After dealing with such striking events, such potent personages and vast territories, it is rather an anti-climax to have to treat of the little island of Mauritius, which is not as large as the county of Surrey, and which, except under its first Governor, Sir Robert Farquhar (who tried from this vantage ground to annex Madagascar), has had no stirring connection with events of great importance. Mauritius was taken by the British from the French in 1810. The French had known it by the name of Île de France, but the British revived the older Dutch name of Mauritius. The French had introduced the sugar cane and other valuable plants; and these plantations were half-heartedly cultivated by means of slave labour until the slave trade was abolished. Then, in the fifties, Indian kuli labour was introduced with great success; and now the inhabitants of Indian descent in the colony number nearly 40,000, while Indian half-breeds are also numerous. The total population in 1912 was about 370,500. The negro, negroid and Malagasy element was important—over 50,000. Deducting the Asiatics (20,000, mainly Indian, a few Chinese and Arabs) there remain about 120,000 white and 160,000 half-castes and Eurasians. The European population is almost entirely of French descent; and the marked French sympathies of the white inhabitants have sometimes caused a dissonance between the Governor and the governed, though ample concessions have been made to the Mauritians by the equal recognition afforded to French laws and the French language. Nevertheless, in spite of these political questions, and the occasional hurricanes which visit the island with disaster, it is a prosperous colony in ordinary years (doing a trade with an annual value of about £5,000,000), and only has to appeal to the Treasury of Great Britain for assistance on such rare occasions as when unusually great damage has been done by cyclones.