Sir,—David Mould’s fascinating article on Corkman James Hastie’s involvement in Madagascar (HI 33.1, Jan./Feb. 2025) brought to mind a story of the capture of Mauritius by the British in 1810.
The French recruited Irish POWs from captured British forces to bolster their defences: what happened to them after the French defeat is still debated. One version is that they were sent to France along with their French comrades, whilst another is that they—500 Irish soldiers in British uniforms—were executed as deserters.
Bearing in mind that many United Irishmen who were captured after the failed rebellion of 1798 had their death sentences commuted to service in His Majesty’s armed forces (including a member of my own ancestral family sent to the Indian Ocean colonies), there would likely have been any number of willing ‘traitors’.
On 3 June 1819, in the House of Commons, the attorney general, Sir Robert Wilson, stated that ‘there were instances very lately, in the case of persons who had engaged in the service of France at the Mauritius [sic]; but they were prosecuted on the old and constitutional law against treason, and suffered death’.
The gifts sent to King Radama in 1817 as part of the treaty negotiations overseen from Mauritius included 400 British army uniforms, suspiciously close in number to the reported 500 executed Irish soldiers. I note that the means of how they ‘suffered death’ were not mentioned but, assuming hanging, many uniforms would have been left in good repair.
French soldiers being returned to France while the Irish were harshly dealt with does have the ring of 1798 about it!—Yours etc.,
MICHAEL BRABAZON