250th anniversary of the discovery of the Crozet Archipelago

[Anatol]

The Crozet Islands (French: Îles Crozet; or, officially, Archipel Crozet) are a sub-Antarctic archipelago of small islands in the southern Indian Ocean. They form one of the five administrative districts of the French Southern and Antarctic Lands.
The Crozet Islands were discovered on 24 January 1772, by the expedition of French explorer Marc-Joseph Marion du Fresne, aboard Le Mascarin. His second-in-command Jules (Julien-Marie) Crozet landed on Île de la Possession, claiming the archipelago for France.[3] The expedition continued east and landed in New Zealand, where Captain Marion and much of his crew were killed and cannibalized by Maori. Crozet survived the disaster, and successfully led the survivors back to their base in Mauritius. In 1776, Crozet met James Cook at Cape Town, at the start of Cook's third voyage. Crozet shared the charts of his ill-fated expedition, and as Cook sailed eastward, he stopped at the islands, naming the western group Marion and the eastern group Crozet. In the following years, sealers visiting the islands referred to both the eastern and western groups as the Crozet Islands, and Marion Island became the name of the larger of the two Prince Edward Islands, which had been discovered by Captain Marion on the same expedition
In the early 19th century, the islands were often visited by sealers, and the seals had been nearly exterminated by 1835. Between 1804 and 1911, 153 vessels visited the island for seals, seven of which wrecked on the coast. Subsequently, whaling was the main activity around the islands, especially by the whalers from Massachusetts. In 1841, there were a dozen whaleships around the islands. Within a couple of years, this had increased to twenty from the United States alone. Such exploitation was short-lived, and the islands were rarely visited for the rest of the century.
There were many shipwrecks on the Crozet Islands. The British sealer, Princess of Wales, sank in 1821, and the survivors spent two years on the islands. The Strathmore was wrecked in 1875. In 1887, the French Tamaris was wrecked and her crew stranded on Île des Cochons. They tied a note to the leg of an albatross, which was found seven months later in Fremantle, but the crew was never recovered. For some time, the Royal Navy dispatched a ship every few years to look for stranded survivors. The steamship Australasian also checked for survivors en route to Australia.
Between 1924 and 1955, France administered the islands as a dependency of Madagascar. In 1938, the Crozet Islands were declared a nature reserve. The Crozet Islands became part of the French Southern Territories in 1955. In 1961, a first research station was set up, but it was not until 1963 that the permanent station Alfred Faure opened at Port Alfred on Île de la Possession (both named after the first leader of the station). The station is staffed by 18 to 30 people (varying by season). They perform meteorological, biological, and geological research, and maintain a seismograph and a geomagnetic observatory (IAGA code: CZT). The Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization has listening equipment on the island and it was disclosed that two of its stations, the other being on Ascension Island, detected what is believed to be an underwater, non-nuclear explosion off the coast of Argentina and believed to be the fatal accident of the ARA San Juan submarine in 2017.
TAAF 2022;1,10e
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crozet_Islands