1950s: Diego Garcia Makes Favorable Impression on Traveler

Traveler Robert Scott tours the Chagos Archipelago and later writes of a thriving settlement at East Point on the island of Diego Garcia. “East Point has a look of a French coastal village miraculously transferred whole to this shore,” he writes. He recalls “the touches of old-fashioned ostentation in the chateau and its relation to the church… the neighborly way in which whitewashed stores, factories and workshops, shingled and thatched cottages, cluster round the green. The lamp standards along the roads and the parked motor lorries.” He notes how the islanders owned their own boats, fished, gardened and raised livestock. “Roots have been struck and a society peculiarly suited to the islands have [sic] been developed,” he observes. He also reports that there are three or four other villages on the island and numerous smaller hamlets. [Sunday Times (London), 9/21/1975]