evidence: Tromelin Island is a tiny island 280 miles east of Madagascar. Surrounded by coral reefs, the island is hard to reach, except by fate. In 1722, the French ship Utine ("useful" in French) traveled from Mauritius to Madagascar carrying a few dozen sailors and about 150 slaves. [...] In 1776, Bernard Boudin de Tromelin, captain of the French warship La Dauphine, visited the island and rescued the survivors, which were then only seven women and an 8-month-old baby boy born in the island. Three of the survivors were a grandmother, a mother, and a child, and they were returned to Mauritius. [...] There were no other records to show what happened to the other survivors. However, Guerot belives that some of the survivors of Tromelin island may have merged into the community of freed slaves in Mauritius, where their descendants still live there to this day.