the island of Mauritius being itself under threat of attack from British India. Castellan left Mauritius (Isle de France) to return to France in 1762 and never gave up hope to one day return to the Isle of Sand to save the Malagasy people. The news of the castaway slaves got published and stirred the Parisian intellectual milieu; later, the episode was all but forgotten with the end of the Seven Years' War and the bankruptcy of the East India Company. In 1773, a ship passing close to Tromelin Island located the slaves and reported them to the authorities of Isle de France. A boat was sent, but this first rescue failed, as the ship could not approach the island. A year later, a second ship, Sauterelle, also failed to reach the island. During this second failed rescue, a sailor managed to swim to the island, but he had to be abandoned by the ship due to bad weather. This sailor remained on Tromelin Island and, some time later, probably around 1775, built a raft on which he embarked with three men and three women, but which disappeared at sea. It was not until 29 November 1776, 15 years after the sinking, that Ensign Tromelin-Lanuguy, captain of the corvette Dauphine, reached Tromelin Island and rescued the survivors – seven women and an eight-month-old child. Upon arriving there, Tromelin-Lanuguy discovered that the survivors were dressed in plaited feather clothes and that